Early in the sixth century AD, a young man of the old Roman senatorial nobility found himself face to face with a deep emotional and spiritual crisis. He had been brought up a Christian the final triumph of Christianity over paganism was a century or two old by his day but for the most part his education and the values he had been imparted by his family and associates were the traditional late Roman ones. In effect, he had been trained to be a member of the governing class of the Roman Empire.
But the Roman Empire, by his day, no longer existed. He was born in about the year 480.1 Four years earlier, in 476, the last Roman Emperor in the West had been dethroned by a Germanic warlord. Decades earlier, most of the provinces of the West had fallen under "barbarian" rule. In the East, the Emperor at Constantinople retained his power, but the Eastern Empire was gradually changing out of recognition, becoming not "Roman" but Byzantine in culture and spirit.
The young man's name was Benedict. He is known today as St. Benedict of Nursia, founder of the Benedictine Order of monks. And, more than any other single man, he may be called the father of Western European civilization as it has emerged in the fifteen centuries since the fall of ancient Rome. The Benedictine Rule, which he established for the monastery he founded on Monte Cassino, embodied the principle that laborare est orare: labor is ________
1C. Warren Hollister, Medieval Europe (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1964), 82.
prayer.2 With this concept, St. Benedict created the essence of the so called "Protestant" ethic, a thousand years before Luther, Calvin, or Knox. If "labor is prayer," then the spiritual search can be carried out not only as a hermit in isolation, or (like a Buddhist monk) as a beggar dependent upon the charity of others, but through productive effort.
In later centuries, indeed, monasteries following ...