St. Pachomius: Monastic Pioneer
By RAY CAVANAUGH
The product of a pagan household, St. Pachomius would emerge as a pioneer of communal monasticism, one of the most influential of Church traditions. May 9 is his feast day.
He was born in the Thebaid region of ancient Egypt in the year AD 292. Though raised in an idolatrous home, from a young age he “had an aversion to the profane ceremonies used by the infidels in the worship of their idols,” according to Alban Butler’s The Lives or the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints (volume 5).
At age 20, Pachomius entered compulsory military service under the auspices of the Roman Empire, which then encompassed much of North Africa. While spending time at the city of Thebes as a poorly treated military recruit, he was much impacted by the kindness that Christian residents showed to him and others in difficult circumstances. He decided that someday he wanted to serve the same God whom these compassionate people followed.
At the end of Pachomius’ military tenure, he headed to a church in Thebes, where he joined a group of catechumens and later received Baptism.
Once baptized, he visited a holy recluse named Palemon, who lived in the desert. Palemon spoke in detail about his highly austere lifestyle. However, Pachomius was not only unfazed but enamored, and he asked to join Palemon in the desert. Day after day, they worked and prayed together.
While on a solitary excursion along the banks of the Nile River, Pachomius heard a voice that told him to build a monastery and receive faithful members.
When Pachomius related this news to Palemon, the two went to a location known as Tabenna, where they built what would become the first cenobitic (organized communal) monastery. Pachomius’ first recruit was his brother, but he soon died, as did the elderly Palemon. Word had spread of the monastery, however, and so others began to arrive. Soon there were 100 men residing with Pachomius.
Easy living it was not: Residents labored together in silence and took their meals with hoods drawn over their heads so that they could not even see one another. As Butler puts it: “No moment was allowed for idleness.” At the same time, whenever anyone fell ill, Pachomius personally attended to the afflicted person.
Others have suggested that Pachomius’ concept of a spartan, highly regimented communal living arrangement came from his earlier experience as a soldier. Of course, these intrepid early monks were warriors of the spirit who served no master other than God.
Pachomius proceeded to build six other monasteries in the Thebes region. He clearly was becoming an important person in the early Church. However, he chose not to become a priest, even though his area’s bishop sought to ordain him. Despite never being ordained, he converted a large number of longtime idol-worshipers to the Church.
Pachomius could be rather rigid at times: When his sister once attempted to visit him, she was told that no females — family or otherwise — were allowed near the premises, and that she should content herself with the knowledge that he was still alive.
But, in his own way, he would prove a generous sibling: When he received word that this same sister — who presumably was also a Christian convert — wished to follow his monastic path, he built a convent for her, albeit on the opposite side of the Nile. This establishment was soon filled with female religious.
In addition to his administrative talents, Pachomius was also reportedly the source of multiple miraculous incidences of healing. However, he could not prevent a virulent plague that claimed a combined 100 monks at his various monasteries.
But he could take solace in the fact that there were a total of 7,000 monks in the monasteries he had established. And at the time of his death in AD 346, his version of monasticism was spreading beyond Egypt to Central Europe and Mesopotamia. Of course, in ensuing years it would spread much further.
It is worth noting that St. Antony had actually founded a monastery in Egypt about two decades before Pachomius’ first monastery. Because of this fact, it is more accurate to regard Pachomius as the “father of organized cenobitic monasticism,” for he was the first person to bring smaller communes into a larger monastic network, as related by Marilyn Dunn, author of The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages. Pachomius also authored the earliest set of guidelines for Christian monks.
Though most historical accounts of Pachomius portray him largely as a “drill-sergeant of the ascetic life,” Philip Rousseau — author of Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt — credits his subject as a “shrewd judge of character . . . able to mold without tyranny those who trusted him.”
Rousseau adds how Pachomius’ utmost objective, both in his own life and in the lives of his followers, was “a clear vision of the self as a creature of God.” In the Pachomian view, this “clear vision” was obtainable only through the humility and care fostered by the communal life.
