9
Monastic Rules (Fourth to Ninth Century)
ALBRECHT DIEM AND PHILIP ROUSSEAU
Introduction: A History Created Backwards
In a study of late antique and early medieval monastic rules in the West, one logical starting point is Benedict of Aniane's early ninth-century Codex regularum. We depend to an enormous degree on the sources that he has provided for us. The Codex (in the Munich manuscript, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 28118) is by far the most extensive early medieval collection of monastic rules: twenty-four rules for monks and six rules for nuns.1 Many of them would probably have been lost if Benedict of Aniane had not collected and preserved them. He also produced a second work, the Concordia regularum, in which he arranged most of the material of his collection so that it corresponded thematically chapter by chapter, with what we now think of as the Rule of St. Benedict (RB), and what he thought of as the work of the sixth-century Benedict of Nursia. Both works, the Codex and the Concordia, formed part of his endeavor to promote the RB as a rule for all Frankish monasteries. He wanted to show that the RB formed the culmination of a rich tradition of monastic norms (not excluding exemplars from the East).
Benedict of Aniane's work has had a deep impact on virtually all subsequent understanding of the origins of Western monastic life. In 1661 and 1663, the German humanist Lucas Holstenius published his own Codex regularum, which included most of Benedict's collection, along with a few rules from other manuscripts and a number of late antique and early medieval ascetic treatises. A later edition and expansion of this work by Marianus Brockie
Albrecht Diem's contribution to this chapter was made possible by the SFB F 4202 "Visions of Community," funded by the Austrian Science Funds (FWF), the Faculty of History and Cultural Sciences of the University of Vienna, and the Austrian Academy of Science.
1 On   the   manuscript   dissemination   of   early   medieval   monastic   rules, see www.earlymedievalmonasticism.org (date of last access: 18 August 2018).
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formed the basis of J. P. Migne's reprint in the Patrologia Latina (most of it in PL 103), which is still not entirely replaced by modern critical editions.2 We shall argue here, however, that we should not necessarily read Benedict of Aniane's work as he intended it to be read. It represents a misleadingly tidy picture of what was much less ordered in its development, and imposes on early sources a meaning and purpose that they did not always possess at the time of their original composition. Moreover, Benedict has also implanted in the mind of modern historians an image of monastic life as essentially governed by a written rule. The Codex regularum, which is vaguely organized chronologically, regionally, and by gender, could be and was read as a history book depicting the emergence of Latin monasticism as a chain of changing normative observances. While the texts may have been slightly different from each other, the Codex wants its reader to believe in a basic and stable principle: that monasteries followed rules, according to the precept of the RB itself that the cenobitic life can only exist sub regula vel abbate (RB 1.2; RM 1.2).
In this chapter, therefore, we want to mount an experiment: to see what happens if we step away from this early ninth-century paradigm of a "life following a written rule" and give what we shall call more loosely "normative observance" a genesis and a history of its own, concluding that Benedict of Aniane's notion of a regularized monastic life was a skillfully crafted construct that served the purpose of promoting his own understanding of what it meant to "follow" the RB.
The World of the Pioneers
It has to be said at the outset that this approach presents us with a paradox. On the one hand, ascetic literature (from at least the fourth century onwards) includes texts habitually thought of as "rules": today we may speak, even write, of the "Rules of Pachomius," the "Rules of Basil," the "Rule of Augustine," even though the pioneers themselves rarely used the term regula when referring to those texts. On the other hand, before the end of the sixth century it is difficult to identify ordered communities of ascetics (such as we customarily think of as "monasteries") living according to a single set of written prescriptions. Are we suggesting, therefore, that Benedict of Aniane "invented" a Vorgeschichte (pre-history) of the RB, concocting an illusory sequence of pioneer rule-writers? Obviously not. It needs to be stressed
2 Lucas Holstenius and Marianus Brockie, Codex regularum monasticarum et canonicarum, 2 vols. (Augsburg, 1759). A complete list of the abbreviations used for rules is to be found at the end of this chapter.
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rather that his "history book" tells only a fraction of the story of the rise of Western monasticism. Pachomius (d. 348), Basil (d. 379), and Augustine (d. 430), together with others of significance, really did exist and were eager to give some order to the ascetic life. What characterizes this early period is not so much the absence of that order as a confusion of terminology an untidiness of development, and an obscurity of dependence.3
Let us begin with terminology. Scholars use the words "monks" and "monasteries" to translate many different terms referring to a great variety of fourth-century situations, from a single individual living a life of focused devotion to groups of such enthusiasts numbering from two or three to tens or even hundreds; and both their persons and their dwellings could bear quite different names: apotaktikoi, spondaioi, anachoretae; coenobia, cellae, laura.4 Even more to the point, these assemblies and establishments were rarely brought together or purpose-built from scratch. In the earliest stages of ordered asceticism, existing urban or suburban families and households or rural small-holdings, villages, or estates were co-opted and expanded to new moral purposes.5 As Christianity experienced more public confidence after Constantine, such centers of ascetic devotion were extended to include pilgrims' hostels and shelters for the destitute and sick, as well as new chapels, memorial shrines, and churches.
So, we should not assume that the sancti patres whom Benedict of Aniane looked back to shaped a stable and forever repeated monastic model. We should think rather of "monasticisms" in the plural (although even that may make too formal a mark). An almost infinite variety of forms—more or less communal, more or less ascetic—played very different roles in a rapidly changing and geographically diverse society. A monasterium in post-Roman Gaul, for example, could be anything from the cell of a hermit or a community gathered around a charismatic individual (in a cave, on an island, in a city dwelling, or set in remote country—as it were, "the desert"); to a monastically redefined aristocratic villa rustica, or a saint's or martyr's shrine with a monastic community adjoining; to an episcopal household, a community of clerics, or a monastery connected to an episcopal see; or, finally, to
3 See also the article by Helvetius in this volume.
4 Claudia Rapp, Brother-Making in Late Antiquity and Byzantium: Monks, Laymen, and Christian Ritual (Oxford, 2016).
5 Kimberly D. Bowes, "Inventing Ascetic Space: Houses, Monasteries and the Archaeology of Asceticism1," in Western Monasticism ante litter am: The Spaces of Monastic Observance in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, ed. Hendrik Dey and Elizabeth Fentress (Turnhout, 2011), 315-51. See also the articles by Brooks Hedstrom and Dey, Giorda, and Bully and Destefanis in this volume.
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an urban community of praying virgins and widows. Some "monasteries" could serve as hideouts for fugitive slaves or young aristocrats escaping from their family or state responsibilities; as re-appropriations of pagan cult sites; as training camps for a future ecclesiastical elite; as places of forced retreat for clerics who committed a major transgression; as outposts of episcopal power; as missionary bases; as places of teaching, learning, and the preservation of knowledge; or as powerful factories of intercessory prayer for the surrounding world, for kings, bishops, and aristocrats.6
Even this list is not exhaustive and there are many examples of monasteries fulfilling more than one of these roles or changing their shape and function in the course of history. Each of these manifestations of monastic life reflects the society around it, and we can see in these mirrors much that might otherwise remain invisible. Indeed, in the changing face of monastic life, we observe transformations of the Roman world itself, which make the study of late antique and early medieval monasticism relevant within a much broader framework than just monastic or religious studies.7
An analogous amalgam characterizes the texts produced within and for all those different monastic communities. Material which it appears entirely appropriate to label prescriptive is constantly enfolded within corpora of writings different (or, perhaps better, complementary) in genre. An awareness of classical culture makes this entirely unsurprising. The pursuit of virtue had been governed for centuries by tested strategies recommended and demonstrated by acknowledged experts already distinguished by the authority of their moral success. This very fact implied in turn that, within certain "schools," devotees felt or were made to feel a need to be "governed" in this sense; to cultivate trust, seek out talented and experienced instructors (or read their posthumous recommendations), and practice regular discipline and obedience. Such was the thrust of EunapiusJ Lives of the Philosophers and Sophists (contemporary with Jerome), imitating Philostratus who wrote nearly two centuries before him, and reaching back to the moralizing portraits of Plutarch. This may not have reflected a regulated way of life as Benedict of Aniane envisioned it; but the notion had long been in moralists' minds nevertheless.
So, even as we move into the more publicly Christian world, we discover a vast diversity of other texts that expressed "monastic" ideals, "monastic"
6 Renie S. Choy, Intercessory Prayer and the Monastic Ideal in the Time of the Carolingian Reforms (Oxford, 2017).
7 On the continuing monastic diversity in southern Italy and in Spain, see the articles by Ramseyer and Diaz in this volume.
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theology, and "monastic" discipline: ascetic treatises (like those of Evagrius and Cassian—on whom more shortly), narrative texts (for example, the História monachorum, the Histoňa Lausiaca, the Verba seniorum, the Vitae Pachomii, or the Lives of the Fathers of the Jura), letters (like Caesarius' Vereor), and sermons (like those of Faustus, Caesarius, and Ps.-Ephrem the Syrian). In other words, there were regulae in the narrow sense but also regulae in a much broader sense. We shall return to this point; but it is worth saying at once that moral pedagogy, as it was subsequently inherited and developed within the Christian ascetic sphere, imposed narrower definitions on "regularity," even as it allowed ordered devotion outside "monastic" institutions to escape, in a sense, the growing taste for the creation of "rules" as Benedict of Aniane might have later understood them.
