By Kathleen Bonnette, Th.D., Assistant Director, JPIC
The monastic Rule of St. Augustine – the oldest of its kind, written in 397 AD – served as the foundation for the Bishop of Hippo’s own religious community, and it continues to be one of the most valued set of principles for religious life today. Over 100 religious communities have modeled themselves on Augustine’s Rule, including the School Sisters of Notre Dame. Notably, Augustine’s Rule “is short on regulations and ascetic advice because Augustine focused on getting right the foundation of community life, accepting that the details would be worked out if the essential pattern was securely in place.” Celebrated at once for its brevity and penetrating depth, the Rule of Augustine focuses primarily on unity – on communal structures that will facilitate “that oneness for which Jesus Christ was sent” (YAS, C 4). Recalling the way of the early Church of Acts 4:32, Augustine writes, “Let all of you then live together in oneness of mind and heart, mutually honoring God in yourselves, whose temples you have become.”
This emphasis on unity grounds the SSND charism: “Our charism flows from our spiritual heritage, especially the gifts of St. Augustine, who formed a community to be of one heart and one soul in God, seeing in the Trinity the basis, source and goal of all community” (YAS, C Prologue). By exploring the nuances of Augustine’s Trinitarian spirituality, then, we can gain a deeper appreciation for the SSND charism.
To understand Augustine’s conception of community, we should start by looking at his view of selfhood – of what it means to be a person, made in the image of God. With that groundwork in place, we can begin to appreciate what it means to be “one” with others – to be a self, united with other selves. Augustine bases his account of human selfhood on what he takes to be its key descriptor – i.e. that human beings are made in God’s image. The defining characteristics of God as maintained by the Catholic faith are that God is Truth, God is Love, God is Creator and Sustainer of Reality, and God is Trinity. Augustine therefore recognizes that human beings will express aspects of these characteristics, as well – in other words, Augustine maintains that human beings are thinking, feeling, willful, relational beings, who are created and sustained by God.
Perhaps the most important feature to underscore, here, is that God exists as relationship. Each person of the Trinity is enlivened and constituted by its relationship with the others – e.g. there can be no Word without a Speaker or the Breath that carries it; correspondingly, without a Word to utter, what is a Speaker? It goes deeper than that, however, since Augustine recognizes the interconnection of truth, love, and being, as well. Thus, God represents both an interpersonal union and an intrapersonal one – i.e. God is a Trinity of persons, integrally related to one another, and this Triune God is Truth, Love, and Creativity, each of which conditions and affirms the others. Thus, “Augustine argues that, on an internal level, the human intellect, affect, and will – each critical to human selfhood – must be brought into alignment if one is to participate in loving communion with God and neighbor [including the environment]; and he affirms the inherent goodness of all creatures, each of which contributes in a particular way to the goodness of the universal whole.” Sister Mary Clark, RSCJ, a world-renowned Augustine scholar, explains that for Augustine, “a relational concept implies that for a human being to be a person is for [one] to stand in certain relations. … Augustine explicitly exhorted human persons to image the relational character of God by individually relating by love to the Trinity and to one another.”
When Augustine urges us to “live together in oneness of mind and heart, mutually honoring God in yourselves, whose temples you have become,” then, he is advocating that we become a community of persons who will to seek God with the entirety of our being. Of course, part of seeking God entails relating rightly to others, self, and creation. Because Augustine recognizes that we are who we are only in relation to God and others, he maintains that it is only when we view ourselves and others iconically – as reflections of God – that we “can we appreciate their full dignity.” In other words, To love others in their finite particularity, we must recognize the way in which they bear the mark of their Creator – we can love others holistically only when we are aware of the ways they witness to the Creator, and we can respect their dignity only when we recognize it to be dependent upon their participation in the created order. If God’s goodness is absolute and immanent, then any good that we love in the other is of God, and our love is directed toward God, so long as we recognize that the good we love refers back to, and is sustained by, the Creator. However, this does not mean that the beloved is reduced to an indiscriminate creature of God; it rather facilitates a more holistic appreciation of the other in her particularity, which includes her unique participation in God’s created order.
Loving others in this way – as expressions of God’s love, dependent upon God for their very being – frees us to act for the good of others within our community. By grounding our actions in the truth of God’s eternal being, while interpreting situations through the lens of creative love, we can approach the common good with an ethic that is stable enough to provide a standard of right action, but fluid enough to allow relational considerations to shape the contours of our lives. “When we understand ourselves to be related to others (and constituted by others) in a universal community, our actions will reflect a desire to make our relationships right and good – i.e. we will engage in actions that ‘fit,’ as it were, the continuous process of seeking good.”
Thus, Augustine’s rule need not contain excessive regulations, for a community that pursues God wholeheartedly will be able to apply their knowledge of morality to specific situations in creative and loving ways that inspire all members of the community toward “that oneness for which Jesus Christ was sent” (YAS, C 4). For the School Sisters of Notre Dame, this is exemplified in the “spirit of creative fidelity” that the community embodies in “efforts toward unity, our community life, our ministry directed toward education, our common search for and doing of God’s will” (YAS, C Prologue).
