The Rule of St Augustine: Wisdom for our Augustinian Moment

The election of Cardinal Robert Prevost as the new head of the Roman Catholic Church has been accompanied by no small amount of fanfare and speculation. Prevost - now Leo XIV - was a relative unknown before his elevation to Bishop of Rome; he’d only recently become a cardinal and was not on many papal shortlists before the conclave began. Only the most intimately acquainted with the Roman curia had ever even heard of his name before his ascendancy. This low profile has meant that those seeking some sense of the trajectory of his papacy have needed to scour his biography for details upon which to base their prognostications. 

Prevost’s US origins are what is most intriguing about him to many: Midwest-born, Villanova-educated, a fan of the White Sox. For others, it is his ministry in Peru: like his predecessor Francis, Leo XIV lived and worked in the Global South and is attentive to the realities of poverty, conflict, and migration that he encountered there. And many - including Leo himself - have noted how his choice of papal name invokes the memory of Leo XIII’s famous encyclical Rerum Novarum and its relevance to our modern moment. 

But the most significant influence upon Leo XIV may not be any of these various formative threads that people have begun to pull upon to attempt to unravel his biography. It may instead be what is both most plain in his biography and yet also least obvious to us: Leo XIV is an Augustinian friar. He not only attended Villanova, an Augustinian university, but even more significantly he took vows in the Order of St Augustine (O.S.A.), a religious order organized around the spirituality of Augustine of Hippo, eventually becoming prior general of the global order. In joining the O.S.A., the young Robert Prevost was submitting himself to a deeply formative way of life that organized not only his exterior behavior, but was also aimed at re-ordering his heart according to the ancient wisdom of Augustine of Hippo. 

The wisdom of this way of life merits our attention, and not merely because of its influence on the current pope of the Roman Catholic Church. Augustine is rightly known for his immense corpus of writings and the role they have played in the development of the Western theological tradition: Confessions, The City of God, On the Trinity, and more. Of lesser renown - but still great significance - is the role that he played in the Church’s monastic tradition. Augustine lived most of his Christian life in monastic communities and even was the author of his own monastic rule (which preceded and influenced Benedict and his rule). Throughout his life, Augustine was deeply concerned with the realities of the disordered human heart. In response to those realities he committed his considerable intellect to the composition of a rule for his monastic community and submitted to it himself. That rule, The Rule of Saint of Augustine, is still in existence today, preserved, adapted, and practiced by the Augustinian Order (adapted from two documents in Augustine’s Monastic Rules - the Praeceptum and the Ordo Monasterii). 

As a Reformed Protestant, my respect for other streams of the Church Catholic is tempered by a rejection of the institution of the papacy, the vows that necessarily accompany religious orders, Marian adoration, and more. But even if I stand outside of the Roman Church and Leo XIV’s authority, happily pastoring as a Presbyterian, I believe that we live in an Augustinian moment, a time when the insights of the Bishop of Hippo speak with particular insight into the problems and opportunities of our age. With Pope Leo XIV, I have found The Rule of Saint Augustine to be a document of deep spiritual wisdom (One of Robert Prevost’s few pre-papal writings that is publicly available is his doctoral dissertation on the role of the prior in The Rule of St Augustine), and in what follows I’d like to invite you to consider that wisdom, not just for what it might tell us about the new pope and the sources of his spirituality but for what it might tell us about what is required for faithfulness in our times. 

When we encounter the young Augustine in Book XIII of the Confessions, we meet a man who has been intellectually converted to Christian faith but whose heart drew back from commitment to the Gospel. “I was attracted to the Way, which is our Savior himself, but the narrowness of the path daunted me and I still could not walk in it” (Confessions VIII.1.1). He is stuck in a state of spiritual lethargy, unable to move out of his indecision and attachment to the deformative habits of his old way of life. But a change is coming, and soon: by the beginning of Book IX, Augustine is a Christian, having wrestled, wept, and finally surrendered to God in the garden in Cassiacum. 

A close reading of the Confessions also reveals that there is quite a bit more to Augustine’s conversion than this simple summary. He is converted from his slavery to the desires of his flesh. But he is also converted into something else: a ruled way of life. Many things are converging in Book VIII of Confessions, but the immediate catalyst that sets his conversion into motion is Augustine’s encounter with the monastic way of life. When in Book VIII Ponticianus visits Augustine and Alypius and spies a copy of Paul’s letters open upon a table, it is not long before the visitor introduces Augustine for the first time to the figure of Anthony of Egypt. “His discourse led on from this topic to the proliferation of monasteries, the sweet fragrance rising up to you from the lives of monks, and the fecund wastelands of the desert. We had known nothing of all of this.” (VIII.6.15). This revelation spills immediately into a story from Ponticianus about two friends who discovered Athanasius’ The Life of Anthony and, inspired by this witness, gave themselves into the monastic way of life. In the space of just a few paragraphs, Augustine encounters monasticism in no less than four different ways: the discovery of the institution of monasticism, the monastic pioneer Anthony the Great, the story of Ponticianus’s friends, and even the discovery of a monastery nearby in Milan. 

