Anthony the Great

Anthony the Great, known also as Anthony of Egypt, Anthony the Abbot, and Anthony of the Desert, was a Christian ascetic of Roman Egypt and the most influential of the early Desert Fathers. Later tradition, drawing on the Life of Anthony composed by Athanasius of Alexandria soon after Anthony's death, places his birth about 251 in the village of Coma near Heracleopolis Magna. His parents were Christians of substantial means. They died when he was about eighteen or twenty, leaving him the care of a younger sister and of considerable property. Moved by a church reading of the Gospel counsel to sell one's goods and give to the poor, he distributed his land and possessions, entrusted his sister to a house of virgins, and began an ascetic life at the edge of his native village. He next took up residence among the tombs outside the settlement, a stage of withdrawal that Athanasius presents as marked by severe spiritual trial.

Seeking still greater solitude, Anthony crossed the Nile and shut himself for some two decades in an abandoned fort in the desert. Disciples gathered outside, and around the opening of the fourth century he came forth to organize them into a network of hermits living under his spiritual guidance rather than in a single communal monastery. This eremitic pattern, distinct from the later coenobitic rule associated with Pachomius, earned him the title of father of Christian monasticism. During the persecution under the emperor Maximinus Daia he went to Alexandria to support imprisoned Christians and sought martyrdom, but he was not seized and returned to the wilderness. In subsequent years he moved to a more remote inner mountain in the Eastern Desert near the Red Sea, later called Mount Colzim, the site of the present Monastery of Saint Anthony.

Athanasius portrays Anthony as a defender of Nicene orthodoxy against Arianism and records a visit to Alexandria around 338 in support of the bishop. The same source states that the emperor Constantine and his sons wrote to the hermit and that Anthony replied with exhortations to piety. He remained a lay monk and was not ordained to the priesthood. In 356, at a reported age of about one hundred and five, he died at the inner mountain. He instructed two companions to bury him in a hidden place so that his tomb would not become a shrine, and he left his sheepskin garment to Athanasius and a similar cloak to Serapion of Thmuis.

The Life of Anthony, quickly translated into Latin, made him famous throughout the Christian world and became a model for later hagiography. His feast is kept on 17 January in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Anglican calendars, and on 22 Tobi in the Coptic Church. Medieval Europe associated him with the Hospital Brothers of Saint Anthony, who cared for victims of ergotism, popularly called Saint Anthony's fire; from that cult derived his patronage of those suffering from skin diseases, erysipelas, and epidemic illness, as well as of hermits, monks, gravediggers, and keepers of domestic animals, especially pigs. Relics said to be his were later claimed at Alexandria, Constantinople, and Saint-Antoine-l'Abbaye in France, but the original burial place in the Eastern Desert was, by his own design, unknown.