Pachomius Founds Communal Monasticism

The ancient Life says that Pachomius was born to pagan parents in the Thebaid, in Upper Egypt, and that at twenty he was conscripted and shipped away with other recruits. In a city where they were held under guard, local people brought them food. He was told that they were Christians, and he vowed to serve their God if he were set free (Life of Pachomius 2–4). On his discharge he went to the village of Chenoboskion, was baptised, and attached himself to an old hermit named Palamon (Life of Pachomius 5–6).

Some time later, praying at an abandoned village called Tabennisi, he heard a voice telling him to stay and build a monastery, because many would come to him. The Life adds that an angel gave him a tablet with a rule for those he would teach, and that he built a small cell on the spot (Life of Pachomius 12). Palladius, writing about 420, also tells of an angel who gave him the rule on a tablet of brass (Palladius, Lausiac History 32.1–7). His brother John joined him, and he began to enlarge the buildings for the numbers he expected (Life of Pachomius 14–15). Three men came first, then many more. He set the more able in charge of the others, and since he would not have any of the monks hold clerical office they called in priests from nearby villages for the Eucharist (Life of Pachomius 23–24).

The rule that Palladius reports has the monks living three to a cell inside one enclosure, eating together, wearing a common habit, working according to their strength and meeting for set prayers through the day and night (Palladius, Lausiac History 32.1–7). Jerome, who translated the community’s rules into Latin about 404, describes houses of about forty monks, each under a housemaster and each grouped by a trade; thirty or forty such houses made a monastery, and all the monasteries had one head and assembled twice a year (Rule of Pachomius Jerome’s preface 2–8). A monastery was built across the river for Pachomius’s sister; other women joined her, and they kept the same rule (Life of Pachomius 28) (Palladius, Lausiac History 33.1).

The Life tells how Athanasius came to the monasteries on a tour of the Thebaid, and how Pachomius hid among the monks to avoid being ordained (Life of Pachomius 27). It says that he died of an illness on 9 May, shortly after Easter (Life of Pachomius 53). Palladius gives seven thousand monks living under the rule in his own day, thirteen hundred of them in the chief house (Palladius, Lausiac History 32.7–9).

The Life itself begins from the hermits: Antony in the inner desert and the solitaries of Nitria (Life of Pachomius 1). See Antony Withdraws to the Desert. Pachomius, in Jerome’s words, was among those who first laid the foundations of the coenobia, the monasteries of the common life (Rule of Pachomius Jerome’s preface 1).