Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 2.djvu/498

 BENEDICT

436

BENEDICT

The best account of the writings of Benedict and the sources towards the end of the century, and at his request for his hfe are containe_d in the above-mentioned work of KRA.ns. ^ ^^^^ careful transcript of it was made for him, as

See also Guarnacci, Vita: et res gesta Romanor. Pontif. et Card, a Clem. X xisque ad Clem. XI (Rome, 1857); Novaes, Sloria de' Sommi Pontefici (Rome, 1822); R.akke, Die rom. Piipste in den letztenvierJahrh. (Leipzig, ed. 1900); VieduPape Bened. XIV (Paris, 1783); Grone, Papst-Geschichte (Ratisbon, 1875), 11. For a long account of the Curia and the character of the car- dinals in the time of Benedict XIV. see Choiseul. Letires et Memoirea inedites, publices par Maurice Boutry (Paris. 1895). On Benedict as a canonist see Schulte, Gesch. der Quellen und Lilt, des can. Rechta (Stuttgart, 1880), III. 503 sqq.

Patrick J. Healy.

Benedict, Rule

the first place among monastic legislative codes, and was by far the most impor- tant factor in the organization and spread of monasti- cism in the West. For its general char- acter and also its illustration of St. Benedict's own life, see the article Bene- dict, Saint. Here, however, it is treated more in detail, under the following heads: I. The Text of the Rule; II. Analysis of the Rule; III." Prac- tical Working of the Rule.

I. The Text op THE Ru'^B. — The ex- act time and place at which St. Benedict wrote his Rule are not knowii, nor can it bcdetermined wheth- er the Rule, as we now possess it, was composed as a sin- gle whole or whether it gradually took shape in response to the needs of his monks. Somewhere about 530, however, may be taken as a likely date, and Monte Cassino as a more probable place than Subiaco, for the Rule certainly re- flects St. Benedict's matured monastic and spiritual wis- dom. The earliest chronicler says that when Monte Cassino was destroyed b y the Lombards

OF Saint. — This work holds

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an exemplar of the text to be disseminated through- out the monasteries of his empire. Several copies of the Rule were made from it, one of which survives to this day; for there can be no doubt that the present Codex 914 of the St. Gall Library was copied directly from Charlemagne's copy for the Abbey of Reichenau. An exact diplomatic reprint (not in facsimile) of this codex was published at Monte Cassino in 1900, so that the text of this MS., certainly the best indi- vidual text of the Rule in existence, can be studied without difficulty. Various other MSS. go back to Charle- magne'sMS.,orto its original a t Monte Cassino, which was destroyed by fire in 896, and thus the text of the so-called autograph may be restored by approv- ed critical methods with quite unusual certainty, and could we be certain that it really was the auto- graph, there would be no more to say.

But as already pointed out, it is not quite certain that it was St. Benedict's autograph, and the case is complicated by the circumstance that there is in the field another type of text, represented by the oldest known MS., the Oxford Hat- ton .MS. 42, and by otlicr very early au- thorities, which cer- tainly was the te.xt most widely diffused in the seventh and eighth centuries. Whether this text nas St. Benedict's first recension and the " autograph ' ' his later revision, or nhether the former IS liut a corrupted form of the latter, is 11 question which is still under debate, I hough the major- ity of critics lean towards the second alternative. In ei- ther case, however

581, the monks fled to Rome, carrying with them, the text of the "autograph" is the one to be adopted, among other treasures, a copy of the Rule "which The MSS., from the tenth century onwards, and the the holy Father had composed"; and in the mid- ordinary printed editions, give mixed texts, made up die of the eighth century there was in the pope's out of the two earliest types. Thus the text in cur- library a copy believed to be St. Benedict's auto- rent use is critically a bad one, but very few of the graph. It has been assumed by many scholars readings make any substantial difference.^ that this was the copy brought from Monte Cassino; The Rule was written in the Lingua Vulgaris or but though the supposition is likely enough, it is Low Latin vernacular of the time, and contains much not a certainty. Be that as it may, this MS. of the .syntax and orthography not in conformance with Rule was presented by Pope Zachary to Monte classical models. There is as yet no edition of the Cassino in the middle of the eighth century, a short Rule that satisfies the requirements of modern time after the restoration of that monastery. Charle- criticism, though one is in process of preparation for magne found it there when he visited Monte Cassino the Vienna "Corpus" of Latin Ecclesiastical writers.

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