Palamon of Egypt

The anchorite of the Thebaid

Palamon appears in the record already old. The Lives of Pachomius place him in the desert country near Sheneset (Chenoboskion) on the east bank of the Nile in the Upper Thebaid, living the solitary life in a hut, with one or two disciples about him at any time, and supporting himself by the ordinary desert crafts — the plaiting of palm-fibre and the weaving of mats and ropes — the proceeds of which went to his own scanty food and to the poor. He belonged to the first generation of Egyptian anchorites, the generation of Anthony the Great, and represents the eremitic tradition in the form in which it existed before Pachomius made a rule and a common life out of it.

Nothing at all is transmitted of his birth, his country or his conversion. He enters the narrative when Pachomius knocks at his door, and he leaves it when he dies.

The reception of Pachomius

Pachomius, a conscript released from the army and baptised at Sheneset about the year 313, spent some three years serving the villagers before he sought out a teacher of the ascetic life. He was directed to Palamon.

The scene is one of the most quoted in monastic literature, and its interest is that the elder begins by turning the young man away. He told him that many had come with enthusiasm and gone away broken; that his own discipline was severe; that he ate only bread and salt, tasted neither oil nor wine, kept vigil half the night in prayer and the recitation of the Scriptures and frequently the whole of it, and that he would not relax any of it for a newcomer. Pachomius answered that he believed God would help him to bear it, and asked to be tried. Palamon then — the Coptic Life makes the change of heart explicit and attributes it to God's own prompting — opened the door, gave him the habit, and took him as his son.

Seven years of training

For about seven years the two lived together. The Lives are unusually concrete about what the training consisted of. They worked at the plaiting of mats and ropes and gave what they earned to the needy, keeping only enough to live. They prayed through the night, and when sleep pressed on them they carried sand from one place to another to keep themselves awake. They kept a fast that was continuous, eating once in the evening or once in two days, without oil and without wine. Palamon insisted above all on vigilance in the smallest things: the Lives record his rebuking his disciple, gently but firmly, for a dish prepared with a little oil at a feast, and for the wish to be seen fasting; and it is precisely this attention to the interior motion behind the small act that reappears, systematised, in the Rule of Pachomius.

The two also lived through the ordinary hazards of the desert. The Lives tell of an ascetic from another cell who came to them possessed by the delusion that he could walk unhurt into a furnace, and did so, and was destroyed; Palamon used the episode to teach Pachomius the discernment of spirits and the danger of an ascesis pursued for its own sake. Whether the story is remembered fact or a teaching narrative, the doctrine it carries is Palamon's and passed through him into the Pachomian tradition.

Tabennisi and the parting

About the year 320 Pachomius, praying in the deserted village of Tabennisi further up the river, heard the voice which told him to remain there and build, and that many would come to him. He returned and told Palamon. The old man did not oppose it. He went up with his disciple to Tabennisi, helped him to build the first cell with his own hands, and made an agreement with him that neither would forget the other — that they would visit one another as long as they both lived. It is a quiet and altogether characteristic ending to a monastic apprenticeship, and it is the reason the Pachomian coenobium was never in its own eyes a break with the anchoritic tradition but a growth out of it.

Repose

Not long after — the Lives suggest within a year or two — Palamon fell gravely ill. The brethren of the neighbourhood pressed him to relax his rule and take some ordinary food; he refused for a long while, saying that the martyrs had endured worse, and yielded only when they had almost compelled him, and even then found no relief. He was brought, or came, to Tabennisi; and there Pachomius received him, tended him, and buried him, carrying his body back to his own place with the customary psalms. The year is not given, and is placed by the chronology of the Lives about 323.

Legacy

Palamon has no writings, no foundation and no cult of his own beyond the calendar entry. His importance is entirely mediated. The discipline of the Pachomian houses — the fixed measure of food, the night office, the manual work with its earnings given away, the examination of motive, the elder's authority exercised by refusal as much as by permission — is Palamon's anchoritic practice translated into a common life for thousands. Through the Rule of Pachomius, carried west in the Latin version of Jerome, it shaped Basil the Great, Cassian, the Rule of the Master and Benedict, and so the whole subsequent monasticism of both East and West. Few saints of a single calendar line have a longer reach.