Good morning. This is our first conference on Pacomius. We will have two sets of conferences this week, one set with the members of the seminar every morning, and a few evenings this week we will have also some conferences with the community. So we will have to try not to repeat what I say to the seminar in the morning, in the afternoon, but in some way the matter will not always be in the ideal order. There are some things that are essential, elementary, that I will reserve for the evening. And so this morning we will begin with something else, although what I'm going to say this evening should have been said this morning, but I don't think it will matter too much. Pacomius lived in Egypt at the end of the 3rd, beginning of the 4th century, 292 to 347.

[01:08]

We know very little about the beginning of his life. He was converted at the age of 20, became a monk soon after. gathered the community around him, founded the first synabetic community in Upper Egypt, and gradually became the superior of a series of nine monasteries of men and two of women, which were called the koinonia, or congregation. The term koinonia was reserved as the technical term to designate the old Pergomian congregation. After his death, he had a successor who died just a few days after himself from the same epidemic. Then it was Orsiesius who was his successor. But Orsiesius had some difficulty to maintain the unity of the congregation, and so he called Theodore to help him or take over

[02:21]

Theodore had been one of the first disciples of Pachomius and his preferred disciple, but for some reason that we will see this week, was not appointed by Pachomius as his successor. But then after a certain number of years, Theodore called back Orsieges, who was again superior general for a good number of years after Theodore's death. So this is a general outline of the history of the Pacomian congregation. We will come back to that in detail, but I thought it was important to give at least those few details at the beginning. What we will do this week will be to read together a certain number of Pacomian texts, analyze them, and try to see the spirituality that is manifested in those texts and in the life of the early Pacomian monks.

[03:30]

I will not try to give you some beautiful synthesis of that spirituality. for many reasons. First, because I want you to discover that synthesis yourself, but most of all because such a synthesis is always something artificial. Pachomius was not a man of theory, a man of concepts, so in some way we can say that he did not have any conception of monastic life. He lived his monastic life. So he was a man of vision. And it is his vision that we will try to discover together. So, we will try to learn how to read Pachomius, how to use his life, his writings for our Lectio Divina, try to get his message. And I will let you to discover in your work in small groups the most important aspects of that spirituality through the text that we will read together.

[04:36]

So I will ask each one of the group, we have five groups, each one of the group to be attentive to one aspect of the Pagomyan spirituality. So sometimes it may happen that the text that we will be reading that day will not seem to be related very closely to your topic, but I think everything is in some way related to everything. So you have to try to see as a group, in each small group, to try to find a general view, general vision of the Pākomyan spirituality and see more specifically how the topic that is given to you is related to the other elements of that spirituality. So the first topic will be common life for the first group. The second one, asceticism. The third one, prayer life.

[05:37]

which includes both private prayer, personal prayer, and communal prayer, and then the leadership for the fourth group and obedience for the fifth group. Now, what we will do this morning will be a bit different of what we will have to do during the next days, few days. I will give you a certain number of technical information that are necessary in order to be able to use the sources and understand them. As I said, the aim of this seminar is to help us to use Pachomius for Lectio Divina. So I don't intend during this week to spend too much time on technical problems, problems of textual criticism and so on. But it is important to have at least a certain amount of initiation to those texts. It may be a bit dry, but it is important.

[06:40]

A few years ago, maybe about ten years ago, I wrote an article in Collectanea about the technical requirements of the fidelity to our founders or to our monastic tradition. What I try to explain in that article is that today we speak very much about going back to the sources, going back to our founders, trying to understand their spirit and be faithful to it. But in order to do it, we have to be aware of all the technical requirements. We cannot simply take any text and just read it without any preparation and think that we have discovered what they meant. They lived, whether it is Pacomius or Cassian or our founders of the 12th century, they lived in a culture. that was very different from ours. And in their way of thinking, their way of writing, their way of speaking, they were very much dependent on that culture.

