Anthony the Great

Anthony was born about 251 in Coma, a village in Middle Egypt, to Christian farmers with good land. He spoke Coptic, the Egyptian language, and never learned Greek. He would not go to school as a boy, he did not like the other children, so he grew up unlettered and learned the Scriptures by listening to them read in church, which he did with a concentration that people remembered.

His parents died when he was about eighteen or twenty, leaving him the farm and a younger sister to raise. Six months later he walked into church while the gospel was being read: If you would be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me. He took it as spoken to him. He gave the land to the villagers, sold the movable property and gave the money away, kept back a little for his sister, and then, hearing the next Sunday that we are not to be anxious about tomorrow, gave that away too. He placed his sister with a community of consecrated women and went to live outside the village.

At first he stayed near home, learning from an old ascetic and copying whatever he could from every holy man in the district, patience from one, prayer from another. Then he went out to the tombs in the hills and had himself shut into one, a friend bringing bread now and then.

The tombs are where the story became famous. Athanasius, who knew him and wrote his life, reports what Anthony reported: sustained assault. Nights of noise and terror, beasts in the dark, the appearance of gold on the road, women, arguments, despair. Once he was beaten so badly that the friend who brought the bread found him unconscious and carried him back to the village for a funeral. Anthony woke, made the man take him back to the tomb, and lay on the floor calling out for another round. He said afterward that the demons are loud because they are weak, and that the fear itself is most of the weapon.

About 285, aged thirty-five, he crossed the Nile to an abandoned Roman fort at Pispir and shut himself in for twenty years, taking bread over the wall twice a year and speaking to no one. People camped outside. When they finally broke the door down around 305, they expected a wreck. Athanasius says he came out neither swollen from lack of exercise nor shrunken from fasting, but exactly himself, calm, balanced, entirely present. That description is why the book mattered: the desert had not destroyed him, it had finished him.

He stayed a few years teaching the crowd of men who had followed him out, and the desert filled up. He did not invent the solitary life, and he never wrote a rule. What he did was make it visible, and by the time he died the Egyptian sand held thousands of monks, with cities of them at Nitria and Scetis.

He came out of the desert twice. In 311, during the persecution under Maximin, he went to Alexandria openly in his sheepskin to stand with the confessors in the courts and visit the condemned in the mines, hoping to be martyred. He was not; the prefect ordered him out of the city and he refused to hide. Around 338 he came again, an old man now, to preach in public against the Arians, saying flatly that the Son of God is not a creature but the Word and Wisdom of the Father, and that to say otherwise is to worship a made thing. The city emptied into the streets to see him, and pagans came to touch him.

Then he went further out, to what he called the Inner Mountain, near the Red Sea, where he grew a little grain and some vegetables so as to stop being a burden to anyone. He lived there the rest of his life. Letters came to him from the emperor Constantine, and he had to be talked into answering them; he told his monks not to be impressed, since the emperor was only a man.

He died about 356, past a hundred years old, having asked two disciples to bury him in an unmarked place so that no one would make a shrine of his body. They did.

Athanasius wrote the Life of Antony within a few years. Translated into Latin almost immediately, it became the most widely read Christian book of the ancient world after the Bible. Augustine records in his Confessions that hearing the story of Antony, a man with no education who simply obeyed a sentence he heard read, was one of the blows that broke his own resistance in the garden at Milan.

Sources: Athanasius, Life of Antony; Anthony, Letters (seven, surviving in Georgian, Latin and Arabic); The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum); Augustine, Confessions, book 8.