RENE FULOP-MILLER
THE SAINTS WHO SHAKEN THE WORLD
Translation by Oscar Mendes
eighth edition
1976
JOSÉ OLYMPIO BOOKSTORE EDITOR
TITLE OF THE NORTH AMERICAN EDITION:
THE SAINTS THAT MOVED THE WORLD
Translated by Alexander Gode and Erika Filóp-Miller
Copyright by René Filóp Miller
Rights for the Portuguese language reserved to
LIVRARIA JOSE OLYMPIO EDITOR SA
Rio de janeiro Brazil
FOR FIVE HUNDRED YEARS, the "temptations of Santo Antão" captivated the imagination of artists and writers. The impression they left can be traced from the masters of the oldest Byzantine school to Cézanne and Félicien Rops, from the most remote chroniclers to Flaubert and Anatole France. Athanasius, the famous bishop of Alexandria, personally knew Antony, the man whose life and character would manifest such infallible powers of fascination. In his Vita St. Antonii, the bishop left a firsthand description of Antony's personality and strange life, which spanned over a hundred years.
In addition to being the first narrative of the life of any saint, this Vita is also the first biography not limited to a simple copying of outer events, but looking into the inner conflicts of its subject. It can be called the first psychological biography in world literature. The author was a pious fourth-century bishop, with no religious doubt of any kind to trouble him. Legends and miracles, holy visions and apparitions of the devil were facts as real to him as the names of people and places, or dates. Its hero was the first hermit, whose environment and way of life are strange and sometimes incomprehensible to modern readers. However, the basic conflict in this man's life was an eternally human conflict, one that cannot be avoided by anyone striving to obey the call of his highest nature:the conflict between carnal temptation and spiritual restraint.
Antão was born around the year 251 , in the small village of Coma, today called Quemã-el-Arune, in the province of Beni Suef, in Upper Egypt. He was the son of wealthy captas, whose planting lands, about 130 acres, were located on the banks of the Nile, in the province of Faium, in Upper Egypt. Then, as today, Egypt was a land without rain. Overhead the sky was eternally blue and serene. There was only one source of water, the Nile. The prosperity or penury of the farmers depended on the mysterious whims of the "great river."
In winter, spring, and summer, the Nile was a dreary, dirty expanse of water, gliding lazily along its wet, sandy shores. Only the most persistent effort and the immense expenditure of hard work could extract from it that minimum amount of water that man, animal and soil require.
Day after day, young Antao, with a team of buffaloes, was occupied with the task of keeping his father's water wheel in motion. He was a typical young fellah, strongly built and tanned skin, high cheekbones, large black eyes and thick lashes, and remarkable height, summation and repetition of his forebears. There he was, perched on a strange kind of seat, watching the endless procession, which descended into the water and rose again to the bank, with empty and full clay pots, connected to the protruding spokes of a vertical wheel, mounted on the teeth of a horizontal one. , which the buffaloes pushed, slowly and constantly, turning, turning, turning.
Until autumn came, this toil could not be stopped. Then, quite suddenly, the lazy, placid river swelled and began to flow with great rapidity. Its gray color turned to red and green. It continued to climb; it flooded its banks; it transformed the region, even to the hills at the edge of the desert, into a vast lake.
Finally the waters ebbed. And the time of year came when Antao had to accompany his father, with his hands overflowing with seeds, sowing the grain in the fertile mud left by the waters of the river. Before long, the banks of the Nile changed into a bright field of undulating wheat. One or two harvests, often, thanks to the abundant richness of the river, as many as six harvests, followed each other in quick succession. It was the time of plenty and plenty, when Antao's father could add new sums to his savings from previous years.
From his earliest childhood, he had known Antao the Nile as the same great central experience that had been for his ancestors. He taught him that the labors of all men are nothing in themselves, that what man needs, his daily bread and his earthly goods, is given to him as a grace. For Antao and his family the giver of this grace was the Nile, but on the Nile there was God who ruled and expressed His will.
At that time, no one knew where the "great river" came from and where its source was located. There was no explanation for its mysterious floods and droughts, except that God Himself would run over the tumultuous waters, year after year, to bless the fields of men.
On the Nile, God was manifested in His omnipotence, the omnipotence of Nature; and in the little church in the village of Coma, the priest proclaimed His divine commandments. Antony's father lived his life in strict adherence to those commandments and conveyed to his son the spirit of his own innate and unconditional piety. The simplicity and naturalness of their faith, characteristic of all fellahs, were deeply rooted in the peculiar nature of Coptic Christianity.
This religion was not really a young or new religion.
All of its characteristic features had been foreshadowed in the faith of the ancient Egyptians. The god Amon of Upper Egypt had once been a god in three persons, and Seth, the slayer of Osiris, had been an early incarnation of the Christian devil. The introduction of Christianity here had once been a smooth transition, without fiction or conflict, and in Coptic Christians, like Antony's father, pious tradition thousands of years old lived dormant with uninterrupted vigor.
For Antony the doctrine of Christ was a law that could not be disputed. His father had always been careful to keep away from him any outside influence that might disturb his purity of faith. While other boys played, played, and enjoyed themselves, Antao stayed at home and spent his free hours in pious prayer.
For the spirit of the old farmer, the worst threat to his son's salvation was worldly knowledge as cultivated in Greek schools. The Greeks were foreign intruders in Egypt, and owners or rulers of large estates, where they exploited the native fellah. Racial hatred, heightened by social resentment, had produced in Antony's father an acute distrust of everything the Greeks taught in their schools. A mere knowledge of the letters of their alphabet was, in their way of thinking, an initial false step, out of the way of true faith. Once people fell under the spell of those magical symbols, they were doomed to fall prey to the skepticism of Greek thought, as well as exploitation by the Greek landlords. So young Antão was not sent to school and grew up illiterate.His spiritual and mental baggage had been limited to what the priest at the local church had to offer in his captivating Bible readings and the godly lessons he based on them.
As the boy grew and approached manhood, the beautiful fellail girls in the neighborhood began to attract his attention. These girls often passed by, walking through the fields, haughty in the grace of their springy step, deftly swinging the clay pots on their heads, the loose-fitting bodices naturally revealing the firm contours of their bronze breasts. Antao stopped and stared at them, as if fascinated by their beauty. The other boys could accompany the girls, they could talk to them and enjoy their company, but Antao, the obedient son, following the strict orders of his father, returned home and prayed until he could free his thoughts from the seductive maidens and concentrate. if again only in God.
Antao was almost twenty years old when, in quick succession, his father and mother died. He was alone now, with the exception of one younger sister, who was even younger. He had inherited fields, pastures, and herds and did his best to manage his father's wealth that had now become his. Economically and honestly he added drachma to drachma, eager to increase the sums his father had left him.
He spent his days in acts of piety and righteousness, just as before the death of his father, for he was a good son and lived according to the lessons of his early upbringing. And when this young man, deprived of his paternal guidance, heard in church the lessons taken from the Bible, he took them as the orders of a father whose authority was even greater than that of the other who had died. As an obedient child, he worked harder and harder, harder and harder, to faithfully live in accordance with his Heavenly Father's commandments. In the years of his childhood, he had strove to please his earthly father, but now he saw more and more clearly that it was his duty to make himself worthy of the grace of God, striving to attain the highest degree of inner perfection.
One Sunday morning, about six months after his parents' death, Antao was sitting in the family pew in the village church. There he was, handsome and slender young, obedient son, listening intently to his Father's orders. His eyes were fastened on the priest's lips. The ears, so attentive that not a word could escape them. The priest read the Gospel, according to St. Matthew: "And behold, someone approached Him and said to Him, 'Master, what good thing shall I do to have eternal life?' And Jesus answered him, "If you would enter into Life, keep the commandments." The young man said to him, "'All these I have kept; What do I still lack?" Jesus said to him, "If you want to be perfect, go and sell all that you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come follow Me.'' And Antao got up,he left the church, went and sold his land and herds, and gave the money to the poor in the village. For he felt that the words which Christ had spoken to the rich boy of Galilee applied to him, the rich youth of Coma.
We do not know what happened to the rich young man from Galilee and whether he carried out the words the Lord had spoken to him 250 years before the time of Antony. But this we know: Antony, the rich youth of Coma, who lived in the third century after Christ, fulfilled the exhortation addressed so long before to the youth of Galilee. He decided to live his life according to the precept of Christ and it is for us. the oldest and best known example of what happens to a man who follows the Gospel's request in its full consequences.
Overnight the rich young man had become poor. His daily bread was no longer guaranteed. I was now facing all the hardships of poverty.
The following Sunday, it was a mortified young man, dressed in the rags of poverty, who sat in the village church in Coma and listened to the priest read the following passage from the Sermon on the Mount: tomorrow itself will bring its care; for the day its own evils suffice.''
And once more Antony felt the words being addressed to him.
He took his sister to a maidens' home and made his way to perfect solitude, where there's no need to think about the things of tomorrow.
Antony's decision meant a complete break with his old life. To carry it out, he needed the advice of a man of wisdom and experience. The village priest could not help him. He was a godly man and lived his life according to the letter of the law, but at the same time, as was the custom in the Capta Church, he owned land and other earthly goods and had a wife and children. His voice recited the Lord's command, but he did not know how the counsel contained therein could be translated into practical acts. There were, however, at that time a number of pious Christians, who lived in Egypt, true "upright men", forced to flee the persecutions of the Roman Emperor Decius, and who now lived for their faith in quiet seclusion.One of these men had a small shack not far from the limits of Coma, and it was him that Antao sought out, to guide him through the dilemma in which he found himself.

* The biblical quotations in this edition (7a) are transcribed from the Holy Bible, according to the Hebrew and Greek originals, translated into Portuguese by the United Biblical Societies, Rio de Janeiro, 1947.-N. of E.
He found an old man, swathed in a camel-hair cloak, who sheltered him in place of the shirt Coptic farmers usually wore. He had only a hard mat, on which he slept, and he earned a miserable wage, weaving mats and baskets. From him Antony learned how to resist worldly temptations, with the strength of prayer and work, how to subdue sensual appetites, by fasting and mortification; he learned how important it was that his food should give him only mere sustenance and that it should consist of nothing more than bread and water and a few dates.
Before leaving the old hermit, he learned Antao to weave mats and baskets from palm leaves.
All these things, however, only concerned, as it were, the externalities of asceticism. The inward path to the target was pointed out to Antony by nature, the characteristic nature of Egypt. When he was still a child, he had already been told of the omnipotence of God, and now, at the beginning of his ascetic novitiate, he was showing him the path that would lead him away from the world of men to the world of absolute solitude.
In its sheer grandeur, the landscape of Egypt lay before Antony like an admirable reproduction of the sudden break he was contemplating. Along the banks of the Nile stretched the fertile province of Faium, deep and green extension of pastures and fields, symbol of life and abundance. Then, suddenly, not far from the limits of the village of Coma, all that luxury gave way to an uninhabitable aridity, where nature itself seemed to have become ascetic. Was this not precisely the kind of abrupt change that the Gospel command required?
Wrapped in a cloak of camel hair, stripped of even the smallest bundle of earthly goods, Antony entered the desert. He found a bramble bush and chose it for his future shelter, though it seemed more suited to the escape of wandering desert animals than the abode of a human being. Then he thought at last that far from all worldly temptations, freed from all cares concerning the things of the world, he could begin his life of undisturbed devotion. But this abrupt shift from abundance and life to barrenness and solitude proved to be more of a problem for the young Egyptian than for the Egyptian landscape. In nature, the lush vegetation abruptly changed into irremediable aridity, yet they were different things and one knew nothing about the other. Antony, however, had to pass from one to the other, from abundance to sterility,from life to solitude; and though he carried no earthly goods of any kind with him, he was nevertheless carrying, unconsciously, invisibly, the baggage of memories of all that he had left behind.
He had barely begun to get used to his new life when, with hideous malice, his invisible package began to unpack, by itself, the undignified remains it contained: step by step his entire life, the life he had abandoned, the world he had renounced. He saw again their cultivated fields and their grazing cattle, and he missed them and felt how much they meant to him. He saw the firm contours of the bronze breasts of the beautiful fellah girls. He often thought of the money he had received in return for his land, the money he had given to the poor. And again the figures, which he remembered down to the last penny, marched back through his mind, adding up to a perfect total.
He did what the old "upright man" had advised him to do: he used all his efforts to concentrate on prayer and he also sought refuge in the physical work of weaving mats. But each day of her solitary life increased the power of her memory.
As his perverse purpose was to disturb his work and devotion, he began to employ all sorts of imaginative devices: he showed him his lost fields, bearing a hundred times more fruit, and his lost cattle increasing in proportions to great herds.
But Antao replied to that. praying even more fervently, working even harder. He became stricter in his fasting, more ruthless in his self-punishment Enemy thoughts had to be driven out by prayer, by work, by fasting, by scourging. And then one night, when he was almost certain that he had succeeded after all, when he looked up after praying, he saw before him a girl. She was carrying a pot of water on her head and her blouse was open, showing her neck and breast.
She was one of the fellah girls he had seen many times passing through the fields. The girl stripped off her garments and lay down under the shroud. Antony tried not to see her, tried to seek refuge in prayer, But the girl would not give up; she spent the entire night tempting him with all sorts of lewd gestures. But he kept his eyes turned to God, imploring Him to come to his rescue. Through the most ardent prayers, he resisted the temptation. When at last dawn came, the girl, like an apparition, had disappeared in the morning twilight.
But immediately another figure appeared in its place, equally real and equally true, as if the one who had tempted him during the night for her beauty had now turned into her disgusting counterpart. A small, thick-lipped black man stood before him, stark naked and devoid of even the most primitive sense of shame, looking at him with a beastly degenerate look. He looked like a member of one of those wild tribes who lived in the forest along the Nubian border, tribes deeply despised by the Egyptians for their unbridled sensuality. Two horns adorned his head, a sign among the blacks of the forests of the enjoyment of full virile power. At first Antao was afraid of that strange figure, but then he suddenly noticed,that it must be the devil and that none other than the devil had been tempting him all night, in the form of the beautiful fella girl.
When the apparition noticed that his disguise had been uncovered, he revealed his identity, saying: "I am the advocate of impurity, and the spirit of fornication is called to me. How many have I attracted from the paths of chastity, with my temptations! I knocked down; yet now, when I attacked you, as I have attacked others, I was not strong enough."
Encouraged by this confession of weakness on the attacker's part, and filled with disdain, Antony exclaimed, filled with pride: "Very despicable art thou, for thy mind is black and thou hast the strength of a child!"
In this way the dark spirit was shamefully defeated and disappeared instantly.
Thanks to his firm resolve, Antony had managed to overcome the temptations of that night. But at the same time he had been led to verify a force which, in his piety and chastity, he had not known before: the mighty force of the diabolical adversary! Even in this first attack, the great adversary had given Antony proof of his true demonic power. Antony had renounced the world, but the devil knew how to enter his loneliness.
It had descended upon him with worldly temptations, just when all of Antony's efforts were focused on God, and he had seized upon his memories, troubling him with fantasies and fallacious visions.
Antony was a devout Christian. For him God was a reality, an active cause, a living experience. God's commandments were commands that had to be carried out. They determined all of Antao's actions. And God's adversary, the devil, was also a concrete reality for him. Who faced him, as the great tempter, was the devil incarnate, a real and tangible being.
Antony was not the first, nor the last man, to believe in the devil. The old Egyptians had seen him in the form of Set and Typhon; the Zoroastrians, participants in the ceaseless struggle of light against darkness, had found him under the name of Ahriman; under the guise of Mara, he had tempted Buddha the Enlightened One; and both Job and Christ in the wilderness knew him as Satan, as did the devout adherents of the Christian faith. Luther was so enraged by her presence that he threw an inkwell at her. The unrestricted belief in the devil continued into the Renaissance, and in the time of humanists and painters such as Bosch, Breughel, Schongauer, Dürer, Grünewald, they painted him not precisely as a symbolic figure, but as a physical person whom they believed in with their hearts. .
It fell to the rationalistic thinking of the Age of Enlightenment to strip the devil of his true reality and thus strip man's struggles against the satanic temptation of its dramatic poignancy.
All that remained were abstract concepts and a moral problem.
In our era, psychological consciousness, with its conception of the conflict of good and evil, as a simply psychomechanical problem, in the binomial organization of man, has agreed to reinterpret the temptations of the devil as complexes that disturb our animal instincts. These are repressed by the morally conscious ego to the subconscious, where they maintain an underground struggle against the dictatorship of conscious thought. In order to gain access to the sphere of consciousness, repressed instincts become able to use skillful stratagems. They take on symbolic costumes and masks.
From this point of view, the devil appears as a simple mask, sometimes obsolete, of man's desires, a pathological hallucination of his fantasy. According to such an interpretation, Antony's diabolical visions were merely imaginative symbols of the outlaw instincts which his ascetic ego, in order to repudiate any connection with them, naively deceived itself envisioned as an external phenomenon. The tempting fella girl was a projection of Antony's own ardent and rebellious desire; under the mask of the black boy of the Nubian forests there was nothing but Antao's own detested greed, and his initial fear, at the appearance of that boy, was simply the fear of his own subconscious.
Yet whether man resists the temptations of his lowest nature with the contour and form of the devil, whether he thinks of them in terms of ethical abstractions, or visualizes them as the eruption of repressed desires remains the fact that there is a power that it interferes with all the highest aspirations of man, a power with which all human life must cope. Belief in the devil, or ethical and psychological interpretations, are simply different ways of explaining the same and unique phenomenon.
"In earlier centuries," said Goethe, "great views on life were conceived in concrete forms; today we conceive of them as abstract ideas. In those times man's creative power was greater; today it is his analytical and power of destruction."
