'If you would be perfect, go and sell all that you have and give to the poor, and come and follow me': so God to St. Anthony in Athanasius's Life. And when Anthony had sold his possessions, save what would provide thereafter for his sister, God spoke to him again: 'Take no thought for the morrow'. The future saint sequesters himself in the cowshed at the bottom of his garden, departing only now and again to learn the teachings of other solitary devotees on the matter of perfection.
Anthony is illiterate, but is able to remember the Scripture he heard in church; and by the work of his hands, he's able to look after himself, making rope, mats, baskets and sandals from the palm-blades and rushes. Anthony prays. He prays unceasingly, the work of his hands not diverting his prayer for purity of heart. He prays to be delivered from the demons that plague him – not figurative demons, these, temptations of the flesh, but real ones – so real that he shuts himself in a tomb at the edge of the village to confront them in solitary combat.
When his admirers find him unconscious, carrying him to the village church, Anthony wakes and demands to be taken back to his tomb. He challenges them again, the demons: do your worst!, he tells them, praying all the while. And when morning comes, the light of Christ suffuses that of the lambent sunlight. – 'Where were you, Lord?', asks Anthony to the morning. 'Why did you not appear from the beginning to cease my pains?' And the answer comes: 'Anthony, I was here, but I was waiting to see your contest'. Anthony, I was here: there was light all the time in the darkness.
And now Anthony feels the need to leave behind his cowshed and village. He feels a need for the solitude of the desert. He is thirty-five years old when he crosses the Nile, and encloses himself in an abandoned fort in the desert, having bread brought to him twice a year. And he is fifty-five years old when his admirers break down the fort door to find him strong and alert, full of light and radiance.
There were other solitaries before Anthony, of course. There were prophets who sought to enclose themselves from the madness of the world, and warn others of that madness. But Anthony became the prototype of a new kind of existence, at least in the West. It is in Athanasius's life that we first find the words monk and monastery. And it is there we find Anthony's long discourse to his fellow monks – to those solitaries who joined in the desert, finding their own abandoned dwelling places in which to seek union with the Lord.
Because they did follow him, persecuted Christians fleeing into the desert, and remaining there even when the persecution stopped. And indeed there were others out there before him – did God not summon Anthony, age ninety, yet deeper into the desert to meet Paul of Thebes, who had fled there from Decius as a young man? There were other anchorites, as they came to be called – others who withdrew into the deserts, as there would be others in the centuries to come.
'If you would be perfect, come and follow me'; 'Take no heed of the morrow': when he dies at one-hundred-and-five, Anthony is in the deepest desert of all, out beyond anyone, beyond his admirers. To the deepest desert, that's where he went at ninety-nine, the white bearded solitary striding out, still strong, still vigorous of mind, to be more alone than ever with his God …
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