How the Coenobites Began

So the system of the coenobites arose in the days of the apostles’ preaching. For such was that whole multitude of believers in Jerusalem, described in the Acts of the Apostles in these words: “Now the multitude of believers was of one heart and one soul. None of them said that any of the things he possessed was his own, but they had all things in common. They sold their possessions and property and divided them among all, as anyone had need.” And again: “For there was no one among them who lacked anything. All who owned fields or houses sold them, and brought the price of what they sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as he had need.” The whole church, I say, was then what those few are now who can hardly be found in the coenobia. [a]

But after the death of the apostles the multitude of believers began to grow cold. This was especially true of the multitude that had come to the faith of Christ from various foreign nations. Out of consideration for the infancy of their faith and their ingrained pagan habits, the apostles had required nothing more of them than that they should “abstain from things sacrificed to idols, and from sexual immorality, and from things strangled, and from blood.” And so the freedom granted to the Gentiles because of the weakness of their newborn faith had by degrees begun to mar the perfection of the church that existed at Jerusalem. The fervor of that early faith cooled down as the number of both natives and foreigners grew day by day, and not only those who had accepted the faith of Christ, but even the leaders of the church, relaxed something of that strictness. For some imagined that what they saw permitted to the Gentiles because of their weakness was allowed to themselves as well, and thought they would suffer no loss if they followed the faith and confession of Christ while keeping their property and possessions.

But those who still kept the fervor of the apostles remembered that former perfection. They left their cities and the company of those who thought that carelessness and a looser life were allowed to themselves and to the church of God. They began to live in country places and more secluded spots, and there, privately and on their own account, to practice the things they had learned the apostles had ordered for the whole body of the church in general. And so that whole system we have spoken of grew up from those disciples who had separated themselves from the evil that was spreading.

As time went on, these were gradually separated from the great mass of believers. Because they abstained from marriage and cut themselves off from the company of their relatives and from the life of this world, they were called monks, or solitaries, from the strictness of their lonely and solitary life. From their common life it followed that they were called coenobites, and their cells and lodgings coenobia. That alone, then, was the earliest kind of monks. It is first not only in time but also in grace, and it continued unbroken for a very long period, up to the time of Abbot Paul and Antony. And even to this day we see its traces remaining in strict coenobia.