The anchorite of the fourth century, endowed with greater "creative power" and conceiving the tempter in concrete form, one could not logically expect, when fighting the devil, to use the same means that men today, when they believe in the power of analysis and bring their psychological disturbances to the study of graduate experts. The exorcism of the "devil", nowadays, is done through the technique of freeing painful and repressed elements from the subconscious, raising them to the level of consciousness.
Antao did conceive of the devil as incarnate and real, and as such he fought against him. His struggle against temptation could not simply be a process of intellectual self-analysis, opening up the recesses of the subconscious in the light of consciousness; it was becoming a powerful drama of far-reaching. The hero of this drama is a valiant fighter against the Enemy, against the eternal adversary of 'man', and at the end of this superhuman struggle, the world does not see a healed patient, but a victorious saint.
Antony's struggle with the devil was full of elements that defy rational understanding, but all of them find explanation in the "visual logic" of a man who was able to see what he believed. Goethe, who possessed in a unique degree the ability to observe and decipher the meaning of the things around him, and who, precisely because of this, had come to know the limits of observation and understanding, once wrote: "Why do we walk to search for the meaning of phenomena, when the phenomena themselves teach us the lesson?"
For Antony, the ascetic, the material things of the world had a demon, and the devil was truly "the prince of this world." He must move from the realm of the living to the realm of the dead. To reach . this, he decided to exchange his refuge, under the bush!, for a tomb, the shelter of death, totally isolated from the world and the living.
In Egypt, the tomb was of much greater significance than it does in our civilization. Man's temporal life was for the Egyptian a simple pilgrimage on the way to eternal life. An earthly shelter was only a repose for the traveler, but a tomb was a “mansion of eternity.” This explains why tombs were designed to play such a prominent role in the Egyptian scene. from the mountain that borders the Libyan desert, they had the hardness and permanence of granite, and from their majestic height they looked down with disdain at the ephemeral pettiness of the adobe dwellings of the living.
For Coptic Christians, who held to the old Egyptian concept of the ephemeral nature of life on earth and that life after death was the attainment of the true essence of all being, the tomb retained its unusual importance. This was especially true in the eyes of an ascetic, whose acts and thoughts were centered on the mortification of the flesh and for whom the grave was the gateway to eternal life. And yet the idea that a living person should decide to make a tomb his abode is difficult to grasp, not only from a modern point of view, but was equally baffling to Antony's contemporaries.
The ancient Egyptian sepulchral cult forms an interesting historical background for this extraordinary project. The ridge of tombs along the Libyan desert became the stage set for an unparalleled spiritual drama.
Heavy blocks of granite isolated the "mansions of eternity" from the world below, and for centuries no one had dared to penetrate those tombs. Antao was on his way to his new shelter, taking with him a pious friend from the village. This friend would close the entrance to the tomb after Antony entered it, leaving only a narrow gap through which, from time to time, would pass the bare essentials of bread and water, without which Antony himself could not live.
Antao entered and found himself in an anteroom in the shape of a vault, whose poor lighting was due to a ray of light coming from the entrance. The walls were covered with reliefs depicting hunting scenes and sacred animals from far into antiquity, the sort of decoration with which the ancient Egyptians used to adorn the resting places of their dead.
From there a dark corridor led to the tomb itself below. Antony felt the way, carefully, through the darkness. But as soon as he reached the end of the corridor and entered the underground room to which it led, an angry voice rose out of the darkness, saying, "What are you doing here in the realm of the dead?
How dare you do what no living creature has ever dared?” These were human words that the voice uttered, but the sounds were at once faint and penetrating and seemed to come from the realm of spirits.
Antony recoiled, but he had learned the lesson of his previous experiences and knew immediately that this was all the work of the devil once more. It was certainly the devil who had ordered the spirit of a dead man to return to the place where his body lay, in order to prevent Antony from finding any peace in the solitary tomb. But Antao would not give up on his decision to live with the dead. He began to pray. He raised his voice and prayed aloud, echoing the words of devotion around him in the darkness. But an echo of hundreds and thousands of voices answered out of the darkness, trying to submerge her prayer in a blasphemy din. He knew it was the devil who had ordered the coming of that special choir from the realm of the dead! It was the devil, from whose worldly domain he had fled, who was now trying to interfere with his pious purposes,through those diabolic voices.
God does not grant an easy life to those He has chosen. Experience them, surrendering them to the temptations of evil. He delivered Job, the most pious of men, and even Jesus, His only begotten son, into the hands of the tempter. So did He now, giving the devil a free hand to try to steady His pious son of Coma.
Great complications had Antao with the devil. When he began to pray, his pious words were drowned out by the noise of ghostly cries. The devil, however, had major complications with Antao as well. For Antao was not intimidated by the diabolical noise and simply continued to carry out his exercises of devotion. And so the struggle continued, for days and weeks, for months perhaps, or even for years. It is not possible to say how long it lasted, for in the tomb there is no clock to tick the hours.
There is no sun or moon to rise or set. There is no time in the grave.
From the depths of his misery he called Antao: "Oh my Lord, help me and enlighten me!" But as soon as he uttered these words, he saw around him a multitude of hundreds and thousands of sulfurous lights, and from each light he also heard a separate voice.
And all of a sudden, it seemed like the ghostly voices and the sulfurous lights mingled. Voices flickered like wisps and lights exploded in a ghostly chant. "Listen, Antao! We've come to enlighten you!" And this was followed by a burst of devilish laughter and a thunderous thunder of wild applause. But there were no mouths to laugh there, no hands to clap. Laughter and applause came from nowhere, from that same dark nowhere that had sent the voices and the lights, the realm of spirits, with which the devil had filled the tomb.
Antony redoubled his ascetic rigor. For days, he neither ate nor drank. For long stretches of time he denied any sleep, for he knew that only a more intense concentration of his soul could help him to triumph over the machinations of the devil. But the attacks mounted with fury. One would say that the demon fed on Antao's empty stomach, quenched its thirst in Antao's parched throat, and found a strange repose in Antao's sleepless nights.
When it became clear that the ghosts and their mockery had failed, the devil resorted to more drastic methods of attack. He ordered his cohorts to rage against Antao's weakened body, to torture him, to kick and kick and beat him until his passion for prayer was defeated. The spirits obeyed and threw themselves at Antony with such fury that he lost consciousness, unconsciously falling to the ground.
On this occasion Antony's friend arrived at the tomb, bringing him a fresh supply of bread and water, but when he gave the signal at the entrance, he received no reply. He pushed the heavy rock aside and entered. She called again, and when silence was the answer again, she conquered her fear and walked slowly down the dark corridor to the lower room. After feeling around for a long time, he finally found Antao's fallen body. He dragged the inert body from the tomb and carried it on his shoulders to the church in the village of Coma.
The news that the most God-fearing son of Coma had been found dead excited the entire village, and soon the little church was filled with a mob of mourning and sobbing villagers who wanted to help the priest bury Antao's body, or simply contemplate. her venerable face for the last time. A group of them, led by Antao's friend, was charged with carrying out the wake of the corpse during the night. But in the middle of the night, when all those good men, save Antony's friend, were fast asleep, the one they were charged with watching over, the one everyone thought dead, rose from his lethargic sleep. He sat down, seeing his friend, beckoned to him, and made him understand that he wanted to leave. Without a word, the two left cautiously,bypassing the sleeping watchmen and leaving the church. Soon the sleepers awoke and found the coffin empty. By that time Antony, leaning on his friend's arm, was on his way back to the tomb, where he intended to continue his fight against the devil again.
Entering the tomb, he shouted defiantly: "Here I am! See! Do the worst! Nothing will ever separate me from Christ my Lord!"
And then he began to sing the words of the psalm: "Though a rod encamped against me, yet my heart would not be afraid."
Enraged by the defiant firmness of the stubborn man of God, the devil, with his demonic power, commanded the granite beasts in the frieze of the walls to come alive. Immediately the tomb was filled with the fury of animals that roared, hissed and roared. Wherever Antony turned, all around him, there were packs of wolves, wild lions, leopards, bears and bulls. Poisonous snakes curled around his legs. Greedy eyes sparked in the darkness. Greedy mouths threatened to devour him. Pointed horns were ready to gore him. Gigantic spiders wove their webs to trap him.
But Antao, full of firmness, refused this brand new means of intimidating his opponent, since he clearly saw that those wild beasts were nothing more than the products of an infernal whim.
So he exclaimed with all courage, "If you had any strength, one of you would have been enough. But the Lord has deprived you of strength, and in this way you seek to frighten me by number."
And then he turned to the devil himself and challenged him: "It is a sign of your despair that you have taken the form of wild animals. Look at me now, safe within the stronghold of my faith! If you really think you can exercise yours power over me, don't delay, knock!"
Then the devil, in his impotent rage, ordered his beasts to tear down the granite walls of the tomb. Immediately they obeyed. The lions and leopards with their mighty paws, the bears with their clumsy strength, the bulls with their horns, the wolves with their sharp teeth, all began pushing and pulling, biting and gnawing, digging and digging, and snakes too they helped and the scorpions and all the crawling and slithering beasts of hell that the devil had summoned.
The walls of the tomb began to shake. Before long they would crumble and with them the vaulted ceiling would crumble. But then, suddenly, instead of falling down, it opened! And a glorious radiance of radiant light descended amidst the darkness of the grave. And wherever that glare reached, the darkness had to give way and with it the monsters generated by the devil disappeared.
Antony understood that the light meant the presence of the Savior and asked, "Where are you, my Lord Jesus? Why did you not come sooner to help me?"
A voice that emanated from the light answered, saying, "Antão, I was with you all the time. I was by your side and I saw your struggle; and because you faced your enemy manly, I will always protect you."
When Antony looked around, the walls were firmly in place again and the wild beasts had returned to the friezes carved into the cliff.
Faced by a modern psychoanalyst at his desk, Antao's affair with the devil, including his vision of light, is reduced, leaving nothing but a complex of pathological illusions. The psychiatrist, willing to apply to religious phenomena what he learned by analyzing dreams in individual cases, would interpret the voracious beasts of the devil as phallic symbols, a typical representation of repressed erotic impulses. In the light of this kind of psychological interpretation, the radiant vision of Christ is simply transformed into the set of illusory images that is the characteristic expression of a process of sublimation.
Nevertheless, in Antony's life the events of the tomb constitute the most important phase in the genesis of his sanctity.
When he finally left the tomb, Antony was thirty-six years old, and behind him lay sixteen years, which he had spent solely on his struggle with the devil.
On the day that Christ appeared before him, in a vision of light, assuring him of His help, Antony left the tomb and went out into the wilderness. He followed the path that many great saints and prophets before and after him had to follow before they could fulfill their mission. Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist, Christ himself, St. Paul, and many, many others.
Antao's goal was the lonely Mount Pispir in the desert.
He crossed the Nile, leaving the Iybian Desert behind, and entered the Arabian Desert. The landscape in its extreme desolation was like a vast tomb of Nature. A great barren, sandy expanse stretched out before him, streaked with sparse brown cones of bare rock. There were valleys petrified like dried-up riverbeds, and the few traces of life and vegetation in this desert, the sycamore trees, tamarisks, and empty palms looked like ghosts, their branches outstretched as if to grab the parched air. A deadly silence lay heavy over this land, rarely interrupted by the shrill breath of the torrid simum, which blew from the Sahara. The blazing sunlight was so intense that the landscape looked glassy and unreal. And then, suddenly, the zobaa, the high vortex of sand,it would lift pillars of dust into the sky in eddies and the sun would lose its strength and day would turn to night.
With the greatest difficulty, Antony had covered about half the distance, across the desert, when he was forced to an abrupt halt. In front of him, right in the middle of the sandy expanse, lay an immense silver disk. It was undoubtedly the dark magic of the devil that had dropped that glittering thing there in the desert sand.
He had failed to seduce Antony through voluminous temptations; she had not succeeded in frightening him with ghosts, demons, and spirits; so that now he had tried to awaken in him the lust for the riches of the world, hoping thus to reach his aim, which was to divert him from the direct road to God.
Antony couldn't be fooled that easily. "Oh l" he exclaimed. "In this I recognize your work. But you must know that your will cannot prevail against mine!" After he uttered these words, the silver disappeared as if it had been absorbed by desert sand.
A few miles away, Antony was crossing a ravine when a huge chunk of gold suddenly blocked his path. Its glow was so intense that even the blinding desert sun could not match it. Only an instant stopped Antony, as if blinded by the golden splendour, and his hand, over which he seemed to have lost hold, reached out. greedy for the precious metal. But just in time he restrained himself, realizing that he was the devil again, trying to tempt him and instill in him a covetous desire for earthly goods. He reproached himself and concentrated on prayer, hoping to free himself from the golden vision. But the piece of gold, as if it were a real thing, didn't move. So Antao used a ruse of his own. In a quick decision, he jumped over the piece of gold, like someone jumping into a blazing fire, and,without looking back, he ran as fast as he could, farther and farther into the desert.
After many days, he finally reached Antao, the oasis of Meiamum, the modern Der-el-Memum, the last landing in this part of the desert. This was where he had to veer off the main road on his way to Mount Pispir. Before leaving the oasis, Antão made a deal with one of the people who lived there.
Twice a year this man would bring him a supply of bread to his desert shelter. Antao promised to pay him, in exchange for this service, with the product of his palm mats.
Mount Pispir, with its conical reddish-brown rock formations, could be taken as the archetype of this vast and desolate region. After a difficult ascent, Antao finally reached the plateau, crowned by the ruins, gnawed by time, of an abandoned fort. Its crumbling walls provided shelter for desert jackals and hordes of reptiles against sunlight.
Before he could establish himself there, Antao had to clean the underground vault, under the ruins of the old fort, which he had chosen for his new abode. He drove out or killed every persistent mob of jackals, snakes, and scorpions.
Even afterward, however, he would find neither peace nor rest. He looked around his new hiding place and soon found that he was surrounded by demons, who were in and out, bustling about in the old room under the ruins, as if it had always been their abode. As conscientious mercenaries of hell, they were always exercising their task, but without a doubt, as the humble subordinates that they were, they did not have the art and skill of their master at their disposal. The devil himself, after sixteen years of fruitless efforts to seduce Antony, had transferred himself to more promising victims and left it to his slaves to keep Antony occupied and keep an eye on him at all times, in fear that he might take advantage. a moment of carelessness, in order to escape to God's side.This explains why the methods now employed by Antony's adversaries to lure him away from God were altogether utterly stupid and petty.”
When Antao, emaciated and exhausted, after a severe fast, crouched in a corner of his room, a pot-bellied little devil approached him, smacking his lips, patting his full belly, and promising the hungry hermit every imaginable kind of Lucullian feast . When his vigils lasted until the middle of the night, he found himself suddenly surrounded by a mob of imps, reeking of hell, yawning sleepily and offering to find him a comfortable bed of bird fluff where he could stretch out and comfort yourself for awhile. When he was thirsty, they brought trays full of the most choice drinks and sat down in joyful drunkenness. When he tried to concentrate with his prayers, they made hellish pandemonium and when he was busy weaving mats,they snatched the half-finished work out of his hands. Some sought to flatter him and promised him glory and power; others threatened him; still others ridiculed him; and all the servants of the devil tried, each in their own way, to lead him away from his life of piety and devotion.
For Antao they were a continual annoyance, a constant pest, and each time he chased them away they returned with a new and different series of stupid wiles. But Antony, whom the great Enemy, with his mighty weapons of sensuality and the lust of earthly riches, had not been able to conquer, could certainly not have been shaken by the miniature temptations of all that petty rubbish of hell. He would not allow himself to be led astray from any of his pious observances. And always, when the time came for the delivery of a fresh supply of bread by the man from the oasis, the finished mats were ready, waiting for him in the cistern.
For twenty years Antony spent his days in the company of those turbulent devils, rejecting their offerings in time, praying, fasting, and weaving mats. And perhaps there he would have stayed there in the ruins of Mount Pispir, until the end of his days, fighting the imps, day after day, if something had not happened in the outside world that suddenly brought about a change in his life.
The man who had been hired to provide Antony with bread fell ill and once sent a young man in his place. This was a kind of very smart boy and the strangeness of his mission piqued his curiosity. After putting the bread in the cistern, he began to look at the desert fort. Suddenly he heard a noise coming from somewhere beneath the ruins, and as he walked in that direction there was an explosion of injurious vociferations, among which he could clearly distinguish different voices. This distressed him, as he could not help thinking that the hermit was perhaps being attacked by bandits. So he continued to look, and at last he discovered an opening through which he could see into the room beneath the ruins. To his great astonishment, the hermit was there, alone.
Excited by this strange experience, the boy ran back to the oasis and related everything that had happened. The next day, a group of men headed for the ruins. They too heard the offending voices; they too looked through the gap and saw that the hermit was alone. The story they told back raised the entire Meiamum, and soon, as a result, the entire population set out on a pilgrimage to Mount Pispir to solve the riddle.
They called and knocked on the walls, but when no answer came, they decided to force their way inside. At that moment the hermit came out to meet them, calm and unruffled, and to their impetuous questions he replied, still deeply involved in his affair with the demons: can do damage". Hearing this calm mention of the devils, the men and women who surrounded him were seized with an emotional attack. When Antony noticed that many were backing away in fear, he comforted them, saying, "Those demons are just bragging, with their stupid wiles.
They talk and threaten But they are only lesser demons and a fervent prayer is enough to embarrass them."
Having thus spoken, Antony turned away and went back to his room under the ruins. But the crowd, deeply excited, on learning that the hermit of Mount Pispir had managed to defeat man's eternal enemy, the devil, descended into the oasis and sent a caravan to spread the great news across the desert. It was soon known in all the oases in all parts of the desert, all along the Nile and all over Faium, that there was a man living on Mount Pispir, who had vanquished the devil.
