CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 14
TWO months had passed after these events when the venerable abbot Sigfrith, God’s well-beloved, passed through the fire and water of earthly tribulation and was led into the refreshment of eternal rest, making his supplications to God as a sacrifice of perpetual praise, in fulfilment of the vows he had assiduously made on earth with his own pure lips.1 After another four months Benedict, conqueror of sin and valiant champion of virtue, was himself overcome by bodily weakness and came to his last hour. ‘Chilly night falls as the storms of winter blow,’2 but for that holy man it was soon to give way to the dawn of eternal happiness, light and serenity. The brethren gathered in church, awake throughout the dark night, praying and singing psalms, relieving the sorrow they felt at their father’s passing by constant praise of God. Some of them stayed the whole time in the cell in which Benedict, feeble in body but strong in spirit, awaited eagerly for death to lead him into eternal life. A priest read the gospel to him, to alleviate his pain, throughout the whole of that night, as had been done on previous nights. The sacrament of the Body and Blood of the Lord was brought as viaticum for his journey when the hour of death was at hand. And so that holy soul, which had been tested and perfected by the burning pain of long but profitable suffering, left this earthly furnace of the flesh3 and, free at last, took wing to the glory of eternal bliss. The psalm which at that instant was being sung for him witnesses to the fact that his soul made a triumphant entry into Heaven with no hindrance or delay by evil spirits. For the brethren had gathered in church at nightfall and were singing through the psalter, in order, when they came to the eighty-second psalm, which has for title ‘God, who is your like?’4 The tenor of the whole of this psalm is that the enemies of the name of Christ, whether physical or spiritual, are unceasing in their efforts to destroy and annihilate the Church of Christ and every soul in it, no matter how faithful; but by contrast they themselves will be routed and thrown into confusion and disorder and will perish for all eternity, unmanned by the Lord Himself, to whom no one can count himself equal, for He alone is the highest above all Heaven. It was rightly seen as a dispensation of Providence that the psalm should have been recited at the very moment his soul was leaving his body, so that with God’s help no enemy might prevail against him. This confessor of the faith fell asleep in the Lord on the twelfth day of January, in the sixteenth year of his founding the monastery and was buried in the church of the blessed apostle Peter. In death, therefore, his body was not far from the altar and relics of him whom he had always loved during his earthly life and who had opened for him the gates of Heaven. He had ruled the monastery for sixteen years, the first eight without appointing an assistant abbot, the rest of the time with the help of the holy and venerable Eosterwine, Sigfrith and Ceolfrith, men who had the title, authority and office of abbot; the first of whom assisted him four years, the second three and the third one.