This ancient discourse of moral regulation was a necessary precondition— indeed, a concomitant—of the process we are observing. In Latin, regula had a clear pedigree: it retained, even in figurative usage, an association with "measure" and therefore with a pattern in relation to which one could assess the value or acceptability of a course of action. The Greek word hóros (Basil's term for "rule") functioned in a comparable way, setting up a framework of "markers" or "guidelines" within which an action became potentially fruitful or readily sanctioned, thus placing useful "bounds" to behavior in specified circumstances.8 And we are forced to broaden our field of reference still more. Given the fact that Augustine of Hippo and his master, Ambrose of Milan (d. 397), played a prominent part in the early development of Western ascetic practice, we have to take note of the way in which they made use of other terms—officia (in Ambrose's De ojficiis) and mores (in Augustine's De moňbus ecclesiae catholicae): these were words equally applicable to the description of desirable, indeed obligatory behavior; words equally old and Roman, underpinning what was considered appropriate in the public or civic sphere. There were many such terms that held sway, before regula achieved its dominance.
Pursuing, therefore, our analogy with the scale and setting of ascetic practice, we note how the texts that carried a specific note of regulation were, like the ascetics themselves, part of a larger whole—in their case, a literary whole. If we take as our initial examples the "rules" of Pachomius, Basil, and Augustine, we find two features: first, the "rules" themselves are not homogeneous in form; and second, they are written by men who associated them integrally with other sorts of texts—biographical, epistolary, homiletic,
8 Philip Rousseau, Basil of Caesarea (Berkeley, CA, 1994); and Anna M. Silvas, The Asketikon of St Basil the Great (Oxford, 2005).
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exegetical, theological, even liturgical, and in a few instances mundane—all of which, taken as a larger whole, are appropriately considered exhortatory and formative: a total "rule of life," an ascetic politeia.
Here we have a double-barreled conundrum: a rich but diffuse body of textual reflection and advice seemingly in search of an organization to impose it on. The apparent search is the illusion, not the body of texts themselves; and the illusion springs from two sets of ambitions, one our own and one more ancient. Our own is the historian s natural urge to expose and explain development. We know that monasteries and rules existed in the Western Middle Ages: we can find the sites (eventually) on our maps, and we can find the texts (some of them, anyway) in our medieval archives. What we need (or think we need) is a narrative of discernible and explicable growth. The ancient illusion is more insidious. It resides in a later and in the end predominantly Carolingian wish to create a monastic tradition that culminates in its own program of definition and reform—one architect of this history being, as we said at the outset, Benedict of Aniane, the compiler of the Codex regularum, ordering the centuries before him to lead where he wished.
Entering a New World: The Fifth Century
Much that we have described so far in the earliest phases of ascetic development was Greek or Syriac in its inspiration. Eastern tradition began to follow a pattern not entirely dissimilar to the one we are tracing here for the West. We observe the creation of an early ninth-century image of ancient monasti-cism, based on a similarly backward-looking narrative, reflected in the work and career of Theodore of Stoudios.9 It was played out at exactly the same time as the "Carolingian moment" (Theodore lived 759-826, Benedict of Aniane 747-821). Both men essayed their reform or recapitulation after some two hundred years of post-imperial identity confusion, made worse for the Byzantines by the rise of Islam and the shaming interlude (shaming for some) of Iconoclasm. But that is a different and (in several ways) contested story, and it was the century very roughly 400-500 that saw Western, Latin monasticism starting out on its own path. This was a century of some "monastic" obscurity. Although it witnessed the emergence of Augustine's "rule," the work of Cassian (d. 435), the foundation of Lerins by Honoratus of Aries (d. 429), the De laude heremi of Eucherius of Lyon (d. 449), the De vita contemplativa of Julianus Pomerius (written in Gaul toward the end of the century), and
9 Roman Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness (Oxford, 2002).
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(a little later, but referring back several decades) the Lives of the Fathers of the Jura, there is in fact a strange silence around the middle of the century, a "gap" that is difficult to fill convincingly with a smooth-running development of regulae and monasteria.
Let us look in a little more detail at this (roughly) fifth-century story. It begins with translation work: Rufinus of Aquileia's (d. c. 410) Latin translation of the "rules" of Basil (quite possibly undertaken for Latin-speaking companions in Palestine, before his return to the West in 397) and Jerome's (d. 420) Latin translation of the "rules" of Pachomius (made probably in 404).10 It is difficult to know exactly what sources the two men had at their disposal or where they obtained them; but a comparison between their productions and the Coptic or Greek material at our disposal (often later copies and sometimes variant or fragmentary) leads to two relatively secure conclusions: we have no reason to suppose that either man actually falsified his originals; and so their versions probably give us at least a useful guide to the stage of development that the Eastern texts had reached by their day. We have to adopt a slightly hesitant tone here, because the very act of translating such "rules" removed them from their original context and thus perhaps modified their effect, intentionally or otherwise. But, taken together with the early sixth-century Latin Life of Pachomius, they certainly made available to the West full-scale attempts to "regulate" the communal ascetic life; and they were attempts that Benedict of Aniane knew about. We should also take into account the Latin translation of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (known in the original Greek as the Apophthegmata Patrum—henceforth AP) in their so-called "systematic" form in the middle of the sixth century (what came to be known in the West as the Verba seniorum or Vitae Patrum), since many of these "sayings" were in fact fragments of "rules" in the sense of prescriptive legacies of named ascetic heroes first collected (in Greek) at the end of the fifth century.11
There are several things to note about the Latin legacy, so to speak, of Pachomius and Basil. First, we have no evidence that their "rules" functioned in their own time as Benedict of Aniane would have understood the word. Neither man was catering for a single system of ascetic living—not even Pachomius, whose communities varied considerably in size, character, order
10 Catherine M. Chin, "Rufinus of Aquileia and Alexandrian Afterlives: Translation as Origenism," Journal of Early Christian Studies 18 (2010): 617-47; Megan Hale Williams, The Monk and the Book: Jerome and the Making of Christian Scholarship (Chicago, IL, 2006); but see especially Stefan Rebenich, Hieronymus und sein Kreis. Prosopographische und sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Stuttgart, 1992).
11 Jean-Claude Guy, ed. and trans., Les apophtegm.es des Peres. Collection systematique, 3 vols., SC 387, 474, and 498.
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of foundation, and overriding ethos.12 Nor can we be completely confident about the correspondence between Jerome's translations of the specifically regulatory material and the way it was assembled in Benedict's Codex. This applies in particular to the adduced divisions that Jerome appears to have made between indicia, praecepta, and instituta. Basil's rules as later appealed to in the East (after Rufinus' time) emerged in different sets (some prolix, many more pithy), and were generated in different districts of Asia Minor and over a long period of time.
There is a particular and in some ways awkward feature of our uncertainty here. Not all serious ascetics in the fourth century thought it their primary duty to "lay down the law." Yes, this was an age when Christian men and women were ready to lead in matters religious, and to be led by others; and they did so fully aware of the pedagogic traditions they had inherited from a classical past (as we pointed out above), with its traditions of schools, defined by their successions of masters and disciples.13 But the Christian paideia was marked in a special way by two cautious responses to the competitive self-assurance that had long characterized cultural formation in the ancient world: first, something approaching "humility," modifying one's understanding of one's insight and authority; and second, a conviction that one should not recommend verbally what one had not experienced in practice.
These cautions are expressed within the very regulatory material itself, creating a tension precisely among those who produced or were portrayed in material collected in the Codex. In the Apophthegmata, an inquirer faced by persistent requests to act as a spiritual guide, who scrupled to acquiesce in the trust of such admirers, was confirmed in his hesitation by Abba Poemen's counsel that he should be to them an "example," not a "lawgiver" (AP, Poemen 174). Poemen assured another young visitor that, "just by remaining near" a potential mentor, "you will gain instruction" (AP, Poemen 65). Such anecdotes (the bulk of them surviving also in the "systematic" collection of sayings that influenced the West in its sixth-century Latin translation) provide vivid evidence of the distance between those eager to launch into words and those who felt that well-intentioned instruction was too easily confused with facile if not arrogant or misleading prescription. This general air of doubt and hesitation must color our assessment of the surprisingly little we do have
12 Philip Rousseau, Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt, 2nd ed. (Berkeley, CA, 1999) and crucially James E. Goehring, Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism (Harrisburg, PA, 1999).
13 See, among many works, Fairy von Lilienfeld, Spiritualität des frühen Wilstenmönchtums, ed. Ruth Albrecht and Franziska Müller (Erlangen, 1983).
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from the later fourth century that can even remotely be thought of as "rules." It explains convincingly why it has always been hard to find early signs of formal monasticism.