A saint! And there arrived, coming across the desert, from all directions, innumerable caravans, whose object was the saint of Mount Pispir. The desert escarpments and the valley of Meiamum soon became a vast encampment for a multitude of thousands. There were many who had come out of simple curiosity, desirous of seeing with their own eyes the saint who had overcome the devil. But there were some also, tortured with cares and cares, who had come to receive the comfort and counsel of a man to whom holiness had endowed with more than human wisdom. There were the lame and the blind, who hoped to be freed from their illnesses by the touch of the hand of a saint. And finally there were the multitudes of those who sought God and had come to stay and learn from Antony the secret of victory over the devil.
They all arrived at the ruins and called the saint, asking him if he could hear them and answer their questions. And as the Lord Himself had at one time fulfilled His mission among men, so Antony, His disciple and saint, would have to do it now.
The devils of the ruins realized that their time was wasted, that Antony would escape them forever, through the good works that awaited him outside. They redoubled their efforts, invented new ruses and temptations, blocked the way out. But the forty years the Lord had given them to try and experience His holy one was over. He sent His angels, in radiant splendor, into the ruins, and they took Antony, taking him high. When the devils saw this, they tried to avoid it. But the angels said, "If you know of any evil deed done by this man, speak up, and we will forsake him."
In this way the devils were confused. They could not answer, and the angels took Antony and carried him high above the ruins, then depositing him gently outside the walls.
At the age of twenty, young Antao had obeyed God's command, had left the world of men, and retired to solitude. Now, at the age of forty-four, he was back among men. But this also according to the will of God, for God had chosen Antony to guide those who longed for guidance, and there were many of this kind among the crowd on Mount Pispir.
For decades, this man had been in contact only with supernatural beings, and now he suddenly found himself. face to face again with deadly creatures. How different were these two worlds! The ghosts and beasts of the grave, the devils under the ruins, and in contrast to them these pious people, in desperate search of God! How different were the confused, hateful, and injurious voices of demons, from the childlike, trusting voices of godly men! For forty years he had had Antao to defend his own soul against the devil, but now it had become his task to free the souls of others from the clutches of the devil. Man, who had mastered the devil, had to prove himself master again, when called to do the work for God among men. From his own lonely desert life he drew the strength to be a leader of men.He would teach them what loneliness had taught him. His example showed them how prayer, fasting, and toil can overcome the temptations of the senses and open the way to God. The biblical parable of the withered tree that bore fruit became a reality and the human tree of the desert and of solitude produced the fruit of an ascetic community of men.
The desert fort became a center of life. The ravines and caves, the abandoned tombs and the dry cisterns became shelters for men who fervently prayed to their God, sang psalms and fasted and mortified their bodies. Under Antao's direction, the paradox of a community of hermits, of a society of men who had abandoned the world of men, began to take shape. A world grew over which the Prince of this World had no power. Only in this way could Antony's triumph over the devil be consummated, for now he was no longer a mere individual facing his archenemy with firm resolve, but a new world of men, complete and independent.
Antony remained among his disciples, until solitude became for them what had been for him the mainstay of life. Then he left them. He abandoned Mount Pispir and penetrated farther into the desert. There he lived in a cave, on a hill that was even higher, even more inaccessible, even more desolate. The power, which the devil had tried to exert over him, had been overcome, and for the first time he was able to live undisturbed in the contemplation of God. But only two years of his earthly life allowed God to devote him to the disinterested view of heavenly things. News that in the midst of the desert a new world had arisen-a world of celestial splendor above the earth-had spread beyond the desert and Faium. They had crossed Upper and Lower Egypt and reached Syria and all the neighboring lands. And everywhere,in cities and towns, men abandoned their homes, renounced their earthly possessions and headed into the desert, going into caves and living a life of renunciation and solitude.
So it came to pass one day that Antony's second refuge in the desert was again surrounded by a multitude of clamoring men. His work, begun on Mount Pispir, had continued to grow and spread and had now reached him again, high up in its mountain enclosure. The slopes and crests of Mount Pispir had long since become too narrow, and already the desert, encompassing Thebaid and Nitria, was covered with colonies of anchorites, who had followed in Antao's footsteps, eager to imitate his way of life.
Again Antao had to resume his work among men. His work, which had accompanied him and which now demanded that he complete it.
While Antony lived among men, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to the needs of men. But when, his task accomplished, he withdrew again to an isolated cave - and each time he penetrated deeper into the desert, higher into the mountains, and more completely isolated - he again became the loneliest of the lonely, the saint of solitude. As a mediator between God and men, he had to live at times in complete solitude, and then hear the voice of God in all its purity and clarity, and then he had to return to the fellowship of men in order to convey the words of God to them. and let His commandments take earthly reality among them.
Like the stronghold of a king of solitude, Antony's mountain retreat looked down from the high, vast realm of renunciation, which his example had made to grow in the desert. Five thousand men, creatures of Antony's piety, mute in their silence, devoted to their prayers, trapped in the circle of his divine acts, led there a life of absolute devotion to eternal things. The strength of the example he had set had made Antony the sovereign head of five thousand free men, subjects by voluntary discipline.
Then, one day in the year 311, the outside world burst into Antony's realm of never-ending spirituality. A torrent of anguish rose from below, the towering height to Antao. A man from Alexandria went up to his cave and, with all the excitement with which worldly suffering likes to express its grievances, said: "In Alexandria, hundreds and hundreds of those who profess their faith in Our Lord Jesus Christ are punished in public, are sent forth to the mines or cast into prison, they are tortured and burned or, to amuse the crowd in the circus, they are fed to feed wild animals in the arena." The man went on to explain that Emperor Maximin Daia had ordered the pursuit, and that Roman officers and gladiators were carrying it out.He spoke as someone to whom persecution by the executioners of the world means pain and to whom pain can inspire fear. But Antony listened to her words like someone who had come face to face with the devil incarnate. This story of imperial edicts and the fact that Roman officials tried to induce the Christians of Alexandria to abandon their godly life could not blind him to the fact that the very adversary of God, who had tempted him in his solitude, he was using the weakness of men, down in the city, to carry out his diabolical plans. Resolved to face his old adversary out there in the world, with the same fearless confidence in God that he had in the solitude of the desert, Antony gave the man this message: "Tell them I will go!"But Antony listened to her words like someone who had come face to face with the devil incarnate. This story of imperial edicts and the fact that Roman officials tried to induce the Christians of Alexandria to abandon their godly life could not blind him to the fact that the very adversary of God, who had tempted him in his solitude, he was using the weakness of men, down in the city, to carry out his diabolical plans. Resolved to face his old adversary out there in the world, with the same fearless confidence in God that he had in the solitude of the desert, Antony gave the man this message: "Tell them I will go!"But Antony listened to her words like someone who had come face to face with the devil incarnate. This story of imperial edicts and the fact that Roman officials tried to induce the Christians of Alexandria to abandon their godly life could not blind him to the fact that the very adversary of God, who had tempted him in his solitude, he was using the weakness of men, down in the city, to carry out his diabolical plans. Resolved to face his old adversary out there in the world, with the same fearless confidence in God that he had in the solitude of the desert, Antony gave the man this message: "Tell them I will go!"This story of imperial edicts and the fact that Roman officials tried to induce the Christians of Alexandria to abandon their godly life could not blind him to the fact that the very adversary of God, who had tempted him in his solitude, he was using the weakness of men, down in the city, to carry out his diabolical plans. Resolved to face his old adversary out there in the world, with the same fearless confidence in God that he had in the solitude of the desert, Antony gave the man this message: "Tell them I will go!"This story of imperial edicts and the fact that Roman officials tried to induce the Christians of Alexandria to abandon their godly life could not blind him to the fact that the very adversary of God, who had tempted him in his solitude, he was using the weakness of men, down in the city, to carry out his diabolical plans. Resolved to face his old adversary out there in the world, with the same fearless confidence in God that he had in the solitude of the desert, Antony gave the man this message: "Tell them I will go!"with the same fearless confidence in God that he had had in the solitude of the desert, Antony gave the man this message: "Tell them I will go!"with the same fearless confidence in God that he had had in the solitude of the desert, Antony gave the man this message: "Tell them I will go!"
Antony left the desert now for the first time. He was sixty-one years old. He set off around the world, a tall man, pale and emaciated from fasting, his beard and hair disheveled.
His only garment was a white sheepskin, which came down to his feet, and he carried a heavy staff in his right hand.
He descended the steep slope, waded through the tawny sand of the desert and, following the green banks of the Nile, kept walking until he finally reached the walls of Alexandria.
He entered the city through Porta do Sol.
Until then all Anton had seen of the world had been Coma, the village of his childhood, which consisted of a few mud huts, and the desert with its bushes and graves, its dilapidated ruins and its caves. Now, for the first time, he set foot in a great city, the second great city of the Roman Empire and the most populous and most beautiful in the East.
A new world full of color stretched out before him, in all the turbulent bustle of an eastern city. He saw Greeks in short cloaks, Romans in gowns, bearded Jews in linen caftans, Arabs in burners, Egyptians in striped clothes of various colors, Negroes, Carthaginians, and all speaking at once in their various native languages. Antao's eyes, accustomed to the dark brown hue, to the stagnant calm of the desert rocks, were dazzled by that orgy of colors, of movements; and his ears, accustomed to the insurmountable silence, could barely tolerate that choking tide of noise.
A few steps beyond the Porta do Sol, Antao found himself surrounded by a crowd that was gesticulating and barking, offering fruit baskets, pitchers filled with water, sweets, food, rugs, clothing, all the goods they had to sell. At the same time, jugglers and swindlers, magicians and dancers, tried to attract his attention. The devils of Mount Pispir had been no more persistent and tedious. This was the market of Racotis, the Egyptian quarter of Alexandria.
Escaping that confused vortex, Antao arrived at the foot of an imposing staircase, flanked by two obelisks and having a gigantic arch as its dome. It led to a sumptuous building, adorned with the same strange animals that Antony had seen in the desert tombs. These were the reliefs of Apis, the sacred ox, and the building, a temple of the Egyptian god Serapis, was the center of pagan doctrine in this part of the world.
Antao was now walking along a long avenue, bordered on both sides by marble colonnades. Here he saw long rows of stone pillars. Crowning each of them was a carved head, also made of stone and disembodied. These were the busts of famous Greek philosophers, standing along the street that led to the center of the city. Sumptuous high-rise buildings attracted his attention. He had reached the most elegant part of the city, the Bruquíon, where the rich mansions, administration buildings and municipal theaters were located. The more he walked, the more deeply he felt involved in a strange and unknown world. It was harder for him to make his way through the turbulent crowd than through the endless masses of sand in the desert. Every few steps he had to stop.
Men passed by, clad in colorful robes, embroidered with flowers and animals, plump pouches fastened to their belts as evidence of their wealth, their red breeches adorned with gold stars that glittered more blindingly than the sliver of gold in the desert bank. Women in scarlet headdresses brushed against him, and in their transparent tunics they displayed their charms more shamelessly than the naked fella girl under the bush!
When he finally arrived at a park where maples, firs, and jarícios offered shade and coolness, he felt far more exhausted than under the blazing desert sun.
The twilight surprised him near the harbor with its long granite piers. Night fell, but it brought no rest to his eyes and ears. The noise of the harbor mingled with the roar of the sea, and a light cut through the darkness, more fantastic than the wisps of the infernal spirits in the tomb. It was the light of the famous lighthouse, symbol of the great port, rising to a height of four hundred feet, on the small island of Faros.
By dawn the next morning, the colorful whirl of metropolitan life was again in full swing. Antony, however, was not impressed by him. How impressed he was by the piece of gold in the desert, either! For him, the pomp of the city was no more than a diabolical illusion. And so he walked on, until he reached behind the dazzling facade of Alexandria, where the devil openly pursued his work, where his obedient servants tortured the pious disciples of Christ.
The "obedient servants of the devil" were imperial officers, judges, legionaries, prison guards, executioners, who carried out the Christian persecutions that Maximin Daia, the Roman emperor of the East, had ordered. Daia was a superstitious pagan and thought that the cause of the empire's decline lay in the displeasure of the old gods, angered by the tolerance they had for the God of the Christians. To regain favor with the gods and save the empire, Daia ordered Christians to abjure their faith and sacrifice to the official gods. Those who refused were to be killed, sacrificed to the great gods of Rome. The decaying empire, lost its military courage, face to face at last with economic collapse, was prey to superstitious terrors,He saw in every disaster the work of demonic powers and reacted against it all with fanatical cruelty.
In the courts of Alexandria, sentences after sentences were handed down against Christians; the prisons were crowded with them; they were herded into narrow cells and treated as felons of high treason. They were tortured, whipped, and tortured, and when they still refused to abjure their faith, they were sent to Thebaid to be forced to labor in the porphyry quarries.
In the anteroom of the racecourse, there were always groups of Christians, dressed only in animal skins, waiting for their fate - to be thrown to the wild beasts in the arena. Outside the city walls stood pyres on which others would have to suffer the death of martyrs.
The tall white figure of the desert saint, as a visitor from a better world, suddenly appeared in the prison of Alexandria, amidst the crowd of handcuffed Christians. He had come to comfort those who were suffering; to strengthen them in their faith. He brought them the word of God, which had been denied them for so long, for their priests were in prison, their churches closed, and their sacred writings burned in public. "Be strong in the faith," he said. "The victory is yours, for soon your chains will be broken and you will enjoy heavenly glory."
And with one voice the prisoners answered: "If we die with Him, we will live with Him.
If we suffer with Him, we will reign with Him.
If we deny Him He will deny us."
Strict guards were posted at the prison doors. No one was allowed to enter. But when the strange figure of the emaciated saint approached, the guards were filled with awe, and instead of holding him back, they stepped aside and let him pass.
Hardened jailers kept watch over the prisoners but did not prevent the stranger from greeting the faithful with the forbidden sign of the cross. They didn't put him in irons, but let him in and out at will. This man, who dared to enter there, of his own free choice, did not act in his own strength alone. Such boldness could not be imagined. It must have been that strange Being, the God of Christians, who watched over him and inspired him, giving him strength.
In the camp, where those condemned to forced labor awaited their departure, the voice of the desert saint was suddenly heard: "Stand strong in the faith! Your march into exile will lead you to triumph and victory." The victims' eyes became bright. With hymns on their lips, they left as if on a journey of pleasure and joy. The guards beat the prisoners to hurry them up. But no guard dared touch the saint, who stood in their midst. His intrepid courage could only be the gift of a most powerful devil.
In the torture chambers, prisoners were lined up to be flogged. The saint appeared among them. "Be strong in the faith!" he said. "The Lord will heal your wounds!" And the moans of pain turned into hymns of praise. No whip was raised against the foreigner, for fear of the staff he carried in his hand, which could only be the instrument of magical power.
In the anteroom of the hippodrome, among the Christians wrapped in animal skins, the desert saint appeared and said in a loud voice: "Be strong in the faith! He who suffers will conquer!" And none of the unbelievers dared to cast an animal skin on the saint's shoulders.
If he hit the ground with his staff, the earth would split open and engulf anyone who dared insult him.
Outside the city walls, Christians were being burned.
With dying eyes they saw the saint, who suddenly appeared among them. They heard the voice of the messenger of God, who comforted them and counseled them to remain strong. They died with a smile on their lips and their last word was: "I believe!" Then, while wood was being piled up for new fires, the saint stood nearby, shouting in the same high tone of voice the same challenge: "I believe!" Yet no one dared lift a finger against him.
The judge of the highest court did not issue subpoenas to compel the foreigner to appear before him, even if he was more guilty than the other Christians, even if his offenses to the official gods had been more flagrant, for it was he who had incited others to to remain firm in their adherence to the foreign God.
However, even though he had not been summoned, one day the saint appeared among the accused sitting in the dock. It had come of its own volition. "Be strong in the faith!" he said, comforting the prisoners. "If you are condemned here, you will be acquitted in Heaven! And then each of them, in turn, asserted his belief: "I believe!" but the prosecutor had not prepared a case against him and the judge left the court in a hurry.
The governor was responsible to the emperor for the meticulous execution of the imperial edicts. It should have been his duty to detain this man whose activities in Alexandria could only be interpreted as dangerous to the security of the state. However, the governor did nothing to summon the foreigner to appear in his presence. He feared the displeasure of the emperor and the gods, but he feared even more the wrath of this foreigner, who was regarded as a sorcerer and a magician.
One morning the governor was in his office when a man came running in with the news that the terrible stranger was approaching the palace. "Stop him!" ordered the governor.
"Don't let him enter my palace!" But none of the guards at the gate and none of the servants within had the courage to block his way. Unmolested, he made his way to the governor's office and entered. The governor was too hamstrung to utter a word and could only softly listen to the thunderous harangue which the foreigner uttered in his Coptic dialect. All the while he gazed fearfully at the gnarled staff, for any movement of it might indicate that the stranger was about to invoke its magical power, to tear open the earth and engulf both the governor and his palace. When the white figure finally left and the governor was still unharmed in his office, he breathed a deep sigh of relief.'
And all of pagan Alexandria heaved a deep sigh of relief when the "demon of Christendom" with his gnarled sorcerer's staff at last left the city. The "devil" was gone but his message remained. He continued to live and showed his vital energy, helping persecuted Christians maintain their heroic resistance.
When Antony left Alexandria, it was the year 312. The last persecution, the last organized attempt to uproot the Christian religion, was coming to an end.
