Despite the importance of St. Benedict of Nursia in the history of the Church and of the world, we know precious little about his life. He left no written documents except his great Rule, which has wisely guided countless God-seeking souls for a millennium and a half. In the absence of an Augustinian Confessions, Benedict's Rule supplies a self-effacing but unmistakable biography, for the Patriarch could not have lived otherwise than as he taught.
Ildefonso Schuster, one of the outstanding ecclesiastical scholars of the twentieth century, has fitted St. Benedict into the times in which he lived, using the Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great as his point of departure. With an immense fund of knowledge at his disposal-historical, juridical, liturgical, archaeological, and literary-the author is able to invest the rather sketchy outline of St. Benedict with flesh and bones. No other biography of the Patriarch of Western Monasticism has ever come close to matching Schuster's in breadth of vision or richness of scholarship.