01 — Foundations
The ground on which Pachomius stands: the Christianized countryside of early-fourth-century Upper Egypt, the eremitic movement that St. Antony the Great had made famous, and the personal story the Lives tell of the young conscript — a pagan from the Thebaid pressed into Roman service, shown unexpected charity by Christians in a prison at Thebes, baptized after his discharge, and apprenticed to the old hermit Palamon before he conceived the new thing that would become the Koinonia.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of cenobitic monasticism)
Pachomius did not invent monasticism; he inherited an ascetic ferment already a generation old and gave it a new form. By the time of his birth (c. 292), the deserts and villages of Egypt were filling with anchorites and village ascetics, and St. Antony’s withdrawal to the inner desert had become the celebrated model of the solitary life. The Lives present Pachomius’s own beginnings as a conversion narrative: the soldier who saw Christian love in action, sought baptism, and learned the ascetic craft from a hermit before the call came to do something Antony had not done — to gather. This section sets that double background, the historical (Egypt and the eremitic movement) and the biographical (the soldier and the conversion).
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Upper Egypt and the First Monks | Early-fourth-century Upper Egypt — the Thebaid, the Christianized Coptic countryside, the Great Persecution and its aftermath; the eremitic movement, the figure of St. Antony, and the spectrum of ascetic forms (village ascetic, anchorite, the coming cenobite) into which Pachomius was born. |
| The Soldier and the Conversion | The Lives’ account of Pachomius’s early life: the pagan youth of the Thebaid, the forced conscription (c. 312/313), the Christians who fed the prisoners at Thebes, the vow and the baptism after discharge, and the apprenticeship under the hermit Palamon at Šeneset (Chenoboskion). |
See Also
- The Call at Tabennesi — what Pachomius did with the formation Palamon gave him
- St. Antony the Great — the father of the eremitic life whose model frames Pachomius’s innovation
- The Lives of Pachomius — the source-critical status of the conversion narrative
- Monasticism — the Orthodox theology and history of the monastic life
References
- Veilleux, Armand, trans. Pachomian Koinonia, Vol. 1: The Life of Saint Pachomius and His Disciples. Cistercian Studies 45. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980.
- Rousseau, Philip. Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985; rev. ed. 1999.
- Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
- Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.