[07:46]

So if, for example, somebody arrives at the monastery, a novice, and reads Cassian or reads Pachomius without any preparation, what he will understand will not be Cassian or Pachomius, it will be what he himself put in that text from his own cultural background. So it's important to see the cultural background and to see also the type of text with which we deal. People who wrote, for example, history at that time did not have the conception of history that we have. So it's important to see what type of book we have to deal with. We have a good number of sources for the Pacomian monasticism. Unfortunately, few of those sources have been translated in English up to now. We have good critical editions of most of them, but don't have any good translation.

[08:49]

You have into your hands an English translation of one of the life of the Pacomians, the first Greek life, which is one of the good lives, one of the most important. It is good that you have that translation, which we will use this week, which is reasonably good, but not too good. It seems that the one who made it knew Greek reasonably well, but did not know about anything concerning the monastic vocabulary, monastic customs, and so it's full of mistranslations. I will mentioned some of them during this week. And also, Father Felix has printed a certain number of texts that were translated recently. The book of Orsiasius, which has been translated by one of the sisters who is here with us, Sister Mary Charles, which is a good translation.

[09:51]

And also a translation of Catechesis, of Pachomius concerning a spiteful monk, which is a beautiful catechesis, which is Pachomian, at least in the large sense of the word, which is probably from a disciple of Pachomius, if not from Pachomius itself, but we have to be aware that it includes a long, long, long quotation from An Homily of St. Athanasius in Coptic, so to some extent it is a literary composition. So we have the rule also translated into English by a monk of Montevideo. So we have enough text to work with this week. When we speak about the Pacomian sources, we can divide them in three series. There are some biographical sources. The other sources are of legislative character and some others of a catechetical nature, catechesis, letters, and so on.

[11:00]

So let's speak in the first place about the biographical sources. We have a life of Pacomius, or rather many lives of Pacomius, and then a few other narratives that have been collected and were not integrated into the lives, and a few other small texts that were discovered recently and published in different periodicals. How was the life of Pachomius written? Probably in some way, just like the New Testament. What existed first were isolated short histories, short narratives that were assembled into different types of compilations and then were put together to build up a life. And then that life was translated in different Coptic dialects in different languages, Greek and then Latin, Ethiopian, Syriac, and so on.

[12:09]

And of course, there were compilations of that life with other texts. And we have to know that In that early period of history, when a scribe transcribed a text, or when a translator translated it, they never left the text unchanged. They always put something of their own in that text. they thought that they should do it. They were, to some extent, all composers, and they adapted the text to their own needs, to their own time. For example, if the text speaks about some liturgical practice, and if at the time when they are making their own work, the practice has changed, they will modify the text to make it correspond to the practice of their own time. So that's the reason why it is important to try to discover the chronology of those texts, the hierarchy, to see which text is the oldest one and which one are the later compilations and interpretations.

[13:18]

Each one of those texts may be important, but it is necessary to see the order, chronological order, and that can help us to follow a kind of evolution. For example, we will see in the same narrative, in different versions, an evolution of the conception of obedience, for example, or evolution of a liturgical practice. And so you have in the... Let's take, for example, to begin with, the Greek corpus. We have six Greek lives, and then we have a series of narratives called the paralipomena. That's a Greek word which means the leftovers. Those are a series of shorthist narratives that have not been integrated in the first lives, and then they were used in the lives later on. And then you have six full lives. The two important ones are the first and the second.

[14:24]

And when we quote those lives in articles and so on, we just quote G1, G2, G3, that means Greek one, Greek two, the Greek life number one, Greek life number two. The number three, four, five, six are not important. They might be important for some historical, scientific historical study, but for us they are no importance because they are late compilations of the former ones. The third one has some importance. It is a compilation of the first Greek life, the Paradipomena, and then some text from the Lasiak history of Palladius and so on. One important characteristic of that life, it is that it had been translated into Arabic, and I will speak about it later on. The second Greek life is very much parallel to the Latin one, which you find in the Pathologia Latina, and which was published recently in a new critical edition by van Canenburgh.