Back in the desert, Antao resumed his life of solitude. But during the years that followed, years he spent away from the world and time, in the contemplation of God, a decisive historical shift took place in the world, beyond its desert domain. "Our numbers will grow, even if your sword tries to reduce us, for the blood of martyrs is the seedbed of Christians!"
These prophetic words, spoken at the beginning of the era of Christian persecutions, were finally fulfilled. Romans and more Romans, from all walks of life, from all social classes, converted to the faith of the Cross. Senior officers, dignitaries, soldiers, men and women, even courtiers from the pagan emperor's wheel, saluted one another, openly with the sign of the cross.
The new emperor, Constantine the Great, was preparing for a decisive battle against his rival Maxentius. He descended from the Alps to northern Italy and there begged his god Apollo to favor him with a sign. But Apollo remained silent. His time of signs and miracles had passed.
Then, suddenly, in the cloudless blue of the firmament, he saw Constantine what he knew to be the symbol of faith adopted by Christians. And beneath that flaming vision, he read these words written in fire: "With this sign thou shalt conquer!"
He understood the prophecy and adopted the Cross as his motto. The monogram of the first two letters of Christ's name was inscribed in Greek on the imperial standard and engraved on the soldiers' shields. In this way the army was set in motion for the decisive battle against Maxentius. On the Milviana Bridge, outside Rome, Constantine defeated his opponent and came to the conclusion that the God of the Christians had won that victory for him. Convinced of the invincibility of the Cross, he promulgated in Milan the famous edict of tolerance, by which Christians were granted full protection and the right to free public worship. Within a few years, the persecuted faith had become the official religion of the empire.
One day, the little oasis of Meiamum was filled with excitement. A caravan had arrived such as had never seen the desert before.
Nobles, sumptuously attired, rode camels, accompanied by slaves, interpreters and guides. Then came a caravan of cargo camels, weighed down with all manner of travel gear, water and food, clothing and tents. The travelers had come from far away. They had departed from the capital of the empire, crossed the ocean and the desert, Meiamum being their destination. The story they told was hard to believe for the simple inhabitants of the oasis. They came from the order of Constantine, the "divine emperor", and carried a message to the desert saint. The entire village was keen to put itself at the service of visiting nobles who paid profusely for every suggestion or assistance they received. Some of the villagers who, from time to time, carried water and food to Mount Pispir in exchange for ready-made straw mats,they offered to escort the foreigners to the edge of the "cave kingdom". A dry cistern at the foot of the mountain, where they used to deposit provisions, marked the point beyond which they were not allowed to go. There were no guards, no sign of warning, but the law had its roots in the reverence of their hearts, which forbade them, in their unworthiness, to set foot on the sacred domain of those who had renounced the world.of setting foot on the sacred dominion of those who had renounced the world.of setting foot on the sacred dominion of those who had renounced the world.
The villagers said the password. After some time, an emaciated, rustic-looking man emerged from one of the caves, visibly frightened by the extraordinary spectacle there in the cistern. It took him some time to detach himself sufficiently from his world of solitude, prayer, and mortification to understand the mundane things the strangers were discussing. Finally he realized that they were there by order of the "Emperor of the Christians" and that they were carrying a letter from the supreme leader to the saint of the desert.
He explained that he could not be their guide because he did not know where the saint was. Only two men in the entire village knew the way, but their retreat was almost two hundred caves higher, somewhere, amidst the chaos of rocks and ravines. It would take a day, he decided, to get to and from the cistern, with one of the men who could serve as their guide.
The emperor's emissaries had to wait patiently in the cistern. The next day Macarius, the man who knew the way, appeared. He scrutinized the strangers suspiciously, in their sumptuous clothes from head to toe, for he wanted to be perfectly sure that they were not just another one of those artful visits of the devil. He was told again, more than once, that they were there by order of the "Emperor of the Christians" and finally agreed to guide them to Padre Antao. But they had to leave, by the cistern, all their camels and slaves, their luggage. your waterskins, your food and your clothes.
They walked through a land filled with silence. The men who lived there remained invisible, hidden in their caves.
Sinking into the sand, climbing the rocky slopes and descending again through valleys and ravines, this was an arduous walk for the corrupted people of the city. They walked for two days and two nights, and when they finally reached the place where the saint was retired, they felt exhausted, exhausted, tortured by hunger and thirst.
Macarius went up to the cave to announce the arrival of the Emperor's mission. But when he reached the opening, he stopped reverently and then returned. The saint was busy with his devotions and could not be disturbed. His prayers lasted for hours. Almost a whole day passed, until he had finished and Macarius could announce the arrival of the foreigners.
- Father, - said the disciple, - the emperor of the Christians sent a legacy bringing him a letter.
But Antao was not impressed. "It should not surprise you," he said, "that the Emperor wrote to me, as a man to another man. But it may surprise you to know that God has just spoken to me!" With solemn ceremonies, the legate handed Antao the imperial scroll. He broke the seal and unrolled the papyrus. But he was not skilled in the art of reading and he gave the document to Macarius, so that he could interpret its contents. "The Emperor," said Macarius, "has learned of your holy life and asks you to advise him how he may live and govern in the true spirit of Our Lord. He asks you to send him your reply and send him your blessing." Antony, unfamiliar with the art of writing, entrusted Macarius with the task of tracing his answer on the back of the papyrus. As for that answer,knew no hesitation. Sure, as few others had been, of what life in the Lord's spirit should be like, he dictated without a pause: "Practice humility and despise the world, and remember that in the day of judgment you shall render an account of all your actions."
While the Emperor's emissaries bowed deeply and engaged in the prescribed farewell ceremonies, Antony crossed them and retired again into his cave. The legacy returned, taking to the emperor of the world the rigorous advice that the saint of renunciation had given him.
Before long, the humble oasis of Meiamum became a thriving tourist center. The simple mud huts were turned into inns and the villagers became water carriers, merchants and guides through the labyrinth of cliffs to Mount Pispir and its hamlet of anchorites. For since the emperor of the Christians had sent his emissaries to ask the desert saint's counsel and his blessing, the nature of travelers, who stopped at Meiamum to inquire of the village of hermits, had changed. They were no longer exclusively pilgrims, steeped in burel, but more and more often noble and wealthy Christians, who came to imitate the example set by the emperor and ask Father Antao to cast his blessing on his secular affairs. In the beginning, these men arrived,mainly from Alexandria and the nearby Egyptian cities, but after a time there appeared among them others who had come from Syria and even farther away from Italy. At times entire delegations, such as those from the municipalities of Ravenna and Milan, stopped at Meiamum on their way to see the famous desert saint.
There in the cistern, each new arrival was rigorously interrogated by Macarius, Antao's disciple. "Why have you come here?
What do you want?" If the newcomer was a pilgrim dressed in burel, eager to stay and find refuge in that realm of renunciation of the world and worldliness, Macário would escort him along the steep path to the Padre's cave, which taught him the pleasant way of life. bye. And the password word was "Jerusalem!"
But if the man was a mere tourist, one of those who appeared at the cistern with rich clothes and full bags tied to his belt, desiring to obtain from the saint his advice and his blessing in his worldly affairs, Macarius would take him first to his own cave. There he instructed him in the doctrine that Father Antao had summarized for the emperor of the world: "Practice humility, despise the world, and remember that in the day of judgment you will have to give an account of all your acts." Only then did he take him to the saint's cave. And the password was "Egyptian!"
Antony came out, raised his hand in blessing, and retreated again to his cave.
Despite this careful examination which Macarius was in charge of, the number of "Egyptians" continued to increase. They disturbed Antony in his divine contemplation. One day Macarius went up with a pilgrim and the password with which he announced his arrival was "Jerusalem!" No reply has been received. He entered the cave. It was empty.
At that very moment, the old hermit was far away, resting on a cliff from which he could see all of Thebaid.
He had walked an entire day, looking for a retreat where he could resume his life of solitude, unknown and peaceful. But wherever he went, he found the desert inhabited by world-weary anchorites. His kingdom had spread far into Thebaid and nowhere was there a place where he could hide from those who sought him.
The night came and went. New dawn shone and he still couldn't decide which path to take. Then he saw in the distance an immense cloud of sand, moving quickly towards him. When she came closer, she saw men armed with spears and sabers, riding camels and horses, and herds of goats and domesticated gazelles, amidst the cloud of dust. Spring had arrived and in spring the Bedouins were moving from the desert to distant lands along the coast in search of new pastures for their herds.
Antony decided to join those desert nomads. They didn't know, nor did they care to know who the old man was. But his fate and theirs converged in the distance. After the first day's journey, they reached a part of the desert that was still entirely uninhabited. There were long stretches with nothing but sand and beyond it rocks and ravines. For three days they traveled together through those desolate regions.
Antão's companions were pagans whom the desert had taught to walk thirsty and hungry. Antony was an ascetic who was thirsty and hungry because of his faith. They understood each other in their power of renunciation. The Bedouins were silent, because the desert had taught them to be silent. Antony was silent because he obeyed an inner command. They understood each other in not being silent. The pagan nomads, eternal emigrants, were closer to him than the wealthy Christians who lived in the mansions of the world.
Together they crossed the central expanse of the Arabian desert. Then Antony and his companions crossed the plain of Baccarat. In the distance, on their right, they passed Mount Colzin, at whose feet, many centuries into the future, the city of Suez would lie. They arrived to rest on a plateau, where they found a fountain and some stunted palm trees with ripe fruit. From there they could see the coastline and beyond the ocean the peaks of Mount Sinai. The Bedouins still had a day's journey to reach the green pastures on the shore of the Red Sea. But Antony had reached his destination. Near the fountain there was a cave and in it he could live his life of absolute seclusion.
There he remained for twenty years. Twenty years of quiet worship, which for him were an eternal moment of blessed absorption in Christ and God. But for his fellow Christians out there in the world, these same twenty years were a vexing succession of theological quarrels over the correct definition of the concept of God and the divinity of Christ.
Since Constantine's conversion, Christianity has no longer been a persecuted sect. It was now a powerful religion, and Christians had many different problems to face. As the most pressing of the tasks of fortifying his church was the formulation of a definitive dogma; only this could guarantee the universal spread and permanence of his faith. The result was a bitter controversy over the nature of Christ. Basically, this was the question: one should consider the Lord, whose initials now adorned the shields of the Emperor's legions and whose Martyrdom Cross appeared with symbolic grandeur in the market squares of cities and towns, as a God who had assumed human form, or simply as a man who had attained an almost divine perfection?
The conflict was one of fatal consequences and his decision formed the dogma that has remained the foundation of the established Church ever since.
To the pagan Greeks, with its rational clarity, the Christian doctrine of the identity of God the Father and God the Son· had always seemed "strange folly." Even among Greek Christianity, some of these. doubts survived. So Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria, tried to make the Christian faith more readily accessible to the skeptical and speculative spirit of the Greeks. It replaced the unfathomable mystery in rational terms. Relying on the authority of certain passages of Scripture, he insisted that God alone was uncreated and eternal, and concluded from this that Christ must be a creature of God and, as such, subject to the laws of instability and transition. With this dogma. halfway to human reason, Arius conquered the philosophically trained Greeks of Alexandria, as well as, later, through the skillful popularization of his sermons,large masses of the common people.
Alexander, the Orthodox Archbishop of Alexandria, regarded Arius' innovation as a dangerous heresy. He ordered the elder to cease spreading his doctrine, and when Arius refused to obey Alexander excommunicated him.
Arius reacted with clear rebellion. He asked many of the most influential bishops of the Eastern Church - among them Eusebius, the bishop of the imperial seat of Nicomedia - to examine his teachings and was able to secure their sanction and support. Thus the excommunicated priest came to become the head of a considerable faction, a dangerous adversary of Orthodox Christendom.
In this crisis, the traditional doctrine was vigorously maintained by the young deacon Athanasius. His eloquence had the same power of fascination as that of Arius, and through it he managed to impart new vigor and vitality to the doctrine of the identity of God and Christ. In support of his controversy that God the Father and God the Son were one, he quoted Christ's own words: "I and my Father are one."
Soon the passionate controversy between Arius and Athanasius spilled over into the diocese of Alexandria. Bishops and priests from Syria to Italy, from Spain to the shores of the Black Sea, were vehement supporters for or against one cause or another. However, not only theologians, but the masses and classes, the entire population, took part in the dispute. High imperial dignitaries as well as lower extraction sailors, laborers, as well as parasitic idlers were involved in it. So great was the excitement that real revolt broke out in the city of Alexandria itself. Soon the whole of Christendom was divided into two opposing camps, and the problem of the identity of God and Christ had become a political problem, affecting the entire empire. The emperor himself had to get his hands on the case,trying to mediate between the fighting factions.
At heart Constantine was still really a heathen, and at first the whole conflict seemed to him a pedantic brawl of theologians. His power, however, as head, was largely dependent on his Christian supporters and so he was determined to preserve the unity of the Church at all costs. His attempt at mediation, sending a delegate to Alexandria, failed, and in 325 he called a general council, to be held at Nicaea, near the imperial seat of Nicomedia, where a comprehensive and unitive creed was to be formulated.
Three hundred bishops, from all over the world, attended the summons of the emperor. They came from Egypt and Asia Minor, Africa, Spain and Italy, the mountains of the Caucasus, Armenia and Persia. They came by ship, across the Askan Sea, or by land, on horseback, by donkey, by mule, accompanied by priests and slaves.
The emperor employed all the pomp of his sovereignty to provide a worthy seat for this first great council of the Church. Court officials - until recently mortal persecutors of the Christians - were on festive service, and the weapons of the legionaries - used not long ago in vicious attempts to suppress the Christian faith - were raised to greet the arriving guests. In a solemn procession, the imperial guard escorted the bishops to the palace.
The council itself, with its sharp contrasts, was an event such as the world had never seen. In the hall of assembly a magnificent altar had been erected, and before it the emperor was seated on a throne of gold. From there he presided, in his robe of purple, heavy silk, embroidered with precious stones. The dignity of his bearing, the restraint of his countenance, were majesty incarnate. But at his feet, farther down the hall, the bishops with their passionate disputes offered a spectacle of turbulent discord. Most of them still bore the marks of the martyrdom they had suffered. With bodies mutilated, scalded, burned or blinded by their oppressors, they were now engaged in a struggle for the truth of their doctrine. "Christ is a man!" "Christ is God!"
"Truth is reason!" "The truth is a mystery!" "The Scripture proves that there is only one God!" "The Scripture proves that Christ is God!"
The bishops fought in Greek. The emperor spoke only Latin, but he saw the excited disputers and the amount of his words was summarized for him by an interpreter. It was difficult for him to grasp the cause of all the noise. The problem as such left him cold. He wanted an agreement, and this he had said in the appeal he had addressed in Latin to the bishops in assembly.
To satisfy the emperor's desire, the bishops tried to establish a definition of Christ that could prove acceptable to all. "Homo-ousion", suggested one of the Orthodox chiefs, "equal in essence". "Homoi-ousion", corrected one of the Aryan bishops, "similar in essence". The only difference was dum i, the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet. With renewed fury contention flared up again over the correct definition of Christ and over the i, which should or should not be in it.
"
What are they arguing about now?" asked the emperor, whose patience was greatly exhausted. "About a letter!" replied the interpreter. But the contestants knew that the hi, which separated them, was also a separation from heaven and of the earth, of God and of man.
Constantine grew tired of the endless debate and pressed for a decision.
When the vows were cast, "homo-ousion" triumphed over "homoi-ousion", Athanasius over Arius, Christ God over Christ the Man, mystery over reason. Two hundred and twenty bishops signed the essence identity creed. Those who refused were branded as heretics and the Church's anathema was thrown against them.
By imperial decree the decision of the council became binding law throughout the empire.
Apparently, the unity of the Church had been restored. But the decision of the council and the anathema of the Church were not enough in themselves to eradicate the heresy of reason. She was banned from the market square, but lived behind closed doors, in secret conversation and confidential letters.
The defeat at Nicaea spurred Ario to fight with greater determination. He was a born organizer and knew how to get in touch with his hidden supporters, both East and West, in ladies' alcoves and galleys, in episcopal mansions and tents. He knew how to make use of both the ways of the population and the intrigues of the court. He was well aware of the impression made by the simple platitudes and publicity value of popular melodies, and he managed to fit his doctrine into a song, with all the marks of a direct allusion.
From the pulpits the Nicene Creed was proclaimed, the mystery of the divinity of Christ; but the crowds in the street hummed the song of the Aryan heresy: "Christ was only a man!" And more and more casually, the rebellious song of the street crowds was heard in homes, at private meetings, or at banquets in Nicomedia.
An imperial law made it an offense, punishable by punishment, to adhere to Aryan doctrine. But the emperor's sister Constance, Nicomedia's courtiers, and even Eusebius, the bishop of the imperial seat, were Arius' sympathizers. And before long, the exiled Aryan bishops were back in their sees, and the Athanasian bishops incurred in disfavor. So it came to pass that the heresy "was protected and kept within the fold that had condemned it."
The pressure which the Arians might come to bear was increasing, and the emperor, at whose request Arius had been exiled, was now urging his reintegration into the Church. Athanasius, who had been made Archbishop of Alexandria in fulfillment of the last wishes of his predecessor Alexander, rejected the Emperor's recommendation. Then came his turn to be sent into exile. After Constantine's death, he returned to the episcopal see and the city gave him an enthusiastic welcome. All of Alexandria was sparkling with lights and the road from the harbor to her palace covered in precious rugs.
But with the carpets removed from the streets and the lights turned off, the returning bishop gazed at his city in ordinary daylight. He then noted, with great disgust, that heretical doctrine had taken advantage of his absence, had gained access to the very heart of its domain, clandestinely here, in lamentable confession there, and, in the end, even in open rebellion. When he preached from his pulpit, he was no longer addressing a flock united in faith. The congregation of believers was interspersed with Aryan opponents who did their best to interrupt the sermon. Divine revelation was contested on the strength of doctrines of reason, and the house of the Lord was like a forum for public debate.
