Antony Withdraws to the Desert

Antony the Great was born in Egypt to Christian parents who owned good land. They died when he was about eighteen or twenty and left him with a young sister. Some months later he went into church as the Gospel was being read and heard the words of Jesus to the rich man: “If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21). He took the words as spoken to himself, gave his land to the villagers, sold his goods for the poor, and placed his sister with a community of Christian women (Athanasius, Life of Antony 1–3).

Athanasius says that there were then few monasteries in Egypt and that no monk yet knew the deep desert; those who wished to live in this way stayed near their own villages. Antony began like them, learning from an old solitary nearby and working with his hands (Athanasius, Life of Antony 3–4). He then moved to the tombs outside the village, where the Life describes him beaten by demons and comforted by a vision (Athanasius, Life of Antony 8–10). At about thirty-five he crossed the river to a deserted fort and shut himself in, receiving bread twice a year (Athanasius, Life of Antony 10, 12–13). The Life gives the fort no name; Palladius, about 420, calls Antony’s settlement by the river Pispir (Palladius, Lausiac History 21.1).

After nearly twenty years his friends broke down the door. He came out, Athanasius says, in sound health and even temper, healed the sick, reconciled enemies and persuaded many to take up the solitary life, so that “the desert was colonised by monks” (Athanasius, Life of Antony 14). During the persecution under Maximinus he went to Alexandria to serve the confessors (Athanasius, Life of Antony 46–47). Finding himself pressed by visitors, he travelled three days into the inner desert with a party of Saracens and settled on what the Life calls the inner mountain (Athanasius, Life of Antony 49–51), which later tradition names Mount Colzim. He died there at a great age (Athanasius, Life of Antony 89–92).

The account given here comes from one book, which Athanasius wrote for monks abroad who had asked how Antony lived, and which he offers them as a pattern (Athanasius, Life of Antony prologue). A generation after Antony’s death Augustine of Hippo heard at Milan how two imperial officials at Trier had come upon the Life in a cottage, read it, and given up the emperor’s service that same day, and he says that until then Antony’s name had been unknown to him (Augustine, Confessions 8.6.14–15).