St. Benedict Aniane

ST BENEDICT OF ANIANE
From Butler’s Lives of the Saints 3
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Benedict was the son of Aigulf of Maguelone and served King Pepin and
his son, Charlemagne, as cupbearer. At the age of twenty he made a resolution
to seek the kingdom of God with his whole heart. He took part in the campaign
in Lombardy, but, after having been nearly drowned in the river Tesino, near
Pavia, in endeavoring to save his brother, he made a vow to quit the world
entirely. Upon his return to Languedoc he was confirmed in this determination
by the advice of a hermit called Widmar, and he went to the abbey of SaintSeine,

fifteen miles from Dijon, where he was admitted as a monk. He spent two

and a half years here learning the monastic life and bringing himself under
control by severe austerities. Not satisfied with observing the rule of St
Benedict, he practiced those other points of perfection which he found
prescribed in the Rules of St Pachomius and St Basil. When the abbot died, the
brethren were disposed to elect him to fill the post, but he was unwilling to
accept the charge because he knew that the monks were opposed to anything in
the shape of systematic reform.

Benedict accordingly quitted Saint-Seine and, returning to Languedoc,
built a small hermitage beside the brook Aniane upon his own estate. Here he
lived for some years in self-imposed destitution, praying continually that God
would teach him to do His will. Some solitaries, of whom the holy man Widmar
was one, placed themselves under his direction, and they earned their livelihood
by manual labor, living on bread and water except on Sundays and great
festivals when they added a little wine or milk if it was given them in alms. The
superior worked with them in the fields and sometimes spent his time in
copying books. When the number of his disciples increased, Benedict left to
build a monastery in a more spacious place. In a short time he had many
religious under his direction, and at the same time exercised a general
inspection over all the monasteries of Provence, Languedoc and Gascony,
becoming eventually the director and overseer of all the monasteries in the
empire; he reformed many with little or no opposition.

In order to have him close at hand, the Emperor Louis the Pious obliged
Benedict to dwell first at the abbey of Maurmünster in Alsace and then, as he
wanted him yet nearer, he built a monastery upon the Inde, later known as
Cornelimünster, near Aachen, the residence of the emperor and court. Benedict
lived in the monaster yet continued to help in the restoration of monastic
observance throughout France and Germany. He was the chief instrument in
drawing up the canons for the reformation of monks at the council of Aachen in
817, and presided in the same year over the assembly of abbots to enforce the
restoration of discipline… Benedict also wrote the Codex Regularum (Codex of
Rules), a collection of all the monastic regulations which he found extant; he
likewise compiled a book of homilies for the use of monks, collected from the
works of the fathers; but his most important work was the Concordia
Regularum, the Concord of Rules, in which he gives those of St Benedict of
Nursia in combination with those of other patriarchs of monastic observance to
show their similarity.

This great restorer of monasticism in the West, worn out by
mortifications and fatigues, suffered much from continual sickness in the latter
part of his days. He died at Inde with great tranquility in 821, being then
seventy one years of age.

3
Lives of the Saints. Butler, Harper San Francisco, 1991, pp. 43-44.