Sayings in the Apophthegmata

Antony heads the alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum with thirty-eight sayings — the desert’s memory of its father in his own terse words. This file gathers the most characteristic: the cell and the fish out of water, the snares of the devil overcome by humility, the counsel on temptation and stability, and the famous reply about the obscure desert workman holier than Antony himself. It also treats the Apophthegmata as a source — orally transmitted, compiled a century or more after Antony, and cited by number — with the discipline that history requires.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Apophthegmata as a Source

The Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers) is a collection of short sayings and anecdotes of the fourth- and fifth-century Egyptian monks, gathered and written down — in the alphabetical recension, ordered by the name of the father to whom each saying is attached — over the later fourth and fifth centuries and reaching its surviving forms in Greek (and other languages) considerably after the events. Antony stands first in the alphabetical collection, with thirty-eight sayings (Antony 1–38; trans. Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 1984).

This source must be handled with the care its character demands (per the repository methodology §2.4). The sayings are compiled, orally transmitted tradition, written down well after Antony’s death in 356; a saying placed in his mouth in the Apophthegmata reflects the desert’s memory and the way the tradition understood him, and cannot be assumed to be a verbatim record. The sayings are cited here by their number in the alphabetical collection, and presented as what the Apophthegmata attributes to Antony — a true witness to the desert’s mind, weighed as compiled tradition rather than as stenography.

The Cell and the Fish Out of Water

The most famous of the Antonian sayings concerns the monk’s cell and the danger of wandering from it. Antony, the Apophthegmata records, said: “Just as fish die if they stay too long out of water, so the monks who loiter outside their cells or pass their time with men of the world lose the intensity of inner peace. So like a fish going towards the sea, we must hurry to reach our cell, for fear that if we delay outside we will lose our interior watchfulness” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Antony 10; trans. Ward). The saying is the charter text of monastic stability: the cell is the monk’s element, the place where hēsychia is kept, and to abandon it for the company of the world is to die as a fish dies on dry land. It states in an image what the Life states in narrative (see Solitude and Visitors).

The Snares and Humility

A second great saying, paralleling the vision in the Life (see Spiritual Warfare Teaching), gives the desert’s answer to despair before the omnipresence of temptation: “Abba Antony said, ‘I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said groaning, “What can get through from such snares?” Then I heard a voice saying to me, “Humility”’” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Antony 7; trans. Ward). The traps are everywhere and no strength evades them; only the humble pass through, because humility offers the enemy nothing to seize. The saying fixes humility as the master virtue of the desert.

Temptation, Stability, and the Discernment of Others

Several other sayings carry teaching the tradition especially associated with Antony:

On temptation as the condition of salvation: “Whoever has not experienced temptation cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven… Without temptations no one can be saved” (Apophthegmata, Antony 5; trans. Ward) — temptation is not a sign of abandonment but the very arena of growth.
On acedia and stability: a brother oppressed by listlessness in the desert is shown by an angel, in Antony’s vision, the remedy of alternating work and prayer — “Do this and you will be saved” — the cure for the noonday demon being not flight but the patient rhythm of labor and prayer in the cell (Apophthegmata, Antony 1; trans. Ward).
On the hiddenness of holiness: Antony, the Apophthegmata relates, was shown by a revelation that he had not yet reached the measure of a certain doctor in Alexandria, who gave his surplus to the poor and sang the Trisagion daily with the angels (Apophthegmata, Antony 24); and again that a humble tanner of that city surpassed him in holiness for reckoning all men saved and himself alone lost (a saying widely attached to Antony in the tradition). The point is the great hermit’s own humility: even Antony is shown his betters among the ordinary faithful of the city.

The Picture That Emerges

The Antony of the Apophthegmata is recognizably continuous with the Antony of the Life and the Letters, but the accent falls on practical, transmissible wisdom: keep your cell, expect temptation, do not despair, be humble, do not presume yourself the greatest. Where the Life gives the heroic combat and the Letters give the theology, the Sayings give the desert’s working maxims — the counsel a young monk could carry and live by. That this body of practical wisdom was attached above all to Antony is itself a measure of his standing: the tradition made him the first and the type of the desert father, and put into his mouth the sayings by which it wished to be remembered.

