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Course 20 · Lesson 2.4

From the hermit to the community: Pachomius, Basil and Benedict

11 minute read

Lessons in this course

Course 20 outline

Module 1: Spiritual Formation and the Doctrines Behind Prayer

  1. What spiritual formation means in Scripture and tradition
  2. How the Trinity, the Incarnation and grace shape Christian prayer
  3. A map of the prayer traditions: Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant
  4. Ways and stages of growth: purgation, illumination and union, and their critics

Module 2: The Desert and Early Monasticism

  1. Anthony, Athanasius and the beginning of the desert movement
  2. The sayings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers: how to read them
  3. John Cassian and the eight thoughts that trouble the mind
  4. From the hermit to the community: Pachomius, Basil and Benedict

Module 3: Praying with Scripture and with the Church

  1. Lectio divina: its history and the four movements
  2. The Psalms as the prayer of the church
  3. The Divine Office and the Liturgy of the Hours: hours, texts and structure
  4. Using the daily office alone, and the Protestant daily prayer tradition

Module 4: Hesychasm and the Jesus Prayer

  1. Stillness and the prayer of the heart in the early Eastern church
  2. The Jesus Prayer: its words, its sources and its history
  3. Gregory Palamas and the fourteenth century controversy over light and energies
  4. Practice and cautions: the role of a guide and the warnings of the tradition

Module 5: Fasting, Discernment and Spiritual Direction

  1. Fasting in Scripture and in the three traditions
  2. Asceticism: its purpose, its dangers and its abuses
  3. The discernment of spirits from Antony and Cassian to Ignatius of Loyola
  4. Spiritual direction: the elder, the confessor, the pastor and the mentor

Module 6: Contemplation and Action

  1. Mary and Martha: how the church has read the two lives
  2. Prayer that issues in service: Benedict, Brother Lawrence and the Reformers on vocation
  3. When practice goes wrong: pride, quietism and spiritual experience without doctrine

Module 7: Building a Rule of Life

  1. What a rule of life is, and what the word rule meant for Benedict
  2. Choosing practices: Scripture, prayer, fasting, rest and service
  3. Dryness, failure and starting again
  4. Reviewing and adjusting a rule over time

All courses

Program / Course 20: Spiritual Theology / Lesson 2.4

What you will learn

  • Describe how Pachomius organized monks into a common life in Egypt.
  • Explain Basil of Caesarea’s argument for community over solitary life.
  • Summarize the purpose and character of Benedict’s Rule, including its balance of prayer, work and rest.
  • Explain why the move to community mattered for the spiritual theology of the West.

The big idea

The first monks were often solitaries. Within a generation, many Christians concluded that a life of prayer was safer and more fruitful in community. Pachomius gathered monks into organized communities in Egypt in the early fourth century. Basil of Caesarea argued that the commandments of love need other people, and wrote guidance that still shapes Eastern monasticism. Benedict of Nursia, in the sixth century, wrote a moderate Rule for a community under an abbot, and it became the basis of Western monastic life. In each case, the tradition connected the inner life to shared life.

Key terms

Cenobitic monasticism
Monastic life lived in community under a rule and a superior.
Abbot
From the Aramaic abba, father. The superior of a monastery, who is meant to act as a spiritual father.
Rule
A written guide to the common life of a community: its prayers, work, meals, discipline and government.
Stability
In Benedict, the vow to remain in one community for life, as a guard against restlessness.
Obedience
Listening and responding to a superior or to the community’s rule, treated in the monastic tradition as a path to freedom from self-will.
Gyrovague
Benedict’s term for a wandering monk who moves from place to place and follows his own will.

Background

The solitaries of the Egyptian desert often drew disciples, and clusters of cells grew up around famous teachers. This pattern of loosely connected hermits has been called semi-eremitic. It had advantages, but it left each monk largely to himself, and the sayings show that it could produce eccentricity and pride as well as holiness. Early monks saw both gifts and risks in solitude, and some drew the conclusion that a shared life with common rules gave better protection.