Once Jerome and Rufinus had launched upon the Latin world their limited representations of Pachomius and Basil, we might think we face some plainer sailing—the development of a more obviously regulated culture of asceticism, in defense of which we place our bets on Augustine and Cassian. But that does not quite work either. To begin with, Augustine's "rules" were no more stable than the early traces of Pachomius and Basil. Whatever coherence they were allowed to acquire in later hands (much later, in the late eleventh century at the soonest), they were constituted in Augustine's own time out of a range of different texts, undoubtedly influenced by early principles reflected in his dialogues from Cassiciacum in the later 380s, and then serving the changing needs of communities established first in Thagaste (after his return to Africa in 388) and then during a long episcopate in Hippo (from 395 to his death in 430). The core document concerned, the Ordo Monasterii (OM), is built around a set of principles rather than a daily routine (in that respect not unlike Basil's "Longer Rules"); and the whole corpus is visibly the product of a man busy writing other things at the same time and in cognate styles.14
As for Cassian, he belonged to a class and generation of ascetics (like Jerome, or Evagrius and Palladius in the East) who were neither entirely settled in a clearly defined style of life nor associated with any one region of the empire.15 (Sulpicius, by the way, must be allowed a life of his own: he was more than the biographer of Martin of Tours (d. 397), way to the north—his Dialogues are gravely underestimated as a key to his own personality and to the ascetic culture he represented—and his episcopal hero gained his full and markedly unmonastic stature only two centuries later, at the hands of his successor Gregory, who died in 594.) Cassian's surviving xuvre is remarkably confused in drift and implication.16 In spite of the much later (and perhaps not entirely reliable) testimony of Gennadius (De viris illustribus 62), he shows
14 Luc Verheijen, La Regie de saint Augustin (Paris, 1967); George Lawless, Augustine of Hippo and His Monastic Rule (Oxford, 1987; reprinted 1990) and Raymond Canning, trans., The Rule of Saint Augustine: Masculine and Feminine Versions, with introduction and commentary by T.J. van Bavel (London, 1984).
15 See the articles by Brakke and Alciati in this volume; Richard J. Goodrich, Contextualizing Cassian: Aristocrats, Asceticism, and Reformation in Fifth-Century Gaul (Oxford, 2007).
16 Philip Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority, and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN, 2010); Augustine Casiday, Tradition and Theology in St John Cassian (Oxford and New York, 2007); Steven D. Driver, John Cassian and the Reading of Egyptian Monastic Culture (London and New York, 2002); and Columba Stewart, Cassian the Monk (Oxford, 1998).
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little sign of being a monastic "founder." Like Honoratus, Cassian (deeply influenced during his years in the East by the teaching of Evagrius) was very much the protege of bishops, and whatever institutions he hoped to inspire or affect were the projects of churchmen such as Leontius of Frejus (d. 488; Honoratus' patron) and Castor of Apt (d. before 436).
The only section of Cassian s work that comes anywhere near being a "rule" in character is Books 1-4 of his Institutes, and even they are to do mostly with dress and ceremony. His study of the vices in the remaining books and his three sets of Conferences—intimate "chats" with famous ascetics of Egypt—constitute much more a theology of the ascetic life, and show a remarkably ambiguous attitude to various styles of ascetic regime. Cassian, after all, spent a good fifteen years wandering here and there between his years in Palestine and Egypt (ending with the death of Evagrius in 399) and his eventual settlement in Marseille (under the patronage of Bishop Proculus around 415). Little effort is made to disguise the tension between a regulated monastic life and the almost competitive charisma of those ascetic sages who feature in the Conferences. Even more striking, Cassian then seems to have been scarcely at the forefront of people's minds in the century after his death, meriting only a vague allusion (to the collationes patrum) in RB 73, where Basil by contrast is mentioned by name. (The spirit of his ascetic theology nevertheless permeates RB as a whole.)
Lerins, finally, presents problems of its own.17 Its founder, Honoratus, in his eastern travels in the 370s, never reached the Holy Land as he had intended, but the regime he established on the famous island, when he returned, owed much to the earliest reputation of Pachomius, giving him a cast of mind iden-tifiably different from Cassian. Much effort has been expended, especially by Adalbert de Vogue, on identifying a "rule" of Lerins that developed through the fifth century in various recensions.18 The funeral oration preached by Hilary of Aries (d. 449) in 429 is as reliable as such speeches can be but essentially impressionistic. Lerins became famous mostly for the men, like its founder and Hilary, who left it to become bishops, and to that extent its spirit
17 See the articles by Alciati, Lauwers, and Brooks Hedstrom and Dey in this volume. See also Salvatore Pricoco, L'Isola dei santi. II cenobio di Lerino e le origini del monachesimo gallico (Rome, 1978); Salvatore Pricoco, Monad filosofi e santi. Saggi di storia della cultura tardoantica (Soveria Mannelli and Messina, 1992); Conrad Leyser, Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (Oxford, 2000); Roberto Alciati, Monad, vescovi et scuola nella Gallia tardoantica (Rome, 2009); and Roberto Alciati, "II vescovo e il monaco nel De vita contemplativa di Pomerio," in Church, Society, and Monasticism, ed. E. Lopez-Tello Garcia and B. S. Zorzi (Rome, 2009), 25-38.
18 Adalbert de Vogue, ed. and trans., Les Regies des saints Peres, SC 297-298.
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came to permeate the church of southern Gaul in later decades. The most famous of these alumni was undoubtedly Caesarius, bishop of Aries from 502 until his death forty years later.19
By Caesarius' time the character of church life in the lower Rhone valley had become at least temporarily transformed by the settlement of the Ostrogoths in Italy affecting the politics of both Franks and Burgundians to the north and reopening the area to the influence of the Greek East. (The "Fathers of the Jura," further north, may have represented a more independent stance.) To that extent, Caesarius and his episcopal colleagues were able to reinterpret the meaning and tendency of ascetic culture at least in their own region: they were the first to present the "view from the future," as Benedict of Aniane would do on a much greater scale more than two centuries later. This reecriture would continue to have an impact on the Western Church even after the fall of the Ostrogothic kingdom to the armies of Justinian (r. 527-65) in 554. Such was the world, barely ten years after Caesarius' death and the death of Benedict of Nursia, which ushered in a clearly new phase in the history of Latin monastic culture.
The World after Chalcedon
But there was one other event in the fifth century of crucial importance for our understanding of this chapter's theme: the Council of Chalcedon, held in the East in 451, albeit with Western representatives of standing present. Its stipulations had a profound effect in the sphere of "normative observance," and no less in the West (although perhaps more slowly) than in the East. Canon 4 (which is of most significance in our context) makes only a few demands (and note that this is a disciplinary canon, not immediately connected with the council's doctrinal decrees), and none that are totally clear or detailed. The most anxious is probably the declaration that monks should live in monasteries and not wander around in cities, causing "political" as well as religious upheaval—a clear feature of the late 430s and 440s.20 (This was a point that had been made by secular decree as far back as the reign of Theodosius I.) Moreover, monasteries are not to be established at the
19 William E. Klingshirn, Caesarius of Aries: The Making of a Christian Community in Late Antique Gaul (Cambridge, 1994); Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, 1990).
20 Daniel F. Caner, Wandering, Begging Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 2002); Maribel Dietz, Wandering Monks, Virgins, and Pilgrims: Ascetic Travel in the Mediterranean World, ad 300-800 (University Park, PA, 2005).
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whim of monks themselves but only with the approval of the local bishop; and, once established, no one can override the bishop's authority over them (by the exercise of lay patronage, for example; see also canon 24). The exact nature of that authority, however, is very loosely expressed. Monks are not allowed to leave their monastery (unless the bishop has a special job for them to do—of which canon 3 gives some examples). Within the monastery, they are expected to lead a "quiet life" (kesuchia or quies), dedicated "only" to fasting and prayer. Throughout these canons, a constant distinction is made between ordained priests and monks. Priests should confine themselves to the place assigned to them (which, according to canon 6, can include a monastery), the implication being that, when monks are exhorted (in canon 4) to be "subject" to their bishop (hupotetdchthai and subiectos esse are the verbs used), this submission will be mediated through that priest (and will be of a type susceptible to that species of mediation). It does not seem to be expected that any monk will himself be ordained. Bishops do, nevertheless, have responsibilities of their own to provide for a monastery's needs—to exercise the "appropriate" pronoia or cum on their behalf.
A remarkable paradox attaches to these prescriptions, which appear to impose a very thorough episcopal control over the monastic life. The paradox has two components. First, there is little attempt to provide a definition of the "quiet life" or to identify the formulae that should govern fasting and prayer (leaving, indeed, everything else a monk might do in his monastery completely unspecified). This point will reward attention. It lies at the root of important modern scholarship and anticipates later prescriptive details.21 Second, the council says nothing about the ascetic devotees (especially the female ones) who might not pursue their vocation under the label of "monk." This cohort of enthusiasts, we shall find, had been and continued to be very large. They escaped the restrictions that Chalcedon appeared to impose, even while embracing (either alone or in small groups) the self-discipline espoused by monks in a more formal sense. These "irregular" ascetics—the vagantes or "wanderers"; the non-cenobitic types of monk—will now run in constant contrast to the "regular" life, and may indeed represent a criticism of what monasteries were attempting to achieve. This counter-culture, within ascetic society itself, may have had a profound influence on the development of regulae, making the latter in their turn instruments of a distinctive
21 Both Owen Chadwick, John Cassian, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1968), and Amand Veilleux, La liturgie dans le cenobitisme pachdmien au quatrieme siecle (Rome, 1968), opened their scholarly investigations with the importance of a liturgical ordo.
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safeguard or badge of authenticity. But an even greater complexity attaches to this relatively new development. To adhere to a "rule" was not simply a critical assertion that one was "doing things the right way." It served to reinforce other useful boundaries between monk and world; in particular, it limited the degree to which bishops could enforce their own agenda within a community—subverting with a certain irony the anxious stipulations of the Council of Chalcedon.
