Theodorus of Tabennese

Theodore was born about 314 in Upper Egypt, to a Christian family with money. The sources say he broke with his household as a boy, at a feast, struck by the thought that the comfort around him was buying him nothing, and left home for a monastery at about fourteen.

At around eighteen he heard of Pachomius and went to Tabennesi to join the new common life on the Nile. Pachomius took to him at once, and Theodore became the closest of his disciples. He was made housemaster, then given charge of the monastery at Tabennesi itself, then made Pachomius's steward and effectively his second.

The relationship was not simple. The Pachomian Lives record a hard episode: some of the brothers, thinking Pachomius near death, pressed Theodore to accept the leadership in advance, and he listened. Pachomius recovered, learned of it, and put him under penance for years, stripped of office, kept at a distance, made to prove he had let go of the ambition. Theodore accepted it without complaint, and the account of that discipline is one of the more human passages in early monastic literature.

Pachomius died in the plague of 348. Petronius succeeded him and died within months. Horsiesios took over and could not hold the federation together, one large monastery under a superior named Apollonius refused obedience and began trading for its own profit. Horsiesios resigned and named Theodore.

Theodore ran the Pachomian communities for about eighteen years, from roughly 350 to his death in 368, and this is what he is remembered for. He restored order, brought the rebellious houses back under one rule, held the annual general assemblies, and rebuilt the discipline of the common life, and he did it while insisting the whole time that he was only Horsiesios's deputy, that the real father was still alive, and that he held the office in trust. When he died, Horsiesios simply took the leadership back.

His surviving writings are catechetical instructions delivered to the assembled monks, preserved in Coptic and in Jerome's Latin. They are practical and unadorned: on obedience, on not judging a brother, on the danger of a monk who keeps property back, on remembering death.

Athanasius of Alexandria, hiding from imperial officers during his exiles, was sheltered by the Pachomian houses in these years and corresponded with Theodore; one of Athanasius's letters to him survives, and the Lives record him travelling upriver by boat with the monks.

What Theodore proved is that Pachomius's invention could outlive Pachomius. A rule and a common life that survive their founder's death and a leadership crisis are an institution. Every monastery in the Christian world descends from that.

Sources: the Greek and Coptic Lives of Pachomius, and Theodore's Instructions, in Armand Veilleux, Pachomian Koinonia (three volumes); Jerome's Latin translation of the Pachomian corpus; Athanasius, Letters; Palladius, The Lausiac History.