The epic of the Copts, the primary Christian monks | EUROtoday

At the origin of any founding work, and significantly religious adventures, there should be an preliminary instinct, and others should set up it. The instinct got here from a person nicknamed Antoine the Great and who fascinated Nicolas Diat. After having distributed all his items by selecting to reside alone and poor within the desert, he didn’t know that his gesture initiated monasticism, and would encourage so many mystics for hundreds of years. Because his reminiscence was perpetuated, because of the testimony of Macarius the Elder, and particularly to the writings of an undisputed biographer: the bishop of Alexandria Athanasius recounted his extraordinary deeds and gestures in The Life of Antoineround 360. And as a result of Antony had a disciple, Pacôme, born within the village of Kénèh round 292, who made his thought prosper.

As considered one of their distant descendants, Father Marcos, a forty-year-old with “a voice dipped in honey,” says considered one of their distant descendants, whom the creator met on the monastery of Deir Mar Antonios: “Antoine fathered us; then Pachomius brought the monks together by unifying their lives. »

Between angels and demons

Pacôme founded, in fact, the first convent which made it possible to attract and welcome vocations. And laid, in the Egyptian desert, the foundations of monasticism. “The monks lived in buildings that already resembled the monasteries of the early Middle Ages,” says Nicolas Diat. Thus, they divided their lives between work and prayer. Ora et labora…” The work impressed the ascetic Basil of Caesarea (329-379), thought of one of many fathers of the Church, who established the foundations of oriental monasticism and in flip influenced Benedict of Nursia (480-547) , the creator of the Rule which served as a foundation – and continues as we speak – for Catholic and Orthodox monks within the West.