Pastoral Rule, Dialogues & Letters 109

While still living in my monastery, I learned by the account of a certain most venerable man what I now tell. For he used to say that a venerable Father by the name of Spes built a monastery in a place whose name is Campli, which is separated from the ancient city of Nursia by the interval of about six miles. Almighty and merciful God protected him from eternal punishment by scourging him, and kept for him the greatest severity of His dispensation—and its grace; and how much He loved him earlier by scourging, He showed afterward by perfectly healing him. For He pressed his eyes with the darkness of continual blindness for the space of forty years, opening for him no light, not even of the faintest sight.

But since no one subsists under His scourge if His grace forsakes him, and unless that same merciful Father who inflicts the penalty also grants patience, then presently through impatience the very correction of sins increases sin in us, and in a wretched manner our fault takes increase from that whence it ought to have hoped for its end; therefore God, beholding our infirmities, tempers a safeguard to His scourges, and in His chastisement is now mercifully just toward His chosen sons, that there may be those to whom He must afterward justly show mercy. Whence, while He pressed the venerable old man with outward darkness, He never forsook him of inward light. Though he was wearied by the scourge of the body, he had, through the keeping of the Holy Spirit, consolation of heart. But when now the

fortieth year of the time had been completed in his blindness, the Lord restored his light to him, and announced his approaching death, and admonished him to preach the word of life to the monasteries built round about, that, his bodily light being received, he might visit the brethren in the surrounding region and open to them the light of the heart. He at once, obeying the commands, went round the monasteries of the brethren, and preached the commandments of life which he had learned by doing them. On the fifteenth day, therefore, his preaching accomplished, he returned to his own monastery, and there, the brethren being called together, standing in their midst, he received the sacrament of the Lord's Body and Blood, and presently began with them the mystic chants of the psalms. And while they were singing, being intent upon prayer, he rendered up his soul.

But all the brethren who were present saw a dove go forth from his mouth, which presently, the roof of the oratory being opened, went out and, as the brethren looked on, penetrated heaven. And his soul is therefore to be believed to have appeared in the form of a dove, so that almighty God might show by this very form with how simple a heart that man had served Him.