What I'd like to do today is do Augustinian monasticism fast. I mean, I think we can finish it. There's not a lot to say. There's enough that's important, and I can get it down in 50 little sentences. And then next time, tomorrow, we're going to do Martin of Tours and La Reine, which means that your next installment for the reader will be due next week, and that's John Cashin. Those of you who have already read John Cashin, The Institutes, can pass this up. But only four of his institutes, or four books, are represented in that reader. And that will be due for next Wednesday. We're past the halfway mark. We're about halfway mark now in the reader already. Not in the course, however. But the longer course won't have any reading assignments, most of it, in fact. They're all towards the front.

[01:02]

I've got some maps here, four maps. We'll look quickly at these, and then I'll lecture. And we may begin next time, or end this time, with discussion on the work of Moss, if you have anything about that to question or discuss. OK, if you keep those kind of in order, as I gave them to you, or adverse order, if you Just so we can quickly look at the maps. Somebody has two of the first one?

[02:14]

Doesn't matter. You can read in stereo. OK, the first one there, Monastere Africaine, so 4th to 6th centuries. This is just to locate what we're treating today. So we want to look, see where Carthage is, northeast of the map. That's important to notice right there. Also, Tagaste, so go west of Carthage, see Tagaste. Suc Arras, in parentheses. Hippo, way up north. OK, so you see where we're, basically where we are.

[03:17]

That used to be Numidia, huh? Numidia. Could you just give me an idea of what these modern countries would be? Yes. Basically, it's more than one. Now, we're talking Tunisia, Algeria, basically those two. Algeria? Algeria? Algeria would be that. Tunisia, isn't Tunisia where, um, Gaddafi is, I mean, near there? Libya, Libya. Libya, but isn't that near Tunisia? Yeah, it's right on the border. OK. Tunisia is what, Tripoli, huh? This is known as Egypt. Farther over, northern Africa. Yeah, but not black. Yeah, there's black people there too. Augustine of Hippo.

[04:23]

Mixed blood. The next map shows, I thought this would be a good one for you to have. It shows the two main streams of the monastic spread. You see all those arms and sweeping. This means something to us now. This is the way we're going to move. OK? So just look at that later. It's not all that important today, but this is the general direction we're going to be moving now. The next map, the barbarian invasions, keep this because we will refer to it now and then whenever we've got a question about which tribe and where they come from. Basically, they're all coming from the east. Keep this because we'll want to look at this once in a while. And the fourth map.

[05:26]

Which one is it? Does it say, does it start with Ezor? North Africa and Gaul. Where do I have that? Here we are. Oh, I had it in a different... Yeah, there again, you want to see where Hippo is? So see, see northern... Now look at northern Africa, where Augustine is, at Hippo, Togaste. See Carthage there? Look at how close it is to the Italian peninsula. That's basically what I wanted you to see there. Also, look ahead, go straight north. Look ahead where La Rente is. Basically, you're talking about the, what do they call that area? The Riviera, huh? In general. That whole coast along there. La Rente, John Cashion. See where Ambrose of Milan would be? Caesarius of Arles is coming up.

[06:31]

Just a little bit to the left. Marseille is John Cashion. Okay, keep these maps, huh? Don't toss them, because we'll need them. Okay, also some bibliographical pointers. Here's an area where within the last two years, we've actually gotten some good stuff in English on Augustinian monasticism. I want to point these out, and they're in our library. They're in the Augustan section. So the patristic section under Augustan. The first, the main two I want to point out are the book by George Lawless. This is on your bib, for those of you who took a bib. I think two or three of you did. Augustan of Hippo and His Monastic Rule. This is a critical text and book, and a secondary investigation.

[07:37]

Adolar Zumkeller, who is an Augustinian, did Augustan's Ideal of Religious Life. I don't know who translated it. Edmund College, who is also an Augustinian. He's usually working in Mystics, isn't he? That's Eric. Oh, okay. These two are the two important English sources you have in the library. For the monastic angle, we got a whole slew of books on Augustan, his psychological development, his controversies, his sexuality, his youth, his old age, his exegesis, all the wonderful things he did, and some of the horrible things he did, according to some people. But this is what we have monastically. Also, for those of you who know French, so Cyprien, Jeff, I've probably asked you this before.

