Saint Anthony the Abbot

Saint Anthony the Abbot, also called Anthony the Great or Anthony the Hermit, lived in Egypt in the third and fourth centuries. As a young man he gave his property to the poor and withdrew into the desert. He had so many disciples that he came to be called the father of monks. The Church remembers him on January 17.

Almost everything we know about him comes from the Life written soon after his death by Saint Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria. Anthony was born about the year 250; the village of Coma in Middle Egypt is given as his birthplace. His parents, well-to-do Christians, died when he was eighteen or twenty and left a younger sister in his care.

Less than six months later he heard in church the Gospel of the rich young man, whom Jesus counsels to sell everything and give to the poor (Mt 19:21). He took these words as addressed to himself. He gave his land to the people of the village, sold the rest of his belongings and gave the money to the needy, and entrusted his sister to a community of virgins. He himself settled at the edge of the village and learned the ascetic life from older hermits. He worked with his own hands, prayed without ceasing and listened to Holy Scripture so attentively that his memory served him in place of books.

Seeking greater solitude, he went to live in a tomb at a distance from the village, and at about the age of thirty-five he shut himself up for nearly twenty years in an abandoned fort in the desert beyond the Nile. Athanasius describes the temptations and spiritual battles he went through at that time. When his friends at last broke down the door, he came out healthy and serene. Many resolved to imitate him, and in the mountains and the desert there arose the cells of monks, for whom he became a spiritual father.

About the year 311, while the persecution begun under Emperor Diocletian was still going on in Egypt, he came to Alexandria. He ministered to the confessors in the mines and prisons and gave courage to those being led to death. Afterward he withdrew deep into the desert, to a mountain not far from the Red Sea, where a monastery bearing his name stands to this day.

According to Athanasius he had no schooling, and yet monks, the sick and philosophers came to him for counsel, and Emperor Constantine and his sons wrote him letters. When the Arians spread the claim that he shared their views, he came down from the mountain to Alexandria at the summons of the bishops and supported Saint Athanasius, publicly professing that the Son of God is not a creature but the eternal Word of the Father.

According to the Life he died at the age of one hundred and five; 356 is accepted as the year of his death. He charged two disciples to bury him in a place known to no one, and he left his sheepskin cloaks to the bishops Athanasius and Serapion. The Life, quickly translated into Latin, carried the ideal of monastic life through East and West; Saint Augustine describes in the Confessions how reading this book changed the lives of two imperial officials. Anthony has been venerated as a saint since antiquity. On the day of his memorial, domestic animals are blessed.