Across the West, and also in large parts of the East, the Aryans had gained strength. Now Egypt, the last remaining stronghold of the orthodox faith, was threatened with falling victim to heretical doctrine. But if Egypt fell, Christ would lose his last and strongest bastion.
With all the fervor of his faith, Athanasius tried to win back the deserters, but in his cold reason, the heretics remained unmoved. He could quote the Scriptures, or refer to the Fathers, but each proof was contradicted by another, each passage in the Bible - confronted with one that proved otherwise, and each argument of his elicited a counterargument from the others. By virtue of his episcopal power, Athanasius excommunicated the heretics, but they proudly carried their anathema, convinced that it was they who were struggling and suffering for the true faith.
At that time the Pope was not yet recognized as an infallible authority in matters of dogma. Christian emperors claimed the right to decide religious disputes within their realms.! And the new emperor, Constantius, son of Constantine, was a supporter of Arianism. There seemed to be a diabolical conspiracy all over the world against the deity of Christ.
But if the world could not help, the desert could.
In the desert there was a saint who had seen the deity of Christ.
Christ had spoken to him from a vision of supernatural light. Christ had--received him of His divine grace, had sent His angels to him, and delivered him from the demons of darkness.
It was a living testimony of the divinity of Christ. And it was to him that Athanasius appealed in this hour of need.
He chose his emissaries from among his most loyal supporters. On camels and mules, they set out on their mission. But the task before them, of finding the saint and bringing him to Alexandria, was far from easy. At last they reached the cistern on Mount Pispir and asked where the saint was, but received no answer. Since the day Macario had gone to see Antao and found his cave empty, he hadn't tried to accompany Padre. He knew and understood that Antony wanted to be alone with God. But now the Church was looking for him, because our Lord Jesus Christ himself was in danger, and Macarius and his companion and disciple Amanas were ready to fulfill the request of the bishop's delegates to help them in their difficult search.
1. The dogma of papal infallibility was only defined by Pius IX, by the Constitution "Pastor Aeternus". However, even before, it was always up to the Pope to give the final decision in matters of faith, as well as to summon councils and preside over them by his delegate. Regardless of any imperial authority, it fell to Peter to convene the First Council of Jerusalem, as narrated in the ACTS OF THE APOSTLES in c. XIV, vers. 6 and sec. (No. of T.)
They traveled from Mount Pispir to Thebaid. The men who lived there were hermits in their caves and neither cave knew anything about the other. Again and again they passed through the oasis, but all their inquiries about a man who had gone out into the desert some twenty years ago were unsuccessful. There were no roads leading through that ocean of sand, and the tracks the caravans left behind were quickly covered by the piled up sand. The mountains in the deserts were a maze of rocks, cliffs and gorges. And here were the delegates looking for a man who had decided to live in isolation. It was a hopeless adventure. But they refused to give up hope. They had traveled for days without end. Their waterskins were empty. The desert wind blew clouds of dust and pillars of sand in their path.
Mirages eluded us. His energies were on the verge of giving way. But they didn't turn their backs. They traveled onward, farther and farther into the desert. They had to find him. And they found him.
The fact is that a Bedouin, whom they finally found, gave them the right information. He remembered that long ago, when he was still a boy and he had traveled with his father across the desert to find new pastures for his herds along the shores of the Red Sea, they had taken with them a silent old man, who had stayed behind. on a plateau of mountains. He led them to the place where they had left him.
"Jerusalem!" exclaimed Macarius. And the ninety-year-old saint came out of the cave, his snowy beard reaching to his feet. "The Church of the Lord wanted to speak to you, Father Antao."
When Antony found himself face to face with the emissaries of the Church, he was filled with awe and fell to his knees. Coma's pious farm boy was still alive in the old man. Ashamed of such humility, the visitors lifted it up and conveyed to it the reason for its mission. With all the prolixity of theological pedantry, they explained the unfortunate controversy that had broken out over the divinity of Christ. Macarius translated everything the delegates said into Greek, word for word, into Coptic.
For Antao, however, it remained Greek. It was difficult for him to understand what it all meant. "The Church calls you," interpreted Macarius, "that you may bear witness to the divinity of Christ."
Antony had remained an obedient son of the Church. The Church's requests were for him authentic orders from God. Just as he had once responded to the call to distribute his goods and go out into the desert, he was now ready to obey. But the language of the Church had changed since he had last heard it from the mouth of the village priest of Coma, and at first he could not fully understand what was expected of him. Bear witness to the deity of Christ? Wasn't that the same as being asked to testify that the sun was shining high in the sky? "Now!" he exclaimed. "Don't they see her?"
"The true Christians, yes, but the Arians..." And they explained to him the heresy of Arius, how the strife had started, and that many bishops and members of the clergy and even the Christian emperor had sided with Arius.
He couldn't understand that. But suddenly he remembered a vision he had once seen above the fountain. There was an altar there, in the bright daylight, and donkeys surrounded it, trying to tear it down. And when the delegates made another attempt to explain the difference between "homo-ousion" and "homoi-ousion" to him, he interrupted them, saying, "You don't need to go any further. I understand.
The donkeys are trying to tear down the altar. I will. ."
They helped the old man onto a camel and took the short road across the desert, via the Suez road, to Alexandria.
One spring morning in the year 338 they arrived at the gates of the city. Supported by his disciples, Antony entered Alexandria. The boisterous crowd was filled with reverence, in view of his majestic appearance, and made way for him and his attendants. No messenger had announced Antony's arrival; no solemn reception had been prepared; but his mere presence commanded respect and forced the crowd to retreat to one side, making a wing in his path, in the silent solemnity of a spontaneous welcome. He was a saint who walked the streets of Alexandria.
The merchants closed their tents, the arms of the scales were locked, the blacksmiths, potters and moneylenders closed their stalls, the bakers did not make bread, the butchers did not cut meat, in the port both fish and valuable cargo were dropped on the hulls of ships, the taverns were deserted, the stoves in the kitchens went out, the women forgot the dust and the carmine, the rich didn't think about their purses, and from all the houses people poured into the street, because no one wanted to miss the spectacle of passage of a saint. The sumptuous pomp of Alexandria was forgotten. The city gave the appearance of a place of fasting and penance.
Diante das portas da basílica, centenas de cristãos. bem como de pagãos, judeus e heréticos, tinham-se reunido cedo, pela manhã, todos esperando ouvir as palavras que o santo iria pronunciar. O arcebispo tinha planejado celebrar o santo ofício na manhã seguinte, mas a multidão impaciente persuadiu-o a fazê-lo na noite daquele mesmo dia. Não havia tempo para ornamentar a basílica. Estava fracamente iluminada por umas poucas velas. O trono do arcebispo, reservado para o santo hóspede, estava posto no semicírculo da abside, perto do altar. Ali sentou-se Antão com seu traje de burel branco, com o clero à sua esquerda, trajado com pompa eclesiástica.
The archbishop, wearing the white canopy as a sign of his pontifical power, climbed to the pulpit. After a short prayer, he read excerpts from the Apostles and Prophets. Then came the sermon. "We believe - he said - in one God, Father Almighty, creator of all things visible and invisible. And in our Lord Jesus Christ son of God, who was begotten by the Father, who is of the substance of the Father, God of God , Light of Light, true God of true God, begotten, not made, of the same substance with the Father, by whom all that is in heaven and on earth was made, who for us men and for our salvation came down to earth and became he became flesh, became man, suffered and rose again on the third day..."
A voice from the crowd protested. Antony was startled at this unseemly interruption of the religious ceremony, and turned to Macarius to find out what the voice had said.
"The Lord - Macarius translated - was but a man, created by God and subject to death and transition."
Antony rose. Its lofty bearing stood erect beside the altar. The columns along Alexandria's thoroughfares were no more straight than the nonagenarian saint. The ears of the crowd were attentive as one ear, the eyes looked as one eye, electrified by the imposing figure of the saint.
"I saw Him!" he exclaimed.
It was the voice of a man to whom the supernatural truth of Christ had become real through direct experience and vision. There was a decisive tone in that voice that could not be shaken by any speculation or counterargument. No reasoning, no contradiction could touch the words of the saint. A shiver ran through the ships: "He saw Him! He saw the Lord Himself!"
And without waiting for the Archbishop's signal, the crowd fell to their knees and into fervent prayers. The spirit had taken possession of it, as in the times of the first apostolic communities. And while the crowd remained in the ecstasy of that service, the bishop went up to the altar and celebrated the holy rite at the table of the Lord. High above, the choir sang and the people replied, "For His mercy endures forever."
At the altar, the curtains of the tabernacle were opened and the people pressed forward, pressing together, to participate in the holy communion. And heretics also came in great numbers, repentant and ready to abjure their false doctrine, in order to be deemed worthy of partaking of the sacrament again.
Times had changed since Antony's last visit to Alexandria. The next morning, the governor appeared before him and asked him, "Father, we need you! Stay with us and continue your ministry among men!"
But Antao's task was accomplished and he replied: "Fish, out of water, dies; so do monks who keep men of the world: they deviate from their vow of stillness. Therefore, so must the fish hasten to enter the water, we must hurry back to the mountain."
When Antony left for the desert, the sick in their beds and the children in their cradles were carried to him in the street so that he could cast his blessing upon them. Athanasius accompanied Antao to the city gates. There he took off his episcopal robe and gave it to the saint to take him back to the desert, as a sign of the Church's gratitude.
A fé no Cristo Eterno, como fora professada por Antão em Alexandria, estava destinada a tornar-se o credo dominante da Cristandade. No momento, porém, formidáveis obstáculos permaneciam no caminho duma vitória ortodoxa final. Imperadores arianos perseguiam a verdadeira fé com todo o seu poder e força, e o próprio Atanásio foi enviado três vezes a exílio. Os povos jovens do Norte, entre eles os vândalos e godos, que invadiram o império com forças indomáveis, abraçaram oCristianismo, sob sua forma ariana. Mas por fim, nenhuma interferência mundana, nenhuma perseguição brutal pôde quebrar a fé em Cristo Deus. Os grandes Padres das eras que se seguiram, inclusive Ambrósio e Agostinho, professaram-na e, finalmen te, sob o imperador Teodósio, o mesmo fez todo o império cristão.
"Christianity itself was then at stake," Carlyle said of the time of the Aryan strife. "If the Aryans had won, Christianity would have been reduced to mere legend."
And indeed, if at that time the Aryan Christ had vanquished the Son of God, His sublime teaching might have been reduced to merely one of those ethical doctrines, which pass so quickly, with the changing standards of morality. Only one God could keep His place in the hearts of men for nearly two thousand years and exercise His redemptive power, which today, as in ancient times, brings relief and blessing to the faithful. And it is not just the Catholic Church that rests on the dogma of the divinity of Christ. The same assurance that God appeared in human form gave the Lutheran message its manly strength.
If Christ had been simply a man, the joyous joy of the Christian faith could not have been born. There would be no resurrection, no miracle of the Holy Spirit, no grace, neither. sacrament, nor redemption. There would be no merciful Mother of God, there would be no Christmas, there would be no Easter.
The arid concepts of Aryan rationalism could never have engendered the immortal masterpieces of Christian art. It was the census of Christ that inspired the movement to heaven of the heavy masses of stone, rising on pilasters and columns, and the arches, arches and vaults of Gothic churches and cathedrals. the earthly suffering of a God radiates from the arcler colors of the mosaic rivers in Ravenna. The redemptive power of the Son of God is praised on the Van Eyck altar panels in Ghent. The blessed knowledge that a God lived on earth guided Fra Angelico's seraphic brush. And all his angels, as well as the loving Madonnas of Memling, Raphael, Murillo, the crucifixions, pieties, ascensions of Dürer, Grünewald and all the great painters and sculptors, the entire miracle of color, line and form of Christian art, in Western,they sprung exclusively from the most fervent absorption in knowledge through faith. El Greco, the visionary saint, used his genius to show the supernatural light in which the Lord appeared to St. Anthony and other great saints. And finally, faith in the Redeemer inspired the works of Dante, Dostoevsky, and many others, enabling them to occupy the high place they hold for us today in the realm of letters.
The little rattle that Ario invented is forgotten. But the great music of Christ the Redeemer will sound through all eternity. If the time comes when His Church no longer exists, the music that faith in Him gave rise to will continue to proclaim His Truth, to spread joy over the earth, until the day of Judgment. In all the hundreds and hundreds of works by João Sebastião Bach, in all his cantatas, masses, passions, hymns, the prayer of someone whose faith is deeply rooted in the scene's trust in God the Redeemer is voiced. It is him that Bach praises in his fugues, recitatives, arias and choirs of the Passion according to St. Matthew and in the Mass in B minor. In Handel's Oratory, a solo voice rejoices: "I know my Redeemer lives!"In Beethoven's Missa Solemnis there is the powerful motif of "Et incanzat us est!" "God incarnate" became an eternal truth. One thousand six hundred years earlier, St. Anthony had given witness to this in the basilica of Alexandria.
After Antony returned from Alexandria to the desert, his solitary life was interrupted only once more. This happened when he went to see S. Paulo de Tebas. A pious young man of noble lineage, Paul had fled into the desert in the year 250, planning to hide there during the period of Decius' persecutions. But after the persecutions, he could not make up his mind to return to the world.
Since the age of twenty-one, he had never laid eyes on any man or woman. No news about him had reached the outside world. His life had taken place in silent isolation.
When Antony visited him in 342, Paul had spent ninety years in the desert and was 113 years old. At that time, Antao himself was over ninety. Since his departure from Mount Pispir, it was the fourth time he had left his solitude. Three times he had descended from his height to respond to a call for help from men. This time, however, he left his cave at the request of God, to go to meet a holy man, a man of his own kind and older than himself in his pious renunciation.
The chronicles describe his descent among men; his ascent to Paul, the oldest saint in the desert, is described in a legend.
St. Jerome, for whom legend was the highest form of truth with which to relate this great meeting, transmitted it to posterity.
Antony's journey took him along a range of mountains through the desert, from one desolate cave to one even more desolate. But the legend raises Antao's journey to a sphere where supernatural things occur, where reality humbly walks by and where reason remains silent.
Monsters, half-man, half-animal, guided him through the wild regions. On the third morning, he saw, in the light of dawn, a wolf, half-dead with thirst, disappear into a cave.
Antao accompanied him on the trail, as he was certain he had hit his target. When he reached the mouth of the cave, he called: "You who admit the entrance of the beasts of the desert, ye shall not deny it to a son of men! I have been looking. I have found it! Now I ask to be received."
At these words, St. Paulo left the cave with the wolf. The two men greeted each other, calling each other by their own names, which had been communicated to them by God Himself. The Lord had promised Paul to send Antony, before calling him to Himself, so that once more he could speak, human to another human being, after nine decades of silence and solitude. The two elderly Saints talked about the things of eternity.
Only once were they interrupted. A crow came flying towards them. He had a loaf in his mouth and placed it before them. "Look! - said Paul - God sends us our food. For sixty years I have received half a loaf every day; but at your arrival, Christ has doubled the ration of His soldiers."
After the meal, both spent the night in prayer. Paul knew it was his last prayer on earth, for he was aware that Antony's visit heralded his departure from this world. The time had come for his return to God. To spare his visitor the spectacle of his death, he asked Antony to return to his cave and bring him the Church robe he had received from Athanasius. Antony satisfied his desire and hurried back to his cave. Three days of travel separated his cave from Paulo's. Long journey for such an old man! But Antao covered this distance with the speed of a little bird.
When Antao arrived at the cave again, he found Paulo on his knees, praying. He also knelt down to pray. Later he realized, by the rigidity of Paulo's body, that he was a dead man who was there on his knees, in the attitude of prayer.
Deeply mourning, Antony took the saint's body to prepare the place of his final rest. It had no tools to dig a grave. But as he circled the view, not knowing how to do it, he saw two lions walking towards him. A few steps ahead they stopped and with their claws began to dig a grave.
Antony deposited his body in it and covered it with the Church's mantle.
Then he knelt beside the grave to mourn the death of St. Paulo.
And he heard the echo of his voice multiplied in a great chorus of lamentation, and when he looked up he saw all the beasts of the desert gathered around the grave. They had come to mourn the loss of their friend.
Antao himself was awarded fourteen more years of life on earth.
The youth of Coma, who had so long followed the counsel of the Gospel and exchanged earthly goods and worldly delights for want and seclusion in a cave, was a hundred years old. Pilgrims now arriving at the cave of the rigid ascetic met a kind old man, radiant with joy and serenity.
His visitors often arrived with sadness in their hearts; perhaps they suffered some illness or were entangled in the cares of the world. But just seeing him changed sadness to joy, cured illness, and soothed the spirits of those oppressed by worldly cares. As for the many people who came to ask him for advice, he welcomed them, and a single word of kindness from him was enough. The clouds broke and all darkness and confusion disappeared.
A man from Alexandria reported, on returning from a visit to the saint in the desert, that while he was waiting in front of the cave's dark entrance, he had suddenly realized that the darkness of the cave was actually a radiant glow and that the cave looked like a vault filled with light. supernatural. When the saint left, it was as if a body of light emerged from a mass of formless splendor.
The man, whose entire being shone with such comfort and relief, had spent eighty years in the desert. Its radiation was the result of severe renunciation; his wisdom had matured in quiet seclusion, far from the world; the treasures of his soul had won through terrible hardships. He, who had forsaken the life of the world, had gained an abundance of life. In it is revealed the eternal truth of one of the secrets of human existence: the fullest and deepest energies can only be released through solitude and renunciation.
