Justified True Belief

(●) The Egyptian farmer who walked into the desert alone and came out of it the father of monks. + A young man in a village church hears a sentence of the Gospel read aloud, walks out, and gives away the farm he has just inherited. That is the whole of Antony’s beginning, and it is most of the reason a man who wrote almost nothing is remembered at all. He is not remembered for a doctrine he invented. He is remembered for what he showed was possible, and for the book that told the world about it. The word for what he became is monk, from the Greek monachos, meaning a solitary, someone living alone for God. Antony was not the first Christian to live that way, and the book about him says so plainly. What he did was go much further out than anyone had gone, stay much longer, and then come back and teach. Within his own lifetime the deserts of Egypt filled with men doing what he had done, and by the time he died the movement had a shape that Christian monasticism has kept ever since. Here is the fact about him that people tend to remember. Antony never learned to read Greek, the language of the empire’s learning; he spoke Coptic, the language of Egyptian villagers, and met visiting philosophers through an interpreter. Constantine the emperor and two of his sons wrote him letters anyway. When the monks around him were impressed by this, he told them they had the wonder backwards.

(●) c. 251 AD: Born into a prosperous Christian household in Egypt, a boy who refused to learn his letters. + The date is worked backwards, not recorded. Athanasius, the bishop of Alexandria who knew him and wrote his life within a year or two of his death, says Antony told the monks he was near a hundred and five, and he died in 356. Subtract, and you get about 251. No document gives his birth year, which is why it carries a "c." while the year of his death does not. His parents were Egyptian, well off, and Christian, so he was raised in the faith rather than converted to it. He went with them to church, and Athanasius says two things about the boy that turn out to matter later: he paid close attention to whatever was read aloud, and he could not be made to learn letters. The second stayed true for life. The first meant that Scripture went into him by ear, and by the time he was a grown man his memory served him for books. Where exactly the family farmed is not in Athanasius at all. A century later the historian Sozomen says Antony came of a good family of Coma, a village near Heracleopolis on the Egyptian border, and that is where the tradition has put him ever since; it is a later report rather than something his biographer knew.

(●) c. 270 AD: A sentence read aloud in church cost him the family farm, and within a few years he was living in a tomb. + His parents died, leaving him about eighteen or twenty years old with a farm, a household, and one small sister to raise. Not six months later, walking to church one morning, he was turning over how the apostles had left their nets (Matthew 4:20), and how the first believers in Jerusalem had sold what they owned and laid the money at the apostles’ feet (Acts 4:34–35). He came in while the Gospel was being read, and what he heard was "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me." (Matthew 19:21) He took it as spoken to him. He gave the land to the villagers, three hundred arourae of it (an aroura is the Egyptian measure of roughly two thirds of an acre, so this was something over two hundred acres, a farm and not a gesture), sold everything movable, and gave the money away, keeping a little back for his sister. A few days later another reading caught him, "Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow" (Matthew 6:34), and he gave away the remainder too. His sister he placed with women who had consecrated their lives to Christ. Then he did something quieter and more sensible than the story usually gets credit for: he apprenticed himself. There were no monasteries in Egypt yet and nobody knew the far desert, but men in the villages were already living this way, and there was an old hermit in the next village who had done it since his youth. Antony learned from him, and then went from one good man to another, Athanasius says, like a prudent bee, taking the graciousness of one and the patience of another and the constant prayer of a third. He supported himself with his hands, having heard that the idle should not eat. The tombs came next, and they were a step further out than anything he had tried yet. Egyptian burial chambers stood in the open country beyond the villages, empty and cool and well away from anyone who might hear you call. Antony had a friend shut him into one and bring him bread at long intervals. This is where the temptations of Antony that painters have loved for six hundred years belong. He was beaten so badly one night that the friend found him the next morning lying as if dead and carried him to the village church, where the neighbours sat round him like mourners. Near midnight he woke, and asked to be carried back. Unable to stand, he prayed lying down, and then shouted into the dark, "Here am I, Antony; I flee not from your stripes." He was about thirty-five when the worst of it ended.

