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18.3. Antonian vs Pachomian Monachisms
Here we have a fully constituted and indeed highly organised cenobitical life, the day being divided between a fixed routine of church services, Bible reading, and work seriously undertaken as an integral factor of the life. Herein lies one of the most significant differences between Pachomian and Antonian monachisms. In the latter the references to work are few, and the work is of a sedentary kind, commonly basket-making and linen-weaving, which could be carried on in the cell; and the work was undertaken merely in order to supply the necessaries of life, or to fill up the time that could not be spent in actual prayer or contemplation or the reading of the Bible. Palladius’s picture of the Pachomian monastery, on the other hand, is that of a busy, well-organised, self-supporting agricultural colony, in which the daily religious exercises only alternated with, and did not impede, the daily labour that was so large an element of the life: and so this picture is of extraordinary value. Whatever may be thought of the life led by the hermits or quasi-hermits of northern Egypt, there will hardly be two opinions as to the strenuousness and virility of the ideal aimed at by St Pachomius.
The Antonian ideal is the one that (even in accentuated forms) has been in all ages dominant in the East, and it was the form of monachism first propagated throughout Western Europe. It was not the least of St Benedict's contributions to Western monachism that he introduced, with the modifications called for by differences of climate and national character, a type of monachism more akin to the Pachomian, in which work of one kind or another, undertaken for its own sake, forms an essential part of the life.
Having thus traced in the briefest manner the external phenomena of the earliest Christian monachism, we must say a word on its inner spirit. The theory or philosophy of primitive Christian monachism finds its fullest expression in Cassian's Collations. These are 24 conferences of considerable length, which purport to be utterances of several of the most prominent of the Nitriot and Scetic monks, made in response to queries and difficulties put by Cassian himself and his friend Germanus, who lived for a number of years in Scete between 390 and 400. The Collations were not written till 25 years later, and the question has been raised how far they reproduce actual discourses uttered by the various monks named; or are compositions of Cassian's, a literary device for presenting the teaching and ideas current in Scete.
In any case, there can be no reasonable doubt that they do faithfully represent the substance and spirit of that teaching — and this is all that is of historical importance. Cassian puts into the foreground, in his first Collation, an exposition of the purpose or scope of the monastic life: Abbot Moses declares it to be the attainment of Purity of Heart, so that the mind may rest fixed on God and divine things: for this purpose only are fastings, watchings, meditation of Scripture, solitude, privations to be undertaken: such asceticisms are not perfection, but only the instruments of perfection. This conference supplies the key to the fundamental conception of the monastic state. It is a systematic and ordered attempt to exercise the tendencies symbolised by the terms Mysticism and Asceticism — two of the most deeply rooted religious instincts of the human heart, but which beyond most others need regulation and control. Egyptian monachism was probably at its highest point of development about the year 400, just when Cassian and Palladius came in contact with it. Without accepting the probably apocryphal figures given by some of the authorities, there can be no doubt that there were at that date very many thousands of monks in Egypt. And the original enthusiasms and spirituality of the movement still, on the whole, held sway. But with the fifth century the decay set in, which has gone on progressively till our day. The Egyptian monks, who had been the great adherents of the Catholic faith in the Arian times, became the chief supporters of Dioscorus in making the Egyptian Church Monophysite. As the Mahommedan invasion swept over Egypt the monasteries were in great measure destroyed, and Egyptian monasticism has ever since been gradually dying out; at the present day only a few monasteries survive, and the institution is in a moribund condition, unless some unlooked-for revival come about.
When we pass from Egypt to the oriental lands, we find that in Palestine monastic life was introduced from Egypt by Hilarion early in the fourth century. He had been a disciple of Anthony, and the life he led in Palestine was purely eremitical. There are traces of cenobitic monasteries in Palestine during the fourth century, especially those established under Western influences — as by St Jerome and Paula, Rufinus and the two Melanias. But the glimpses of Palestinian monachism the end of the century given us by Palladius in the Lausiac History, reveal the fact that it remained in large measure eremitical.
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