The Letters and Jerome’s Latin Rule

Besides the Lives written about him, two bodies of text come from the Pachomian community itself: Pachomius’s own Letters, a small and famously cryptic corpus partly written in a mysterious “spiritual alphabet” whose key is lost, and the Rule — the precepts that ordered the Koinonia. The Rule survives most fully not in its original Coptic but in the Latin translation made by St. Jerome in 404, undertaken at the request of Latin-speaking monks in Egypt and destined, by a momentous accident of transmission, to carry the Pachomian cenobitic system into the heart of the Western Church.

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

The Letters of Pachomius

Among the most intriguing — and most difficult — of the Pachomian sources are the Letters attributed to Pachomius himself, addressed to the superiors and houses of the Koinonia. They are short, occasional, and often strikingly obscure: alongside straightforward exhortation, several of them deploy a kind of secret or symbolic alphabet — sequences of letters of the alphabet used as ciphers or mystical signs, whose key Pachomius evidently shared with his closest disciples but which is now lost, so that the meaning of these passages is uncertain (Veilleux 1982, introduction to the Letters; Rousseau 1985, ch. 3; Joest 1996). The Letters survive in Coptic and Greek fragments and, importantly, in a Latin translation also made by St. Jerome (in the same 404 undertaking that produced the Latin Rule), which is one of the reasons we have them at all (Jerome, Preface; Veilleux 1982).

The “spiritual alphabet” of the Letters has fascinated and frustrated scholars. [Disputed: the meaning of the cryptic letter-sequences in Pachomius's Letters is genuinely uncertain — proposals range from a private cipher shared among the monastic leadership, to a mnemonic or numerological/allegorical system, to a form of angelic or "spiritual" language; Veilleux (1982) and Rousseau (1985, ch. 3) present the obscurity as real and the key as lost, declining to claim a decipherment, while later studies (e.g., Joest 1996) have proposed partial reconstructions that remain debated.] Whatever their solution, the Letters are precious as the founder’s own voice — rare direct testimony, behind the later Lives, to the mind of the man himself, his concern for the unity and discipline of the houses, and his sense of the Koinonia as a single spiritual body (Veilleux 1982; Rousseau 1985, ch. 3).

To the Letters should be added the other writings of the Koinonia‘s leadership translated in Veilleux’s third volume — the Catecheses (instructions) attributed to Pachomius and Theodore, and the writings of Horsiesios, especially his Book (the Liber Orsiesii / Testament of Horsiesios), a sustained meditation on the common life that is one of the theological treasures of early cenobitism (Veilleux 1982; Rousseau 1985, ch. 6; see Community as the Way of Salvation).

The Rule and Its Languages

The Pachomian Rule — the Praecepta and the related collections (see The First Cenobitic Rule) — was composed in Coptic, the language of the Koinonia. But the original Coptic text survives only in fragments; the Rule comes down to us substantially complete only in two translations: a Greek version (also fragmentary) and, above all, the Latin version of St. Jerome (Veilleux 1981, introduction; Chitty 1966, ch. 1). This is a striking situation: the foundational rule of cenobitic monasticism, written by a Copt for Copts, is preserved chiefly in the Latin of a Western father. The text-critical task of reconstructing the original therefore depends heavily on Jerome’s Latin, checked against the Coptic and Greek fragments — which makes Jerome’s translation not a curiosity but the principal witness to the Rule itself (Veilleux 1981; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4).

St. Jerome’s Translation of 404

The circumstances of Jerome’s translation are known from his own Preface to the work. By the early fifth century there were communities of Latin-speaking monks and nuns in Egypt and Palestine — Westerners drawn to the holy places and to the monastic life of the East — and among the Pachomian foundations there was, the tradition holds, a house that had come to include such Latin-speakers (Jerome, Preface to the Rule of Pachomius; Veilleux 1981, introduction; Chitty 1966, ch. 1). For their sake, a copy of the Pachomian Rule and Letters (in a Greek version made from the Coptic) was sent to Jerome at Bethlehem, with the request that he render it into Latin; and in 404 he did so, producing the Latin translation of the Praecepta and the Letters that is now our fullest text (Jerome, Preface; Veilleux 1981). Jerome — the greatest Latin translator of his age, already the author of the Vulgate — thus became the conduit through which the Pachomian system entered the Latin world.

The Momentous Accident

The consequences of this translation were out of all proportion to its modest occasion. Jerome had translated the Rule simply to serve a few Latin monks in the East; but the Latin text, once made, circulated in the West, where it became one of the channels — alongside the Life of Antony in Latin, the Conferences and Institutes of John Cassian, and the History of the Monks and Lausiac History — by which the monasticism of Egypt was made available to Latin Christendom (Chitty 1966, ch. 1; Rousseau 1985, ch. 4; de Vogüé 1991). When, a century and more later, St. Benedict of Nursia composed his Rule, he wrote within a Latin monastic tradition already shaped by these Egyptian sources, and the Pachomian elements — the primacy of the cenobitic life, the ordered day of work and prayer, the role of the superior, the common ownership — had become part of the inheritance he received and transmitted (de Vogüé 1991; Chitty 1966, ch. 1; see The Influence on All Monasticism and St. Benedict of Nursia). Benedict himself, at the close of his Rule, points his monks to the Egyptian fathers — to Cassian and to “the Rule of our holy father Basil” — as the higher authorities behind his own (Rule of St. Benedict 73; de Vogüé 1991).

It is one of the quiet ironies of monastic history that the Rule of an Upper-Egyptian Copt who may never have written a word of Greek or Latin reached Benedict, and through Benedict the whole Latin West, by way of a translation Jerome made almost in passing for a handful of homesick Western monks. Without Jerome’s Latin, the Pachomian Rule might have been as fragmentary in the record as it is in the original Coptic; with it, Pachomius’s institution became a permanent possession of the universal Church (Veilleux 1981; Chitty 1966, ch. 1; de Vogüé 1991).

References

Veilleux, Armand, trans. Pachomian Koinonia, Vol. 2: Pachomian Chronicles and Rules (Cistercian Studies 46, 1981) and Vol. 3: Instructions, Letters, and Other Writings of Saint Pachomius and His Disciples (Cistercian Studies 47, 1982). Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications. (The Rule in its Latin, Greek, and Coptic forms; the Letters and the cryptic alphabet; the Catecheses and the Book of Horsiesios; introductions on the transmission.)
Jerome. Preface to the Rule of Pachomius (404). Translated in Veilleux, Pachomian Koinonia, Vol. 2. (Jerome’s own account of the occasion and method of his translation.)
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 Letters and the Rule.)
Joest, Christoph. “Die Geheimschrift Pachoms.” Le Muséon (1996). (A study of the cryptic alphabet of the Letters.)
de Vogüé, Adalbert. The Rule of Saint Benedict: A Doctrinal and Spiritual Commentary. Cistercian Studies 54. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1991. (On the Egyptian, including Pachomian, sources behind Benedict.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966.