Catholic News Agency: St. Pachomius can justifiably be called the founder of of cenobitic monasticism, monks who live in community. Even though St. Antony the Great was the first to go into the desert to live a life of seclusion pursuing evangelical perfection, he lived a heremitic life, that is, a primarily solitary life.
Pachomius first started out as a hermit in the desert, like many of the other men and women in the third and fourth centuries who sought the most radical expression of Christian life. There he developed a very strong bond of friendship with the hermit Palemon. One day during prayer, he had a vision in which he was called to build a monastery, and was told in the vision that many people who were eager to live an ascetic life in the desert, but were not inclined to the solitary life of a hermit, would come and join him. His hermit friend, Palemon, helped him to build the monastery and Pachomius insisted that his cenobites were to aspire to the austerity of the hermits.
However, Pachomius knew that his idea was a radical one, because most of the men who came to live in his monastery had only ever conceived of the eremitic lifestyle. His great accomplishment was to reconcile this desire for austere perfection with an openness to fulfilling the mundane requirements of community life as an expression of Christian love and service. He spent most of his first years as a cenobitic doing all the menial work on his own, knowing that his brother monks needed to be gently inducted into serving their brothers in the same manner. He therefore allowed them to devote all their time to spiritual exercises in those first years. At his death, there were eleven Pachomian monasteries: nine for men and two for women.
The rule that Pachomius drew up was said to have been dictated to him by an angel, and it is this rule that both St. Benedict in the west and St. Basil in the east drew upon to develop their better known rules of cenobitic life. St. Pachomius died in the year 346.
21. My son, be merciful in all things, for it is written, Strive to be presented to God as having come through trial, like a workman who fears no shame (2 Tm 2:15). Approach God as one who sows and reaps, and into your granary you will gather God’s goods. Do not pray with much show, in the manner of hypocrites, but give up your whims and do what you do for God, acting thus for your own salvation. If a passion arouses you, whether it is love of money, jealousy, or hatred and the other passions, watch out, have the heart of a lion (2 S 17:10), a strong heart. Fight against them, make them disappear like Sihon, Og, and all the kings of the Amorites. May the beloved Son, the Only-begotten, Jesus the king, fight for you, and may you inherit enemy towns. Still, toss all pride far from your side, and be valiant. Look: when Joshua (son) of Nun was valiant, God delivered his enemies into his hands. If you are fainthearted, you become a stranger to the law of God. Faintheartedness fills you with pretexts for laziness, mistrust, and negligence, until you are destroyed. Be lion-hearted and shout, you as well, Who can separate us from the love of God (Rm 8:35)? And say, Though my outer self may dissolve, still my inner self is renewed from day to day (2 Co 4:16). St. Pachomius the Great
