The Lives of the Saints, Volume III (of 16): March

Next among the saints of Aran comes S. Brendan. S. Finnian of Moville (March 18th) is also mentioned in the ancient life of our saint as one of S. Enda's disciples at Aran. The Irish life of S. Columbkille makes mention of the sojourn of that great saint on Aran. The deep love of S. Columba for Aran, the sorrow with which he quitted its shores for Iona, are expressed in a poem, written by him on his departure.

Aran, the Rome of the pilgrims.Aran thou sun – O! Aran thou sun!My affection lies with thee westward;Alike to be under her pure earth interred,As under the earth of Peter and Paul.

The ancient life of S. Enda also reckons among the inhabitants of Aran S. Finnian the elder, the founder of the great school of Clonard; S. Jarlath, the founder of the see of Tuam; S. Mac Creiche, of the race of the men of Corcomroe, who were in possession of Aran when S. Enda first went thither. The Martyrology of Donegal makes mention of S. Guigneus; the Martyrology of Ængus adds S. Papeus, S. Kevin of Glendaloch, S. Carthage of Lismore, S. Lonan Kerr, S. Nechanus, and S. Libeus, brother of S. Enda. In the midst of this holy brotherhood S. Enda died in 540 or 542.

The sight of Aran peopled by this host of saints forcibly recalls to mind that other island, where, in an age of wild and fierce passions, the arts of peace, religious learning, and the highest Christian virtues, found a sanctuary. At the beginning of the sixth century, Aran may, with truth, be styled the Lerins of the Northern seas. True, its bare flags and cold grey landscape contrast sadly with "the gushing streams, the green meadows, the luxuriant wealth of vines, the fair valleys, and the fragrant scents which," according to S. Eucherius, "made Lerins the paradise of those who dwelt thereon."79 However, its very wildness did but make it richer in those attractions so well described by S. Ambrose, which made the outlying islands so dear to the religious men of that time.80 They loved those islands, "which, as a necklace of perils, God has set upon the bosom of the sea, and in which those who would fly from the irregular pleasures of the world, may find a refuge wherein to practise austerity and save themselves from the snares of this life. In it these faithful and pious men find incentives to devotion. The mysterious sound of the billows calls for the answering sound of sacred psalmody; and the peaceful voices of holy men, mingled with the gentle murmur of the waves breaking softly on the shore rise in unison to the heavens."

On a summer's day in the year 1870, says the Bishop of Ardagh, we set sail to visit the remote Aran, which the virtues of S. Enda had changed from a Pagan isle into Aran of the Saints. And as the faint breeze bore us slowly over the waters that lay almost motionless in the summer calm, we gazed with admiration upon a scene which was but little changed since S. Enda and his pilgrim band had first looked upon it. Before us there lay stretched out the same expanse of sea, fringed on one side by the dark plains of Iar-Connaught, along which the eye travelled from the white cliffs of Barna to where the Connemara mountains, in soft blue masses, stood out in fantastic clusters against the sky. On the other side ran the Clare coastline, now retreating before the deep sea-inlets, and now breasting the Atlantic with bold promontories like that of gloomy Black-Head, or with gigantic cliffs like those of Mohir. And as the day closed, and we watched the evening breeze steal out from land, crisping the water into wavelets that rippled against the vessel's side; and as we saw the golden glory of the sunset flush with indescribable loveliness, earth, and sea, and sky, we thought how often in bygone days, the view of Aran rising, as we then saw it, out of the sunlit waves, had brought joy to the pilgrim who was journeying to find rest upon its rocky shore.

The Aran isles are three in number, named respectively, Inishmore (the large island), Inishmain (the middle island), and Inisheen (the eastern island). The eastern island is the smallest of the three, and is about two-and-a-half miles long; the middle island is three miles long; the largest is about nine miles in length, and twenty-four in circumference.

Our chief interest was naturally centred in the group of buildings which exist at Killeany, and consist of the church of S. Benignus, the church of S. Enda, the round tower of S. Enda, and the stone houses in its immediate vicinity. Our readers will have remarked that the first six churches named in Dr. Keely's list, all stood near each other, and to the north of the present village of Killeany. Out of six churches which existed here as late as 1645, four have almost entirely disappeared. They were demolished by unholy hands for the sake of materials to build the castle of Arkin.

