Egypt and the Call

The world into which Antony was born — a Christian household of comfortable landowning Copts in Middle Egypt around 251 — and the Gospel sentence that, heard at the Liturgy after his parents’ death, sent him to sell his land, provide for his sister, and take up the ascetic life. The Life of Antony presents this renunciation not as a sudden enthusiasm but as the obedient hearing of a word addressed personally to him: “if you would be perfect, sell what you have and give to the poor” (Matthew 19:21).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Coptic Egypt Around 251

Antony was born, according to the chronology that the Life makes possible, around the year 251, in the village the Greek sources call Coma (Coptic Qeman), in Middle Egypt near Heracleopolis Magna, in the region of the Fayum (the date is an inference: Athanasius says Antony was about thirty-five at the start of his twenty years in the fort and that he died at one hundred and five in 356 — Life of Antony 89; trans. Gregg, CWS). He was, the Life is careful to note, the child of well-born and reasonably wealthy parents, Christians, who raised him in the faith and from whom he inherited a substantial holding of farmland (Life of Antony 1; trans. Gregg). This detail matters for the whole shape of the story: Antony’s renunciation is the renunciation of a man with something real to renounce.

The Egypt of the mid-third century was a deeply Christianized land beneath a still-pagan official surface. The Church of Alexandria, with its catechetical school and its line of formidable teachers, was among the intellectual centers of Christendom; but the Christianity of the chora, the Egyptian countryside, was a village faith carried in the Coptic language and rooted in the Scriptures read at the Liturgy. Antony belonged to this rural, Coptic-speaking Christianity. The Life stresses that as a boy he would not learn letters in the Greek school manner and kept to his home and the church (Life of Antony 1; trans. Gregg) — a detail that will become contested when the Letters are weighed (see The Literacy Question), but which in Athanasius’s narrative establishes Antony as a man formed by hearing rather than by the schools. His was a Christianity of the assembled congregation and the Gospel proclaimed aloud, and it is precisely in that setting — the Scripture heard in church — that his vocation will be born.

The broader Egyptian Church of these years had also just passed through the Decian persecution (250–251) and would soon face that of Diocletian; martyrdom was a living memory and an imminent possibility, and the ascetic life would soon be understood, by Athanasius among others, as a kind of daily martyrdom that took the place of the bloody witness when persecution waned (a theme the Life develops at Life of Antony 46–47; trans. Gregg). For the wider setting of this early Egyptian and pre-Nicene Christianity, see The Pre-Schism Church.

The Death of His Parents and the First Hearing

The Life sets the decisive moment within months of his parents’ death, when Antony was, as Athanasius reckons, about eighteen or twenty years old and left with the care of the household and of a younger sister (Life of Antony 2; trans. Gregg). He was turning over in his mind, as he walked to church, how the apostles had left everything to follow the Lord and how the first believers in Acts had sold their possessions and laid the proceeds at the apostles’ feet (the Life names the example of Acts 4:35–37). It was in this disposition — already half-prepared, already meditating on the renunciation of the apostolic Church — that he entered the church for the Liturgy.

There he heard the Gospel being read, and the sentence fell on him, the Life says, as if it were spoken to him in particular: “If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me” (Matthew 19:21, quoted at Life of Antony 2; trans. Gregg). Athanasius’s wording is exact and theologically loaded: Antony heard the Lord’s word to the rich young ruler as commanded to himself, “as if the passage had been read on his account.” The hagiography here establishes a pattern that will run through the whole Life and through the desert tradition after it — the Scripture is not merely studied but obeyed, taken as a direct address, enacted at once and to the letter.

The Renunciation

Antony went out from the church and acted immediately. The Life recounts a staged divestment that itself reads as a meditation on the Gospel word. He first gave away the family land — Athanasius specifies some three hundred arourae (a substantial estate, the aroura being roughly two-thirds of an acre) of good and fertile ground — to the people of his village, “so that they should be no trouble to himself and his sister” (Life of Antony 2; trans. Gregg). He then sold the rest of the movable property and gave the proceeds to the poor, keeping back a little for his sister.

But on entering the church again he heard another Gospel sentence — “do not be anxious about tomorrow” (Matthew 6:34) — and, the Life says, gave away even that remainder, placing his sister in the care of “known and faithful virgins,” a household of consecrated women, to be raised for virginity (Life of Antony 3; trans. Gregg). The detail is historically significant in its own right: it attests the existence of organized communities of consecrated women in the Egyptian Church already in Antony’s youth, before the great male monastic foundations — the ascetic life for women was, if anything, the older institution. With his property dispersed, his sister provided for, and nothing of his own remaining, Antony “devoted himself from then on to the discipline” (askēsis) — and the monastic life, in the form the tradition would remember as its beginning, was under way.

