Episode 92: Athanasius’ Life of Antony

Athanasius, Jerome, and the First Eremitic Saints’ Lives

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 92: Athanasius’ Life of Antony. In this episode, I’m going to tell you a story about a bishop and a monk. The bishop in question is Athanasius of Alexandria, who lived from roughly 297-373 and, over the course of the fourth century, ended up being one of the champions of what would soon become orthodox Catholicism. And the monk is Saint Antony the Great, or sometimes Anthony the Great, a man about two generations older than Athanasius of Alexandria, who, between about 270 and 356, lived an ascetic lifestyle mostly in solitude in the remote Egyptian countryside and became the most famous pious hermit in Christian history. Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria wrote a book about Saint Antony the monk in the years following the old hermit’s death in 356, and this biography, our main text for today, was the Life of Antony. The Life of Antony was an immediately popular text. In an era of Christian factionalism – an era during which bishops were politicking against one another in partnerships with Roman emperors, Athanasius’ Life of Antony showed Christianity in its purest and most raw form, telling the tale of a holy monk who went out into the desert, ate and drank nearly nothing, slept on the dirt, and devoted himself to praising Christ and resisting the ravages of Satan. One of the oldest Christian biographies to have survived from Late Antiquity, the Life of Antony had a formative role in establishing the ideals of monasticism, with its valorous portrait of the most monkish monk of all monks.

As famous as Saint Antony the hermit eventually became, though, monks, in the 300s CE, were really nothing new. The figure of the ascetic sage was well established in the Ancient Mediterranean imagination long before Christianity came along. Way back when the Old Testament was being written in the 500s and 400s BCE, Pythagorean and Orphic cults in southern Italy and Greece were proposing dietary regulations, purity codes, and ascetic behaviors, all with the aim of promoting an advantageous reincarnation. These ideas enchanted Plato, the most important architect of mind-body dualism, and in the wake of Plato’s writings, across the centuries leading up to Christ’s birth, stoicism arose – a wildly popular ideology in Ancient Greece and Rome that glorified the figure of the stoic sage – a man in control of his emotions and desires, focused on an intellectual life and in closer communion with the stoic god than the common rabble all around him. In the first century, Saint Paul and other authors of the New Testament soaked up these older ideas and transmitted them into Christianity. And from John the Baptist emerging out of the Galilean hinterlands, to Jesus’ 40-day stay in the desert, to numerous admonitions throughout the epistles to temper one’s passions and focus on spirituality, the New Testament champions the old Greek notion of the unflappable stoic, confident in his abnegation of the material world for the sake of higher things.

The figure of the ascetic sage, then, was an old idea – one that stretched back to the 500s BCE and surely a long time before this. But from about the 350s CE until the time of Saint Augustine’s death in 430, that old notion of the stoic man apart exploded into Late Antique Christian culture. Saint Augustine, Saint Jerome, and their generation of theologians, born in the mid 300s and dying in the early 400s, were the theologians who pruned back and subdued the lavish garden of early Christianity, the generation that vigorously championed a single form of Christianity as the sole correct ideology on earth, and the generation that joined together with Roman imperial power to establish their new form of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman empire. Excepting the Apostles themselves and authors of the New Testament, Jerome and Augustine were the most influential Christian theologians to ever live, and both of them, like so many others of their generation, were profoundly affected by Athanasius’ biography, the Life of Antony, again our text for today.

So in this and the next episode, we’re going to learn all about the early history of monks, and Late Antique texts written about them. The fourth century and a little before it are the timeframe when we begin to hear of individual Christian believers, and slightly later Christian communes, beginning to root themselves in various outlying backwaters of the Roman Empire and beyond, with an overall emphasis on asceticism, holiness and clean living. Christian monks, and monastic communities, from the very beginning, seem to have been content to do their own thing. In early Christian texts about these colorful figures, we learn about men and women whose interior spiritual lives are as rich as their physical living conditions are stark and severe. And while Christianity’s earliest monks may have been content to live, worship, and die in obscurity, the popular books written about famous monks, works that vacillated between documentary biography and kooky fairytale, made monkish living something of a craze in Roman Christian circles by the late 300s. When Saint Jerome returned to the city Rome in the year 382, he found that the old capital was speckled with provisional monasteries and nunneries, in the form of converted aristocratic mansions. These makeshift facilities bustled with Christians and recent converts – those who sought to turn away from the cultural norms of Rome and toward a cloistered and ascetic version of Christianity – a version influenced by popular texts like Athanasius’ Life of Antony. Popular texts about Christian desert hermits, then, while they chronicled real men and women living lives of self-renunciation out in the sticks, somewhat ironically, also fueled countercultural movements in Rome’s urban centers in the second half of the 300s, as monks became faddish icons for popular imitation. And as Rome staggered from the 300s into the 400s, popular Christian biographies of monks gave the religion’s faithful something else.

As the great Gothic War of 376-382 began to turn the marchland provinces between Rome and Byzantium into scorched earth, as the Gothic Invasions of Italy from 401-410 ravaged the ancestral seats of the empire, as barracks emperors slammed armies against one another and the Vandals slowly positioned themselves to cross over into North Africa – as the western provinces sagged into patchworks of old guard wealth and war and ruination, Christian readers learned of others like them whose powers of faith and physical endurance could leave them prosperous even beneath failed states and the fires of war – who might, as Saint Antony had done, leave it all behind for God.

From a high level view, then Athanasius’ Life of Antony was one of the most influential books of the fourth century. To some extent, surely, based on fact, the biography chronicles some of the earliest activities of Christianity’s desert hermits. But because of who read this biography, and when it burst into the culture of the literate Christian world, it had a remarkable impact on the shape that Catholicism would assume during and after the fifth century. So to start us out today, let’s talk about our main author for today, Athanasius of Alexandria, whose book on Saint Antony proved profoundly influential in the Christian world, and more broadly, literary history. [music]

The Life of Athanasius of Alexandria

In our programs on Late Antiquity, we are covering a wide range of authors, both pagan and Christian – authors about whom today we know next to nothing, and ones whose lives are quite well documented, considering how long ago they lived. Athanasius of Alexandria falls squarely into the latter category. The bishop of Alexandria during much of Christianity’s formative fourth century, Athanasius was born within a few years of 297, and he died in 373. Athanasius came of age during the reign of Constantine the Great. The Edict of Milan had passed in 313, which guaranteed that Christians would be safe within the Roman Empire. And Alexandria, the capital where Athanasius grew up, remained a unique cultural and commercial center of the Roman empire – an intellectual hub both Greek and Roman, built atop the awesome heritage of Ancient Egypt and covered with a newer varnish of Christianity – a place where Latin, Greek, Coptic, and other languages were spoken in the streets and where Manichaean and Gnostic sects flourished alongside traditional Greek academies. In addition to Alexandria’s cultural mélange, the city’s bishopric held special esteem in Christian circles, being second only to the patriarchy of Rome.

Athanasius distinguished himself sufficiently as a young man to end up becoming the secretary of Alexandria’s bishop, Alexander of Alexandria. In this position – in other words secretary to the bishop of Alexandria, Athanasius attended one of the most important meetings in Christian history – the First Council of Nicaea in 325. One of the main subjects of the First Council of Nicaea was Arianism. And while Late Antiquity is full of obscure and sometimes hairsplitting arguments about the nature of Christ, the fourth century rift between Arianism and Nicene Christianity may be the most important of all of them, and is certainly a division that we should all understand before moving forward, because it’s central to the book that we’re about to read.

Arianism had roots in Athanasius’ own hometown and diocese of Alexandria. Arianism arose due to the teachings of the Alexandrian priest Arius. Arius was born around 250. His controversial view of the nature of Christ had gained a lot of ground by the time Athanasius began his ecclesiastical career in the 310s and 20s. Arianism’s view of Christ, to simplify things substantially, was as follows. Arius evidently taught that Jesus Christ was not as old as Yahweh – that Yahweh really had engendered Christ at some point, making Christ younger, and subordinate to Yahweh. In a word, Arian’s view of Yahweh and Jesus was like the Greek view of Zeus and Dionysus – a proper father and son, the former older and more storied than the latter. An enormous part of Athanasius’ career involved pushing back against this popular fourth century movement. What eventually became orthodox Catholicism taught that on the contrary, Yahweh, Christ, and the holy spirit were a holy trinity – aspects of a single god, and thus that no aspect of this god could predate or engender another aspect. While the codification of the Holy Trinity in formal proclamations took a bit longer, hammering out the church’s official stance on Jesus’ relationship with Yahweh took place in 325 at the First Council of Nicaea, and Athanasius himself was present there. The Nicene Creed that emerged from this council described Christ as “Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the father.” The Creed demonstrates that young Athanasius and his Bishop, who had argued for a consubstantial Christ and Yahweh, had been victorious over Arius, who had also attended the First Council of Nicaea and argued that Yahweh had created Christ.

Three years after the First Council of Nicaea, the old bishop Alexander passed away and Athanasius himself inherited the esteemed position of Bishop of Alexandria. The year was 328. Constantine the Great was elderly, but still alive and kicking, and it seemed Nicene Christianity was secure in Alexandria. However, for the next four decades of Athanasius’ life, through the 330s, 340s, 350s and 360s, through an astounding series of five different exiles beneath four different Roman emperors, the opposite proved to be the case. The theological diversity of Alexandria, together with a pendulum swinging back and forth between Nicene and Arian Emperors of two different dynasties and the reign of the pagan Julian the Apostate in between them, together with the inherently volatile situation of sectarian bishops currying favor with these emperors and using political alliances to persecute their theological rivals, all made the middle part of the 300s a very rough time to be the Nicene bishop of Alexandria. Athanasius stuck to his guns, however, wrote vigorously against Arian Christology, and died peacefully as the bishop of Alexandria in 373, having weathered some very close calls and navigated some perilous situations over the course of his eventful career.

As we’ll hear again and again in our shows on Late Antiquity, the fourth century, Athanasius’ century, was the period during which Early Christianity solidified from several early strands into Catholic orthodoxy, consolidating advantageously with Roman executive power. Athanasius, by all accounts a courageous and resolute person, also ended up being on the winning side of history. The orthodoxy that emerged between 325 and 425 set itself not only against Arianism, but also against Gnosticism and Manichaeism, and soon, with the publication of the Theodosian Codes of the 430s, against all other ideologies. Athanasius was a major part of this general pattern of codification and exclusion in early Catholic history. One of the many reasons he is well known today is that during his final stint as Bishop of Alexandria, following his fifth exile and in the year 367, Athanasius wrote the earliest surviving list of a 27-book New Testament canon, and used the term kanonizomena, or “canonized” for the first time in relation to Christian scriptures deemed official.¹ An extremely important figure in the consolidation of what would become Catholic orthodoxy, then, Athanasius also had a firm sense of the New Testament itself. But Athanasius has been highly regarded for a third reason, and this third reason takes us to the main subject of today’s show.

