We are enabled by this partially-quoted description to imagine the importance attached to the election of an abbot.  He became, in feudal times, a lord of the land, the richest man in the community, and a tremendous power in political councils and parliaments.  A Benedictine abbot once confessed:  “My vow of poverty has given me a hundred thousand crowns a year; my vow of obedience has raised me to the rank of a sovereign prince.”

No new principle seems to be disclosed by the Benedictine rules.  The command to labor had been emphasized even in the monasteries of Egypt.  The Basilian code contained a provision enforcing manual labor, but the work was light and insufficient to keep the mind from brooding.  The monastery that was to succeed in the West must provide for men who not only could toil hard, but who must do so if they were to be kept pure and true; it must welcome men accustomed to the dangerous adventures of pioneer life in the vast forests of the North.  The Benedictine system met these conditions by a unique combination and application of well-known monastic principles; by a judicious subordination of minor matters to essential discipline; by bringing into greater prominence the doctrine of labor; by tempering the austerities of the cell to meet the necessities of a severe climate; and lastly, by devising a scheme of life equally adaptable to the monk of sunny Italy and the rude Goth of the northern forests.

It was the splendid fruition of many years of experiment amid varying results.  “It shows,” says Schaff, “a true knowledge of human nature, the practical wisdom of Rome and adaptation to Western customs; it combines simplicity with completeness, strictness with gentleness, humility with courage and gives the whole cloister life a fixed unity and compact organization, which, like the episcopate, possessed an unlimited versatility and power of expansion.”

The Struggle against Barbarism

No institution has contributed as much to the amelioration of human misery or struggled as patiently and persistently to influence society for good as the Christian church.  In spite of all that may be said against the followers of the Cross, it still remains true, that they have ever been foremost in the establishment of peace and justice among men.

The problem that confronted the church when Benedict began his labors, was no less than that of reducing a demoralized and brutal society to law and order.  Chaos reigned, selfishness and lust ruled the hearts of Rome’s conquerors.  The West was desolated by barbarians; the East dismembered and worn out by theological controversy.  War had ruined the commerce of the cities and laid waste the rural districts.  Vast swamps and tracts of brush covered fields once beautiful with the products of agricultural labor.  The minds of men were distracted by apprehensions of some frightful, impending calamity.  The cultured Roman, the untutored Goth and the corrupted Christian were locked in the deadly embrace of despair.  “Constantly did society attempt to form itself,” says Guizot, “constantly was it destroyed by the act of man, by the absence of the moral conditions under which alone it can exist.”