We are beginning to observe, therefore, at least two features of a new phase: the next stage in the invention of the post-Roman bishop (compare Caesarius with a more traditional figure such as Avitus of Vienne (d. c. 519)) and a new way of ordering the relations between bishops and virgins in particular. This took time, certainly in the West. Only when imperial practice had been stabilized anew with the establishment of the Ostrogothic kingdom in Italy in the 490s (reverberating up the Rhone valley into Gaul) could bishops in those regions discern what a post-imperial Church was going to look like; and a man like Caesarius could only emerge in such a context. (We only have to think of the way bishops behave in the Histories of Gregory of Tours (d. 594) or the Dialogues of Gregory the Great (d. 604) to be struck by the difference.) So, while we might like to think that the work of the pioneers has prepared us for what comes next, the components of the ascetic legacy that do eventually "crop up" in the sixth century and thereafter do not do so in the form in which they left the 420s. At least some ascetics (and they will become a majority) have started to change from being competitive, individualistic, charismatic figures to members of organized and disciplined communities. This, in miniature, was the way in which Caesarius transformed Augustine (although the latter ironically was the least individualistic ascetic thinker). The Desert Fathers had also been moved into a past now represented only in texts, open to fresh interpretation in very different circumstances.
Toward a Chronology of Monastic Observance in the West
The route from a world of ascetic diversity, the diffuse use of regulae, and a multiplicity of genres in which monastic norms could be expressed to the world of Benedict of Aniane can be best described by identifying different stages: an "experimental" phase lasting roughly until the end of the sixth century; a phase of consolidation of normative observance during the seventh century; and the slow and shaky "victory" of the RB from the eighth century onwards. As far as we can judge from the texts that are preserved (we will never know how "complete" the Codex regularum is, how much is lost
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and to what extent the preserved texts were filtered and maybe even modified to fit into Benedict of Aniane's scheme), we can then see an increase in the number of Latin regulae, along with charismata, decreta, praecepta, leges, normae, institutiones, instituta, ordines, and other such terms from the fifth century onwards.
Benedict of Aniane starts his compilation with four short regulaepatrum: the Regula quattuor patrum (RIVP), the Regula patrum secunda (2RP), the Regula Macharii (RMac), and the Regula patrum tenia (3RP), a group of rules produced in the course of the fifth century and today tentatively ascribed to the monastery of Lerins, the first outpost of eastern Mediterranean monasticism in Gaul. The first of these regulae patrum is presented as speeches of Egyptian Desert Fathers: Macharius, Paphnutius, Serapion, and another Macharius. If we look at the last three, we can observe a remarkable shift in literary form. The RVIP and the 2RP present themselves as short speeches given at a gathering of monks; the RMac is mostly phrased as an admonition addressing the individual monk; and the 3RP is a collection of short, straightforward regulations. The diversity of formats, however, does not end with the 3RP: on the contrary, Benedict of Aniane's collection gives the impression of a long-lasting experiment of finding the right words and the right tone.
In other words, authors of monastic rules tried out a great number of different ways of conveying the content of a rule: questions and answers (RBas, RM); words of wisdom spoken by venerable fathers at monastic gatherings (RIVP, 2RP); vociferous admonitions (RMac, RCaeV); straightforward paragraphs, with (RAM, RAV, RFer, RcuiV) or without (3RP, RCaeM, RTar) biblical grounding or theological rationales; florilegia of older monastic rules (ROr; RDon); or rephrased versions of older texts (RAV, RB, RM, RcuiM, RcuiV). Rules address the singular and plural you, the us, him, her, and them, and some of them shift from one tone and addressee to another in the middle of the text: a true playground of "regulating."
Nevertheless, despite their diversity in form, most rules are tied together by a closely knit intertextual net.22 Almost every author of monastic rules used, excerpted, or rephrased already existing ones. This sends two seemingly contradicting messages. On the one hand, using previous rules shows respect for a textual tradition, giving the authors of rules the status of those sancti patres who represent the venerable monastic past. On the other hand, new rules expressed the necessity to produce new norms by rewriting, rearranging,
22 Adalbert de Vogue, Les regies monastiques anciennes (400-yoo) (Turnhout, 1985), 14, draws a family tree of all monastic rules.
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and amending the old ones and in that way created a distance from this venerable past. In order to retain the vigor, the spirit, and the standards of the venerable predecessors, one has to rewrite and adapt their rules and do things slightly differently from how they did them.
The largest group of monastic rules preserved by Benedict of Aniane was written in the sixth century—and here things start to shift toward a clearer notion of what regulariter vivere might mean. In Gaul, the rules of Caesarius of Aries (RCaeM and RCaeV) were followed by three rules also written by bishops, Aurelianus and Ferreolus (RAM, RAV, RFer), and one rule of unknown origin, the Regula Tarnatensis (RTar). The Regula Pauli et Stephani (RPS), the Regula Magistri (RM) and the Regula Benedicti (RB) were probably written in Italy, roughly in the same period as Caesarius' rules. Those new rules were to be read out aloud (RAM/RAV i; RTar 1.5; RFer 5; RB 58, 66; RPS 41); monastic entry equaled a submission to the regula; rules started to claim to be unchangeable; and, maybe most importantly, some of them began to describe themselves as a sancta regula (RCaeV 43, 47, 62; RB 23.1, 65.18; later RDon 5, 60; RcuiV 18): an instrument to create a holy community, not just as a tool to shape order and foster discipline or establish structures.
This new phase represents another large step away from a practice of individual instruction. The move toward a normative understanding of regulae went along with a shift of emphasis in the rules' content: on the one hand, toward a regulation and de-individualization of asceticism that imposes a moderate but sophisticated regime of fasting, manual labor, organization of the day, and a mortificatio that was rather meant to kill one's own will than the flesh and bodily desires; on the other hand, toward an increasingly rigorous system of liturgical discipline that was meant to ensure that monasteries continuously produced payer of the highest possible quality. In some rules (e.g. RPS and RTar) liturgical discipline overshadowed every other aspect of monastic discipline; yet it is prominently present in all sixth-century rules.23
The genesis of the rules written by Caesarius of Aries (d. 542) and only a few decades later by his successor Aurelianus (d. 551) can be taken as an example of this process. RCaeV, written for a female community Caesarius had founded in the city of Aries, was continuously revised over a period from roughly 512 to 534. Through its amendments, the text itself tells a history of Caesarius' monastic project: a story of crisis management, anorexic nuns, dirty laundry, and looks from unwished visitors, but also of a profound shift of monastic ideals. At the beginning the author describes the text as merely
23 On the divine office, see the articles by Jeffery Billett, and Blennemann in this volume.
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an anthology of regulations collected from other texts and adjusted to the specific situation of virgins dedicated to God: 'And, because many things in monasteries of women seem to differ from the customs of monks, we have chosen a few things from among many, according to which the older religious can live under a rule with the younger, and strive to carry out spiritually what they see to be especially adapted for their sex" (RCaeV 2).24
In the course of revising his Rule, Caesarius' notion of the function of the text changed profoundly. In chapter 47 he calls his text a sancta regula: "I admonish and I charge you before God and the angels, holy and highly venerated mother of the monastery, and you, the prioress of the holy congregation, let no one's threats or persuasions or flattery ever relax your spirit, and do not yourselves take away anything from the established form of the holy and spiritual rule" (RCaeV 47, see also 43 and 62). In the last section of the text, the Recapitulatio added to finalize the work (RCaeV 48-73), Caesarius repeats time and again that nothing of the Regula may be changed by anyone involved with the monastery, and emphasizes that the rule as holy text plays a crucial role in attaining salvation. The rule ends by emphasizing its legal character through the subscription and confirmation of its content by six bishops (RCaeV 73).
In the course of its genesis, Caesarius' Rule became a double tool. On the one hand, it provided a disciplinary basis for defining and collectively achieving perfection: a regula sancta to create a congregatio sancta. On the other hand, Caesarius produced an instrument for his community to gain and maintain independence from external interference and control: a rule to protect the nuns from being ruled by others and not least by those bishops who, according to the Council of Chalcedon, were in charge. All the texts that Caesarius wrote for his monastery and the vita that the nuns commissioned after his death were driven by the fear that his successors might interfere in his project and eventually destroy it.25 The ambivalence of being a disciplinary program and a basis for claims of independence will remain an important aspect of the rise of normative observance.
Caesarius' much shorter Regula ad monachos (RCaeM), one of the few monastic rules that survive from the time of their writing but do not appear in Benedict of Aniane's collection, adds yet another important aspect of the rise of normative observance. Its prologue reports that Caesarius wrote this rule
24 Slightly revised translation.
25 William E. Klingshirn, "Caesarius's Monastery for Women in Aries and the Composition of the 'Vita Caesam," Revue benedictine 100 (1990): 441-81.
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as a directive for all monasteries under his supervision. As such, his rule is one of the first to be phrased as a general directive, as an instrument for external supervision, and as a potential tool for monastic reform and unification.