At several junctures during Athanasius’ exiles, for personal safety and a reprieve from the political and theological pugilism which dominated his career, Athanasius went south, into the remoter inland regions of Egypt. Probably fluent in Coptic, and a native Egyptian to boot, Athanasius could always lay low among the Christian communities in the hardscrabble villages and enclaves a ways south of the populous Nile Delta. When an Arian bishop usurped Athanasius’ seat in Alexandria in 356, and later, when Julian the Apostate banished Athanasius in 362, the long-suffering Nicene bishop sought refuge in the Egyptian interior. And there he lived in Christian colonies at a remove from the bustle of the Egyptian capital, encountering, firsthand, a group of Christian hermits often called the Desert Fathers. What Athanasius wrote about these fathers, and one father in particular, became one of the most famous texts of the fourth century. Let’s talk about the Desert Fathers. [music]

The Earliest Records of Christian Monasticism in Egypt

Before Athanasius was born, at some point during the 200s CE, in a series of events now mostly lost to history, a population of Egyptian Christians began gradually migrating into the desert, where a lack of distractions, severe climate, and a dearth of food and water encouraged them to concentrate fully on their spiritual pursuits. According to Christian tradition, the first of these was a man named Paul of Thebes, and after him Saint Antony the Great, whose tenures in the desert began in the mid-200s. Later, in the next century, other desert-dwelling hermits followed, including Hilarion in Palestine, and Malchus and Syria, and more still thereafter. As we know, ancient history was overly fond of etiology – of tracing an entire tradition to one exceptional individual and place and time, and it’s safe to say that eschewing civilization to go and live alone in the wilderness was undoubtedly taking place long before the third century.

However, some early pioneers may have been at the foundations of the Christian eremitic movement in Egypt, specifically. Eremitic, by the way, means related to hermits, and especially religious hermits, a handy term for this program, which will feature a number of aged, unwashed, heavily bearded, skinny desert dwellers, or eremites, who lived roughly from 240-375. So let’s make “eremitic” our word for the day – of or related to religious hermits. Anyway, our earliest textual records of the Christian Desert Fathers depict a small group of extremely pious men who, due to both a desire for heightened spirituality and an eagerness to avoid various persecutions and the temptations of civilized life, set out with only minimal possessions to begin homesteading in various backwater territories of the Roman Empire. While we might, like Henry David Thoreau did, generally associate remote rural life with clean living and immersion into nature, in the early Christian imagination, going to live in the desert alone had slightly different connotations. In all the Synoptic Gospels – Mark, Matthew and Luke, Jesus goes and stays in the desert for forty days and forty nights, fasting, and, confronted by the temptations of Satan, easily overcomes them. For early Christian eremites, then, a residency in the desert was a way of modeling one’s life on that of Jesus, and far from relaxing apart from the clamor of civilization, living alone in the desert was a means of facing the allurements of evil head on. In the biographies we’ll look at today, we don’t see, for instance, Saint Antony or Paul of Thebes marveling on the beauties of freshwater desert springs or the glow of the sunset in palm fronds – the focus in Christian records of early eremites tends to be the extremes of asceticism that these hermits endured, and the Satanic seductions they were able to overcome.

The word “monk” comes from the Greek word monachos, which itself comes from the word monos, which means “alone.” Today, while we associate monks with communes, at a very early point monasticism was associated with isolated believers. Some of these isolated believers, by about 330, seem to have congregated about thirty miles south of Alexandria at a site called Nitria. Nitria, however, wasn’t too far off from the civilized world, and from Nitria some eremites went further out to live, setting up shop in a place called Kellia, or “the cells,” at the end of the 330s at a distance 40 miles inland from Alexandria. Kellia, or the cells were for those desert ascetics who required isolation for their spiritual pursuits, though one of the primary historical sources on the subject notes that the monks still saw one another there during Saturday and Sunday services.² Deeper inland still was a third monastic site called Scetis, this one 55 miles south of Alexandria located in a depression nearly 100 feet below sea level, where a former herdsman of camels established a sphere of Christian monasticism around the same time. So those three sites – Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis, located on a daisy chain that dangles 55 miles inland to the southeast from Alexandria, were where Christian monasticism probably began, as far as we can tell from the written record. While the first two sites lay within the irrigated territories of the present Nile Delta, in antiquity they were all in what gets called the Nitrian Desert, an arid region where natron salts were harvested as customary parts of the mummification process.

According to Athanasius himself, in the Life of Antony, Antony’s example of living minimalistically in the desert was the main force that set in motion the whole monastic movement – Athanasius writes that Antony’s words “had the immediate effect of persuading many of those who heard him to reject human things: this marked the beginning of the desert’s colonization.”³ According to a later ancient source, by the end of the 300s – just half a century after Saint Antony’s death, 5,000 monks were living at Nitria, the first site associated with desert hermits.⁴ Now obviously, a community of 5,000 hermits is an oxymoron, and the Christians who ventured into the natron salt desert south of Alexandria to live probably had all sorts of reasons for doing so – persecution, unemployment, personal connections, together with a desire to live in a region with likeminded people. Soon, a name for the practice of monks living together arose, and this was coenobitism, from the Greek words koinos bios, or “common life.”

Saint Antony was by all accounts a trailblazer for the monastic movement, but he was not a community organizer or abbot in the first half of the 300s. The rise of the communal monastic movement in Egypt – as opposed to hermits just going out and praying in caves – the communal monastic movement had some roots in the Nitrian desert south of Alexandria, but it is most prominently associated with a man named Pachomius. Pachomius was from the middle Nile – the city of Thebes, or modern day Luxor. He converted to Christianity as a young man, and, inspired by the stories of Antony, tried his hand at being a hermit and ascetic. However, Pachomius’ bent seems to have been more toward engineering monastic communities. The first community that he built was a couple of miles across the river from the village of Nag Hammadi, at a site called Tabennisis – this was around 320. The monastery at Tabennisis frequently gets the credit for being the first communal monastery in Christianity. Pachomius’ settlement at Tabennisis wasn’t just a desert campground where hermits squatted – over the 320s it became a sort of enclosed village, complete with a meeting hall, bakery, quarters for guests, and permanent rooms for dozens of monks. This proto-monastery was popular, and Pachomius established a secondary monastery a few miles downriver to the north. These cloistered communities were not, like Antony’s desert hermitages, way off the beaten path. Pachomius’ monasteries were within the irrigated territories of the Nile, making them more practical dwelling places for monks seeking minimalism and spirituality, but who didn’t necessarily want to live in alone in caves for the rest of their lives.

Now, if you want to found a monastic settlement, or more broadly a monastic order, you need some sort of list of guidelines for what’s allowed and what’s not. When archaeologists excavated the site of Qumran near the Dead Sea, within the Dead Sea Scrolls they discovered rules lists governing life in the settlement established some time around the second century BCE. Naturally, then, four hundred years later, when Christian monks under Pachomius began living in communes, they established a code of conduct, as well. The code of conduct established at the first communal monasteries around 330 CE, some 280 miles south-southeast of Cairo, was called Pachomius’ Rule – initially in Coptic, and then later translated into Greek and Latin. Later still, this rule would have counterparts in the different monastic movements within Christianity, most importantly the Rule of Saint Benedict, a monastic code set down two centuries after Pachomius’ Rule.

So that was a quick crash course on the very early history of Christian monasticism. Let’s review. A few legendary desert hermits, most prominently Saint Antony, whom we’ll learn all about in a moment, led a charge into the Egyptian desert toward the end of the 200s and the beginning of the 300s. In two distinct places – the Nitrian Desert in a 50 mile radius south of Alexandria, and then much further south down the Nile, and the middle Nile north of Thebes, monastic activity sprang to life during the 320s and 330s. Monastic communities, unlike desert hermitages, could exist all over the place, including in cities, and by the end of the 300s, we start to have records of monasteries beginning to pervade many of Egypt’s towns and cities. In the next program, we’ll go into a bit more detail about monastic communities. But in the present show, we’re going stay at the beginning of it all, in the Egyptian desert and learn about the small handful of eremites who, in the historical texts of Christianity, were monkish before being a monk was even cool. [music]

Background for the Life of Antony

Now that we’ve heard a bit about both Athanasius himself, the Arian controversy, and the earliest beginnings of monasticism, let’s move on to our main course for this program – Athanasius’ Life of Antony. There are a couple of things to review before we crack open the biography. First of all, the text is what is known as a hagiography, or Saint’s life. Hagiography is a genre in which exceptional figures in Christian history are glorified in exciting narratives, narratives that show the mettle of saints being tested in all sorts of ways, and the saints themselves emerging triumphant. This genre dates back to the apostolic miracles that appear in the Book of Acts, and the apocryphal Acts of John, Acts of Paul and Acts of Peter are all early examples of hagiography, and so Athanasius wasn’t inventing a genre in his biography of Antony. Additionally, Athanasius wasn’t writing about some legendary figure from the distant past. Athanasius had, according to the biography itself, met the desert hermit, and Antony, at the tender age of 105, bequeathed some of his garments to Athanasius just before old Antony passed away. By the time Saint Antony died in roughly 356, he had become revered for his piety and asceticism. But Antony was also, importantly for Athanasius himself, an ethnic and cultural Egyptian.

Athanasius and Antony were both Egyptians. But at several points in Athanasius’ Greek language Life of Antony, Athanasius makes it clear that Antony spoke and understood only Coptic. While the bishop Athanasius himself lived much of his life in Greek and traveled widely, the hermit Antony remained Egyptian through and through, living his life in increasingly remote places in Egypt. Earlier, I mentioned the monastic activity that began to build pick up steam in the natron desert south of Alexandria. While at a remove from the Egyptian capital, the three communities I described earlier – Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis – these were all within a couple of days travel from Alexandria at the most. Saint Antony, however, went much deeper into Egypt, his final hermitage being incredibly remote even by today’s standards. To Athanasius, then, Antony was not only a wise and revered ascetic hermit. He was also more broadly the apex of Egyptian Christianity – a Coptic speaking sage who went deeper into the wilderness and remained there longer than anyone else dared to. So, with all this background established, I think we’re ready to hear Athanasius’ Life of Antony, one of the most revered hagiographies in Christian history. Unless otherwise noted, I’m occasionally quoting from the Carolinne White translation, published by Penguin in 1998. [music]

Saint Antony’s Youth and Embrace of Monasticism

Athanasius’ Life of Antony begins with a short preface explaining why he wrote the biography. Athanasius was prompted, he writes, by various members of the monastic communities scattered all over the Christian world. These communities, following the traditions established during Saint Antony’s lifetime and generations that had come before him, wanted to know more about the famous monk. What had Antony been like before Antony’s embrace of monasticism? How had Antony come to embrace the virtuous path? Athanasius assures his readers that Saint Antony was a remarkable person, and that in fact, “you should believe everything that those who talk about him claim, and consider that you have heard only the least remarkable of all the very remarkable things he did.”⁵ Athanasius tells his readers that he knew Antony personally, having visited the famous monk frequently, and also having known the person who brought water to the Saint’s desert hermitage. And with his justification for writing the Life of Antony established, Athanasius begins his biography of the famous monk.

