Letter 6: Ferrandus, servant of God and of the brethren, to the most holy Abbot Eugippius, greetings.

Ferrandus, servant of God and of the brethren, to the most holy Abbot Eugippius, greetings. Your reputation as a guide of souls and as a custodian of the Augustinian tradition has reached us in Africa, and I write to you not as a teacher to a student but as one who has heard much good and who wishes to enter into correspondence with one of the men most worth knowing in this age. On the specific question you have posed through your messenger — how to handle the monk who is genuinely devout but chronically incapable of the regular life of the community, whose rhythms are simply different from those of the common life in ways that create friction — I want to offer a thought. The Rule exists for the community as a whole, but the community exists for the salvation of souls. When a particular soul, through no fault of its own, finds the common life genuinely harmful rather than genuinely formative — when the friction is not the productive friction of growth but the destructive friction of incompatibility — the abbot has to ask whether insisting on complete conformity serves the soul or merely the institution. I do not say this to undermine the Rule. I say it to point toward the pastoral wisdom that Benedict [whose Rule was becoming influential] and the tradition of the abbots generally have always required: that the abbot know each of his monks as an individual and govern accordingly. Your brother in Christ, Ferrandus