St. Anthony

St. Anthony was born around 251 to prosperous Christian parents in a village of Upper Egypt. Orphaned at about twenty, he heard the Gospel proclaimed at Mass—'If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor'—and took the words as addressed personally to him. He gave away his inheritance, placed his sister in the care of a community of virgins, and embraced a life of asceticism, at first near his village and then in ever deeper solitude. For some twenty years Anthony lived alone in an abandoned desert fort at Pispir, engaged in prayer, manual labor, and what his biographer describes as fierce spiritual combat with temptation—scenes that would fascinate Christian artists for centuries. Around 305 he emerged at the pleading of disciples who had gathered near his refuge, and he organized them into a loose community of hermits living under his guidance. For this he is honored as the father of Christian monasticism. Anthony left the desert only rarely: once during the persecution under Maximin, to encourage the imprisoned confessors of Alexandria, and again in his old age to support St. Athanasius in defending the divinity of Christ against Arianism. He spent his final decades on Mount Colzim near the Red Sea, receiving visitors who sought his counsel, and died in 356, reputedly at the age of 105. His influence spread through the Life of Antony written by St. Athanasius, one of the most widely read books of the early Church—St. Augustine records that hearing of Anthony helped precipitate his own conversion. The Monastery of St. Anthony still stands near the Red Sea at the site of his final retreat and remains a place of pilgrimage; a medieval tradition also venerates his relics at Saint-Antoine-l'Abbaye in France, where the Hospital Brothers of St. Anthony cared for sufferers of ergotism, the disease known as 'St. Anthony's fire.' His feast is celebrated on January 17, and he is a patron of monks, of those with skin diseases, and of basket-makers, recalling the labor of his own hands.