(●) c. 286 AD: He walled himself into an abandoned fort across the Nile and stayed for twenty years. + Two things happened on the walk out to that fort. Antony passed what looked like a large silver dish lying in the road, and reasoned about it aloud: nobody travels here, a thing that size could not be dropped without being missed, and whoever lost it would have come back for it. A little further on he found real gold scattered across the path, and ran past it. Believe those two as they stand or not, they are how Athanasius wants everything that comes next understood. The man had already settled what he was not going to be talked into. The fort itself was derelict and full of snakes, on the far bank of the river. He built up the entrance behind him, stored bread, found water inside, and stayed. Bread came only twice a year, let down to him from above, which sounds impossible until you know the bread: Theban loaves, from the south of Egypt, keep, and often stay edible a full twelve months. As for what the neighbours made of it, they camped outside the wall and heard shouting from within, and took it for a fight, as though a gang of men had got in over the top by ladder. They put an eye to a hole to see who was in there, and saw nobody. Antony talked to them through the door, told them to sign themselves with the cross and go home, and did not come out. He came out in about 305, when friends who wanted to live as he did finally wrenched the door off. What they expected was a wreck. What they got, Athanasius says, was a man neither fat like someone who never exercises nor wasted from fasting, but exactly as they had known him before, and with a soul that was not contracted by grief nor slack with pleasure nor given to sudden laughter or gloom. That description, more than any miracle in the book, is what made people want what he had. He began to teach, and monks began to settle the desert around him: cells rose in the mountains, and the men who came out from their own people, in Athanasius’ phrase, enrolled themselves for the citizenship in the heavens.

(●) 311 AD: He went down to Alexandria hoping to be martyred, and the persecution passed him over. + The persecution under the emperor Maximinus was taking Egyptian Christians to Alexandria for trial, so Antony left the desert and followed them in. He would not hand himself over, which he seems to have regarded as presumption, but he did everything short of it: he served the confessors in the mines and the prisons, met the condemned on their way, and stood in the courtroom encouraging people who were about to be sentenced. A confessor, in the church’s language, is someone who owned Christ in front of a magistrate and was not killed for it: sentenced instead to the quarries or the mines, alive and needing food and company and someone to tell him he had done right. The judge eventually ordered that no monk was to appear in the court or stay in the city. Every other monk kept out of sight. The next day Antony washed his outer garment, put on his best, went and stood on a raised place in the path of the governor’s procession, and waited to be noticed. The governor looked at him and walked past. He had made himself as easy to arrest as a man can be, and was not arrested. That year, on 25 November, the bishop of Alexandria, Peter, was executed, though the persecution itself ran on in the East until Maximinus was dead in 313. Antony went back to his cell when it was over, and Athanasius records the verdict he himself drew from the disappointment: he was daily a martyr to his conscience. The order of events explains a good deal about the movement that followed. The desert filled up as the arena emptied. When dying for Christ was no longer on offer, a great many people went looking for another way to give him everything.

(●) c. 313 AD: He travelled three days into the inner desert and made a garden at the foot of a mountain near the Red Sea. + He was now famous, and it was ruining the thing he had gone out for. People arrived wanting cures, and he was afraid of what that was doing to him. He thought of sailing up the Nile to the Thebaid, the stretch of upper Egypt around Thebes where nobody knew him, and then took a better offer. A company of Saracens came past, which is the book’s word for the nomadic Arabs of the eastern desert, and they were going that way themselves, so he simply asked to go with them. Three days and nights of walking brought him to a high mountain with a cold spring at its foot, a small plain, and a few untended palms. Palladius, writing two generations later, places it in the great desert that runs down toward the Red Sea, about thirty miles in from the river. He stayed there for the rest of his life, in what everyone afterwards called the inner mountain. At first the brothers sent bread out to him, and when he saw the trouble that cost them he asked instead for a spade, an axe and some grain, found a patch of workable ground, and grew his own. Later he put in a few vegetables as well, so that anyone who had made that walk would have something at the end of it. The wild animals came for the water and trampled the seedbed until he took hold of one of them and told them all, gently, to leave his plot alone. A monastery bearing his name stands at the foot of that mountain today, and by tradition it has stood there since not long after his death. The world came out to him anyway, and the two best scenes in his later life happened in that unpromising spot: Greek philosophers made the journey to test him and were answered through an interpreter (T4), and letters arrived from Constantine and his sons Constantius and Constans, addressed to him as to a father.

