Ecumenical Commemoration
Monastic Father & Desert Ascetic
January 17 · d. 356
also known as Antony the Great, Antony of the Desert, Anthony the Abbot
Antony of Egypt, born in Middle Egypt about the middle of the third century and dead at the age of a hundred and five, gave away a large inherited estate after hearing the Gospel read aloud in church, and spent the rest of his life in the Egyptian desert. He did not invent the solitary life; he learned it from older ascetics near his own village and then carried it further than anyone before him. His biographer, Athanasius of Alexandria, knew him personally, and the book he wrote made Antony the father of Christian monasticism.
Antony was the son of well-off Christian farmers in a village in Middle Egypt, and when both his parents died he was about eighteen or twenty, left with the land, the household, and a sister to look after. Not six months later he was in church when the Gospel was read, and the words came at him as though they had been spoken to him by name: "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast." He went out and did it. The land, three hundred acres in his biographer's phrase, "productive and very fair," he gave to the villagers. Everything portable he sold and gave to the poor, keeping back a little for his sister, whom he placed with faithful consecrated women to be brought up.
Then he went looking for people who already knew how to pray. There were such men around the villages, living hard and quiet lives, and Antony went from one to another and took a different virtue from each of them, like a bee, his biographer says, working over flowers. When at last he wanted to go further out, into the real desert, he asked an old solitary to come with him, and the old man said he was too old. So Antony went alone.
He shut himself into a tomb outside the village, and a friend brought him bread at intervals of many days. That is where the fighting began. Demons came at him in the shapes of beasts, and they did not stop at frightening him; they beat him until he could not stand, and he was carried out for dead. When he came to himself he had himself carried back. He had worked out what they were worth: they hate a man who fasts, who keeps vigil, who prays, who will not be provoked, and they are afraid of exactly those things, which is another way of saying that they can be beaten.
After fifteen years of that, at about thirty-five, he crossed the Nile to an abandoned Roman fort, "so long deserted that it was full of creeping things," and shut the door. Bread was let down to him over the wall twice a year. He stayed there nearly twenty years, "never going forth, and but seldom seen by any." People assumed that what would eventually come out, if anything did, would be a wreck: starved, or mad, or both. In the end they broke the door down themselves. What walked out was a man neither thin nor heavy, neither wild-eyed nor broken, coming forth "as from a shrine," his biographer writes, "initiated in the mysteries." He was, quite simply, still himself, and better.
He never got his solitude back, and he seems not to have minded. Men came out to live near him and he taught them for years, telling them that they had given up less than they thought: "the whole earth is very small compared with all the heaven," and a man who hands over a few acres has handed over almost nothing. When persecution broke out in Alexandria in 311 he went down to the city, hoping to be martyred, and served the confessors in the mines and the prisons; the governor forbade monks to appear at the court, so Antony stood in the open where he could be seen, "showing the readiness of us Christians." They passed him over.
Nor was he safe to insult. A commander named Balacius was flogging monks and beating consecrated women, and Antony sent him a letter of warning. Balacius spat on it. Five days had not passed before the gentlest horse in his own stable, with the prefect Nestorius on its back, turned on Balacius and tore his thigh open, and in three days he was dead.
The emperor and his sons wrote to Antony as to a father, and he was so unimpressed that the monks had to persuade him to answer at all. He came down from his mountain once more, an old man, to denounce the Arians in Alexandria in front of everyone. At a hundred and five he told the brothers that his time had come, and went back up to die where he could not be turned into a spectacle: Egyptians kept the embalmed bodies of holy men in their houses, and he wanted none of it. He left one sheepskin and the cloak he lay on to Bishop Athanasius, the other sheepskin to Bishop Serapion, the hair shirt to the two disciples who had nursed him for fifteen years. "Live as though dying daily," he told them, and then, "for Antony is departing, and is with you no more." They buried him in the ground in secret, as he had asked, and no one knows to this day where it was buried, save those two only. He had gone out to the desert to be forgotten, and what he found there, that God is worth the whole of a life, was already loose among more people than he ever met.
