When Augustine was born in 354 CE, Christian monasticism was already assuming its main lines of development. Its origins are traditionally located in Egypt at the beginning of the fourth century: the earliest written use of the word monachos for “monk” is found in a complaint lodged with an imperial official in 324 by a villager who had been rescued by a deacon and a monk when he was attacked by a neighbor. The earliest monks, evidently familiar figures on the Egyptian rural scene by the 320s, were individuals who withdrew from society and rejected sexual relations to lead lives of Christian contemplation. The most famous of these hermits or anchorites (from anachōrēsis, “withdrawal” or “retreat”) was St. Antony the Great, the son of a prosperous Christian Coptic farmer: he renounced the world as a young man, retreating first to the burial ground at the edge of his village and then further into the Egyptian desert, where he lived a solitary life of prayer and contemplation until his death, allegedly at the age of 104.

Early Egyptian monasticism drew much of its spiritual inspiration from the speculative work of the Alexandrian theologian Origen (d. 253/4), whose teaching was transmitted to the Copts of the Nile delta by Hieracas of Leontopolis in the early fourth century. Origen taught that human souls were preexistent intelligences that had grown cold and fallen away from God, while human bodies, originally good in themselves, were now the place of their confinement. He maintained that the nous, or intelligence, the highest part of the soul and seat of participation in God’s image, might be freed from the desires and urges associated with the flesh and reunited with God in a recreation of the state of Adam before the fall. Antony’s ascetic thinking, communicated in a series of seven letters, is framed within Origenist paradigms of alienation from and return to God. Antony taught that the Holy Spirit had sent people “a rule for how to repent in their bodies and soul until they had taught them the way to return to God their creator.”Footnote ¹ This was to be achieved “through many fasts and vigils, through the exertion and exercises of the body, cutting off all the fruits of the flesh.”Footnote ² Such transformational asceticism, founded on mastery of the body and passions and rejection of sexuality, was widespread in the third and fourth centuries: Hieracas had preached that the married would not enter heaven, while the continent were regarded as elite in the early Syriac Church. Antony’s retreat to the desert did not prevent visitors arriving in the area to await his spiritual guidance; it is to these and to other imitators that his letters were addressed. Individual ascetics settled in other areas such as the “mount” of Nitria, Scetis, and Kellia, all in Lower Egypt, forming groups of several thousand monks who lived independently of each other but who could seek wisdom – a “word” – from the more charismatic and experienced solitaries.

Our picture of the lives and teachings of these hermits has been shaped by their representation in late-fourth-century texts, such as the Apophthegmata Patrum (the Sayings of the Fathers), the Latin History of the Monks of Egypt, and Lausiac History. It has also been formed by the Life of Antony – the (disputed) work of Athanasius of Alexandria – written in the 350s. In this classic of spirituality, a variety of themes jostle with each other: it makes some reference to Antony’s Origenist ideas while privileging other elements, notably anti-“Arian” propaganda. The Life’s mythologizing of the desert draws attention away from other ascetic individuals who practiced continence and also scriptural study and meditation, another fundamental of the Origenist program, in their own homes, and it obscures a reality in which monks and “apotactics” or renunciants of various kinds were familiar figures not just in the cities of Egypt but also in smaller towns and villages.

Egypt also saw the growth of the first real Christian communal monasticism in the 320s. It was largely shaped by the work of Pachomius (d. 346/7), a convert to Christianity who had originally acted as “steward” to a group of hermits, looking after their everyday needs. Pachomius gradually developed the idea of fully communal monasteries enclosed by a wall and containing a church, kitchen, refectory, workshops, and dormitories or cells that housed a few monks under a house master. He aimed to create a koinonia, or community, like the Jerusalem community described in Acts, in which all possessions were held in common and the believers were as “one heart and one soul.”Footnote ³ The Pachomian koinonia developed as a chain of monasteries in Upper Egypt situated along the banks of the Nile in which monks worked at crafts and agriculture. It inspired the formation of other Coptic communities, such as the White Monastery headed by Shenoute of Atripe.

The idea of monastic community was given an additional dimension in Cappadocia in the 370s by the work of Basil, bishop of Caesarea (d. ca. 378). Basil was familiar with both Stoic philosophy and Origenist theology and had visited Egypt, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Syria in the 350s. Taking as his watchword the scriptural injunction to love God first of all and then one’s neighbor,Footnote ⁴ he envisioned monasteries as sources of charity for the Christian community as a whole. Basil demanded not only disposal of an individual’s property on entry to a community but also that its members should work – not just to support the ascetic group but also to provide alms for the Christian poor. Rejecting hyperasceticism, he blended practical service with moderation in diet and askēsis (“training,” “self-discipline”), with a contemplative element more usually associated with the eremitic life, and with a system of spiritual perfection through confession to a senior.