Three names stand for the shift. Pachomius, an Egyptian who died around 348, organized monks into large communities under a common rule. Basil of Caesarea, a bishop who died in 379, wrote rules and replies to questions that favored the shared life and linked it to service of the poor. Benedict of Nursia, who lived in the late fifth and early sixth centuries, wrote the Rule that became the standard in the West. Between them they gave Christians a way of life with a stable structure that did not depend on the genius of a single holy person.

This lesson sets out what each contributed and what the tradition saw in common life. The practical details of a daily rule are the subject of Course 25.

Step-by-step explanation

Step 1: Pachomius and the common life

According to the lives written after his death, Pachomius was born to pagan parents in Upper Egypt and was conscripted into the army as a young man. Christians who treated the conscripts kindly impressed him, and after his release he was baptized. He first lived as a solitary under an older ascetic, and then, around the 320s, he gathered monks at a place called Tabennisi and organized them in a shared life.

The Pachomian communities grew into a federation of monasteries with houses grouped by trades and by work, a common table and shared worship. A community of women was led by his sister. Rules attributed to him were later translated into Latin by Jerome. Scholars note that the life stories are mixed with legend, but the main outline is accepted.

Step 2: Basil’s argument for community

Basil, bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, wrote a body of material usually called the Asketikon, with shorter and longer rules in the form of questions and answers. He argued that solitude leaves many commandments unkept. A person alone cannot wash another’s feet, share food with the hungry or correct a brother. He also asked who would correct a solitary’s faults. The Gospels, he said, show life in community as the mark of Christ’s disciples.

Basil insisted that monks work, serve the poor and care for the sick, and some of his foundations included hospitals. His rules remain the basis of monastic life in the Orthodox churches.

Step 3: Benedict and his Rule

Benedict, born in Nursia in Italy, lived as a hermit for a time and later founded the monastery of Monte Cassino. Knowledge of his life comes mostly from the second book of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, a work of edification and not a modern biography. The Rule he wrote, probably in the 530s or 540s, draws on earlier texts, including a rule known as the Rule of the Master. Scholars have long discussed which of the two came first.

Benedict calls his work a little rule for beginners. It sets out the daily round of prayer (the Work of God), reading, manual labor and rest, the duties of the abbot, how to receive guests and how to correct faults. Its tone is moderate. Benedict says he hopes to set down nothing harsh or burdensome.

Step 4: The kinds of monks and the shape of stability

In his first chapter, Benedict names four kinds of monks: the cenobites, who live in a community under a rule and abbot, the anchorites, who go out into solitude after being tested in community, the sarabaites, who live in small groups by their own rules, and the gyrovagues, who wander and serve their own will. He praises the first two and criticizes the others.

The vow of stability binds a monk to his community. Together with obedience and conversion of manners (a phrase scholars read as a lifelong pursuit of reform of life), it forms the center of his teaching on the monk’s promises. The vows serve the aim of seeking God.

Step 5: What community adds to the theology of prayer

The move to community changed how the tradition thought about growth. Humility could be practiced with real people. Obedience, the work of the day and the common office gave shape to prayer. And the tradition could say with Scripture that believers are one body, with many members (1 Corinthians 12:12-27). Community did not end solitude. Benedict allows for it after testing, and monasteries often set time apart. The two were seen as supporting each other.

  1. What does a person gain from living under a common rule that they cannot give themselves?
  2. How do I respond to Basil’s claim that many commandments need other people?
  3. Who corrects me, and have I asked them to?
  4. What does stability protect against, and what does it cost?
  5. How might Benedict’s moderation be a form of spiritual realism?
  6. Where in my life do I behave like a gyrovague?

Examples

Washing feet

Basil’s argument that Jesus’s command to wash one another’s feet needs other people is easily tested. A student who tries to list the commandments of the Sermon on the Mount that can be kept entirely alone finds the list is short. (A classroom exercise.)