Saint Antony, Athanasius tells us, was born into prosperity in Egypt. Yet even as a child, Antony displayed the staunch minimalism that would characterize him all his life – Antony didn’t play games with other kids, and was unwilling to be taught to read or write. Young Antony didn’t yearn for sweets, but instead listened attentively in church and tried to apply what he learned there to his life.

Antony’s temperance was tested early, as both of his parents passed away, and Antony, at eighteen or twenty, was left to take care of the family estate, including his sister. Musing on what to do, Saint Antony thought of passages in Acts and Gospels urging communalism and giving one’s possessions away to the poor. While he made sure a small annuity was still available to his sister, Antony sold everything that had belonged to the family, including about 200 acres of excellent land, taking the earnings and passing them onto the poor in that part of Egypt. Then, after seeing that his sister was cared for, Antony began what would become a lifelong pursuit of living an ascetic lifestyle in remote places in the Egyptian desert.

Monasticism, our author Athanasius tells us, was not yet a firmly established practice in Egypt, and so young Antony began his journey toward minimalism by seeking out likeminded eccentrics who dwelt in solitude and with a dearth of personal belongings. Antony met one such person, and then began living at a remove from the villages and settlements of Egypt. Antony, as he began his long years as a solitary monk, soon began to give up the written word, keeping the Scriptures fixed in his mind and focusing on the daily work he did with hands to sustain himself.

He was still, at this point, a student in his monasticism, learning from others who had already chosen similar lifestyles. Antony, during the early years of his time as a monk, visited the desert ascetics of his region, admiring the various ways that they poured themselves into their spiritual isolationism. There was no enmity among the members of this early generation of self-styled monks – only love and respect, and gradually young Antony rose to distinguish himself in his singular pursuit of a devout lifestyle, uncluttered by the trappings of civilization. Antony showed such promise in perfect piety early on, in fact, that he attracted the attention of none other than Satan himself, and the devil, for a time, made it his mission to turn young Antony from the path of sanctity, and toward the path of sin. [music]

The Temptations of Saint Antony

Satan’s first assaults against Antony were reminders of everything Antony had given up – Antony’s family’s reputation, his sister’s care and protection, the delectable foods of the Egyptian aristocracy, and the niceties of upper class life. Satan sent Antony fearsome visions of monsters during the day, and he came to Antony at night in the form of an alluring woman. But through prayer and concentration, and even the direct help of Christ, Antony was able to withstand the temptations of the devil. At his wit’s end, then, Satan appeared to Antony in the form of an ugly child, and Antony condemned him, scoring his first major victory against Satan.

This initial confrontation, while it proved that Christ was on Antony’s side, didn’t cause the monk to congratulate himself or celebrate, as Antony knew that Satan would be back. Accordingly, Antony worked ever more staunchly to discipline his body. He did this through fasting. Antony tested himself to see how long he could go without sleep. Like all monks, Athanasius tells us, Saint Antony was a vegetarian and he abstained from alcohol. Often, Antony slept on the dirt, and always, he disdained oil on his skin. These new exercises in self-denial were undertaken with greater efforts toward personal isolation. Antony moved beyond the outskirts of his town in order to dwell near some local tombs in the desert, his friend promising to bring him basic provisions.

Satan was not pleased that Antony had moved to dwell near desert tombs – it seemed to the devil that one righteous desert dweller might cause many others to come and inhabit the Egyptian hinterlands. And so Satan adopted more aggressive measures against Antony, marshalling forth his demons and physically torturing and beating the aspiring monk. By a hairsbreadth, Antony survived the ordeal. The friend who brought him food discovered Antony, severely wounded, the next morning and brought him back to their village. But when Antony awoke and recovered his senses, he only asked to be carried back out to the desert tombs to continue his solitary spiritual pilgrimage.

Installed once more in his hermitage, Antony, though he was unable to even rise from the ground, told Satan that he was not going to back down from the fight that the devil had started. Equally not one to shy away from a confrontation, Satan redoubled his efforts. Satan summoned a horde of demons – lion-faced demons, and creatures shaped like snakes, scorpions, bears, wolves, leopards and even bulls, and these creatures fell upon Antony and battered him. Antony, however, remained confident, telling the monsters that they were weak, and that was why so many of them were necessary.

And as if on cue, Christ appeared in a ray of light through the roof of Antony’s domicile. Antony was grateful but nonetheless uncertain. Where had Christ been, all this time, he wanted to know? Why had Christ allowed his devotee to receive such awful punishments? And Christ explained himself, telling Antony that he was proud that the devout mortal had gone toe to toe with Satan himself, and that from this point onward, Christ would be with Antony and bring Antony to great glory on earth. And at the time of this pivotal meeting, Athanasius explains, Antony was thirty-five years of age. [music]

Antony’s Middle Years

Antony’s initial victory over Satan steeled his resolve to venture into greater degrees of isolation and asceticism. The great monk ventured deeper into the desert, and it soon became clear that Satan had not given up in his efforts to thwart Antony’s devotion. As Antony made his way into the arid wilderness, he saw in his path a single lavish silver plate. A few moments of deduction led Antony to conclude it was a trick, and the silver plate disappeared, having been a Satanic phantom designed to stall Antony’s journey into the wilds. Next, Antony happened upon a mass of gold lying ahead in his path. But rather than picking it up, Antony left it alone and hurried onto his destination – a remote mountain. There, he fortified himself in a walled-off chamber, living off of a pittance of bread and water which were delivered to him twice annually through a hole in his roof.

Just as Antony’s extreme piety had attracted the attention of Satan, it also attracted the attention of certain curious passerby. Inquisitive visitors camped just outside of Antony’s domicile, and what they heard within surprised them – a pandemonium of conflicting voices; indeed, demons reproving Antony for homesteading in their territory. While to passerby the cacophony sounded menacing, Antony would urge listeners through his closed door to make the sign of the cross and go with his blessing, and as the years passed, Antony became stronger and stronger in his spiritual devotions, until he was fifty-five years of age.

By this time, no one had seen the hermit for twenty years, and the unruly zealots who had gathered around his dwelling place were clamoring for a sight of him. Finally, Antony’s devotees tore down the rock barrier that kept him separate in his hermitage, and they were surprised to see that the now middle-aged man had a beautiful and dignified appearance, together with a calm and civilized social demeanor. Thinking that perhaps the ravages of Satan’s minions and long years of isolation might reduce Antony in both form and social skills, his admirers discovered that no such thing had happened. Antony possessed the power to cure illness and cast out unclean spirits. His intellect and powers of rhetoric were sharp, and he settled disputes and displayed his capabilities as a teacher, as well. His presence was, in fact, sufficiently formidable that he encouraged others to adopt similar lifestyles, and gradually a trickle of self-styled ascetics began installing themselves in the desert, inspired by Antony’s doings. Having come out of his twenty years of solitude, Antony led a small expedition of monks to visit some other monks, and when they crossed the Nile, they were unharmed by crocodiles and other predators that dwelt in the river. The holy man, together with his disciples, began setting up cells of monks to continue colonizing the desert with ascetic worshippers.

Antony’s Long Sermon

Antony, by this point, had gone from being an isolated eccentric to the leader of a movement. And as a sort of monk-in-chief at that moment of Egyptian history, Antony had to answer questions and concerns of his adherents. One of these concerns was where, exactly, monks would learn how to be monkish. Antony, considering, replied that the Holy Scriptures ought to be the primary source of instruction for monastic conduct, but also that monks should be brothers to one another, to encourage one another, and always remember the initial zeal that had prompted them to join the movement. This counsel, in fact, was only the beginning of Saint Antony’s remarks to his followers, and as is the case in so many Christian narratives of Late Antiquity, Athanasius the writer breaks the narrative of the biography to offer quite a long sermon from Antony, the essentials of which were as follows.

Antony announced that human lives were quite short in comparison to the eternal life of a human soul, and that expending one’s life in industriousness and discipline was quite a small price to pay for an everlasting reward. One couldn’t, after all, carry finery and property with oneself to the afterlife – but one could carry one’s record of chastity, uprightness, vigilance, wisdom, and devotion to Christ. In order to pursue these virtues, Antony told his followers, mortals ought to constantly reflect on the transience of their lives and the instability of human existence on earth more generally, never fretting about its ebbs and flows. What his devotees really needed, Antony told them, was something they already had – the scriptures and the potential for heaven was the property of every one of them, and they didn’t need to go traveling and studying things and acquainting themselves with foreigners like the Greeks did. A good Christian monk, Antony continued, needed to be able to control his anger, as well.

Beginning a new section of his sermon, Antony then went into detail about Satan and his minions, all arrayed against the forces of good. These enemies, Antony said, were everywhere – at that very moment flying all around them in the air. Following popular but non-Biblical traditions on the roots of Satan and his minions, Antony assured his listeners that God didn’t create Satan and company, but that these were heavenly beings who tumbled down to earth due to their errant wills. These fallen deities, Antony said, had introduced paganism to the world, and were furious upon meeting pious Christians, who had seen beyond their web of illusions. In fact, Antony emphasized, demons especially hated monks and virgins, seeking to lead them astray at every turn. To this end, demons used the temptations of lust, fear, and false prophecy. They sung the psalms and recited the Scripture in their foul voices, awakened those who rested, took on the appearance of devout monks to lead other monks astray, and assumed other specious appearances to confuse the minds of the pious. Failing all of this, demons simply told monks that the monkish way of life was too hard for anyone to bear, and encouraged them to soften their efforts and embrace the ways of the world. And when this failed, Satan himself appeared to lead the righteous astray, but at every turn he was thwarted by Christ.

