In the Life of Pachomius, we read of how, as a youth, he could eschew the idolatry of his parents and was lead by God to the truth (read: Eastern Orthodoxy). It reminds one of the common theme of religious figures, in their youth, indicating, in varying degrees, signs that God was working with them, often to lead them out of false traditions:
The
Life of Pachomius (n.d.)
The
Life of Pachomius, trans. Apostolos N. Athanassakis (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press,
1975), 5-167
The Life of
Pachomius is an anonymously authored biography of the man widely considered
to be the founder of “cenobitic,” or communal, monasticism, a form of
monasticism much different from the hermetic life described in the Life of
St. Antony and the Sayings of the Deseret Fathers.
When Pachomius (ca. 292-34/8)
first decided to become a monk, he followed the example of St. Antony and his
immediate successors by adopting a solitary life. But then, according to this
biography, God instructed Pachomius to build a monastery to house the first
community of cenobitic monks. The site was Tabenna (Tabennesis in the text
below), an island in the Nile River in upper Egypt.
Although The Life of Pachomius celebrates
the ascetic example of Antony, and although it takes pains to demonstrate the
Pachomius managed ascetic feats, it ultimately promotes an anti-individualistic
(and hence somewhat anti-Antonian) ideal of monasticism as community.
For Pachomius, monasticism—as ordered by God through an angel—centers around a
godly community of “brothers” and “sisters,” not isolated people devoted to
individual feats.
This biography, a case study of
sorts on the possibility of shared struggle and support, served as an important
example of new coenobitic monasteries. Pachomius himself helped establish
hundreds of such communities, and his work inspired many more. In 357-358 St.
Basil (the Cappadocian father who worked on Trinitarian matters with the two
Gregories) visited Pachomius’s monastery, an experience that inspired Basil to
form his own community patterned on Pachomius’s model.
[. . .] There was a man named
Pachomius, born of pagan parents in the Thebaid (a region populated by monks in
the upper part of the Nile River Valley in northern Egypt), who, having
received mercy, became a Christian. He made progress and achieved perfection as
a monk. It is necessary to account his life from childhood on for the glory of
God, who calls everyone from everywhere to his wondrous light.
It happened that the child went
with his parents to an idol’s temple to sacrifice to the phantoms of evil
spirits in the river. And when the priest in charge of the sacrifice saw him,
he had him chased away, and furiously cried, “Chase away from here the enemy of
the gods!” When his parents heard this, they were greatly grieved about him
because he was an enemy of the so-called gods, who are no gods at all,
especially since once at another time they had given him to drink of the
wine-libations in that same place, and the child forthwith vomited what he had
drunk [. . . ] (Bryn Geffert and Theofanis G. Stavrou, Eastern Orthodox
Christianity: The Essential Texts [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016],
98-99)
