Athanasius and Orthodoxy

Pachomius built his federation in the very years of the Arian crisis, under the patriarchate of St. Athanasius of Alexandria — and he set the Koinonia firmly on the side of Athanasius and the Nicene faith. The Lives record Athanasius’s visit to the Thebaid, Pachomius’s reverence for the patriarch and his refusal of ordination, and the summons that brought Pachomius before a synod of bishops at Latopolis to examine his spiritual claims. This file treats that loyalty, that examination, and the orthodoxy of the early Egyptian monks within the doctrinal turmoil of the age.

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

A Founder in the Age of Arius

Pachomius’s working life (c. 323–348) coincided almost exactly with the storm of the Arian controversy. The Council of Nicaea met in 325, two years or so after the founding at Tabennesi; the long struggle over the divinity of the Son, with Athanasius as its central champion, ran through the very decades in which the Koinonia was taking shape (Chitty 1966, chs. 1, 2; Rousseau 1985, ch. 7). The Egyptian desert was not insulated from these questions. The monks were claimed by both sides as a moral constituency, and the allegiance of the great ascetic communities was a matter of real ecclesiastical weight — as Athanasius well understood, who courted the monks, wrote the Life of Antony, and counted the desert among his strongest supports against the Arians and the imperial pressure behind them (Chitty 1966, ch. 2; Brakke 1995).

Loyalty to Athanasius

The Pachomian tradition places the Koinonia unambiguously on the side of Athanasius. The Lives record that when Athanasius first travelled up the Nile through the Thebaid (the visit is usually dated to about 329/330, early in his episcopate), Pachomius and his monks went out to honor the patriarch, and that Pachomius held Athanasius in the highest reverence as the lawful bishop and defender of the faith (Bohairic Life 28; First Greek Life 30; trans. Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 7; Chitty 1966, ch. 2). The Lives add a telling detail: that on this occasion the bishop of the region (Serapion) wished Athanasius to ordain Pachomius to the priesthood and set him over the clergy of the area, but Pachomius, hearing of it, hid himself to avoid ordination, holding that the monk should flee office and honor (Bohairic Life 28; First Greek Life 30; Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 7). The refusal of ordination is a standard desert ideal — the monk’s flight from clerical rank and authority — and Pachomius’s adherence to it is part of the Lives’ portrait of his humility. It also defines the relation he sought between his communities and the hierarchy: loyal submission to the bishop, but no absorption of the monks into the clerical order.

This loyalty held through the worst of the Athanasian troubles. When Athanasius was driven into exile and the Arianizing party pressed its advantage, the Pachomian federation remained, like the Egyptian desert generally, a bastion of the Nicene cause and of communion with the persecuted patriarch (Chitty 1966, ch. 2; Rousseau 1985, ch. 7). For the full account of Athanasius and his struggle, see St. Athanasius; for the patriarchate of Alexandria under which the Koinonia lived, see Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.

The Synod at Latopolis

One episode shows that the relation between the charismatic monastic founder and the institutional Church was not always frictionless. The Lives record that Pachomius was summoned before a synod of bishops at Latopolis (Latopolis, the modern Esna, in Upper Egypt) to answer for himself (Bohairic Life 112; First Greek Life 112; trans. Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 7; Chitty 1966, ch. 2). The occasion, as the Lives present it, was an examination of Pachomius’s claim to spiritual insight — his gift of discerning spirits and reading hearts (see Visions and Miracles). Some among the clergy and monks, it appears, were uneasy at the authority Pachomius exercised and at the visionary gifts attributed to him, and the synod called him to account.

The Lives report that Pachomius answered with humility, neither boasting of his gifts nor denying the grace of God, and that the matter was resolved without his condemnation (Bohairic Life 112; First Greek Life 112; Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 7). [Disputed: the Lives present the Latopolis synod as an examination of Pachomius's claims to spiritual discernment from which he emerged vindicated; modern scholars (Rousseau 1985, ch. 7; Chitty 1966, ch. 2) read the episode as evidence of real tension between the new, charismatic monastic authority of the founder and the established authority of the episcopate and older clergy, with the synod representing an attempt to bring the powerful and independent monastic leader under hierarchical scrutiny — the details and exact charges remaining uncertain in the sources.]

