"There was no rule of life. The Elders exercised an authority, but it was mainly personal.... The society appears to have been a sort of spiritual democracy, ruled by the personal influence of the leading ascetics, but there was no efficient hold upon individuals to keep them from falling into extravagances.... A young man would put himself under the guidance of a senior and obey him in all things; but the bonds between them were wholly voluntary. The purely eremitical life tended to die out, but what took its place continued to be semi-eremitical."[3]
The second system introduced at the beginning of the fourth century may be described as the cenobitical or conventual type of monachism. Pachomius' monks lived together under a complete system of organisation, not, indeed, as a family under a father, but rather as an army under a discipline of a military character. This form of the monastic life spread with great rapidity, and by the time of its founder's death (_c._ 345) it counted eight monasteries and several hundred monks.
"The most remarkable feature about it," says Dom Butler, "is that (like Citeaux in a later age) it almost at once assumed the shape of a fully organised congregation or order, with a superior general and a system of visitation and general chapters--in short, all the machinery of centralised government, such as does not appear again in the monastic world until the Cistercians and the Mendicant Orders arose in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries."[4]
The various monasteries under the Rule of St. Pachomius existed as separate houses, each with a head or præpositus and other officials of its own, and organised apparently on the basis of the trades followed by the inmates. The numbers in each house naturally varied; between thirty and forty on an average living together. At the more solemn services all the members of the various houses came together to the common church; but the lesser offices were celebrated by the houses individually. Under this rule, regular organised work was provided for the monk not merely as a discipline and penitential exercise, as was the case under the Antonian system, but as a part of the life itself. The common ideal of asceticism aimed at was not too high.