Anthony the Great

Anthony was born about 251 CE in Coma, a village in Middle Egypt on the west bank of the Nile, to Christian parents who owned a substantial amount of arable land ^[1]. Egypt at the time was a Roman province, and its Christian communities, concentrated in Alexandria and scattered through the villages of the valley, were living through decades of intermittent persecution under emperors such as Decius and Valerian. Anthony grew up speaking Coptic, and the ancient sources agree that he never learned Greek letters, relying instead on scripture read aloud in church and on a memory his contemporaries found remarkable ^[2].

His parents died when he was roughly eighteen to twenty years old, leaving him a farm of about three hundred arourae (a large holding by village standards) and the care of a younger sister ^[1]. Within months of their death, according to Athanasius, he heard the Gospel passage in which Jesus tells a rich young man to sell his possessions and give to the poor. Anthony took the words as addressed to himself. He distributed the land among his neighbors, sold his movable goods, gave the proceeds away, placed his sister with a community of Christian women, and began an ascetic life at the edge of his own village ^[1].

This first stage was not yet the desert. Solitary ascetics already existed in third century Egypt, living in huts on the outskirts of towns, and Anthony apprenticed himself to an old man who had practiced this discipline since his youth ^[3]. He supported himself by manual labor, mostly weaving and gardening, and visited other village ascetics to learn what each did best: one man's endurance in fasting, another's constancy in prayer, another's gentleness. The habit of learning by observation rather than by books marked his teaching for the rest of his life ^[2].

Around the age of thirty-five, Anthony did something the sources present as new: he left the inhabited valley altogether. He crossed to the desert margin and shut himself inside an abandoned Roman fort at Pispir, a site on the east bank of the Nile roughly opposite the Fayum, where he remained for about twenty years ^[1]. Friends threw bread over the wall twice a year. Athanasius fills this period with the celebrated combats against demons, described as assaults by wild beasts, temptations, and blows that left the hermit half dead, scenes that later became one of the most painted subjects in Western art ^[4].

Whatever a modern reader makes of those narratives, the historical outcome is clear. Around 305 CE a crowd of admirers broke down the fort's door, and Anthony emerged, in Athanasius' telling, neither emaciated nor deranged but balanced and healthy in body and mind ^[1]. The moment marks the point at which a private discipline became a public movement. Men settled in cells around Pispir to live under his informal guidance, and similar colonies multiplied along the desert edge. Athanasius wrote that the desert was made a city by monks, a phrase that gave its title to a standard modern history of the movement ^[3].

Anthony organized nothing in a legal sense. He drafted no rule, took no vows from followers, and held no office. His authority rested on reputation and on the spoken counsel he gave to visitors, later collected among the Sayings of the Desert Fathers ^[5]. In this he differed from his younger contemporary Pachomius, who built walled communities with written regulations in the south of Egypt. The two models, the loose colony of hermits and the organized monastery, would divide monastic history between them for centuries ^[3].

Any list of Anthony the Great achievements begins with a paradox: his most consequential act was withdrawal. By demonstrating that a Christian could live for decades in the desert, a landscape Egyptians associated with death and hostile spirits, he redefined where and how religious devotion could be practiced ^[4]. The thousands who followed him created the first large scale monastic movement in Christian history, and pilgrims and writers carried reports of it across the empire within his own lifetime ^[3].

Seeking deeper solitude as crowds grew, Anthony moved again around 313 CE, traveling with a caravan of Saracens three days into the Eastern Desert toward the Red Sea. He settled at the foot of a mountain with a spring and a few palm trees, the site now occupied by the Monastery of Saint Anthony near the Gulf of Suez, among the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monasteries in the world ^[6]. He cultivated a small garden of grain and vegetables there, returning periodically to Pispir to see the brothers who depended on him ^[1].

He also intervened, sparingly but memorably, in public affairs. During the persecution under Maximin Daia around 311 CE he went to Alexandria to encourage imprisoned Christians, openly attending their trials ^[1]. Near the end of his life, probably in 337 or 338 CE, he visited the city again at the bishops' request to preach against Arianism, the teaching that the Son was a created being, and Athanasius reports that crowds, including pagans, turned out simply to see the famous old man ^[1]. Seven letters attributed to Anthony survive, and modern scholarship, led by Samuel Rubenson, treats most of them as authentic, which would make the unlettered hermit a genuine theological author engaging ideas current in Alexandrian Christianity ^[2].

