Benedict of Aniane

Benedict of Aniane, known in secular life as Witiza, belonged to the Visigothic aristocracy of Septimania in southern Gaul. He was the son of Aigulf, count of Maguelone, and was born in the mid-eighth century in that region, which had only recently passed under Frankish control. Sent to the court of the Frankish kings, he was trained in letters and palace custom and served as a cupbearer, first under Pepin the Short and then under Charlemagne. He also followed the military career expected of his rank and took part in Charlemagne’s Italian campaign against the Lombards. The near-contemporary life by his disciple Ardo Smaragdus relates that during this expedition he nearly drowned in the Ticino while trying to save his brother; the episode is presented as the crisis that led him to abandon court and arms.

He entered the monastery of Saint-Seine near Dijon, where he was professed and later ordained. Judging the observance there too mild, he imposed on himself extreme fasts, vigils, and austerities drawn from the rules of Basil, Pachomius, and other Eastern fathers. After some years he left Saint-Seine, returned to Septimania, and settled as a hermit on family land at Aniane, in the Hérault. Disciples gathered, and the hermitage grew into a monastery. Although Benedict continued to study a wide range of ancient rules, he came to treat the Rule of Saint Benedict of Nursia as the most workable instrument for communal life in the Frankish world, and Aniane was organized under that rule. The house became a model of disciplined observance and a base from which reform spread through the south.

His reputation drew the attention of the Carolingian court. Charlemagne used him in the reform of monasteries in Aquitaine and Septimania. Louis the Pious, who as king of Aquitaine had already relied on him, summoned him north after becoming emperor in 814 and had a monastery built for him at Inda (later Kornelimünster) in the forest near Aachen, so that Benedict could direct reform from beside the palace. He became in practice the overseer of monastic life in the empire. The reforming synods of Aachen in 816 and 817, whose legislation he largely shaped, required monks to follow the Benedictine Rule alone, issued detailed capitula on custom, liturgy, and enclosure, and sought to distinguish monks clearly from canons.

To underpin this program he assembled the Codex regularum, a collection of older Latin and translated Eastern rules, and composed the Concordia regularum, a topical concordance placing excerpts from those rules beside the corresponding chapters of Benedict of Nursia in order to present the latter as a balanced summary of tradition. He died at Inda in February 821 and was buried in the abbey there. Veneration began soon afterward; his feast is kept on 12 February. Later Benedictine memory regarded him as a second founder of Western monasticism, the figure who, more than any other individual, made the Rule of Saint Benedict the standard of Latin monastic life under the Carolingians.