The Growth of the Federation

What began as a single community at Tabennesi multiplied, within Pachomius’s own lifetime, into a federation of monasteries. As the brothers grew too numerous for one site, Pachomius founded a second house at Phbow and made it the federation’s center; he founded or affiliated further monasteries up and down the Nile, drew existing communities into the Koinonia by adopting them under his rule, and added houses for women. This file traces that expansion — its sites, its scale, and the organizational instinct that turned a community into the first monastic order.

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

From One House to Many

The Lives present the growth of the Koinonia as the natural overflow of a successful experiment. Once Pachomius had learned, through the early failure (see The Call at Tabennesi), how to order a community by rule and obedience, Tabennesi filled — the Lives speak of the brothers multiplying until the original site could not hold them (Bohairic Life [Bo] 49–50; First Greek Life [G1] 54; trans. Veilleux 1980). Rather than simply enlarge one monastery without limit, Pachomius did something organizationally decisive: he founded a second monastery and bound it to the first under a common rule and a common government. This is the birth of the federation — a structure in which each house keeps its own buildings, its own superior, and its own internal economy, while all are members of one body under a single father (Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; Chitty 1966, ch. 1).

Phbow (Pbow): The Center of the Koinonia

The most important new foundation was at Phbow (Greek Pbow, also spelled Pabau or Faw), a short distance from Tabennesi. The Lives report that Pachomius established Phbow and, as the Koinonia grew, transferred the center of the whole federation there, making it the residence of the head of the Koinonia and the site of the great twice-yearly gatherings of all the monks (Bo 49–50; G1 54, 83; trans. Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4). Phbow became the federation’s heart: its great basilica (rebuilt and enlarged by Pachomius’s successors and known from later archaeology) was the largest church of the region, built to hold the assembled brothers of all the houses, and it remained the central monastery of the Pachomian system long after Pachomius’s death (Goehring 1999, “The World Engaged”; Chitty 1966, chs. 1, 3). It was at Phbow that Pachomius himself died in 348 (see The Death and the Succession).

The Network of Houses

Beyond Tabennesi and Phbow, the Lives record a series of further foundations and affiliations, by which the Koinonia spread along a stretch of the Upper Nile. Pachomius founded new monasteries and also adopted existing communities into the federation — most notably when the monks of older or independent ascetic settlements asked to come under his rule. The Lives name, among the houses brought into the Koinonia in Pachomius’s lifetime, Šeneset (Chenoboskion, the very region where he had been baptized), Thmoušons (Tmoušons / Tismenê), Thbew, and others, together with monasteries founded further north as the movement reached toward the region of Šmin (Panopolis), where the local bishop himself invited Pachomius to plant a community (Bo 50–58; G1 54, 81; trans. Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4).

The Lives also record the founding of houses for women — a monastery for nuns associated with Pachomius’s sister Maria, set apart across the river from the men’s community and governed under the same rule (Bo 27; G1 32; Veilleux 1980; treated in Women and the Pachomian Houses).

The Scale of the Federation

By the end of Pachomius’s life the Koinonia was a substantial institution. The sources and the modern reconstructions give a federation of roughly nine monasteries for men and two for women along the Upper Nile, governed from Phbow (Chitty 1966, ch. 1; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; Harmless 2004, ch. 5). The population is harder to fix, and the ancient figures are not to be taken as a census. [Disputed: Palladius (Lausiac History 32, c. 419/420) gives very large round numbers — on the order of 3,000, and elsewhere up to 7,000, Tabennesiote monks — and St. Jerome's preface to the Rule (404) likewise reports a federation of many thousands gathering for the Pascha; modern scholars (Chitty 1966; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; Goehring 1999) treat these figures as rhetorical magnifications by later and outside witnesses and reckon the true numbers in Pachomius's own lifetime in the hundreds to low thousands across all the houses, while agreeing that the federation was, by any measure, large and unprecedented.]

Whatever the exact count, the qualitative novelty is clear: nowhere before had so many monks been bound together under a single rule and a single government, sharing a common economy and a common calendar. This is why Pachomius is credited not merely with founding a monastery but with founding the first monastic order — a supra-local structure with a constitution, a central authority, and a coordinated common life (Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; Chitty 1966, ch. 1; treated in detail in The Federation of Monasteries).

Why a Federation and Not One Great Monastery

It is worth pausing on the choice that defines the Pachomian model: when Tabennesi filled, Pachomius did not simply build one ever-larger monastery but founded many and bound them into a federation. The decision has lasting consequences. A single enormous community is hard to govern, hard to feed from one place, and brittle — a disorder at the center threatens the whole. A federation of moderate houses, each self-contained but all under one rule and one head, is more resilient and more expandable: new monasteries can be added without remaking the existing ones, local superiors handle the daily life of each house, and the central authority coordinates rather than micromanages (Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; Chitty 1966, ch. 1). Pachomius seems to have grasped — whether by design or by trial — that the way to grow a monastic movement without dissolving its discipline was to replicate the unit rather than to swell it. This is the same insight that underlies every later religious order that plants daughter-houses under a common rule, and it is why the Pachomian Koinonia, rather than any single large monastery, is reckoned the ancestor of the monastic order (Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; see The Federation of Monasteries).

The Organizational Instinct

It is worth dwelling on what the growth reveals about Pachomius himself. The Lives present him as a man of unusual administrative imagination, a quality not always prized in the desert tradition, which tended to celebrate the charismatic hermit over the organizer. Pachomius’s genius was precisely organizational: he saw that a community of hundreds could not be governed like a cell of a few, and he devised the structures — the division of each monastery into “houses” by trade, the office of the steward, the written rule, the twice-yearly general assembly, the central treasury — that made large-scale common life sustainable (Rousseau 1985, chs. 4–6; Chitty 1966, ch. 1). The federation did not grow by accident; it grew because its founder kept inventing the institutions a growing body required. That instinct is the deepest reason Pachomius, and not the many holy hermits around him, became the father of cenobitic monasticism (see The Influence on All Monasticism).

The federation outlived its founder. Under Pachomius’s successors — Petronios, Horsiesios, and Theodore — the Koinonia weathered a serious internal crisis and then expanded and consolidated, remaining a major presence in Egyptian Christianity for generations (see The Death and the Succession and The Pachomian Legacy in the East).

References

Veilleux, Armand, trans. Pachomian Koinonia, Vol. 1: The Life of Saint Pachomius and His Disciples. Cistercian Studies 45. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980. (The filling of Tabennesi and the founding of Phbow at Bo 49–50 / G1 54; the network of houses at Bo 50–58 / G1 54, 81; the women’s monastery at Bo 27 / G1 32.)
Palladius. The Lausiac History, ch. 32. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. 1965. (The large population figures.)
Rousseau, Philip. Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985; rev. ed. 1999. (Ch. 4 on the growth and structure of the federation.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.
Goehring, James E. Ascetics, Society, and the Desert. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999.
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.