Benedict appears in a complex historical moment, which has something similar to the present: a time of crisis, motivated in part by a profound cultural change.
He was born in 480 in a city north of Rome, Nursia. He begins his higher studies in Rome but his inner search soon leads him to withdraw into solitude. He has discovered that beyond knowledge, he has an appointment with the Wisdom that comes from God. He lives in Subiaco, as a hermit. As his biographer, Pope Saint Gregory the Great, will write, Benedict is following a path of inner unification.
From this intense experience he will be able to organize twelve small communities and then move on to Montecassino. He has to take a sometimes difficult path of communion with others. He opens himself more and more to free love towards his monks and towards every man or woman who crosses his path: poor and pilgrims, potentates and simple people. He is a spiritual teacher able to educate, to guide others on their own path to God, to discern and help them get rid of what is holding them back in their progress along the path of the gospel. He knows how to heal his own wounds and those of others, he is alert to the signs of the times.
Benedict collects all the rich heritage of the previous monks and, with an extraordinary gift of synthesis, gives shape to the monasticism of his time: he adapts the monastic life to the West and opens the doors of his community to the old Romans and the new barbarians alike. For him, what defines a man or a woman is not their race, their social status, their sex or their age, but that they truly seek God.
He matures his project and writes his Rule.
His sister – twin according to tradition – Scholastica, along with a group of women, also embraces the lifestyle of Benedict, who ends his days in the year 547. Shortly before he dies, the saint has a vision of the whole world concentrated in a ray of light. Benedict sees things and people from God. His path has ended but his spirit lives on.
