Preface To The Life Of Saint Antony

PREFACE TO THE LIFE OF SAINT ANTONY

LIGHT IN THE DESERT—PREFERRING NOTHING TO CHRIST

By William Edmund Fahey, Ph.D.

ACROSS the southern desert of Egypt in the Red Sea Mountains sits Der Mar Antonios, the monastery established in honor of St. Antony the Great shortly after his death in A.D. 356. Even today it is a remote spot, away from the thriving cities of the Nile, hidden amidst the arid highlands. Was it here that St. Athanasius received the sheepskin cloak of Antony the Great, one of the fathers of monasticism? In his last days, St. Antony had specified that the bishop of Alexandria should be one of the few recipients of one of the few existing personal belongings of Antony. To bestow a cloak, we know from Elijah, was long considered a blessing, as well as a symbol of succession and the transferral of authority. In that year St. Athanasius had been on the run, a hunted man now in his third exile. The Roman imperial government, dominated by heretical Arian leadership, sought to crush the resistance of those who clung to the Nicene belief that Christ was fully God as well as fully man. Pope Liberius had already been arrested and the small minority of priests and bishops willing to voice their views on the divine and co-equal nature of God’s Son were once again fugitives, if not incarcerated. As the most outspoken defender of Nicene orthodoxy, Athanasius was a marked man.

For six years St. Athanasius remained in exile, sometimes hiding in the desert, sometimes moving secretly about the cities in northern Egypt. Athanasius wrote many of his finest works during this period, among them the Life of St. Antony. For many years the two men had been in communication—although Athanasius was Antony’s junior by some four decades—and it is fair to say that while Athanasius’s work was not written by a close friend in the natural sense, the spiritual bond between the two was intense. Athanasius composed the text in Greek, having interviewed Coptic-speaking monks who knew St. Antony. Within a few years of its completion Bishop Evagrius of Antioch translated the Life from Greek into Latin. Why the work was rendered into Latin, we cannot say for sure. It would seem that Evagrius was a friend or associate of St. Jerome, who then lived in Palestine and whose network of friends were arduously studying and promoting monasticism. In any case, it was Evagrius’s translation that entered into the Western Mediterranean in the 370s. It was this text that was discovered a decade later in the humble cottage of some monks which the friends of St. Augustine came upon while walking one afternoon in the countryside just beyond the walls of Trèves along the Moselle in Germany. In the account of St. Augustine, the Life of Antony and the example of this Egyptian saint became the spark for numerous ascetical quests of men and women, who left behind the ordinary concerns of the world to become wholly at the service of God.

St. Antony’s profound humility compelled him to discourage his own veneration, as readers of his life will discover. St. Antony tried so very hard not to leave any trace of his remains behind and his monks succeeded in a secret burial. Nevertheless, the Life of St. Antony was designed as a pattern of life for widespread veneration and imitation. This is ironic, but profoundly beneficial for the development of Christian spirituality.

The suggested readings at the end of this introduction will guide readers who wish to continue studying Antony the Great. To Antony are attributed many letters, which survive in Greek, Latin, Syriac, Coptic, and Arabic. A rich body of modern literature now exists for the study of early Christian monasticism and the monasticism of Egypt, but the work that launched all future studies, whether spiritual or historical, was Athanasius’s Life of Antony. A few features of that Life are worth consideration.

Athanasius presents Antony’s spiritual program for readers in its authentic simplicity. The young Antony responded to hearing the Word of God. He came from a comfortable family background, but shortly after the death of his parents he heard the words which would forever change his life, and the life of western civilization: “If thou wilt be perfect, go sell all that thou hast and give to the poor, and come follow me and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.” (Matt. 19:21) Unlike the young man in Scripture and so many others through the ages, Antony responded immediately. Looking forward, such obedience—the word literally means “attentive listening”—would become central to the organization of western monasticism and the spirituality of the monk (e.g., The Rule of St. Benedict, ).

