The saints

Saint Anthony of Egypt

Hermit and Father of Monasticism · Feast day January 17 · About 251 to 356 · The Egyptian desert · Also known as Anthony the Great, Anthony the Abbot, Antony

Saint Anthony the Great heard the gospel call to sell all he had and follow Christ, gave away his inheritance, and went alone into the Egyptian desert, where he wrestled with temptation and grew into a father of souls. Called the father of Christian monasticism, he drew thousands after him into the desert life and lived, by all the ancient accounts, to the great age of one hundred and five.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is;Psalm 63:1 (KJV)

The rich young man of the Nile

Anthony was born around the year 251 to a prosperous Christian family in a village of middle Egypt, and he was raised in the faith and in comfort. When he was about twenty his parents died, leaving him a large and fertile estate and the care of a younger sister. He was, in the eyes of his neighbors, a young man with everything before him. But the world's promises had never gripped his heart, and about six months after his parents' death, as he walked to church turning over in his mind how the first Christians had sold their possessions and laid the proceeds at the apostles' feet, he came in just as the gospel was being read aloud.

The words of Jesus to the rich young ruler fell on him as if the Lord were speaking to him alone across the centuries: if thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me. Anthony walked out and did precisely that. He gave the family lands to the villagers so they would trouble no one, sold the rest of the property and distributed almost all of it to the poor, keeping back only a little for his sister. Not long after, hearing in church the further word of Jesus to take no thought for the morrow, he gave away even that remainder, placed his sister in the care of a community of consecrated Christian women, and set out to follow Christ with nothing at all.

Learning the desert life

Anthony did not vanish into the deep desert all at once. He began, as was the custom, by apprenticing himself to the way of self-denial near his own village, seeking out older Christians who had given themselves to prayer and asceticism and learning from each of them a particular virtue: from one his constancy in prayer, from another his patience, from another his gentleness, gathering their graces into himself as a bee gathers from many flowers. He supported himself by the work of his hands, weaving mats and baskets, giving away what he did not need for bread, and he prayed without ceasing, having taken to heart the apostle's command to pray always.

Step by step he withdrew farther from human company, seeking greater solitude and silence, until he shut himself up alone in an abandoned tomb, and later in a deserted fort across the Nile, and at the last on a remote mountain by the Red Sea where he would spend his final decades. He went into the wilderness not to escape people, though he loved solitude, but to strip his soul bare before God, to face in the silence everything in himself that comfort and company had let him ignore, and to give his whole undivided attention to the one thing that mattered.

Alone with God and the tempter

Anthony's desert years became famous across the Christian world for his long struggle with temptation, described vividly in the Life written soon after his death by his friend Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria. Shut up alone for twenty years, he battled assaults of every kind: temptations of the body, terrors of the mind, waves of despair and boredom, and the seductive memory of his old comfortable life with its wealth and ease. The account tells of the devil coming against him in a hundred shapes, as a beguiling woman, as wild beasts, as crushing darkness, and even of a night when Anthony was left beaten and half dead upon the ground.

But the point of the story was never the horror of the demons; it was the faithfulness of God. Anthony emerged from each trial not broken but calmer, stronger, and more full of joy, having learned that the enemy is strong only where Christ is forgotten and powerless before the name of Jesus and the sign of the cross. When at last friends broke down the door of his retreat after twenty years, expecting to find a wreck of a man ruined by isolation, they found him instead serene and whole, his body sound and his soul at perfect peace, as though he had spent those years feasting rather than fasting. He had gone into the desert to lose everything and had found, in losing it, the one thing that cannot be taken away.

Father of a multitude

Anthony had gone to the wilderness to be alone with God, but his holiness could not stay hidden, and disciples followed him into the desert by the hundreds and then the thousands, drawn by the report of a man who had found peace, until, in the famous phrase of his biographer, the desert was made a city of monks. He did not found an order with written rules and stone buildings; he simply became a father. He taught by his life and by his few plain words the way of prayer, labor, humility, and love, and he insisted that the point was not extraordinary feats of endurance but steady, hidden faithfulness. Watch and pray, he told those who came, do not be proud of your fasting, keep the memory of death before your eyes, and above all cling to Christ, for virtue is not far off or hard to reach but near us, in the turning of the heart to God.

Though he loved solitude, Anthony came down from his mountain whenever the church needed him. During the persecution under the emperor Maximin he went openly to Alexandria to encourage the martyrs, tending the imprisoned confessors and longing, though it was not granted him, to share their death. Years later, an old man now, he came down again into the same city to stand publicly beside Athanasius against the Arians who denied that Christ is truly God, lending the immense moral weight of his reputation to the true faith, and the crowds poured out to see the famous hermit and to touch him, and many pagans were converted by the mere sight of his holiness.

A hundred years in the wilderness

Anthony lived to a great age, by the accounts of the time to one hundred and five years, spending nearly all of it in the desert, and he remained clear in mind, sound in body, and gentle in spirit to the very end, his eyes undimmed and his teeth, it was said, still whole. His fame spread so far that even the emperor Constantine and his sons wrote to the old hermit begging for his prayers, and Anthony, unimpressed by earthly majesty, answered them without flattery, reminding the rulers of the world that they too were only men who must one day stand before God, and urging them to show mercy and justice and to remember Christ.

When he felt his death drawing near, Anthony gave careful instructions to the two disciples who cared for him. He asked that his body be buried secretly in an unmarked place known only to them, so that no one would make a shrine of his remains or turn his corpse into an object of display, wanting in death the same hiddenness he had sought all his life. He divided his only earthly possessions, a couple of sheepskin cloaks and the worn garment he lay on, between Athanasius and another bishop, embraced his disciples, and died in peace, his face glad. The short Life of him that Athanasius wrote soon after spread across the whole Christian world with astonishing speed and drew countless others toward the total following of Christ, including, a generation later and a world away, the young Augustine, whose own conversion was set in motion by the story of the Egyptian hermit.

Why Anthony still matters

Anthony teaches that the whole gospel can be carried in a single sentence taken utterly to heart, and that the deepest riches are found by those willing to let go of everything else to seek them. He is the father of Christian monasticism, the root from which the whole later tree of monks and nuns and their prayer grew, and the patron of all who seek God in silence and solitude. Above all he is a standing witness that the human heart was made not for possessions or pleasures but for God alone, and cannot rest until it rests in him. My soul thirsteth for thee, sang the psalmist, in a dry and thirsty land where no water is, and in the driest land on earth Anthony found the living water that satisfied him for a hundred years and more.

A note for all traditions: the saints are honored across the church as examples of faith and, in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, as friends who pray with us, never worshiped, for worship belongs to God alone. What Scripture records and what later tradition holds are distinguished above. In every tradition there is one Lord, Jesus Christ, and every believer, not only the saints, is called to follow him.

Related: Saint Athanasius · How to pray · Saints for January 17 · Saint of the day