[08:41]

You speak French, but do you read it? A little bit, huh? So this book here, which is in the monastic section, it's on a belle fontaine, the abbey, and it's a regular, ongoing series that we have. This is volume, or even number, it's number eight. It's the Vie Monastique series. This here is by, I can't pronounce, another Augustinian with a Belgian name, Verheim or something like that. And it's a new approach to the rule of St. Augustine. So it's a recent criticism, recent historical. Evidence and conjecture. Very good. Also on the market through image books, you can actually get, in old paperback, the rule of St. Augustine. And here you get both the rule for man and the rule for women. Now, that leads to many things. But we'll talk more about that.

[09:42]

When you say the rule of Augustine, you mean many things. So we'll talk about that. What I did for myself was I went through these books. They give you all the text here. These books are very nice, because between them, they have synthesized all of his letters, all of his sermons, plus the rules, plus treatises on monastic, everything monastic, they've pulled out of everything, and you have it here. And what I did was I photocopied it and I made my own little volume, Augustine's Monastic Writings, a handy little resource. And I hope to do that with a number of other, I did it with Cesare S. Aurel also. Okay. So when we're talking Augustine of Hippo, we're talking late 4th century, early 5th century.

[10:43]

And Augustine was born in, on your map there, in Togaste. Later on, he'll end up there forming a monastery. But he was born there. He was born most probably of mixed blood parents. And you know the story. If you don't know the story, I'm not going to go through the general biography of Augustine, but there's this whole thing with Monica praying for, because Manichaeism is there, and Augustine is at first a Manichaean, his father's a pagan, there's turmoil there and everything. We have plenty of nice biographies and you can look them up. I'm not, I'm just going to, whatever is relevant to my lecture I'm going into. He's considered the father of Northern African monasticism. He never visited Egypt, but he was, he did know, Athenaeus' Life of Antony, he did know that source. African monasticism is extant at this time.

[11:47]

Now I'm talking African monasticism outside Egypt. Egypt is sort of the Netherlands between Asia and Africa at this time. When you talk Africa, you're not so much talking Egypt. There's monasticism in other parts of Africa also. In this area we're going to be talking about, there are the traveling gyrovagues, the strange vagabond monks who hole up here and there on the road, that type of thing. And there are the jitsi monks, basically. Some of them troublemakers. And there's another group who during this time will be throughout this area called the Circum, or Circumcellians. Now I'll talk a little bit about that when I get to Donatism. So near present day Algeria, Tunisia, Augustine is born in Togaste. And he studied, his student days,

[12:49]

he studied in Carthage, moving towards Rome, moving towards Italy. He studied his early student days in Carthage, and then he was a teacher there. He was a teacher, he was a Manichean teacher. Now he was a teacher of rhetoric, I believe. But at this time he's a dedicated Manichean, although he's beginning to ask some questions. And he goes to Rome from Carthage to study more rhetoric, to become a better teacher. And philosophy, da da da da. He becomes a friend of the Bishop of Milan, Milano, who is Ambrosio. And he was studying Neoplatonism. And at this time, during his pursuit of philosophical studies, he got fascinated with the idea of having

[13:51]

some kind of common life. He's still Manichean, although he's sort of moving, he doesn't know where he is. So he's sort of interested in trying the common life, and he has this friend, Olypius, with whom he sets up a common life, a sort of quasi-monastic lifestyle, at a place they called Cassiacum. And that was in the year 386. THE year 386. That's all that lasted. He was very short-lived. Eventually, ten people joined him during that year. They had 12, a community of 12. But he was only there for that year. And the two of them, Olypius, who was also a fellow student with Augustine, Augustine and Olypius sort of took care of those others that came. So they taught them and were guides for them. It lasted one year.