What Athanasius is at pains to convey is that none of this was improvised. Antony’s act was the obedient hearing of the Gospel, performed in the place where the Gospel is proclaimed, and ratified by a second hearing that perfected the first. The renunciation is total, scriptural, and ecclesial — born not in the desert but in the village church. The desert came after.

The Theology of the Renunciation

It is worth dwelling on why Athanasius constructs the call exactly as he does, because the shape of the scene is itself a teaching. The Life could have presented Antony’s vocation as an inner movement, a private resolve, a dream or a vision; instead it grounds it wholly in the public reading of Scripture at the Liturgy. This is deliberate. For Athanasius the word of God is not the property of the learned but the common possession of the assembled Church, proclaimed aloud and available to be heard and obeyed by any believer, however unschooled. Antony’s renunciation thus models a Christianity in which the Gospel is sufficient: one needs no philosophy and no special illumination, only ears to hear the word read in church and the will to do it. This sola-Scriptura-of-the-ear, so to speak, is one of the Life’s persistent themes, and it is set in place at the very outset by the manner of the call (Brakke, Athanasius and Asceticism, 1995, on the scriptural shaping of Antony).

The choice of Matthew 19:21 is equally pointed. The sentence is the Lord’s word to the rich young ruler — a man who, in the Gospel, failed to obey it and “went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions” (Matthew 19:22). Antony is presented as the rich young man who succeeds: he hears the same word, and where the young ruler turned away, Antony sells all and follows. The Life thus casts Antony as the living refutation of the Gospel’s most famous failure, the proof that the hard saying can be kept. And because Antony was, like the young ruler, genuinely wealthy, the renunciation has real cost and real meaning; the Life’s careful note of the three hundred fertile arourae is precisely what gives the obedience its weight. The pattern — hear the word, count the cost, give up everything, follow — became the charter of the monastic vocation, and the scene in the village church became its founding icon.

The Egyptian Ascetic Background

Athanasius’s narrative also quietly preserves a historical truth that qualifies the legend of Antony as the absolute first monk. The Life takes for granted that, when Antony took up the ascetic life, there were already solitaries living near the villages of Egypt from whom he could learn (a point developed in The Stages of Withdrawal), and that there were already organized communities of consecrated virgins to whom he could entrust his sister (Life of Antony 3; trans. Gregg). Both details attest a pre-existing Egyptian asceticism — men and women who, without leaving the orbit of their villages, practiced celibacy, fasting, prayer, and renunciation as a recognized form of Christian life. Antony did not invent the ascetic life; he inherited it and transformed it, carrying it from the village edge into the deep desert and giving it, through Athanasius’s book, a pattern and a fame it had not had before. The modern scholarship is unanimous on this point: Antony is the father of monasticism as a movement and an ideal, not the first Christian ascetic (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 3; Rubenson, The Letters of St. Antony, 1995). The renunciation in the village church is the beginning of his own story, not the beginning of asceticism — but it is the beginning the tradition chose to remember, because in it the whole logic of the monastic life is already present in seed.

Asceticism as the New Martyrdom

The renunciation that began Antony’s life as an ascetic is best understood against the backdrop of the age’s understanding of Christian perfection, which was changing precisely in his lifetime. For the first three centuries the supreme Christian witness had been martyrdom — the literal giving of one’s life in the persecutions. With Constantine’s conversion and the end of the persecutions in the early fourth century, that supreme witness was, in the ordinary course, no longer available; and the ascetic life rose, in the Church’s imagination, to take its place. The monk became the new martyr, his renunciation of the world and his daily combat with the passions and the demons understood as an unbloody martyrdom, a witness sustained over a lifetime rather than consummated in a single death (a theme the Life makes explicit at Life of Antony 46–47; see Spiritual Warfare Teaching). Antony’s renunciation, then, stands at the hinge of this transition. He was born into the age of the martyrs — the Decian and Diocletianic persecutions frame his early life — and he died in the Christianized empire of Constantine’s sons; and his ascetic life came to be seen as the very type of the new, bloodless witness that succeeded the old. The Gospel sentence heard in the village church sent him not merely to poverty but to a lifelong martyrdom of the will, and it is as this new kind of witness that the tradition received him.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. Life of Antony (Vita Antonii), chs. 1–3, 46–47, 89 [Greek text PG 26:835–976; crit. ed. G. J. M. Bartelink, Vie d’Antoine, Sources Chrétiennes 400, Paris: Cerf, 1994]. Trans. Robert C. Gregg, Athanasius: The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1980. (Birth to landowning Christian parents at Coma; care of his sister; Matthew 19:21 heard at the Liturgy; the staged renunciation and Matthew 6:34; the chronology yielding c. 251.)
Life of Antony, trans. NPNF II/4 (H. Ellershaw), as a web-checkable public-domain anchor.
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. (On the village setting, the Coptic countryside, and the consecrated women’s communities; ch. 3 on the Life.)
Rubenson, Samuel. The Letters of St. Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995. (On Antony’s social class and Coptic background.)