St. Augustine gathered companions into a common life after his conversion and at Hippo. His rule places unity in God, common goods and mutual responsibility at the centre of the community. Distribution is according to need rather than a demand that every person receive precisely the same material provision. Care of the sick and correction of conduct belong to the same pattern of charity.
Canons regular joined a common rule to a clerical life with liturgical and pastoral duties. Their development cannot be treated as identical with every monastery observing Augustine’s rule. The rule also served other religious institutes. Reception of the same text did not mean that all such communities possessed one superior or one uninterrupted corporate history.
The mendicant Order of Hermits of St. Augustine developed through thirteenth-century unions, notably in 1244 and 1256. It took its place among orders engaged in urban ministry and study. The Grand Union supplied a common government to previously separate groups. It was an institutional foundation receiving an older spiritual inheritance, not a claim that the same organisation had operated unchanged since Hippo.
Gregor Mendel’s community at St. Thomas in Brno belonged to this Augustinian order. The abbey supported education and intellectual work in a nineteenth-century setting. Calling Mendel an Augustinian correctly identifies that religious life; it should not collapse the history of canons, friars and Augustine’s own communities into one undifferentiated line.