The three vows of chastity, poverty and obedience were adopted and became the foundation stones of the monastic institution, to be found in every monastic order.  There is a typical illustration in Kingsley’s Hypatia of what they meant by obedience.  Philammon, a young monk, was consigned to the care of Cyril, the Bishop of Alexandria, and a factious, cruel man, with an imperious will.  The bishop received and read his letter of introduction and thus addressed its bearer, “Philammon, a Greek.  You are said to have learned to obey.  If so, you have also learned to rule.  Your father-abbot has transferred you to my tutelage.  You are now to obey me.”  “And I will,” was the quick response.  “Well said.  Go to that window and leap forth into the court.”  Philammon walked to it and opened it.  The pavement was fully twenty feet below, but his business was to obey and not to take measurements.  There was a flower in a vase upon the sill.  He quietly removed it, and in an instant would have leaped for life or death, when Cyril’s voice thundered, “Stop!”

The Pachomian monks despised possessions of every kind.  The following pathetic incident shows the frightful extent to which they carried this principle, and also illustrates the character of that submission to which the novitiate voluntarily assented:  Cassian described how Mutius sold his possessions and with his little child of eight asked admission to a monastery.  The monks received but disciplined him.  “He had already forgotten that he was rich, he must forget that he was a father.”  His child was taken, clothed in rags, beaten and spurned.  Obedience compelled the father to look upon his child wasting with pain and grief, but such was his love for Christ, says the narrator, that his heart was rigid and immovable.  He was then told to throw the boy into the river, but was stopped in the act of obeying.

Yet men, women, and even children, coveted this life of unnatural deprivations.  “Posterity,” says Gibbon, “might repeat the saying which had formerly been applied to the sacred animals of the same country, that in Egypt it was less difficult to find a god than a man.”  Though the hermit did not claim to be a god, yet there were more monks in many monasteries than inhabitants in the neighboring villages.  Pachomius had fourteen hundred monks in his own monastery and seven thousand under his rule.  Jerome says fifty thousand monks were sometimes assembled at Easter in the deserts of Nitria.  It was not uncommon for an abbot to command five thousand monks.  St. Serapion boasted of ten thousand.  Altogether, so we are told, there were in the fifth century more than one hundred thousand persons in the monasteries, three-fourths of whom were men.

The rule of Pachomius spread over Egypt into Syria and Palestine.  It was carried by Athanasius into Italy and Gaul.  It existed in various modified forms until it was supplanted by the Benedictine rule.