[14:52]

He heard about Antony of the Desert and Athanasius' life from a person named Ponticianus. Ponticianus. And he was a Roman soldier. He was an officer. And he also heard about the Roman soldiers near Trier who had encountered in the Egyptian desert monastics, the Abbas. Some of the Abbas and Augustine met these soldiers and talked to them. Or Ponticianus met these soldiers and talked to them and passed them on to Augustine. I can't remember which. But anyway, Augustine gets the knowledge that this sort of thing is going on. And this sort of plugs into his desire to have some kind of monastic life

[15:56]

in an ongoing way. His conversion process takes quite a long time, actually. He does an awful lot of reading and debating and thinking prior to the conversion until finally his reading of Romans, a letter to the Romans, brought a certain peace and it clinched in him a conversion experience and a matter of will to become Christian. And he was baptized by Ambrose in the year 387. And he became gradually more monastic in these early years, in outlook, and decided to go back to Gus and go back to home base and start a monastery on his own family property. And so when Monica died near Ostia Antica,

[16:58]

so if you go east of Rome, west of Rome, excuse me, if you go west of Rome to the ocean, Ostia is right there on the shores. And that's where she died. I think every year at her feast we read about that experience that she had and they had together a shared contemplative vision just the day before she died. When she died, he returned to Rome to take on the Maniches. So he wrote tracts against the Maniches in 388. So he's back and forth here. He starts the monastery and then he's back to Rome writing for the church, basically tracts against Manichaeism. Manichaeism, a type for memory brushing up.

[18:00]

Mani is the founder, he's from Persia, and give you a little distillation here. Radical dualism of flesh, matter is equal man. Good. Okay, so you get the picture. He was Manichaeism, so he knows exactly where to go for the judgment in the debates. In some of the tracts against the Manichaeism, against Manichaeism, Augustine actually refers to certain groups of ascetics and nuns living common life at that time. So that's another source where we can pinpoint, eh, there are groups beginning to do this sort of thing now in the empire. And later in the year 400, just down the ways, he's going to write his work On the Work of Monks, which you read for this. Did you read it in toto,

[19:01]

or was it just a selection? It was probably in toto. It wasn't all that long. 30, 40 pages maybe? Oh, you had the whole thing. It's basically a tract against excesses and abuses in that regard. So in 388, he founds this monastery, Tegaste, when he's not at Rome. And it goes till 390. And there they stroll for living monastic perfection together. They sold their property, in order to give it to the poor, not to build up a bank account, but to give it to the poor as an ongoing charitable work. And they devoted daily time to prayer together, to study, to fasting, and asceticism. The two main problems of this time, theologically, are from the Manichaeans and the Donatists. And the Donatists are out for Augustine. And he has to take on

[20:03]

the Donatists. Because they are actively, they are a very aggressive bunch. Does anyone know who the Donatists were? Or what Donatism means? Donatist was a bishop in North Africa. Donatus was the bishop? During one of the persecutions, he moralized apostatize. And then the Donatists were people that said that the ones who apostatize shouldn't be let back into the church. They were extremely rigorous. Right. During the persecution of Diocletian, certain of the bishops followed the ruling coming from the emperor to hand over all the sacred vessels. And later on, the Donatists, they weren't quite Donatists, this movement said, these bishops can no longer be bishops. Look what they did. And we can't go back to having them preside

[21:03]

at our Eucharist. Look what they did. Okay, so there was a real problem there. And Donatus let this, Donatus let this revolt. And the Donatists, it starts off as a religious movement, but in no time at all, it's cultural and it's social. That is, Donatism in no time at all becomes ethnic. That is, the Romans against the Berbers in Tunisia and Algeria, where they are, in near Carthage. The stronghold of Donatism is Carthage, the city of Carthage. Cyprian is going to have to deal with the Donatists also. Doesn't he end up... And the other is social, and that is, those who have to work are against the upper classes. And so the Donatists basically

[22:05]

are going to be those who have to work, whoops, those who have to work and Berbers. So they become anti-Rome, anti-rich, anti-church. And they set up their own church, their own communion, under the Bishop Donatus, called Donatist Church. One group from this Donatist movement, and they just become, as soon as they start getting cornered in, they become more fierce, more extreme, and they are bloody. Circumceidans were roving bands of Donatist monastics. They sort of lived a common life together. What they were was like, who was that famous Mexican-American? Pancho Villa, etc. They ran around raising hell. They would destroy property, slaughter people,

[23:06]

slaughter Christians. This is a monastic group. You see how extreme it moves in no time at all. They would sweep through in the night with these curved swords and blop off heads of children. Real nice people. And it all started off with the controversy of whether they should have given them chalices or not. Here they are, chomping heads off one generation later. Strange. For the most part, poor Berbers. All over Africa, Northern Africa, Egypt too, all over that area. They're nomads, basically. So roaming around in a group like this, no problem for them. It's in their genes. They still are Berbers, for the most part, nomadic groups. This is not just a logical, theological dispute. No. It's over the chalices. There were some sidelines to it