Latin translations of the Life of Antony appeared in the 350s and 370s. These texts had enormous impact in the west, initially among high-ranking Roman women such as Melania the Elder and her friend Paula. Melania would become a leading exponent of and supporter of Egyptian Origenism, and both she and Paula founded monasteries in the Holy Land.

Before his conversion to Christianity, Augustine learned about Antony from a friend. His Confessions suggest that he had, up to then, been completely ignorant of Christian asceticism and monasticism, but that the Life’s account of Antony’s inspiration by the Gospel made such an impression on him that his decision to accept Christianity was partly based on it. Earlier, Augustine had lived with his mother, his son, and group of friends with whom he pooled his resources.Footnote ⁵ After his conversion, he created a house monastery – a type of ascetic retreat springing up throughout the Roman Christian world – in his former family home in Thagaste where, once more, he lived with a group of friends. George Lawless considers that this group practiced what Augustine would later characterize as the four elements of monastic life: manual labor, reading, prayer, and scriptural study.Footnote ⁶ The community moved to the grounds of the church at Hippo after Augustine was forcibly ordained priest in 391.

Augustine became bishop of Hippo in 395–6, and it is thought that around 397 he composed the text known as the Praeceptum (or Regula Tertia) for the guidance of the “garden monastery” he had left. This generally accepted dating would make the Praeceptum the first western monastic rule and perhaps the first monastic rule in a formal sense, even if Augustine did not label it as such.Footnote ⁷ The original Pachomian “rules” may have been in the form of letters and specific instructions: the early koinonia is likely to have been run by visitation and assemblies, while the Pachomian legislative texts creatively rendered into Latin by Jerome in 404 are of indeterminate date. Basil’s ascetic works were framed as questions and responses, originally dealing with issues affecting the wider Christian community as well as monastic groups; they emerged in several recensions, and Rufinus of Aquileia only began his Latin version of one of these in 397. So Augustine’s integrated set of spiritual and practical instructions may break new ground.

The Praeceptum innovates in other ways. Soon after his conversion, in The Ways of the Catholic Church and the Manicheans, Augustine composed a eulogy of monasticism in Egypt and the east in which he seems to be thinking of the koinonia. Before his conversion, he had conceived of the soul in Neoplatonist or Plotinian terms as ascending toward God. In framing his rule, he reversed the order of heart and soul in Acts’ description of the Jerusalem community, adding the phrase in Deum, which might be translated as “seeking” or “tending toward” God. The opening of the Praceptum announces that the community is to “have one soul and heart seeking God.”

The Praeceptum aimed at achieving what twentieth-century anthropologist Victor Turner characterized as communitas, a condition in which selfhood is dissolved in the mystical union of a group of people.Footnote ⁸ Augustine visualizes a gradual progression toward this state:

While aiming to abolish all distinctions of social rank, he also counts understanding of those who find it difficult to sustain more austere circumstances as a sign of spiritual progress, as individual concerns dissolve in a transcendent unity sustained by mutual forgiveness and restraint in speech. Ultimate authority is vested in a priest, but the community’s superior, who exercises practical control in everyday matters, is to be obeyed as a father. Nevertheless, he is instructed to serve in love rather than dominate in power, while obedience to him is to be based on compassion. This conception of authority is highly individual yet also characteristic of the relatively unhierarchical nature of early monastic communities. Pachomius himself lived under the supervision of a house master, while authority in the koinonia could be extremely fluid, shifting between house masters, weekly servers, stewards, heads of monasteries, and community “fathers.” Even Basil, who considered obedience unto death the primary monastic virtue, nevertheless instructed the community superior – described simply as is qui praeest (“he who is in charge”) – to be meek and lowly of heart.

The Praeceptum reminds community members that they are “no longer slaves under the law, but a people living in freedom under grace.”Footnote ¹⁰ The role of grace in relation to asceticism would be fiercely debated in the early fifth century, with Augustine himself playing the decisive part. Jerome led the assault: first on the British ascetic Pelagius in Rome and then on the Origenist-inspired writings of Evagrius Ponticus, who died in Kellia in 399, just as Origenism was also coming under attack in Egypt. Jerome castigated both Pelagius and Evagrius for what he deemed overemphasis on human potential in the ascetic life, expressing particular scorn for Evagrius’ objective of freedom from passions – apatheia – as a prelude to union of the nous with God. Augustine would insist on the need for both the enabling and the cooperative grace of God. Evagrian thought was refashioned for the west by the work of John Cassian, who composed the Institutes and Conferences between 420 and 430, bringing a version of transformational asceticism to western monastic communities. Without once mentioning Evagrius, whose controversial terminology he neutralized in Latin expressions, Cassian attempted to show that both God’s grace and human effort played a part in monastic life. Yet there remained a considerable gap between his technologies of individual spiritual progress and Augustine’s desire to create a community in which the boundaries between individual souls would be dissolved.