Beginning with this providential encounter with monasticism, Book VIII moves with ineluctable inevitability to Augustine’s final surrender to God. Many things have converged to bring Augustine to this moment—vocational frustration, Neoplatonist philosophy, the paternal figure of Ambrose of Milan, and more—but it is this ruled way of life that provides the final element that has been missing from his life thus far. Augustine had felt that until this moment he “could as yet see no certain light by which to steer my course” (VIII.7.18). The monastic way of life provided that guide and light, steering him to Lady Continence (the vision of a holy life Augustine imagines in the garden) and away from “dissipation and drunkenness, debauchery and lewdness, arguing and jealousy” (the sins described in the passage Augustine’s eyes fall upon in the Scriptures in the tolle, legge moment). It is not at all an exaggeration to say that Augustine’s final conversion in Book VIII is nothing less than a conversion into a ruled way of life (even if it is always more than that as well). 

We do not know an Augustine apart from that Augustine — Augustine the monastic. All of his existing writings were written under the conditions of some kind of monastic life, from an early experiment in Cassiacum to the entirety of his life and ministry in Hippo Regius. Augustine first came to Hippo to recruit for a fledgling monastic community in Thagaste, and — even after he was on that trip dramatically conscripted to the pastorate by the sitting Bishop Valerius — then moved his monastic enterprise there, establishing another monastic community adjacent to the Catholic Basilica that was composed of both lay and clergy members. Every treatise, letter, and sermon was composed by a man who had submitted himself to a rule of life, a rule that he himself composed in order to sustain the life in Christ that had begun in him.

What makes monasticism so important in Augustine’s account of his conversion in Confessions? What Augustine grasped then, and what his wisdom still has to say to us today, is that conversion is not merely a momentary repentant response to the disordered realities of the human heart. It is also the beginning of a lifelong project of re-ordering those desires. And that project demanded both intention and effort, two things that would not be received by leaving the post-conversion Christian life up to inertia. Augustine understood that Roman culture was neither friendly nor neutral towards the human heart. It was characterized by vices like avarice, self-indulgence, and selfish ambition. And so in order to combat those de-formative influences and cultivate the life of ordered love of God and neighbor that characterizes the disciple of Christ, Augustine submitted himself to a rule of life—and then later composed one for himself and his community. 

Every rule has its own spirituality, its own sense of the central challenges of living the Christian life and thus the central practices and habits that must be instantiated in response. Augustine’s rule is no different, and insofar as his times resemble ours and his voice speaks with particular pastoral authority to us in our need, we can learn from this ancient document. What wisdom can we draw from The Rule of St Augustine about the work of re-ordering our own desires in our own times? I would suggest three different things to which we can listen and from which we can learn.

Ordered Love

Augustine begins his rule by locating the locus of Christian formation: the heart. Its first sentences: “Before all else, dearest brothers, let God be loved and then your neighbor, because these are the chief commandments which have been given to us” (Augustine, The Monastic Rules, 106). The Rule gives much attention to all kinds of external details that occupy the life of a monk—clothing, traveling, labor. We will find no breach or dichotomy between the exterior and the interior in Augustinian spirituality. But Augustine, that great cartographer of the interior life, knows that the heart is the central venue for discipleship and formation. Growth in the Christian life is fundamentally growth in love of God and neighbor. 

It’s unsurprising that, given the importance of the ordo amoris in his thought, that we would find this theme in Augustine’s rule. But what the rule makes plain—and what recent controversies about the ordo amoris have ignored and obscured—is that the ordo amoris is not a concept that is analytically applied by a detached, neutral intellect. It is instead an ongoing work of formation, of learning to give objects the love that they demand: “Living a just and holy life requires one to be capable of an objective and impartial evaluation of things; to love things, that is to say, in the right order” (Teaching Christianity I.27.28). To love in this way requires intention, formation, vigilant and constant attention to the movements of our heart and how prone we are to wander. 

Our fractured, fallen world is not a friendly place to learn to love this way. In both Confessions and The City of God Augustine provides running commentary on the ways that specific cultures actively deform and disorder the human heart: the family, the academy, the Empire. The various cultures we inhabit today, while superficially different, are fundamentally the same. The Rule of St Augustine invites us to attend to our hearts, to consider these deformative influences and to set our intentions to love well. The specific prescriptions it makes are the regular praying of Psalms, participation in a community with a common moral vision, and the regular unglamorous work of daily service that takes place in life together. The rule creates a trellis upon which the fruit of well-ordered love can grow.