The church known as Teglach Enda, wherein S. Enda was laid, still exists on the shore; it is in good preservation, and is a fine specimen of the single church without chancel. It is twenty-four feet in length and fourteen in breadth. All the walls now standing are by no means of an equal antiquity. The eastern gable and part of the northern side wall are the only parts belonging to S. Enda's time, the remainder of the building being the work of a later period. Around the church spreads the cemetery, now almost completely covered up by the sands, in which the body of S. Enda, and those of one hundred and fifty other saints, are interred.

On the hill side, are S. Enda's well, and altar; the latter surmounted by a rude cross. S. Enda's well, and indeed all the other wells we saw in the island, are carefully protected by the Araners; the scarcity of water rendering the possession of a well almost as precious to them as it was to the Eastern shepherds in the days of Rebecca. At a short distance to the left of the well, stands the remnant of the round tower of S. Enda. Once its height was worthy of the cluster of sacred temples which stood within the circle traversed by the shadow it projected in the changing hours; but now it is little more than thirteen feet high. An aged man who joined our group, told us that in S. Enda's time the mass was not commenced in any of the churches of the island, until the bell from S. Enda's tower announced that S. Enda himself had taken his place at the altar in his own church.

With the permission of the excellent priest who has charge of the island, we resolved, on the last morning of our stay on Aran, to celebrate mass in the ruined church of Teglach-Enda, where in the year 540 or 542, S. Enda was interred. The morning was bright and clear, and the rigid outlines of the rocks were softened by the touch of the early sunshine. The inhabitants of Killeany, exulting in the tidings that the Holy Sacrifice was once again to be offered to God near the shrine of their sainted patron, accompanied or followed us to the venerable ruins. The men, young and old, were clothed in decent black, or in white garments of home-made stuff, with sandals of undressed leather, like those of the peasants of the Abruzzi, laced round their feet; the women were attired in gay scarlet gowns and blue bodices, and all wore a look of remarkable neatness and comfort. The small roofless church was soon filled to overflowing with a decorous and devout congregation.

We can never forget the scene of that morning: the pure bright sand, covering the graves of unknown and unnumbered saints as with a robe of silver tissue; the delicate green foliage of the wild plants; on one side, the swelling hill crowned with the church of S. Benignus, and on the other the blue sea, that almost bathed the foundations of the venerable sanctuary itself; the soft balmy air that hardly stirred the ferns on the old walls; and the fresh, happy, solemn calm that reigned over all.

The temporary altar was set up under the east window, on the site where of old the altar stood; and there, in the midst of the loving and simple faithful, within the walls which had been consecrated some twelve hundred years before, over the very spot of earth where so many of the saints of Ireland lay awaiting their resurrection to glory, the solemn rite of the Christian Sacrifice was performed, and once more, as in the days of which S. Columba wrote, the angels of God came down to worship the Divine Victim in the Churches of Aran.

S. BENEDICT, AB(A.D. 543.)

[Roman Martyrology, Benedictine, that of Bede. Greek Menologium on March 14th. Authorities: – Life written by S. Gregory the Great, in the second book of his dialogues; S. Gregory received his information from the lips of four disciples of the holy patriarch, Constantine, Honoratus, Valentinian, and Simplicius, the two first of whom had succeeded him as abbots respectively of Monte Cassino and Subiaco. Also the Chronicon Casinense, the first three books containing the life of S. Benedict by Leo Marsicanus, B. of Ostia, a monk of Monte Casino; the fourth book was added by Paulus Diacomus. The following life has been condensed from that by M. de Montalembert in his "Monks of the West."]

S. Benedict was born in the year of our Lord 480. Europe has, perhaps, never known a more calamitous or apparently desperate period than that which reached its climax at this date. Confusion, corruption, despair, and death were everywhere; social dismemberment seemed complete. Authority, morals, laws, sciences, arts, religion herself, might have been supposed condemned to irremediable ruin. The germs of a splendid and approaching revival were still hidden from all eyes under the ruins of a crumbling world. The Church was more than ever infected by heresy, schisms, and divisions, which the obscure successors of S. Leo the Great in the Holy See endeavoured in vain to repress. In all the ancient Roman world there did not exist a prince who was not either a pagan, an Arian, or an Eutychian. The monastic institution, after having given so many doctors and saints to the Church in the East, was drifting toward that descent which it never was doomed to reascend; and even in the West, some symptoms of premature decay had already appeared.

