The life of St Benedict of Nursia
Disciples gathered around him even in that early solitude, drawn by reports of his holiness, and he organized them into a loose community; the arrangement provoked enough local resentment that an attempt was reportedly made to poison him, after which he moved on and, in time, founded twelve small monasteries, each with its own twelve monks, keeping a general oversight over all of them. Renewed jealousy and further danger eventually led him, around 529, to Monte Cassino, where he spent his remaining years and wrote the mature form of the Rule by which he is remembered, a guide balancing prayer, manual work, and study within an ordered common life, drawing on the experience of the Eastern desert fathers and the teaching of John Cassian. That Rule became, in the centuries after his death, the pattern most Western monasteries followed. Nearly everything known of Benedict's own life comes from a single source, the second book of Pope Gregory the Great's Dialogues, written some decades later from the testimony of two of Benedict's own disciples; it offers less a connected biography than a gathering of remembered incidents, and its account should be read with that in mind. He reposed at Monte Cassino around 547, not long after the death of his sister Scholastica, whom he had guided in the same manner of life.