I’m going to pause Saint Antony’s long sermon here, because in this part of the text our author Athanasius is about to change topics slightly and descend into some slightly more complex theological waters. What you’ve heard so far in Antony’s sermon, with the exception of the origin story of Satan and demons, is very standard sounding Christian stuff – life is short but eternity is long, value spiritual gains and not worldly possessions, resist temptations and keep your eyes on the prize of heaven – these ideas pervade the written record of Christianity from the Gospels onward. Athanasius, however, is especially interested in Satan, that renegade who snuck in through the turnstile in the closing chapters of the Bible and thereafter took on an astonishingly disproportionate role on the subsequent Christian imagination. Specifically, in the next part of Saint Antony’s sermon that you’re about to hear, Athanasius is going to have Antony undertake the tricky task of explaining why, following the various covenants of the Old Testament, and the coming of Christ to earth, Satan was still ruining so many people’s lives in the world.

We already heard earlier that Athanasius uses a common non-Biblical origin story for Satan – what we might call the “errant children” etiology, to explain the origins of Satan and his demon army. To Antony, Satan and company are fallen angels like those described in 1 Enoch and other early Christian writings like the Questions of Bartholomew and the Life of Adam and Eve. In Antony’s sermon, Athanasius the biographer continues his musings about Satan and how Satanic doings work. Indeed, Antony tells his listeners that when Christ came to earth, the main strength of the devil was vanquished. However, Antony explains, “when the devil sees that he has collapsed and remembers his former strength, like a tyrant who is now growing old, he attacks human wickedness” (28). A vanquished deity, then, Satan harried humanity to remind himself of his glory days prior to the arrival of Christ. Antony said he was confident that he was correct – Satan had really been kneecapped by Christ’s coming to earth, and if this hadn’t been the case, even as pious Christians they wouldn’t have stood a chance against the ravages of the devil. To prove his point, Antony openly disparaged Satan’s impotence against true worshippers of Christ – Antony said that the once mighty father of lies had been reduced to cheap theatrics and illusions.

The character Job, from the Book of Job, Antony said, hadn’t been stricken by Satan – it had been God who had stricken him, and God who had granted Satan his power in the first place. And Satan, mostly beaten down as he now was, was terrified by the steadfast faith of Christian monks – their prayers, their asceticism, and their disdain of worldly existence. And that statement concludes what we might call Athanasius’ long origin story of Satan – a decent effort to try and reconcile some of the statements about Satan found in the Gospels, Epistles, and Revelation with truisms that had become commonplace by the fourth century.

The author Athanasius continues the sermon of Saint Antony with an account of the way that humanity practiced divinations and other false miracles. Various charlatans, said Antony, just like demons, could pretend to see into the future through means of certain tricks of the trade. And it was precisely through the artifice of false miracles that paganism came to be – demons and their human enablers deluded followers into believing that their tricks were fueled by divine power. Athanasius, clearly a bishop with no interest in religious pluralism, has Antony conclude “This is why the miserable pagans, unaware of the Lord’s prohibition, mistakenly believed that the demons were gods” (37). It had all stopped, however, Antony said, with the coming of Christ. From thundering around the earth prior to the events of the Gospels, Satan and his entourage had been largely been reduced to a flock of nocturnal tricksters, ones that were formidable, certainly, but ones that could be vanquished by a steadfast monk’s piety in short order.

Antony said that even though a righteous monk might easily parry the thrusts of Satan and his minions, doing so was still no cause for pride. Then, contradicting himself, Antony proudly recounted some of his own confrontations with Satanic forces. He recalled a time when demons had pretended to be able to predict the flooding of the Nile, and he told the demons that the Nile had nothing to do with them. He told a story of devils thronging around his dwelling and then banishing them with a pious song. Antony said once the demons had appeared to him in a band of bright light, and he’d simply closed his eyes to block out their nefarious influence. His vaunting narratives crescendoed with the story of encountering Satan, and spitting in Satan’s face and attacking Satan when the devil pretended to be God. A final story about Satan served to underscore Antony’s – and moreover monasticism’s – triumphs over Satan. Antony told his listeners that a very tall man had come to speak with him who said that he was the devil. The stranger was downcast, and humble – he told Antony that with all of the monks pioneering their way into the desert to live, the devil himself could no longer hide in the benighted countryside of Egypt. It was, Antony told all of the monks listening, a great story of their triumphs over evil, and yet they mustn’t let it go to their heads – vigilance and righteousness would still be the watchwords of what they were.

And Antony closed his lengthy sermon with one last bit of advice. Antony said that visions would come to them – and when these visions did, they must ask the apparitions that they saw about their origins – were these apparitions divine and holy, or were they the emanations of demons? This, Antony advised his followers, was the correct way to deal with sudden visions when they arrived. And with this closing admonition, Antony finally concluded his speech. [music]

Saint Antony and the Diocletian Persecution

Saint Antony’s long sermon, delivered just after he’d come out of being sequestered for two decades, filled his listeners with a range of emotions – a desire for heightened virtue, a sudden mental clarity, and even a supercilious disgust at the paltry efforts of evil to try and seduce them. Monks broke out into the singing of psalms, and Athanasius depicts the monks as suddenly on the verge of a sort of sacred utopian society. Athanasius writes, in the Penguin Carolinne White translation, that the monks

appeared to inhabit an infinitely large area, a town removed from worldly matters, full of piety and justice. Anyone who set eyes on that multitude of ascetics, anyone who saw that heroic and harmonious community where no one caused any harm, where there was no slander from tale-bearers, but a crowd of people leading lives of restraint, competing with each other in the performance of their duties, would immediately burst out [into prayer]. (44)

And as for Antony, he redoubled his efforts at asceticism. The need to eat and sleep began to bring him shame and self disgust, and Antony reflected on how a person’s soul absolutely must resist the call of physical temptations in order to be granted entry into heaven. It was, in fact, a time when Egyptian Christians needed to be firm in their faith, because, Athanasius writes, Saint Antony’s sermon was delivered “at the time when Maximin’s most cruel persecution was raging out of control” (46)

. Let me give you some historical background on this. If we take Athanasius’ chronology seriously, Saint Antony was about 55 years old at this time, and the year would have been 311. We have records of various sporadic persecutions during the first few centuries CE, but by all accounts the most severe abuse of human rights directed against Christians broke out under the Emperor Diocletian, driven by Diocletian’s co-Augustus Galerius more than Diocletian himself. As students of Roman imperial history know, Diocletian, who ruled from 284-305, instituted a tetrarchy wherein four emperors ruled simultaneously – two senior and two junior, the tetrarchy being an attempt to control the massive empire and forestall the sorts of military coups that had nearly destroyed the Empire during the 200s. Diocletian’s right hand man Galerius, beginning in February of 303, issued an edict aimed squarely at suppressing the presence of Christianity in the Roman Empire. In the ten years that passed after 303, to varying extents throughout the empire, Christian houses of worship, and their scriptures were sporadically destroyed, and bishops and priests arrested. Christians of all stamps, from aristocrats to soldiers, had their titles and rights stripped from them. Most famously, demands that Christians and their clergymen sacrifice to Roman gods led to imprisonments and executions in a chaotic checkerboard of oppression, some regions earnestly trying to extirpate the religion, and others only engaging in piecemeal persecutions according to the whims of governmental appointees there.

Saint Antony, again if we trust Athanasius’ chronology, spent the years of the Great Persecution walled up in a hole on the side of the mountain in the Egyptian desert, having bread and water delivered to him on a bi-monthly basis. And in the spring of 311, the Emperor Galerius – again Diocletian’s main co-Augustus who had spearheaded the persecution of Christians – Galerius issued an edict of toleration granting Christianity the status of an acceptable Roman religion. Unfortunately, though, after Galerius died that same year in 311, his nephew Maximinus Daia rose to power in the east. Maximinus Daia, though his reign was very brief, was extremely harsh on the Christians of Egypt’s urban centers, ordering their enslavement abroad in mines and quarries, the confiscation of their property, and worse still, their deaths and mutilations, regrettably ignoring his departed uncle’s instructions for religious tolerance.⁶

All of this is necessary background for understanding what’s about to happen in Athanasius’ Life of Antony – it is the year 311 in the narrative, and the Christians of Egypt, who may have believed themselves right on the verge of being delivered from the final and most horrific persecution of Christians in Roman history, seem about to be plunged back into the nightmare they’ve been suffering for nearly a decade. While we know today, and the author Athanasius knew, that the Edict of Milan passed in 313 and endured, in the year 311 in central Egypt, the outlying Christian communities couldn’t have had any sense that they were living through darkest hour just before dawn. For all Antony and his spiritual brethren knew, 311 might have been the very end. And so, to return to the text of Athanasius’ Life of Antony, acting on the assumption that Romans really did have it in for all the Christians of Egypt, Saint Antony gathered some of his followers, and headed directly into the lion’s den – the provincial center and storied capital of Alexandria. [music]

Antony Grows in Notoriety and Resolve

In Alexandria, Antony showed his resolve by going to the trials of Christians and standing in a prominent place there, eager to be martyred if that were what it came down to. We know from historical documents that under the Great Persecution, Christians were not permitted court testimonies, and so the hearings that Antony would have attended in Alexandria in 311 would have been sham ceremonies – ugly pieces of public theater designed to humiliate and elicit confessions from Christians through bullying and perhaps torture, like what happened in the Salem witch trials in 1692, only on a much grander scale. Anyway, Antony attended these sham trials and he wore white, eager to go to his grave to prove his faith. But, Athanasius tells us, God had more plans for the 55-year-old ascetic hermit. Antony’s contemporary Peter, the Patriarch of Alexandria, was beheaded. But as for Antony, his show of solidarity with his fellow Christians was evidently not enough to warrant an execution, and the monk returned to his hermitage in the desert. He had not been martyred in the Great Persecution, as he had hoped, but he could at least aspire to greater and greater heights of asceticism and self-mortification. Antony began wearing a hair shirt, and he stopped bathing, never washing unless he happened to cross a body of water.

While Antony’s interests lay merely in solitude and self-denial, his status as a sort of regional monk-in-chief began to attract more visitors than he wanted. He helped a military officer exorcise a demon from the officer’s possessed daughter. Others who passed by, inspired by Antony’s faith, were cured of their ailments by praying on the threshold of his quarters. Indeed, after a time, Antony began receiving too many visitors, and so he decided he needed to secure a remoter position in the wilderness. Now, let’s talk for a moment about where Antony stayed, as this is a fairly important topic in the history of Christian monasticism.

