He incurred the furious hatred of the young and beautiful Empress
Eudoxia, who united her influence with that of the ambitious Theophilus,
patriarch of Alexandria, and Chrysostom was banished from
Constantinople, but died on his way to the remote desert of Pityus. His
powerful sermons and valuable writings contributed in no small degree to
the spread of monasticism among the Christians of his time.
Then there was Augustine, the greatest thinker since Plato. "We shall
meet him," says Schaff, "alike on the broad highways and the narrow
foot-paths, on the giddy Alpine heights and in the awful depths of
speculation, wherever philosophical thinkers before him or after him
have trod." He, too, like all the other leaders of thought in his time,
was ascetic in his habits. Although he lived and labored for
thirty-eight years at Hippo, a Numidian city about two hundred miles
west of Carthage, in Africa, Augustine was regarded as the intellectual
head not only of North Africa but of Western Christianity. He gathered
his clergy into a college of priests, with a community of goods, thus
approaching as closely to the regular monastic life as was possible to
secular clergymen. He established religious houses and wrote a set of
rules, consisting of twenty-four articles, for the government of
monasteries. These rules were superseded by those of Benedict, but they
were resuscitated under Charlemagne and reappeared in the famous Austin
Canons of the eleventh century.
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