Rule of Saint Augustine

The Rule of Saint Augustine is unusual among major Western monastic rules in that it began, most scholars agree, not as a rule at all but as a pastoral letter, Letter 211, that Augustine of Hippo wrote around 400 AD to a community of nuns in Hippo experiencing internal discord, and only later did an editor extract and adapt its content, with the grammatical gender changed from feminine to masculine, into a separate, shorter document usable as a rule for male religious communities as well. This textual history, debated in its precise details but broadly accepted in outline, gives the rule a distinctly pastoral, exhortatory tone rather than the detailed procedural instruction found in later rules such as Benedict's: Augustine writes about the reasons for common life, that the members love one another and regard nothing as private property but hold everything in common, rather than laying out precise schedules for prayer, work and meals. Its central themes, communal ownership modeled explicitly on the Book of Acts' description of the earliest Jerusalem church holding all things in common, obedience to an elected superior, and charity expressed in concrete daily conduct rather than abstract sentiment, made it adaptable to a wide range of later religious communities whose specific circumstances Augustine himself never anticipated.

Precisely because the Rule of Saint Augustine is so much briefer and less procedurally specific than the Rule of Saint Benedict, later religious founders repeatedly chose it as a foundation onto which they could build their own more detailed constitutions suited to a particular mission, rather than adopting it as a complete, self-sufficient system the way Benedictine houses generally adopted Benedict's rule whole.

The order of Augustinian Canons and later the Augustinian Friars took their name directly from it, but so did the Dominicans, founded by Dominic de Guzman specifically to combine Augustine's communal rule with a mission of preaching and study that the original rule had never envisioned, and numerous congregations of canons regular across medieval Europe organized themselves under Augustine's name while writing their own detailed local constitutions to sit alongside it. This pattern, a short, flexible foundational rule paired with order-specific supplementary legislation, made Augustine's rule one of the two or three most influential texts in the entire history of Western Christian monasticism, shaping communities whose specific work, contemplative, mendicant, academic, active in the world, would have been unrecognizable to Augustine himself, precisely because the rule he left behind specified the spirit of common life far more than it specified any particular way of living it.