Humility

The dynamics of ordered and disordered loves unfold alongside another Augustinian emphasis for discipleship: the conflict between pride and humility. It was Augustine who not only famously identified pride as the root of sin, but who also named pride as the defining characteristic distinguishing the City of Man and the City of God. “The former glories in itself, and the latter glories in God” (The City of God XIV.28). The two cities possess two distinct cultures, one characterized by the dominating lust to make a name for oneself, and the other characterized by selfless love for God and his glory. 

This theme is present not only in all the places we expect in Augustine’s corpus—Confessions, On the Trinity, The City of God—but also in the spirituality of Augustine’s rule. What is so helpful about the rule’s approach to pride is that it identifies it not merely as “out there” in the world beyond the Church (as superficial readings of Augustine might suggest) but as a reality that is alive within the Church as well. Augustine notes at the beginning of his rule that “every other vice prompts people to do evil deeds; but pride lies in ambush for good deeds in order to destroy them.” (The Monastic Rules 111). That awareness is woven into the ordinary life that the rule prescribes as it relates to the leadership of the community, conflict and forgiveness, and more. The rule is an attempt to describe a community that reflects and fosters the culture of humility that is intrinsic to the City of God. 

This wisdom is a gift to a Church that is tempted to mis-locate the principles of her moral discernment and spiritual leadership. As we face the pressing issues of our time (many of which Leo XIV has himself named) of Artificial Intelligence, intra-ecclesial conflict, political uncertainty, the specter of another industrial revolution, and more, it is easy to attend to superficial symptoms rather than root causes. Augustine would have us consider the fundamental division between a city wracked by division and chaos in its pursuit of its own glory and one that loves selflessly because it seeks God’s glory. And then he would have us seek to become the kind of people who are at home in this latter polis. “Thus the more you are concerned about the common good rather than your own, the most progress you will know you have made” (The Monastic Rules 118). 

Friendship

In spite of his introspective reputation, Augustine was almost never alone. The Augustine we meet in the Confessions is a man of many friends—Alypius, Nebridius, Romanianus, Verecundus—who were with him at each key moment in his long conversion. Augustine speaks movingly and at length about the gift of these friends and the joys and gifts of companionship, of “the charms of talking and laughing and kindly giving way to each other’s wishes, reading elegantly written books together, sharing jokes and delighting to honor one another, disagreeing occasionally but without rancor” (Confessions IV.8.13). Even after becoming a pastor and then a bishop, he continued to work to cultivate friendships, founding a company of pastor-monks in Hippo which later grew into a network of North African clergy whose collegiality emerged from their shared monastic experience. 

In the Greco-Roman world, friendship was not an optional luxury; it was an essential element of the good life. Augustine both adopted and adapted this framework, articulating a specifically Christian vision for friendship. The Rule of St Augustine is one piece of Augustine’s attempt to provide an institutional trellis that would sustain that vision. In the rule we see a positive articulation of unity, wisdom for the complexities of life together, and guidance for when things inevitably go awry. These things find a home in the rule because of the central importance of friendship in Augustine’s vision of the Christian life.

We live in a lonely age. The various technologies that mediate our relationship to the world extend to us the promise of a frictionless existence, and attempt to provide that by removing the seemingly inconvenient aspects of embodied relationship with others. The result is that we are ill-suited to navigate the complexities of friendship, left to listlessly drift in loneliness. Augustine’s rule sustains the fragile good of friendship in our times as it names its beauty and protects it from its threats.  

It does seem that we are in an Augustinian moment. In his times as in ours, something is coming to an end, and what will emerge is not yet clear. And this Augustinian moment has given us an Augustinian Pope. The story of the papacy of Leo XIV is yet to be written, and time will tell just how his leadership leaves its mark on both his communion and the wider church catholic. While we wait to see what shape his papacy takes—what guidance he will give about labor, about technology, about the divided church—we would do well not to lose sight of the way of life that has been his for almost five decades now. 

Augustine’s theology, from the incisive cultural criticism of The City of God to the thick description of spiritual formation of the Confessions, was a timely intervention in his own fragmented moment. While retrieving that tradition is not a panacea for the troubles of our own times, it nonetheless does provide us with resources relevant to the moment handed to us. But we would be mistaken if we believed that ideas and concepts were all we needed for faithfulness in our times. What The Rule of St Augustine reminds us is that we need to retrieve not only his theology, but also a coherent way of life that embodies and sustains that tradition, translating those intellectual principles into a resource for faithful, deep discipleship. Augustine’s attention in the rule to ordered love, humility, and friendship are one such vision of a ruled life that we might look to and learn from with great profit.