Anthony the Great

Anthony the Great was born around 251 CE in Koma, Lower Egypt, the son of prosperous Christian parents. Orphaned while still young, he inherited a substantial estate — but around age twenty, hearing Matthew 19:21 read aloud during the liturgy ('Go, sell what you have and give to the poor'), he distributed his property to his neighbors and the poor, placed his sister in a community of virgins, and turned toward the desert. For roughly thirteen years Anthony lived as an ascetic in the Nitrian Desert, learning the disciplines of prayer, fasting, and manual labor from older hermits nearby. He ate only bread, salt, and water — and only once a day, or sometimes once every few days — and wore a rough garment of animal skin. This was the apprenticeship, not yet the solitude he sought. Around age thirty-five, Anthony withdrew to an abandoned Roman fortress at Pispir on the east bank of the Nile and sealed the entrance behind him. For twenty years he remained inside in total isolation, a period Athanasius of Alexandria described as a sustained assault by demonic forces — visions of beasts, apparitions of gold, and beatings so severe that a friend who came to check on him reportedly found him near death. When Anthony finally emerged around 305, witnesses described him as healthy, serene, and unchanged in appearance — a detail Athanasius treated as the physical sign of interior transformation. The communities that had gathered outside the fortress during his years of silence now looked to him as their father. He guided them for a time before withdrawing again to Mount Colzim near the Red Sea, where he would spend his final forty-five years in the deeper solitude he had always sought. He grew his own food, received occasional visitors — including his younger contemporary Paul of Thebes, according to Jerome — and continued the regimen of prayer and fasting that had shaped him since youth. In 311, during the persecution of Christians under Maximinus Daia, Anthony left his mountain and traveled to Alexandria to stand beside those imprisoned for their faith. He visited confessors in the mines and prisons, encouraging them publicly at considerable personal risk. He returned to his mountain when the persecution subsided. Anthony died January 17, 356, at the extraordinary age of 105. Following his explicit instructions, his disciples buried him in a secret place — he had refused throughout his life to allow his body or his dwelling to become objects of veneration. The biography Athanasius wrote shortly after his death, the Vita Antonii, became one of the most influential texts in Christian history: the first major saint's life, translated almost immediately into Latin, read by Augustine of Hippo (who recounts hearing it read aloud in Confessions VIII as a turning point in his own conversion), and credited with spreading the monastic ideal throughout the Greek and Latin West. Though not technically the first Christian ascetic, Anthony's life as recorded by Athanasius gave monasticism its defining shape and its founding story.