Augustine in His Own Words (continued)
to trust anyone in this matter but you, their elders, and at present they do not know which one of you they are to believe unquestionably. I have sent this letter sealed with a ring which has a head of a man looking to one side.43
Augustine as Monastic Legislator
Augustine was a monk. This fact is too often overlooked. The idea of a monk-bishop may not seem striking now, but it was avant-garde at the time. Such a dual vocation began appearing more often in the Greek East, among contemporaries such as Basil of Caesarea (d.379) and John Chrysostom (d. 407).44 Like Basil, Augustine was not only a monkbishop, but also one of the earliest monastic legislators. Around 397, soon after taking office as bishop, he authored his Rule (Praeceptum), one of several legislative documents used by monastic communities under his authority. The Rule's opening, quoted below, captures the spirit of Augustinian monasticism. His model was the Jerusalem community of Acts 4. The lifestyle, while austere, did not embrace the ascetical athleticism found in monastic communities in Egypt and Syria. Centuries later, Augustine's Rule would be resurrected as the constitutional basis for medieval orders such as the Augustinians and Dominicans. From Rule 1:
(1) These are the rules we set down that you are to observe when admitted to the monastery. (2) First, the basis on which you are gathered into one community is that you live in a single-minded unity in the house and that you be of "one soul and one heart in God" (Acts 4:32). (3) And do not call anything your own, but you are to have all things in common. Your Superior should distribute food and clothing to each of you, not equally to all, because you do not all have the same health, but to each one according to his need. For you read in the Acts of the Apostles: "They held everything in common," and "distribution was made to each according to each one's need" (Acts 4:32, 35).
(4) Those who owned anything in the world before they entered the monastery should will freely that it become common property. (5) But those who had nothing should not seek in the monastery what they could not have had on the outside. But what they require, because of any infirmities of theirs, should be provided for even if their poverty would not have allowed them those necessities when they were outside. Let them not consider themselves fortunate because they now have found food and clothing of the sort they
43. Ep. 59.1–2 (CCL 31A:9–10); trans. Parsons, FOTC 12:298–300. On this issue, see Jane Merdinger, "Augustine and Church Authority: The Developing Role of the Provincial Primate," Studia Patristica 33 (1997): 183–89. 44. On this, see Andrea Sterk, Renouncing the World Yet Leading the Church: The Monk-Bishop in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Augustine Holmes, A Life Pleasing to God: The Spirituality of the Rules of St. Basil (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2000).