St. Antony developed his program in four locations, always in response to grace and the circumstances around him. The first was his hometown, Herakleopolis, and one of its nearby villages. Antony placed himself under the tutelage of wise Christian men and learned Scripture by ear, while working with his hands. He renounced the possessions and the ease into which he was born. Then followed many years of honing his monastic excellence: some years in the Nitrian Desert; some sixty miles west of the ancient cosmopolitan center of Alexandria; some on Mt. Pispir (Der el Memum) in an abandoned Roman fort. Careful readers will observe that though removed from centers of population, St. Antony was never so remote as to be completely free from human exchange. Indeed, during the height of persecution, Antony spent time in Alexandria and elsewhere giving courage to the martyrs and ministering to their needs. Finally, Antony departed to the “inner wilderness” far to the south and east of Cairo, on Mount Galala, where eventually his followers would establish the community of Der Mar Antonios.

When one reads over the events of his life or considers his advice to others, one can discern that his spiritual program has two essential parts: the discipline of the body, and what we may call the spirituality of the present moment. The discipline of the body can, of course, be found amongst pagans and Jews in antiquity. One thinks of the program of Pythagoras, which had great influence over Plato’s thought, or the Stoics. Indeed, the virtue of temperance had many champions in antiquity. Only when the body and its cravings were brought under control could the soul be properly and rationally governed. In his meditation on St. Paul’s maxim from 2 Cor. 12:10, “When I am weak, then am I strong,” Antony understood it in a manner that would have been very attractive to a host of ancient observers: “when the enjoyments of the body are weak, then is the power of the soul strong.”

Yet the second part of Antony’s program reveals how the motives for bodily discipline and the self-governance of the soul differed from that of Greco-Roman philosophical movements. Athanasius describes what he calls St. Antony’s “strange-seeming principle”:

He held that not by length of time is the way of virtue measured and our progress therein, but by desire and by strong resolve…. Each day, as though beginning his religious life, he made greater effort to advance … as though always beginning, he was earnest each day to present himself such as one ought to appear before God: clean of heart and ready to obey His will and none other.

Antony has set the stage for subsequent development in Christian spirituality. The age in which the second coming of Christ was thought increasingly imminent had passed. So too, during Antony’s life was passing the sense that persecutions would usher in some glorious End Time. Antony transforms that simple eschatology into a deeper sense that God is already present, just as Jesus had said. The kingdom is at hand now, and so each day one must simply renew a resolve to be present to the God who is present, not to prepare for some future. Thus, St. Antony’s governance of his soul, his austerity in thought, speech, and way of life, was not an end in itself. For all his emphasis on the will, the goal was not simply the will to power, but rather to live a life that would allow Antony each day to say with confidence: “nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ.” Everything that readers tend to thrill over when encountering the life of Antony—his instant renunciation of wealth, his effective Scripture-based education, his combat with demons, the miracles, his extra-ordinary mortifications of mind, desire, and body, his combating of heresy, his shunning of schism, his good counsel, his ability to defeat pagan philosophers by their own dialectical sparring, his good death—all these were undertaken day after day to maintain loving union with Christ.

It is only appropriate to make a brief cautionary statement regarding the depiction of St. Antony which follows. It is the life of Antony, but it is the Life of Antony written by St. Athanasius. We know from the extant letters of Antony that he had a learned, even scholarly side that Athanasius does not draw out. He knew some Greek and was engaged in reconciling aspects of Greek philosophy with Christian revelation; he was linked to a vast network of both scholars and ascetics; and he seems to have been less pre-occupied with the defeat of heresy and paganism than Athanasius. No biography can fully reveal the complexity of any human, especially a saint. Athanasius distills for us the essence of Antony: his confidence (which would explain his lesser concern with pagans and dealing directly with heretics), his self control, and his Christocentric way of being.

St. Antony in this biography and in other early sources consistently appears to readers as an exemplar of how the Christian holy man could subvert the sensual and power-based lifestyle of paganism. He demonstrates that the only true freedom comes from renouncing the will, the only true power comes from governing one’s soul. And contrary to later notions of monasticism as a haven for the weak and disengaged, Antony demonstrated the heroic and virile nature of monasticism. In sum, Antony set out the simple monastic program, at once scriptural and natural: to seek God—to overcome all obstacles, especially those internal obstacles of will and always to prefer nothing to Christ.