The Monk’s Places of Residence

Up to this point in Athanasius’ book, Antony’s hermitage has been in a sealed off cave on the side of a mountain, a mountain that gets called the Outer Mountain in scholarship. Antony’s initial hermitage – the one he where he lived between the ages of 35 and 55, was about 60 miles south of downtown Cairo on the east bank of the Nile – a site called Pispir. While the exact geography of the spot is uncertain, it seems to have been off the beaten path of Ancient Egypt, but not by too much – the Outer Mountain, or Pispir, was the sort of place where you could wear your hair shirt and sleep on dirt, but also where, if you were a revered holy man, your pastimes might be interrupted by too many adventurous pilgrims boating up and down the Nile.⁷ Today, a Coptic church and monastery mark the approximate spot of Saint Antony’s first hermitage. But Pispir, also known as the Outer Mountain, is not the most famous spot associated with Antony.

The Inner Mountain, Antony’s eventual place of residence, is now home to the Monastery of Saint Antony, an important Christian pilgrimage site. Then and now, this is quite a remote place, nestled as it is in the Red Sea mountains. Photo by Loris Romito.

Antony’s second residence is usually called the Inner Mountain. And the Inner Mountain is about 200 miles southeast of Cairo, in the northern foothills of the Red Sea Mountains, in a parched stretch of open countryside just fifteen miles west of the Red Sea, way out of the central thoroughfares of Egypt. Natural springs there make it livable year around, but it is nonetheless quite a remote location, its remoteness certainly having helped its longevity as a stronghold of Coptic Christianity for over 1,700 years. Today, the Monastery of Saint Anthony, a major Christian pilgrimage site, still persists there. While we don’t know exactly what sorts of networks of trade routes were webbed along the arid east coast of Egypt in antiquity, I bring up the subject of Antony’s first hermitage simply to emphasize that Antony’s final residence at the Inner Mountain was in a seriously isolated location – Antony was not, like Henry David Thoreau, living in a little cabin half an hour’s walk from his hometown – he was really out there in what, as far as we can tell, was an extremely secluded and harsh environment.

And so once again to return to Athanasius’ biography of Antony, the ascetic hermit fell into company with some desert traders, hitched a ride deep into the uninhabited badlands, and found the Inner Mountain, where he was dropped off and left to his own devices. It wasn’t a completely harsh and sun-blasted spot, Athanasius assures us – there was a freshwater spring there which watered some palm trees. Antony hadn’t been there very long when some of his followers tracked him down and began offering him provisions. Seeing their selfless devotion to him, Antony felt that it was only right to give something back. And in a beautiful passage that just might describe the birth of the first Christian monastic community, Athanasius tells us in the Penguin Carolinne White translation,

Antony realized that for the sake of his comfort, many were being forced to carry out onerous tasks; and so, wishing to spare the monks in this, too, he asked one of those who were coming, to bring him a two-pronged hoe and some grain. When these were brought to him he went round the mountain and found a small area suitable for cultivation which he could irrigate from the mountain spring. There he sowed some seed and then produced a crop large enough for a year’s supply of bread. He was pleased to be able to live in the desert by work of his own hands, without troubling anyone else. But when some people began to arrive there, he took pity on their exhaustion and grew vegetables on a small patch of earth so that the visitors might be somewhat restored when they arrived after their difficult journey. (50)

And while Antony certainly showed compassion for the occasional devotees who ventured far enough east to see him, his main concern, as always, was moving ever further into self-denial and spiritual purity.

The great hermit’s presence in the desert encouraged Satan and his minions to renew their assaults on him. Through prayers and physical struggles, Antony vied with the forces of darkness. One period of his struggles with demons culminated when a half human-half donkey creature began to unweave one of the baskets that Antony had made, but Antony’s remonstrations caused it to gallop off in fear.

The Monk’s Graceful Old Age

Not all of Antony’s victories were won directly against the minions of Satan. Once, when Antony himself made a trip to visit some fellow monks, he and his travelling party ventured forth during a dire heat wave and ran out of water. Fortunately, in a Moses-style miracle in the desert, Antony caused water to spring forth from the parched ground. It was during this same journey that Antony also saw his sister, seemingly for the first time since they’d parted company nearly forty years prior. Antony’s sister seemed to be of like mind – she had maintained her virginity and had herself become a leader of female devotees. Antony didn’t linger too long with his sister and fellow monks, however, before returning to the Inner Mountain in the rugged country near the Red Sea.

Installed once more in his isolated desert home, Antony began receiving more visitors – it seems word had gone out of the famous hermit’s new quarters. Antony offered visitors counsel heavily sewn with passages from New Testament scriptures – especially ones that emphasized self discipline and personal responsibility. One visitor from Palestine was haunted by an especially powerful demon, which Antony helped exorcise. Another person – a girl from the coastal region of modern day Libya, had an awful disease involving a great deal of mucus, and upon Antony’s learning that she had arrived at the Inner Mountain, the poor young woman was immediately cured. Additionally, Antony saved a man’s life by first having a vision of him dying of thirst in the nearby desert, and second, sending monks to bring him water.

Antony, as he grew older, became associated with other miracles. He was able to see the soul of another monk moving onwards toward heaven. He prayed for a virgin who was purportedly ailing in faraway Anatolia, and it was later discovered that the virgin had recovered the very day of Antony’s prayer. Antony was given the gift of foresight, and knew who was coming to see him prior to their arrival. On a boat ride, he knew a man possessed by a demon lay hidden in the hull because Antony could smell him, and Antony exorcised the man’s demon. Antony also had a great many visions. He beheld his own soul’s impending journey to the afterlife, and the devils who would unsuccessfully attempt to impede its progress. He saw a vision of a giant man whose head reached up to the clouds – he later learned that this was the devil, who snagged upward bound sinners and cast them down to hell, but was incensed that he could not grab the blessed ascending righteously to heaven.

On a personal level, as Antony advanced into old age, Antony was mild and graceful, with an inclination toward cheerfulness rather than gravity. But he wasn’t all that mild. Saint Antony, Athanasius tells us, had very strong sectarian sensibilities, and had no patience for Christians whose faith was different than his own, like Arians or Manichaeans. Saint Antony, Athanasius says, hated Arians. He told his followers not to even approach Arians. When Saint Antony met them, he condemned them as sacrilegious, and more venomous than snakes. Athanasius writes that Saint Antony even came to Alexandria – this may have actually happened in 337 or 338 – and gave a public address fiercely denouncing Arianism and promoting Nicene Christianity.

Athanasius writes that after Saint Antony gave his public fusillade against Arianism, the entire citizenry of Alexandria “rejoiced that this dangerous heresy [of Arianism], hostile to Christ, was being anathemized by a pillar of the church” (70). It’s a colorful scene, but it likely represents Athanasius’ own desire for religious conformity far more than the churning diversity of the religious masses of Egypt in the 330s. [music]

Antony Confronts Pagans and Condemns Arianism

Following Saint Antony’s journey to Alexandria to say his piece on the subject of Arianism, the old monk headed back down to his hermitage in the Inner Mountain near the Red Sea. On the way there, he exorcised a demon from a girl. By this time, Athanasius writes, Antony was known, among many other things, for his wisdom. The monk’s wisdom was perhaps an unexpected quality, as he’d spent so much of his life in isolation, reading next to nothing. Athanasius offers a story of Antony stunning a pair of pagan philosophers with his acumen, and then how Antony insisted that a person with a sound mind didn’t need to read anything at all.

After assuring us that Antony was decorous and tasteful in his conversational capabilities, Athanasius writes a long scene in which Antony, in the style of a Platonic dialogue, asks a series of pithy questions to some pagan skeptics. The pagans, in this scene, have told Antony that Christians revere the cross like idol worshippers. But, taking the argumentative offensive, Antony cited numerous examples of the ridiculousness of Greco-Roman and Egyptian polytheism – gods raping, dying, eating one another and fornicating. He followed this argumentative onslaught by telling the pagan skeptics that interior faith was stronger than deductions and inductions reached through worldly experience and debate. Antony’s conversation with the pagan skeptics, which begins in Athanasius’ book as a Socratic dialogue scene in the wake of Antony’s journey to Alexandria, soon expands into a long and furious harangue against all non-Nicene Christian ideology, in which the pagan listeners aren’t allowed a single word.

In his diatribe, Antony said that Jesus crushed pagan temples, that all of the sophism and philosophy of Greek pagans was useless against the growing popularity of Christianity, that pagans all worshipped demons, that nothing shined brighter than martyrdom and virginity in Christianity, and that pagan syllogisms were nothing next to Christian faith. Antony’s tirade came to its climax when he touched both of the philosophers’ foreheads, causing them to suddenly apprehend the Christian faith, and the two men stumbled off in a mixture of gratitude and wonder.

As the elderly Antony’s faith continued to grow, it reached the ears of the Constantinian dynasty – Constantine himself, and his sons Constans and Constantius. These men sent word to Antony that they would enjoy meeting him if he’d be willing, but Antony was unimpressed. His followers convinced him to at least write the emperors a respectful letter in return, and Antony did so, urging Rome’s rulers to love Christ and treat the poor with respect. Following this letter, Antony began having increasing visions of things to come. One of these visions was a terrifying one – Antony saw Nicene Christianity under threat from humanity, and a vision of Christ ringed by kicking donkeys. It was a vision, Antony said, of a coming uprising of Arians in Alexandria – good Nicene churches would be vandalized and burglarized and their attendees would be forced to undertake impious rites and rituals – women would be raped and the city would fall into chaos as Arianism subsumed the previous Nicene order of the city.

Saint Antony’s dire visions in this part of the biography reflect Athanasius’ frustrations with the continued popularity of Arian ideas in the theological seedbed of Egypt. Although the Council of Nicaea in 325 seemed to herald an end to the movement, Arianism continued to thrive throughout the fourth century, most famously under Constantine the Great’s son, the Emperor Constantius II, between 337-361. As someone who’d staked a firm position against Arianism, then, Athanasius was vulnerable to moments at which the sect gained power in Egypt, and his loathing of Arianism is nowhere clearer in the Life of Antony than when he has Antony telling his listeners, “Just watch that the Arian faith does not stain the purity of your faith. Their teachings do not derive from the apostles but from the demons and their father, the devil. That is why their mind, resembling that of beasts, is represented by the foolishness of asses” (82).

Old Antony grew older still, and continued to be plagued by a few too many visitors requesting audiences with him. But as much as he enjoyed a cloistered and remote existence, when the subject of Arianism came up, he was liable to engage energetically and harshly with it. Two powerful Roman appointees, both of them Arians, were punishing other Christians up in Alexandria and Antony wrote them a threatening letter. Though they wrote back with their own dire warning, the two men later had a terrifying accident. Out riding together – and yes, this is weird – one man’s horse went berserk and tore apart the legs of the other man, who died of his wounds a few days later. [music]

The Death of Saint Antony

After a long and eventful life, Saint Antony knew that his days were drawing close to their end. He was, according to Athanasius’ narrative, 105 years old. In one of his last speeches, Antony told his listeners to be steadfast Christians, work hard, and to be completely intolerant of those of different sects – especially the Arians. And, as Antony himself was drawing close to the end of his life, he also issued a statement on burial customs in Egypt. It’s important to remember, as I said earlier, that throughout this narrative Antony is emphatically a Coptic speaking Egyptian, and not an educated cosmopolitan Greek speaker. Egyptian people, Antony announced, needed to quit it with the mummification thing. Jesus himself had been sealed off in a walled tomb without much more than that, and thus, Antony argued, Christian folks could just go into the ground. Egyptian Christians took him at his word.

