Augustinians (Order of Saint Augustine)

The Augustinians are one of the great mendicant orders, and their origin is unusual in that they were brought into being not by a single founder but by the merger of several groups on the initiative of the papacy.

The Grand Union

The Order of Saint Augustine was formed by the Grand Union of 1256, when Pope Alexander IV amalgamated several communities of Italian hermits into a single mendicant order living under the Rule of Augustine. Unlike the Franciscans or Dominicans, who look back to a charismatic founder, the Augustinians were a constructed order, given a common rule, a central government and the mendicant way of poverty, preaching and pastoral work in the towns. The Rule of Augustine, brief and centred on common life and charity, is shared with many other bodies, so the order distinctive identity lay in its structure and its friars rather than in a unique rule.

Learning and the Reformation

The order became a considerable intellectual and pastoral force in the later medieval church, staffing university chairs and parishes across Europe. Its most consequential member was Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar and professor whose break with Rome began within the order, which gives the Augustinians a singular place in the history of Western Christianity. The order survived the upheavals that followed, and it continues today as a body of friars, with associated nuns and lay members, engaged in education, mission and parish ministry in the mendicant tradition it was assembled to serve.

The 1256 union that created the Augustinian friars gathered together several previously separate communities of Italian hermits under one rule and one governing structure, a deliberate consolidation distinct from the older, unrelated tradition of Augustinian Canons Regular, clergy who had followed Augustine's rule in a more settled, parish adjacent form for centuries before the friars existed at all. The friars' subsequent history was shaped decisively by a single member: Martin Luther entered an Augustinian monastery at Erfurt in 1505, was ordained within the order two years later, and carried the intense scrutiny of conscience his Augustinian formation encouraged into the crisis that produced the Ninety Five Theses and, eventually, the Protestant Reformation, an outcome no order founder could have anticipated but one permanently associated with the Augustinian name in a way true of no other medieval order.

Like the Franciscans, the Augustinians experienced their own internal division between stricter and more relaxed observance in the centuries after their founding, producing reformed congregations that argued, in familiar terms, that the order's original eremitical intensity had been diluted by its growth into settled, urban, mendicant life.