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Updated: June 19, 2025
Pachomius, the founder of the monastery at Tabenna. Truly there is a charm in transporting one's self to that land of the angels one could not wish ever to come out of it."
These sleeping or waking visions, the ordinary effects of abstinence and fanaticism, would almost degrade the emperor to the level of an Egyptian monk. But the useless lives of Antony or Pachomius were consumed in these vain occupations.
Benedict's Rule, as Patrick's quasi-monasticism, nearly two centuries previously, had been influenced by Pachomius and St. Basil, through Lerins. The real peculiarity in Ireland was that when the community-missionary- system was no longer necessary it was not abandoned as in other lands but was rather developed and emphasised.
In the Upper Thebaid, the vacant island of Tabenna was occupied by Pachomius and fourteen hundred of his brethren. That holy abbot successively founded nine monasteries of men and one of women; and the festival of Easter sometimes collected fifty thousand religious persons, who followed his angelic rules of discipline.
If Pachomius had not just then come up, by the Lord I must have sprung into the arena, and have challenged the strongest of them all to wrestle with me, and I could have thrown the disk much farther than the scented puppy who won the victory and was crowned."
"It is a hard thing to be a true monk, and there few who persevere." "Perhaps so," replied Pachomius; "but all people are not alike." "I have already told you," repeated the old man, "that you cannot be a monk here. Go elsewhere and try; if you persevere you can come back." "I would rather stay with you," said Pachomius. "You do not know what you are asking," answered Palemon.
Anthony had advised his imitators to busy themselves with meditation, prayer, and the labour of their hands, and had promised that the fear of God would reside in those who laboured at corporal works; and similar exhortations were to be found in the rules of Saints Macarius, Pachomius, and Basil. St. Augustine and St.
Pachomius had 7000 monks under his direct rule; that in the time of Jerome 50,000 monks gathered together at the Easter festival; that one Egyptian city mustered 20,000 nuns and 10,000 monks, and that the monastic population of Egypt at one time equalled in number the rest of the inhabitants.
Scholarly and magnetic as Abelard, with a certain innate proud poise of the head and shoulders, that ill accorded with the Carlo-Borromeo expression of seraphic serenity and meekness, set like a seal on the large square mouth, he looked a veritable type of the ecclesiastical cenobites who, since the days of Pachomius at Tabennae, have made their hearts altars of the Triple Vows, and girdled the globe with a cable of scholastic mysticism.
Serapion boasted of ten thousand. Altogether, so we are told, there were in the fifth century more than one hundred thousand persons in the monasteries, three-fourths of whom were men. The rule of Pachomius spread over Egypt into Syria and Palestine. It was carried by Athanasius into Italy and Gaul. It existed in various modified forms until it was supplanted by the Benedictine rule.
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