Now, no pious narrative of a saint or martyr’s life is complete without a closing peroration from the hero or heroine, and this is certainly the case with Athanasius’ Life of Antony, which ends with some final counsel from its central character. Antony’s deathbed speech in the biography is a synthesis of ideas we’ve heard before throughout the narrative – beware of demonic deceptions, and concentrate on the final reward of heaven and not the distractions of the material world. Antony gave instructions for his burial, and he asked that Athanasius (meaning the author Athanasius writing the biography) receive some of his clothing. Then, peacefully, old Antony passed away, seeing the angels that came to shepherd him upward as kindly friends. He was buried in a spot that was by agreement kept secret, and Athanasius tells us that the sheepskin and worn cloak that old Antony willed to him always brought fond memories of the old monk to mind.

Athanasius adds that Antony died in good health for his age, with all of his teeth, betraying no signs of the dissipation of civilized life. Antony’s gifts, and his subsequent notoriety, the biography concludes, were all from Christ – not from wealth or inherited privilege, nor from residence in some important spot in the world. [music]

Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Saint Jerome

So that was the story of Athanasius’ Life of Antony. While Athanasius wrote a great deal of theology born in the fires of the fourth century’s schisms, the Life of Antony was destined for popularity that endured long after Late Antiquity. Scholar Carolinne White writes that “the Life of Antony certainly appears to have become an immediate bestseller, and to have remained one throughout the Middle Ages.”⁸ The fact that literature about monks was popular and well-preserved makes sense. Monks were one of Europe’s driving forces in curating and copying manuscripts for a thousand years, and so naturally a work about a heroic proto-monk who lived off of bread and water and went toe to toe with Satan himself would have been a favorite in the scriptoriums of Late Antiquity and afterward. And because the Life of Antony was so popular, like so many popular works on heroes, the biography inspired a number of imitations. Let’s talk about those imitations.

First of all, Saint Antony is thought to have died in about 356, and Athanasius likely wrote his Life of Antony some time between 356 and 362. This Greek language biography was translated into Latin at some point in the 370s – perhaps 373-4. In certain circles – particularly ascetic-minded, literary Christian circles indisposed to Arianism, both the Latin and Greek versions of the Life of Antony were making the rounds, and in 376 or 377, the first spin-off life of a desert ascetic was written. This spin-off was the Life of Paul of Thebes, written by none other than Saint Jerome, an author and theologian about a generation younger than Athanasius.

When all was said and done, Jerome ended up writing about the lives of three ascetic Saints – these were the Life of Paul of Thebes in 376 or 7, the Life of Malchus in about 390, and the Life of Hilarion in 391. Jerome, like Athanasius before him and Augustine after him, shared a special preoccupation with sex and self-abnegation, and early exempla that dramatized the struggles, and enduring grace of isolated ascetics helped these theologians imagine their own conflicts between physical desire and spiritual aspiration. While we will cover a fifth Saint’s life in its entirety next time – Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Saint Martin, likely done a shortly before the year 397, I nonetheless want to sink down into the important decades of the 370s, 80s and 90s a little more and talk about Saint Jerome’s three Saint’s lives, as a sort of bridge between this episode and the next one.

In the spring of 373, when Athanasius died in Alexandria, Jerome was in his 20s. Already by this age, Jerome had lived an unusually full life. Having studied in Rome and continued his career up in the fourth-century imperial center of Trier, Jerome happened upon a Latin translation of Athanasius’ Life of Antony, and the book may have been formative to the rest of Jerome’s life.⁹ After reading the biography, having become enraptured with asceticism and monasticism, Jerome made the acquaintance of a wealthy citizen of Antioch named Evagrius. And Evagrius of Antioch was the very man who had translated Athanasius’ Life of Antony from Greek to Latin. Following the example of the celebrity monk Antony, then, with a rich patron and a nearby desert, Jerome, roughly between 373 and 375 decided to try his hand at being a desert hermit in modern day Syria.

Specifically, Jerome took up residence in a dry territory called Chalcis, about fifteen miles southeast of modern day Aleppo, passing the time learning Hebrew and pouring himself into a formidable course of study. This territory was sometimes called the “Syrian Thebaid,” a nickname which associated it with the similarly dry region of the Egyptian city of Thebes. What Jerome actually did in the desert around Aleppo is unclear – Christian hagiographic art often depicts a topless and emaciated scholar praying in a cave, but modern scholarship, reading Jerome’s letters scrupulously, has demonstrated that he was hardly living off the grid, and one modern biographer has proposed that Jerome merely stayed at one of his patron’s country estates for a couple of years, rather than sleeping on the dirt and fasting in a cave.¹⁰ While Jerome’s actual hermitage may have been fairly plush, though, when he returned to Rome from the east a few years later to gather a flock of aristocratic patrons, Jerome marketed himself as a real live Saint Antony.¹¹ The point of telling you all of that isn’t to disparage Saint Jerome so much as it is to demonstrate that by the 370s and 380s, Christian desert hermits were beginning to loom large even in the urban Christian imagination. A theologian who’d camped in the parched wilderness had something we might call street cred – or maybe “heat cred” to use the parlance of the desert.

Now, we’ll have a full episode on Saint Jerome coming up, but for now it will suffice to say the Life of Antony spoke deeply and profoundly to the young theologian in the mid-370s, to such an extent that Jerome imitated Antony, and then, in surviving letters to patrons, emphasized how he had modeled his life on that of the famous monk. But Jerome didn’t just imitate the monk Antony. He imitated the bishop Athanasius. Because in either 376 or 377, Jerome sat down to write his own ascetic Saint’s life – this one the life of a man called Paul of Thebes, the first in the trilogy of fairly short Saint’s lives that Jerome would write between about 376 and 391. For the sake of thoroughness, to give you a feel for these eremitic Saint’s lives, and also because they’re weird and fun little slices of Late Antiquity, let’s briefly consider the three hagiographies Jerome wrote, beginning with his Life of Paul of Thebes. [music]

Jerome’s Life of Paul of Thebes

Jerome’s Life of Paul of Thebes, again done in 376 or 377, deliberately sets out to position itself as a companion piece to the already popular Life of Antony put into circulation about twenty years prior. Jerome’s preface tells us that although many think Antony was the first desert-dwelling Christian ascetic, in reality, it was a certain Paul of Thebes who got the movement going. Jerome’s Life of Paul of Thebes begins by telling us that the titular character was a teenager in the early 250s beneath the Decian Persecution, offering lurid tales of Christian martyrs, one who was eaten alive by mosquitoes, another who was tied up, and gently aroused by an alluring prostitute before biting off his own tongue so that his erection would falter. Saint’s lives and martyr tales, as we will see throughout this podcast, frequently include surprisingly graphic sex and violence among their ostensible efforts to promote conformity to ascetic ideas – one of the great paradoxes of Christian martyr tales and hagiography more generally. Anyway, back to Jerome’s Life of Paul of Thebes.

Jerome tells us that it was the perilous climate of the Decian persecution that led young Paul of Thebes, then about 16, to flee into the Egyptian desert. The young man found a derelict coining mint hidden in the desert caves, and he set up residence there. In fact, Jerome tells us, Paul lived there for the next 97 years, subsisting off of just the fruits of a palm tree, and clothing himself from that same tree. Jerome then writes that Saint Antony had actually once visited Paul of Thebes when Antony was ninety. What had happened was that Antony, aged 90, had heard that Paul of Thebes, then 113, had out-hermited him, and so Antony went off to meet the even older desert ascetic. On an especially hot day, Antony began his journey, leaning heavily on a cane. Along the way, first a gruff but friendly centaur helped him with directions. Then, a satyr appeared. The creature looked awfully demonic at first glance, with its horns and cloven hooves, but the satyr told Paul that it and its brethren were just desert-dwelling creatures who also worshipped God, and Jerome pauses his narrative to insist that a real satyr was brought to Alexandria in the days of Constantine’s father.¹²

With these odd excursions aside, Jerome wraps up the tale 90-year-old Antony’s journey to go and meet 113-year-old Paul of Thebes. Antony followed a wolf into a dark cave, and there, finally, he met the ancient ascetic. Paul, unlike Antony, had really, properly been a hermit. The older recluse had no idea what had happened over the past century. In a genuinely charming scene, the two elderly, bearded men were gracious and polite with one another, and a raven appeared and brought them a loaf of bread.

Later, after the two men parted company, Antony told his followers back in his normal hermitage that he could no longer really call himself a monk – for he had met an even more monkish person than himself. And on a return visit to Paul of Thebes’ cave, Antony found that the older ascetic had passed away, his remains frozen in the position of a prayer which had evidently been his final act on earth.

Antony wanted to bury the older man, but he had no spade, and thought perhaps he’d just die there beside his kindred spirit. Fortunately, though, a pair of lions appeared from the very remote desert and scratched out a grave for Paul of Thebes – Antony wept and blessed them, and then was able to bury the body, taking with him Paul’s palm leaf tunic as a souvenir. Jerome ends the story with an exhortation – remember, Jerome writes, the minimalist life of happy, blessed Paul of Thebes, who only needed a palm tunic, and do not become too invested in the luxuries and niceties of the material world.

So that’s Saint Jerome’s Life of Paul of Thebes, a short, sometimes strange, and sometimes quite endearing tale of two old men of like minds. When Jerome wrote it in 376 or 377, still a relatively young man, it’s quite possible that he was aiming to capitalize on the already well-received Life of Antony by Athanasius by writing a prequel to it. This certainly isn’t to say the work lacks genuine conviction, but instead that among the numerous factors motivating the bright young theologian to tell the tale of Paul of Thebes, a desire to write within an emerging genre of Christian narration would have very likely been part of the picture.

