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Benedict and Augustine are two founders of styles of Christian community life.
Both wrote a Rule that gave a high degree of form and consistency to religious life in Europe for over 1,000 years. More is learned about both by viewing them in contrast.
God and the Church used the differing talents of both these men.
Neither Augustine nor Benedict was the founder of Christian monasticism, since they both lived at least two centuries after its beginnings in Egypt, Palestine, and Asia Minor.
Benedict became a monk as a young man and thereafter learned the tradition by associating with monks and reading the monastic literature.
He was caught up in the monastic movement but ended by channelling the stream into new and fruitful ways.
This is evident in the Rule which he wrote for monasteries and which was and is still used in many monasteries and convents around the world today.
The Benedictine tradition was the dominant form of vowed religious community life in Europe from the seventh to at least the eleventh century. Benedict lived from approximately 480 to 547.
Scholars debate the dating of the Rule of Benedict, though they generally agree that it was written in the second third of the sixth century.
Augustine (356-430AD) lived over a century before Benedict (480-547AD). Before Benedict came, some had called Augustine the master of the interior life.
Without Augustine who taught how to reintegrate the fragments of a broken civilisation from within, the retreat of Benedict to the enclosure of the monastery walls might easily have turned into mere flight.
But in part because of Augustine the Benedictine monastery became the heart of medieval culture, the spiritual force that motivated the building of a new civilisation.
Letter 211 of Augustine was read and re-read by Benedict, who borrowed several important texts from it for insertion in his own Rule.
The chapter in the Rule of Benedict on the labour of monks is manifestly inspired by the treatise by Augustine called "De opere monachorum" ("The Work of Monks").
This work by Augustine has done so much towards furnishing an accurate statement of the doctrine commonly accepted in religious orders.
The teaching concerning religious poverty is clearly formulated in Augustine's sermons "De vitâ et moribus clericorum suorum" ("The Life and Customs of Clerics").
The authorship of Augustine of these two works is sufficient to earn him the title of Father of monks and religious.
The Rule of Benedict was uppermost until with the coming of the mendicant tradition in the eleventh century, after which, in the words of Tarsisius van Bavel O.S.A. in 1996, the Rule of Augustine "spread like fire among stubble."
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