Rule of St. Augustine - Monastic Life of St. Augustine

Monastic Life of St. Augustine

Augustine was a monk; this fact stands out unmistakably in the reading of his life and works. Although a priest and bishop, he knew how to combine the practices of the religious life with the duties of his office, and his episcopal house in Hippo was for himself and some of his clergy, a veritable monastery. Several of his friends and disciples elevated to the episcopacy imitated his example, among them Alypius at Tagaste, Possidius at Calama, Profuturus and Fortunatus at Cirta, Evodius at Uzalis, and Boniface at Carthage. There were still other monks who were priests and who exercised the ministry outside of the episcopal 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). The silence was imposed, however, was not perpetual, and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were resumed between the Canons and the Hermits but all to no avail. Pierre de Saint-Trond, Prior of the Canons Regular of St. Martin of Louvain, tells the story of these quarrels in the Preface to his "Examen Testamenti S. Augustini" (Louvain, 1564). Gabriel Pennot, Nicolas Desnos and Le Large uphold the thesis of the Canons; Gandolfo, Lupus, Giles of the Presentation, and Noris sustain that of the Hermits. The Bollandists withhold their opinion. St. Augustine followed the monastic or religious life as it was known to his contemporaries and neither he nor they even thought of establishing among those who had embraced it any distinction whatever as to congregations or orders. This idea was conceived in a subsequent epoch, hence St. Augustine cannot be said to have belonged to any particular order. He made laws for the monks and nuns of Roman Africa, it is true, and he helped to increase their numbers, while they, in turn, revered him as their father, but they cannot be classed as members of any special monastic family.