(●) c. 338 AD: He came down from the mountain a last time, to say in public that the Son of God is not a creature. + Supporters of Arius had begun claiming that the old hermit agreed with them. Arius was a clergyman of Alexandria who taught that the Son of God, high as he stood above everything else, had been made rather than being eternal (T5). Putting Antony’s name to that was a shrewd move, because Antony was the most widely trusted Christian in Egypt and belonged to no party, which made his name worth having. He was furious. The bishops summoned him, and he walked into Alexandria, an old man who had been out of the world for a quarter of a century, and told the city that the teaching was the last of the heresies and a forerunner of Antichrist, and that the Word had always existed alongside the Father. The visit lasted a few days and the city emptied into the streets for it. Even the pagan priests came to the church asking to see the man of God. As many people became Christians in those few days, Athanasius writes, as one would ordinarily have seen in a year, and when someone suggested Antony was being worn out by the crowds he said there were fewer of them than the demons he wrestled on the mountain. On the way out through the gate a woman shouted after him about her daughter, and he stopped. The year is a reckoning rather than a record. The visit is undated in the book; Athanasius describes escorting him out of the city himself, which puts it in a stretch when he was in Alexandria and not in exile, and 337 or 338 is where historians usually land.

(●) 356 AD: He died at a hundred and five, and made two disciples promise to hide his grave. + He made a farewell visit to the monks of the outer mountain, told them it was the last one, and refused their pleas to die among them. The refusal was deliberate and he had a reason for it. Egyptians honoured their holy dead by wrapping them in linen and keeping them on couches in the house rather than burying them, and Antony had spent years arguing against the custom, pointing out that the patriarchs and prophets lie in tombs, and that the body of the Lord himself was laid in a tomb with a stone over it. So he went back inside, and a few months later fell ill. Two men were with him who had stayed on that mountain fifteen years looking after him in his old age. He told them to hold to their discipline as if they were only starting, to have nothing to do with the Arians, and to bury him in the ground themselves in a place nobody else would know. He was not disowning the body he had treated so hard: he told them plainly that he expected to get it back incorruptible from the Saviour at the resurrection of the dead. Then he divided his clothes, one sheepskin and the cloak he was lying on to Athanasius, the other sheepskin to Serapion the bishop, the hair shirt to the two of them. Athanasius ends with the detail that at a hundred and five his eyesight was undimmed and he had not lost a tooth, though they were worn down to the gums. The men buried him where they had promised, and told no one.

What He Taught

(T1) Virtue is not somewhere far off that you have to travel to; it is inside you, and what it asks for is willingness. + Most of us know the feeling of waiting for conditions. The running will start when the weather turns, the praying when this stretch at work is over, the real Christian life when the house is quieter. Antony’s long address to the monks, which takes up a third of Athanasius’ book, takes that away from them early on. The key word in it is one the English translation renders "discipline": the Greek is askesis, which simply means training, the ordinary word for what an athlete does, and it is the root behind ascetic. Antony’s point is that the training ground is not elsewhere. The Greeks, he said, cross the sea to get an education, but nobody has to cross the sea for the kingdom of heaven. A soul in its natural state, as God made it, is already fair and honest; vice is that same soul swerving away from what it was made to be. So the work is not acquiring something foreign. It is keeping. One honest note about the text he leaned on. Antony quoted the saying of Jesus in the form his Greek Bible gave it, "the kingdom of heaven is within you." The ESV renders the same saying "the kingdom of God is in the midst of you" (Luke 17:21), and in its setting Jesus is telling Pharisees that the kingdom they are asking about is standing in front of them. The verse is not really about the interior life, and Antony’s teaching does not need it to be. What he actually built on was the goodness of the soul as created and the location of the fight, which is in a man’s own thoughts and not in his circumstances. Nor is this self-help with a beard on it: in the same discourse he says that in this training the Lord is our fellow-worker, and works with all who choose the good.

