Rule of Saint Augustine
The Rule of Saint Augustine, written in about the year 400, is a brief document divided into eight chapters and serves as an outline for religious life lived in community.
[2] The rule, developed by Augustine of Hippo (354–430), governs chastity, poverty, obedience, detachment from the world, the apportionment of labour, the inferiors, fraternal charity, prayer in common, fasting and abstinence proportionate to the strength of the individual, care of the sick, silence and reading during meals.
It came into use on a wide scale from the twelfth century onwards and continues to be employed today by many orders, including the Dominicans, Servites, Mercederians, Norbertines, and Augustinians.
Several of his friends and disciples elevated to the episcopacy imitated his example, among them Alypius at Tagaste, Possidius at Calama,[4] Profuturus and Fortunatus at Cirta, Evodius at Uzalis, and Boniface at Carthage.
Though he wrote chiefly to quiet troubles incident to the nomination of a new superior, Augustine took the opportunity to discuss some of the virtues and practices essential to religious life as he understood it: he emphasised such considerations as charity, poverty, obedience, detachment from the world, the apportionment of labour, the mutual duties of superiors and inferiors, fraternal charity, prayer in common, fasting and abstinence proportionate to the strength of the individual, care of the sick, silence, and reading during meals.
Augustine leaves her free to determine the nature and duration of the punishment imposed, in some cases it being her privilege even to expel nuns that have become incorrigible.
[5] In Augustine's conception, the superior shares the duties of her office with certain members of her community, one of whom has charge of the sick, another of the cellar, another of the wardrobe, while still another is the guardian of the books which she is authorised to distribute among the sisters.
Prayer, in common, occupies an important place in their life, being said in the chapel at stated hours and according to the prescribed forms, and comprising hymns, psalms, and readings.
The sick and infirm are objects of the most tender care and solicitude, and certain concessions are made in favour of those who, before entering religion, led a life of luxury.
Augustine sought to dispel suspicions harboured by the faithful of Hippo against the clergy leading a monastic life with him in his episcopal residence.
"De vitâ eremiticâ ad sororem liber" is a treatise on eremitical life by St. Ælred, Abbot of Rievaulx, England, who died in 1166.
Lérins and the monks of that school were familiar with Augustine's monastic writings, which, together with those of Cassianus, were the mine from which the principal elements of their rules were drawn.
Augustine's influence also extended to women's monasteries in Gaul, where the Rule of Caesarius was adopted either wholly or in part, as, for example, at Sainte-Croix of Poitiers, Juxamontier of Besançon, and Chamalières near Clermont.
But it was not always enough merely to adopt the teachings of Augustine and to quote him; the author of the regula Tarnatensis (an unknown monastery in the Rhone valley) introduced into his work the entire text of the letter addressed to the nuns, having previously adapted it to a community of men by making slight modifications.
This adaptation was surely made in other monasteries in the sixth or seventh centuries, and in his "Codex regularum" Saint Benedict of Aniane published a text similarly modified.
The religious life of the Bishop of Hippo was, for a long time, a matter of dispute between the Canons Regular and the Hermits of St. Augustine, each of these two families claiming him exclusively as its own.
It was not so much the establishing of an historical fact as the settling of a claim of precedence that caused the trouble, and as both sides could not in the right, the quarrel would have continued indefinitely had not the Pope Sixtus IV put an end by his Bull "Summum Silentium" (1484).
