Such was the general position of cenobitism when St. Benedict (Fig. 238), the future patriarch of the monks of the West, the supreme legislator of the monastic order, abandoned his humble cell at Subiaco (528) to found the immense abbey of Monte-Cassino (Fig. 239), which was the glory of the age. The Benedictine rule, the result of profound physiological and philosophical studies, a work of moral science, of wisdom, and of piety, divided the monks’ time between prayer and manual labour, to be succeeded by the cultivation or exercise of the intellect whenever the glory of God, the interests of the monastery, and the education of the people might require it. St. Benedict soon had under his control an army of monks who spread throughout the whole Christian world the rules of their illustrious chief. Amongst them were St. Maurus and Cassiodorus, the former minister of Theodoric the Great: one of them founded the monastery of St. Maur-sur-Loire, in France; the other, that of Vivieri, in Calabria. Cassiodorus took great pains to collect books of the Old and the New Testament, with their commentaries. He went to great expense in collecting all the writings of the Greek and Latin Fathers, of the Jewish historians as well as of those of the Church, and the principal works on geography, grammar, and rhetoric, and even the best treatises on medicine, so that the monks attached to the infirmary might be fully capable of tending the sick. The monastery of Vivieri contained one of the richest libraries of the period. We find in the collection of the Institutions of Cassiodorus the following remarkable homage paid to the calligraphist monks, who were the greatest men of letters in that day: “I confess, my brethren, that of all your physical labours, that of copying books has always been the avocation most to my taste; the more so, as by this exercise of the mind upon the Holy Scriptures, you convey to those who will read what you have written a kind of oral instruction. You preach with the hand, converting the fingers into organs of speech, announcing silently to men a theme of salvation; it is as it were fighting the evil one with pen and ink. For every word written by the antiquary, the demon receives a severe wound. At rest in his seat, as he copies his books, the recluse travels through many lands without quitting his room, and the work of his hands has its influence in places where he has never been.”