Background
According to Ardo, Benedict"s biographer, the saint was the son of a Visigoth, Aigulf, Count of Maguelonne (Magalonensis comes).
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Benedict Aniane
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Education
Originally given the Gothic name Witiza, he was educated at the Frankish court of Pippin the Younger, and entered the royal service as a page.
Career
His feast day is February 12. The experience to act on a resolve which had been slowly forming in him, to renounce the world and give himself to the service of God in the monastic life. He later left the court and was received into the monastery of Saint Sequanus (Saint-Seine).
Around 780, he founded a monastic community based on Eastern asceticism at Aniane in Languedoc.
This community did not develop as he had intended. In 782, he founded another monastery based on Benedictine Rule, at the same location.
His success there gave him considerable influence, which he used to found and reform a number of other monasteries, and eventually becoming the effective abbot of all the monasteries of Charlemagne"s empire. Emperor Louis the Pious entrusted him with the oversight of all the monasteries within his territory.
He had a wide knowledge of patristic literature, and churchmen, such as Alcuin sought his counsel
He was the head of a council of abbots which in 817 at Aachen created a code of regulations, or "Codex regularum", which would be binding on all their houses. Benedict sought to restore the primitive strictness of the monastic observance wherever it had been relaxed or exchanged for the less exacting canonical life. Shortly thereafter, he compiled a "Concordia regularum".
Sections of the Benedictine rule (except ix-xvi) are given in their order, with parallel passages from the other rules included in the Liber regularum, so as to show the agreement of principles and thus to enhance the respect due to the Benedictine.
Although these new codes fell into disuse shortly after the deaths of Benedict and his patron, Emperor Louis the Pious, they did have lasting effects on Western monasticism. Benedict died at Kornelimünster Abbey, a monastery Louis had built for him to serve as the base for Benedict"s supervisory work.
