Saint Anthony of Egypt

Egyptian hermit

• Born: c. 251
• Birthplace: Coma, near Memphis, Egypt (now Queman el Aroune, Egypt)
• Died: Probably January 17, 356
• Place of death: Mount Kolzim, near the Red Sea, Egypt

A hermit renowned for his ascetic labors and Gospel teachings, Anthony became celebrated within Christendom as the founder of the eremitic movement and the father of monasticism.

Early Life

Saint Anthony (AN-thuhn-ee) of Egypt was born about the year 251 in the village of Coma (the modern Queman el Aroune) in Upper Egypt. The only son of wealthy Coptic Christian parents, Anthony spent his childhood along the Nile River working on the family farm and attending the village church with his pious sister and parents. Because his father feared the worldly learning of Greek academies, Anthony never attended school and did not learn to read or write. His religious training, therefore, was limited to the instructions he received from his parents and from the local priest, who read from the Coptic Bible. While not interested in questions of theology, Anthony was deeply sensitive to spiritual matters. Even as a child, he preferred spending time alone in prayer and meditation to playing games with his friends.

At about age twenty, Anthony suffered the death of both his father and mother. Though a young man of considerable inherited wealth, Anthony became depressed and overburdened with the responsibilities of administering his 130-acre (53-hectare) estate and caring for his young sister. In church, Anthony heard the priest read the Gospel story of a rich young man who asked Jesus what he must do to attain eternal life. Jesus’ reply, “If thou wilt be perfect, go, sell that thou hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21), haunted Anthony, for he (like the protagonist in the story) was rich, had from birth followed all the commandments of the law, and yet still lacked spiritual maturity. That day Anthony decided to respond literally to the Gospel command. He gave his personal possessions to the inhabitants of Coma, sold his estate, and gave the proceeds to the poor, reserving only a small sum for the benefit of his sister.

Soon after that event, on hearing the reading of another scriptural command, “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself” (Matthew 6:34), Anthony determined to make a complete break with his former life. Taking his sister to a convent to be educated for a religious life, he moved to a hut at the edge of the village and sought direction from a hermit on how to live a holy life. Clothed only in a camel’s-hair garment, Anthony studied how to resist worldly temptations by use of prayer, fasting, mortification, and manual labor.

Life’s Work

Anthony, for all of his asceticism, did not achieve sanctification without a struggle. Despite his renunciation of all earthly pleasures, memories of his former life and possessions, as well as erotic visions, disrupted his quest for spiritual fullness. According to his biographer Saint Athanasius, the devil “raised up in [Anthony’s] mind a great dust-cloud of arguments, intending to make him abandon his set purpose.” Anthony persevered and gradually learned to overcome the temptations of his thoughts.

After years of self-conquest on the borders of the village, Anthony was ready to attack the devil in his own territory. He left his arbor hut and moved farther into the desert, into the mortuary chamber of an Egyptian tomb. Permitting the visits of only one friend, who brought him bread and water at infrequent intervals, Anthony challenged the forces of Satan by entering the dark burial cell, which Egyptians believed was haunted by demons. In closing the door behind him, Anthony symbolically severed himself from the world of the living.

The modern mind can only interpret the accounts of Anthony’s struggles with the devil in the tomb as fantasies conjured by his excessive fasting. For contemporaries of Anthony, however, his confrontation with Satan—which included battling demons disguised as bulls, serpents, scorpions, and wolves—was perceived as physical and real. When he emerged after sixteen years in the subterranean tomb, Anthony was widely renowned as a warrior of God who had fought and conquered the powers of darkness.

Anthony’s thirst for solitude, which first prompted him to withdraw to the outskirts of the village and then to the burial chamber on the fringe of the desert, finally drove him into the depths of the desert. He withdrew to Mount Pispir, near the Nile. Anthony at first lived in total seclusion—praying, fasting, and weaving mats from palm leaves. Disciples brought him supplies of bread occasionally, but he fasted for days at a time. As news of Anthony’s disappearance into desert isolation spread, a train of visitors followed him into the wilderness. Some went simply out of curiosity; others sought spiritual guidance. Although at first Anthony attempted to avoid the visitors, in time he acquiesced and assumed pastoral responsibilities: praying for the sick, driving out demons, offering instructions for holy living, and training seekers in the path of asceticism.

Pispir became a monastery, and in or near 313, Anthony moved still farther away, settling in a cave on Mount Kolzim, near the Red Sea. He remained in this remote setting, receiving some visitors, for the rest of his life.

Anthony’s teachings generally emphasized one’s interior development. Unimpressed with mere human knowledge, Anthony reminded his followers that the mind created letters, not letters the mind, and that therefore “one whose mind is sound has no need of letters.” Rather than coveting worldly wisdom, Anthony urged his disciples to live every day as if it were their last, always remembering that “the whole of earth is a very little thing compared with the whole of heaven.” He warned them against taking pride in their own accomplishments or in thinking that in giving up worldly pleasures they were making great sacrifices. He urged his followers constantly to inspect their spiritual progress, not worrying about things that do not last, but gathering those “that we can take with us: prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, understanding, charity, love of the poor, faith in Christ, graciousness, hospitality.” For Anthony, asceticism was not an end in itself but a necessary means to spiritual maturity.