[15:33]

with the Latin text and the text of the second Greek life in the page facing the Latin one. It has been much discussed whether the second Greek life is the source of the Latin life or vice versa. Well, nobody thinks that the Latin life has been translated into Greek, but that the Latin the original translated into Latin, would have been the basis for the second Greek life. Personally, I'm quite convinced that it is the second Greek life, which is the source of the Latin one, but that can be discussed and we don't have time to go into those details. So, the one which is really important among the Greek lives is the first one, which is a very, very old life of Pacomius, written shortly after his death. and which is parallel with the one of the Coptic life that we call the Bohairic life. And so we will see the relation between those two lives later on.

[16:36]

I mentioned the Larziac history of Palladius. Palladius in his Larziac history has three chapters about the Pacomians, those he calls the Tabernesiotas, the people who live in Taberneses. the place of the first monastery of Pachomius. Those chapters are absolutely without any importance for us because they are not really a Pachomian source. Palladius is simply using a Coptic sources that he found in Lower Egypt And Father Draguet, or Canon Draguet, has written a long article about that many years ago, and he has proved that it is not really a Pacomian text. It was written in Boaric, in the dialect of Lower Egypt, near Alexandria, in these circles of semi-Anchorites or semi-hermits, by someone who certainly knew something about the Pacomian customs, but reinterpreted them in the context in which he lives.

[17:45]

And that text is famous because it comprises the regula angeli, the role of the angel, which is supposed to have been dictated to Pacomius by an angel. and which has been very, very often quoted during the Middle Ages and up to our time as the rule of Pacomius, but has nothing to do with real Pacomian monasticism. The same Drage I mentioned who is Belgian scholar, has published about 10 or 15 years ago two small Greek texts that he has discovered about Pachomius. They are quoted usually as Fragment 1 and Fragment 2. So that's about all concerning the Greek corpus. There are many other things to say about it, but we don't have time. So let's go to the Coptic corpus. Coptic is the language of Egypt.

[18:48]

Egyptians used to write their language with hieroglyphs, but that was a bit complicated to make all those drawings of birds and fishes and so on. So after a certain period, a few hundred years before Christ, they started using the Greek alphabet. And this is that language now written with Greek alphabet, which is called Coptic. Actually, to the Greek alphabets, they had to add a certain number of characters, 6 or 8 or 4, according to dialects. Because we have many dialects in Coptic, usually we distinguish 5 of them, according to geography of Egypt. Some people distinguish many more, but usually there are five families. And they are, we say they are dialects, but they are as different from one another as Spanish can be from French and Italian and Portuguese. So they are really languages. Bohairic, B-O-H-A-I-R-I-C, is the dialect of Lower Egypt, around Alexandria, where live the St.

[19:54]

Anthony, the hermits of Skete, the Cells, and Nytria. And then, if you go a bit further, you have the Fayoum, which is a more fertile little spot in the middle of Egypt. So we have the Fayyumic dialect. And then around the city of Aqmim you have the Aqmimic dialect, and a little further, the Sub-Aqmimic, and then at the south of Egypt, the upper Egypt, you have the Syedic. S-A-H-I-D-E-D-I-C. That's the language of the area where Pachomius lived. And so all the Pacomian literature was written first in that dialect. We have fragments of many sciadic lives of Pacomius, but one of those lives has been kept almost completely in a Boeric translation, which is a translation from sciadic into Boeric, but it is almost complete, so we call it the Boeric life.