The fear of God had driven Antony to leave the world, and the fear of God had made him the strict master of his body and soul. But when he reached his hundredth year, the fear of God had turned to love, and denial became triumphant yes! Now Antony could say, "I don't fear God. I love Him. And love chases away fear." What he had hitherto achieved through the fear of God, love now gave him in abundance.
As a message of joy, he delivered it to his disciples, He, who had fasted during his life, now taught that love is worth more than fasting. He, who had mortified his body for eighty years, advised those who followed him: "Feed well, for when the bow is too stretched it breaks!"
Obeying the Lord, with fear and veneration, Antony had left his retreat on Mount Pispir to go to men; he had answered their call by going to Alexandria. But each time he had fulfilled this duty, he had hurried back to the solitude of his cave. It was far removed from his fellow men that he sought to serve the Lord. But now, in his love for God, he saw in every created thing a revelation of the Lord, and his work among men became for him a devotion as deep as his prayers in a lonely cave. In the love of God he had learned to love men. He was not afraid that, because of men, he would come to neglect the Lord, and so he listened to them with all patience. Nothing and no one was too insignificant and even the most fragile vessels and those who had fallen from grace could still be certain of his love.
Down in the desert, groups of hermits had meanwhile formed monastic communities. One day, one of them went to visit Antao. His brothers had cast him out because he had fallen victim to all sorts of temptations. Antao helped him and sent him back to be reinstated. But he appeared once more before Antao, complaining: "They refuse to accept me, Father!" And again Antao sent him back, charging him with the following message: "A ship sank at sea and lost all the cargo it was carrying, and with great effort the empty ship managed to reach land at last. It is your wish to sink the ship who came back safe from the sea?" And the brothers took him back, giving him the place he once had among them.
While living in the fear of the Lord; Antony had seen the desert full of demons. Now he loved God, and the desert became a revelation of the Creator, for he saw him through the eyes of the one who loves. For hours, for days on end, he would sit in front of his cave, deep in contemplation of the desert panorama that lay below. Nature became the first book the illiterate saint could read. Great thoughts, the thoughts of God, were inscribed in rock and sand, cloud and palm. And as he sat there watching, the same deep devotion he felt when he was on his knees praying inside the cave filled his soul, for the greatness of God was the same within and without, and the same piety invaded his prayer and his contemplation of the nature.
A wise man from Alexandria, who spent his days in solitude, absorbed in reading books, hoping to learn the ultimate meaning of things, heard of the wise hermit and went to see him. "I understand," said the philosopher to Antao, that a man would prefer to live without other men, but I cannot understand how it is possible to live in seclusion, without the comfort of books." But Antony replied, "My book is the world of all created things, and when I want to read God's words in it, I find it open before me."
While he lived in the fear of God, Antao had spent his time, in moments not taken by prayer, in weaving your wrath, for he had learned from the honest old man in Coma that work can serve to dispel temptation. But now: that fear had changed into love, everything, including her work, became an expression of love.
One morning, when he was over a hundred years old, Antony went to the fountain to refresh his parched lips. Suddenly he understood that the water he was drinking was a divine message of blessing and fertility. The water was the living water of God. A sip from her changed him. And when he returned to his cave, the message it contained invaded all his thoughts. He did not walk through sterile tracts of rock and sand. He walked on the land of God.
And when he looked down, he saw that the barren ground had shifted into fertile acres by the magic of the living water. He walked and the ground was covered with green shoots, leaves flung in the air, and with each step he advanced the stalks grew, ripening into spikes of rich grain. As he had done so many years before, as a young farmer, Antao would stop and feel the stalks with his hands as if assessing the coming harvest. And when he returned to his cave, he entered her darkness leaving behind him the splendor of a field of ripe wheat. The one who knelt to pray was an old anchorite, but in him beat the heart of a young farmer, who gave thanks for the gifts of the land.
The wheat field in front of the cave was just a vision. A wide expanse of sand strewn with boulders awaited Antony when he again left. But in that vision, the Lord had expressed His will with a comparison and a metaphor. "Plow my land!" said He. And Antony acted according to his vision. His hands were eager to obey as they were commanded now to sow and reap.
From some of the pilgrims Antony obtained the most essential instruments and a few handfuls of seeds. He dug a hole near the fountain. The fountain filled it. With his shovel, he dug furrows lengthwise and perpendicular to the desert floor. The water accompanied it.
He built dams around it, and the water flooded the place he had marked out as his field, soaking its sun-dried crusts. The arid desert soil was changed to moist, fertile loam. Antony took his seeds and sowed them widely. And after a while, the leaves began to sprout and the stalks grew and sprouted grain. What had been a vision had come true. The desert flourished. When the time came, Antao gathered his harvest, separated the grain from the straw, ground it between two stones, made a dough out of it, took a spark from flint, blew a fire—and on the heated rock he baked his first loaf.
Two lone hands had performed this miracle, had turned the desert plateau into fertile acres. Hands used to praying plunged the shovel into the ground, dug, sowed and harvested the harvest. A man used to prayer had turned the barren wastes into a wheat field, for the prayer of the one who had lived in the fear of the Lord had changed, through love, into the prayer creating work.
With this experience of the miracle of growth and fertility, a new form of piety broke out in Antony, the piety of sharing in the greatness of God. And at harvest time, it was as if the land was uttering an amen full of gratitude!
With its fertile fields, Antao wrote his name in the book of creation. It was the signature of a saintly farmer. The farmer of Coma had attained perfection as a farmer of God.
As such, his last visitors find him: as a farmer of God, a saint who sowed and watered, gathered the harvest and baked his bread. And this farmer hermit, though an old man, still had the unshakable vigor and freshness of youth; his body was erect, his step springy, his eyes clear and piercing, and a. powerful and resonant voice. He had turned a hundred and three years old and had retained his virility so young after a lifetime of privation and mortification of the flesh, exposed to the scorching sun and the merciless desert winds and all manner and kinds of temperature.
His visitors looked to that youthful vigor as evidence of God's miraculous intervention. It was, however, a miracle that fitted perfectly with the results of modern investigations. The statistical tables of the American scientist TS Young, for example, demonstrate that people who enjoyed exceptionally long lives were, on the whole, used to a frugal way of existence. And Professor Raimundo Pearl of Johns Hopkins Hospital, one of the best-known experts on longevity issues, summed up his findings in the statement that "the march of our life is the pacemaker of its duration!"
In full possession of his vigor at the age of one hundred and five, Antony was finally caught up in death. No illness, no decline in vitality heralded the coming of the end; but one day, as he was working in his field, mower in hand, ready to cut the harvest, the voice of God informed him that this must be the last harvest he would ever harvest.
In this way a strange and wonderful life had come to an end, a life from which eighty years had been spent in absolute solitude. Viewed from the point of view of our time, which knows only a feverish haste and a yawning emptiness - it is almost inconceivable that a man could have spent such a long period of time in rigorous confinement, let alone satisfied with it.
But for Antony a hundred years of life with God was just one day of eternity. There is something akin to this in the most modern scientific conception of the phenomenon of time Since Bergson it is no longer obvious that time should be measured with mathematical accuracy, as if it were just an external and absolute event. It became necessary to consider it as an internal and psychological factor as well.
Thus considered, its progress does not depend on clocks and souls, as it conquers permanence according to the intensity of man's interior life. Its units are "soul years".
When Antony felt that his last hour was approaching, he sent his favorite disciples, Macarius and Amanas, to his sons of the desert with the message that those who wished to see him once more would hurry yet to come. When they arrived, they were more than he expected. For all the inhabitants of the desert had come: the hermits from their far rocks; the Nile cenobites, already gathered in groups, under the direction of an abbot; the anchorites of the Nitrio Desert and those of the Desert of Esquetis, who lived in impervious regions and had no other guide but the stars. Bearded old men and teenagers, palm branches in their hands, with the sign of the cross on their chests. It was an army of pilgrims but they had not come to march before a general who would review his troops;they had come because a loving father wanted to say goodbye to his devoted children. He walked along their ranks, blessed them and asked them to persevere in their habits of devotion to God; and when he came to someone who had a question or a final request to make, he would listen patiently and respond with all sympathy and good advice.
In weight and quantity, the bread that Antao had prepared was sufficient for only a few of the visitors. But it satisfied them all, as in the time of the miracle of the seven loaves of the Lord. When the feast of love ended in the desert, the innkeeper retired to his cave, for his last hour had come. Again he prayed fervently and, turning to his disciples Macarius and Amanas, said, "The Lord is calling me."
He asked to be buried in a place without any sign or symbol, as he wanted his body to belong to the earth and not to men.
Antony died on January 17, in the year 856 of Our Lord.
He had at last found his last resting place; no one knew where, when the next spring the earth around his cave began to turn green again, when the grain had grown and was soon ready to be harvested again.
But also the seed that Antony had sown by the example of his ascetic life would soon sprout and bear fruit. The desert was its native abode, but it spread and spread, grew and matured throughout the world and through the centuries. For the time would come when colonies of hermits in caves and tombs and ruins would become fortress-like convents and monasteries of the Middle Ages.
Antao's abandonment of the world inspired the monastic movement of later centuries. It had its starting point in the negative idea of renunciation and developed towards becoming a creative factor in the cultural life of subsequent times. Thus the name of Antao, the illiterate, was inscribed, thanks to the work that his example produced, in the cultural history of all mankind.
The earliest beginnings of the monastic form of life developed in the Egyptian desert while Antony was still among the living. One of his disciples, named Pachomius, had gathered a group of hermits on the lonely island of Tabenis on the Nile, organizing them, under his leadership, into a devotional community. At the time of Antony's death there were no fewer than nine or ten of these groups, each numbering about a thousand hermits. Another disciple of Antony, Hilarion, transplanted the seed of asceticism from the desert of Egypt to Palestine, where he founded numerous colonies of anchorites, living together, under the direction of a superior, in separate cell congregations, which came to be known as "lauras ". So Hilarion became the apostle of Eastern monasticism, for the "Lauras"they spread rapidly from Palestine to Syria, to Persia, Babylon and elsewhere, across the East.
For these first communities, a set of specific rules, the rules of chastity, poverty and obedience, which over time assumed the importance of basic vows for all forms of monasticism, was formulated by St. Basil the Great. who had begun his career as a pagan orator and, having dedicated himself to a life of Christian asceticism, came at last to occupy the episcopal seat of Caesarea.
The spread of monasticism in the West, where it would be of such lasting cultural significance, took place thanks to the effects of a book, Athanasius' Vita St. Antonii, one of those written documents whose impact has changed the face of the Earth. Athanasius was an admirer of Antao. Of the twenty years of his life in exile he had spent six as a hermit among hermits in the Egyptian desert, and when he came to write his account of the life of Antony he produced an account of the miracle of a lifetime devoted to Christ.
The first city shaken by the message contained in this book was precisely the most non-Christian in the new empire of Christendom: the city of Rome.
In Rome the old pagan faith had held, despite the fact that Christianity had been declared the official religion of the empire.
In the Senate powerful faction of pagans fought to protect their traditional rights. In Christian basilicas Christians prayed to Christ, but in pagan temples pagans continued to sacrifice to their pagan gods. While women and children were predominantly supporters of the new faith in the Christian Redeemer, their husbands and fathers remained faithful to the gods of the past. The social structure of Rome had not really been affected by Christian doctrine. The nobility, the patricians, and the rich continued their lives of abundance and luxury, made possible for them by the slaves and the poor they exploited and despised. And even Christians, whose Gospel taught a different way of life, could not escape the fascination of social conventions. All in Rome, pagans and Christians alike, lived in the excitement of luxury and worldly pleasures.It was the flight of a civilization haunted by the sense of its impending doom.
Men, infatuated with pride, always in search of better positions and more positions, thought of nothing but money and power. Women spent their time on lace and shirt sheets. Dressed in sumptuous costumes, with golden wigs on their heads, those powdered and painted dolls were transported in ivory litters, from banquet to banquet, from dance to dance, until, exhausted by the weight of their jewels, they sought the support of their slaves , to take them to their beds of leisure. Even Christian priests, who interpreted the Gospel in church, had succumbed to the temptations of this life. In elegant clothes, perfumed with strange perfumes, their hair carefully curled, their fingers loaded with rings, they went out bouncing on their tiptoes, visiting the palaces of their parishioners,greatly concerned not to stain the soft pelt of their shoes. A religion had triumphed, but not its spirit, and the conquerors, now powerful and wealthy themselves, had forgotten the doctrine of their Master, the Galileo, who had declared he had no earthly goods.
This was the world into which the book of Athanasius launched its story of the life of Santo Antao. It recounted the life of an Egyptian farmer, who had renounced the world and all its goods and pleasures, who had lived his life of devotion and deprivation in poverty, in order to be able to follow the true doctrine of Christ. It was in the shocking contrast between this ascetic way of life and the dissolute orgies of the Romans of that time that the Vita of Athanasius made such a deep and shattering impression on the conscience of Roman society.
A man in distant Egypt had set an example. And women in Rome, both pagan and Christian, were the first to enlist in an attempt to emulate the ascetic life of the desert saint.
Among them were descendants of the noblest families, the Julios and Marcelinos, the Gracos and Scipios. One by one, they freed their slaves, distributed their inherited fortunes, rejected splendid suitors, dressed like the poor, and vied with one another in leading lives of hardship and chastity as virgins and widows whose love belonged to the Lord. One after another, the palaces were converted into convents and monasteries. Soon men too were caught up in their enthusiastic example. Senators and consuls abandoned their offices and honors, exchanged their purple robes and the costly garments of their offices for humble burels, and lived the life of monks in poverty and devotion.
When St. Jerome arrived, as a young student, from his home in Dalmatia, in the city of Rome, where he wanted to complete his studies in law and theology, he found that life in that center of worldly pleasures was already profoundly affected by the ideals of Christian asceticism. and, before long, he, too, was entirely overwhelmed by the fascination of the new movement. He himself would, in a later period, spend considerable time as a hermit in the desert lands of Chalcis, but now, at the request of Marcela, a Roman nobleman, whose palace on the Aventine served as the headquarters of the monastic movement, he became the director and chief adviser of the ascetic circle of Rome.
The monastic movement spread from Rome to North Africa. It expanded into Gaul and throughout the western world. And as its sphere of influence extended, it gained strength until it was able to make its characteristic stamp in the centuries to come.
The same fear of God that had driven Antony, the father of the monastic movement, into the solitude of the desert, now inspired all those, and numerous, who repudiated their natural and human desires and refused to fulfill their elementary duties as members of a worldly society, who they exchanged their homes for caves in the desert or cells in convents and monasteries, they distributed their fortunes to live a life of want, they abandoned their friends and families to live in solitude, in conditions contrary to the instincts and habits of human nature, who renounced all requests to participate in social and civic activities in order to spend their days in prayer and devout practices.
The fear of God - which is the first call of the voice of conscience - induced those multitudes of men and women to turn their backs on a decadent society, which lay prostrate in its worldly wickedness. The fear of God encouraged them to withdraw their support from a state built on a system of exploitation of the poor and of injustices perpetrated by the rich. And that same fear of God produced those ghastly excesses of scourging and fasting, the accounts of which fill pages and pages in the history of early monasticism.
But a time has come, in the development of the monastic movement, just as in the life of Antony, when the fear of God was transformed into the love of God; and then the most glorious chapters of the monastic history of the following centuries were written.
What had started as an anti-social movement has now changed into an important social factor. The repudiation of worldliness engendered a new way of affirming life, and men and women, who abandoned their task in the world, became the creators of a new culture and a new form of society.
The importance of cultural strength, which radiated from convents and monasteries and had its earliest origins in desert caves, is attested to by the history of the early Middle Ages.
The intricate distinctions of position and dignity that engender the ruthless selfishness of worldly societies have lost all meaning in the humble caves and cells of anchorites, monks, and nuns, who regarded the poorest of the poor as their equals, as children of the same father, as united to them by a bond of universal brotherhood. Thanks to this ascetic self-renunciation, which had sprung from the love of God, half-dormant sympathies for the suffering of others awoke with ardent impetuosity, and passive commiseration became active in the form of practical help.
In caves and cells, where there were neither proud patrons nor despicable servants, a community of free workers came to form. Here, where each one lived by the work of his hands, work regained the noble position that had been consecrated to him by the prophets, farmers and workers, by the son of the carpenter of Nazareth and by the tentmaker of Tarsus. What piety demanded, the working hands were ready to do.
The power of a will, which had been honed in ascetic discipline, made it possible for anchorites, monks, and nuns to devise their plans of assistance to the needy on a scale so comprehensive that they may well be called the first great social workers. In the fourth century hermits in the Egyptian desert cultivated the arid desert soil with the sweat of their faces; they sowed and reaped and reduced their own meager ration, while sending whole loads by ship to Libya and Alexandria to feed the indigent there.
Our era is rightly proud of its welfare achievements, its hospitals, its homes for the old and the poor, but it should not forget that all these institutions owe their existence ultimately to ascetic men and women, who they worked in the fourth century of the Christian era. At that time, Fabiola, a Roman nobleman, belonging to the ascetic circle of St. Jerome, founded the first asylum for the poor in the city of Rome. And Basil, the monastic bishop of Caesarea, built another Caesarea outside the gates of his city for the sick and the poor, and erected the first hospitals there.
St. Athanasius, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine spoke of charity and work as "counsels of perfection", in a true monastic life. The spontaneous gesture of giving, in one sitting, an entire inherited fortune, was no longer enough in itself; continuous charity was required and work was seen as the instrument of that charity. But it was only through Benedict of Nursia, the first founder of a religious order in the West, that work and charity achieved the status of obligatory principles.
