The life of St Pachomius the Great
Discharged and baptized soon after, he spent three years in ordinary life before withdrawing to the desert under the guidance of the elder Palamon, remaining with him for a decade of ascetic training. Around 320, understanding himself called to found a community rather than remain a solitary, he settled at Tabennisi on the Nile and began gathering disciples there, organizing what had until then been a scattering of individual hermits into a single ordered life shared in common: proportioned hours for work and for prayer, a common table, a common rule. This was, by most accounts, the first true cenobitic monasticism in the Christian world, and it spread quickly; by the time of his death there were nine communities of men and two of women under the rule he had written, numbering some two or three thousand monks and nuns in all. He died in 346, having given Christian monasticism a structure that outlasted him by many centuries.