[21:01]

And we have many fragments of different sciatic life that represent the same tradition. And so all those lives taken together and with which we can reconstruct that early Pacomian life, I call it the SBO. That means the version that we find in sciatic, but that we have kept almost completely in Boeric. And so the different fragments of the sciatic life, just as for the Greek life, are quoted as S1, S2, S3, S4, and so on, up to S25, I guess. Some other sciatic fragments are extremely old, before that Bohairic life. And there we have, especially for the beginning of the Pacomian congregation and the conversion of Pacomius, and his first attempts at making a community, very early versions, which is uneducated and sometimes crude, and which give us really the real authentic version of the beginning of the Pacomian Institution.

[22:19]

We will use them a good deal in the next few days. And then you have another series, S10, S20, S11, if you have the edition by Lefort, who represent what I consider as an early life of Theodore, the disciple of Pachomius, which was later on integrated into the life that we have now, which is, as a matter of fact, called the life of Pachomius and Theodore. Now we could go on to the Arabic lives. There are two types of Arabic lives of Pachomius. The first group are translated from Greek, from the third Greek life, and so they don't have much importance for us since we do have the Greek lives. And some others are translated from Coptic. That's the case of the manuscript from the Vatican library,

[23:20]

which is quoted usually under the sign AV, which means Arabic from Vatican. And then also translated from Coptic, an unpublished, extremely important manuscript in the library of Göttingen in Germany that I call AG, Arabic Göttingen. And then you have a certain number of third series, certain number of compilations most of them late compilations, but that can be interesting because they have kept certain old texts that we don't find any other place. One of them has been published by Amelino at the end of the last century, a French scholar, who work very much and work very fast and his publications are poor but they are the only one we have for some text. So that life published by Amelino is quoted as AM, Arabic to Amelino.

[24:27]

It's a very late compilation but that compilation is composed of the certain number of quotations borrowed from the Greek life or from the Arabic life translated from the Greek, and this is important, it includes all the same life as the manuscript of Göttingen. So as long as that manuscript will not be published, we can have at least the same content in the that life published by Abelino if we take away from it all the text borrowed from the Greek life. Now, what is important about that life from Göttingen is that it is in some way very similar to the Bohairic life and to the Greek life. And it gives us, I think, according to my own hypothesis or my own theories give us the key to interpret the relation between the Boeric life and the Greek life.

[25:39]

You have to know that the people who publish the Greek life of Pachomius had extremely good reasons to believe and demonstrate that the Greek life was the first one written and that the Coptic life was a translation from that Greek life. And those people believed that the Coptic monks were too illiterate to be able to compose a life. some Greek monk had to compose it, and then it was translated into Coptic. And they have good reasons to, in their, as arguments. But, then the people who have published the Coptic Lives, they have extremely good reasons too, to demonstrate that the Coptic Life is the original, and the Greek is only a translation. And if you take the arguments given by the one and the others, it makes sense on both sides, and you cannot decide. But, Maybe there is another solution. And the other solution, I think, is given to us by that Arabic life, is that both the Coptic life that we have and the Greek life depend on the common source.

[26:45]

And I think I have been able to show how the transposition was made. Because in the Arabic life we find practically all the same narratives as in the two others, the Bawaric and the Greek life. But they are disposed in a completely different way. And so, there has been a rearrangement, either in one way or the other. And so, since the Bohairic and the Greek are pretty much parallel, it will be surprising that both of them independently will have made a rearrangement of the Arabic. And it will be surprising also that the Arabic life will be a rearrangement of both of them. Then there is something that can give us a good indication in the Arabic life of how things happen. It's that at some point in the life, when the narrator speaks about the coming to the monastery of Theodore, one of the first disciples of Pachomius, he says, before continuing to tell you the life of Pachomius, I will tell you the life of Theodore.