The fifth century saw significant developments in western monasticism. Despite their different spiritual emphases, Augustine and Cassian had both advocated the idea that members of religious communities should work. By contrast, the monasticism created in northern Gaul by Bishop Martin of Tours (d. 397) attracted high-status males and did not prescribe manual labor: manuscript copying sufficed. The southern Gallic monastery of Lérins, home of two of Cassian’s dedicatees, was similarly refined, and many of the aristocrats who became monks there would return to their native regions as bishops. Monastic life expanded along with Christianity, and some monasteries grew up around churches and relic shrines. Families placed children in communities sometimes for education but often as oblates. Not all communities sought, or could afford, a life of contemplative otium (“ease” or “leisure”): the monks of the Burgundian Jura communities founded in the late fifth century tilled their own fields. By the early sixth century, one of these monasteries had created the first recognizable monastic dormitory.

Augustine’s “garden monastery” disappears from sight with the Vandal capture of Hippo in 430, but the Praeceptum survived. Excerpts are embedded in a very different work, the Rule for Virgins, completed by Bishop Caesarius of Arles in 532. In the 380s, Jerome had begun to advocate enclosed virginity as the essential pattern for female religious life, but Augustine stands apart from this developing paradigm. Historians debate his attitude toward women;Footnote ¹¹ however, his sister was head of a nunnery that appears to have used a rule for women identical to, or minimally different from, the Praeceptum.Footnote ¹² It allowed nuns to leave their buildings in groups to go to the baths, to the laundry, and to an external church under the same conditions of mutual watchfulness as monks. By contrast, Caesarius declared that there were many differences between male and female monasteries and created the strictest conditions of enclosure to protect the nuns’ virginity.

Caesarius’ use of the Praeceptum provides us with other indications of the evolution of monasticism. Augustine’s original vision of communal life as “one soul and heart seeking God” has been transmuted into “one soul and heart in God.” The purpose of Caesarius’ nunnery was to provide liturgical intercession for himself and the city of Arles. There seem to have been few officials in Augustine’s monastery, while Caesarius wrote for a community of around two hundred nuns, where the superior is assisted by a greater number of officials – even if their hierarchy is nowhere nearly so clearly defined as in the Benedictine Rule, written a few decades later.

The suite of quotations from the Praeceptum in Caesarius’ Rule for Virgins is preceded by a similar set from another “Augustinian rule,” the so-called Ordo monasterii, or Regula secunda. While it is no longer regarded as Augustine’s own work, this juxtaposition suggests that it was linked to the Praeceptum at an early date.Footnote ¹³ However, one of the points on which it differs from the latter – and where Caesarius quotes from it – is in its unqualified insistence on obedience to a superior and a prior, something more in tune with post-Augustinian developments in monastic life.

This trend would emerge clearly when, around 550, Benedict of Nursia composed a Rule defining obedience, humility, and silence as the essential monastic virtues and creating a simple but effective hierarchy of monastic officials headed by a powerful abbot. His sparse reminiscences of Augustine center on the Praeceptum’s reference to the Jerusalem community’s pooling of possessions. Benedict’s prescription of obedience to abbatial authority would provide a template for monastic community in the “mixed rules” produced in seventh-century Francia and England.

The combination of Ordo monasterii followed by Praeceptum is also found in a seventh-century manuscript, at the head of a rule speculatively attributed to Eugippius, founder of a southern Italian community in the early sixth century. There is no formal proof of this attribution. As a whole, the text shows many characteristics of the “mixed rules” of the seventh century, including a focus on obedience to the abbot, and it appears to have been designed for the cells or dependencies of a larger monastery.Footnote ¹⁴ However, the presentation together of the text of the two rules is significant. While there are early medieval copies of the Praeceptum on its own, the manuscript would play an important role in the onward transmission of Ordo monasterii and Praeceptum as a pair. This grouping would emerge as the key text of the canonical reform of the eleventh century, when it would be referred to simply as the “Rule of St. Augustine.”