Ecumenical Commemoration
Abbot & Organizer of Monasticism
May 15 · d. 346
also known as Pachomius the Great, Pachomios
Pachomius (c. 292 to c. 346) was an Egyptian monk of the Thebaid who founded the first organized communal monastery, at Tabennese on the Nile. Converted after Christians brought food to the conscripts he was held with, and trained seven years by the hermit Palamon, he gave the monastic life a written rule, shared work, common meals, and a house that could hold thousands. By his death the federation counted nine monasteries for men and two for women. His feast is May 15; his own Coptic church keeps him on May 9.
In the year 312 a young man named Pachomius was taken by a Roman levy in Upper Egypt and shut up under guard at Thebes, on the river. He was twenty years old and a pagan, the son of pagan parents, and he had no reason to expect kindness from anyone. Then strangers came down to the place where the conscripts were held and brought them food, and comforted them, and went away again. Pachomius asked who these people were. They were Christians, he was told, and this is what Christians do.
He never forgot it. Released without ever seeing battle, he went and was baptized at the village of Sheneset, and for three years he simply served the poor of that village, as he had been served. Then he went out to a hermit named Palamon, who lived nearby and was already a model to many, and asked for the grace to become a monk in his company. Palamon tested him first, as such men did, and then took him. For seven years Pachomius kept the old man's regimen: vigils through the night with the Scriptures recited aloud, fasting until sundown in summer, two and three days at a stretch in winter. And Palamon, who could have claimed to have invented all of it, said instead that he was teaching the rule of monastic life, according to what we have learned from those who went before us. The whole thing had been handed to him, and he was handing it on.
Then Pachomius heard a voice at a place called Tabennese, telling him to stay there and build, and promising him that very many eager to embrace the monastic life would come to him. He stayed and he built. His own brother came and joined him. And the promise turned out to be the sort that keeps coming true for years after the man who received it has stopped counting: monks arrived, and then whole communities elsewhere asked to be folded in, and Pachomius wrote down how the life was to be lived, hour by hour, meal by meal, task by task, so that the weak as well as the strong could hold to it. His sister came too, and he would not receive her face to face; he sent her word instead, and sent her the rules he had written for the brothers, and a community of women gathered around her across the way, and a church had to be built for them.
None of it went smoothly, and the sources did not pretend otherwise. His first attempt at a common life failed. In 345 a synod of bishops at Latopolis summoned him to answer for his claim to see into men's souls, and one recension of his life remembers a man in that crowd coming at him with a sword. Pachomius went home and kept working. When the plague came through the following year it took about a hundred of his monks and then it took him, and he asked to be buried in a hidden place, so that no shrine would rise over his body. There is no tomb. There never was one.
What there is instead is what he wanted there to be. At his death some five thousand monks were living the life he had ordered, in nine houses, with the sisters in their two. He had written, out of his own long fight, that patience is the pride of the saints, and that through patience the saints received all that was promised them. He was right about the patience, and he lived long enough to see a little of the promise.
You will not be handed a brass tablet. What Pachomius actually received was a fed meal in a guardhouse from people who did not know his name, and seven years of a rule some older man had learned from someone older still, and the two of them together were enough to organize a life. He wrote that patience is what reveals every grace to you, and that it was through patience the saints received what was promised them; he wrote it as a man who had spent decades on one work and buried a hundred of his brothers before it was finished. Most of what you are given will arrive in that form, ordinary and handed on and slower than you want. What is being asked of you today that you would rather do heroically than daily?
Almost everything known about Pachomius comes through his own monks. The Life survives in Sahidic and Bohairic Coptic, in Greek, in Arabic and in Latin, in interlocking recensions that were, in Armand Veilleux's words, often copied, translated, rearranged and combined; the earliest strata were composed by disciples within a generation of his death, drawing on the recollections of Theodore. The oldest surviving witness outside that family is Palladius, whose Lausiac History was written about 419 or 420 by a man who had travelled in Egypt in the 390s and spoken with people who knew the community, among them Arsisius of Nitria. Sozomen carries much of the same material a generation later, about 439 to 450. Both are admiring, and both are at a remove.