[28:00]

and then he has a long, long, long series of paragraphs about Theodore, in which there are things also about Pacomius. But it looks pretty much like a life of Theodore. And then, later on, he comes back to the life of Pacomius. And if we analyze closely those two parts of that Arabic life, we realize that in that section in which he speaks of Theodore, the language is different, the style is different. Even in Arabic, the Coptic names, for example, name of persons and name of place. The Coptic texts are modified, transposed into Arabic in the first and the third part. And in the middle part, they are just transliterated, they are just left as Coptic into Arabic. And many, many things like that show us that those are two documents. Now, to make a long story short, because it would be very long to make my demonstration, you can read it in my book if you wish, but to make the story short is that

[29:05]

There exists a short life of Pachomius, very early life of Pachomius, that I call the Vita brevis. And then there was a life of Theodore. And then we have one fragment in Psyedic that corresponds exactly to that life in Arabic. And so there existed a life of Theodore and a life of Pachomius. And there was a compilator or compiler, you would say, who took those two lives and just cut the life of Pachomius in two parts and sandwiched in the center of it the life of Theodora in a very clumsy way, artificial way. Then came another one who rearranged that. He just took all the narratives concerning Theodora and relocated them in the life of Pachomius according to chronology. And that is the common source of Boeric and Greed. And so, neither one is the origin of the other. Both depend on the common source, and we can see how they rearrange their source slightly according to their own vision.

[30:16]

Usually, the Greek life will edulcorate the stories which are not too edifying, and the Coptic life will leave them more conformed to the original. It seems that the Boeric life, recovered or reclaimed a certain number of narratives of the early life of Theodore that were not kept in their common source, and then the Greek life has complemented its source by other narratives borrowed from the Paralipomena or other short stories, and also from the rules. There are very, very few mentions of the rules in the lives, but those we find in the Greek life are usually additions or attrition that you don't find in Coptic, and so they are posterior. And this will be important when we will speak about the rule, because I claim that the rules of Pachomius, as we have them now, represent

[31:22]

a stage of the Pacomian institution posterior and reasonably posterior to Pacomius. End of side one. Please turn to side two. They are posterior. And this will be important when we will speak about the rule, because I claim that the rules of Pacomius, as we have them now, represent a stage of the Pacomian institution posterior and reasonably posterior to Pacomius. And so, this is what we have as source for the life of Pacomius. There are a few other texts that I didn't mention. I mentioned the fragments published by Draghe. There is also a document which is called the Epistola Amonis, the Epistle of Amon, who was a bishop. And Bishop Ammonius had been a Pacomian monk, or had been sometime in a Pacomian monastery during his youth.

[32:28]

And later on, many years later, he writes to the Bishop Theophil, which is perhaps, not certainly, the Theophil of Alexandria. And in that text he tells us a certain number of things about Pacomian monasteries. It is an important text, but it is quite different from the lives. It gives another perspective. The lives are very simple narratives, but here we have a kind of theoretician who wants to show that Pagomius and Theodore were very holy men. They had some gifts of clear sightedness and so on. So it tells about a lot of miracles. while the life of Pachomius as a whole is very sober in that film. Very few visions, very few extraordinary things. It's something which is very ordinary, very evangelical. Perhaps you wonder whether there are apothecary matters about Pachomius.

[33:33]

There are very, very few. five or six, I think, altogether. And this is understandable, because most of the apothecary come from the circles of Lower Egypt, and they represent another monastic tradition, the hermetical or semi-hermetical tradition. And maybe there were more apothecary, but as you see, in the first generation, But that whole literature of the Apotheke Matera is still very, very obscure. Hundreds of manuscripts have still to be studied and published. And the compilations, collections of Apotheke Matera that we have now are late collections that include Apotheke Matera coming from different circles and different centuries. At the time of Pacomius and Antony, There was no tension between Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, but it seems that that tension came very, very soon, probably immediately after the life of Pachomius, because in the lives that we have, especially in the additions made by the Greek life, and in some of the Coptic life too, we have

[34:52]

clear mentions of that tension. Of course, in the Pachomian texts, those mentioned describe the superiority of the Cenabitic life over the Eremitic life. There is even a text in the life of Pachomius towards the end, a late text, but rather old or the same, which tells us that just after the death of Pachomius, the disciples of Pachomius went to Alexandria and they went to visit Anthony. and told him about the death of Pachomius. And Antony is supposed to have said that, well, Pachomius was, of course, a very great man, and Antony is supposed to have said to them that if the coenonia, the cenobitic life founded by Pachomius had existed when he was a young man, he would have become a cenobite instead of being a hermit. So that That might have been the words of Anthony, but I doubt it. Probably they come from the disciples of Pachomius who, in a very shrewd way, expressed their own conception and expressed the tension that already existed.