Aurelianus, who became bishop of Aries only a few years after Caesarius' death, decided to write a new monastic rule (RAM), though largely phrased in the words of his predecessor. Why did he do this, instead of just using what was already there and held in high regard? Despite its close proximity to Caesarius' rules, Aurelianus' new work marks another watershed in the development of normative observance. First of all, it is probably the first monastic rule that was written by a complete outsider, a bishop who acted as founder of monastic communities while having neither a monastic past (as Caesarius certainly did) nor the inclination to enter a monastery himself. It was written for one of the first monasteries founded in collaboration with a secular ruler, the Frankish king Childebert I (d. 558). Second, Aurelianus' rule was composed as one piece as a blueprint for a new type of monastery. Shortly afterwards he used the same rule for another foundation, a monastery for nuns. His RAV is somewhat shorter, but both versions are in essence the same. Using both male and female monastic traditions, Aurelianus developed with his regula a monastic program that was in principle not gender-specific.26 The "female" impact on monastic rules (for men and for women), as seen for instance in the significant influence of RCaeV on RAM, can be observed in many subsequent stages of the monastic experiment. When Benedict of Aniane composed his Concordia regularum, he had no problem in changing all segments he inserted from female rules into the male grammatical form.27
The last, and maybe most fundamental innovation in Aurelianus' monastic rule was placing the willingness to submit oneself to the norms of the rule at the center of monastic conversion. Beautifully consistent, Caesarius and Aurelianus framed their rules by placing their central concern in the first and last chapters. RCaeV begins and ends with enforcing enclosure, and the Rule becomes a major instrument in establishing a community thriving on an irrevocable spatial separation from the surrounding world (RCaeV 2.2-3, 73.1-2). Caesarius' Regula ad monachos puts perseverantia at the beginning and
26 Albrecht Diem, "...utsiprofessus fueritseomniaimpleturum, tuncexcipiatur: Observations on the Rules for Monks and Nuns of Caesarius and Aurelianus of Aries," in Edition und Erforschung lateinischer patristischer Texte. 150 Jahre CSEL. Festschrifi für Kurt Smolak zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Victoria Zimmerl-Panagl, Lukas J. Dorfbauer, and Clemens Weidmann (Berlin, 2014), 191-224.
27 Albrecht Diem, "The Gender of the Religious: Wo/Men and the Invention of Monasticism," in The Oxford Companion on Women and Gender in the Middle Ages, ed. Judith Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras (Oxford, 2013), 432-46.
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at the end, emphasizing the irreversibility of monastic conversion (RCaeM i, 26). Aurelianus addresses both enclosure and perseverantia, but his Rule is framed by the imperative to follow the Rule. Its first chapter begins with the words: "If someone converts to monastic life, the Rule is read to him and if he/she professes to fulfill everything, he/she may be admitted" (RAMIRAV1).
RM and RB were written in Italy roughly at the same time as Caesarius' and Aurelianus' rules and we encounter in them a similar shift toward normative observance: rules were to be read aloud and formed the basis of monastic profession.28 The long-discussed question of whether Benedict used RM or whether the "Master" used RB has not been resolved convincingly, and the possibility that both texts independently revised a rule now lost remains an option. RM, phrased as a master's long-winded response to a pupil's questions, may be more "old-fashioned" in form and language but it is clearly more advanced particularly in one respect, which also distinguishes the rules of Caesarius and Aurelianus from one another. Neither Caesarius nor Benedict use the term laicus in opposition to monachus, while both Aurelianus and the "Master" draw a clear distinction between regulated monastic professionals and laid even in those chapters that are otherwise phrased very similarly in both previously written rules.29 It is rather unlikely that Benedict as reviser of RM carefully weeded out all seventeen references to laid and, in doing so, eliminated the distinction between monastic professionals (in a literal sense of the word) and lay people.30
Benedict of Aniane preserved for us two other rules from the second half of the sixth century, the Regula Ferrioli (RFer), a bishop's interference within his own monastic foundation, and the Regula Tarnatensis (RTar), of unknown authorship and provenance. Both texts place themselves in the existing normative tradition, using and rephrasing among others RCaeV, Pachomius' Rules, and (only in RTar) Augustine's Praeceptum. As such they show again the tension between claiming to continue and fulfill the tradition of the sanrti patres and adjusting to fundamentally new frameworks. The same can be said about the four preserved Visigothic rules: a rule for nuns by Leander of Seville (d. 600), one for monks by his brother Isidore (d. 636), and two sets of norms ascribed to Fructuosus of Braga (d. 656). All these authors were bishops who regulated their own monastic foundations.31
28 RB 53.9, 58.9-12, 66.8; RM 24.15-27, 79.24, 87.3, 89.1, 89.8, 90.64.
29 RAM 4.1, 14.1, 16, 19.1, 48.1; RM 1.6, 7.31, 24.20/23, 56.1-15, 58.8, 61.12-15, 78-t, 87.1:, 90.t, 90.83.
30 Compare especially RM 1.6 to RB 1.6; RM 56.1-15 to RB 50; RM 61.12-15 to RB 51; RM 87X/ 90.t to RB 58.t/6i.t; RM 90.83 to RB 58.27.
31 On the Visigothic rules, see the article by Diaz in this volume.
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Such so far is the story that Benedict of Aniane wants to tell us in his Codex regularum. Some rules justify it by emphasizing that there is no alternative to living under a written rule. The RB and RM start by vilifying those monks who are 'unregulated' (calling them sarabaitae and monachi gyrovagi).32 Yet if we look at other textual evidence from the sixth century this story does not pass its "reality check." There is still that other "unregulated" monastic world in existence, which we mentioned above. In fact, we have at this point still very little evidence for the actual use of regulae outside the texts themselves. Life according to written norms may still have been simply one variant within the vast multiplicity of monasticisms, though a variant favored by bishops who founded monasteries and by other external founders with a natural interest in institutional stability and permanence in ascetic standards—and maybe by those monks or nuns who wanted to protect themselves from interference by outsiders and other monastics alike.
The work of Gregory of Tours provides a case in point for the ongoing presence of a non-regulated monastic diversity. Of all the monasteries he mentions in his Historiae, only one, Radegund's monastery of the Holy Cross, is associated with a rule (that of Caesarius), which serves as Gregory's own tool to crush an uprising that took place soon after its founder had died (Histories IX.39-4o).The monastic and ascetic panoptic of his Liber vitae Patrum is described without mentioning any written rule, even though there would have been more than enough occasions (stories of foundation processes and of internal and external conflicts) to use them as a source for authority and a tool to establish discipline.
In sum, certainly until the end of the sixth century we have to approach the development of monasticism under three premises. First, there was no one monasticism but rather an infinite variety of more or less "regulated" monasticisms. Second, the textual basis of monastic life—its regula, if we want to call it that—could manifest itself in yet another confusing variety of different texts and genres. A regula can hide in a story, in an ascetic admonition, in a theological treatise, in a letter, in a charter, in a law, or in the acta of councils of concerned bishops. Third, there was, however, a slow development toward a "regulated" way of life that did use regulae as we know them, in the way that we expect them to be used. Benedict, the Master, and, to a certain extent, Caesarius could already make the claim that there is no
32 See the article by Brakke in this volume, and Monica Blanchard, "Sarabaitae and Remnuoth: Coptic Considerations," in The World of Early Egyptian Christianity: Language, Literature, and Social Context, ed. James E. Goehring and Janet A. Timbie (Washington, DC, 2007), 49-60.
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alternative to a regulated communal life: you either live sub regula vel abbate or you are a monachus gyrovagus or sarabaita. However, not all monks and feminae religiosae—and not even all bishops involved in monastic matters—may have agreed with them.
The Seventh Century: Nothing (or Everything?) New
Gregory of Tours may still have been alive when, sometime in the 580s, the Irish monk Columbanus (d. 615) arrived on the Continent and founded his first monasteries, Annegray and Luxeuil. If we believe Columbanus' hagi-ographer Jonas of Bobbio (d. after 659)—which we should do with great caution—his arrival formed a true turning point. It allowed the restoration of a Christian wasteland in which, mostly thanks to the negligence of the bishops, the medicamenta paenitentiae had been almost disbanded (Vita Columbani 1.5). Gregory of Tours would not have been amused by this verdict. Jonas supports this notion of renewal by suppressing all evidence that Columbanus' monasteries and monastic practice had any roots in existing Frankish monasticism. He does not tell us that Columbanian foundations recruited from Frankish monasteries, prayed the ceaseless prayer of Saint-Maurice d'Agaune, and shaped their legal situation after existing models. Two of the monastic rules written for "Columbanian" monasteries, the Regula Donati (RDori) and the Regula cuiusdam ad virgines (RcuiV), incorporated older Continental rules, most notably the RB and RCaeV. There may have been only a few royal monastic foundations before Columbanus' arrival, but they certainly existed. Childebert I and Aurelianus founded one in Aries; Sigibert (d. 524) established Saint-Maurice d'Agaune; Brunhild founded a monastery in Autun and Radegund one in Poitiers.
In many regards, however, the monastic movement inspired by Columbanus was a watershed. It led to a great number of monastic foundations, especially in northern Francia, usually collaborative projects that involved already existing monasteries (particularly Luxeuil), bishops, aristocrats, and kings. In a different manner from older foundations, these new ones developed a remarkable institutional continuity—thanks to their internal structure and legal status, external support, and the widely shared consensus to respect monastic boundaries. Many of them existed until the French Revolution. The monastery under a rule, which was founded by rulers and aristocrats as a place for intercessory prayer on their behalf, may have existed before Columbanus' arrival as one variant among many; now it became a vastly successful standard model.
