Saint Anthony the Great (251-356)

The father of monks

Anthony, who knew only Coptic and lived far from books, nevertheless left a real body of work: seven dictated letters (probably in Coptic, preserved in translation), whose authenticity is now recognised^[6], as well as the sayings gathered in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Yet no man marked the birth of monastic life more deeply. Before him, fervent Christians already practiced continence and renunciation while remaining near villages; Anthony was the first to push the movement to its end by entering the deep desert, and above all the first whose example, narrated by Athanasius, drew thousands of imitators. For this reason he is called the "father of monks" and the "patriarch of anchorites"^[7].

Two great forms of early monastic life must be distinguished: eremitism (the monk lives alone, as an anchorite) and cenobitism (monks live in community, under a rule). Anthony is the great model of the first; his contemporary Saint Pachomius would organize the second. The two streams would meet and nourish all later monasticism, down to Saint Basil in the East and Saint Benedict in the West.

"Anthony the Great", "Anthony of the Desert"

The title "the Great" does not refer to an office (he was neither bishop nor superior of a great monastery), but to his spiritual rank: in the Church's memory, he is the first and greatest of the Desert Fathers. He is also called Anthony the Hermit, Anthony the Abbot (from abba, "father" in Aramaic, title of the ancient monks of Egypt), or Anthony of the Desert, to distinguish him from Saint Anthony of Padua (thirteenth century), an entirely different figure with whom popular devotion has sometimes confused him.

Coma, in Middle Egypt

Anthony was born around 251 in the village of Coma (Qeman), near Heracleopolis Magna, in Middle Egypt^[8]. His parents were prosperous Christians, owners of fertile land. According to Athanasius, the child was so attached to home and church that he even refused to go to school so as not to mingle in the games of other children; he grew up in simple piety, nourished more by the liturgy than by letters^[9].

The death of his parents and the burden of the household

At about eighteen or twenty, Anthony lost both parents. He found himself solely responsible for an estate of about three hundred arourae of good land and for a younger sister whose future he had to secure^[10]. It was in this situation (a free young man, rich, without parental ties) that the word of the Gospel would seize him.

The Gospel heard on a Sunday

About six months after his parents' death, Anthony entered the church while meditating on the Apostles who had left everything to follow Christ. That day, precisely, the passage of the rich young man was being read. The word struck him as though addressed personally to him:

"If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." (Gospel according to Saint Matthew, 19:21^[11])

Anthony immediately went out and gave the people of his village the three hundred arourae of land, so that they would no longer be a burden either to him or to his sister. He sold the rest, received a large sum, and distributed it to the poor, keeping only a little for his sister^[12].

The second word of the Gospel: do not be anxious about tomorrow

Some time later, returning to church, he heard another word of the Lord:

"Do not be anxious about tomorrow." (Gospel according to Saint Matthew, 6:34^[13])

He could no longer bear to keep anything. He distributed the remainder to the poor, entrusted his sister to a community of consecrated virgins (the first historical mention of a women's monastery) and dedicated himself wholly to asceticism^[14]. He was perhaps twenty years old.

The first steps of ascetic life, near the village

Anthony did not set out for the desert at once. He began, according to the practice of the time, near his own home: he placed himself under the guidance of an old ascetic nearby, then under others as well, taking from each one a virtue: one man's kindness, another's prayer, a third's patience, "like a wise bee"^[15]. He worked with his hands (basketry, weaving), ate once a day after sunset, and slept on a mat or on the bare ground. This was the apprenticeship of the combat that would extend through his whole life.

The tombs: the first great trial

Wanting to harden his ascetic life still further, Anthony had himself shut inside an abandoned tomb, far from the village, where a friend would occasionally bring him a little bread. There, according to Athanasius, he underwent the most violent of demonic attacks: he was beaten to the point of being left for dead. Carried unconscious to the church by his friend, he came back to himself, had himself taken back to the tomb, and provoked the battle again. At night, the place filled with noises, beasts, and terrifying figures^[16].

