Home > Premonstratensians > The saints and the fundamental texts

Augustine did not cease from a restless search for the truth. Whilst he was an orator and a converted philosopher, a bishop and a theologian, he was also a monk. After his conversion, he desired nothing more than to be a “servant of God”, an expression which to him meant first and foremost being a monk. After being ordained priest, he still remained a monk. After his consecration as bishop, he continued to live in the same style, together with the priests of his diocese. As the author of the oldest western monastic Rule, he exerted great influence on the concept of the Christian ideal of religious life and greatly contributed to the development of western monasticism.

Over the centuries, different texts of the monastic rule have been attributed to Augustine. Thus, in the twelfth century, there were attributed to him, inter al, a præceptum Rule and a monastery rule, the ordo monasterii. St. Norbert, when obliged to give a rule to the Premonstratensians, initially chose the second of these, which appeared to him to be the more austere, but which was not, so to speak, adopted anywhere. At the request of the Pope, he finally chooses the “praeceptum”, which, according to recent research, is the only one, which can authentically be attributed to Augustine.

Augustine wrote this Rule in around 397. It was the fruit of experience, which began at Thagastum ten years earlier shortly after his baptism and which was, to a large extent, inspired by the lifestyle of the Pythagorean “philosophical communities”. On becoming a priest, he founded in 391 a lay monastery at Hippo and a nunnery which he entrusted to the direction of his sister and then, on becoming a bishop, he converted his episcopal residence into a monastery of scholars. It was there that he wrote down the lessons he had learned over the ten past years. In doing so, Augustine became part of a movement of which Egypt, with St. Anthony and St. Pachomius, was the cradle and which continued to develop in the East, thanks, in particular, to St. Basil, Bishop of Caesarea. From 370 onwards, monastic life also emerged in the West and its first regulation was due to Augustine. A good century later, Benedict of Nursia (480-547) wrote his well-known Rule, which drew on the traditions of both the East and West.

Until the end of the first millennium, the Rule of St. Augustine was passed on, always being integrated into an organised body of rules and monastic documents. This “Patristic tradition” constituted a well, from which the religious drew their inspiration. Between the ninth and the eleventh centuries, the Rule of St. Augustine acquired, for certain groups of religious, the status of a rule of life. This was a period of reform of religious and priestly life.

The rule strikes one by its conciseness; eight chapters (the Rule of St. Benedict has seventy three) the reading of which is enriched if considered in the context of the whole of the works and the doctrine of St. Augustine.

Some important precepts drawn from the Holy Scriptures appear there. There are eight references to the Old Testament and twenty seven to the New. The fundamental principles of the Rule are based on the ideal of the first Christian community of Jerusalem, described in chapter four of the Acts of the Apostles (verses 32 to 35): “The multitude of believers has only one heart and one soul and nobody calls any property his own, but places everything into common ownership.... with everyone receiving according to his needs”. Communal life is identified with charity. The monk (monos, one, single, solitary) is not here primarily an individual, but the community, which is welded together so as to be a single body. This is why Augustine has few detailed rules but goes to the foundations of things which touch the hearts of men. And this, too, is why he speaks little of asceticism, since the target of spiritual struggle is essentially egotism. One could define the Rule of St. Augustine as a call to recognise the equal dignity of all men according to the Gospel. Augustine makes himself the interpreter of the Christian requirement of perfect brotherhood, which is called upon to become universal. From that point of view, yesterday like today, the Rule of St. Augustine is a work of social criticism.

[updated on the 03.11.05]

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