A lot of miracles aren’t too good. On the bottom tier are a couple by St. Benedict, the founder of the monastery at Monte Cassino and notional author of the famous rule of St. Benedict. Gregory the Great gives us our fullest account of Benedict’s life in his Dialogues, a collection of edifying stories that also illuminates the (otherwise rather obscure) social life of ordinary Italians during the period of Ostrogothic rule. Actually, Benedict is supposed to have come face-to-face with the last of the Ostrogothic kings, Totila, respecting whom many of th Western sources are outstandingly hostile. The Dialogues show him in a comparatively favorable light. At first given over to cruelty and sin, he mends his ways after receiving a prophecy from Benedict about the course of the rest of his reign: “Et quidem Romam ingressurus es, mare transiturus, novem annis regnas, decimo morieris.” Benedict just about nails it, though we may recognize “mare transiturus” as a typically Delphic amphibole. Will Totila go over the ocean to conquer his enemies or (as it turns out) while fleeing from them?
That’s a pretty good miracle. Others that Gregory introduces into his life of St. Benedict under the same rubric (Benedict’s spirit of prophecy) are less impressive. For example, Benedict can tell when someone who’s come to share a meal with him has already eaten. A monk on an errand encounters the devil (he was everywhere in Italy back then), who offers him food. Since the monk is fasting, he refuses; as the day and the journey stretch on, however, his hunger gets the best of him and he relents before his travelling companion’s repeated entreaties to eat. Back at the monastery, Benedict catches him out: “malignus hostis qui tibi per conviatorem tuum locutus est, semel tibi persuadere non potuit, secundo non potuit, ad tertium persuasit, et te ad hoc quod voluit superavit?” The monk blushes and begs forgiveness: “se cognivit etiam absentem in Benedicti patris oculis deliquisse.”
Why include this astonishingly trivial incident (and a few others like it) in Benedict’s catalogue of miracles? It may be a matter of furnishing enough examples to show posterity that Benedict did indeed possess the gift of prophecy, but I suspect that the matter at hand would not have appeared quite so trivial to Gregory’s contemporaries as it does to us. A full survey of the miracles included in the Dialogues in fact suggests that issues of food, drink and their consumption loomed large in its author’s mind. This can produce a humorous effect, as in an incident (also discussed by Erich Auerbach in Literary Language and its Public) involving a young nun who becomes possessed after eating a lettuce leaf over which she has forgotten to make the sign of the cross. Again, I suspect that the humor here is an effect of anachronism; Gregory’s contemporaries would probably have taken the threat of unhallowed lettuce leaves rather seriously.
Part of the reason for this is probably economic. The Italy Gregory describes is an austere one, shocked by scarcity after centuries of being supplied from the whole Roman Empire. Also on the bottom tier of Benedict’s miracles are a series of magical extractions from a lake: among other things, he pulls out an iron pruning-hook that has been lost there by a stupid (“poor in spirit”) Goth. A century earlier, replacing that pruning-hook would have been a simple matter; during Benedict’s lifetime, perhaps the only remaining source of iron available to Italy was the nearly-exhausted mines on Elba. Many are the saints in the Dialogues who prove their merit by miraculously extending scanty supplies of oil or wine during famine years, thus satisfying at once the hunger of their fellow monks and the skepticism of these latter about whether god will really provide.
The double-function of those famine miracles highlights another dimension of the nexus between eating and holiness. If scarcity raises food to a level of dignity and importance that we have a hard time understanding, then food also becomes a fruitful field for demonstrating something which is, it seems to me, the chief aim of the Dialogues to prove: the usefulness of sanctity. Gregory’s saints are positioned as indispensible intermediaries between the natural world and human bodies: to attempt to do without them is to open a gateway for sin. They process the food their flock eats in order to remove the taint of the devil from it. Vice-versa, laymen can re-introduce sin into consecrated food by misappropriating it: thus the many stories Gregory tells of snakes found in wine-barrels that have been stolen or embezzled.
Thus also the importance of saintly surveillance like that provided by Benedict. Best would be to establish complete control over the eating and drinking habits of his subordinate monks; next best is to know when they’ve transgressed the rule, so that the damage may be controlled and undone. Against this background, Benedict’s ability to know when someone has eaten outside the monastery looks less trivial. Actually, it’s a backstop that guarantee the efficacy of what is, for Gregory, perhaps the most important function of the saints.