Henry Chadwick, once fellow of Queens', Cambridge, student of Christ Church, Oxford, and Dean, returned to Cambridge and became the most junior fellow of Magdalene. As he humbly performed the duties of the most junior fellow in the combination room after dinner, he would delight to tell a stranger that he was following the rule handed down from monasticism of old. In a volume devoted to the evolution of orthodoxy I offer him my hunch that the tradition is even older than he thinks. He will find the rule he followed in Magdalene explicitly stated in Philo's book On the Contemplative Life, §67. Ideas may evolve, but practice remains stubbornly the same, and I offer this essay as grateful tribute to a teacher and friend who passed on to me by precept and example the ancient practices of scholarship without which truth would soon be choked with weeds. I argue that, if orthodoxy evolved, the practice of the orthodox did not.

Everyone says that monasticism began with Antony and Pachomius in Upper Egypt, that is, at the end of the third century and the beginning of the fourth, and the case is certainly impressive. Athanasius' Life of Antony, and the Life of Pachomius are massive literary evidence of a popular movement, first of disciples around the great hermit Antony, and then of settled monasteries governed by an abbot according to a definite Rule, a Rule formulated by Pachomius.