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The Regula, first labeled as Regula Columbani, then as Regula Benedicti et Columbani (which may never have existed as a specific text), and eventually as Regula Benedicti, played a central role in this process: a tool to legitimate the existence of the monasteries, to maintain standards of communal ascetic life, to shape internal structures, and to form the basis for a collective identity. Thanks to Benedict of Aniane, we have a number of written manifestations of these rules; we also have references to regulae in hagiographic texts and, most notably, in an increasing number of episcopal and royal charters that define the monastery's rights and privileges but also their responsibilities toward their founders and the Christian world in general. The regula became a legal category, also (or maybe even primarily) for the interaction between monastery and outside world. Outsiders took an interest in regular discipline but they needed to "play by the regula," as Jonas of Bobbio explains dramatically when he reports that the intrusion of King Theuderic II (d. 613) and Queen Brunhild (d. 614) into Columbanus' foundation of Luxeuil eventually caused their downfall and violent end:
"If you try to destroy what has until now been strictly forbidden under the discipline of our Rule," Columbanus replied, "I no longer want any of your gifts or support. And if you have come here for this reason, so that you might destroy the communities of God's servants and dishonor the discipline of the Rule, I want you to know that your kingdom will quickly be destroyed entirely and all your family will be annihilated." (Vita Columbani 1.19)
Here we have the same ambivalence that we already observed in regard to Caesarius' and Aurelianus' Rules: the regula serves as a statement of independence and as a legal framework that protects communities from external interference but it also expresses an external interest in internal discipline, hierarchy, and maintaining standards. The Privilege of Rebais (632), the first preserved episcopal privilege issued for a Columbanian monastery, warned bishops (as had been done before) to be unobtrusive in their limited visits to monasteries (to be done mainly for liturgical purposes) and explains why:
because monks, who are [after all] known as solitarii ["solitaries"], depend for their well-being on an atmosphere of complete peace: led by the Lord, they then find unceasing joy; living under the Holy Rule [of Benedict and Columbanus] and following the lifestyle of the blessed fathers, they are able to pray more intensely to the Lord for the stability of the Church and the safety of the king and indeed of the fatherland. (PL 87,1136)
Yet at the beginning of this new notion of regula stands a phantom, which shows us that Benedict of Aniane's notion of normative observance is still
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far away. His Codex regularum contains a Regula Sancti Columbani (RColM combined with RColC) which looks rather different from most other rules in the collection. It consists of a general ascetic treatise (which was vaguely inspired by John Cassian) with two lengthy insertions: a liturgical ordo, and a rather chaotic monastic penitential which imposes corporal punishment, fasting, and prayers for a great number of often minor transgressions (the second insertion appears as Regula coenobialis, RColC, in modern editions). This Regula Sancti Columbani expresses several important new ideas, particularly the notion that monks have to pray for the outside world (RColM 7) and the rather revolutionary idea that confession and penance save from eternal damnation (RColC 1). Nevertheless, it is neither a program nor a legal basis for a new monastic movement.33
It is likely that the Regula Columbani that Jonas of Bobbio mentions several times in his Vita Columbani was different from the text preserved in the Codex regularum. Jonas's work describes in great detail ColumbanusJ monastic ideals, gives hints about internal structures of his monasteries and their notions of space and boundaries, but does so without quoting RColM and RColC (with the exception of one vaguely similar snippet of text). He refers to the Regula Columbani almost exclusively in the context of founding a monastery, an aspect not discussed at all in RColM and RColC. The text preserved by Benedict of Aniane may thus have been just one written manifestation of a much broader and more abstract Regula Columbani, which is just as much expressed in Jonas's own work or in the monastic privileges issued for Columbanian foundations. There is still more in the term regula than just a written rule.34
The Regula Sancti Benedicti et (vel, seu) Columbani was a title that appeared for about half a century in some episcopal privileges. But it was probably not so much a text that combined different written rules (renamed by modern scholarship as regula mixta, a misleading neologism) but rather the RB combined with descriptions of the monastic ideal added to different texts produced by and for Columbanian monasteries. As a regula, therefore, it was indeed the "Benedictine" text that would later become the basis of Western monastic life. And yet, curiously, the first reliable traces of this future sancta
33 Albrecht Diem, "Columbanian Monastic Rules: Dissent and Experiment," in The Irish in Europe in the Middle Ages: Identity, Culture, and Religion, ed. Roy Flechner and Sven Meeder (London and New York, 2016), 68-85 and 248-9.
34 Albrecht Diem, "Was bedeutet Regula Columbani?" in Integration und Herrschaft. Ethnische Identitäten und soziale Organisation im Frühmittelalter, ed. Max Diesenberger and Walter Pohl (Vienna, 2002), 63-89; and Albrecht Diem, "Inventing the Holy Rule: Some Observations on the History of Monastic Normative Observance in the Early Medieval West," in Dey and Fentress, Western Monasticism ante litteram, 53-84.
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regula can be found in the two already mentioned Columbanian Rules for nuns (RDon and RcuiV), which both vigorously rewrite Benedict's text and express monastic ideals that are quite distinct from those of their model.35
This confusing interchange between "Benedictine" and "Columbanian" elements probably helps to explain why the second half of the seventh century opens another gap in the evidence. References to the Regula Columbani fade away but those to the RB also become scarce and unreliable. We have to wait for almost another century before the real takeover of the RB starts.
The Bumpy Road toward una regula
Even that outcome is not straightforward. The short version of the Carolingian "Benedictine" takeover sounds simple and convenient: Carolingian rulers and reform-minded monks, inspired initially by Anglo-Saxon monks, realized that the RB was indeed "excellent in its discretion and splendid in its language," as Gregory the Great expressed it in his Dialogues (2.36). They imposed the text as the single legal norm on all monasteries: monks are monks and monasteries are monasteries because they follow the RB. The "regular life" is now definitively monastic and definitively based on a written rule. This process found its culmination in the reform councils of 813 under Charlemagne and of 816/ 817 under Louis the Pious (r. 814-40). Benedict of Aniane played a key role in this process and expanded the una regula with a catalogue of explanations, slight alterations, and additions to the Rule.36 The attempt to submit all monasteries under Carolingian rule to one shared understanding of the RB, however, met resistance from some monasteries that wanted to cling to their own traditions, and consequently had rather limited success.37
The true catalogue of events is more complex. When the first Carolingian councils (from 742 onwards) started to promote the RB, the use of regulae seems already to have been a matter of past practice (if it had happened at all). Indeed, resistance against applying the RB did not come from monasteries that followed other regulae but from those that feared submitting to a regula
35 Albrecht Diem, "New Ideas Expressed in Old Words: The Regula Donati on Female Monastic Life and Monastic Spirituality," Viator 43 (2012): 1-38.
36 See the article by Kramer in this volume. Benedict of Aniane, Regula sive Collectio Capitularis, ed. Josef Semmler, CCM 1, 503-35. See also Albrecht Diem, "The Carolingians and the Regula Benedicti," in Religious Franks: Religion and Power in the Frankish Kingdoms: Studies in Honour of Mayke deJong, ed. Rob Meens et al. (Manchester, 2016), 243-61.
37 Josef Semmler, "Benedictus II: una regula—una consuetudo," in Benedictine Culture J50-1050, ed. Willem Lourdaux and Daniel Verhelst (Leuven, 1983), 1-49.
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would force them to give up their consuetudines, which defined the internal structure and the schedule of daily life, especially of liturgical practices.
So, giving the RB the status of una regula meant introducing (or maybe reintroducing) the notion of following a written rule (not, in other words, a plethora of consuetudines) more than replacing one written norm by another. The RB itself, however, was in a sense unsuitable for this effort. Even Benedict of Aniane admitted that no monastery of his time did—or could—follow the RB to the letter. This is not surprising, since we are dealing with a set of norms and monastic ideals that was produced roughly 250 years before for a community that was deeply rooted in the world of fading Romanitas. Such a world could hardly be more different from that of the self-confidently rising Carolingian Empire.
Moreover, the text of the RB needed to be discussed, interpreted, submitted to an exegetical reading, taught, and memorized, so that its spirit could be captured—or at least what the Carolingian rulers and reformers considered that spirit to be, in line with what they saw as useful for their purposes. Such a process inevitably took time and invited variation. The communities that the author of the RB had in mind probably had little to do with the Carolingian "powerhouses of prayer."38 The RB says nothing about intercessory prayer, which was to become the main raison d'etre of Carolingian monastic life; nor had Benedict of Nursia imagined that monasteries would become centers for the preservation of knowledge, of education, and of training for a new reform-minded elite. Most likely he never envisioned that monasteries would turn into major economic and political hubs with possessions scattered over hundreds of square kilometers. Nor could he have guessed that they would become places of forced retreat for the powerful who had fallen from grace, and outposts for missions and political expansion, founded by bishops and aristocrats and ruled by (often lay) people holding key positions in the Carolingian political apparatus.39
In many regards, the earlier Carolingian monasteries were about as "un-Benedictine" as it was possible to be. They are certainly more appropriately placed in the tradition of the Regula Columbani as described by Jonas; in Columbanian privileges and (to some extent) in those rules ascribed more directly to Columbanus. It is here that we find the political entanglement, the intercessory prayer, the economic strength, the education and book
38 See the article by Blennemann in this volume and Choy Intercessory Prayer.
39 Mayke B. De Jong, "Carolingian Monasticism: The Power of Prayer," in The New Cambridge Medieval History, vol. 2: c. yoo-c. goo, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), 622-53. See also the article by Rose in this volume.
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production, the involved kings, aristocrats, and bishops, the assertiveness of being a congregatio sancta in a locus sanctus with carefully guarded boundaries, and the deep interest in maintaining monastic purity. In sum, it is far from surprising that we still find in Carolingian monastic charters of immunity words and sentences that first appeared in the Privilege of Rebais.