(Q) "But fear not to hear of virtue, nor be astonished at the name. For it is not far from us, nor is it without ourselves, but it is within us, and is easy if only we are willing." + Source: Athanasius, Life of Antony 20 (Ellershaw translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 4). Antony is speaking Coptic to a crowd of monks who have walked out to hear him, and he is about to spend twenty chapters on how the fight actually goes (T3). "Without ourselves" is old English for outside ourselves.

(T2) Live as though you were dying daily, and most of what makes a man sin loses its grip. + There are people who keep a packed bag by the door because they may be called out at any hour, and it changes how they live in small, visible ways. They do not accumulate much. They keep short accounts. Antony wanted his monks to live like that with respect to death, and he got the phrase from Paul, who wrote to Corinth, "I die every day!" (1 Corinthians 15:31), meaning that his own life was daily at risk. Antony turned it into a discipline anyone could keep. Get up thinking you may not last until evening. Lie down thinking you may not wake. He was blunt about the effects he expected, and they are not morbid ones: a man living that way does not hoard, does not carry a grudge, and forgives everybody, because there is no time in which to do otherwise. He told them to take the apostle’s rule about not letting the sun go down on your anger and apply it to every sin and not only to anger. He also gave them a method that sounds startlingly modern. Write down what you do and what goes through your mind, he said, as though you were going to read it out to each other. Nobody sins comfortably while being watched, and a page will do the work of a witness. It is the sort of practical suggestion that shows how much of his teaching came from having actually tried things.

(Q) "For if we too live as though dying daily, we shall not sin. And the meaning of that saying is, that as we rise day by day we should think that we shall not abide till evening; and again, when about to lie down to sleep, we should think that we shall not rise up." + Source: Athanasius, Life of Antony 19 (Ellershaw translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 4). He said the same thing again on his deathbed, almost word for word, to the two disciples who buried him: "Live as though dying daily."

(T3) The demons are real, and they are also beaten, so the right response to them is contempt rather than fear. + This is the part of Antony that a modern reader stumbles over, and six hundred years of painters have not helped, since what sells a canvas is the monster and not the man’s reply to it. What he actually said is steadier than the pictures. In the Life the attacks are physical and theatrical: noise like an earthquake, the room filling with lions and bulls and snakes, a silver dish in an empty road. Antony’s response to the menagerie is a joke. If any one of you had real power, he told them, one would have been enough; you have come as a crowd and in the shape of animals, and that is the proof you are weak. His teaching about them runs on three claims. They were not created evil and are not creators of anything. They have no power except what is permitted. And their favourite weapon is not force but suggestion, which means the battlefield is a person’s own thoughts. Out of that came the practice the desert became known for, what later writers call the discernment of spirits: the habit of asking what a thought is and where it came from before acting on it. Antony gave his monks a workable test. A visitation that leaves you frightened, confused and full of your own importance did not come from God; one that leaves joy, courage and a quiet mind did. Christian readers who find the demonology overdone should notice that Antony is not a dualist, a person who thinks good and evil are two rival powers of the same size. Scripture does not allow that and neither did he. Everything he says about the enemy assumes the fight is already decided and the only real question is whether a man will be frightened out of ground that has been won for him.

(Q) "If you are able, and have received power against me, delay not to attack; but if you are unable, why trouble me in vain? For faith in our Lord is a seal and a wall of safety to us." + Source: Athanasius, Life of Antony 9 (Ellershaw translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 4). Spoken from the floor of the tomb in the small hours, after the beating that had nearly killed him, when he still could not stand up.