[36:00]

And so that tension between Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt is certainly one of the main reasons for the absence of Pachomian texts in the Apothecary. One other reason is the distance, of course, between the the two monastic circles, a very large distance. And the tension also was much greater further on, after the Origenist polemics, because most of the monks of Lower Egypt became Origenists, and the Pacomian monks remained stubbornly anti-Origenists. So those are the reasons why we have very little in the Apothecary about Pacomius. It's a completely different tradition. that we know much less, so that's one of the reasons to study it a bit more today, because as we will see, I guess, it is a tradition which is very relevant for us today. Now let's speak about the legislative material.

[37:04]

We don't have a rule of Pachomius in the same sense as we have a rule of Benedict. We don't have a rule in which the whole spirituality is expressed and the whole life is organized in a very systematic way. We have a text which is called The Rules of Pachomius, which comprises a certain number of precepts. Obviously, some of them may go back to the time of Pachomius. It is mentioned in the lives that Pachomius gave to his disciples a certain number of regulations that he took from the Scripture. And we have to remember that the first rule of the monk is the Scripture, and Pachomius is very strong on that. Our role is scripture. But he mentioned also the regulations or the canons that he took from the scripture for them. And also when, for example, his sisters come and she becomes a nun and she founds a monastery of nuns, it is said that Pachomius wrote for her the regulations or the canons of the monks so that they will follow the same way of life.

[38:18]

So he certainly gave them a certain number of regulations that dealt with very concrete, material, little points of the organization of work, of the synaxis, the meeting of the brothers, and what to do, what not to do. But it's not a rule where the whole life is described and where spirituality is The Pacomian spirituality is very much rooted in scripture. In the catechesis, for example, scripture is quoted all the time. But in the life we don't find practically any quotation of the scripture, only one or two. So it's very surprising. But we should not try to find in the rule what the rule does not intend to give us. not the spirituality. If we want to know about the spirituality of Pachomius, we have to see how he lived, and not those few little regulations that we have. We had those rules for a long time only in Latin, in the translation made by Jerome in 404.

[39:25]

It is published by Born in a book called Pacomiana Latina. In that book you have the rules, you have the letters of Pacomius and the book of Forciasius. But recently, a few years ago, some Coptic fragments of those roads were discovered, so they certainly existed in Coptic, were translated into Greek, and Jerome translated them from Greek into Latin. Checking his translation with what we have of the Coptic fragments, We can realize that Jerome here, as in most of his other translations, is very free in his translation. He gives the same meaning, but sometimes he will translate the same Coptic text, Greek term, by three or four different Latin words in different paragraphs, or will use the same Latin word for three or four different Coptic or Greek terms.

[40:32]

So, unusually also, when the text is not very clear, he will add a few words to make it clearer, giving his own interpretation. And also, from what we can see from the Coptic texts that we have, the titles and subtitles usually are from Jerome. So we should not try to find too much of Parkomian spirituality or practices in the mentions of those titles or subtitles which are proper to Jerome. There are some translations of those rules. In Greek, those excerpts only, which were translated in a posterior date, are not important at all. We have also some Ethiopian versions, which are not important at all either, but I mention them because in the Pachomina diversa, the book that you have here for the seminar,

[41:33]