"Where were you?": Christ and the meaning of combat

At the height of the ordeal, the roof seemed to open, a ray of light descended, and the demons fled. Anthony, still bruised, dared to question that presence:

"Where were you? Why did you not appear at the beginning to make my pains cease?" And a voice answered him: "Anthony, I was here, but I waited to see your fight; and since you have endured, I will always be your help and will make your name known everywhere." (Athanasius, Life of Anthony, 10^[17])

This episode contains the heart of Anthony's spirituality: God does not suppress the trial, he accompanies it; God's apparent silence is not an absence, but the waiting of a love that wants to see us stand firm. Anthony would later draw from this one of his most famous sayings:

"Whoever has not experienced temptation cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Without temptations no one can be saved." (Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Anthony 5^[18])

The fort of Pispir: twenty years of enclosure

Around the age of thirty, Anthony crossed the Nile and settled in an abandoned fort at Pispir (the "outer mountain"), on the edge of the eastern desert. He walled up the entrance, received bread only twice a year, and remained there for nearly twenty years without seeing anyone, communicating only through a small opening^[19][20]. This was the most hidden and most severe period of his life.

When, around 305, friends finally broke down the door to bring him out, everyone expected to find a man exhausted and broken by enclosure. Athanasius instead notes the wonder:

"He came forth as from a shrine, having been led into divine mysteries and inspired by God. [...] His body had neither grown fat from want of exercise, nor lean from fasting and fighting with the demons: it was just as they had known it before his retirement. The state of his soul was pure [...] neither contracted by grief, nor relaxed by pleasure." (Athanasius, Life of Anthony, 14^[21])

"The desert became a city"

His reputation then drew a crowd of disciples who settled around him to learn how to live as monks. The desert filled with cells. Athanasius summarized this transformation in a phrase that became famous:

"Cells arose even in the mountains, and the desert was colonised by monks, who came forth from their own people. [...] The desert had become a city of monks." (Athanasius, Life of Anthony, 14^[22])

The central section of the Life of Anthony is a long discourse (chapters 16 to 43) placed by Athanasius on Anthony's lips: a true treatise of spiritual life, probably the oldest one monasticism has left us^[31]. It already contains everything later masters would develop.

Discernment of spirits

Anthony teaches at length how to distinguish the action of God from that of the devil. The criterion is peace: a divine visitation leaves the soul in joy, calm, and courage; a bad suggestion, even when disguised as light, leaves disturbance, fear, and disorder^[32].

"The vision of the holy ones is not tumultuous [...] it takes place so quietly and gently that immediately joy, gladness, and courage arise in the soul. [...] But the attack and apparition of the evil ones is full of confusion, with noise, sound and shouting [...] it produces fear in the soul, disturbance and disorder of thoughts." (Athanasius, Life of Anthony, 35-36^[33])

This doctrine of discernment, the first of its kind, would irrigate the whole tradition, down to Saint Ignatius of Loyola and his Spiritual Exercises.

The doctrine of humility

For Anthony, the decisive weapon against demons is not ascetic achievement but humility: the devil, a spirit of pride, can do nothing against one who knows himself small. One of the best-known sayings sums up this intuition:

"I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world, and I said groaning, 'What can get through from such snares?' Then I heard a voice saying to me, 'Humility.'" (Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Anthony 7^[34])

Remaining in the cell

Anthony also insists on stability: the monk must remain in his cell, because it is there, in solitude, that the combat is fought and won. Scattered outside, he loses his inner peace.

"Just as fish die if they stay too long out of water, so the monks who loiter outside their cells or pass their time with men of the world lose the intensity of inner peace." (Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Anthony 10^[35])

Yet this demand is not inhuman. Another saying, Anthony 13, tells how a hunter, shocked to see Anthony relaxed with the brothers, learned the lesson of the bow: bend the bow too much and you break it. Anthony draws from it the rule for the work of God: stretching the brothers beyond measure would soon break them, and one must sometimes know how to "come down" toward their needs^[36].

The neighbor as the path to God

The hermit is not an egoist of perfection. One of his sayings founds an entire spirituality of charity:

"Our life and our death is with our neighbor. If we gain our brother, we have gained God; but if we scandalize our brother, we have sinned against Christ." (Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Anthony 9^[37])

Contrary to the image of a solitary cut off from the world, Anthony came down twice from his desert to serve the Church, at two of the gravest moments of the fourth century.

The confessor of Alexandria

Around 311, under the persecution of Maximin Daia, Anthony left the desert and went down to Alexandria to comfort imprisoned Christians and support the martyrs before the tribunals. He exposed himself openly, desiring martyrdom himself, but God, says Athanasius, preserved him so that he might continue to instruct others. When the persecution calmed, he returned to the desert, "daily a martyr to his conscience"^[38].

