Anthony of the Desert

What drives a man to walk away from his wealthy estate and march off into the unforgiving dunes of the North African desert? I find it difficult to recognize such a bravura gesture as an act of faith in any conventional sense. Were that so, then Anthony would have continued to bow to an acceptably orthodox Church authority. But he walked away from that as well. Others seeking to find grace among the desert’s terrible purity had left their footprints in the sand before him, but their tracks went no farther than the outskirts of Alexandria.

What made Anthony different is that he went farther than any before him. Far to the south of Alexandria Anthony settled into the rough shelter that was to become his hermitage, there to undertake what we would now perhaps more readily recognize as a vision quest.

Anthony’s beliefs were an intensely personal form of Gnosticism – of a seeking for a direct experience of the Divine through privation-induced visions. It was these beliefs which cut him loose from the authority of the Church hierarchy, and which therefore presented the Church with a problem. Over the years the hermit’s fame spread, and his devotional asceticism captured the popular imagination of the time.

What to do about Anthony? For the Church to chastise the wayward hermit in such a climate of popularity was an unfavourable option. The solution was found after Anthony’s death by Athanasius, the influential bishop of Alexandria. The bishop wrote a presumed biography of Anthony, reinventing the hermit, not as the lettered scholar which Anthony truly was, but as a humble and illiterate monk who devotedly upheld the very principles of obedient orthodoxy which the real Anthony in his life abjured. Athanasius even appended a wholly fictitious ending in which the hermit presents the bishop with his cloak as his worthy successor.

For centuries the biography by Athanasius was accepted as literal fact; so much so that the very Gnostic Anthony, as we know, has even received sainthood. It was only after Anthony’s own letters came to light that the bishop’s subterfuge has been realised, and his own agenda has been revealed as a maneuver of the power politics of the Church of that time.

There are many depictions of Anthony from various periods of art history, from the soberly contemplative saint of Albrecht Dürer to the bizarre visions of Hieronymus Bosch. But generally these opt for a portrayal of the grizzle-bearded hermit in advanced years in the setting of his retreat, surrounded by a lurid phantasmagoria of grotesque monstrosities and tempted by equally phantom wanton females. But what compels me more than these is the Anthony who walked away, the young man (he was then in his early thirties) who turned his back on his considerable earthly wealth to pursue his own intensely personal vision of things.


Sources:
Samuel Rubenson: The Letters of Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint. A&C Black, 1995. Just how profoundly Gnostic Anthony actually was is revealed in Professor Rubenson's book, an extract of which can be read here. Anthony was not the only Gnostic to be 'reinvented' by the orthodox Church to drive its own agenda. Both Clement of Alexandria and Paul himself were subjected to the same process.

Gustave Flaubert: The Temptation of Saint Antony. Translated and with an introduction by Kitty Mrosovsky. Penguin Classics, 1983. Flaubert's daring experiment with the literary form, using Anthony's visions as inspiration, and written as a play not intended for actual performance.

More about the conflict of truth between Anthony and Athanasius can be read at: Anthony of the Desert: Life as Fiction.

Portrayals of Anthony and his visions by a variety of artists can be seen at: Temptations.