Germany was still entirely pagan, as was also Great Britain, where the new-born faith had been stifled by the Angles and Saxons. Gaul was invaded on the north by the pagan Franks, and on the south by the Arian Burgundians. Spain was overrun and ravaged by the Visigoths, the Sueves, the Alans, and the Vandals, all Arians. The same Vandals, under the successor of Genseric, made Christian Africa desolate, by a persecution more unpitying and refined in cruelty than those of the Roman emperors. In a word, all those countries into which the first disciples of Jesus Christ carried the faith, had fallen a prey to barbarianism. The world had to be re-conquered.

Amidst this universal darkness and desolation, history directs our gaze towards those heights in the centre of Italy, and at the gates of Rome, which detach themselves from the chain of the Apennines, and extend from the ancient country of the Sabines to that of the Samnites. A single solitary was about to form there a centre of spiritual virtue, and to light it up with a splendour destined to shine over regenerated Europe for ten centuries to come.

Fifty miles to the west of Rome, among that group of hills where the Anio hollows a deep gorge, the traveller, ascending by the course of the river, reaches a basin, which opens out between two immense walls of rock, and from which a limpid stream pours from fall to fall, to a place called Subiaco. This grand and picturesque site had attracted the attention of Nero. He confined the waters of the Anio by dams, and constructed artificial lakes below, before a delicious villa, which, from its position, assumed the name of Sublaqueum, and of which some shapeless ruins remain. Four centuries after Nero, when solitude and silence had long replaced the imperial orgies, a young patrician flying from the delights and dangers of Rome, sought there a refuge with God. He had been baptized under the name of Benedictus, or the Blessed. He belonged to the illustrious Anician family; by his mother's side he was the last scion of the lords of Nursia, where he was born, as has been said, in 480. He was scarce fourteen when he resolved to renounce fortune, his family, and the happiness of this world. Leaving his old nurse, who had been the first to love him, and who alone followed him still, he plunged, in 494, into these wild gorges, and ascended those savage hills. On the way he met a monk, named Romanus, who gave him a hair shirt and a monastic habit made of skin.81 Proceeding on his ascent, and reaching the middle of the abrupt rock, which faces the south, and which overhangs the Anio, he discovered a dark cave, a sort of den, unillumined by the sun. He there took up his abode, and remained unknown to all, except the monk Romanus, who fed him with the remainder of his own scanty fare, but who, not being able to reach his cell, transmitted to him every day, at the end of a cord, a loaf and a little bell, the sound of which warned him of this sustenance which charity had provided for him.

He lived three entire years in this tomb. The shepherds who discovered him there at first took him for a wild beast, but by his discourses, and the efforts he made to instil grace and piety into their rustic souls, they recognised in him a servant of God. Temptations were not wanting to him. The allurements of voluptuousness acted so strongly on his excited senses, that he was on the point of leaving his retreat to seek after a woman whose beauty had formerly impressed him, and whose memory haunted him incessantly. But there was near his grotto a clump of thorns and briers: he took off the vestments of skins, which was his only dress, and rolled himself among them naked till his body was all one wound, but also till he had extinguished for ever the infernal fire which inflamed him even in the desert.

Seven centuries later, another saint, father of the most numerous monastic family which the church has produced after that of S. Benedict, S. Francis of Assisi, came to visit that wild site, which was worthy to rival the bare Tuscan rock, where the stigmata of the passion were imprinted on himself. He prostrated himself before the thicket of thorns which had been a triumphal bed to the masculine virtue of the patriarch of the monks, and after having bathed with his tears the soil of that glorious battle-field, he planted there two rose trees. The roses of S. Francis grew, and have survived the Benedictine briers. This garden, twice sanctified, still occupies a sort of triangular plateau, which projects upon the side of the rock, a little before and beneath the grotto which sheltered S. Benedict. The eye, confined on all sides by rocks, can survey freely only the azure of heaven. It is the last of those sacred places visited and venerated in the celebrated and unique monastery of the Iagro Speco, which forms a series of sanctuaries, built one over the other, backed by the mountain which Benedict has immortalized. Such was the hard and savage cradle of the monastic order in the West. It was from this tomb, where the delicate son of the last patricians of Rome buried himself alive, that the definite form of monastic life – that is to say, the perfection of Christian life – was born.