The outline is not in serious dispute: birth in the Thebaid about 292, conscription in 312, baptism at Sheneset, seven years under Palamon, the foundation at Tabennese between 318 and 323, the later headquarters at Pbow, the Synod of Latopolis in 345, and death in an epidemic. The date of that death is contested. Veilleux, who translated the whole Pachomian corpus into English, heads his article "Pachomius, Saint (292 to 346)," and the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia agrees with "died about 346"; the succession that follows, Petronius for three months, then Horsiesius from 346, Theodore from 350, Horsiesius again from 368, is built outward from that anchor. The Coptic Synaxarium instead dates his departure to the year 64 of the Era of the Martyrs, which converts soundly to 348, and that is the date his own church keeps. This page follows 346 and notes 348 as the Coptic reading.
The community's size is reported in five figures that measure different things and were never reconciled by anyone who reported them: 1,300 at the first and greatest monastery and about 7,000 in the federation (Palladius, with Sozomen agreeing on the larger number); 1,400 at the first monastery elsewhere in Palladius; 3,000 under him, on the testimony of Arsisius, who had known him; and 5,000 in nine monasteries, with the nuns in their two convents, in Veilleux's reckoning for the year 346. They should be held apart rather than averaged.
Two things are candidly disputed. The first is the angel and the tablet. Palladius reports that an angel in the monastic habit gave Pachomius a brass tablet inscribed with the ordinance: twelve prayers by day, twelve at lamp-lighting, twelve in the night vigils, three at the ninth hour, food rationed to a man's strength, work assigned by ability, the community divided into twenty-four grades named for the letters of the Greek alphabet, and a three-year novitiate. Sozomen repeats the story but specifies no metal, saying only that a tablet was given and was still carefully preserved. Modern historians read the surviving Rule as accreted custom rather than a single revealed document, and Ladeuze argued in 1898 that every account of the angelic rule descends from Palladius and that in some important points it was never followed by Pachomius or his monks. The church has told the story for sixteen centuries; its origin is unrecoverable independent of that testimony.
His own church keeps him on 14 Bashans, which the Coptic Synaxarium equates with 9 May; the West, most of the Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican use keep 15 May, and Lutherans commemorate him on 17 January together with Anthony of Egypt as a renewer of the church. A quieter Western tradition put him on 14 May: Jacques Callot's engraving of him, one of four oval scenes on a plate from Les Images de tous les saincts et saintes de l'année, is titled "St. Pachôme, abbé, May 14th," and the Bollandists placed a Florentine manuscript of his Rule under that same day.
In icons he is almost always shown receiving rather than ruling: an angel, dressed in the monastic habit, hands him the Rule, and Pachomius leans back with both palms raised in astonishment. In Western art he acquired a second attribute, fording the Nile on the back of a crocodile that carries him out of reverence, as the lion serves Jerome. That one is legend, and no Life has been found to carry it.
He left no relics, and this is not an accident of history but the tradition's own memory of his last instruction, that he be buried where no shrine could grow. There is no tomb, no translation, no competing claim. Of his nine houses none survives as a community: Pbow, where he died, lies at Faw Qibli near Nag Hammadi, its basilica columns still lying at the surface. The devotion continues instead in living foundations, among them St. Pakhomious's El-Shaieb Monastery near Luxor, recognized by the Coptic Holy Synod in 1998, whose name comes from a tradition that he still appears there as an old man with white hair and a grey beard.
Palladius, Lausiac History, chapters VII, XVIII and XXXII, composed about 419 to 420, supplies the angel and the brass tablet, the prayer ordinance and the twenty-four lettered grades, and the figures 1,300, 1,400, 3,000 and 7,000; W. K. L. Clarke's 1918 English translation is in the public domain and is available at https://www.tertullian.org/fathers/palladius_lausiac_02_text.htm#C32. Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History III.14, gives the tablet without a metal and the mother-house at Tabenna, at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/26023.htm.