During much of the eighth century, therefore, the RB as it had now survived had yet to embody categorically what might later be thought of as central and universal characteristics of Carolingian monastic existence. Its convenience consisted in meaning almost anything to anyone, and it served as a source of arguments for very different reform agendas. For the Anglo-Saxon church reformer Boniface (d. 754) and his contemporaries, for example, the RB was a tool to redefine the blurring boundaries between monachi and clerici canonici: monks lived under the regula; canons under (equally vague) canon law.40 Introducing this distinction had three implications. It helped to establish a clear ecclesiastic structure in the Frankish kingdoms and those regions that newly came under Carolingian power; it defined to what extent religious communities and institutions were submitted to episcopal power; and—as a comparison between the RB and its counterparts (Chrodegang's (d. 766) Regula canonicorum and the Institutio canonicorum) shows—it forced communities to take a position on whether their members were allowed to own private property.41
To take another example, if we look at references to the RB in most of the charters of immunity issued by Charlemagne and his predecessors and successors, we find another context that made it especially attractive for monastic communities to place themselves sub regula sancti Benedicti. Most of these charters mention the RB in conjunction with granting a community the right to choose by itself the most suitable abbot from its own members, as the Rule prescribes. Indeed, choosing one's abbot according to chapter 64 of the Rule may have been the essence of living according to the Rule.42 It is remarkable that the documents marking what are often thought of as the heyday of monastic reform—those related to the councils of 813 and 816/ 817—did not refer at all to this particular aspect of the Rule. Already the Council of Frankfurt in 794 had used select chapters of the RB as tools for
40 For example Concilium Germanicum (742), c. 7; Concilium Liftinense (743), c. 1; Concilium Aquisgranense (802); Concilium Cabillonense (813), c. 22, in MGH Concilia 2.1, 4, 7, 278.
41 See, for example, Chrodegang's Privilege for Gorze, MGH Concilia 2.1, 60. Martin A. Claussen, The Reform of the Frankish Church: Chrodegang of Metz and the Regula canonicorum in the Eighth Century (Cambridge, 2004).
42 MGH DKarl 1, nos. 52, 72, 89,152,157, 158,164, 173.
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reform while at the same time explicitly rejecting a monastery's right to choose its own abbot.43
Another, heavily contested, reform matter in which the RB could serve both ways was the question of creating liturgical unity. Should monasteries follow the Ordo Romanus or keep their own liturgical traditions—perfectly legitimated through RB 18.22-3? Or should they all uniformly pray for the king, the kingdom, and stability according to the liturgical ordo laid out in RB 8-18?
The conclusion to be drawn from this sluggish and contested process is not quite what we might have expected. It remains true that Benedict of Aniane presided in some sense over a (distinctly late) attempt at uniformity, which involved giving prominence to a particular "history" of monastic precedents; but his disposition to uniformity (whether it was his own or that of his masters) was not the only reason why the RB won the day as the most useful model for all monasteries. If we look at all the other contemporary arguments surrounding the implementation of the Sancta Regula, ranging from the question whether birds are meat to the question whether abbots should eat with guests or the community, we could subsume the contentious favoring of the RB under three main questions. First, which of its many regulations needed to be enforced to increase the monastic purity that enabled them to perform prayer of the highest quality? Second, which regulations might be used (rather unsuccessfully) to create uniformity among Carolingian monasteries? And third, what power and status was attached to those who ruled these Carolingian "powerhouses"? When one puts it that way, not much seems to have changed: the Rule—and all the attempts to enforce different aspects of it—could serve both to claim independence and to claim control.
The two most important commentaries on the RB, written by Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel (d. c. 840) around the time of the 816 reforms and by Hildemar of Corbie (fl. c. 845) roughly a generation later, add yet another dimension to the Carolingian monastic enterprise. Two-thirds of Smaragdus' Expositio comment on the first seven chapters of the RB and show that Smaragdus was first and foremost interested in the theological grounding of monastic life and the role of the Sancti patres, rather than the technicalities of monastic structure and practice. Hildemar, who explained the Sancta Regula sentence by sentence to the oblates of Civate (in Lombardy), still devotes more than two-thirds of his loquacious commentary (635 pages in modern print) to theological questions.44 If we look at the rest of his text, Hildemar's countless
43 MGH Concilia 2.1, 168.
44 Hildemar, Expositio regulae. See vvww.hildemar.org (date of last access: 18 August 2018).
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digressions focus on the difference between Benedict's sixth-century vision and the monastic practice of his own day (in this case at Civate), his deep interest in monastic purity and his concern with uncontrolled abbatial power and the problem of how to deal with its abuse.45
Epilogue: Monastic Rules as Historical Sources
Our investigation has followed a chronological order to demonstrate the benefits of not abiding by Benedict of Aniane's view of pre-Carolingian monastic history as a simple chain of rules to be followed. We arrive at an entirely different history of early medieval monasticism if we investigate the genesis of normative observance instead of assuming its presence, and if we accept that there was an initial—perhaps unexpectedly long-lasting—diversity of monasticisms and a confusing variety of textual options to express and enforce ascetic values, monastic practices, and concepts of community. In this new narrative, the eventual triumph of the RB is neither the fruit of an organic process nor a historical necessity and, as we hope to have shown, even the Carolingian Benedictine norm needs to be reassessed.
The fact that the thirty regulae collected by Benedict of Aniane (along with two or three others that were preserved elsewhere) played a less significant role than generally assumed does not diminish their eminent value as historical sources, and we have not yet sufficiently addressed their content. Aside from a long tradition of investigating the RB as a theological text and a source of spiritual wisdom, monastic scholarship has shown a striking lack of interest in what these regulae have to say and a hesitancy to approach each of them as an individual text representing its own little monastic universe. This lack of interest may have been caused by the assumption that most rules roughly say the same in different words—as was implied in Benedict of Aniane's Praefatio to the Concordia regularum. At first glance, the repertoire of topics addressed in rules is indeed rather limited. It includes tasks and responsibilities of monastic office holders (especially the abbot/ abbess), liturgy and liturgical discipline, interactions among the members of the monastic community, transgressions, punishment, excommunication and exclusion, monastic entry, separation from (and interaction with) the surrounding world, manual labor, individual poverty, motivation, and negligence. To see the often fundamental differences requires a very close reading of the texts.
45 Diem, "The Carolingians and the Regula Benedicti," 243-61.
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What is most common in modern scholarship on monasticism—and to a certain extent legitimate—is the use of the corpus of monastic norms as a convenient and prolific quarry for details of monastic life or even early medieval daily life. Here we find mentions of shoes, kitchen tools, vegetable gardens, men holding hands, weaving women, writing utensils, and many other mundane things that are otherwise invisible in the scattered and fragmentary early medieval sources.46 Lateral cuts through the corpus of monastic norms provide a wealth of material on topics such as childhood, literacy, labor practices, liturgy, gender roles, sexualities, space and architecture, emotions, and ascetic practices, to mention only a few subjects—and many still wait to be explored.47 Another traditional approach to rules has been the—often unsuccessful—attempt to assign rules to monasteries and monasteries to rules, based on the assumption that every monastery needed its regular
Yet a "synthetic" reading of rules that tends to use one rule to fill in the gaps of another and in which congruity is read as the indication of a pattern is problematic in many regards. The fact that many monastic rules are similar at first sight and are intertextually connected should incite us to do the opposite of combining evidence. Rules respond to other rules: the Regulapatrum secunda to the Regula quattuor patrum, the Regula orientalis to the Regula Pachomii, Aurelianus' rules to CaesariusJ rules, the Regula Tarnatensis to CaesariusJ and Augustine's rules, the Regula cuiusdam ad virgines and the Regula Donati to the RB. They express discrete disagreement, maybe even discontent, or at least the notion that the work of previous regulators of monastic life, venerable as it may be, does not suit the new circumstances, so that the production of a new monastic rule is needed. Every regula forms a distinct contribution to the experiment to create ideal, theologically sound, practical, and perpetual
See the articles by Diaz and by Real in this volume.
See, for example, Mayke B. De Jong, In Samuel's Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West (Leiden, 1996); Gisela Muschiol, Famula Dei. Zur Liturgie in merowingischen Frauenklöstern (Münster, 1994); Pierre Bonnerue, "Concordance sur les activites manuelles dans les regies monastiques anciennes," Studia Monastica 35 (1993): 69-96; Albrecht Diem, Das monastische Experiment. Die Rolle der Keuschheit bei der Entstehung des westlichen Klosterwesens (Münster, 2005); Sofia Ugge, "Lieux, espaces et topographie des monasteres de Tantiquite tardive et du haut Moyen Age: reflexions ä propos des regies monastiques," in Monasteres et espace social. Genese et transformation d'un Systeme de lieux dans l'Occident medieval, ed. Michel Lauwers (Turnhout, 2014), 15-42; and the articles by Real and Cochelin in this volume.
Friedrich Prinz, Frühes Mönchtum im Frankenreich. Kultur und Gesellschaft in Gallien, den Rheinlanden und Bayern am Beispiel der monastischen Entwicklung (4. bis 8. Jhd.), 2nd ed. (Munich and Vienna, 1988).
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monastic institutions. This should incite us to read them against each other rather than along with each other.
Possible battlefields illustrated through the writing and rewriting of rules are the tension between charismatic authority and strict hierarchy versus a notion of equality; collaboration and individual responsibility; different ways of interacting with the outside world; the balance of fostering ascetic achievements versus collective moderation; the pool and techniques of recruitment; the balance of opus Dei, manual labor, and intellectual activity; or the question of individual and collective poverty—to mention only a few.