The solitude of the young anchorite was not long respected. The faithful in the neighbourhood, who brought him food for the body, asked the bread of life in return. The monks of a neighbouring monastery, situated near Vico Varo, obtained, by dint of importunity, his consent to become their ruler, but, soon disgusted by his austerity, they endeavoured to poison him. He made the sign of the cross over the vessel which contained the poison, and it broke as if it had been struck with a stone. He left these unworthy monks, to re-enter joyfully his beloved cavern, and to live by himself alone. But it was in vain: he soon found himself surrounded by such a multitude of disciples, that, to give them a shelter, he was compelled to found in the neighbourhood of his retreat twelve monasteries, each inhabited by twelve monks. He kept some with him, in order to direct them himself, and was thus finally raised to be the superior of a numerous community of cenobites.

Clergy and laymen, Romans and barbarians, victors and vanquished, alike flocked to him, attracted by the fame of his virtue and miracles. While the celebrated Theodoric, at the head of his Goths, up to that time invincible, destroyed the ephemeral kingdom of the Hercules, seized Rome, and overspread Italy, other Goths came to seek faith, penitence, and monastic discipline under the laws of Benedict. At his command they armed themselves with axes and hatchets, and employed their robust strength in rooting out the brushwood and clearing the soil, which, since the time of Nero, had again become a wilderness. The Italian painters of the great ages of art have left us many representations of the legend told by S. Gregory, in which S. Benedict restores to a Goth who had become a convert at Subiaco, the tool which that zealous but unskilled workman had dropped to the bottom of the lake, and which the abbot miraculously brought forth. "Take thy tool," said Benedict to the barbarian woodcutter, – "take it, work, and be comforted." Symbolical words, in which we find an abridgment of the precepts and examples lavished by the monastic order on so many generations of conquering races: Ecce labora.

Beside these barbarians already occupied in restoring the cultivation of that Italian soil which their brethren in arms still wasted, were many children of the Roman nobility, whom their fathers had confided to Benedict to be trained to the service of God. Among these young patricians are two whose names are celebrated in Benedictine annals: Maur, whom the abbot Benedict made his own coadjutor; and Placidus, whose father was lord of the manor of Subiaco, which did not prevent his son from rendering menial services to the community, such as drawing water from the lake of Nero. The weight of his pitcher one day overbalanced him, and he fell into the lake. We shall leave Bossuet to tell the rest, in his panegyric, delivered twelve centuries afterwards before the sons of the founder of Subiaco: —

"S. Benedict ordered S. Maur, his faithful disciple, to run quickly and draw the child out. At the word of his master, Maur went away without hesitation, … and full of confidence in the order he had received, walked upon the water with as much security as upon the earth, and drew Placidus from the whirlpool, which would have swallowed him up. To what shall I attribute so great a miracle, whether to the virtue of the obedience or to that of the commandment? A doubtful question, says S. Gregory, between S. Benedict and S. Maur. But let us say, to decide it, that the obedience had grace to accomplish the command, and that the command had grace to give efficacy to the obedience. Walk, my fathers, upon the waves with the help of obedience; you shall find solid support amid the inconstancy of human things. The waves shall have no power to overthrow you, nor the depths to swallow you up; you shall remain immovable, as if all was firm under your feet, and issue forth victorious."

However, Benedict had the ordinary fate of great men and saints. The great number of conversions worked by the example and fame of his austerity, awakened a homicidal envy against him. A wicked priest of the neighbourhood attempted first to decry and then poison him. Being unsuccessful in both, he endeavoured at least to injure him in the object of his most tender solicitude – in the souls of his young disciples. For that purpose he sent, even into the garden of the monastery, where Benedict dwelt, and where the monks laboured, seven wretched women, whose gestures, sports, and shameful nudity, were designed to tempt the young monks to certain fall. When Benedict, from the threshold of his cell, perceived these shameless creatures, he despaired of his work; he acknowledged that the interest of his beloved children constrained him to disarm so cruel an enmity by retreat. He appointed superiors to the twelve monasteries which he had founded, and, taking with him a small number of disciples, he left for ever the wild gorges of Subiaco, where he had lived for thirty-five years.