(T4) Faith is not a poorer substitute for argument; it is the knowing that the arguments are trying to reach. + Greek philosophers kept making the trip out to the mountain, some of them to learn and some to enjoy themselves at the expense of an illiterate Egyptian. One group came to mock the preaching of the cross, and what happened next is the most interesting conversation in the book. Antony argued first, and that half of it tends to fall out when the story gets retold, leaving a holy man who waves reasoning away. He did the opposite. Which is uglier, he asked them, a God who submits to a cross, or gods whose stories are full of adultery and the seduction of boys? You mock the crucifixion, but the same writers who report it report the resurrection, and the blind who saw and the lepers who were cleansed; if you doubt the one, say why you are silent about the others. And if you now tell me your myths were only ever allegories about fire and air and the sea, then you have been giving the honour due to the maker to the things he made, which is like handing the builder’s credit to the house. Only then did he turn the question round. How is anything known at all, he asked: by argument built step by step, or by faith? Notice what he means by dialectic, the word the translation uses, which is the trained art of reasoning by definitions and inferences. His claim is not that reasons are worthless, since he had just spent several minutes giving them. It is that trust rightly placed already has hold of what the proofs are working toward, so that a man who has it is not waiting on the argument to finish. And he did not leave it as an assertion. There were people present who were tormented, and he invited the philosophers to cure them by whatever art they liked, and when they could not, he prayed and they were healed. The apostle he was echoing had made the same move among the Greeks of Corinth: not plausible words of wisdom, but demonstration of the Spirit and of power (1 Corinthians 2:4–5).

(Q) "You have answered well, for faith arises from disposition of soul, but dialectic from the skill of its inventors." + Source: Athanasius, Life of Antony 77 (Ellershaw translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 4). The philosophers had just conceded, when he asked them, that knowledge which comes from God working in a person is better and more accurate than knowledge built up by argument. Antony is agreeing with them, and then pointing out what they have handed him. He is speaking through an interpreter throughout.

(T5) The Son of God is not a created thing, and a hermit does not get to stay out of that argument. + Arius was a presbyter of Alexandria, which is to say one of the senior clergy serving the city under its bishop, and he taught that the Son, though the first and greatest of all beings, was made rather than eternal, so that there was a time when he did not exist. The Council of Nicaea, a gathering of bishops from across the empire, rejected that in 325. The dispute went on regardless, for most of the century, with emperors on both sides of it by turns. Antony had every excuse to stay on his mountain. He did not, and the reason he gave connects the controversy to everything else he had been saying for fifty years. He had spent his life telling Greek visitors that the great error is to give the honour owed to the Creator to something created. Very well: if the Son is a creature, then Christians bowing to Christ are doing exactly what they have been telling the Greeks not to do. That is why he called the teaching worse than the poison of serpents and would not let its advocates stay on his mountain, and why he came down to the city to say so where it counted. Two things should be said for honesty. Antony also refused communion with the Meletians, an Egyptian group separated from the bishops of Alexandria over how to treat Christians who had lapsed under persecution, and drove Arian visitors away rather than debating them, which is a harder line than most Christians would draw today. And the man reporting all this, Athanasius, was the leading opponent of Arianism in the world and had an obvious interest in the old hermit’s endorsement. What supports the account is that it was published in Egypt while thousands of people who had been in that crowd were still alive.

(Q) "For you are good Christians, but they, when they say that the Son of the Father, the Word of God, is a created being, differ in nought from the heathen, since they worship that which is created, rather than God the creator." + Source: Athanasius, Life of Antony 69 (Ellershaw translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 4). From the address in Alexandria, spoken to the crowd that had run together to see him. "Nought" is nothing.

(Q) "Do not be astonished if an emperor writes to us, for he is a man; but rather wonder that God wrote the Law for men and has spoken to us through His own Son." + Source: Athanasius, Life of Antony 81 (Ellershaw translation, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume 4). Letters had arrived at the inner mountain from Constantine and his sons, and the monks were impressed. Antony was not, and at first did not want to answer them, saying he did not know how to write a reply to such things; he was persuaded on the grounds that the emperors were Christians and would be hurt. He wrote back telling them not to think much of the present, to remember the coming judgment, to know that Christ alone is the true and eternal king, and to be merciful and attend to the poor. The line he corrects the monks with is Hebrews 1:1–2.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) Athanasius’ book carried him: within twenty years of his death the Egyptian desert was being read about in Latin, and within thirty the book had emptied two careers at Trier and reached Augustine in Milan. + Athanasius wrote the Life of Antony within a year or two of the funeral, at the request of monks outside Egypt who wanted to know how the man had begun, what he had been like, and whether the stories were true. He had the qualifications: he says he saw Antony many times and had been his attendant, pouring water on his hands. Evagrius of Antioch turned the book into Latin around 370, and Jerome, who knew Evagrius personally, records the translation in his catalogue of Christian writers (On Illustrious Men 125). An earlier and rougher Latin version was already circulating before that. What followed is one of the best-attested chains of influence in Christian history, because the man at the end of it wrote down how it reached him. In Augustine’s Confessions (VIII.6) an African official named Ponticianus visits his lodgings in Milan, notices a book of Paul’s letters, and starts talking about Antony, whose name Augustine had never heard. Ponticianus then tells him about an afternoon at Trier when he and three colleagues from the imperial service went walking by the city wall. Two of them wandered off, came on a cottage, and found a copy of the Life inside. One read it through and did not go back to his career, and his friend gave up his own to stay beside him. Augustine, listening, was being shown his own life from the outside. A few days later, in a garden, he heard a child’s voice saying take up and read (VIII.12), and he says exactly why he obeyed it: he had heard that Antony once came in while the Gospel was being read and took what he heard as addressed to him. The Life is also the book that gave the saint’s life its pattern. Christians had written accounts of martyrdoms before it, and Eusebius had lately written a life of Constantine, but it was Athanasius’ book that the biographers of holy men and women copied, in the East and in the West, for centuries after.