A rule for beginners

The Rule says it asks nothing too hard. A modern parish reading group notes that most of its members cannot keep a full monastic day and asks what they can take from it: a fixed time for prayer, a respect for work, and a person to whom they are accountable. (A constructed example.)

The wandering monk

A man who leaves every church after a disagreement and describes himself as seeking the real thing would, in Benedict’s terms, resemble a gyrovague. The Rule does not condemn seeking but warns about a life with no stable place where one can be known and corrected. (A constructed example.)

Different perspectives

Orthodox

Orthodox monasticism follows Basil, with local and Athonite customs. Orthodox writers regard monastic life as a living center of the church, and bishops are usually chosen from the monks. Many lay Orthodox keep to a simpler rule at home with guidance from a priest or elder.

Catholic

Catholic religious orders, including Benedictines, Cistercians and many others, draw on Benedict or on later rules. The Church regards religious life as a gift to the whole body, and lay people may join as oblates, associates attached to a monastery who follow a version of the Rule in their own homes.

Protestant

The Reformers closed many monasteries and objected to vows undertaken as a way of earning merit. Luther himself had been an Augustinian friar. Some Protestant communities, such as Taize in France and some Anglican and Lutheran orders, have revived community life. Other Protestants value the Rule as a source of wisdom for families and congregations without adopting monastic vows.

Scholarly view

Historians stress that the three figures belong to a larger movement, with many other founders, and that rules borrowed from each other. They also point to the economic and social roles monasteries played, as centers of farming, hospitality, copying and care for the poor, alongside their religious purposes.

Why it matters

The tradition of prayer in the West and East was shaped by life in community more than by individual hermits. Knowing why Pachomius, Basil and Benedict made the choices they did helps a student weigh the risks of a purely private practice, and see why even the greatest solitaries sought a teacher and a church.

Common misunderstandings

Misunderstanding: Benedict founded the first monastery.

Correction: Monasteries existed in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Gaul before him. Benedict’s Rule became the standard in the West.

Misunderstanding: Ora et labora, pray and work, is the motto of the Rule.

Correction: The phrase is a later summary and does not appear in the Rule. The Rule does give prayer and work central places, and says that idleness is the enemy of the soul.

Misunderstanding: Monastic obedience means giving up one’s mind.

Correction: The Rule asks for listening and for obedience grounded in love, and it provides for the abbot to consult the community. Abuses have occurred, and the tradition itself acknowledges them.

Misunderstanding: Community and solitude are opposites.

Correction: Benedict allows solitary life after testing in community, and Basil’s rules assume private prayer. The tradition treated each as protecting the other.

Knowledge check

What did Pachomius contribute to early monasticism?

He organized monks into large communities with a common rule, shared work and worship. His communities grew into a federation of monasteries in Egypt, and a women’s house was led by his sister. His rules were translated into Latin by Jerome.

What is Basil’s central argument for community?

Many commandments, such as bearing one another’s burdens and washing one another’s feet, cannot be kept alone. A solitary also has no one to correct his faults. Basil held that life together is the mark of Christ’s disciples, and linked monastic life to service of the poor.

What are the four kinds of monks in Benedict’s first chapter?

Cenobites, who live in community under a rule and abbot, anchorites, who go into solitude after testing in community, sarabaites, who live in small groups under their own rules, and gyrovagues, who wander and follow their own will. Benedict praises the first two.

What is the vow of stability for?

It binds a monk to one community for life. Benedict intends it to counter restlessness, since a monk who can always leave when conflict arises never learns patience or faces his own faults. It is part of seeking God in a particular place and with particular people.

Think it through

  1. What would you lose if you had no community that could correct you?
  2. How do you decide whether a church fits you, and is that the right question?
  3. Where does a rule you did not write teach you something you would not choose?

Independent assignment

Three founders compared

In your notebook, write 350 to 500 words. Read the Prologue and chapter 1 of the Rule of Benedict, and a summary of Pachomius and Basil. Make a table or list comparing what each founder asks of a monk, and then write a paragraph on which element of common life you think would be hardest for you and why. Do not share this with anyone.

Further study