You have probably never been asked to sell three hundred acres, and the verse Antony heard was not read at you by name. But you know the shape of what he did: he heard something he already believed, and he treated it as though it applied to him, that week, in the arrangement of his actual property. Most of us keep a careful distance between what we assent to and what we act on, and the distance is where the comfort lives. Notice that the desert did not make Antony strange. Twenty years behind a door and he came out recognisably himself, and kinder, and everyone who had expected a wreck had to revise. What is the one thing you already believe to be true, and have arranged your life so as never to have to act on?
Almost everything anyone knows about Antony comes from one book: the Life of Antony, written in Greek by Athanasius of Alexandria within a few years of Antony's death, about 356 to 362. Athanasius says he visited Antony himself, and he is named inside his own narrative as the recipient of one of the two sheepskins. Alongside it stand the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, a fifth-century compilation from oral tradition with thirty-eight items under Antony's name; Palladius, who travelled Egypt in the 390s; Cassian, who reports at second hand that Antony held discretion the chief of the virtues; Jerome, a child in Antony's last years, who records in On Illustrious Men that Antony sent seven letters in Coptic to various monasteries, "letters truly apostolic in idea and language"; and the Coptic Synaxarium, a much later liturgical compilation that keeps his feast on 22 Tobi and gives his birth at Qimn al-Arus in 251 and his death in 355.
The chronology has one anchor and no more. The Life gives no calendar dates at all, only ages and durations, and its single fixed point is Antony's own remark that he is near a hundred and five years old. Every year attached to his life is a back-calculation from that sentence. Edward Cuthbert Butler, who worked the dates out for the Catholic Encyclopedia in 1907 and is the source of most of the years still quoted, said so himself: "All the chronology is based on the hypothesis that this date and the figures in the Life are correct." The Western tradition has settled on 356 for the death; the Coptic tradition says 355. Neither should be pressed harder than Butler pressed his own.
Two things in the record are genuinely contested. The first is the seven letters. They survive whole only in translation, Latin, Georgian, Syriac and Arabic, with the Coptic original in fragments, and the 1907 Catholic Encyclopedia judged that they might be authentic but that it would be "premature to decide." Samuel Rubenson's study of 1995 made the fuller case for them and argued that they show a theologically literate author, which sits awkwardly against the Life's portrait of a man who would not learn his letters and told a party of Greek philosophers that "whoever, therefore, has a sound mind has not need of letters." Both pictures are old; the tension between them is the interesting thing, not a fault to be resolved. A separate collection of sermons and twenty epistles surviving in Arabic is by common consent spurious, and the Rule that circulates under Antony's name is a later compilation from his sayings rather than his own composition.
The second is Athanasius himself. He was the chief opponent of Arianism in his century, exiled five times over that fight, and he wrote the while it was going on. That Antony appears in the book unambiguously on his side is precisely what his authorship would produce whether or not it is also true. This is not a reason to set the book aside. It is a reason to read the anti-Arian passages as the testimony of a biographer with a stake in the claim.
Antony is kept on 17 January in the Orthodox, Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran calendars, and on 22 Tobi among the Copts. He was never formally canonized: he lived many centuries before there was any such process, and there is no positio, no date, and no pope to name.
The largest thing his memory ever built was a hospital order. About 1095, at La-Motte-Saint-Didier in France, a young nobleman recovered from ergotism at a shrine of Antony, and his family founded the Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony in thanks. At their height in the late fifteenth century the Antonines ran roughly 370 hospitals across France, Flanders, Germany, Spain and Italy, several on the pilgrim roads to Compostela, where they fed the sick clean rye from their own fields. Ergotism has been called Saint Anthony's Fire ever since. The order's emblems became his: the tau cross on the cloak, the bell the brothers rang on their collecting rounds, and the pig, which the brothers were licensed to let forage in the streets and whose fat dressed the sores. No Antonine hospital order survives today.
Painters have returned to him for six hundred years, almost always to the temptations. Grünewald put him on the wing of the Isenheim Altarpiece, torn by disease-shaped demons, for an Antonine hospital whose patients had the disease he was being torn by. Bosch, Schongauer, whose engraving the teenage Michelangelo copied in paint, and Dalí all painted the same scene. In Egypt the Monastery of Saint Anthony in the Eastern Desert, founded by his disciples after his death, is still a working Coptic community and a place of pilgrimage.