(†) The desert filled in his lifetime, and Christian monasticism kept the shape he gave it. + He is called the father of monks, and the title needs one qualification, which his own biographer supplies. Athanasius says that when Antony began there were already men practising this life in solitude near their own villages, and women consecrated to Christ in communities: he put his sister into one. So Antony did not invent the thing. What he did was take it out past the last village, stay there for decades, and then let people watch what it had made of him. The movement he shaped went two ways almost at once, and both are still with us. Antony’s own way was the hermit’s, alone or with a disciple or two, with a father to go to for counsel. Within his lifetime Pachomius, an army conscript further up the Nile who was baptised after his discharge, gathered monks into an organised community under a common rule, which is the written code of a monastery: the hours of prayer, the work, the meals, the same for everyone in the house. Basil of Caesarea in the next generation wrote the rules that shaped monasticism for the Greek East and came down firmly for the common life over solitude, on the ground that a man alone has nobody to serve. In the West, Benedict’s Rule closes by pointing its readers to the sayings and lives of the Egyptian fathers and to Basil, which is Antony’s inheritance handed on in two hands at once. He reaches ordinary Christians in a quieter way too. The collections of desert sayings, short exchanges between a young monk and an old one, begin with the ones remembered under Antony’s name, and they have never stopped being read: how to pray when prayer goes dry, what to do with a thought you did not ask for, why the brother you live with is the test of the love you claim to have.

(†) He was harder on his own body than his teaching about the body ever asked him to be. + The Life is candid about habits that ought to give a Christian reader pause. Antony ate and slept with a sense of shame, and would excuse himself and eat apart when he could, thinking it beneath the dignity of a soul to be seen feeding. After the persecution he wore a hair shirt next to the skin under a garment of hide. A hair shirt is a tunic woven from coarse animal hair, the sort of cloth that prickles through a sleeve, worn against bare skin so that it never stops being felt. Over the top of that went the hide, and Athanasius reports with admiration that Antony never bathed, and never washed his feet, and would not put them in water unless he had to. Scripture does not ask for that and in places argues against it. "For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving" (1 Timothy 4:4). Paul goes further about the whole style of piety: rules of severity toward the body have "an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh." (Colossians 2:23) A man can neglect his body thoroughly and remain proud, which Antony knew, and it is one of the things he warns his monks about. In fairness, his own teaching was better than his practice at exactly this point, and the same book shows it. He worked with his hands, ate with the brothers all the same, kept a vegetable patch so that visitors would have something after a hard walk, bowed his head to bishops and presbyters and gave place even to a deacon in prayer, and said flatly that the Scriptures are enough for instruction. And when he came to die he told his disciples to put his body in the ground because he expected to receive it back incorruptible at the resurrection, and he had spent years arguing with Egyptians who kept their holy dead on couches at home, on the ground that the Lord himself was laid in a tomb. That is not contempt for the body. It is a man who honoured the body in his doctrine and was harder on it in practice than his doctrine required, which is a fault worth naming plainly and worth keeping in proportion.