The very first coenobite in
Pachomian Koinonia. Volume I: The Life of St. Pachomius and His Disciples. Trans. Armand Veilleux, OCSO. Cistercian Studies 45.
Pachomian Koinonia. Volume II: Pachomian Chronicles and Rules. Trans. Armand Veilleux, OCSO. Cistercian Studies 46.
Pachomian Koinonia. Volume III: Instructions, Letters, and Other Writings of St. Pachomius and His Disciples. Trans. Armand Veilleux, OCSO. Cistercian Studies 47.
What should be understood, however, and what becomes clear from the Lives, is that St Pachomios was very much in the tradition of the solitary desert ascetic with his single disciple. St Pachomios’ coenobitical monasticism is essentially the use of certain ideas from the army of the day to organize monks into large groups of solitary ascetics. That is to say, the spirituality and life of St Pachomios’ monasteries is much more like the life of the solitary desert ascetics than it is like the life of the coenobitical monasteries of the Medieval West (Benedictine monasticism after the reform of Benedict of Aniane, friend of Charlemagne) or even the coenobitical monasteries of that great legislator of coenobitical monasticism, St Basil the Great. The emphasis in the Pachomian monastery was on providing a place where the somewhat weaker ascetic could engage in Egyptian desert asceticism, as briefly described in an earlier post, without all the difficulties associated with a completely solitary life. Most coenobitical monks today would find Pachomian coenobitical monasticism fearsomely ascetical and psychologically isolating.
It is noteworthy that St John Cassian, writing in
Virtually all the women who were monastics in
We will next see what changes St Basil the Great introduced into monasticism.