Upper Egypt and the First Monks

Pachomius was born into a Christian Egypt already in ascetic ferment. By the early fourth century the Thebaid of Upper Egypt was a deeply Coptic, increasingly Christianized countryside; the Great Persecution had just passed; and the eremitic movement that St. Antony the Great had made famous had set the desert before the Church as a place of contest and prayer. This file sets that world — the land, the language, the persecution, and the spectrum of ascetic forms (village ascetic, anchorite, and the cenobite-to-come) — into which the founder of communal monasticism was born.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Desert Father; father of cenobitic monasticism)

The Land: The Thebaid and the Coptic Countryside

Pachomius was a man of Upper Egypt — the long, narrow ribbon of cultivation along the southern Nile that the Greeks called the Thebaid, after the old city of Thebes (Diospolis Magna, near modern Luxor). This was not the cosmopolitan, Greek-speaking world of Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast but the deeply native Egyptian hinterland, where the everyday language was Coptic — the last stage of the Egyptian tongue, written in Greek letters with a handful of added signs — and where Hellenic culture lay thin over a population whose religious memory ran back to the Pharaohs (Rousseau 1985, ch. 1; Goehring 1999, “The Origins of Monasticism”). It matters for the whole story that Pachomius and his first disciples were Coptic-speakers: his Rule, his Letters, and the earliest Lives were composed in Coptic, and the very fact that his movement produced a great body of native-language literature is one of the signs of a Christianity that had struck deep roots in the Egyptian countryside (Veilleux 1980, introduction; Chitty 1966, ch. 1).

The Thebaid in Pachomius’s lifetime was studded with villages strung along the river and its canals, with the desert escarpment — the jabal, the “mountain” — rising on either side a short walk from the green. That geography is essential to the monastic story: the desert was never far away, a place at once of danger (wild animals, the heat, the tombs reputed to be haunted by demons) and of withdrawal (a wilderness into which a man could go to be alone with God, as Israel had gone into the wilderness and as Christ had gone to be tempted). The first monks did not have to travel far to find the desert; it lay at the edge of every village (Chitty 1966, ch. 1; Harmless 2004, ch. 1).

The Great Persecution and the Peace of the Church

Pachomius was born about 292, on the eve of the Great Persecution launched by the emperor Diocletian in 303 — the last and most savage of the Roman persecutions, felt with particular ferocity in Egypt, where the Coptic Church would afterward date its very calendar (the “Era of the Martyrs,” Anno Martyrum) from Diocletian’s accession in 284 (Chitty 1966, ch. 1; Harmless 2004, ch. 1). He came to manhood, then, in the years immediately after the persecution ended — the years of Constantine’s victory (312), the Edict of Milan (313), and the new and disorienting condition of a Church that was suddenly safe.

Scholars have long noted the link between the peace of the Church and the rise of monasticism. With the age of the martyrs over, the radical Christian impulse that had once expressed itself in the readiness to die for Christ sought a new outlet, and found it in the ascetic witness — a “white martyrdom” of self-denial, prayer, and withdrawal that could be lived out daily where the “red martyrdom” of blood was no longer demanded (Chitty 1966, ch. 1; Harmless 2004, ch. 1; Rousseau 1985, ch. 1). The monk became, in the famous phrase, the successor of the martyr. Pachomius’s own generation stands precisely at this hinge: he was a child of the persecution and a young man of the peace, and his life’s work belongs to the first great flowering of the ascetic movement that the peace released.

The Ascetic Spectrum: Village Ascetics, Anchorites, and Antony

It is a common simplification to say that Antony “invented” monasticism and Pachomius “invented” the cenobitic form; the reality the sources show is messier and richer. Long before Antony withdrew to the desert, Egyptian villages had their ascetics — men and women who renounced marriage and property and lived lives of prayer, fasting, and continence within or at the edge of their home communities. The Greek word monachos, “monk,” literally “solitary” or “single one,” appears in a documentary Egyptian papyrus of 324 already as a recognized social type (Goehring 1999, “Through a Glass Darkly”; Harmless 2004, ch. 1). Asceticism, in other words, was not first a flight to the empty desert but a way of life that grew up inside Christian society and only gradually moved outward.

The decisive outward movement is associated with St. Antony the Great (c. 251–356). According to the Life of Antony written by St. Athanasius of Alexandria, Antony, hearing the Gospel command “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor … and come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21), gave away his inheritance, placed himself under an old ascetic near his village, and then withdrew by stages ever deeper into the desert — first to the tombs, then to a deserted fort at Pispir, and at last to the “inner mountain” by the Red Sea — until he became the celebrated father of the anchoritic (solitary) life (Athanasius, Life of Antony 2–3, 11–13; trans. in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 4; Chitty 1966, ch. 1). Athanasius’s Life, written shortly after Antony’s death, became the great manifesto of the movement and spread its fame across the whole Christian world. The eremitic life it portrayed — the solitary athlete of Christ, contending alone with the demons in the silence of the desert — was the dominant image of monasticism that Pachomius inherited (on Antony and the Life, see St. Antony the Great).

Between the village ascetic and the full anchorite there was also the semi-eremitic form that would crystallize a little later at Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis in the desert north-west of the Delta — a “colony” of hermits living in scattered cells, each alone through the week but gathering for the synaxis (the common worship) on Saturday and Sunday under a senior father (on this “middle way,” see St. Macarius the Great). Egyptian monasticism, then, was never a single thing; it was a spectrum of forms, and Pachomius’s contribution was to add a new one at the communal end of that spectrum (Chitty 1966, ch. 1; Rousseau 1985, ch. 1; Harmless 2004, chs. 1, 5).

What Was Missing: The Common Life

For all its spiritual power, the eremitic movement had a structural weakness that the Lives of Pachomius and the later tradition both register. The solitary life was perilous for the unformed and the unstable: a hermit without a guide could fall into delusion (plani), into pride, into despair, or into the bodily ruin of an asceticism without measure. The desert demanded discernment, and discernment was scarce. The anchoritic life also made little provision for the weak, the young, the sick, or the simple, who could not survive the rigors of solitude but who nonetheless sought to give themselves to God (Rousseau 1985, chs. 1, 4; Chitty 1966, ch. 1).

It is into this gap that the Pachomian innovation falls. The Lives present Pachomius as a man trained in the eremitic school — apprenticed to the hermit Palamon (see The Soldier and the Conversion) — who nonetheless conceived a different thing: not a colony of soloists but a Koinonia, a “fellowship” or “common life,” in which monks would live and work and pray together under a single rule and a single father, sharing everything, so that the strong might bear the weak and the whole body might be saved together (Bohairic Life 17–23; First Greek Life [G1] 24–25; trans. Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4). The historical significance of Upper Egypt for the universal Church is that, in this Coptic backcountry, in the first generation after the persecutions, the cenobitic form of monastic life — the form that would shape Basil, Cassian, and Benedict, and through them the whole monastic West and East — was born (see The Influence on All Monasticism).

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. Life of Antony. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 4. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1892.
Veilleux, Armand, trans. Pachomian Koinonia, Vol. 1: The Life of Saint Pachomius and His Disciples. Cistercian Studies 45. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980. (The Bohairic Life and First Greek Life cited by chapter.)
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: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
Goehring, James E. Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999.
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.