The tradition holds that Antony was led by a vision to an older hermit, Paul of Thebes, deeper in the desert still, and that two lions came out of the waste and dug the old man's grave; Jerome tells it, a generation after Antony died, and it has been loved ever since. As for Antony's own grave, he ordered it hidden and it was. The later accounts of his relics being found and carried to Alexandria, then Constantinople, then France, do not agree with each other about the century, and they sit against the plain testimony of the Life.
One last thing, because it trips nearly everyone: the saint invoked for lost keys, with the Christ Child in his arms and a feast on 13 June, is Antony of Padua, a Franciscan who died in 1231. Almost every English-speaking "St Anthony's" belongs to him. St Antony's College, Oxford took from 1952 to January 1961 to decide which of the two it meant.
*Athanasius, Life of Antony**, written in Greek about 356 to 362, is the source of every quotation in the account above except where noted. All are given in H. Ellershaw's translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers*, second series, volume 4, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (New York, 1892), which is in the public domain: the inheritance and Matthew 19:21 at §2; the ascetics and the bee at §3 and §4; the old solitary at §11; the deserted fort at §12; the twenty years and the emergence at §14; the earth and the heaven at §17; the demons' fears at §30; Alexandria under persecution at §46; the philosophers at §73; Balacius and the horse at §86; the deathbed, the sheepskins and "Live as though dying daily" at §91; and the hidden grave at §92. Read it at newadvent.org/fathers/2811.htm, or at ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf204.xvi.ii.i.html.
*Edward Cuthbert Butler, "St. Anthony," The Catholic Encyclopedia*** (New York, 1907), supplies the conventional chronology together with the caveat quoted above, the judgement on the seven letters ("premature to decide"), the verdict on the Arabic sermons, and the note that Weingarten's case has been "abandoned on all hands." At newadvent.org/cathen/01553d.htm.
*Jerome, On Illustrious Men 88 and 125, translated by Ernest Cushing Richardson in the same Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series, records the seven Coptic letters "truly apostolic in idea and language" and names Evagrius of Antioch as the Latin translator of the Life. Jerome's Life of Paul the Hermit*, the source of the lions, is at newadvent.org/fathers/3008.htm.
*Samuel Rubenson, The Letters of St. Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint** (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995; first published at Lund, 1990, as Origenist Theology, Monastic Tradition and the Making of a Saint*), is the standard modern study of the letters and prints Rubenson's own English translation of them.
The *Coptic Synaxarium** entry for 22 Tobi is at st-takla.org. For the Latin transmission of the Life, see Vitae Antonii Versiones Latinae, ed. Pascal Bertrand and Lois Gandt (Brepols, 2019), and for the Greek, G. J. M. Bartelink's edition in Sources Chrétiennes* 400 (1994).
Anthony is said of Ana, which is as much to say as high, and tenens that is holding, which is as much as to say as holding high things and despising the world. He despised the world and said: It is deceiving, transitory and bitter, and Athanasius wrote his life.
Of the Life of S. Anthony.
S. Anthony was born in Egypt of good and religious father and mother, and when he was but twenty years old, he heard on a time in the church read in the gospel, that said: If you will be perfect go sell all that you have and give it to poor men; and then according thereto he sold all that he had, and gave it to the poor people and became an hermit. He had overmany temptations of the devil. Then on a time when he had overcome the spirit of fornication which tempted him therein by the virtue of his faith, the devil came to him in the form of a little child all black, and fell down at his feet and confessed that he was the devil of fornication, which S. Anthony had desired and prayed to see him, for to know him that so tempted young people. Then said S. Anthony: Sith I have perceived that you are so foul a thing I shall never doubt you.
After, he went into a hole or cave to hide him, and anon he found there a great multitude of devils, that so much beat him that his servant bare him upon his shoulders in to his house as he had been dead. When the other hermits were assembled and wept his death, and would have done his service, suddenly S. Anthony revived and made his servant to bear him into the pit again where the devils had so evil beaten him, and began to summon the devils again, which had beaten him, to battles. And anon they came in form of divers beasts wild and savage, of whom that one howled, another siffled, and another cried, and another brayed and assailed S. Anthony, that one with the horns, the others with their teeth, and the others with their paws and ongles, and disturned, and all to-rent his body that he supposed well to die. Then came a clear brightness, and all the beasts fled away, and S. Anthony understood that in this great light our Lord came, and he said twice: Who are you? The good Jesu answered: I am here, Anthony. Then said S. Anthony: O good Jesu! where have you been so long? why were you not here with me at the beginning to help me and to heal my wounds? Then our Lord said: I was here but I would see and abide to see your battle, and because you have manly fought and well maintained your battle, I shall make your name to be spread through all the world. S. Anthony was of so great fervour and burning love to God, that when Maximus, the emperor, slew and martyred christian men, he followed the martyrs that he might be a martyr with them and deserve it, and was sorry that martyrdom was not given to him.
