Cenobites, Hermits, and the Discipline That Won

Christian monasticism did not begin as a life lived in community. Its first widely admired form, in Egypt from the late third century, was the hermit's solitude: Anthony withdrawing alone into the desert, sought out by visitors precisely because he had left society behind. The communal, ruled form now taken as the default came slightly later and from a different founder. Pachomius, a former soldier, organized a walled community of monks at Tabennisi in Upper Egypt in the 320s, with shared work, shared meals, and a superior giving orders, borrowing more from the discipline of an army camp than from a hermit's cave.

Basil of Caesarea took the communal model and gave it a theological argument in the fourth century, holding that charity and mutual correction were impossible in solitude and that monks needed each other to practice the virtues the life demanded. The West received both strands and eventually settled on the communal one: Benedict of Nursia's sixth century rule for Monte Cassino absorbed earlier monastic writing, including Basil's, into a single moderate document that balanced prayer, work and rest, and it was this synthesis, rather than the older eremitic ideal, that later reform movements like Cluny and Citeaux took as their starting point when each argued the current practice of monastic life had drifted from it.