SAINT PACHOMIUS (347)

Founder of Christian cenobitic (communal) monasticism whose rule (book of observances) for monks is the earliest extant.

Of Egyptian origin he encountered Coptic or Egyptian Christianity among his cohorts in the Roman emperor Constantine´s North African army and on leaving the military c.314 withdrew alone into the wilderness at Chenoboskion near his Thebian home.

Soon after he joined the hermit Palemon and a colony of solitaries (anchorites) in the same area at Tabennisi on the east bank of the Nile.

With a talent for administration Pachomius built the first monastic enclosure replacing the scattered hermits´ shelters and he drew up a common daily program providing for proportioned periods of work and prayer patterned about a cooperative economic and disciplinary regimen.

This Rule was the first instance in Christian monastic history of the use a cenobitic or uniform communal, existence as the norm and to depart from the individualistic, exclusively contemplative nature of previous religious life.

Pachomius moreover instituted a monarchic monastic structure that viewed the relationship of the religious superior´s centralized authority over the community as the symbolic image of God evoking obedient response from man striving to overcome his egocentrism by self-denial and charity.

By the time he died Pachomius had founded 11 monasteries numbering more than 7,000 monks and nuns.

Though none of Pachomius´ manuscripts have survived his life and bibliograohy have been preserved by the 5th-century historian Palladius in his Lausiac History.
The Rule of Pachomius is extant only in the early-5th-century Latin translation of St. Jerome.