The Rule of St. Augustin

The precepts that would form the foundation of the Rule of St. Augustine, as it was defined in the course of the 13th century, emerge in part from writings attributed to Augustine himself, datable to the years 388-389. In twelve short chapters, this Father of the Church describes the foundations of monastic life: poverty, love for the neighbor, obedience, prayer, reading of Scripture, labor and apostolic works.

The spirituality of the Augustine family, in addition to St. Augustine himself, also had origins in the hermetic contemplative experience of some religious institutes formed in a climate of spiritual and ecclesiastical reawakening during the 12-13th centuries. Hermits of foundations that adopted the Rule of St. Augustine and a life of spirituality were situated close to population centers. The members, consisting of lay people and priests, led lives of prayer and repentance while remaining in close contact with the people, even though they assumed no direct pastoral care for them. In 1256, at the will of Pope Alexander IV (1254-1261), delegates from all of the hermetic institute monasteries and other minor institutes came together in Rome at the church of Santa Maria del Popolo to accept the will of the pontiff to unite formally and constitute a single large Order, the Order of the Hermit Friars of St. Augustine. This is how the Augustinian religious family officially came into being as one of the "mendicant" or "apostolic brotherhood" Orders, on the model of the Franciscans and the Dominicans, already formed and approved by the Church for several decades.

The philosophy of Augustine

According to an estimate by his friend and disciple, Possidio, Augustine was the author of 1030 writings. In general, the resulting works reflect an extensive knowledge of ancient philosophical knowledge. We know from the Confessioni - a work in which the author recounts his own life before addressing the nature of time - that during his studies he read and memorized many ancient philosophical texts. The readings he cites include the Ortensio of Cicero (106 B.C. - 43 B.C.), the scholarly writings of Varro (116 B.C. - 27 B.C.) and those of Apuleius (125 - 180 approx.). Subsequently, while in Milan he came into contact with the neo-platonic culture through the writings of Plotinus (205 - 270), Plato's Greek philosopher heir, who had succeeded in reconciling Platonic thinking with the Aristotelian philosophy. This search for truth depicted a universe based on two principles - divinity and inert matter - with reality consisting of intermediate combinations of these two abstractions. Humankind occupies a privileged position within this outlook, being capable of using reason to ascend into divine contemplations, but also of following materialistic instincts to descend to the lowest levels. This neo-platonic model exerted a radical influence on Augustinian philosophy, and had many consequences for the subsequent development of western thought.

As Augustine himself declared, "pagan philosophy is not nobler than our Christian philosophy, which is the only true philosophy." The strong point of Augustinian thinking is that it succeeded in wedding philosophy with faith, accepting the latter as the guide and stimulus for philosophical study. Augustine knew how to look deeply into man through the perfection of God, making it this duality itself - man and God - that gathered the energy to manifest autonomous human thinking. Thus the task of this doctrine was to restore hope to humankind's search for truth, overcoming the skepticism that affects every kind of philosophical study and guiding man towards the wisdom that represents knowledge and dominion of the higher good.

St. Augustine and neo-platonism in Renaissance aesthetics

I placed you at the center of the world ,
said the Creator to Adam, to make it
easier for you to behold all that it
contains. I created you to be a free
teacher and lord of yourself .
(Pico della Mirandola)

Ideas like these help us understand how Augustinian thought, which succeeded in reconciling Christianity with the classics, is critical for understanding Renaissance art, and how its ideas were actualized in the period's aesthetics as part of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola's climate of the rediscovery and reevaluation of ancient cultures.

In the early fourteenth century, Italian art came to full maturation with a completely new artistic vision that signaled the beginning of modernity. The German historian Jacob Burckhardt, in his book The civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1st edition in 1860, translated into Italian in 1876), called this era the "renaissance" to highlight how, from that time on, art had been "re-born" with an aesthetic vision very similar to that of the classic age. This new vision grew out of a complex and sophisticated philosophical culture founded on the idea that man was at the center of the world, and that not only was he endowed with free will, but also with an intelligence that enabled him to study and decipher the world around him. In practice, man was liberating himself from the mystical worldview of medieval times, in which the only knowledge that was possible was that transmitted to us through the word of God. This required closing the gap between lay culture, represented by the ethical models of antiquity, and the religious model, which condemned antiquity as pagan. Art itself played an important role in this debate because of how art, as representation, is always a form of knowledge. This perspective contrasted with the medieval vision of art as being based fundamentally in religion, to the exclusion of all notions of the beauty and representation of reality itself. The aim of art, in the end, was didactic in essence: to teach the story of the Christian religion. Beauty, harmony and the representation of truth, in other words, were all unimportant. On the contrary, they were often considered dangerous because of how formal refinement speaks directly to the senses, making it more apt to induce sins than good precepts.

In this cultural atmosphere, neo-platonism offered significant theoretical points for reflection. Indeed, this philosophy maintained that what is beautiful is also good, and that what is good is also beautiful : in practice, there was not conflict between ethics and aesthetics. This all contributed to reawakening the theme of beauty during the course of the fourteenth century. This is how art contributed to the creation of the new Renaissance man, a man who used every instrument to study the world around him in order to understand it better. Augustinian thought had an intense influence on figurative artwork, marking the passage from medieval art to that of the renaissance.