AUGUSTINE had not read in vain St. Paul's injunction that a bishop
should first rule his own household. When he first took over the
bishopric and became the leader of its clergy he immediately carried
through an unobtrusive reform. He proposed that he should lead, together
with them all, that life in community which up till then he had led as a priest
in company with a few like-minded men. He turned the bishop's palace into a
monastery, that is to say, into a community of priests, deacons and subdeacons
living under direction of their bishop without lay brothers or novices, all under-
taking the obligation to live according to a common rule. The first bishop in
the West who, to use the expression of Ambrose, united the spheres of
monastic discipline and pastoral activity (which till then had been separate),
the first bishop, that is to say, who sought to live in community with his
cathedral clergy, was Eusebius of Vercelli, who made a beginning of the vita
communis after a journey to Egypt round about the year 340. There followed
Paulinus of Nola, the sometime soldier Victricius of Rouen, then finally came
Augustine between the years 391 and 396, and shortly thereafter that other
famous soldier Martin of Tours. ¹ Whether Augustine knew of these first
attempts we cannot be certain. Probably he was in this instance carrying out
a plan which he had long formulated as a wish. It is certainly a plan that
carries the stamp of his own mind, though its essential idea may have already
been realised in Nola and Vercelli without his being aware of it. He was,
however, certainly the first to introduce the idea of clergy living in community
into Africa. It was impossible for him, as a bishop, to live behind closed doors
in the bishop's palace, as he had lived, while still a priest, in the monastery
within the cathedral grounds. A bishop who was inaccessible to visitors would
appear inhuman, and indeed he says as much himself -- and those who, despite
everything, insist on seeing him par excellence as the great humanist, will find
their views confirmed in that utterance. ² And so Augustine was driven to find
his own solution of this problem. He did so by leaving his own door open
while the doors of the priests who remained scattered around were kept
closed, and social intercourse, which he had twice sought to limit strictly to

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