COMPARING AND CONTRASTIN ANTHONY AND PACOMIUS

INTRODUCTION

Things, concepts or people that are totally different or totally the same in themselves cannot be compared or contrasted. However those that can be easily placed parallel to each other can be compared and contrasted. Regarding the life of Anthony (254-356) and Pachomius (290-346), they can be placed on a parallel because they are great and champions of the same course but they had ran their races in not exactly the same fashion and this is the major reason why they have some things in common and equally some things that are peculiar to each of them.

COMPARISON

Both Anthony and Pachomius are noble and key figures when it comes to the history of religious life (monasticism) in the church. These are men who boiled with a radical zeal for God and both determined to make a difference to the greater glory of God. They practiced asceticism, desiring to respond radically to the law of God, and imposing upon themselves a life of total detachment and mortification, and the foundation and noble beginnings of Christian monasticism is firmly placed on their merits and efforts coupled with the help of grace.

Their way of life was not imposed upon them, but it was a deliberate choice for the glorification of God and sanctification of themselves. Their lives are modeled toward God, for a greater good of attaining the beatific vision and changing lives. They are the fathers and giants of religious life, building it upon the foundation of the Gospel. They made of religious life what it is today. They were both tempted, they both strived and they both conquered.

Anthony and Pachomius denied themselves the pleasures of the outside world, forgoing the right to own things, and putting off their wills, entrusting it to the divine will. They lived their lives for God and his Kingdom.

CONTRAST

Both Anthony and Pachomius have qualities that can be predicated to them in common, but also they equally have qualities and characters in the life that is peculiar to each of them. Anthony spent and had his monastic experience basically in the desert, in an abandoned military fortress. He had no formal community or monastery; the whole of the desert was his community and by implication of what the desert stood for during his time, his life was a constant struggle with demons. This is to say that St Anthony was a hermit. Pachomius on the other hand had a different idea of how to live the same life, and he came up with the concept of the “Koinonia” he instead took St. Anthony’s example and made it accessible to people who were not called to live the life of hermitage. This is to say that Pachomius didn’t embrace the desert as an abode but established a community of monks with a more ordered life. This implies that Pachomius drew influence from Anthony and developed it.

Anthony’s decisions to live a radical life of a radical response to the law of God proceeded from the scriptures (Mt. 19:21, and 6:34) while Pachomius was basically moved by the hospitality of the Christian doctors to him when he was a wounded soldier.

Prior to their decisions to live a radical life, Anthony was born into a Christian home, while Pachomius was born into a pagan home. This is to say that Anthony had a Christian background while Pachomius does not. The hermitic life of Anthony had not formal order or rules, but the life cenobitic life of Pacomius is formally ordered and also with some basic rules to guide the monks who are living together.