After this, as S. Anthony went in desert he found a platter of silver in his way; then he thought whence this platter should come, seeing it was in no way for any man to pass, and also if it had fallen from any man he should have heard it sound in the falling. Then said he well that the devil had laid it there for to tempt him, and said: Ha! devil, you ween to tempt me and deceive me, but it shall not be in your power. Then the platter vanished away as a little smoke. And in likewise it happed him of a mass of gold that he found in this way, which the devil had cast for to deceive him, which he took and cast it into the fire and anon it vanished away. After, it happed that S. Anthony on a time was in prayer, and saw in a vision all the world full of snares and gins. Then cried S. Anthony and said: O good Lord, who may escape from these snares? And a voice said to him: Very humility shall escape them without more.
When S. Anthony on a time was left in the air, the devils came against him and laid to him all the evils that he had done from his childhood, tofore the angels. Then said the angels: You ought not to tell the evils that have been defeated, but say if you know any evil sith he was made a monk, then the devils contrived many evils, and when they might not prove them, the angels bare him higher than tofore, and after set him again in his place. S. Anthony records of himself that he had seen a man so great and so high that he vaunted himself to be the virtue and the providence of God, and said to me: Demand of me what you will and I shall give it to you. And I spit in the midst of his visage, and anon I armed me with the sign of the cross, and ran upon him, and anon he vanished away. And after this the devil appeared to him in so great a stature that he touched the heaven, and when S. Anthony had demanded him what he was, he answered: I am the devil and demand you why these monks and these cursed christian men do me thus much shame? S. Anthony said: They do it by good right, for you do to them the worst you can, and the devil answered: I do to them none harm, but they trouble each other, I am destroyed and come to naught because that Jesu Christ reigns over all.
A young man passed by S. Anthony and his bow in his hand, and beheld how S. Anthony played with his fellows, and was evil apaid. Then S. Anthony said to him that he should bend his bow, and so he did, and shot two or three shots tofore him, and anon he unbent his bow. Then demanded him S. Anthony why he held not his bow bent. And he answered that it should then be over weak and feeble; then said to him S. Anthony: In likewise play the monks, for to be after more strong to serve God.
A man demanded of S. Anthony what he might do to please God, and he answered: Over all where you shall be or shall go, have God tofore your eyes, and the holy scripture, and hold you in one place all still, and walk not ne royle not about in the country, do these three things and you shall be safe.
An abbot came to S. Anthony for to be counselled of him what he might do for to be saved. S. Anthony answered to him: Have none affiance in the good that you have done, ne that you have kept your belly and your tongue well soberly, and repent you not of penance that you have done I say, for like as fishes that have been long in the water when they come in to dry land they must die, in like wise the monks that go out of their cloister or cells, if they converse long with seculars they must needs lose their holiness and leave their good life. It behoves the monks that they be solitary, and that they have three battles, that is of hearing, of speaking, and of seeing, and if they have but one of these battles, that is of the heart, yet they have overmuch.
Some hermits came to S. Anthony for to visit him, and their abbot was with them; then said S. Anthony to the hermits: You have a good wise man with you, and after he said to the abbot: You have founden good brethren. Then answered the abbot: Truly I have good brethren, but there is no door on their house, each body may enter that will, and go into the stable and unbind the ass of within. And this said he because that the brethren had overmuch their mouths open to speak, for anon as they have thought on a thing is it come to the mouth. Then S. Anthony said: You ought to know that there be three bodily movings, that one is of nature, another of overmuch plenty of meats, and the third of the devil.
There was an hermit that had renounced the world, but not perfectly, for he had somewhat proper to himself, whom S. Anthony sent to the market to buy flesh, and as he was coming and brought the flesh, the dogs assailed him, and all totare him, and took the flesh from him; and when he came to S. Anthony he told him what was happed to him; and then said S. Anthony to him: Thus as the hounds have done to you, so do the devils to monks that keep money and have some proper to themselves.
