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Updated: May 26, 2025
They abounded from the freezing Tanais to the sultry Tabenné. In rigorous personal life and in supernatural power the West acknowledged no inferiority to the East; his admiring imitators challenged even the desert of Thebais to produce the equal of Martin of Tours. The solitary anchorite was soon supplanted by the coenobitic establishment, the monastery.
The Abbot of Lerins was simply the chief of some thousands of religious devotees, scattered over the island in solitary cells, and linked together by the common ties of obedience and prayer. By a curious concurrence of events the coenobitic life of Lerins, so utterly unlike the later monasticism of the Benedictines, was long preserved in a remote corner of Christendom.
The chapels served till the Revolution as seven stations which were visited by the pilgrims to the island, but we can hardly doubt that in these, as in the Seven Chapels at Glendalough, we see relics of the earlier coenobitic establishment.
Benedict, father of the Benedictine order, and "father of all monks," as he was afterwards called, who, beginning himself as a hermit, caused the hermit life to fall, not into disrepute, but into comparative disuse; while the coenobitic life that is, life, not in separate cells, but in corporate bodies, with common property, and under one common rule was accepted as the general form of the religious life in the West.
But on the top of the mountain was another retreat, known as Castellense, for those monks who divina gratia suffragante desired a severer discipline, and left the coenobitic house to become anchorites. Did these virtuous brothers continue their literary labours? One hopes so, and one is glad that Cassiodorus himself seems to have ended his life down in the valley by the Pellena.
In this career of victory the Gothic king once approached that Campanian hill on which the great benefactor of the West, St. Benedict, was laying the foundations of the coenobitic life. In the first instance, Totila tried to deceive the Saint. He dressed up a high officer as king, and sent him, with three of his chief counts in attendance, to personate himself.
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