Anchoritism and Its Spread

“Through him the desert was made a city” — Athanasius’s famous formula marks Antony as the catalyst of the monastic movement. This file treats the kind of monasticism Antony patterned: the anchoritic (solitary or semi-solitary) life, in which monks lived alone or in loose clusters around a spiritual father, as it took root at Pispir and spread to the great desert settlements of Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis. It sets that pattern beside the contemporaneous cenobitic (fully communal) monasticism founded by Pachomius — the two great forms of the desert, distinct from the start.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

“The Desert Was Made a City”

The hinge of the Life‘s account of Antony’s public significance is a single sentence. After Antony emerged from the fort and began to teach, the Life says, monks multiplied and “cells arose in the mountains, and the desert was made a city by monks, who left their own and registered themselves for the citizenship in the heavens” (Life of Antony 14; trans. Gregg, CWS). The image is deliberately paradoxical: the desert, the place of emptiness and the demonic, becomes a populous city of ascetics — an inversion in which the wilderness of death is colonized by the life of heaven. Athanasius credits Antony as the catalyst: not the first ascetic (the Life itself shows him learning from earlier solitaries — see The Stages of Withdrawal), but the one whose example and teaching drew the scattered ascetic impulse of Egypt into a movement and gave it a father.

The Anchoritic Pattern

What Antony patterned was specifically the anchoritic life (from anachōreō, “to withdraw”): the monk lives alone, or in a loose cluster of separate cells, devoting himself to prayer, manual labor, and ascetic struggle, under the informal guidance of a more experienced father but without a common rule, common dormitory, or common table. Antony at Pispir and the inner mountain is the type: a solitary whose disciples settle nearby in their own cells, coming to him for a word but living their own struggle. This is the eremitic ideal in its pure form.

From Antony’s example this anchoritic and semi-anchoritic monasticism spread across the Egyptian deserts. In the deserts west of the Nile delta arose the great settlements of Nitria (founded by Amoun in Antony’s lifetime, the Life itself recording Antony’s friendship with Amoun), Kellia (“the Cells”), and Scetis (the desert of Macarius the Great), where monks lived in dispersed cells, gathering only for the weekly synaxis and meal — a “semi-anchoritic” middle form between pure solitude and full community (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, chs. 4–9). These settlements, peopled by figures like Amoun, Macarius the Great, and the fathers of the Apophthegmata, were the direct heirs of the Antonian impulse; for the desert of Scetis and its fathers, see St. Macarius the Great. The whole world of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers is the world that grew from the city Antony made in the desert.

The Pachomian Alternative

At almost exactly the same time, and in the same Egypt, a quite different monasticism was being founded by Pachomius (c. 292–348). Where Antony’s was anchoritic, Pachomius’s was cenobitic (from koinos bios, “the common life”): monks lived together in large, organized communities (koinonia) within walled enclosures, under a written rule, with common prayer, common work assigned by superiors, common meals, and a structured hierarchy of obedience. Pachomius founded the first such community at Tabennesi in the Thebaid around 320, and by his death a federation of monasteries housing thousands followed his Rule (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, ch. 5).

The two forms — anchoritic and cenobitic — were thus contemporaneous and distinct from the beginning, the two great patterns of Christian monasticism that the rest of the tradition would inherit, combine, and balance. They embody different emphases: the anchoritic prizes solitude, the direct and unmediated struggle of the soul before God, and the freedom of the individual ascetic; the cenobitic prizes community, obedience, the discipline of the common rule, and the safety of mutual support and accountability. Each guards against the other’s danger: the cenobium against the anchorite’s pride and delusion, the hermitage against the community’s mediocrity and routine. The later tradition — Basil’s preference for community in the East, Benedict’s rule in the West, the Athonite balance of lavra and idiorrhythmic and coenobitic forms — works out the relation between these two poles that fourth-century Egypt set in place.

Antony stands at the head of the anchoritic line, as Pachomius at the head of the cenobitic. The tradition’s title for Antony — “father of monasticism” — is therefore best understood with precision: he is the father and pattern of the eremitic life and the catalyst of the whole movement, not the founder of the communal institution, which is Pachomius’s work. The desert he made a city was a city of solitaries.

