The Monastic Rules of Visigothic Iberia - eTheses Repository ...

Chapter One: Preceptive Literature and Monastic Rules
―The more enclosed a community, the simpler it is to live either wholly by the book or
wholly without the book: at one extreme, the remote traditional village, with little contact
with outsiders, untouched by writing, where norms of behaviour, allocation of resources, and
methods of resolving disputes are regulated according to self-renewing memory and custom;
at the other extreme, an organised monastic community‖ (Franklin 2002: 143)
1.1 Introduction
The idea of legislating cenobitic communities with written precepts seems to have
been first undertaken by the Coptic monk Pachomius for his laurai in the mid-fourth century
AD at Tabenninsis in the Egyptian Thebaid (Rousseau 1999). Palladius, the historian of early
monasticism, wrote that this occurred after an angelic visitation, informing Pachomius how to
organise his community:
θαζεδνκέῳ оὐλ αὐηῳ ἐλ ηῳ ζπειαίῳ ὤθζε αὐηῳ ἀγγεινο θπξίνπ, θαὶ ιέγεη αὐηῳ, „Παρώκηε,
ηά θαηὰ ζθπηὸλ θαηώξζσζαο· πεξηηηώο νὐλ θαζέδῃ ἐλ ηῷ ζπειαίῳ ηνύηῳ· δεύξν ηνίλνλ,
ἐμειζώλ ζπλάγαγε πάληαο ηνύο λεσηέξνπο κνλαδνληαο θαὶ νὔθεζνλ κεη‟ αὐηώλ θαὶ θαηὰ ηὸλ
ηύπνλ ὅλ δίδσκί ζνη νὕησο αὐηνηο λνκνζέηεζνλ‟· θαὶ ἐπηδέδσθελ αὐηῷ δέιηνλ αιθήλ ἐλ ἦ
ἐγεγξαπην ηαύηα 13
The subsequent rise of organised cenobiticism was concomitant with the rise of the
monastic rule, or regula in the Latin west and ηππηθόλ in the Greek east, a text that has been
said to have played a crucial role in the evolution of the ascetic movement away from the
anchoritic practice of the earliest akathistoi to a world of the organised koinobion, a choice
between Freiheit and Zwange (Rousseau 1978: 51). This initial Pachomian adventure was
followed by a literary tradition that was subsequently evoked by writers in order to add
13 Lausiac History 32.1.
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