Jerome’s Life of Paul of Thebes is an important text for us to bring in toward the close of this program for two reasons. First, according to tradition, Paul of Thebes – not Saint Antony – is generally considered the first Christian ascetic hermit. Second, Jerome’s spin-off biography, which included additional content on Antony, forms part of the greater legend of Saint Antony, the main subject of today’s show. The short book was not the end of Jerome’s work on ascetic hermits, though. More than a decade after writing his Life of Paul of Thebes, after becoming ordained in Antioch, studying in Constantinople, working as a papal secretary in Rome and beginning his most famous work – the Vulgate, or translation of the Bible into Latin, and finally, traveling all over the empire, Jerome’s imagination once again returned to desert caves. He settled in one in the year 388 – a cave near Bethlehem that was reported to be the birthplace of Jesus but which Jerome himself reported had been a ritual site for the Roman god Adonis.¹³ And there, in the Palestinian desert, in addition to many other works, Jerome undertook two more Saint’s lives – both of them about ascetic hermits. [music]

Jerome’s Life of Hilarion

If Paul of Thebes is the first major Christian hermit on record, and Saint Antony the second, then Hilarion the Great is the third, being born in the 290s, making him about a generation younger than his two predecessors. While Paul and Antony were the patron hermits of Egypt, Hilarion was the Christian ascetic most associated with the province Palestine. And Jerome, himself no stranger to desert asceticism a century after Hilarion’s birth, set out to write a fairly long account of Hilarion’s life, closely modeled on that of Athanasius’ Life of Antony. This biography, which I recommend reading in its entirety, but will summarize quite quickly here in the interests of time, is as follows.

Hilarion was born into a prosperous pagan family about five miles south of the city of Gaza. He was sent to Alexandria for his education, and early on took to the Christian religion. By the time Hilarion finished his schooling, Saint Antony was alive and quite famous, and Hilarion visited him. Antony made quite an impression on the young man, for at the age of fifteen, he ventured into the Palestinian interior – somewhere, Jerome tells us, about seven miles’ distance from the northwestern part of modern day Gaza. Armed only with a cloak and his steely piety, Hilarion made his way into a territory dominated by brigands, but his worst foe, as Antony’s had been, was Satan himself.

As Satan subjected young Hilarion to visions of feasts and sexy women, Hilarion fasted and worked himself nearly to the point of starvation. The devil sent frightening visions of carnivores to distract the young man from his prayers, and equally, visions of naked women. Hilarion resisted all of it. Breaking the young man’s life into different epochs, Jerome tells us precisely about what Hilarion ate – first, half a pint of lentils per day; then later, bread, salt and water; then wild herbs and raw vegetable roots; then bread and vegetables. Jerome writes that Hilarion added a bit of oil to his food in his middle age so as to help with his health problems.

The robbers in the area, Jerome writes, found that Hilarion had nothing to steal. And as news of the ascetic’s presence spread in central Palestine, various petitioners came to him to ask for miracle cures common in Christian narratives. Hilarion made an infertile woman able to conceive. He cured three aristocratic children from a deathly illness. He spat on a blind woman’s eyes and she could see again. Hilarion made a paralyzed man able to walk once more. He exorcised a demon from a burly young worker, exorcised multiple demons from another man, cured another paralyzed man, and caused a man’s chariot to win a high profile chariot race, which was seen as a triumph for Christianity in the city of Gaza. He helped a young woman recover from a demonic possession caused by Egyptian love spells. He exorcised a demon from a man in the Roman imperial cabinet. He mollified a large and aggressive camel.

As all of this took place, a monastic movement began in the province of Palestine in earnest, with Hilarion as its figurehead. He resisted the lionizing of those who admired him. At the time when the Emperor Julian the Apostate rose to power and began a pushback against the Christianization of the Roman Empire – this was from about 361-3 – Hilarion went further into isolation, first visiting Antony’s hermitage in Egypt and staying there for a year. Upon Julian’s death, Hilarion didn’t hurry back to the familiar monastery communities of Palestine, though – instead, after a bumpy journey, Hilarion installed himself in an abandoned farm in Sicily. He was old and renowned by this point, and his identity was discovered there before too long, and it became necessary for the old timer to move on again.

Hilarion’s next place of residence after Sicily was a town in the eastern Adriatic along the coast of modern day Croatia. Before Hilarion got a chance to try keeping a low profile there, though, his unique powers were required. A giant serpent was raging through the countryside – so large that it could eat cattle whole, and Hilarion had a giant pyre built and demanded the snake climb up the pyre. It did so, and it was burned alive. If this alone didn’t end Hilarion’s anonymity in the region, what happened next did. A powerful earthquake had rocked the Mediterranean, and sea swells threatened to devastate the eastern Adriatic. Hilarion, however, was summoned. The old man stood on the beach and made magical signs with his hands, and the waters were held at bay. This caused pilgrims to begin flocking to him, which was exactly what he didn’t want, and so Hilarion moved on to Cyprus.

On the way there, he used his special powers to ward off pirates. Soon on Cyprus, Hilarion’s cover was blown when he had to perform a mass exorcism. A migration to a more remote part of Cyprus allowed him the solitude that he craved, and he lived there for five years. After a few more healing miracles, old Hilarion passed away at the tender young age of eighty. [music]

Jerome’s Life of Malchus

So that concludes the third of our four biographies – now, let’s close Jerome’s Life of Hilarion and move on to his Life of Malchus. While Jerome wrote the biographies of an Egyptian desert hermit and a Palestinian desert hermit, Jerome also wrote the biography of a Syrian hermit – this man named Malchus, a man only attested in the work of Jerome. But just as Athanasius’ much more famous Life of Antony was in part a vehicle for the theologian to advance his pro-Nicene ideology against the Arians, Jerome’s Life of Malchus was also a polemical text. If the cardinal issue for Athanasius’ generation was promoting a Nicene Christology over an Arian view of Jesus, for Jerome and Augustine’s generations, it was the promotion of a severe and self-denying version of Christianity – one which saw virgins as superior to the sexually experienced, ascetics superior to all others, and in Augustine’s case, humanity as the wayward outcome of innate depravity, and a grotesque mistake in the Garden of Eden.

Jerome, some time in the 380s, became engaged in fierce debates with a rival theologian named Jovinian. While we have hardly anything on Jovinian beyond the viciously critical tracts Jerome wrote about his rival, it seems Jovinian promoted a gentler and more egalitarian version of Christianity than what emerged from the Latin church doctors, daring to teach that virgins were as holy as married women and widows, and that every redeemed person was on equal footing in heaven.¹⁴ For a man like Jerome, who had invested himself so much in celibacy and followed his monastic idols to live in remote regions of the Roman Empire, the milder version of Christianity Jovinian espoused was insufficiently exacting, and those who subjected themselves to unusual extremes of self-denial – like Paul of Thebes, Antony, Hilarion, and Jerome himself, deserved special rewards above those of the common rabble of practicing Christians.

To turn briefly to Jerome’s Life of Malchus, then, this final hagiography is less of a chronological account of a heroic Christian’s life and deeds than a vehicle for Jerome’s theological altercations. The biography opens with an announcement that Jerome is writing a history of Christianity up to the present time, as he was at that point, and that in this history he views Christianity’s first four centuries as a process of degeneration from pure and uncorrupted beginnings to decadence and rot. Most of the biography consists of a long monologue on the part of the titular character – Jerome tells us that he met this old Syrian ascetic. In Jerome’s account, Malchus fled his parents’ farming community because he didn’t want to marry. Malchus became a monk near present-day Aleppo – the same area where Jerome had spent a stint as a desert dweller. Later, Malchus returned home, however, intending to settle. In a scene reminiscent of Ancient Greek novels popular during Jerome’s lifetime, Malchus was kidnapped by brigands, and his captors tried to force him to marry and copulate with a younger female slave, who was already married. In a cave, the two captives tried to figure out who would commit suicide first. In the end, the two decided to pretend they had had sex, and pledge themselves to one another in chastity.

Then, after some time had passed, they decided to try to escape and get back to Syria. After some sensational adventures reminiscent of fourth century popular fiction – adventures involving crossing a swollen river, evading captors, nearly being caught but being saved by marauding lions, and a sizable journey on the backs of camels, Malchus and his chaste partner made it back to Syria and installed themselves comfortably there, the threats to their lives and chastity now overcome. The moral of the story, Jerome assures us, is that virgins should remain virgins, and that chastity can never be defeated. And that was Jerome’s Life of Malchus, or fourth and final Saint’s life for this episode, a text reminiscent, far more than the others, of sensational adventure stories in prose popular during the first few centuries CE. So, having heard so much in this program about ascetics in the desert – essentially four different versions of the same tale, let’s draw everything together and consider what we’ve learned in this program. [music]

Eremitic Saints’ Lives and the March Toward Clerical Celibacy

We have met four eremitic saints in this show – most of all Saint Antony, but also the protagonists of Jerome’s hagiographies, these being Paul of Thebes, Hilarion, and Malchus. The narratives that extol these gaunt desert hermits are careful syntheses of fact and fiction. We have little reason to doubt that prominent desert sages could and did pioneer the monastic movement in Egypt and other remote regions in the Roman Empire. The decades of Saint Antony’s life encompassed a period during which devout Christians had compelling reasons to flee several major Roman persecutions and homestead in solitude, or in communes with one another out in the desert. But while the general historical outlines of the eremitic Saint’s lives we’ve heard in this program surely have basis in fact, they are also biographies crafted by ambitious writers sometimes disposed to the sensational. Jerome’s biography of Hilarion usefully teaches us that in the fourth century a prominent ascetic had roots in present day Gaza City. But when Jerome assures us that Hilarion fought a giant snake in modern day Croatia, and then thwarted a tidal wave with magic, we can be fairly certain that we’re dealing with an imaginative young man inventing or embellishing the deeds of an eminent near-contemporary.

The real Antonys and Hilarions are lost to history, and what survives in the eremitic Saint’s lives are narratives steeped in the interests of the fourth century theologians who wrote them. As Athanasius and Jerome imagined Saint Antony and his shaggy, desert-dwelling peers, they imagined Christianity extracted from the messy realities of fourth century Roman civilization and put to the test in the remote wilderness. Their narratives are driven by a romantic sense of individualism – faraway cities might lose themselves to debaucheries and passing fads, and kings and emperors might vie with one another for power, but the individual’s struggle for triumph and self control and grace was the core of his experience on earth. Against the busy horse race of civilization, the real story, to key theologians of Athanasius and Jerome’s generations, was the individual’s conflict with himself and his negotiations with the spirit world.

