Pope Gregory the Great wrote the only early account of Saint Benedict’s life, in Book II of his Dialogues, around 593. Among its stories is one of the most dramatic: a farmer carries his dead son to the abbey gate and refuses to leave without him.
The story
In the Benedictine translation (chapter 32), the father arrives carrying the body and cries, “Give me my son!” Benedict answers that such miracles “are not for us to work, but for the blessed Apostles.” The man swears he will not go. Benedict lays himself over the body, lifts his hands and prays: “Behold not, O Lord, my sins, but the faith of this man.” The soul returns, the body trembles, and Benedict hands the boy back alive.
Why it sits lower on the list
- Secondhand. In the prologue Gregory says he could not know all of Benedict’s deeds and that the few he reports came “from the relation of four of his disciples”: Constantine, Valentinian, Simplicius and Honoratus.
- No witness named. The farmer and the boy have no names, and the text gives no place beyond the abbey gate.
- Written later. Gregory wrote around 593, some decades after Benedict’s life.
What Gregory himself says
Gregory is careful about the meaning. In chapter 30 he distinguishes miracles done by power given by God from those obtained by prayer, citing Peter raising Tabitha (Acts 9). Benedict’s miracle, he says, came by prayer, not by power of his own.
The ranking says nothing about whether it happened. It says only that this story reaches us through a chain of tellers we cannot question.
A note on the ranking: it is ours, not the Church’s. We weigh who wrote a story down, when, and whether witnesses were named. We do not weigh holiness or what God can do. The Catechism (548) says miracles are signs that invite faith, not proof to satisfy curiosity.
Watch the video: Saints Who Raised the Dead: Ranked by Evidence, where all five cases are put side by side.
Sources
- Gregory the Great, Dialogues Book II (Benedictine translation): prologue, chapter 30 and chapter 32.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, 547-549.
Image credits
- Pierre Subleyras, St. Benedict Resuscitating an Infant (study), c. 1745. Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. A later artwork, not a portrait.