Against Arianism: the old hermit in Alexandria

The second journey, around 337-338, was still more striking. Arianism (the heresy that denies that the Son is truly God) was then tearing apart the Eastern Church, and Saint Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria, was being hunted for refusing every compromise. At the bishops' request, the very old Anthony came down again into the city and preached publicly against the Arians, declaring Arianism "the last heresy and the forerunner of Antichrist", because it lowers the Son of God to the rank of a creature^[39]. The word of this hermit respected by all, even by pagans, gave immense moral support to orthodoxy.

"The Son of God is not a creature, nor did he come into being out of nothing; he is the Word and eternal Wisdom of the Father's substance. Therefore it is impious to say: there was a time when he was not, for the Word has always coexisted with the Father." (Athanasius, Life of Anthony, 69^[40])

Faith before Greek philosophers

During this stay, Greek philosophers came to test this unlettered man. Anthony confounded them not by dialectic but by life: he observed that they needed long arguments to demonstrate what the humble faith of the Christian already possessed, and that the sign of the Cross put to flight demons whom their wisdom was powerless to chase away^[41].

"Where the sign of the Cross is made, magic is weak and witchcraft has no strength." (Athanasius, Life of Anthony, 78^[42])

The letters of Emperor Constantine

Anthony's fame reached the imperial palace. In 337, the emperor Constantine and his sons Constantius and Constans wrote to him as to a father, asking for his prayers. The monks marvelled; Anthony remained unmoved and gave them a lesson in interior freedom:

"Do not wonder if an emperor writes to us, for he is a man; but rather wonder that God wrote the Law for men and has spoken to us through his own Son." (Athanasius, Life of Anthony, 81^[43])

He nevertheless agreed to answer, exhorting the princes not to grow proud of their power, to remember judgment, and to honor justice and the poor: the frankness of the hermit was worth as much as the emperor's purple.

Mount Colzim, near the Red Sea

Overwhelmed by visitors around Pispir, Anthony sought a deeper solitude. Guided, Athanasius says, by a voice from above, he journeyed three days into the eastern desert to a steep mountain near the Red Sea, with a spring and a few palm trees: this was the "inner mountain", today's Mount Colzim, where the Monastery of Saint Anthony (Der Mar Antonios) still stands, the oldest Christian monastery still inhabited^[44]. He would spend most of the end of his life there, cultivating a small garden, receiving pilgrims, but jealously guarding his recollection.

Saint Paul of Thebes

It is in this period that tradition, recorded by Saint Jerome in his Life of Paul of Thebes, places the most famous episode of Anthony's old age: warned in a dream that an older hermit than himself was living in the desert, Anthony set out in search of him and found Saint Paul of Thebes, the "first hermit", fed every day for decades by a raven bringing half a loaf. The two old men embraced; that day the raven brought a whole loaf. Shortly afterward, Anthony buried Paul, helped (the story says) by two lions that dug the grave, and inherited his tunic of palm leaves^[45].

"Bury my body in a hidden place"

Feeling his end near, Anthony (one hundred and five years old) visited his brothers one last time, then withdrew to the inner mountain with two disciples. He left them his final recommendations: persevere in asceticism, beware of schismatics and Arians, and above all hide the place of his burial. He feared the Egyptian custom of embalming and exposing the bodies of saints:

"Bury my body yourselves, and hide it under the earth; let my word be kept by you, so that no one may know the place except you alone. [...] At the resurrection of the dead, I shall receive it incorruptible from the Savior." (Athanasius, Life of Anthony, 91^[46])

The two sheepskin cloaks: the inheritance to Athanasius and Serapion

Anthony possessed almost nothing: two sheepskin cloaks (melotes) and the worn garment on which he slept. He divided them as a spiritual testament:

"Divide my garments. To Athanasius the bishop, give one of my sheepskin cloaks and the garment on which I am lying, the one he gave me new, and which has grown old with me. To Serapion the bishop, give the other sheepskin cloak; and you, keep the hair-shirt." (Athanasius, Life of Anthony, 91^[47])

Then he stretched out his feet, looked at his disciples with joy, and breathed his last on January 17, 356^[48][49]. His two companions buried him secretly, according to his will; his relics were officially found only in the sixth century.

