rise out of the great Roman plain, there stands a monastery. Its grey walls and bastions rise out of the vineyards amid the olives and peach trees, while above, the tawny roofs cluster around the great church and the slim red Lombard tower. From the court of this monastery you may look across the haze of the Campagna to the long white line and to the great dome of the Eternal City. And the stranger who, turning back from the glare of the Italian sun, goes into the cool church will learn from the Greek "Hail Mary" written round the walls, from the great screen across the chancel, perhaps from the unfamiliar chant of the monks, that here, in the middle of the Latin world, he has found a Greek Laura.
In the 10th century St. Nilos was driven from his Abbey of Rossanum, in greater Greece, by the Saracens. He might have gone to any other part of the Greek world and he would have been eagerly received as a confessor of the faith and as an already famous Saint. But he feared lest his own people would make him too proud, so he came rather to the country of the Latins, thinking to live there unknown. But he was mistaken. The Franks knew how to be generous and chivalrous to a stranger in trouble. He came, with his sixty Greek monks, to the great Benedictine mother-house at Monte Cassino. The Benedictines, always the most hospitable of religious, met him, says his biographer, "as if St. Anthony had come from Alexandria, or their own great St. Benedict from the dead."[1] He was very surprised, still more so when the Abbot asked him to use their church to sing his Greek Office, alternately with the Latin Opus Dei, "that, according to the word of God, all should be complete in him." Sixty Greek monks then kept their hours regularly in the Benedictine Abbey Church. And St. Nilos, as generous as his hosts, wrote a hymn about their founder, and, forgetting the prejudices of generations, trained his tongue to pronounce their strange language, and when his own office was done, turned the unfamiliar leaves of a Latin psalter to join them in theirs. Then he talks with the Benedictines, and, naturally, the question of their different customs is raised. The Saint's attitude is very unlike that of the arrogant
- ↑ M.P.G. cxx. 124.