The Latopolis episode is historically valuable precisely because it complicates the picture. It shows the early Koinonia not as a frictionless extension of the institutional Church but as a new kind of authority that the bishops had to learn to place — a charismatic, lay-led, fast-growing movement whose founder commanded a devotion and exercised a spiritual power that the ordinary structures had not anticipated. Pachomius’s submission to the synod, on the Lives’ telling, is itself a statement: the monk, however gifted, stands under the Church and answers to her bishops (Rousseau 1985, ch. 7).

The Orthodoxy of the Early Monks

Pachomius was no theologian; he wrote no dogmatic treatise, and the doctrinal sophistication of the great councils was not his world. But his orthodoxy was a settled and deliberate stance, and it mattered. The Pachomian tradition is consistently anti-Arian and Nicene, loyal to Athanasius; it is hostile to the Melitian schismatics (the rigorist party that had broken with the Alexandrian Church over the lapsed during the persecution) and to the Manichaean missionaries who were active in Upper Egypt in just these years; and it was wary of the speculative Origenism that would later convulse Egyptian monasticism (Rousseau 1985, ch. 7; Chitty 1966, chs. 1–2; Goehring 1999). The Lives present Pachomius as actively guarding his monks against heresy — examining those who came to enter for unsound belief, and refusing communion with the disciples of error (Bohairic Life; First Greek Life; Veilleux 1980; Rousseau 1985, ch. 7).

The Pachomian wariness toward speculative theology is itself characteristic. Pachomius was a Coptic-speaking man of the countryside, not a Greek-trained controversialist, and the Koinonia‘s orthodoxy was less a matter of doctrinal subtlety than of loyalty and obedience — adherence to the Nicene faith as held by the lawful patriarch of Alexandria, and a corresponding suspicion of novelty and of the disputatious spirit. The Lives present Pachomius as discouraging idle theological speculation among his monks and as directing them rather to the Scriptures, to prayer, and to the practical work of salvation in the common life (Rousseau 1985, ch. 7; Veilleux 1980). This is not anti-intellectualism so much as a particular ascetic temper — the conviction that the monk’s business is the purification of the heart and the keeping of the commandments, and that doctrinal fidelity is best secured by communion with the orthodox hierarchy rather than by private inquiry. It is a temper that would recur throughout the monastic tradition, and that made the great communities, including the Pachomian, a stabilizing and conserving force in the doctrinal storms of the age (Chitty 1966, ch. 2; Rousseau 1985, ch. 7).

This matters for the larger history of the Church. The alliance of monasticism with orthodoxy — the desert and the great communities ranged on the side of Nicaea and the canonical hierarchy against heresy — was one of the decisive facts of the fourth century, and Pachomius’s Koinonia, the largest organized monastic body of its day, threw its weight on the orthodox side. When Athanasius needed the moral authority of the monks, the Pachomians were among those he could count on. The father of cenobitic monasticism thus stands not only at the origin of an institution but within the great fourth-century settlement by which the ascetic movement and the orthodox episcopate became allies rather than rivals (Chitty 1966, ch. 2; Brakke 1995; Rousseau 1985, ch. 7).

References

Veilleux, Armand, trans. Pachomian Koinonia, Vol. 1: The Life of Saint Pachomius and His Disciples. Cistercian Studies 45. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980. (Athanasius’s visit and the flight from ordination at Bohairic Life 28 / First Greek Life 30; the synod at Latopolis at Bo 112 / G1 112.)
Rousseau, Philip. Pachomius: The Making of a Community in Fourth-Century Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985; rev. ed. 1999. (Ch. 7 on Pachomius, the Church, Athanasius, and Latopolis.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (Chs. 1–2 on the monks and the Arian crisis.)
Brakke, David. Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. (On Athanasius’s relations with the monks.)
Goehring, James E. Ascetics, Society, and the Desert. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999.