[24:06]

that followed through on the question of, well... Delivering the sacrament. Right. And so you get into that whole business and orders and whatnot. But that didn't become the... Those were just sort of like sidelines. In no time at all, it became a social and ethnic trouble. And Augustine had his... He was up to here with fighting everyone. He had to take on the Donatists, as did Cyprian and Carthage. Okay. At this time, there's already some rumblings about Augustine. Pro-Augustine rumblings. This frightens him. He doesn't want to have to give up this monastic group. Life in Togasti. Because people wanted him to be a bishop. And he's not happy about that. He doesn't want a bishopric. He just wants to live in a common life together. He probably wanted to be in charge of it. But he wanted to live that type of life. And do his writing.

[25:07]

Which was certainly the most efficacious thing he did for the church, in any case. Anyway. In 391, he has ordained a priest against his will. Now, today, you would say the ordination is invalid. I can't allow them to say that. You can't be ordained against your will. He was not willing to be ordained. But gave in at the end. So, yes and no. By popular acclaim, he was ordained. And it was a great orchestrated event in Hippo. They dragged him there into the market square the whole time. He was very greeted in this marvelous scene. And so he decided, I'm not giving up the monastic life. And so, in the episcopal garden of his bishop, he sets up a little monastic community where they live poverty and the common life together.

[26:08]

And he's a priest, a minister, a bishop. There's plenty of married priests and married bishops at this time, huh? We're talking the late 300s. One of the main attractions for certain individuals with Augustine's, the main attraction to Augustine's type of life was the celibate thing. This is an issue already. Why one should be celibate and chaste rather than have a family and have all those problems and da-da-da-da. Practical reasons. And this was attractive to certain elements who wanted to remain celibate and yet be a priest da-da-da-da. One thing to remember is the Augustinian monasticism is highly clerical right from the beginning. It's meant to be. It's not a question. It's not a problem. Another thing

[27:12]

with this whole business with celibacy and chastity, remember that if you know the biography of Augustine, he had a lot of problems in his early life. Huh? The sexuality. And he had a mistress. And he had a son. His son's name is Adiodatus. Later became a bishop too? Priest? Or did he? I'm fuzzy on this. I know the mistress too. Oh, okay. Well, we have some letters from Adiodatus. Maybe this is another Adiodatus in the patristic body. Anyway, he struggled with sexuality and his struggles with sexuality and the way he moved, many will say, have conditioned the Western church to be far more fanatical and paranoid about sex and matters sexual in theology and in morality

[28:12]

than would have been otherwise without Augustine. But anyway, he wanted, one of the reasons he wanted a common life was the support of others living with him to help him through that part of his personality. Because he was afraid if he just lived in isolated, he wouldn't be able to handle the celibacy, chastity business. That's just one sideline to another contributor to Augustine's reason for having a common life of priests. He always remained a teacher. It was his first love. All the way to the end he was teaching. Excuse me. We've moved to the city of Hippo now, remember? It's way up north. Northern Togostin. And he's there in the Episcopal Garden. Even as a bishop, he's going to keep that monastery in the garden. That monastery became a center of learning

[29:15]

and a seminary, basically. A training spot for clerics in northern Africa. It was also a parish center because they did a lot of pastoral work from there. The difference being from other communities that existed at the time is that it's highly clerical. It's meant to be. This is a grouping together of priests for their own benefit. For their support and a certain amount of common life together. Also, certain... We have the beginnings, just the beginnings now, of certain waves of barbarians who are coming through the north. Some of them are going through Italy. And there's a number of highly educated priests, clerics, let's say,

[30:16]

in Italy who just can't tolerate that and who leave Italy at the onset of these barbarian invasions and go down and join Augustine and his community in northern Africa. It becomes a thriving clerical communal center. In 395, he was consecrated bishop upon the death of his own bishop. Bishop of Hippo. But he continued to live with his community in the garden. And it served as a center basically during his bishopric as a center of contemplation for meditation and also for catechesis. So there's a pastoral outreach there. Not just the clerics, but others later. How large was this community? I don't know. I don't know. It sounds like it's getting larger because you have these people