One particularly interesting aspect of dissent, or at least of plurality of viewpoints, addresses the theological foundation of monastic life and the problem of how monastic communities can, despite the inevitable sinfulness and destructive tendency of each individual, become holy communities, establish holy spaces, foster the expectation of eternal salvation, and even, from a certain point onwards, start to produce a "surplus" in the form of powerful intercessory prayer for the Christian community in general and monastic founders and sponsors in particular. Some monastic rules come up with vastly different ideas of how monastic discipline could be used to circumvent the challenges of Augustine's doctrine of full dependence on divine grace and his dismissal of any justification through work—and, more generally, they might be read as evidence for a striking plurality of theological viewpoints stretching the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy.49
Things get even more complicated if we take into account—as we do for almost all medieval sources—that rules may have been read and used differently at different moments in their history, initially maybe as a document of reform and crisis management, later as an identity-forming text, as a word of wisdom of a venerable past, as a collectible to be combined with other rules (Benedict of Aniane's Codex regularum was not the first collection), as a holy text to be submitted to careful exegesis, or even, as we know from the RB, as a text to improve one's Latin skills.50
If we focus on the moment of genesis of a monastic rule we find yet another potentially fruitful way of approaching our texts as Gesamtkunstwerke. Norms never depict life; and any attempt to reconstruct monastic practice on the basis
49 Albrecht Diem, "Lespace, la grace et la discipline dans les regies monastiques du haut Moyen Age," in Enfermements II. Regies et dereglements en milieux dos (IVe-XIXe siecle), ed. Isabelle Heullant-Donat, Julie Claustre, Elisabeth Lusset, and Falk Bretschneider (Paris, 2015), 215-38.
50 Matthieu van der Meer, Glosae in regula Sancti Benedicti abbatis ad usum Smaragdi Sancti Michaelis abbatis, CCCM 282.
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of rules fails for two obvious reasons: we do not know to what extent a regulation, particularly a disciplinary measure, indicates a problem or points to its solution. Moreover, aside from incidentally providing elements of stage decor, monastic rules (and narratives similarly) leave out the consensual, everything that does not need to be regulated, thus most likely the core of monastic life. Nevertheless, they inevitably reflect on a monastic reality and they are sometimes astonishingly close to "real life." We can see the aristocratic lady who had starved herself to death and incited Caesarius of Aries' overly anxious amendment on assessing the practice of individual fasting with great scrutiny (RCaeV 42). We can reflect on the incident of washing someone's dirty linen that gave Caesarius a reason to prohibit his nuns from providing laundry service to priests. We can imagine how the monk who flirted with the parvuli (child monks also called oblati) urged monastic legislators to establish clear boundaries between monastic generations (RAM 35; see also RTar 13.4). And we see the monks attempting to sneak out of the monastery by crossing the river, which encouraged the author of the Regula Tarnatensis to prohibit the use of boats and punish every confidant of a monastic escape (RTar 4.5; 13.7-8). Maybe we can even smell the monk who incited Ferreolus (d. 581) to prohibit the use of perfumes in his monastery (RFer 32).
Every rule both conceals and reveals a number of dramas large and small, and the moment or process of composing each monastic rule has itself the potential for drama, which sometimes leaves traces in its prologue or dedicatory letter. Rules may express discontent with the existing normative tradition (or 'unregulated' monastic practice), but they can also indicate a very specific crisis that was the reason for abandoning a non-regulated state, or perhaps for tossing out an existing normative basis for one's ascetic life. It might be the nervous attempt of monastic founders or their successors to 'routinize' their charisma: the dying Benedict who writes down his Rule or Jonas of Bobbio who replaces Columbanus by the Regula Columbani;51 the gathering of monks whose most outspoken leaders put their ideas in writing (if we believe the setup of the Regula quattuor patrum); or the awareness that none of the old texts can form the basis of a continued existence, which motivated Caesarius and Donatus (d. after 658) to compose their rules for nuns. There is most certainly an interesting story behind the genesis of every single monastic rule.
Finally, there is an irresolvable tension in monastic rules. Carolingian reformers (and Caesarius of Aries three centuries earlier) proclaimed their
51 Albrecht Diem, "Monks, Kings and the Transformation of Sanctity: Jonas of Bobbio and the End of the Holy Man," Speculum 82 (2007): 521-59.
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rule as regula sancta, as a disciplinary tool to bring their communities close to a state of collective sanctity But rules can also be read as an expression of defeat. They show that a congregatio sancta (to use Caesarius' term) needs to be regulated and can only exist in a hierarchical framework and a closely confined space. Rules admit that the apostolic sint vobis omnia communia (Acts 4:32) can only work if it is enforced upon the monks or nuns. They reveal, sometimes in great detail, a world of weaknesses, transgressions, and the fact that discipline and motivation is permanently in danger of being undermined by human deficiency. The remarkably scarce manuscript transmission of most monastic rules and the fact that regulae are rarely combined with other texts and are rarely excerpted or processed in florilegia or pastoral works, indicates that most rules were "for internal use only." The RM, the (older or younger) brother or cousin of the RB, expresses unease about its own existence most pointedly in the chapter on the readings at table. If the monks are eating as a community then let them hear the Rule.
But if by chance lay people come to the table of the monastery, because of potential evil gossip in the world if a lay person gains knowledge of the secrets of God, if it pleases the abbot, [the weekly reader] should read from some other book, so that the secret of the monastery and the norms of a holy life determined by discipline will not be known to those who might make fun of them. (RM 24.20-1)
Monastic rules can also be quite embarrassing texts.
Monastic Rules
LOr: Liber Orsiesii, in Pachomiana Latina. Regie et epitres de S. Pachome, epitre de S. Theodore et
"liber" de S. Orsiesius, ed. Amand Boon (Louvain, 1932), 109-47. RAM: Aurelianus of Aries, Regula ad monachos, in Albert Schmidt, "Zur Komposition der
Monchsregel des Heiligen Aurelian von Aries I," Studia Monastica 17 (1975): 237-56;
more complete in PL 68, 385-96. RAV: Aurelianus of Aries, Regula ad virgines, PL 68,399-408.
RB: Regula Benedicti, ed. and trans. Jean Neufville and Adalbert de Vogue, SC 181-2; ed.
Rudolf Hanslik, CSEL 75, 2nd ed. RBas: Basilius, Regula a Rufino latine versa, ed. Klaus Zelzer, CSEL 86; ed. and trans. Anna
M. Silvas, The Rule of St Basil in Latin and English: A Revised Critical Edition (Collegeville,
MI, 2013).
RCaeM: Caesarius of Aries, Regula ad monachos, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogue and Joel
Courreau, SC 398,165-226. RCaeV: Caesarius of Aries, Regula ad virgines, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogue and Joel
Courreau, SC 354, 35-272; trans. Maria Caritas McCarthy, The Rule for Nuns of St.
Caesarius of Aries: A Translation with a Critical Introduction (Washington, DC, i960).
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RCas: Regula Cassiani, in Henry Ledoyen, "La 'Regula Cassiani' du Clm 28118 et la regie
anonyme de l'Escorial A.I.13: presentation et edition," Revue bénédictine 94 (1984): 154-94. RColC: Columbanus, Regula coenobialis, in Columbani Opera, ed. and trans. G. S. M. Walker
(Dublin, 1970), 142-69. RColM: Columbanus, Regula monachorum, in Columbani Opera, 122-43. RCom: Regula communis, in San Leand.ro, San Isidoro, San Fructuoso. Reglas monásticas de la
Espaňa visigoda, ed. and trans. Julio Campos Ruiz and Ismael Rocca Melia (Madrid,
1971), 172-211.
RcuiM: Regula cuiusdampatris ad monachos, in Fernando Villegas, "La 'Regula cuiusdam Patris ad monachos': ses sources littéraires et ses rapports avec la 'Regula monachorum' de Colomban," Revue d'histoire de la spiritualitě 49 (1973): 3-36.
RcuiV: Regula cuiusdam ad virgines, PL 88, 1051-70 (new edition by Albrecht Diem in preparation).
RDon: Regula Donati, in Monastica: Donati Regula, Pseudo-Columbani Regula monialium (frg.), ed. Victoria Zimmerl-Panagl on the basis of the preparatory work of Michaela Zelzer, CSEL 98,1:3-188.
RFer: Regula Ferreoli, in Vincent Desprez, "La Regula Ferrioli: texte critique," Revue Mabillon 60 (1982): 117-48.
RFruc: Fructuosus of Braga, Regula, in San Leandro, San Isidoro, 129-62. RÍ: Isidore of Seville, Regula, in San Leandro, San Isidoro, 79-125. RLea: Leander of Seville, Regula, in San Leandro, San Isidoro, 21-76.
RMac: Regula Macharii, in Les regies des saints Peres, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogue, vol.
1, SC 297, 287-389. RM: Regula magistři, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogue, SC 105-7.
RO: Regula orientalis, in Les regies des saints Peres, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogue, vol. 2, SC 298, 409-95.
RPflc: Amand Boon, ed., Pachomiana Latina. Regie et épitres de S. Pachome, épitre de S. Theodore
et "liber" de S. Orsiesius (Louvain, 1932), 1-74. 2RP: Regulapatrum secunda, in de Vogué, Les regies des saints Peres, 1:209-83. 3RP: Regula patrum tertia, in de Vogué, Les regies des saints Peres, 2:499-543. RIVP: Regula quattuor patrum, in de Vogué, Les regies des saints Peres, 1:57-205. RPS: Regula Pauli et Stephani, ed. Johannes Evangelista M. Vilanova (Montserrat, 1959). RTflr: Regula Tarnatensis, in Fernando Villegas, "La 'regula monasterii Tarnatensis': texte,
sources et datation," Revue bénédictine 84 (1974): 7-65.
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