The Call at Tabennesi

Around the year 323, the Lives say, Pachomius came at God’s command to the deserted village of Tabennesi on the east bank of the Nile and there received the call that defined him: not to perfect himself in solitude but to gather others into a common life. This file follows that founding — the call and the first settlement, the failure of his earliest companions, the tradition (reported by Palladius) of an angel who delivered the rule on a bronze tablet, and the naming of what he built: the Koinonia, the fellowship.

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

The Call to Gather

The Lives place the decisive turn while Pachomius was still living the eremitic life he had learned from Palamon (see The Soldier and the Conversion). Walking in the desert near a deserted village called Tabennesi, he heard — the Lives report — a voice commanding him to settle there and build a dwelling, “for many will come to you to become monks” (Bohairic Life [Bo] 17; First Greek Life [G1] 12; trans. Veilleux 1980). The traditional date of the settlement is about 323, reconstructed from the internal chronology of the Lives and the better-fixed later dates (Rousseau 1985, ch. 3; Chitty 1966, ch. 1). Palamon, the Lives say, helped him build the first cell and blessed the undertaking before returning to his own place, so that the new communal venture was launched with the older hermit’s blessing (Bo 17–19; Veilleux 1980).

What the call announced was something genuinely new in form. Antony and Palamon had withdrawn to be alone; the voice at Tabennesi sent Pachomius to gather. The first who came was his own elder brother John, and the Lives preserve a revealing conflict between them: John wished to keep the life small and austere, in the eremitic manner, while Pachomius — already moved by a larger vision — began to enlarge the buildings to make room for the many he expected (Bo 19; G1 14–15; Veilleux 1980). The episode dramatizes the very thing that made Pachomius original: against the instinct of the solitary, he built for a community.

The First Failure and the Hard School of the Common Life

The Lives are candid that the first attempt to gather brothers failed. Pachomius received a number of men, served them with his own hands, and asked of them only that they share the common life and obey; but they presumed on his gentleness, despised his service, and would not submit to discipline, so that at length — after he had borne with them long — he was compelled to drive them out (G1 24; Bo 23–24; trans. Veilleux 1980). The detail is important both historically and theologically. Historically, it shows that the cenobitic institution was not handed down ready-made but was learned the hard way, through failure and correction. Theologically, the Lives draw from it the lesson that the common life requires not merely good will but a rule and a settled obedience — that fellowship without order dissolves (Rousseau 1985, ch. 4). Only after this failure, in the Lives’ telling, did Pachomius gather the disciples who would become the nucleus of the lasting community and begin to give them the ordered pattern of life that became the Rule (see The First Cenobitic Rule).

The Angel and the Tablet

The most famous element of the founding tradition is the story of the angel and the bronze tablet. The earliest and best-known form is in Palladius’s Lausiac History, written about 419/420 — within living memory of the Pachomian movement, though by a Greek outsider who had visited Egypt. Palladius reports that “an angel” appeared to Pachomius and gave him “a tablet” (Greek deltos) on which a rule of life was written — the angel directing how the monks should be clothed, how they should eat, and how they should pray, and prescribing the number of prayers by day and by night — and that the angel concluded, “I have given you this rule,” instructing him to govern the brothers by it (Palladius, Lausiac History 32; trans. Meyer 1965). Palladius even reproduces a version of the angelic rule, with its quota of prayers and its arrangement of the monks into “houses” by their crafts.

This tradition must be handled carefully, per METHODOLOGY §3.5. It is reported here as what the sources attest, not certified as historical fact — and the sources themselves vary. [Disputed: Palladius (Lausiac History 32, c. 419/420) gives the fullest "angel and tablet" account, including a quota of twelve prayers at several hours; the Coptic and Greek Lives know the motif of an angelic communication but in more restrained forms, and some branches of the dossier present the rule chiefly as something Pachomius developed through experience and correction (Bo 23–25; G1 24–25; Veilleux 1980); Veilleux (1968; 1980, introduction) and Rousseau (1985, ch. 4) read the angel-tablet story as a later, schematizing legend that personifies and divinely authorizes a rule which in fact grew organically, while noting that the motif served to vest the human institution with heavenly sanction.]

The point for an Orthodox reader is not to choose for or against the angel but to see both the tradition and its function. The story expresses a real conviction — that the cenobitic life is not a mere human arrangement but a God-given way of salvation (see Community as the Way of Salvation) — while the soberer evidence of the Lives and of the Rule itself, with its evident accretions and case-by-case judgments, shows a rule that was also worked out on the ground over many years (Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; Veilleux 1980, introduction; treated further in The First Cenobitic Rule and The Lives of Pachomius).

The Naming of the Koinonia

The community Pachomius built he called the Koinonia — the Coptic and Greek term for “fellowship, communion, the common life,” the same word the Acts of the Apostles uses of the first Christians who “devoted themselves … to the fellowship [koinonia], to the breaking of bread and the prayers” and “had all things in common” (Acts 2:42, 44). The choice of name is itself a theology. Pachomius understood his monasteries not as a collection of individuals each pursuing his own perfection under one roof, but as a single body realizing, in the conditions of the fourth century, the apostolic ideal of a community that held everything in common and bore one another’s burdens (Bo 25; G1 25; Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4). The brothers were koinobioi, those who “live the common life” — and from the Greek koinos bios, “common life,” comes the word cenobitic by which the whole subsequent tradition would name the form Pachomius founded (Chitty 1966, ch. 1; Harmless 2004, ch. 5).

By the end of Pachomius’s life this single community at Tabennesi had become the head of a federation of monasteries strung along the Nile of Upper Egypt, governed from a central house at Phbow, holding all property and labor in common, and assembling twice a year — the institution treated in The Growth of the Federation and The Federation of Monasteries. But it began here: a voice at a deserted village, a brother who would not enlarge the house, a first community that failed, and a man who learned from the failure how a fellowship must be ordered if it is to hold.

References

Veilleux, Armand, trans. Pachomian Koinonia, Vol. 1: The Life of Saint Pachomius and His Disciples. Cistercian Studies 45. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980. (The call at Tabennesi at Bo 17 / G1 12; John and the enlarging of the house at Bo 19 / G1 14–15; the first failed community at Bo 23–24 / G1 24; the naming of the Koinonia at Bo 25 / G1 25.)
Palladius. The Lausiac History, ch. 32. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1965. (The angel and the bronze tablet.)
Veilleux, Armand. La liturgie dans le cénobitisme pachômien au quatrième siècle. Studia Anselmiana 57. Rome, 1968. (On the development of the Rule and the angel-tablet tradition.)
Rousseau, Philip. Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985; rev. ed. 1999. (Chs. 3–4 on the founding and the growth of the Rule.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.