Ascetic Culture: Essays in Honor of Philip Rousseau

Chapter 1: Pachomius and the Mystery of the Letters

C h a p t e r O n e Pachomius and the Mystery of the Letters JoeL KaLvesMaKi T he only writings left behind by Pachomius, father of cenobitic monasticism, are thirteen brief epistles—all terse, all puzzling. The puzzle lies in Pachomius’s cryptic use of the letters of the alphabet, the result of a spiritual language an angel was said to have taught him. This alphabet recurs time and again in Pachomius’s epistles, rendering many of them unintelligible to all but the recipients, who were said also to know and use this language. For instance , to one of his monastic leaders, Cornelius, Pachomius writes: “Do the work of the ι, which was called ο in the old days. Place δ also before your eyes, so that it might be good for your soul. ρ has stretched out his hand to reach you; this is ι, which is the sepulcher, your resting place. sing to the ω, lest the ω sing to you. Let the shameless age rejoice with you so that you do not rejoice with the shameless age” (example 1).1 in this passage, a mix of admonition and teaching, each Greek letter acts as a noun or nominal phrase. Cornelius is expected to do something about 11 12 Joel Kalvesmaki whatever these letters symbolize, but exactly what is unclear. in some epistles even the grammatical or semantic function of the letters is a mystery . Consider this example (2): “Honor God and you will be strong (Prov 7:1). Remember the groanings of the saints σφ.”2 are the sigma and phi initials for specific saints? Do they represent a sentence? if so, is the pair of letters an admonition, doctrinal instruction, question, statement, or something else? sometimes contextual clues attenuate into wisps. For example (3), to the abbots sourous and John he writes, “We should not fear ruin in the place of our pilgrimage; but we must fight to be able to have peace with those who keep the commandments of God. η. What will be your gain if you win the whole world (Mt 16:26; Mk 8:36; Lk 9:25) and have enmity with God?”3 if the eta represents a noun, like the eta used in the first example, or any other single part of speech, how does it—indeed, how could it—connect with the sentences that precede and follow? even if one could tease out what a letter means in one epistle, that same letter used in other epistles can seem incoherent. at one place Pachomius writes (example 4), “Write ν above η and θ; write ζ above χ, μ, λ and ι, when you have finished reading these characters.”4 These seem to be instructions in scribal habits. He is not asking his readers to believe something, or to live their life a certain way (although such overtones may be present). He explains that he is writing “so that you might understand the mysteries of the characters,”5 but what mystery is there about how a letter is situated on the page? We find ourselves simultaneously contemplating two very different things, the mosaic of meaning and the rituals of writing. in passages such as example 4, are we to think of symbols and the symbolized, or tools and goals? are we to peer in, to detect meaning and mystery behind the letters, or to gaze out, to think of the design on the page and how the pen affects the world? in that same epistle a sequence of coded letters symbolizes Pachomius’s named identity. He writes (example 5), “Therefore i wrote to you σφθμ, lest perhaps some one might say that my name is not written σφθμ. . . . Now, therefore, σφθμλουυουυλιλ.”6 it is not apparent what he means, particularly since he does not explain “name,” and we do not have enough context to discern whether these letters were to be understood orally, visually, or, more likely, both.7 Perhaps in the autograph, now lost, the letters were written in a certain shape, like the eight-by-eight block of letters associated with epistles 9a and 9b.8 and if this is his name, how does it explain another epistle where Pachomius adapts the cipher: “The Lord takes pleasure in those who fear him (Ps 147 [146]: 11) σφθμλ”?9 Two of Pachomius’s epistles, addressed to no one specifically, follow a peculiar alphabetic pattern quite different from all the above examples . each epistle consists of twelve lines, each starting with a pair of...