The Form of the Saying

The apophthegma is a distinctive literary form, and its shape carries its meaning. Most often a saying takes the pattern of a disciple’s request and a father’s answer: “A brother came to Abba Antony and said… and the old man said to him…” The young monk’s question is concrete and existential — how to be saved, what to do about temptation, how to make progress — and the father’s reply is brief, pointed, often paradoxical or imagistic, designed to be remembered and turned over in the heart rather than analyzed. The form embodies a whole pedagogy: wisdom is transmitted not as a system but as a “word” (rhēma) given by a father to a son in answer to a real need, and “give me a word, father” is the characteristic request of the desert. The Sayings are thus the deposit of an oral, relational, person-to-person transmission of spiritual wisdom — the literary residue of the practice of spiritual fatherhood itself (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, chs. 6–7; see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction). That Antony heads the collection means that the tradition placed him at the fountainhead of this whole practice — the first and archetypal giver of the saving “word.”

Work, Prayer, and the Cure of Acedia

The very first saying in the alphabetical collection deserves its prominence, for it states the desert’s basic remedy against its besetting temptation. Antony, oppressed in his cell by boredom and a storm of thoughts — the condition the desert called acedia, the “noonday demon” of listlessness and despair — cried out to God for help. He then saw, the saying recounts, a figure like himself who sat and worked, then rose and prayed, then sat and worked again; and a voice told him, “Do this and you will be saved.” At these words Antony was filled with joy and courage, “and by doing this, he found the salvation he was seeking” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Antony 1; trans. Ward). The remedy for acedia is thus not flight, not heroics, not novelty, but the patient alternation of manual labor and prayer — the simple, sustainable rhythm of the monastic day. The saying enshrines a deep desert wisdom: the demon of listlessness is defeated by stability and rhythm, by staying in the cell and keeping the ordinary discipline, not by dramatic remedies. It is the practical counterpart to the “fish out of water” — both insist that the monk’s salvation is found by remaining and keeping the measure, not by movement and excess (see Discernment and Moderation).

Antony Among the Fathers in the Sayings

The Apophthegmata also place Antony in relation to the other great fathers, and these scenes carry their own teaching. Antony appears in dialogue with Abba Pambo, with Macarius, and with younger monks who come to him for a word; he is shown sending disciples to learn from others and being himself instructed by revelation that humbler men surpassed him (Antony 24 and the related sayings of the city’s hidden saints). The cumulative effect is to present Antony not as an isolated peak but as the first and greatest of a company of fathers, the head of a living tradition of transmitted wisdom rather than a solitary genius. This is how the desert wished to remember its origin: not in one towering individual but in a fatherhood passed from elder to younger, of which Antony is the source and the type. The Sayings thereby preserve, in their very structure, the desert’s conviction that holiness is handed down — that one becomes a monk by sitting at the feet of a father and receiving his word, as the whole tradition received its first word from Antony.

The Saying on Obedience and the Will

Among the Antonian sayings the tradition prized is one that fixes the relation between obedience and the cutting-off of self-will. Antony is recorded as teaching that “obedience with abstinence gives men power over wild beasts” — that the monk who has surrendered his own will and disciplined his appetites is restored to the dominion over creation that pride and self-will forfeited (cf. Apophthegmata Patrum, Antony, in the sayings on obedience; trans. Ward). The teaching links the desert’s two great instruments — obedience to a father and ascetic self-denial — to the restoration of the human person to his proper order and authority, and it sets self-will, rather than any particular vice, at the root of the fall to be undone. This diagnosis — that the disease to be healed is the autonomous, self-willed ego, and the medicine is obedience and the renunciation of one’s own judgment — runs through the whole desert tradition and became central to monastic spirituality East and West. The cutting-off of self-will (the apotagē of one’s own will to a spiritual father) is, in this teaching, not a denial of the person but its healing, the path by which the soul deformed by self-assertion is restored to its true freedom in conformity to God.

References

Apophthegmata Patrum (Alphabetical Collection), Antony 1, 5, 7, 10, 24 (and the corpus Antony 1–38). Trans. Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1984. Cited by name and number.
Harmless, William. Desert Christians. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, chs. 6–7. (On the Apophthegmata as a source — its compilation, oral transmission, and forms — and on the Antonian sayings.)
Ward, Benedicta. Introduction to The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (on dating, transmission, and the alphabetical recension).