For the monks of Bento it was a duty to feed the poor, clothe the naked and care for the sick. In his rule, "Pray and labor, for laziness is the enemy of the soul," he intimately united spiritual absorption and manual labor in an identical piety.
Benedict would develop Antony's monasticism into the most powerful cultural institution in the West, but he began his career entirely in the spirit of the renunciative flight from the world, which had also animated the beginnings of his Egyptian precursor. The son of rich countrymen of Nursia, just like the son of rich farmers of Coma, broke all his worldly ties and took refuge in solitude. In the gorge of Subiaco he chose a cave in a sheer cliff, connected to the outside world by a simple canyon with extremely adventurous access. There he spent several years, practicing the most austere penance, until one day, attracted by his holy life, other men arrived, eager to be his disciples and to accept his direction in order to follow the example he had set.Benedict founded his first monastery for a first group of twelve disciples, and over time, as the number of his followers increased, eleven other monasteries, of which the famous Monte Cassino was the last and most important. Thus the first religious order in the West, the Order of the Benedictines, was formed. It would become of the utmost significance for the full development of European cultural life.
This magnificent institution had not been planned by the ascetic hermit in his cave of Subiac. He developed her as the head chosen by his companions, according to the spontaneous growth and progress of his work. The Order of the Benedictines, as the Cardinal said
Newman, was "a growth rather than a structure". Benedict was faced with the task of establishing a rule for a community of disciples. All the small requirements of daily life passed through the general rules, summarized in the famous Benedictine Rule, which became the basis of Western monasticism for the next four centuries. The Benedictine Rule provided relatively unstable monastic communities with the solid structure of an organized institution. The loose bonds that had held groups of pious individuals together were replaced by a permanent union, which only death could dissolve. Those who left their families in the world became members of a spiritual family of monks. Those who left their homes and homes in the changing world found in monasteries an unchanging home,a house of the spirit, which could never be lost. Those who renounced their world-centered work were placed by the rules in an organized pattern work, the product of which accumulated for a group and never for a single individual. Self-flagellation was replaced by self-discipline; the mortification of the body through devotion to work.
So when Bento once became aware of a certain hermit whose exaggerated asceticism had led him to chain himself to a rock, within his narrow cave; sent him this message concerning the new life of godliness: "Break the chains, for the true servant of God is bound, not to rocks by iron, but to righteousness by Christ."
In the Benedictine monasteries, both work and contemplation and worship were regulated by a strict scheme and each monk had his specific tasks. Brother woodcutter chopped wood, brother miller ground grain, brother farmer dug the ground, brother cook prepared food; the gardener brother worked in the garden and the monks in the workshops made utensils and instruments and all kinds of gear.
Scholastica, Bento's sister, who had followed her example and founded numerous convents, which she had placed under the same Benedictine Rule, ordered her nuns to spin, weave and make clothes.
Thanks to Bento's work rules, monasteries and convents became self-sufficient institutions, without any dependence on the outside world. And only this emancipation from the need to ask for and accept what others had to offer could engender the capacity to give and help, in a spirit of complete disinterest, on which Christian charity is based. Only the planned cultivation of the fields, the planned production in the workshops, could provide the permanent excess of food and supplies, which guaranteed the effectiveness of Benedictine alms.
The place of sporadic charity was taken by the organized work of social assistance. For what was done by those Benedictine monks, in monasteries far away in space, in ages separated by centuries, everything formed a single whole, by virtue of the structure of the order, in a great and total achievement. It went beyond the limits of individual monasteries, it extended beyond reckoning the living space of individual monks. The individual Benedictine did not care that he could finish the work he had begun, that he could live to see the harvest of the seeds he had sown. Those who came after him would continue the same kind of work and complete it. It was only the certainty that the order would last that made it possible for the Benedictines to conceive of their vast plans that it gave them, the courage to embark on an adventure that no monk,which no generation of monks and which no monastery could ever hope to accomplish.
The glory of Benedictine achievements can only be appreciated against the dark backdrop of time. Benedict was born in 480, shortly after the fall of the last Roman emperors. His life, his work and the great achievements of his order coincide in time with the migration of peoples, which marked the end of ancient civilization. The Mediterranean world lies ravaged in the wake of fighting armies such as those of the Eastern Roman general Belisarius and the invading Goths, Vandals and Lombards. The prevailing mood was one of imminent destruction. The cities were destroyed, Rome itself lay in ruins, the rural districts were depopulated. War, famine, poverty were the scourges of the land.
And then, in the midst of a decaying old world, the new world of the Middle Ages arose in the reclusive monasteries of the Benedictine monks. These monks, who had withdrawn from the chaos of the time to live in cloistered solitude their lives of calm serenity, had discovered the path that led to a new beginning. While out in the world hordes obsessed with warlike passions without reason or sense destroyed the lives of men and the produce of their labor, the monks kept away from worldly passions and quietly kept working to build anew. His charity was immune from partisan hatred and prejudice and welcomed anyone who arrived, solicitous of help and comfort. Where turbulent hordes of war had ravaged the fields, quiet monks moved to dig the ground again.And in the midst of chaos and devastation they tended their flower gardens and fruitful grain fields. What Alaric and Attila had halved and ruined, the industrious monks patiently began to rebuild. In a war-torn world, they were building new bridges and opening new roads.
In the course of time their example inspired men and women outside the cloister walls as well. Wherever monks were seen digging and plowing, devoted to their work as a new form of worship, godly men and women of all classes in the lay world volunteered to take part in the great work of reconstruction. And as the spirit of this new piety of work invaded entire districts of the earth, the rehabilitated fields stretched farther and farther into the countryside, and more and more men and women returned to their work in the workshops and on the farms. They found their way back to a constructive life, and St. Benedict's Rules, written for monks, had become a message of hope to the world at large.
Very early on, Benedictine monasteries became focal points in the task of reconstruction. All those in whose hearts the desire to build and preserve was still inflamed, all those who longed to be freed from destruction and decay, retreated to the monasteries and submitted to the rules of S. Bento.
In the year 540, the patrician Cassiodorus, whom the king of cattle, Theodoric the Great, had made minister, decided to withdraw from the world to the quiet of a monastery. Professionally he was a dignitary in the State of the Ostrogoths, but at his heart he had remained a Roman and he saw, with the deepest sadness, how the culture of the past, which he shuddered, was undermined by the actions of the new rulers. It seemed to him that monasteries were the ultimate sanctuaries where the remnants of the old cultural heritage could be kept safe, where a systematic effort on the part of the monks could succeed in preserving and developing the knowledge of the ancients for the benefit of generations to come. Philosopher and monk, Cassiodorus collected the remains of ancient literature and acted as the great curator of these monuments of the past "so that the world would not be completely submerged in barbarism.” He transformed his country house in Brutio into a monastery, which consisted not only of cells and a chapel, but also a library and a so-called “office”, he prescribed to his monks, as a form of religious service, the work of preserving and copying ancient codices. Monks in black burels bent over old papyrus papyrus, patiently tracing letter by letter, transcribing and translating manuscript to post-manuscript. Soon the other monasteries of the Benedictine Rule followed suit. the example given by Cassiodorus and with the passing of time entire libraries of copies and translations were formed.The ancient eras owe to these preservation efforts the knowledge of the writings of the Church Fathers, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose and St. Augustine ,but also knowledge of the poems of Virgil and Horace and the prose writings of the Roman classics.
Thus, the Benedictine monasteries became, while their founder was still alive, sanctuaries of ancient wisdom and centers of a new form of knowledge. Training in ancient thought, combined with monastic concentration, generated the intellectual strength that constituted the new culture of the Middle Ages.
It is of symbolic importance that Monte Cassino, the starting point of the new progress, had been built in the same year that also saw the dissolution of the Academy, the last surviving bastion of ancient knowledge. The Benedictine Order is the link that links Antiquity to Modern Times.
Their interest in learning enabled Benedictine monks to become teachers of young peoples, to maintain the continuity of the educational tradition that might otherwise have been destroyed during the migration of peoples. Cassiodorus wrote several textbooks on the liberal arts, as well as a grammar, and within a short time a whole corps of monks of this powerful order applied themselves to the task of the magisterium. Wherever the Benedictines founded a new monastery, they also organized a new school or academy. It was from these educational institutions that the universities of the Middle Ages later originated. With the Benedictine monk Gregory, monasticism, which had long since begun in the Egyptian desert, reached its highest power in the political world. Gregory was crowned Pope and history calls him Gregory the Great. It belonged to the Advertisements,family of Roman patricians, and had been at first one of the praetors. But he, like Cassiodorus before, felt himself dragged out of his prominent position into the quiet of a monastic cell, by the ideals that were forming a new world behind the protective walls of the monasteries. He transformed his ancestral home, on Monte Célio, into the monastery of S. André. In addition, he founded six Benedictine monasteries in Sicily.
Cassiodorus had enriched monasticism with Roman wisdom; Gregory added Roman organizing skill to the monastic character. His extraordinary talents extended his influence beyond his narrow cell to the outside world, and in 590, when the clergy, senate, and people of Rome acclaimed him Pope, there was not a single dissenting voice. At that time the Pope already possessed the power of an absolute ruler. When Gregory ascended the papal throne, this power first fell into the hands of a monk. He felt that his position of universal power was a heavy burden, and sometime after he had had to leave the quiet of his cell to occupy the papal see, he wrote in a letter to one of his friends: , as I fall from the height of my repose."
Under his pontifical vestments he remained faithful to the black burel of the Benedictine monks. He was invested with papal power, but as a simple monk of his order he continued to practice the rule of charity. When he learned one day that despite his most strenuous efforts to alleviate the misery of the poor, a beggar in Rome had starved to death, he insisted that it was his fault. It flagellated itself and redoubled its efforts to curb the suffering of poverty. It was then that he made it the obligation of every church to set aside part of their income to help those in need.
The Pope planned to extend the power of the Church of Rome over the entire Universe and decided to conquer for Christianity the pagan regions of Britain and Gaul. But it was a Benedictine monk, on the papal throne, who was making plans for this campaign of conquest. This was Rome's second attempt since Julius Caesar to extend its rule to the British Isles. When Caesar wanted to conquer Britain, he sent six of his legions there; the papal monk, thinking of the conquest, sent forty Benedictine monks. Caesar's legions were armed to the teeth as they crossed the channel to head inland from Dover. The rules of war that Gregory had for his forty monks were love and charity, and the weapons of conquest the Book of Books and hymns of his own composition. With songs on the lips,the monastic conquerors marched through the forests of Kent to Canterbury, where King Engelbert had his court. Instead of taking their lands, they brought them a new religion and a new culture. The doctrine of their faith was stamped in a book which they presented to their Anglo-Saxon armies, and since the Anglo-Saxons could not read or write, those thoughtful monks, who had come to spread the Gospel, brought with them grammars and primers. Wherever they worked, they founded schools. And soon, thanks to the Benedictine monks, Christianity, textbooks and schools also extended their domain to Ireland, Gaul and the Teutonic lands.they brought to them a new religion and a new culture. The doctrine of their faith was stamped in a book which they presented to their Anglo-Saxon armies, and since the Anglo-Saxons could not read or write, those thoughtful monks, who had come to spread the Gospel, brought with them grammars and primers. Wherever they worked, they founded schools. And soon, thanks to the Benedictine monks, Christianity, textbooks and schools also extended their domain to Ireland, Gaul and the Teutonic lands.they brought to them a new religion and a new culture. The doctrine of their faith was stamped in a book which they presented to their Anglo-Saxon armies, and since the Anglo-Saxons could not read or write, those thoughtful monks, who had come to spread the Gospel, brought with them grammars and primers. Wherever they worked, they founded schools. And soon, thanks to the Benedictine monks, Christianity, textbooks and schools also extended their domain to Ireland, Gaul and the Teutonic lands.thanks to the Benedictine monks, Christianity, primers and schools also extended their domain to Ireland, Gaul and the Teutonic lands.thanks to the Benedictine monks, Christianity, primers and schools also extended their domain to Ireland, Gaul and the Teutonic lands.
Yet this great monk on the papal throne, through whom faith had been brought to the peoples of the North, through whom they had been brought into the orbit of Mediterranean civilization; who came to be called the last of the Fathers of the Church, because with his writings he completed the work of spiritual consolidation that his predecessors had begun; this great Benedictine monk had given the Church and all of Western civilization another even more wonderful gift: the gift of the art of music. St. Athanasius and St. Hilarion in the East and St. Ambrose in the West had led their congregations of the faithful to sing the praises of God, but it was only through Gregory the Great that song and music received prayer value, as it established them as integral parts of the Mass.
He had been endowed with the creative power of a musical genius and used it to develop, on the basis of Greek melodies, the solemn recitative forms of ritual plainsong, known by the name of Gregorian chant. Thus he saved the musical heritage of antiquity, preserving it in the Church and passing it on to subsequent centuries.
Already old, afflicted by gout, this Pope still spent hours and days in the singing school he had founded, tireless in the task of making his monks share his own feeling for the purity of sound and teaching them the art of singing for God's greater glory. . Thanks to the rigorous efforts of this inspired music master, Christian worship came to be a worship of melody and song and Christianity a singing faith. And those who were still outside the Church were dragged into its fold, since it had become a Church of singing, in far greater numbers than dogma, school, and sermon would have been able to attract. And from among them the first lay students of music were recruited, who later went on to be the first teachers of singing and music in Western Europe. These were the beginnings and from them came the great western music,that in Bach's fugues embraced heaven and earth.
For many centuries after Gregory's death, the Order of Benedictines held sway over the cultural heritage of the ancients and the building materials of the rising civilization. Finally, in the tenth century, this great order succumbed like everything else exposed to the world, to the same eternal tempter whom Antony, the "father of monasticism", had seen in the form of the devil. The temptations that caused the Benedictine Order to fall, as many other orders also fell, over time, were wealth and avarice. But always and everywhere monasticism found its way back to its original ideal and end, as soon as it returned to its old ascetic severity, to poverty, renunciation and stillness.
Whenever this happened, monasticism drew new creative energy from it, enabling him to reach new heights in his achievements. All the great figures in the history of monastic orders: St. Bernard, the mystic of Clairvaux; St. Anselm of Canterbury, the founder of scholasticism; Albert the Great, the Universal Doctor; St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor Angelico; St. Francis of Assisi, the Troubadour of God; St. Bonaventure, Doctor Seraphic; all of them were strengthened in solitude, exercised themselves in renunciation and remained faithful to their vow of poverty. As much as these Western monks of the late Middle Ages may have differed from the Egyptian desert hermit, who could neither read nor write, they all belonged to his spiritual kinship. In his austerity he is, unmistakably, the common ancestor of them all.
In Christian monasteries, asceticism established itself as a powerful institution, which persisted through well over fifteen centuries and at the same time became a force that helped to determine the course of history. However, the essence of the ascetic idea is much more deeply rooted than any specific religious creed. Deeply inherent in the human soul, it is not only the aspiration for a higher spiritual plane, but also the conviction that such an ideal can be attained only through solitude, through the renunciation of earthly goods, through the exercise of the body and of the soul, in short, through an ascetic way of life.
The word "asceticism" goes back to a Greek base meaning "to practice" and was applied to athletes who lived in seclusion and abstinence while exercising for an arena dispute. Christianity applied this word to the spiritual training of the soul to its disputes with the temptations of man's animal nature. Whenever individuals or groups of individuals have tried to rise above the level of common nature, they have chosen solitude as their new home, they have made poverty their condition and abstinence their way of life.
In India, the cradle of all spiritual nobility, the brahmins of the early Vedic times retreated into solitude and lived as hermits in order to penetrate the ultimate arcana of being. For the Hindus, the great god Shiva, in whom the principles of destruction and restoration are conjoined, gave the example of the ascetic life. They formed a visual image of him far from the world, in the solitude of the highest peak of the Himalayas, sitting on a tiger skin and absorbed in meditation, directing the course of the world, only thanks to concentrated thought. In the doctrine of yogas the practice of asceticism was formulated in a definite system, which is one of the oldest spiritual traditions of man. Buddha spent seven years of silent solitude under a fig tree,until he reached that all-encompassing illustration which turned the ancient Prince Gautama into a Buddha, that is, into an Enlightened One. And Buddhist monks and nuns sang the "immortal songs of their serene wisdom."two
The priests of the Egyptian god Serapis were ascetics. So were members of the Greek-Jewish sects of the Essenes and therapists. The prophet Mohammed retired to a cave near Mecca to prepare for his great work, and later asceticism played an essential part in Mohammedan piety. Mystics from all areas and all faiths assure us that the unia mystica, the true union with God, is only attainable in solitude and thanks to an ascetic way of life. And finally, Protestantism, the staunch opponent of monasticism, produced the ascetic severity of Calvin and Cromwell, produced the Puritans and Pietism.
2. There is a huge difference between Christian asceticism and what is practiced in any other religion, such as Buddhism. In him, asceticism is a means rather than an end and is used to ensure the fullness of life. It's a way of life. In other religions, it is practiced as an end in itself, without taking into account the positive, vital element. That's why the Christian is not a Manichean, who hates the body. When Christ affirmed that the flesh was weak, he was not referring to the body, but to human nature, which was lavish with sin (T.).
Not only the religious instinct, but also the spiritual experience of the great philosophers and shapers of ethical thought confirm the value of the ascetic life. All agree that 'true understanding can only be gained by those who submit to severe discipline, to some form of asceticism, for nothing else can make that full concentration possible, without which reason remains sterile. Heraclitus, the father of philosophy, lived in solitude. Plato's idealistic doctrine is based on an ascetic view of life. Aristotle called the life of pleasure seekers barbaric. The Stoics, the Cynics, the Neoplatonists, Spinoza, Pascal, Schopenhauer, Tolstoy, all taught that true life, true knowledge, and true serenity are gained only through the subjugation of the lowest instincts.The great philosopher Kierkegaard published his first great book, One of Two, under the pseudonym "Victor Hermit", the victorious hermit.
