THE UNANIMOUSLY POISONED WINE

Chapter Three of Gregory’s Life of Benedict

by Andrew Marr, OSB

One of the most famous stories about St. Benedict narrated by St. Gregory is about the short and near-disastrous abbacy over a community near his cave at Subiaco. This is also a story that illustrates the theory of Girard of collective violence with great clarity.

The basic story is quickly told. Benedict is living a life of constant prayer, alone, in his cave at the top of a mountain near Subiaco. The abbot of a nearby community has just died and “the whole community” comes to Benedict and the monks ask him “insistently” to be their superior. Benedict warns the monks that “his way of life would not fit with theirs,” but they persist in their request and Benedict agrees to this arrangement against his better judgment. The monks quickly change their minds about wishing to have Benedict be their superior and they put poison in his cup of table wine. This plan is thwarted when Benedict makes the sign of the cross while saying grace over the meal and the decanter breaks miraculously, spilling the wine. Benedict takes the hint and returns to his cave at Subiaco.

Gregory emphasizes the dysfunctional quality of this community. Although he does not describe them in those terms at the very first, when they approach Benedict, Benedict’s response makes it clear that they have a bad reputation. Although their bad repute caused him to hesitate to take the position, he gave in to their entreaties. Gregory then makes it clear that there was much about the collective way of life in this monastery that needed correcting. Benedict would not “allow them to do unlawful things, as they had done beforehand.” For their part, the community found the prospect of change for the better to be “unbearable.” The monks became “mad with anger” and they “began to blame one another” for asking Benedict to be their superior. At this tense moment, the monks “conspired together” to poison his cup at wine at the next meal.

Fragmented as this community is, Gregory stresses their unanimity in relationship to their new superior. It is the whole community that asks Benedict to be the superior. When the community splinters over blaming each other for the subsequent unsatisfactory state of affairs, the monks “conspire together” to poison their abbot. In reflecting on this story after Benedict returns to his cave, Gregory tells his partner in dialogue, Peter the Deacon, that “these people conspired unanimously against the holy man.” One begins to wonder if this community could have been surprised with the way things turned out. It is difficult to believe that they were so stupid as to think that Benedict would allow them to live in the lawless fashion that had been their custom. One can speculate that these monks wanted the prestige of Benedict’s reputation for holiness to rub off on them without their becoming holy themselves. One can also suspect that these monks were setting up this outsider to become a victim of their collective action. This scenario is quite similar to the tribal society that drafts a person from outside the tribe to be their chief who then becomes the object of sacrificial violence.

Benedict’s reaction to this incident if firm and decisive, but it is not vindictive. He doesn’t call the District Attorney and ask for the electric chair. On the contrary, Gregory reports that Benedict’s face was “serene” and “his soul at peace.” He asks God to have mercy on these monks, admits that he should have known this arrangement was not going to work, and left them so that they could find a superior “suitable to [their] ways.” What was important to Benedict was his return to God, not revenge.

Gregory’s subsequent reflections in this chapter make it clear that withdrawal is an important theme in his own mind, and is an also important consideration in a Girardian reflection on this incident. The significance of Benedict’s withdrawal from this community cannot be fully understood without looking back to two earlier acts of withdrawal. First, Benedict had dropped out of his academic training because “he saw that many of the students there had fallen into vice.” By quitting his studies that would have set him up to be active in the society of his time, Gregory says that Benedict became “learnedly ignorant and wisely unskilled.” I doubt that Gregory was thinking in terms of mimetic rivalry at this point, but this withdrawal did have the effect of removing Benedict from involvement with the mimetic dimensions of society. Benedict did not withdraw alone, however. He took his childhood nurse with him. After being “charitably” received in his new neighborhood at Effide, his nurse borrowed a winnowing-dish and accidentally broke it. Benedict “felt compassion for her distress” and prayed over the dish with the result that it was fully repaired. “Everyone in the district got to know about it” and they hung the dish outside the church porch. Ironically, a miracle done out of compassion and for a practical purpose was changed into a frozen act of the sacred. Benedict seems to have realized that this unanimous adulation and sacralizing of his person was dangerous. This danger was fully demonstrated later when Benedict was asked by a whole monastic community to be their abbot although their unanimity was a result of their own mimetic crisis.

When Benedict serenely left the dysfunctional monastery and returned to “the place of his beloved solitude,” he again lived alone “under the eye of the Onlooker from above,”and he “dwelt with himself.” Peter then asks Benedict to explain what he means by the phrase “he dwelt with himself,” thus giving Gregory a chance to explain it to the reader, which he does at some length. Gregory says that Benedict could have chosen to hold the incorrigible monks “forcefully subject to himself,” but he would have “exceeded his strength and lost his peace.” In the end, he would have “lost himself without finding them.” With the help of Girard’s theory, we can see that Benedict was on the verge of going out of himself, where he was grounded in God, and moving into a conflictual mimetic rivalry with the community. In such a case, the superior and the followers enter a contest of wills to see who can get the better of the other. Far from building each other up in Christ, they can only tear each other down in the mirror relationship where they can only see each other as stumbling blocks rather than Christ.