Athanasius, biographer and witness

The Life of Anthony, written by Saint Athanasius shortly after 356, is one of the most influential texts in all Christian literature. Athanasius, who had seen Anthony and received his sheepskin cloak, wrote at the request of Western monks to offer a model for imitation^[50]. Translated into Latin before 375 (notably by Evagrius of Antioch), it spread like wildfire through the Empire.

The conversion of Saint Augustine

The most illustrious reader of Anthony was perhaps Saint Augustine. In his Confessions, he tells how the story of the conversion of two imperial officials at Trier, after reading the Life of Anthony, shook him and prepared his own conversion under the fig tree at Milan:

"You turned me back toward myself [...]. I was astonished, I trembled." (Saint Augustine, Confessions, VIII, 7, §16^[51])

"The unlearned rise up and take heaven, and we, with our heartless learning, see how we wallow in flesh and blood!" (Saint Augustine, Confessions, VIII, 8, §19^[52])

The father of all monasticism

From the Life of Anthony descend, directly or indirectly, the great monastic families: the hermits and lauras of the East, the cenobitism of Pachomius and Basil, then, in the West, Saint Martin, the Fathers, and finally the rule of Saint Benedict, which explicitly cites the Desert Fathers. All Western monasticism recognizes itself, from near or far, as Anthony's child. His most direct spiritual disciple in the desert of Scetis was Saint Macarius the Great.

Relics and feast (January 17)

Discovered around 561, Anthony's relics were transferred to Alexandria, then to Constantinople, and finally, in the eleventh century, to France, at La-Motte-aux-Bois (later Saint-Antoine-l'Abbaye, in Dauphine), which became a major place of pilgrimage. His feast is celebrated on January 17, in both the Latin and Byzantine calendars^[53].

Patronage, the Tau, the pig, and the Antonines

In the Middle Ages, Saint Anthony was invoked against "Saint Anthony's fire" (ergotism, poisoning by ergot of rye, sometimes confused with erysipelas). To care for the sick, a hospital order arose in the eleventh century, the Antonines (Canons of Saint Anthony), who raised pigs allowed to wander through the streets, hence the pig often shown at the saint's feet. Anthony thus became patron of butchers, pork butchers, basket-makers, domestic animals, and protector against skin diseases^[54].

His most constant attribute is the Tau (the Greek letter T), shaped like a cross and a crutch, embroidered on the Antonine cloak and carried as a staff: it symbolizes both the Cross and help for the sick.

Iconography: the temptations of Saint Anthony

Few saints have inspired artists so much. Anthony's combat against demons, monsters, and seductions became a major pictorial theme: from Martin Schongauer and Hieronymus Bosch to Matthias Grunewald (the Isenheim Altarpiece, painted precisely for an Antonine commandery), Jacques Callot, Tiepolo, and even Cezanne, Dali, and Flaubert's novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Through these works, Anthony has remained in Western culture the very figure of the man grappling with evil, and triumphing over it through prayer.

Sixteen centuries later, Anthony remains strikingly relevant. He first reminds us that the interior life is a real combat, not a vague search for well-being: there is an enemy, there are snares, there is a struggle, and there is a victory promised to the humble. He also reminds us that silence and solitude are not flight, but the place where man finally stands before God and before himself.

Finally, one of his sayings has taken on an almost prophetic resonance in the age of crowds and screens:

"A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad, you are not like us.'" (Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Anthony 25^[55])

Anthony left no treatise, no institution, no monument: only an example, letters and a few sayings. But that example was enough to open behind him the great river of Christian monasticism, and to show, once for all, that an unarmed man fixed on God alone can stand "against the world" and transfigure it from within.

• Saint Athanasius of Alexandria: the bishop who knew Anthony, wrote his Life, and received his sheepskin cloak.
• Saint Pachomius: the other father of Egyptian monasticism, founder of cenobitic life.
• Saint Macarius the Great: disciple of the following generation, great master of the desert of Scetis.
• Saint Jerome: author of the Life of Paul of Thebes, which tells the meeting of the two hermits.
• Saint Augustine of Hippo: converted in part by reading the Life of Anthony.
• Saint Benedict of Nursia: the patriarch of Western monasticism, a distant heir of Anthony.
• Arianism: the heresy the old Anthony went down publicly to fight at Alexandria.