Anthony never married and left no descendants; celibacy was the foundation of the discipline he practiced and taught. The one family relationship the sources record is his sister, whom he placed with consecrated women as a young man and found, decades later, grown old as a leader among them ^[1]. His household, insofar as he had one, consisted of the disciples who attended him in old age, among them Macarius and Amatas, who witnessed his final instructions ^[1].

His daily regimen was austere but deliberately sustainable. He ate bread with salt, drank only water, took his single meal after sunset, often extended fasts over two or more days, and slept on a rush mat or the bare ground ^[1]. Against the assumption that such a life must break the body, the sources insist on his physical soundness: sharp eyesight, a full set of teeth worn but intact, and vigorous mobility past the age of one hundred ^[1]. He worked with his hands throughout, holding that a monk should earn his bread and have something to give away.

The personality preserved in the sayings tradition is dry, practical, and humane. He advised a hunter scandalized by monks at ease that a bow kept always at full stretch will snap, and that the brothers likewise needed occasional relaxation ^[5]. Among the Anthony the Great facts most often repeated is his reply when a visiting philosopher asked how he endured without books: his book, he said, was the created world around him ^[5]. He wore a garment of skins, refused to bathe, and asked at the end of his life to be buried in secret, fearing that Egyptians would preserve and venerate his body ^[1].

Anthony spent his final four decades chiefly at the inner mountain by the Red Sea, tending his garden and weaving mats, while a steady traffic of monks, pilgrims, officials, and letter writers sought him out ^[6]. Constantine and his sons wrote to him, Athanasius reports, and Anthony had to be persuaded even to accept the letters, remarking to his monks that God had written to humanity in the scriptures and that an emperor was only a man ^[1]. He replied with brief advice: remember judgment, care for the poor.

Age scarcely slowed him. The Alexandrian preaching visit against the Arians came when he was in his mid eighties, and Jerome preserves a tradition, in his life of Paul of Thebes, that the aged Anthony trekked through the desert to meet that even more reclusive hermit ^[7]. Whatever the historical value of Jerome's story, it shows how quickly Anthony had become the standard against which all other ascetics were measured, a figure other writers needed their own heroes to surpass.

Sensing death approaching, he gave final instructions to the two disciples who lived with him. His sheepskin cloak and one garment were to go to Athanasius, his other sheepskin to the bishop Serapion of Thmuis, and his hair shirt to the disciples themselves; his grave was to be hidden ^[1]. He died in 356 CE, and the tradition that he had reached the age of one hundred five, placing his birth in 251, comes directly from Athanasius ^[1]. A few later chronologies stretch the dates by a year in either direction, and some strands of the tradition associate his death with the region of the Thebaid, but the mountain by the Red Sea is where the ancient biography leaves him ^[6].

The instrument of Anthony's influence was a book. Within a few years of his death Athanasius composed the Life of Antony, and Greek copies, followed quickly by two Latin translations, spread it through the empire ^[1]. Augustine of Hippo records in his Confessions that hearing about Anthony's conversion, told to him in Milan in 386 CE, precipitated the crisis that led to his own ^[8]. Through such readers the Egyptian hermit shaped Latin monasticism long before Benedict, and every Anthony the Great biography since has had to reckon with Athanasius as both indispensable source and committed advocate ^[2].

Eastern and Western churches alike venerate him as Anthony the Great, with a feast on 17 January. Claimed relics were translated in the Middle Ages to Constantinople and then to France, where the Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony, founded in the eleventh century, treated the gangrenous disease ergotism, popularly called Saint Anthony's fire ^[4]. The saint's pigs and bell, attributes of that medieval order, attached themselves to his iconography, while the temptation scenes inspired painters from Hieronymus Bosch and Matthias Grünewald to Salvador Dalí ^[4].

Modern scholarship has complicated and enriched the portrait. Historians read Athanasius' Life partly as a polemical work enlisting the hermit for the anti-Arian cause, and Rubenson's study of the letters presents an Anthony more theologically literate than the unschooled peasant of legend ^[2]. None of this revision has dislodged the essential point. The Monastery of Saint Anthony still functions at his mountain, Coptic, Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant traditions all claim parts of his inheritance, and the questions he posed about wealth, solitude, and attention remain uncomfortably current ^[6].