You have an English translation of them from the Ethiopian texts. You should not pay attention to them because there are three rules there. The first one is the rule of the angel from Palladius, which is not a Pachomian text. The second one is a translation of the Greek excerpts. And the third one is a late Ethiopian compilation, including all kinds of very surprising stuff from different sources. And so, that text we won't use. There is a big problem about the authenticity, the Pacomian authenticity of the Pacomian rules. Nobody seems to doubt that authenticity. Personally, I have some if not some doubt, some reserve, or some qualifications to make. I'm pretty sure, like everybody else, that those texts come from some type of Pacomian milieu, but they seem to me to represent a phase of the Pacomian institution much posterior to Pacomius.

[42:45]

and much more of the time of Orciasius and maybe later, at least a good number of the parts of that rule. Some people have mentioned, for example, that there is a similarity between the rules and the regulations of Orciasius, which is a text translated from Coptic by Lefort. But that text is attributed to Orciasius, but I'm not sure it is from Orciasius. Just one little indication, for example, towards the end, the author says, he speaks about the rules or canons that were given to us by our father Pacomius and his successors, in the plural, successors at the head of the congregation. Now, Orciasius is the first successor of Pacomius. Although he may count the other also, if he speaks about the successors of Pachomius, the author might be, and should be, somebody posterior to Arcius. And if you analyze the type of mentality, the type of monastic life represented into those rules, and the type of monastic life that you can find into the lives, I think you will see immediately a big difference.

[43:59]

There are many, many little details of the organization of life. which is very organized with very much details in the rules that you never find mention of in the life. So, we will study a little those rules, but personally I prefer to take the lives as the main sources for the knowledge of the Pacomian spirituality and Pacomian mentality. Perhaps some of you know about some studies about those rules made during the last ten years by a lady, a Belgian lady, by the name of Van Moll, Miss Van Moll. She wrote four articles in Vis Spirituel, and she claims she can reconstruct the chronology of the different parts of those rules. I will not go into details to study her articles, but I think that particularly everybody has demonstrated that her reconstruction is based on a very weak hypothesis, and she built up one hypothesis above the other.

[45:09]

I think we should not pay too much attention to that reconstruction, and we should take the rules as we have them, being aware that they are composed of different parts from different periods, but we don't have yet any means to identify with certainty which are the oldest parts. Roughly, the rule as translated by Jerome is composed of four parts. The first part is called the precepta, but when I say four parts and the first part and the second part, I don't mean chronologically. We don't have any means of knowing. The Vaudreuil has mentioned that probably they are disposed according to the length. The longest section comes first, the second longest one comes second, and so on. The same way as for the Gospels. The Gospel of Matthew has always but first because it is the longest one, and then Mark, and then Luke and John according to the length. And they used to do that for the works of the authors in the antiquity.

[46:17]

And so Jerome probably put the Precepta as the first part, because it is the longest one, and then the second part is called Precepta et Instituta, the third Precepta a Cleges, and the fourth Precepta a Caudicia. Judicia is a kind of penitential, giving the different penance for different sins, or different sins against the regulations of the community. In the precepts themselves, you have many groups of precepts dealing with different aspects of life. A group about the meeting of all the brothers in the morning, are the brothers of one monastery for the synaxis, and then another group about work in the synaxis. Another group about work outside, a group of precepts about the visits of secular coming to the monastery, or about the visit of monks going outside, and another group about the sick people, how to take care of them, and the guest house, and so on.

[47:23]

We will study them sometime. I mentioned that there is another document which is called the Regulation of Orciasius, which helps us to understand some parts of that life. It is in Coptic. It must be translated into French. It's not translated into English yet. That's about all concerning the regulations. Now, there are a certain number of other texts. The third series I mentioned, the documents of the catechetical character. Some of them are catechesis. other than the catechesis that you can find in the lives. In the lives of Pachomius you have a certain number of catechesis attributed either to Pachomius or to Theodore or to Osseasius, but some of them have been discovered in manuscripts and published apart from the lives. Some of those catechesis are from Pachomius or attributed to Pachomius, others are from Theodore and others from Osseasius.