[31:18]

joining for various motivations. And I also don't know how many communities there were. He also starts a group of nuns out with his sister in charge. We'll talk about that in a minute. But one wonders how many satellite communities he might have started of clerics living together working in the diocese of Hippo. That's the conjecture, but they don't have hard evidence of that. And I don't know how many during his lifetime were in Hippo. Okay. There were other bishops in the empire at this time who were doing the same thing as Augustine, or who modeled their own developing communal clerical thing on Augustine's experience, which is getting around. One of these is Eusebius of Vercelli. You went into that name once in a while. Eusebius of Vercelli.

[32:19]

Ambrose of Milan himself had a sort of common life of prayer together. Martin of Tours, who begins a monastic, a much different monastic group up in Gaul. And Caesarius of Auxerre also does that in his diocese. So it's not just Augustine, but he's certainly the father of this clerical monastic movement. He did found some communities. They know he founded some communities for laymen and laywomen also. But his main thing is clerical and grouping priests together in a common life for mutual support and more efficacious service. What did the Augustinian community life consist in then? For Augustine, charity is the most important thing coming from and living in community life.

[33:20]

And so there's an awful lot of charitable work going on. And they had plenty of deacons who had duties working one-on-one with people who can, working with the poor and that sort of thing. Anyone could join the community from any class. You didn't have to be a priest. You didn't have to be a cleric even. But that was generally the thing. But you could come from any class and you could come as a Berber, a poor Berber, and become a priest and function in them. They didn't have a class thing. And this is important at this time because plenty do. Plenty in the empire had class consciousness. Well, we still have class consciousness. We're talking 17 centuries ago. You can imagine what it was like. And in the early Middle Ages it's terrible what class consciousness does. Well, there's plenty of it going on here too in the Roman Empire. There are still slaves, plenty of them. The work was intellectual

[34:24]

and physical. They had manual labor and they had intellectual labor. And they were very frugal because poverty was an issue for Augustine in what they wore, very simple clothing, and in what they ate, very simple food. There was to be no idle talk. They wore black habits and shaved their heads. They had the women monasteries that he set up, he fenced them in. They had strict cloister. So it was a contemplative life for the women in the giant Augustinian communities. And a community of goods approach was very strictly lived in Augustine. So it would be the Benedictine ideal of poverty. It's you all sharing the common pot. Wow. Okay. In addition to the tracts

[35:27]

that he had to write monastically speaking against these Roman groups, he was also asked, Augustine was also asked to write some refutations about all these vagabond monks he had running around who never did a stick of work and they just went from monastery to monastery, lived off the alms until they were kicked out and went on to the next monastery. We still have those today. There's a regular route to the Benedictine monastery. We have these guys who only go to Benedictine monasteries and they'll be there for a week or two, although they'll work usually. But they make it their whole life has been. Some of them have done 40, 50 years going from island. And every year you see them for two weeks or whatever. Hi Chuck, how's it going? He's been on the road or on the rails. He's back for his two weeks of North Dakota experience or whatever. Well, they had him back then too and they were a little darker than the contemporary versions. And Augustine was asked

[36:27]

to write against them and that's why we have on the work of monks because of these vagabond monks who wouldn't do anything. Also, we have a lot of people attacking virginity at this time in church history. And so that's why you have Augustine writing tracts on virginity because he's supposed to, for the church, take the pro-virginity side. A lot of Augustine's writings are so polemical because they are polemical. He was fighting battles. I mean, that's the whole point of it. And a lot of our theology was found in the squeezings out of these controversies. We are going to finish. Great. There were many convents of virgins, consecrated virgins, at this time, in Augustine's day. And his sister headed one,

[37:27]

writing hippo, headed one up. So he had a convent of nuns run by his sister. And when she died in 423, the whole community was up in arms. They didn't know what to do, who to elect. They had various philosophies and fighting. It was a real bad scene. And so Augustine wrote, at their behest, the regula puellorum. So the rule for the girls. Rule of the girls. And so this is the feminine rule that he did. And one of his letters, number 211, which is one of the most important letters of Augustine, 211, which is also called the praeceptu, excuse me, obiurgatio. So here, they only see the Latin words

