St. Amoun

• He was the first of the monks to settle in Nitria.
• He established a monastery in the village of Nitria, where thousands of his disciples lived under the communal order, which was close to the coenobitic order. Hundreds of them - after a period of training in this monastery - passed to Cellia to live as hermits. In other words he embraced two orders of

monasticism the communal or coenobitic and the anchoretic. This is in marked contrast with the ideal of St. Pachomius, or St. Basil, for whom coenobitism is a lifelong vocation.

• He was of noble birth, and because his parents were exceedingly rich, they constrained him to marry when he was a young man of about 22 years (297). But in the wedding chamber he persuaded the maiden who was now his bride to keep her virginity, and promised to do likewise. A few days later, he went out and settled in the inner part of the mountain of Nitria, where he built himself two domed cells, coming back to visit his blessed wife twice a year. The maiden herself, exhorted all of her household to live in virginity and converted her house into a nunnery.
• Disciples joined him and he became their leader.
• Amoun’s settlement was on the edge of the Western Desert where it forms a low promontory northward into the Delta near the village of Pernoud or Nitria, and about nine miles south- west of the town of Damanhour (Hermopolis Parva).
• According to St. Anthony’s advice, the second Nitrian settlement of the Cells or Cellia was founded for those who wanted more complete solitude, where some six hundred anchorites had their own priest and church.
• He died aged 62.

• Palladius as an eye-witness gives us a brief description of Amoun’s order in Nitria and Cellia, saying: “On the mountain live some 5000 men with different modes of life each living in accordance with his own powers and wishes, so that it is allowed to live alone,or with another,or

with a number of others…There are eight priests who serve the church so long as the senior priest lives, no one else celebrates, or preaches, or hears confessions, but they all just sit quietly by his side.”

• In spite of the thousands of monks who abode in Nitria under St. Amoun’s guidance, he did not gain the same fame of St. Anthony Perhaps because his monastic rule was between anchorism and cenobitism.
• Abba Ammonas was asked, “What is the narrow and hard way?” (Matt 7:14). He replied, “The “narrow and hard way” is this, to control your thoughts, and to strip yourself of your own will, for the sake of God.”
• He also said, “Go make your thoughts like those of the evildoers who are in prison. For they are always asking when the magistrate will come, awaiting him in anxiety. Even so the monk ought to give himself at all times to accusing his own soul saying, “Unhappy wretch that I am. How shall I stand before the judgment seat of Christ? What shall I say to him in my defense?” If you give yourself continually to this, you may be saved.”