Feast and Cult

St. Pachomius the Great is venerated across the Christian East and West as a venerable father and founder of the communal monastic life. His principal feast is kept on 15 May, the traditional date of his repose, in the Orthodox, Coptic, and Western calendars alike. This file treats the commemoration — its date and breadth, his place in the synaxaria and the monastic patericons, his iconography (including the angel-and-tablet motif), and the shape of a cult centered not on spectacular wonders but on his fatherhood of the cenobitic life.

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

The Feast: 15 May

The feast of St. Pachomius the Great is celebrated on 15 May, the traditional anniversary of his death in 348 (see The Death and the Succession). The date is shared across the calendars: the Eastern Orthodox Churches commemorate him as “our venerable father Pachomius the Great” on 15 May (with the usual Julian/Gregorian distinction, so that Churches following the older calendar keep the day on what is, civilly, 28 May); the Coptic Orthodox Church, in whose homeland he labored and whose monasticism he founded, honors him among the greatest of its fathers; and the Roman martyrology likewise commemorates him on or about 15 May (the standard reference works and synaxaria converge on this date; Chitty 1966; Holweck 1924). The breadth of the commemoration — Orthodox, Coptic, and Western — reflects the universality of his achievement: the cenobitic form belongs to the whole Church, and so does its founder.

Pachomius in the Synaxaria and Patericons

Pachomius’s memory is carried in the Church’s books of the saints. He appears in the synaxaria (the liturgical compendia of the saints commemorated through the year) under 15 May, with a notice rehearsing his conversion from paganism, his founding of the communal life, and his fatherhood of multitudes of monks. He is named among the great fathers in the patericons and the literature of the desert, and his sayings and example are gathered with those of the other founders of monasticism (Chitty 1966; Veilleux 1980, introduction). In the Slavic and Greek monastic tradition his name stands in the litanies and prayers that invoke the holy fathers, and he is reckoned among the company of the great ascetic saints to whom the monastic life looks back as to its founders.

It is characteristic of his cult that it rests on his institution rather than on any single dramatic miracle. Where some saints are remembered chiefly for a wonder or a martyrdom, Pachomius is remembered for what he built — the common life — and his liturgical commemoration honors him precisely as the father of the cenobitic monasticism that fills the Church’s monasteries (Harmless 2004, ch. 5; see Legacy and Assessment).

Iconography

In the iconographic tradition Pachomius is depicted as an aged monk in the monastic habit — bearded, holding a scroll or a cross, in the manner of the venerable desert fathers. The most distinctive iconographic motif proper to him is the angel and the tablet: Pachomius is shown receiving the rule of the monastic life from an angel, who hands him the tablet on which the rule is written, an image drawn directly from the tradition reported by Palladius and the Lives (Palladius, Lausiac History 32; see The Call at Tabennesi). The motif visually asserts what the tradition means by the angel-rule story — that the cenobitic life is a God-given way, sanctioned from heaven — and it is the chief way Pachomius is recognized in the iconographic tradition (the angel-rule tradition itself is handled as a structured [Disputed] matter at The Call at Tabennesi, and the iconography is to be read as a depiction of the tradition, not as a claim of historical fact, per METHODOLOGY §3.5).

Pachomius and Theodore in the Calendar

The Pachomian commemoration in the Orthodox calendar does not stand alone: Pachomius is remembered together with the disciples through whom his work survived, and especially with St. Theodore the Sanctified (Theodore of Tabennesi), the beloved disciple who held the Koinonia together after the founder’s death (see The Death and the Succession). Theodore has his own commemoration in the Eastern calendar, and the pairing of master and disciple in the Church’s memory reflects the historical reality that the cenobitic institution was the achievement not of one man alone but of a founding generation — Pachomius, Theodore, Horsiesios, and Petronios — whose names are carried together in the monastic tradition (Veilleux 1980, introduction; Chitty 1966, ch. 3). The synaxarion notices for these fathers reinforce one another, and the cult of Pachomius is in practice inseparable from the memory of the Koinonia he founded and they preserved.

The Shape of the Cult

The cult of Pachomius has its natural home in the monastic life. He is a patron and exemplar of monks, and above all of cenobites — those who live the very common life he founded. His veneration is woven into the self-understanding of communal monasticism: the cenobitic monk looks back to Pachomius as to the father of his way of life, much as the hermit looks back to Antony. In the great cenobitic monasteries of the Orthodox East — and historically in the Coptic monasteries of his own Egypt — his memory is kept as that of a founding father, and his example is set before novices as the pattern of the obedient, common, ordered life (Chitty 1966; Veilleux 1980; see The Pachomian Legacy in the East).

There is a fittingness in this that the tradition itself perceives. The hermit’s holiness is, in a sense, complete in the single sanctified soul; the cenobite’s holiness is realized in and through a community, and so the cult of the founder of the common life is naturally a communal cult — kept by communities, in their common worship, and most fully expressed not by the veneration of an individual shrine but by the continued living of the life he founded. To keep the feast of Pachomius worthily is, in the end, to live as a cenobite: to hold all things in common, to bear one another’s burdens, to obey, and so to be saved together (see Community as the Way of Salvation). The shape of his cult thus mirrors the shape of his achievement.

His relics and the precise later history of his shrine are not securely traceable in the way some saints’ are, and the historic center of his cult — the great monastery at Phbow — eventually fell into ruin with the decline of the federation (see The Pachomian Legacy in the East; Goehring 1999; Chitty 1966, ch. 3). But the cult did not depend on a shrine. It lived, and lives, in the liturgical commemoration on 15 May and, more deeply, in the continuing existence of the very institution he founded: every cenobitic monastery is, in a sense, his living monument, and the prayers of his monastic descendants are the truest form of his veneration (Harmless 2004, ch. 5; see Legacy and Assessment).

References

Veilleux, Armand, trans. Pachomian Koinonia, Vol. 1: The Life of Saint Pachomius and His Disciples. Cistercian Studies 45. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1980. (The Lives behind the commemoration and the iconographic tradition.)
Palladius. The Lausiac History, ch. 32. Trans. Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. 1965. (The angel-and-tablet tradition behind the iconography.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The commemoration and the later history of the cult and the houses.)
Holweck, Frederick G. A Biographical Dictionary of the Saints. St. Louis: B. Herder, 1924. (The Western commemoration on 15 May.)
Goehring, James E. Ascetics, Society, and the Desert. Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999.
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.