The Semi-Anchoritic Middle Way

Between the pure solitude of Antony’s mountain and the full community of Pachomius’s enclosure stood a third and, in practice, dominant form: the semi-anchoritic life of the great desert settlements of Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis. Here monks lived in separate, dispersed cells — sometimes far enough apart that a brother could not hear his neighbor — pursuing the solitary’s struggle on their own through the week, but gathering on Saturday and Sunday for the common synaxis (the liturgical assembly) and a shared meal, and grouping loosely around senior fathers for guidance (Harmless, Desert Christians, 2004, chs. 8–9). This pattern combined the solitude the anchoritic ideal prized with a minimal common life that guarded against the dangers of total isolation; it proved enormously fruitful, and it was in these semi-anchoritic settlements — above all Scetis, the desert of Macarius the Great (see St. Macarius the Great) — that most of the fathers and sayings of the Apophthegmata belong. The world of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers is largely the world of this middle way. Antony’s pure anchoritism was thus the inspiration and the extreme pole of a movement most of whose members lived a more moderate, semi-communal form — the solitary ideal tempered by the weekly gathering and the loose fellowship of the cells.

The Two Forms in the Later Tradition

The polarity that fourth-century Egypt established — solitary against communal, with the semi-anchoritic between — structured the whole later history of monasticism. In the East, Basil the Great (c. 330–379), after touring the Egyptian and Syrian ascetics, came down firmly for the cenobitic common life, judging that the solitary has no one to serve, no one to correct him, and no arena for the commandment of love, and that community is the safer and more evangelical school; his ascetic writings shaped Eastern coenobitic monasticism decisively (see Influence on the Tradition). Yet the anchoritic and semi-anchoritic ideals never died: they were carried into the Palestinian and Sinaite traditions, renewed in the hesychast life of Mount Athos (where the lavra, the skete, and the solitary kellion preserve the whole spectrum of forms to this day), and transmitted through Athos to the Russian startsy and the modern Athonite fathers. In the West, Benedict built a cenobitic rule but honored the anchoritic life as the higher calling for the proven monk (Rule 1). The lasting genius of the tradition was to hold the two forms together rather than choose between them — the community as the school, the solitude as the summit — and that balance was set in place by the simultaneous fourth-century foundations of Antony the anchorite and Pachomius the cenobiarch. The whole later architecture of the monastic life is, in a sense, a series of variations on the relation the Egyptian desert first established.

What Antony Actually Founded

It is worth stating with care what the historical Antony did and did not institute, because the loose title “father of monasticism” can mislead. Antony founded no monastery in the institutional sense — no rule, no enclosure, no community with a common life and a superior. What he founded was an example and a spiritual fatherhood: he showed, in his own person, that the radical anchoritic life was possible and fruitful, and he drew disciples who settled near him and looked to him for guidance. The “city” the desert became was a city of imitators and disciples, not a corporation. The Life itself preserves this: Antony’s disciples live in their own cells, come to him for a word, and are bound to him by reverence and imitation rather than by a rule (Life of Antony 15, 54; trans. Gregg). This is the anchoritic pattern in its purity — fatherhood and example rather than institution. The institutionalization of monasticism — the rule, the enclosure, the organized community — was the work of others: Pachomius for the cenobium, Basil for the Eastern coenobitic rule, Benedict for the West. Antony’s foundational role is of a different and prior kind: he is the one who made the life itself credible and compelling, the pattern from which the institutions then took their inspiration. The tradition’s instinct to call him father of monks is right, but his fatherhood is that of an exemplar and a spiritual parent, not of a legislator or founder of an order.

References

Athanasius of Alexandria. Life of Antony, ch. 14 (“the desert was made a city”), ch. 60 (Antony and Amoun of Nitria) [PG 26:835–976; SC 400]. Trans. Robert C. Gregg, CWS. New York: Paulist Press, 1980.
Harmless, William. Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, chs. 4–9. (On Nitria, Kellia, Scetis; on Pachomius and cenobitic monasticism; on the anchoritic/cenobitic distinction.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The classic study, taking its title from the Life’s phrase; on the spread of Egyptian monasticism.)
The Life of Pachomius (Bohairic Life); and Pachomian Koinonia, trans. Armand Veilleux. Kalamazoo: Cistercian, 1980–82. (On the cenobitic foundation.)