[38:32]

for these references. So that's why I'm not trying to be effete here. This is, if you want obiurgatio, that's what it's referring to, this 211. And in that 211, in that letter, you have a version of this. So you have another slightly different version of this regula puellorum. Just to show you that it isn't just conjecture, that we have evidence of this. And we have more than one version of this regula puellorum. And what it, basically between the two of these, what did it say for these virgins? Eh, you should have all things in common, no more fighting about possessions anymore. All things in common, you should pray together, and your meditation and prayer should be based on scripture. It points to some of the sources of their problems and what they were doing at that time, or what they weren't doing. For him to actually have to

[39:32]

give these laws that everybody had to accept. There was, evidently this was controversial. There should be some type of fasting and abstinence in the life. You should have modest clothing, and you shouldn't take a bath very often. Now there's a side of Augustine that comes through. Why wouldn't you take a bath? Now, remember, we're in the Roman Empire. We're not in the Middle Ages where it's considered unhealthy to bathe. We're not up in Ireland or England or France where you have a winter and it's not good to take a bath because you could die. We're in the Roman Empire, and the Romans were, they were big into baths. I mean, they were into the bath scene. Why would Augustine be so... Because they were public. Yeah, yeah. The whole thing about sex and body. There's that certain manichaeism. I don't think he ever got rid of it.

[40:33]

The body is evil. You know, his sexual problems often come through in different ways and profoundly affected the course of the Western church. But anyway, he was against bathing very often. And that these nuns should manage their quarrels quickly. Evidently, they were holding grudges against one another. That was one of the problems of the community in 423. They wouldn't make up what we're doing. Reconcile. They wouldn't reconcile. Was he the one that, I read something, I can't remember who said it, but he said that all sex was sinful. One of his disciples said, well, you can raise and perish if you didn't have sex. And he said, well, it's better we perish this way than sinfully. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if he said something very similar to that. But I don't remember that harshly. Now, it's not coming to mind,

[41:37]

but it's certainly moving towards the Augustinian line. You couldn't perform sex without having some kind of pubescence in it, some desire. All sex has some sin. Which was another thing for the Manicheans, concupiscence. Bad, not nasty. Any kind of desires, any kind of bodily needs or wants or desires. Flesh. And the last major point for these nuns, he says, the superior, whoever is superior should be loved, not feared. And the superior should remember that, too. Maybe I'm just coming through in the brew a little bit later on, too. As the ideal. A superior, an Abba, should actively pursue the path of being loved, not feared. The regula virum,

[42:38]

so the rule of men, that's the other important one. These are the two biggies. Was likely, they're not quite sure, but it was likely the original rule for that community in Hippo, back in the garden. In the Episcopal garden. Back, if you go back a step to Tegaste, where he had that first African monastery, they had a primitive form of the rule. Remember now, this, we have developing Augustine, monastically. And that rule is called disciplina monasterii. So the discipline of the monasteries. Or of the monastery. Also called ordo, monasterii, the order of the monastery. Also referred to regula secunda, or the regular, excuse me,

[43:39]

I'm talking about this one, I'll jump to this one. The regula secunda is sort of like an offshoot of this, and it's not Augustine. It's inauthentic, it's not Augustinian, in the sense that he wrote it. It's sort of an offshoot, it was probably done by his followers and whatnot. But the regula, jumping back, the regula viroro, or the preceptum, and that's what you find in the rule of Augustine, the main component, is the thing that, is the monastic writing, the regularized monastic writing, which we find referred to by people like Benedict, Caesarius of Arles, we'll see him just down the road, maybe next Thursday. Two more weeks. And Benedict of Ania, one of the most important

[44:40]

monastic figures in Western monasticism, who makes a real pivotal change in monasticism for Benedictinism, and we'll have him down the line, not too far down the line. I've gotten some more books on Benedict of Ania, and I've got another one ordered. They're all in French, unfortunately, but I think we have something in English, if I'm not mistaken. Two, I think. Anyway, these guys use, use Augustine in their own monastic context, which are much different from Augustine's monastery. But they use his monastic principles in their rules. This will be used later on, the rule of Augustine, especially this virorum, regular virorum, into the 11th century, when you have all these new orders arising, of canons. Canon orders are those who flock around the cathedral.

