St. Pachomius was born about 292 in the Upper Thebaid in Egypt and was inducted into the Emperor's army as a twenty-year-old. The great kindness of Christians at Thebes toward the soldiers became embedded in his mind and led to his conversion after his discharge.

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.

Before his death in 346, there were seven thousand monks in his houses, and his Order lasted in the East until the 11th century.

St. Pachomius was the first monk to organize hermits into groups and write down a Rule for them. Both St. Basil and St. Benedict drew from his Rule in setting forth their own more famous ones. Hence, though St. Anthony is usually regarded as the founder of Christian monasticism, it was really St. Pachomius who began monasticism as we know it today.

Other Saints of the Day

1. St. Brynoth

2. St. George Preca

3. St. Gerontius of Cervia

4. St. Gorfor

5. St. Hermas