The Rule of Saint Augustine

The Rule of Saint Augustine, in Raymond Canning's translation published by Augustinian Press in 1986, renders Augustine of Hippo's own monastic rule, one of the oldest and most influential rules governing communal Christian religious life in the Western church. As a translation of Augustine's own primary text, it is a direct source for the rule's actual content and structure as the saint himself set it out. Its limit is that it is a translation rather than the original Latin, so a claim depending on the precise wording of a specific clause is best checked against a critical Latin edition, and the rule's content, like any monastic rule, describes what communities were instructed to do rather than documenting how faithfully any specific community actually followed it at a given later date.