On a time as S. Anthony was in the wilderness in his prayer and was weary, he said to our Lord, Lord, I have great desire to be saved, but my thoughts let me. Then appeared an angel to him and said: Do as I do, and you shall be safe, and he went out and saw him one while labour and another while pray, do thus and you shall be saved.
On a time when the brethren hermits were assembled tofore S. Anthony, they demanded of him of the state of souls when they be departed from the body, and the next night after a voice called S. Anthony and said: Arise, and go out and see up on high. When S. Anthony beheld upward on high he saw one long and terrible, whose head touched the clouds, which kept people having wings that would have fled to heaven, and this great man retained and caught some, and others he might not retain ne let for they flew forth up. Then he heard a noise full of joy, and another full of sorrow, and he understood that this was the devil that retained some souls that went not to heaven, and the other he might not hold ne retain, wherefore he made sorrow, and for the other he made joy, and so he heard the sorrow and the joy meddled together.
It happed on a time that S. Anthony laboured with his brethren the hermits, and he saw a vision much sorrowful, and therefore he kneeled down on his knees and prayed our Lord that he would empesh the great sorrow that was to come. Then the other hermits demanded what thing it was, and he said that it was a great sorrow, for I have seen of great plenty of beasts which environed me, which feared all the country, and I wot well that this is to say that there shall come a great trouble of men like unto beasts, that shall defoul the sacraments of holy church. Then came a voice from heaven to S. Anthony that said that great abomination shall come to mine altar. And anon after, the heresy of Arius began, and much troubled holy church, and did many evils. They beat monks and other all naked tofore the people, and slew christian men like sheep upon the altars, and in especial one Balachyn did great persecution to whom S. Anthony wrote a letter which said: I see the ire and mal talent of our Lord coming upon you if you suffer not the christians to live in peace. Then I command you that you do to them no more villainy or you shall have a mischance hastily. The unhappy man received this letter and began to mock S. Anthony, and spit on it, and beat well him that brought the letter, and sent again to S. Anthony these words: If you have so great charge of your monks come to me and I shall give to you my discipline: but it happed that the fifteenth day after he mounted upon a horse over debonair, and nevertheless when the horse felt him upon him he bit him on the legs and thighs that he died on the third day.
It happed another time that the hermits were come to S. Anthony and demanded of him a collation. Then said S. Anthony: Do you this that is written in the gospel, if one give to the other a stroke on that one cheek show him that other? And they made answer: We may not do so; then said he: Suffer you it once debonairly; they answered: We may not. Then said S. Anthony to his servant: Give them to drink good wine, for these monks be over delicious. Fair brethren, put yourselves to prayer, for you have much great need. At the last S. Anthony assembled the hermits and gave to them the peace, and died and departed out of this world holily when he was of the age of an hundred and five years. Pray we to him that he pray for us.
Of S.
A modern departure worth naming and dating: in 1877 Hermann Weingarten denied that Athanasius wrote the Life at all, called it fiction, and held that Christian monks did not exist before 340, and some English scholars went further and doubted that Antony existed. By 1907 the case had been, in the Catholic Encyclopedia's phrase, "abandoned on all hands," and Athanasian authorship is now received with practical unanimity. The manuscript situation for the Life itself is ordinary for a work of its age: two fourth-century Latin translations, the dominant one by Evagrius of Antioch dated 373, with the earliest surviving copies of either version from the ninth century, and a modern critical edition of the Latin resting on twenty-eight manuscripts of the ninth to eleventh centuries.
One correction the sources themselves require. Antony is often called the first Christian to go into the desert, and the Life does not say so. It describes solitaries already living near his village whom he sought out and imitated, and one older man who declined to follow him deeper because of his age. Antony radicalised the eremitic life and made it famous; he did not begin it.
O God, your blessed Son became poor for our sake, and chose the Cross over the kingdoms of this world: Deliver us from an inordinate love of worldly things, that we, inspired by the devotion of your servant Antony of Egypt, may seek you with singleness of heart, behold your glory by faith, and attain to the riches of your everlasting kingdom, where we shall be united with our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Readings for a Monastic or Religious
Lamentations 3:22–33Psalm 1Hebrews 4:1–13 or Acts 2:42–47Mark 10:23–31