Women and the Pachomian Houses

The cenobitic life Pachomius founded was extended, in his own lifetime, to women. The Lives report that when his sister Maria came to see him, he would not admit her to the men’s enclosure but had a dwelling built for her across the Nile, where other women gathered, forming a monastery for nuns governed under the Pachomian rule and cared for spiritually by an elder appointed for the purpose. This file treats that women’s community — its founding, its government, the discipline that separated it from the men’s houses, and the careful limits of what the sources actually tell us.

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

Maria and the Founding of the Women’s Monastery

The Lives connect the women’s community with Pachomius’s sister, named in the tradition as Maria (Mary). The account runs that, after Pachomius had founded the Koinonia, his sister came to the monastery hoping to see him; but he, holding to the strict separation of monks from women, would not allow her into the enclosure or even meet her face to face, sending word instead — through the porter — that he was alive and well, and that if she wished to embrace the same ascetic life he would have a dwelling prepared for her in which she might save her soul, in the hope that others would join her (Bohairic Life 27; First Greek Life 32; trans. Veilleux 1980). The Lives report that she was moved, accepted, and that a monastery for women was built across the river (or otherwise set apart) from the men’s community, to which other women came, so that there grew up a parallel ascetic community of nuns living the common life under the same discipline (Bo 27; G1 32; Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4).

The episode is told partly to illustrate Pachomius’s rigor in the matter of separation, but its institutional upshot is significant: it makes the Pachomian Koinonia one of the earliest documented organizations to extend a structured, rule-governed communal monasticism to women, paralleling the men’s houses rather than leaving women to individual or domestic asceticism (Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; Chitty 1966, ch. 1; Elm 1994).

Government Under the Pachomian Rule

The women’s monastery was not autonomous; it was bound into the Pachomian system and lived under the same rule as the men, adapted to its circumstances. The Lives report that Pachomius set over the women’s community the spiritual oversight of a trusted senior monk — the tradition names the elder Peter, an aged and proven brother — who was appointed to instruct the nuns in the Scriptures and the Rule and to provide for their spiritual needs, going to them to teach but holding strictly to the rules of separation and propriety (Bohairic Life 27; First Greek Life 32; trans. Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4). The internal governance of the community — its own superior and officers among the women themselves — followed the Pachomian pattern of the houses, so far as the sources indicate, while the men of the Koinonia supplied what the enclosed women could not provide for themselves, such as the heavier labor and the building (Bo 27; G1 32; Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4).

The discipline of separation between the men’s and women’s communities was strict and is dwelt upon in the sources: the men who went over to build or to serve the nuns’ monastery did so under careful regulation, contact was minimized and chaperoned, and the burial customs and other points of common life were ordered so as to preserve the absolute distance between the sexes that the desert tradition demanded (Bohairic Life 27; the relevant Praecepta on dealings with the women’s monastery, Veilleux 1981; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4). By the end of Pachomius’s life the federation included, on the usual reckoning, two monasteries for women alongside its nine or so houses for men (Chitty 1966, ch. 1; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; see The Growth of the Federation).

The Limits of What the Sources Tell Us

It is important to be honest about how little detail the sources give of the women’s communities, and the honesty is itself part of the methodology of this guide (METHODOLOGY §2.4, §3.5). The Lives are written by and for the men’s Koinonia; the nuns appear chiefly when they touch the men’s story (Maria’s arrival, the appointment of Peter, an incident or two of discipline), and we have no women’s Life, no separate rule explicitly for the women, and no first-person voice from the community (Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; Elm 1994; Krawiec 2002). What we can say with confidence is structural: a rule-governed communal monastery for women existed within the Pachomian federation from an early date, set apart from the men, living under the Pachomian discipline, and served spiritually by an appointed elder. What we cannot reconstruct in detail is the inner texture of the women’s own life.

Some uncertainty even attaches to the kinship and the name. [Disputed: the Lives present the founding of the women's monastery through the visit of Pachomius's sister, named Maria in the tradition; the modern scholarship (Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; Elm 1994; Krawiec 2002) accepts that a women's community existed within the federation from Pachomius's lifetime, but notes that the figure of the sister functions partly as a narrative occasion in the Lives and cautions against treating the surrounding details as secure biography.] What the broader study of Egyptian women’s asceticism makes clear — through the work of Susanna Elm and Rebecca Krawiec — is that organized communities of monastic women were a real and significant feature of fourth-century Egyptian Christianity, of which the Pachomian women’s houses are among the earliest and best-attested examples (Elm 1994; Krawiec 2002, on the later Shenoutean federation that inherited the Pachomian model).

The Common Life Adapted

What the sources do allow us to see is that the women’s monastery lived a genuinely cenobitic life on the Pachomian pattern, not a looser or merely domestic asceticism. The nuns held property in common, lived under a rule and a superior, kept the discipline of work and prayer, and were bound into the federation’s spiritual care — the men supplying the elder who instructed them and the heavier external labor, the women governing their own internal life under the same constitution as the men’s houses (Bohairic Life 27; First Greek Life 32; Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4). The strict separation was not a marginalization but the application to the women of the same enclosure and custody that the men observed; the regulation of contact ran in both directions and protected both communities. In extending the full apparatus of the common life — rule, enclosure, common ownership, obedience, the ordered day — to a community of women, the Pachomian Koinonia treated the cenobitic life as a single way of salvation open to both sexes, differing in the circumstances of its practice but not in its essence (Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; Elm 1994).

Significance

For all the thinness of the record, the Pachomian women’s monastery matters. It shows that the cenobitic innovation was, from the start, understood to be a way of salvation for women as well as men — that the common life, the renunciation of property, the rule, and the discipline were extended to nuns living a structured corporate life, not merely to scattered consecrated virgins in their families’ homes (Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; Elm 1994). In this the Pachomian federation anticipated the great double and parallel monastic institutions of later centuries, East and West, and stands near the origin of organized women’s monasticism in the Church (see The Influence on All Monasticism).

References

Veilleux, Armand, trans. Pachomian Koinonia, Vols. 1–2. Cistercian Studies 45–46. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980–1981. (The visit of Maria and the founding of the women’s monastery at Bohairic Life 27 / First Greek Life 32; the appointment of the elder Peter; the Praecepta on dealings with the women’s house.)
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 women’s community within the federation.)
Elm, Susanna. Virgins of God: The Making of Asceticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. (On organized women’s asceticism in fourth-century Egypt and Asia Minor.)
Krawiec, Rebecca. Shenoute and the Women of the White Monastery: Egyptian Monasticism in Late Antiquity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (On the women of the later federation that inherited the Pachomian model.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.