Without withdrawing from the mountainous region which extends along the western side of the Apennines, Benedict directed his steps toward the south, along the Abruzzi, and penetrated into that land of labour, the name of which seems naturally suited to a soil destined to be the cradle of the most laborious men whom the world has known. He ended his journey in a scene very different from that of Subiaco, but of incomparable grandeur and majesty. There upon the boundaries of Sammim and Campania, in the centre of a large basin, half-surrounded by abrupt and picturesque heights, rises a scarped and isolated hill, the vast and rounded summit of which overlooks the course of the Liris near its fountain head, and the undulating plain which extends south towards the shores of the Mediterranean, and the narrow valleys which, towards the north, the east, and the west, lost themselves in the lines of the mountainous horizon. This is Monte Cassino.

It was here, amidst this solemn nature, and upon that predestinated height, that the patriarch of the monks of the west founded the capital of the monastic order. He found paganism still surviving there. Two hundred years after Constantine, in the heart of Christendom, and so near Rome, there still existed a very ancient temple of Apollo, and a sacred wood, where a multitude of peasants sacrificed to the gods and demons. Benedict preached the faith of Christ to these forgotten people; he persuaded them to cut down the wood, to overthrow the temple and the idol.

Upon these remains Benedict built two oratories, one dedicated to S. John the Baptist, the first solitary of the new faith; the other to S. Martin, the great monk-bishop, whose ascetic and priestly life had edified Gaul, and reached as far as Italy.

Round these chapels rose the monastery which was to become the most powerful and celebrated in the Catholic universe; celebrated especially because there Benedict wrote his rule, and at the same time formed the type which was to serve as a model to innumerable communities submitted to that sovereign code. It is for this reason that emulous pontiffs, princes, and nations have praised, endowed, and visited the sanctuary where monastic religion, according to the expression of Pope Urban II., "flowed from the heart of Benedict as from a fountain-head of Paradise."

Benedict ended his life at Monte Cassino, where he lived for fourteen years, occupied, in the first place, with extirpating from the surrounding country the remnants of paganism, afterwards in building his monastery by the hands of his disciples, in cultivating the arid sides of his mountain, and the devastated plains around, but above all, in extending to all who approached him the benefits of the law of God, practised with a fervour and charity which none have surpassed. Although he had never been invested with the priestly character, his life at Monte Cassino was rather that of a missionary and apostle than of a solitary. He was, notwithstanding, the vigilant head of a community which flourished and increased more and more. Accustomed to subdue himself in everything, and to struggle with the infernal spirits, whose temptations and appearances were not wanting to him more than to the ancient fathers of the desert, he had acquired the gift of reading souls, and discerning their most secret thoughts. He used this faculty not only to direct the young monks, who always gathered in such numbers round him, in their studies and the labours of agriculture and building which he shared with them; but even in the distant journeys on which they were sometimes sent, he followed them by a spiritual observation, discovered their least failings, reprimanded them on their return, and bound them in everything to a strict fulfilment of the rule which they had accepted. He exacted from all, the obedience, sincerity, and austerely regulated life of which he himself gave the first example.

Many young men of rich and noble families came here, as at Subiaco, to put themselves under his direction, or were confided to him by their parents. They laboured with the other brethren in the cultivation of the soil and the building of the monastery, and were bound to all the services imposed by the rule. Some of the young nobles rebelled in secret against that equality. Among these, according to the narrative of S. Gregory, was the son of a defender– that is to say, of the first magistrate of a town or province. One evening, it being his turn to light the Abbot Benedict at supper, while he held the candlestick before the abbotial table, his pride rose within him, and he said to himself, "What is this man that I should thus stand before him while he eats, with a candle in my hand like a slave? Am I then made to be his slave?" Immediately Benedict, as if he had heard him, reproved him sharply for that movement of pride, gave the candle to another, and sent him back to his cell, dismayed to find himself at once discovered and restrained in his most secret thoughts. It was then that the great legislator inaugurated in his new-formed cloister that alliance of aristocratic races with the Benedictine Order which we shall shall have many generous and fruitful examples to quote.