[48:30]

Every year, after the Feast of Epiphany, in Egypt, the Patriarch of Alexandria used to send a letter to all the churches announcing the date of Easter for that year. And so the superior of the Pacaman congregation used to do the same, the same thing. So we have letters also from Pacomius and Theodore announcing to the communities the feast of Easter, because at Easter, all the monks from all the monasteries gathered together to celebrate the Pascha, the six days of preparation to the Pascha Vigil together. It was a very important celebration because the catechumens among the monks, because many monks came to the monastery directly from paganism and were instructed in the community, so those catechumens were baptized. at the time of Easter in the central monastery of Pobon. And so the superior of the congregation wrote that letter every year to announce the Feast of Easter and to convoke all the brothers to the central monastery.

[49:41]

We have also letters from each one of those three, Pachomius, Theodorus, Osseasius, and one very important document which is called the Book of Osseasius, or Testamentum of Osseasius, which is the text in which we find the best, the most articulated presentation of the Pacomian Spirituality, the long text that we have only in Latin, translated by Jerome, and full of quotations of Scripture. Our CSS spoke with the language of Scripture, just like St. Bernard or some of the early Cistercian fathers, using the Scripture to say their own ideas. the language of the scripture had become their own idea. So when they spoke, practically each one of their sentences was a sentence of the scripture. There are beautiful texts in that document.

[50:45]

We have to know the context in which it was written. It was in a time of crisis, because shortly after the death of Pachomius, there was a big crisis in the congregation. Orciasius did not have the same friend, the same charism as Pachomius. The koinonia of the congregation had expanded, the number of monks was higher, they had become richer, and so some monasteries were forgetting the ideal of uniformity, of sharing, of poverty, and were trying to separate themselves from the congregation, at least one. And so, in that period, RCA is just saying that he could not maintain the unity, called the other to help him and so on, and then he came back when the other asked him to come back. So, either before he gave up his authority to the other, or when he came back and the situation was more or less the same, he wrote that book to call

[51:47]

the monks to conversion, to call them to the ideal given to them by Pacomius, the ideal of communion, of sharing, of unity and so on. And then there is an insistence, greater and greater, on the rule given by Pacomius and the obedience to the tradition and so on. Parkomios did not have to appeal too often to the rule or to the regulations because his charism was enough. But when his successor cannot maintain the unity through that charism, they tried to maintain the unity through regulations. And this is the reason why regulation is developed at that time, and a kind of mistake of obedience. But then the whole mistake of communion, cognonia, is expressed in that book beautifully. So that's about all what we have as real important sources for the monastic, for the Pacomian monasticism.

[52:50]

I would just mention Cassium. We'll have another week about Cassian next week. But just to mention that although he is, of course, an extraordinary, important monastic author, he does not have much value for the history of Pacomian monasticism. Cassian lived in Egypt, but he lived in Lower Egypt. He intended to go to Upper Egypt, but he could never go, so he never visited the Pacomian monasteries. He knew the rule of Pacomius in the Latin text of Jerome, and he quotes it from time to time. So he had some contacts through that text with the Pacomian Cenobitism, but no direct contacts. And Cassian is a hermit, or semi-hermit by heart. He lived in the semi-hermitical circle of Lower Egypt. So although he certainly heard there about Pachomius, he didn't have any direct contact.

[53:51]

And so when he speaks about the Tabernesiotas or the Mount of Taberneses in his conference or institutes, it is an information of second hand. So we should not try to find too much about the history of or monasticism, or about Pacomian customs in Cassium. So let's keep to the real Pacomian sources, his lives, to some extent his rules, and then the catechetical documents. So, during the next conference and the rest of the week, we will read together and try to analyze and interpret some of those documents. Thank you.

[54:35]

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