And even Nietzsche, who proclaimed his "joyful wisdom" as an anti-Christian gospel, developed his doctrine in ascetic solitude. From Dante and Petrarch to Keats and the Romantics and even the writers of the more recent past, poets live to sing the praises of loneliness and renunciation. And even the Germanic classics, whose only interest was "living the life," felt the need to rest in the "most secluded cloister" to commune with their "calmest self." Not only was the Revelation of St. John written in solitude in a cave on Patmos. Ernesto Bertram claims that all books of universal importance were conceived in some Patmos, in the desert, in captivity, in forced or voluntarily imposed exile.
"Don't you know-he wrote-that the voice of the caller always comes out of the desert and that the things that must be said to a people and a people must mature in the fields of isolation?'' And indeed, even the great ones, whose works and achievements were destined to serve the needs and goals of the world of the day - the pioneers, the explorers, the inventors and social reformers - they all insist in their biographies and confessions that the prerequisite of all true greatness is solitude , poverty, self-denial - a monastic way of life, different only in degree.
In S. Antao, asceticism reaches the pathetic of a great example.
In his life, the denial of himself is brought to the intensity of a drama or an epic. The Egyptian desert interior is a setting that seems to transfer the action to an atmosphere of unreality.
Antao's poverty becomes the symbol and prototype of all poverty; its power of renunciation has the dimensions of mythological heroism. In its temptations the supernatural is mixed with natural events, as it happens in all great literary works.
Because of this, his person and his life merge with other mythical subjects, becoming a perennially fascinating subject of art. There is no portrait of Antony as he was in reality. There is only the portrait that the artists' imaginations created, under the impression of what is known about their character and their life. But this figure, precisely because no one has ever determined its exact contours, together with the unusual and magical background and supernatural apparitions that characterize all phases of its life, allowed the arts to develop such an abundance of varied representations, that the Antão's portraits constitute a special chapter in the history of painting and sculpture.
Starting with the idealizing art of early Christianity, through romantic sculpture, Gothic painting at all stages, through the beginning, heyday and end of the Renaissance, to modern and ultramodern styles, there is no period, no movement or school of art that it has not produced in its own specific spirit, with its own specific techniques, its own specific version of the antonino theme. Most great artists, especially in modern times, enrich the tradition of the Antonine theme with their personal interpretation. They carved their St. Anthony in stone; painted it on canvas; engraved it in copper; they drew it on an illuminated gold background or boldly placed it within the landscape and the midst of their own lives. Brush and needle, color and thread,light and darkness - all the artifices of art served to make his figure more impressively true. Italian and Spanish, Dutch and Flemish, French and German masters tried to recreate in artistic visions the unknown face, the unknown figure of the saint of asceticism, either in the stylized linear idealization of medieval conventions, or through the moving and immobile realism of modern times , either with Impressionist or Expressionist techniques.either with Impressionist or Expressionist techniques.either with Impressionist or Expressionist techniques.
The brothers Huberto and João Van Eyck, the inventors of oil painting, in the 15th century, exhibited on the panels of their main altar, in Ghent, for the building of the faithful, a large colorful painting book, with one of the side compartments occupied by St. Anthony, in the midst of a group of his monks who accompanied their holy teacher in his adoration of the Lamb of God. Lucas Van Leyden, the great master of Dutch art at the Renaissance, painted S. Antao in his personal meeting with S. Paulo de Tebas. Vitor Pisano, one of the pioneers of the early Renaissance in Northern Italy, placed it in one of his famous panels. Pinturicchio, the master of the 15th-century Umbrian school; Paulo Veronese, together with Tintoretto, the last great representative of the Venetian school; José Ribera, the Spanish-Italian mystic and founder of the Neapolitan school; Guido Reni,the painter from the eclectic school of Italian baroque; they all glorified him in the resplendent colors of his rich palette. In Spain, the main painters of the 16th and 17th centuries, who added their interpretation to the tradition of the Antonine theme, are Francisco de Zurbarán, the master of the monastic-ascetic portrait, and Diogo Velásquez, the oldest precursor of modern art. Alberto Dürer, in whom old Germanic art attained consummate perfection, painted the Egyptian desert saint as an eternally valid symbol of universal selflessness, against the background of his hometown of Nuremberg. And even Lucas Cranach, whose reactions and attitudes were those of a deeply convinced Protestant, who painted the only known pictures of the life of Luther, the Reformer and revolt against monasticism, contributed his representation of St. Anthony,which can only be interpreted as an expression of respect for the father of monasticism.
The most impressive and most powerful works in the Antonine tradition are, however, those that deal with the subject of temptations.
One of them goes back to the 11th century, when romantic sculpture had reached its highest point. In the abbey of Vézelay, in Burgundy, the same church in which St. Bernard of Clairvaux preached his ascetic mysticism, there is, carved in stone, over one of the capitals, a representation of the triumph of St. Anthony over the devil. This work was carried out by a time that had witnessed the progressive secularization of the Order of Benedictines and which, alarmed by this development, had rediscovered the original doctrine of asceticism and found the means to save monasticism from its final decay with the formation of new orders, like those of the Clunicians, the Cistercians and Carthusians, with their renewed accentuation of rigor and austerity. It was a time filled with the spirit of ascetic reformation and well prepared to appreciate the significance of Antao,as a living symbol. In the capital at Vézelay, he is standing, flanked by attacking demons, in stony imperturbability, on his face an expression of triumphant serenity, proper to the ascetic, whose strength is rooted in God. In this ancient work, the drama of temptations remains static, as it is preserved, so to speak, not only by the rigidity of the material, but also by the artistic conventionalism of the time. It was only in the fifteenth century, when art freed itself from the shackles of medieval formalism, that the subject could be treated with the freely moving tones of dramatic action.for it is preserved, as it were, not only by the rigidity of the material, but also by the artistic conventionalism of the time. It was only in the fifteenth century, when art freed itself from the shackles of medieval formalism, that the subject could be treated with the freely moving tones of dramatic action.for it is preserved, as it were, not only by the rigidity of the material, but also by the artistic conventionalism of the time. It was only in the fifteenth century, when art freed itself from the shackles of medieval formalism, that the subject could be treated with the freely moving tones of dramatic action.
At that time, the anonymous works of workers linked by tradition were giving way to the creations of the individual genius of artistic personalities. Conventions were replaced by observation and artists perceived and formed not only their visions of the world beyond, but also the world of nature in its universal realism.
From this generation of individualists, of masters of realism, there emerged for the first time a painter related in spirit to Antao, the tortured defender of his soul, against an aggressive rod of demons. It was Jerome Bosch, a 15th-century Dutchman; accustomed to the spectacle of the lush fertility of the Flanders plains, accustomed to living among stout Flemings whose lives centered around the pleasures of food and drink, Bosch was nonetheless drawn to the austere faster and desert dweller, Antao, because he was linked to him by a deep spiritual affinity. Jeronimo Bosch's life had been tortured by the same conflict between good and evil. To this Flemish painter, just like Antão, good and evil appeared in visionary personifications. He also saw the devil, now under the guise of horrible monsters,now in all kinds of seductive forms. Through this identity of experiences, Bosch and Antão, despite the gulf of centuries that separated them, were brothers.
Bosch's contributions to the Antonine tradition are not precisely the works of a great realist painter of the Flemish school, dealing with a certain theme; they are the creations of a man whose heart and soul had lived and suffered and struggled to make his way through all the lessons of the Antonine problem. When the painter Bosch took the traditional theme to execute his own version of St. Anthony's temptations, he actually painted all the conflicts of his personal life at the same time. What Baudelaire has asserted elsewhere, alluding to himself, has remained true equally when it comes to Bosch: "Not only the saint, but also the genius, has a devil against which he must fight." Fascinated by the subject he knew so well, Bosch dedicated ten of his most wonderful paintings to the temptations of S. Antao.The realistic representation of St. Anthony's temptations by the devil, begun by Jerônimo Bosch, was enriched and disseminated by his fellow countryman Pedro Brueghel the Younger, or "Hell Brueghel", who turned it into a universal drama, whose stage is simultaneously the soul of man and outer life, all of nature, the entire Universe.
At the school of his father, Peter Brueghel the Elder, his eyes had been trained, from childhood, to see people and settings as they were. He learned to reproduce the various things in their concrete environment with consummate precision. But his artistic self, his independent genius, was able to perceive equally well the invisible world that is hidden behind the visible world of the bodies and forms of the natural. So he recognized as the basic law of all existence and development an eternal duality, a polar tension, divine creation and satanic destruction.
This principle pervades every detail of Brueghel's magnificent vision of earthly facts and events, which he reproduced in his paintings with all his technical skill and marvelous array of colors. He saw the variegated delights of the world, but also its treacherous depths; beauty ridiculed by ugliness; the unbridled exuberance of the feasters and slackers, together with the tragic ruin on earth, but also the oppressive shadows of night, which hell raises from the nether regions; he saw the straight line cut by the crookedness and peace of the people and the land haunted by hordes of demons.
In Antao's burning desire for purity, for goodness, in his aspiration for God and in his complications with impurity, with evil, in his struggles with the devil, in his temptation under the bush, in the tomb, under the ruins and in the his cave - all the elements that impart such elemental power to Brueghel's realistic conceptions had been condensed into ever-valid symbols of mythic significance. Thus, Brueghel's representations of Antony, made up of elements of the world he had seen and the hells he had envisioned, became an impressive confession of an artist and human being. In his paintings by Antao, nature does not simply provide the background; takes an active part in the drama. Demons are not mere ghosts or visitors to a supernatural world. They are products of nature, mestizos,in which the traits of the Dutch and demons mingle. While Dürer was content to place the prominent figure of his Egyptian Anthem, standing in the middle of the Nuremberg region, Brueghel used the entire story of what had taken place in the desert and had - as happened here at home in Holland .
But the Dutch Brueghel and Bosch were not alone in their time, with their realistic representations of St. Anthony's temptations. In Italy, Parentino dealt with the same subject, and in Germany the two great artists Schongauer and Grünewald. Martim Schon Gauer, from Colmar, in Alsace, made his famous drawing of the temptations of S. Antao, which so delighted Michelangelo that he led him to copy it in his own style. Schongauer accentuated the contrast between the infernal band of demons and the man who triumphed over them by virtue of his ascetic will. In that aggressive nightmare of fangs and claws, of teeth and nails, of beaks and paws, the saint maintains his strength and even his robe and cloak, his hair and beard are entirely intact.
Matias Grünewald, in whom modern art sees, with Velásquez, its earliest precursor, has gone beyond his contemporaries and approached his problem from an angle that is as close as possible to familiarization with modern thought and feeling. He did not limit himself to a reproduction of the external events of the drama, but also painted the interior, psychological action.
His portraits of S. Antao were made for the main altar of Isenheim, which a monastery of the Order of Antoninos had installed in 1516 and had been dedicated to January 17, S. Day. Antao. This one was erected in obedience to a pious purpose, but a modern painter, a master of psychological introspection, is its author. On the altar panels, Grünewald presents asceticism in its most important phases: combatant and triumphant. Here, for the first time, one sees an Antao immersed in the horror of the deepest depths of his soul. The look of desperate searching in his eyes, the desperately defensive gesture of his hand, the whole bearing of this man speaks to us of the unspeakable terror of temptation, of which he is about to fall victim. The opposite panel shows, in sharp contrast, the peaceful idyll of Antão and S. Paulo, as guests of God,waiting in the mountainous desert for the legendary bread, which the approaching crow brings them.
The element of fantastic realism that already characterized the first temptations was consciously brought to a grotesque height by the Flemish Davi Teniers and the Frenchman Jacques Callot. Teniers painted the devils in the ruins, like coarse animals, and gave all his demons an air of Dutch rusticity, while Callot imprinted his personal genius in his print translations of Brueghel's fantastic creations.
In 1845, Gustavo Flaubert, author of Madame Bovary and founder and protagonist of the realistic novel, stopped one day in the gallery of the Balbiem Genoa palace, completely fascinated by the Temptations of St. Anthony of Brueghel. The fascination that kept him there for hours was not just the charm of a great work of art. It was the fascination that grips a man who finds himself face to face with his destiny. Shortly after his return from Genoa, Flaubert purchased an engraving Callot had made after Brueghel's painting. He hung it in his office in Croisset, where it remained until his death. It gave him the inspiration for his next work. With ardent enthusiasm, he set to work on the first version of his famous book La Tentation de Saint Antoine. For eighteen months he worked on it day and night, in one of the most creative periods of his life."Where are you," he exclaimed later, "o happy days of St. Anthony, when I put my whole being in writing!"
Madame Bovary's conception interrupted his work. But as soon as Flaubert had finished his great novel, he returned to temptations, to mold them into a better frame. "I'm working again at S. Antão - he said in a letter from that time. - I'm writing! I'm sweating! It's wonderful! There are times when this work is even more than a delusion!" He traveled to the East, went to Egypt to visit the authentic places where Antony had fought the tempter, and after his return from Constantinople, he wrote a new version of his dramatic story. But he wasn't satisfied yet. He studied hundreds of sources; the notes on his desk were piling up, and finally the third and definitive version began. "It's my life's work," he wrote. Since his first idea occurred to me in Genoa,I have been with the thought incessantly placed on him."
Twenty years of his best creative forces were devoted to this work.
It was a profound certainty of his affinity with S. Antao that fascinated this nineteenth-century novelist. "I myself am the Antao da Tentation," he wrote. "I have spent my life denying myself the most innocent pleasures; I have spent my life working hard, according to a strictly regulated discipline. And why do I find such relief in solitude? Certainly because there is a monk alive within me. I have often wondered. those men who have lived their lonely lives in renunciation or mystical contemplation." He once explained his ascetic way of life, saying that a man who wants to be an artist has lost the right to live like other men. And for a time, he himself toyed with the idea of retiring to a monastery where he thought he could find the extreme seclusion that the artist demanded in it.
How deeply ingrained were Flaubert's ascetic tendencies, his habits and manner of work revealed to him. His artistic temperament was by nature insubordinate and without limits, but he spent years and years stuck at his desk, fighting with self-imposed discipline the flood of imaginative concepts that threatened to overwhelm him, like true temptations. He repressed all traces of his naive sentimentality and continued to practice his literary asceticism until his specifically personal style, "Flaubertian prose," with its impersonal impassivity, had reached perfection. The motto that this fighter of literary demons set before his Tentation de Saint Antoine was: "Messieurs les démons, laissez-moi donc!" Please leave me alone! The inspiration,that the writer Flaubert had received from the sixteenth-century painter, was transmitted by him, through his work, to the artists of modern times. And then art and literature engaged in a splendid fertilizing crossover process, through this theme. In this way, a large number of French artists were profoundly influenced by Flaubert's work, including Félicien Rops, Paulo Cézanne and especially Henrique Riviere, whose series of forty paintings, dedicated to the temptations of S. Antao, inspired writers and poets in turn. try new interpretations of the antonino theme. Riviere, who belonged to Chat Noir, that group of artists from Montmartre, whose name came from a tale by Edgar Allan Poe, managed to recreate St. Anthony's temptations in the spirit of his own time,so that the old theme was penetrated with new meaning. Like Dürer, he felt the eternal relevance of the problem; but whereas Dürer simply took the Egyptian ascetic and placed him in his picture, in the familiar landscape of Nuremberg, with his back to the city and his life, Riviere took the entire dramatic story of temptations and transferred it from Egypt to the Paris of its time.
Riviere, like Rops by the way too, got his devil into modern evening dress. When he transferred Antao from his hermit's cave in Thebaid to Paris, he turned him into a Parisian and tempted him with all the vices of the big city. In the halls, which Zola called Paris' stomach, the devil shows him, in the glittering light of dawn, mountains of fruits and vegetables and freshly slaughtered carcasses, in order to seduce him into gluttony. At night it takes you to the boulevards and there shows you the tempting pleasures of the metropolis. To arouse his greed, the devil leads Antao to a gambling house and invites him, under the guise of a croupier, to venture out for just a franc or two. It goes on like this, in a senseless tour of Paris. Finally, as if emerging from a nightmare, Antony is back in the desert again. He kneels again before his crucifix.Angels are approaching, ready to succor the redeemed's soul and ascend with it to heaven.
Anatole France, the first of the great modern sceptics, was wounded live by Antony, the Lord's fighter, whom Riviere's paintings had brought back to life again, with all the perennial relevance of his problem. For a long time, he devoted himself wholeheartedly to the study of the psychology of asceticism. That he had done so should not be taken as proof of just another one of the artist's many interests, based on the exercise of Epicureanism and Voltairian irony. Behind the sceptic's mask something of the "strange boy" remained alive, as Anatole himself refers to his infantile self, whose greatest ambition had been to become a saint. This boy, who had not been satisfied with the idea of becoming a "member of the Institute", like his father, but who wanted to become "member of the calendar of saints," he once cut; in enthusiastic pursuit of his goal, his father's armchair, to extract from it the horsehair he needed to make himself a regular garment of penance.
Later, this master of mockery and spirit wrote his novel Tais, also known in opera form. In it he tells the story of a courtesan, whom the ascetic Paphnutius converts to holiness, but Anatole's secret admiration for the saints, which he had kept in his heart since his youth, made him choose St. Anthony as the true hero of this work. The Egyptian saint is also the subject of one of Anatole's most brilliant essays. In it he calls Antao "the most fascinating character in history."
The Church placed Antao in the community of its saints, but in the outside world his immortality was glorified by the arts.