[45:40]

They sing the choir in the cathedral, and they're for just that diocese. Then they have various different groupings of cathedral canons, and they become orders. The Norbertines, the premonster tensions, the Croziers. They start in the 13th century, 1215. And these, these canon orders become sort of half monastic and half non-monastic. They're sort of active and contemplative together, because they're sort of like half, quasi-monastic. And they take the rule of Augustine as their, because if the church is going to let you be in order, you've got to have a rule. And so they would adopt the rule of Augustine because it was more flexible, and Augustine started off in an active way anyway, so right up their alley, because they're not as monastic as these other groups. Okay? The Dominicans. The Dominicans take the rule of Augustine among their sources. The Servites.

[46:41]

The Servite order. They also have the Benedictine rule, but they took in the beginning the Augustinian rule as a source. And then the 19th, 18th, 19th, you have all these congregations rising and being erected, and hundreds of them, and many of them took the Augustinian rule because it was the most flexible, and a lot of these orders are teaching orders and active orders, and yet they had a certain monastic flavor to them as well. I've got three minutes and I'm going to take about seven. I will take seven. I want to finish this off. This rule was approved officially by the church, the Fourth Lateran Council, as an epitome of a rule for orders to take the rule of Augustine. What becomes the rule of Augustine? Which is sort of an amalgamation in the end. You get some elements,

[47:44]

you know, you have some other elements from his letter, the letter 211, you have more, you have a document you call the rule of St. Augustine. Okay, is that clear? So it's sort of a gradual amalgamation of things. Today, the rule of Augustine is used by over 150 orders of congregations as their rule. Now, remember, a lot of these are the sisters of the Holy Flame, you know, little groups that we don't know that much of, but there's a lot of big orders that also use the rule of Augustine, you know? I'm just pointing out why 150 sounds like, you know, there's a lot of small little groups that used Augustine. But a very, very popular rule in the history of religious life in our church. And one more thing, too, let me just mention

[48:47]

these other monastic writings by Augustine that you will find would be on The Work of Monks, which you've read, and that's dated 401, if you want a date for that. And that was written to the monks of Carthage. It was on the monks of, well, remember, what we're talking about with Carthage. That and the people, monasteries that are dealing with all these hobos that keep showing up and won't pay. Letters 210 and 211, I mentioned 211. 210 is also monastic. Sermons 355 and 356. And the treatise I mentioned already on holy virginity, it's also monastic. These are the main monastic writings. What I've given you here are the ones I just listed. Also, you can find many where one paragraph of this sermon goes monastic. That's fine, but you've got the main stuff with what I just gave you.

[49:48]

One last note on Augustine. And because this affects the development of Western monasticism. Augustine also had to deal with an English monk named Pelagius. Anybody want to tell me what Pelagianism is about? Say what? He was Irish? Yeah, he was, yeah. Well, yes and no. He was Irish, but where was he living? In England. Yeah. Yeah. And Augustine says, no, no, no. And Augustine takes the other polemical side and there's the great battle. Guess who wins? Augustine. Augustine gets condemned. And then you have all kinds of people sort of

[50:49]

falling in between. Semi. Semi-Pelagianism. And there are many in the church today who say Vatican II church, actually the church since that time, for the most part, has been semi-Pelagian. Well, semi-Pelagianism was condemned down by the Council of Orange later on. So we're all living as heretics. I mean, some people would say that technically we're basically, when it goes downhill, we're all semi-Pelagian. Because Augustine went too far one way to counteract where Pelagius was on the other end. John Cashion gets named a semi-Pelagian after his death. So the followers of Augustine attack the followers of John Cashion, calling him semi-Pelagian because of some remarks he makes in some of his writings which sound like Pelagius. He's condemned and yet not condemned for semi-Pelagian, but there was enough to cloud his corona.

[51:52]

And he was never canonized because of that. In the Eastern Church, he is St. John Cashion. He was never canonized because of the semi-Pelagian business. And that basically is because Augustine went so far to the extreme. Augustine was ruthless. When he's fighting, he's ruthless. Next time, we'll begin with anything you know. If you have things to say about the work of monks, write it down, jot it down so you don't forget it. We'll start with that and then go, we're going to move up to France. We're going to move up to Gaul. We're going to move up to France.

[52:34]

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