In the eremitic Saint’s lives, each protagonist ekes out a living in the wilderness with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other, and their ultimate tasks are to listen to the former and spurn the latter, and everything else is kind of just in the way. The stark simplicity of this fourth century formula – a triangle with a believer and their alternative between Christ and Satan – was surely part of what made the typology of the desert hermit catch on at a popular level in the Christian imagination. But more specifically, the self-renunciation of the desert hermits was also part of what captured the imaginations of readers during late antiquity – especially clerical readers. Self-renunciation is par for the course in philosophical tracts of the ancient world. After Plato sopped up Pythagoreanism and Orphism’s doctrine of reincarnating souls around the beginning of the fourth century BCE, the rugged Socrates became the first of many philosophical idols who contemplated loftier matters in tattered garments rather than swigging wine in luxury. Later fans of austere self-regulation followed, like Diogenes the Cynic, Zeno the Stoic, and the critical mass of thinkers who followed them. The idea that brown bread and water are better than wine and feasts is ubiquitous in the ethical texts of the ancient world, but in Jewish and Christian history, we see a special emphasis on sexual self-regulation not quite so evident in the ethical philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome. This emphasis on sexual self-regulation began to emerge in the fourth century as a primary interest, and perhaps obsession, in some of the most important Christian writers in history – Athansius himself, and especially Jerome and Augustine. Let’s consider why.

A decent mass of evidence points toward the beginning of the fourth century as the time when clerical marriages began to come beneath the crosshairs of church legislation. The historian Socrates Scholasticus, born in about 380, wrote that during the Council of Nicaea in 325, “It seemed fit to the bishops to introduce a new law into the Church, that those who were in holy orders, I speak of bishops, presbyters, and deacons, should have no conjugal intercourse with the wives whom they had married while still laymen.”¹⁵ The historian Sozomen, born in about 400, corroborates the fact that the subject of clerical chastity was under discussion at Nicaea in 325 – Sozomen writes, “Some thought that a law ought to be passed enacting that bishops and presbyters, deacons and subdeacons, should hold no intercourse with the wife they had espoused before they entered the priesthood.”¹⁶ We don’t know, for certain, when and how chastity was legislated across the Catholic clergy. It’s generally assumed that there were married bishops and other church officials prior to the fourth century. The actual New Testament advice on the subject, which comes from Paul mostly, is lengthy, judicious and considerate. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 7 that being married is just fine, but that it’s easier to focus on spiritual matters if one is unmarried – in a sentence, “[H]e who marries his fiancée does well; and he who refrains from marriage will do better” (1 Cor 7:38).¹⁷ And 1 Timothy tells its reader that “Now a bishop must be above reproach, [the husband of one wife], temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, an apt teacher. . .He must manage his own household well, keeping his children submissive and respectful in every way” (1 Tim 3.1-4).¹⁸ It’s worth remembering that the Greek word epískopos, meaning “overseer,” didn’t describe the office of a bishop in the New Testament, but at any rate, these late New Testament epistles strongly suggest that many early church leaders were neither unmarried nor childless. To return to the First Council of Nicaea in 325, then, the move toward mandating clerical chastity was not one strictly stipulated in the Bible – this was a collective transition done on the basis of increasing custom within ante-Nicene Christianity.

The implementation of chastity in the clergy was a complex and piecemeal process, occurring initially at the high offices of bishops and gradually trickling downward. By the opening decade of the 400s, though, those who had advocated for clerical celibacy had become extremely vocal on whether or not their colleagues were allowed to have sex. Saint Jerome, whose desert hermits we read about today were certainly virginal, took issue with that aforementioned influential cleric named Jovinian – Jovinian evidently advocated that it was fine for bishops to be married. After furiously denouncing Jovinian’s viewpoint in a tract written in the year 393, a decade and a half later, in 406, Jerome accused another cleric of “throw[ing] the reins upon the neck of lust, and by his encouragement [he] doubles the natural heat of the flesh, which in youth is mostly at boiling point, or rather slakes it by intercourse with women; so that there is nothing to separate us from swine, nothing wherein we differ from the brute creation, or from horses.”¹⁹ And like Jerome, another Saint, a decade or two before, concurred. For John Chrysostom, archbishop of Constantinople, it wasn’t enough for a cleric to live in celibacy with his wife after ordination. Even male ascetics, like Jerome’s Malchus, would do wrong to live with female ascetics, because in Chrysostom’s opinion, women render such men “softer, more hot-headed, shameful, mindless, irascible, insolent, importunate, ignoble, crude, servile, niggardly, reckless, nonsensical, and, to sum it up, the women take all their corrupting feminine customs and stamp them into the souls of these men.”²⁰ Chrysostom’s is a pretty nasty assessment, so we should counterbalance it with something a little bit more positive to round out our view of the way that the Catholic Church slowly embraced legislating chastity in the clergy.

From the year 409 we have a different, and I suspect more relatable voice from Catholic history. Not long after Saint Chrysostom declared that women were enfeebling distractions to devout men, and not long after Saint Jerome proclaimed that all people who had sex were the same as pigs, a man history would know as Synesius of Cyrene was anxiously awaiting the beginning of his own position as bishop in the Palestinian city of Ptolemais. Synesius left behind a number of letters, and perhaps the most famous of them was written to his brother shortly before Synesius received the news that he had been elected to the position of bishop. Synesius, again in about 409, told his brother he was very nervous about assuming the position of bishop – he scarcely felt worthy of it, and still felt the same human weaknesses that he always had. Synesius wondered how he could be a good Christian with all of the cares of being a bishop on his shoulders. And Synesius, in sharp contradistinction from his contemporaries Jerome and John Chrysostom, wrote the following words:

[T]he priest should be a man above human weaknesses. He should be a stranger to every sort of diversion. . .All eyes are keeping watch on him to see that he justifies his [position]. [But] God himself, [and] the law of the land. . .have given me a wife. I, therefore, proclaim to all and call them to witness once for all that I will not be separated from her, nor shall I associate with her surreptitiously like an adulterer; for of these two acts, the one is impious, and the other is unlawful. I shall desire and pray to have many virtuous children. This is what I must inform the man upon whom depends my consecration. (5, 8)²¹

Synesius was not barred from a bishopric, which suggests that even though momentum had built throughout the fourth century toward clerical chastity, a churchman could still be married and have children during this fairly late period.

To turn things back, then, to Athanasius of Alexandria, and Saint Jerome, and the four eremitic saints who have been the stars of our show, Athanasius and Jerome were attracted to these figures for a number of reasons. First, the desert fathers lived pure, uncomplicated Christian lives, uncluttered by the complications of civilization. Their trials were severe, but they were also crystal clear – survive in the desolate and uninhabited countryside and resist the powers of Satan, and triumph. But beyond the raw simplicity of the figure of the desert hermit, there was another attraction to theologians like Athanasius, Jerome, and Augustine. Saint Antony was chaste and ascetic. And as such, to those who wrote about him, Saint Antony wasn’t just some schmuck coming to mass once a week and leaving some coins as his tithe. Antony looked a bit like they looked to themselves – celibate, mind in control of body, thus, just a little bit above the common Christian riffraff who spent their days eating, drinking, and from time to time making love. Even Saint Paul’s canonical assessment in 1 Corinthians, while saying nothing particularly negative about being married, still prized chastity over sex, and eremitic Saint’s lives promised the celibate theologians who read and wrote them that the paths they had taken, though difficult at times, made them a little better, and a little holier, than the greater Christian community.

Broadly within Christianity, the eremitic Saint’s lives we’ve read in this episode have long been revered as portraits of especially resolute believers whose pursuits of spirituality brought them to the edges of the civilized world and beyond. But Antony, and Paul of Thebes, and Hilarion and Malchus, the paradigmatic monks of early Christianity, were also the literary creations of a clergy in the midst of a transition to celibacy. Christianity had always had a strong dash of stoicism, with stoicism’s romantic belief in individual self-determination in an imperfect world. But in the eremitic Saint’s lives of the 300s, the Greek stoic sage became Christian, while the Greek world’s more freewheeling attitude toward sex came more and more fiercely under fire by the impassioned Christian theologians who had renounced it. [music]

Moving on to Severus’ Life of Saint Martin

We will never know exactly what led the first waves of colonists out into the Nitrian desert in Egypt, in increasing increments south of Alexandria. The principal timeframe associated with the earliest desert ascetics – 250-350, encompasses two major periods of Christian persecution, in addition to some dangerous epochs of unrest in the city of Alexandria, and so it’s probably as safe to think of the populations who spread southward into the desert as religious refugees as it is to think of them as brave pioneers of asceticism. And while half a dozen of them seem to have risen to the top of the clerical imagination as paragons of selfless virtue, more broadly, the real monastic movement into the desert was likely a process involving a search for safety, and collaboration and the careful distribution of scant resources, rather than nameless groupies flocking around one or two luminaries and bringing them bread and water at regular intervals. However it began, what happened in Egypt in the first half of the 300s marked the beginning of a major and semiautonomous movement within Christianity – the movement of monasticism. And in the next episode, we’ll learn a bit more about this movement, with Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Saint Martin. Another one of early Christianity’s most famous biographies, the Life of Saint Martin is an excellent companion piece to the Life of Saint Antony we spent the lion’s share of our time with today. Because the Life of Saint Martin, while also about a devout Christian with ascetic tendencies, depicts a far more three dimensional figure – a person with a complex past in the Roman military, who may well have been quite capable of isolated asceticism in the desert, but instead found that his capacities were best put to use in the office of a bishop, and a busy and industrious one at that. So join me next time for Sulpicius Severus’ Life of Saint Martin, a rich window into Gallic Roman history during the late fourth century, and a beautifully told story to boot. I’ve got a quiz on this program in your podcast app’s episode description if you want a quick review of what you’ve just heard. For you Patreon supporters, as usual I have a little something extra. All of this talk of scorched deserts, together with it being the hottest part of the year where I live, inspired me to reread Mary Austin’s Stories from the Country of Lost Borders again the other day. This collection, published in 1903, was something I dealt with in my own doctoral research, and it’s a famous work of nature writing – specifically, about the Mojave Desert and southeastern California. This is a dry and sparsely populated region of my home state – if I were going to become a monk I’d seriously consider it. Anyway, Mary Austin wrote some incredibly beautiful sketches about the minutiae of the California desert – the flora, fauna, topography, and the people who lived there at the turn of the century, and for you Patreon supporters, I’ve recorded a couple of these sketches. And this week, as happens occasionally, I just didn’t have time to write and record a comedy tune to wrap things up. Everything’s fine, but between my day job piling on some extra projects, summer travel and family visits and stuff, last weekend I didn’t have any time to spare, and I’d rather keep the main train of the show coming than leave it in the depot to tinker with its bells and whistles. So once again I appreciate you sticking with me for these slightly obscurer stretches of Late Antiquity, and in the next three episodes, we’re going to leave the central Mediterranean, and shift our center of gravity to Gaul. Thanks for listening to Literature and History, and I’ll see you next time.


References

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