Insofar as we are “led outside ourselves” by “excessive concern” that leads to mimetic conflict, “we remain ourselves but we are no longer with ourselves.” Gregory goes on to explain this predicament in terms of Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son. By leaving for a distant country and spending his inheritance, the Prodigal Son has alienated himself from himself. While feeding the pigs and wishing he could eat what the pigs are serves, he “comes to himself,” and returns home. Likewise, Benedict had withdrawn from himself to care for the incorrigible monks. When he withdrew from these monks, he returned to himself. It is instructive to recall Gil Bailie’s tape on St. Luke’s Gospel here. Bailie points out that a literal translation of the Greek description of the Prodigal Son’s action is that he “scattered his substance.” To move out of oneself, whether it is for sensual pleasure as with the Prodigal Son, or out of a misguided desire to reform others as with Benedict, is to scatter one’s substance. It is worth mentioning that Gregory also tells a story of Benedict’s being tempted to move out of himself in this lower, sensual way, when he experiences temptation at the thought of a woman he once saw. Only by “coming to oneself” is it possible to re-gather one’s substance.

It is important to note, however, that Benedict’s withdrawal back to himself is not a move from community to individualism. If one hasn’t returned to God, one hasn’t really returned to oneself. This withdrawal back to oneself is not merely a negative movement. There is a movement toward something, actually, Someone, namely God. Gregory stresses the fact that when Benedict lived with himself, he was always guarding himself. But Benedict was not guarding himself in isolation. When Benedict “looked at himself,” he looked at himself “before the eyes of the Creator.” In case the reader doesn’t understand the point yet, Peter asks Gregory for a further explanation of the phrase to “go out of oneself,” by referring to the use of this phrase to describe the Apostle Peter after his miraculous escape from prison where he “came to himself” once the angel had left him.

Gregory explains that there are two ways in which we can go out of ourselves. We can fall beneath ourselves like the Prodigal Son so that we feed the pigs beneath ourselves with “a wandering mind and by impurity.” It is also possible, however, to be raised above ourselves by “the grace of contemplation.” The Apostle Peter, his soul put into ecstacy by the angel, was outside himself “but above himself.” Both the Prodigal Son and the Apostle Peter returned to themselves, but from opposite directions. “One left the way of error and recollected himself in his heart, the other returned from the summit of contemplation.” Likewise, Benedict himself was raised “towards the heights” by the “ardors of contemplation” when he “left himself beneath himself.”

Far from being an individualistic move, withdrawal into oneself so that one dwells with oneself is necessarily a withdrawal into God so that one dwells with God. Thus, a return to oneself is a return to God. More important, this withdrawal is not a withdrawal from all humanity, but a withdrawal from the mimetic vortex that holds humanity in thrall. Once one has learned to dwell with oneself in God, it becomes possible to dwell with other human beings in a much more constructive way. Benedict’s withdrawal back to his solitary cave after the attempted poisoning is not a long one. In fact, Gregory goes on to tell Peter that “as soon as [Benedict] abandoned these incorrigible men in order to live with himself, he was able to revive the spiritual life in a multitude of souls.”

It is commonly suggested among Benedictines that Benedict learned a few things about leadership from his early experience with this dysfunctional community. Upon reflection, Benedict came to the conclusion that monks should be encouraged in a moderate, if firm way to grow into Christ. In his later chapter on the abbot, he interprets Gen. 33: 13, where Jacob pleads to Esau that he should not drive his flocks too far in one day, to mean that the abbot should not drive the community too hard. Rather, the abbot needs to discern how much challenge they are able to withstand at any given time. It is this level of discernment that seems to have been lacking when Benedict took on this community.

It should be clear that proper discernment requires that one be “within oneself” in such a way as to be “besides oneself” in God. We can see that Benedict moved within himself by withdrawing from Effide and the unanimous praise he received there. He then moved outside of himself by listening to the unanimous praise of the community who asked him to become abbot. He then moved further out of himself by entering into a relationship of mirror-image conflict with the monks to the extent that he was involved in their vices rather than involved with himself as grounded in God. As long as he was outside himself, he could not discern the fact that this community was not willing to be formed by him. This chapter makes clear the fact that there are some human situations that some people cannot fix. Maybe another abbot will be able to wean this community from their vices and win them for Christ. Benedict was not the person to do that. In making this point, Gregory refers to the Apostle Paul’s escape from Damascus because it was not possible to accomplish anything except get himself killed. By being “outside himself,” Benedict also could not discern the right approach to these monks. After withdrawing, however, and re-entering himself so as to dwell “within himself,” Benedict learned the moderate approach that would make him the model, not only for abbots, but for all called to leadership among humanity. This withdrawal, however, was only the preparation for re-entering society in the right way with the ability to model a non-conflictual way of living that drew other people to him. He withdrew from one dysfunctional monastery, but soon after, according to Gregory, he founded Monte Cassino which in turn founded twelve monasteries.