Community as the Way of Salvation

Beneath the Pachomian Rule lies a theology, and it is the deepest thing Pachomius gave the Church. For him the common life was not a lesser path for those too weak to be hermits but a positive way of salvation in its own right: a school of charity in which the brothers bear one another’s burdens (Galatians 6:2), hold all things in common after the apostolic pattern (Acts 2:44), and are saved not each alone but together, by the daily cutting-off of self-will in obedience and mutual service. This file draws out that vision and sets it against the eremitic ideal it complemented.

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

The Koinonia as a Theology

The very name Pachomius gave his communities — Koinonia, “fellowship, communion, common life” — is a theological program (see The Call at Tabennesi). It is the word the Acts of the Apostles uses of the first Christians in Jerusalem, who “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship [koinonia], to the breaking of bread and the prayers,” and who “had all things in common” and “distributed to each as any had need” (Acts 2:42–45). Pachomius understood his monasteries as the restoration of that primitive apostolic community — a body in which no one called anything his own, in which goods and labor and prayer were shared, and in which the love commanded by Christ was made the literal structure of daily life (Rousseau 1985, chs. 4–6; Veilleux 1980, introduction; the Catecheses and the writings of Horsiesios develop the theme, Veilleux 1982).

This is a different center of gravity from the eremitic ideal. The hermit’s struggle was waged in solitude, against the demons and the passions, in a contest whose arena was the single soul before God. The Pachomian struggle was waged in common, and its arena was the relations among the brothers — the patience, the forbearance, the service, the surrender of one’s own way that life with others demands. For Pachomius the neighbor is not a distraction from the ascetic life but its very matter: one is saved through the brother, by loving and bearing and serving him (Rousseau 1985, ch. 6; cf. the later development of this theme in Horsiesios’s Book, Veilleux 1982).

Bearing One Another’s Burdens

The Pauline command “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2) is, in effect, the charter of the cenobitic life as Pachomius conceived it. In the Koinonia the strong literally bear the weak: the able-bodied support the sick and the aged in the infirmary; the experienced steady the new; the gifted carry those of lesser capacity; and the whole common economy exists so that no brother is left to sink or swim by his own strength alone (Rousseau 1985, chs. 4, 6; Veilleux 1981, Praecepta, on the infirmary and the care of the weak). This was a profound pastoral correction to the dangers of the solitary life, which had no provision for the brother who could not endure it (see Upper Egypt and the First Monks). The cenobitic monastery could receive and save those whom the desert would have destroyed — the young, the simple, the unstable, the merely ordinary — precisely because in it no one stood alone.

Obedience and the Cutting-Off of Self-Will

If charity is the matter of the common life, obedience is its method. The Pachomian tradition, like the desert tradition generally, made the cutting-off of one’s own will (to idion thelema) the heart of the ascetic struggle — but in the Koinonia this had a communal form. The monk did not invent his own discipline or follow his own judgment; he submitted to the Rule, to his housemaster, and to the superior, doing nothing without leave, keeping his appointed task and place (Veilleux 1981, Praecepta; Rousseau 1985, chs. 4–5). The point was not regimentation for its own sake but the daily, grinding mortification of self-will that life under obedience requires — a surer and humbler asceticism, the tradition held, than the self-chosen austerities of the soloist, which could so easily feed the very pride they meant to kill (Rousseau 1985, ch. 6; cf. The Ascetic Pattern). In the common life, every hour offered occasions to prefer another’s will to one’s own, and in those small surrenders the Pachomian saw the cross taken up.

The Contrast with Pure Eremitism

It would falsify Pachomius to set him against the eremitic life; he was himself trained in it (under Palamon), he revered Antony, and the Koinonia always honored the great solitaries. The relationship is one of complement and correction, not rivalry. The tradition came to see the two forms as suited to different souls and different stages: the common life as the broad and safer way, the school in which most are formed and saved; the solitary life as a steep and perilous height to which only the few, and those well-tested in community first, should aspire (Rousseau 1985, ch. 6; Chitty 1966, ch. 1; the same ordering is later codified by Basil and by Benedict, see below).

Still, the Pachomian sources do register a real critique of the solitary path — not of Antony, but of the danger inherent in solitude for the untested. The eremitic life exposed a man to delusion, to an asceticism without measure, to a self-direction that could curdle into self-will and pride, and to a spiritual loneliness in which there was no brother to correct or console him. The common life answered each of these: it supplied discernment through the superior and the Rule, measure through a moderated discipline, humility through obedience, and consolation through the brotherhood (Rousseau 1985, ch. 6; Veilleux 1980, introduction). Pachomius did not think the hermit’s way wrong; he thought the common way safer and more apt for the many, and he built an institution to make it available.

A Vision the Whole Church Inherited

This Pachomian theology of community — salvation sought and found together, the apostolic koinonia of Acts made a rule of life, the brother as the matter of one’s sanctification — passed into the bloodstream of Christian monasticism. St. Basil the Great, who knew the Egyptian communities at first hand, made the superiority of the common life for the cultivation of charity the very argument of his ascetic writings, asking famously whose feet the solitary would wash, whose burdens he would bear (Basil, Longer Responses; see St. Basil the Great). St. Benedict, at the other end of the tradition, opened his Rule by ranking the cenobites — “those who live in monasteries, serving under a rule and an abbot” — as “the strongest kind” of monk, the fortissimum genus, reserving the eremitic life for the few proven in community first (Rule of St. Benedict 1; see St. Benedict of Nursia). Both judgments are, in substance, Pachomius’s own. The conviction that the ordinary Christian is most surely saved not in heroic solitude but in the patient, mutual, obedient life of a community that holds all things in common is among the most consequential ideas the desert gave the Church — and it was Pachomius who first built a world around it (see The Influence on All Monasticism).

References

Veilleux, Armand, trans. Pachomian Koinonia, Vols. 1–3. Cistercian Studies 45–47. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980–1982. (Vol. 1, the Lives and introduction; Vol. 2, the Rules; Vol. 3, the Catecheses and the Book of Horsiesios, which develop the theology of the common life.)
Rousseau, Philip. Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985; rev. ed. 1999. (Chs. 4–6 on the theology and discipline of the Koinonia.)
Basil of Caesarea. The Asketikon (Longer Responses). Trans. Anna M. Silvas, The Asketikon of St Basil the Great. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
The Rule of St. Benedict. Trans. in RB 1980: The Rule of St. Benedict in Latin and English, ed. Timothy Fry. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1981. (The four kinds of monks at ch. 1.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.