Pachomius the Great

Pachomius was born about 292 to pagan parents in the Thebaid, in Upper Egypt. At about twenty he was swept up by an imperial press-gang and marched down the Nile with other conscripts, locked in a prison at Thebes overnight. Christians from the town came to the prison with food and drink for men they did not know. Pachomius asked who they were, was told, and, by his own account, repeated in every early life of him, prayed then that if he got out he would serve the God who made men behave like that. The army released the conscripts when the campaign ended, and he was baptised at the village of Šeneset around 313.

He went to a hermit named Palamon and lived under him for seven years, learning the ferocious asceticism of the first generation of Egyptian solitaries.

Then he did something new. Around 320, at a deserted village called Tabennesi on the Nile, he began gathering men into a common life, not scattered cells with an old man to visit, but one enclosure, one rule, one table, shared work, and obedience to a superior. His own brother John thought it a mistake. Pachomius went ahead.

The organisation was thorough and unlike anything before it. Monks lived in houses of about twenty, grouped by their trade, weavers, bakers, boatmen, gardeners, each house under a housemaster, the houses under the head of the monastery, and all the monasteries under Pachomius himself. There were fixed hours for prayer, fixed meals, a common dress, a novitiate, and a written rule. Every monk had to learn to read, because every monk had to know Scripture; the rule requires it, which made the Pachomian houses centres of literacy in a countryside that mostly had none. The communities farmed, made rope and mats, and sent boats down the river to sell the surplus and buy what they needed.

By the time he died there were about nine monasteries for men and two for women, his sister Mary led the first of those, across the river, with thousands of members. Athanasius of Alexandria visited in 333 and stayed in touch; Pachomius refused ordination and refused to let his monks be ordained, wanting no clerical rank inside the community.

He died in a plague in May 348, having nursed the sick himself.

What he invented spread. His Rule, translated into Latin by Jerome, stands behind Basil in the East and behind Benedict in the West; the whole later monastic tradition, Eastern and Western alike, is built on the idea Pachomius had first, that Christians seeking God are better off doing it together, under a rule, than alone.

Sources: the Life of Pachomius in its Greek and Coptic versions, and the Rule, in Armand Veilleux, Pachomian Koinonia; Jerome's Latin translation of the Pachomian Rule; Palladius, The Lausiac History; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church.