The quotations here are all from Armand Veilleux, Pachomian Koinonia III: Instructions, Letters, and Other Writings of Saint Pachomius and His Disciples (Cistercian Studies 47; Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1982). "Patience is the pride of the saints," with the clause about the saints receiving all that was promised them, is Instruction Concerning a Spiteful Monk §7, at pages 14 to 15; the instruction survives in exactly one manuscript, British Library Or. 7024, folios 18r to 49v, with a colophon dated AD 985, first published by E. A. Wallis Budge in 1913. Anthony Alcock's independent 2022 translation from Budge renders the same sentence "Patience is the glory of the saints." Veilleux's own introduction (pages 4 to 5) cautions that the instruction incorporates a long quotation from a homily of Athanasius and an aphorism attributed to Evagrius Ponticus, which permits the view that it is a literary composition by a Pachomian monk rather than an instruction given in that form by Pachomius himself.
Palamon's sentence about "the rule of monastic life, according to what we have learned from those who went before us," the dating of the conscription to 312, the figure of 5,000 monks in nine monasteries for the year 346, the manuscript stemma, and the primary references for the sister (SBo 27 and G¹ 32, with S¹ 11 and 17) are all in Veilleux's signed articles "Pachomius, Saint" (CE:1859a to 1864b) and "Palamon, Saint" (CE:1876a to 1876b) in The Coptic Encyclopedia, https://ccdl.claremont.edu/digital/api/collection/cce/id/1497/download. The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia, https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11381a.htm, supplies "died about 346," the nine men's houses and two women's, the founding promise that "very many eager to embrace the monastic life will come hither to thee," the note that Chenoboskion joined the order rather than being founded by it, and Ladeuze's 1898 judgement on the angelic rule. The Coptic Synaxarium for 14 Bashans, giving the year 64 A.M., is at https://st-takla.org/books/en/church/synaxarium/09-bashans/14-pashans-pachomius.html.
On Latopolis, see Lance Jenott, "Clergy, Clairvoyance, and Conflict: The Synod of Latopolis and the Problem with Pachomius' Visions," in Beyond the Gnostic Gospels (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), pages 320 to 334. For the Rule's transmission, A. Boon, Pachomiana Latina (Bibliothèque de la Revue d'Histoire Ecclésiastique 7; Louvain, 1932) is the critical edition of Jerome's Latin; its earliest manuscript is Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 28228, folios 29 to 36, ninth century. The Coptic Lives are edited by L. T. Lefort in CSCO 89 and 107, CSCO 99 to 100, and Les vies coptes de saint Pachôme et de ses premiers successeurs (Bibliothèque du Muséon 16; Louvain, 1953); the Greek by François Halkin, Sancti Pachomii vitae Graecae (Subsidia Hagiographica 19; Brussels, 1932); the Latin retranslation by H. van Cranenburgh (Subsidia Hagiographica 46; Brussels, 1969); and the letters by Hans Quecke, Die Briefe Pachoms (Textus Patristici et Liturgici 11; Regensburg, 1975). Callot's engraving is Metropolitan Museum of Art object 419683.
The second is Latopolis. The bishops questioned his claim to discern the state of men's souls, and here the recensions diverge in temperature: the Greek Vita resolves the episode harmoniously, while the Arabic keeps the threat and the sword. Lance Jenott argued in 2013 that the bishops' real objection was jurisdictional, that Pachomius was using divine sanction as leverage to expand his federation into their territory. What is notable is that the tradition preserved the conflict at all, and preserved its own critics along with its saint.
A word on the Rule itself. It evolved under Pachomius and then under Theodore and Horsiesius, and the Coptic original is lost. The only complete surviving text is Jerome's Latin translation of 404, made at the monastery of Metanoia near Alexandria from a Greek version of Coptic books. Anyone reading "the Rule of Pachomius" in English is at three removes from the man.
O God, your blessed Son became poor for our sake, and chose the Cross over the kingdoms of this world: Deliver us from an inordinate love of worldly things, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant Pachomius, may seek you with singleness of heart, behold your glory by faith, and attain to the riches of your everlasting kingdom, where we shall be united with our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
British (Received Pronunciation): Nursia /ˈnɜːrʃə/
Readings for a Monastic or Religious
Lamentations 3:22–33Psalm 1Hebrews 4:1–13 or Acts 2:42–47Mark 10:23–31