A Rule Born From a Letter

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.