On one occasion, probably in the year 311, Anthony visited the city of Alexandria, where he offered encouragement to Christians being persecuted under the edict of the emperor Maximinus Daia. A short time later, after Constantine emerged as head of Rome, Anthony received a letter from the newly converted Christian emperor seeking spiritual guidance. Although unable either to read the message or to pen a response, Anthony dictated for the Roman emperor the following reply: “Practice humility and contempt of the world, and remember that on the day of judgment you will have to account for all your deeds.” In 338 Anthony again left his retreat for Alexandria, allegedly to help the orthodox bishop Athanasius in his theological struggle with the Arian Christians, who denied that Christ was equal in essence with the Father. As Saint Athanasius, this church leader would write the biography of Anthony. Such contact with the outside world—with people of power—was rare. Anthony much preferred the simplicity of desert life, which did not distract him from concentrating on spiritual matters.

Saint Jerome told a story about a visit in 341 between Anthony and the 113-year-old Saint Paul of Thebes, a hermit who allegedly had not seen either man or woman for more than ninety years. While this story is no doubt apocryphal, the legend was celebrated by Christians for centuries and served as an inspiration for numerous artists, including the master of Dutch Renaissance artLucas van Leyden.

In the year 356, Anthony—knowing that he was about to die—invited his closest followers to come to his desert hermitage in order to give them a parting farewell. To his surprise, thousands responded to the invitation. Anthony walked among this throng of pilgrims, blessed them, and asked them to persevere in their devotion to God. According to tradition, Anthony died on January 17, 356, at the age of 105.

Significance

It is ironic that Saint Anthony of Egypt—an unassuming, deeply private, illiterate man, who refused to pander to crowds and who renounced the efforts of the establishment to reconcile Christianity with culture—became the celebrated founder of the eremitic movement and the father of monasticism. As a result of his ascetic example and teachings, during his lifetime and for a hundred years following his death, hermitages sprang up, and the deserts of Egypt became cluttered with cells of anchorites. Stories of his desert retreat, circulated by Saint Athanasius’s biography Vita S. Antonii (fourth century; The Life of Saint Anthony, 1697), spread across the Empire to Rome, Palestine, Gaul, and Spain. Constantine and his sons wrote to him. Saint John Chrysostom in his homilies designated Anthony as the greatest man Egypt had produced since the time of the Apostles. During the third and fourth centuries, thousands of pilgrims followed Anthony’s example and flocked to the desert. The exodus was so great that a traveler through Egypt and Palestine about 394 reported that the dwellers in the desert equaled the population living in the towns.

For fifteen hundred years, the temptations of Anthony have captured the imagination of artists, who have delighted especially in picturing the more dramatic episodes of devils in hideous and alluring disguises tempting, frightening, and beating the desert saint. From Saint Athanasius to Gustave Flaubert and Anatole France, Anthony has been portrayed as the prototype of a man who suffers temptation and, through the power of renunciation, overcomes it.

In an age filled with Christological problems and theological hairsplitting, Anthony and the desert fathers proclaimed a message of righteous living and simplicity of life. His teaching—“No one of us is judged by what he does not know, and no one is called blessed because of what he has learned and knows; no, the judgment that awaits each asks this: whether he has kept the faith and faithfully observed the commandments”—offered a corrective to the tendency at the time to define Christianity in purely philosophical or religious terms. Anthony’s ascetic labors and simple teachings introduced themes that would run throughout the history of the monastic movement.

Bibliography

Athanasius, Saint. The Life of Saint Anthony the Hermit. Translated by Tim Vivian and Apostolos N. Athanassakis with Rowan A. Greer. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 2003. Saint Athanasius’s biography is the single most important primary source on the life of Anthony.

Chadwick, Henry. The Early Church. 1968. Reprint. New York: Penguin Books, 1974. The best single-volume introduction to the history of the Christian church during the first through fourth centuries.

Cowan, James. Journey to the Inner Mountain. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002. A biography of Saint Anthony of Egypt.

Nigg, Walter. Warriors of God: The Great Religious Orders and Their Founders. Translated and edited by Mary Ilford. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959. The opening chapter provides a scholarly treatment of Anthony and his impact on the monastic movement.

Queffelec, Henri. Saint Anthony of the Desert. Translated by James Whitall. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1954. An entertaining biography based on Saint Athanasius’s account.

Waddell, Helen. The Desert Fathers. New York: Henry Holt, 1936. A translation from the Latin of the writings of the desert fathers. Includes many of the sayings attributed to Anthony.

Ward, Maisie. Saints Who Made History: The First Five Centuries. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1959. A lively, nonscholarly account of the lives of early saints of the Church. Includes a fourteen-page treatment on Anthony.