Theodore the Sanctified

Origins and early life

Theodore was born about the year 314 at Latopolis — Snē, the modern Esna — in the Upper Thebaid, to Christian parents of considerable wealth. The Pachomian Lives make much of the contrast between the house he left and the life he chose. The account relates that at about fourteen, while his family kept a feast with the customary abundance, the boy was struck with a sudden horror of the world's pleasures; he withdrew from the table, wept, and prayed that God would take him for himself. From that hour he ate sparingly and gave himself to prayer, and before long he left home altogether for a monastery in the district of Snē, over his mother's grief.

There a visiting brother spoke to him of a great father in the lower Thebaid who had gathered a community under a written rule — Pachomius of Tabennisi. Theodore would not be quieted until he had gone to him, and about the year 328, at some eighteen years of age, he came to Tabennisi. Pachomius, the Life says, saw what he was at once. Theodore was received, was set to learn the Scriptures by heart, and rose quickly in the estimation of the whole community.

His mother followed him. She came to Tabennisi bearing letters from bishops of her own country, which required the monks to let her see her son and take him home. Pachomius sent for Theodore and left the choice with him; Theodore answered that he had renounced father and mother for Christ's sake and would not look upon her, and asked only whether in refusing he sinned. Pachomius approved him. His mother, seeing that she could not move him, did not go home: she crossed to the women's monastery which Pachomius had founded near Tabennisi and ended her life there in the monastic habit — so that, as the Life observes, she gained more than she had come for. Theodore's younger brother Paphnutius came after him in his turn, and became the great steward of the whole confederation at Pbow, administering its stores, its boats and its trade.

Pachomius's love, and the fall into ambition

The Lives give Theodore a place beside Pachomius that no other disciple holds. He is called the father's "beloved," and — because Pachomius set him to teach and console the brethren — "the comforter of the brothers." He travelled with Pachomius, spoke to the assembled communities in his place, and was left in charge of Tabennisi when about 336 Pachomius transferred his own residence to the larger house of Pbow (Phbow, Faou), which thereafter was the head of the koinonia.

Yet Pachomius withheld formal authority from him for a long time, and the Lives explain why. When the father lay gravely ill and was thought to be dying, certain of the elders, anxious for the future, urged Theodore to accept the government of the communities after him; and Theodore consented — or at least did not refuse. Pachomius recovered, learned of it, and dealt with the matter as ambition and not as prudence: he stripped Theodore of his charge, put him under penance, and for a long season would not receive him. Theodore did not defend himself. He wept in solitude, by the Lives' reckoning for some two years, until his father was satisfied and restored him. The episode is told without softening in a dossier written by Theodore's own disciples, and it is the hinge of his biography: the man who afterwards had to govern a rebellious confederation had first been publicly broken of the wish to govern.

The crisis of the koinonia

Pachomius reposed on 9 May — in the year 348 by the reckoning followed in his own entry in this collection, 346 by many others — in an epidemic that carried off many of the brethren, and he did not name Theodore. He named Petronios, superior of Tsmine, who was himself already sick; Petronios lived only a few months, and before his death appointed Horsiesios (Orsisios). Horsiesios was a man of great gentleness and of deep scriptural learning — his Book of our Father Horsiesios, his monastic testament, survives — but he had neither Pachomius's authority nor his hardness of hand.

Under him the koinonia nearly broke apart. Two generations of labour had made the houses prosperous; the older superiors had begun to reckon their monasteries as their own; and the head of the house of Tmoushons, Apollonios, refused obedience outright and made ready to withdraw his community from the confederation altogether. Horsiesios saw a schism coming that he could not prevent, and rather than hold an office he could not exercise he laid down the government, withdrew to Šeneset (Chenoboskion), and appointed Theodore in his place — about the year 350.

The restoration under Horsiesios

Theodore's eighteen years at Pbow are the recovery of the Pachomian system. He brought the dissident houses back into obedience, restored the common rule and the common purse, and dealt firmly with the ambition that had caused the rupture — moving superiors and stewards from house to house so that no man should strike root in a place and make a faction there. He visited the monasteries in circuit, preached at the great gatherings of Easter and of the August accounting, and founded new houses; under his hand the confederation reached its greatest extent, with communities of men and of women along the Nile from Latopolis to the Delta.

What the sources dwell on, however, is the manner of his rule. Theodore never took the title of father of the koinonia. He called himself Horsiesios's steward, referred decisions to him, had his instructions read out to the brethren, and returned to him at Chenoboskion for counsel; the Lives insist that in Theodore's own mind Horsiesios remained the abbot and he only the deputy. Of the many things praised in him this is the one his disciples remembered first — that having been given everything, he behaved as though he had been lent it.

A Greek convert named Ammon entered Pbow as a youth of seventeen in 352 and spent three years there under Theodore before leaving for Nitria and eventually becoming a bishop. His Letter to Theophilus — written down long afterwards, and the one first-hand portrait of the community from outside the Coptic tradition — describes Theodore catechising in Coptic with a Greek interpreter at his side, reading hearts, and governing thousands of men without raising his voice.

Athanasius and the Arian struggle

Theodore was an unwavering partisan of Athanasius the Great, and the Thebaid's monasteries were among the archbishop's firmest supports through his exiles. The best attested episode belongs to the summer of 363. Athanasius, hunted by the officers of Julian the Apostate, was sailing up the Nile toward the Thebaid; Theodore and the ascetic Abba Pammon met him and took him aboard a covered boat, towed by Theodore's monks. Athanasius spoke of his fear; the two old men smiled at one another, and Theodore told him to turn the boat back to Alexandria, for it had been revealed to them that Julian was already dead, slain in Persia, and that a Christian emperor reigned. The news was afterwards confirmed. Athanasius knew the community well enough that on Theodore's death he wrote to Horsiesios a letter of consolation, which survives and is the earliest external witness to Theodore's standing.

Repose

Theodore foretold his own death, set the affairs of the houses in order, and reposed in 368. The Lives record the brethren's grief and Horsiesios's — the old man came from his retirement, buried him beside Pachomius on the mountain, and took up again the government he had surrendered eighteen years before, holding it until his own repose. Theodore's catecheses and letters, preserved in Coptic and partly in the Latin of Jerome, who translated the Pachomian rules, letters and instructions in 404, place him among the earliest teachers of cenobitic monasticism whose words we still have.