St. Pachomius

St. Pachomius (born c. 290, probably in Upper Egypt—died 346; feast day May 9) was one of the Desert Fathers and founder of Christian cenobitic (communal) monasticism, whose rule (book of observances) for monks is the earliest extant.

Of Egyptian origin, Pachomius encountered Coptic, or Egyptian, Christianity among his cohorts in the Roman emperor Constantine’s North African army and, on leaving the military about 314, withdrew alone into the wilderness at Chenoboskion, near his Theban home. Soon after, he joined the hermit Palemon and a colony of solitaries (anchorites) in the same area at Tabennisi, on the east bank of the Nile River. With a talent for administration, Pachomius built the first monastic enclosure, replacing the scattered hermits’ shelters, and he drew up a common daily program providing for proportioned periods of work and prayer patterned about a cooperative economic and disciplinary regimen.

This rule was the first instance in Christian monastic history of the use of a cenobitic, or uniform communal, existence as the norm and marked the first departure from the individualistic, exclusively contemplative nature that had previously characterized religious life. Pachomius, moreover, instituted a monarchic monastic structure that viewed the relationship of the religious superior’s centralized authority over the community as the symbolic image of God evoking obedient response from human beings striving to overcome their egocentrism by self-denial and charity. By the time he died, Pachomius had founded 11 monasteries, numbering more than 7,000 monks and nuns.

Though none of Pachomius’s manuscripts has survived, his life and bibliography have been preserved by the 5th-century historian Palladius in his Lausiac History. The Rule of Pachomius and other works by him can be found in Armand Veilleux (ed.), Pachomian Koinonia, 3 vol. (1980–82).