Life of Antony

The Life presents itself as a letter from Athanasius to “the brethren in foreign parts”, monks outside Egypt who had asked how Antony lived. It tells how Antony, a young man of a Christian family in Egypt, heard the Gospel read in church, gave away his property, withdrew by stages into the desert, and died there at the age of a hundred and five. The author says that he had seen Antony many times and writes from what he knew and what he could learn.

The book is the main source for Antony and was written within a few years of his death. It is also a portrait of an ideal. A long address on the ascetic life and on the wiles of demons is put into Antony’s mouth (16–43), and the Antony of the Life rejects the Arians and defers to the clergy, which were Athanasius’s own causes. The visions, healings and struggles with demons are told as the text tells them. Athanasius’s authorship is the ancient attribution and is accepted by most scholars, though it has been questioned.