rule saith:[1] Let no one presume to give or receive anything, nor have anything of his own, not a thing, neither manuscript, nor tablets, nor pen,[2] in fact nothing whatever, seeing that neither one’s body nor desires are lawfully in one’s keeping, but all things are common to all as it stands written: neither did any one say that aught was his own, etc.[3] Item, Basil in his rule saith thus: If any man calleth aught his own, he maketh himself a stranger to the elect of God and to the love of the Lord who fulfilled indeed what He taught in word and laid down His life for His friends.[4] Item, St. John Cassian writing to Pope Castorius[5] concerning the institutes of the holy fathers in the fourth book of his rule, saith thus: Whereas in some monasteries where some loose customs are tolerated we see that the rule is most stringently observed, whereby no one may dare even by a word to call anything his own, and it is a great crime for any
- ↑ See Migne, Patrol. Lat. vol. lxvi. o. 33.
- ↑ P.: graphum; read graphium, i.e. γραφεῖον.
- ↑ Benedict wrote dicat—‘let any one say.’ Hus reads dicebat. The rule, we note, is quoted in Wyclif (De Civ. Dom. iii . 85) with dicebat. The reading alters the sense to a reference to Acts iv. 32, a mistake into which Wyclif and Hus fell through the preceding “ut scriptum est.”
- ↑ See Basil, Regulæ brevius tractatæ, Interrog. 85. [Basil Opera, ed. Garnier (Paris, 1839), ii. 629.]
- ↑ Castorius was not a ‘Pope,’ but a bishop of Apt (d. 426), to whom John Cassian, the founder of the two religious houses for men and women at Marseilles, dedicated his De Institutis Cænobiorum. In the preface Cassian twice calls Castor ‘beatissima Papa,’ a relic of the time when the title was applied to all bishops and abbots. For the quotation, see De Instit. lib. iv. c. 13 (ed. Petschenig, Vienna, 1888 [C.S.E.L.], vol i. p. 55).
51b). There the name of the monk is more correctly given as Justus, while the correct reference in the sermon shows that the reading “tertio dialogorum” is a slip.
