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Early Christianity’s greatest success in terms of new converts was in some of the greatest urban centers of the Greco-Roman world: Corinth, Ephesus, Athens, and the nerve-center of the empire itself: Rome.[1] As Wayne Meeks observed, “within a decade of the crucifixion of Jesus, the village culture of Palestine had been left far behind, and the Greco-Roman city became the dominant environment of the Christian movement.”[2] This made early Christianity a primarily urban phenomenon.
The early history of monasticism, coinciding roughly with the imperial acceptance of Christianity as a legitimate religion through the promulgation of Constantine’s Edict of Milan (312 A.D.), emphasized retreat from the city into the desert. Retreat into the desert meant struggling with demons, with passions and sensual desires which got in the way of the Christian’s highest calling-imitatio Christi. The new imperial favor lavished on the Church was deemed to be destroying the Church’s resolve.[3] Desert monks like Anthony would be paradigms of spiritual achievement and victory over devils by their very act of fleeing into the wilderness, away from the habitations of humanity. But this gives rise to the very key question of this study: can the same sort of spiritual withdrawal be achieved within an urban environment? Can a city become a spiritual desert? To answer this question, we must step back and ask an even more quintessential question: What does the desert mean for a person like St. Anthony, and how does the desert rise to become the common metaphor for many ascetic practices that may or may not involve a real “desert”?
For St. Athanasius, St. Anthony is the model desert warrior: the one who departs from the world, going into uninhabitable regions of the desert in order to fight demons, and find God. But the question is whether or not this was the only model of monastic “flight” available to the “desert” ascetic. What other varieties of ascetic life were there, and to what extent did they involve the city? James E. Goehring’s work[4] challenges the traditional view that the later sources are somehow “normative” of the development of monastic thought and practice in early Egyptian monasticism, and offers instead, using early sources, such as papyri from different monasteries, a more diverse and multi-faceted scenario. In short, Egyptian monasticism was quite a diverse affair, and, for the most part, it was an urban phenomenon. Much of his work offers an analysis of the “desertification” of Egyptian monasticism, making it (especially in the hands of Sts. Athanasius and Jerome) a desert movement to the virtual exclusion of the urban communities that formed if not before, then simultaneously to the desert ones. One way in which he does this is through a reexamination of the term apotaktikos, which he argues meant simply someone who had withdrawn from “certain social norms” through ascetic struggle. It was only in the later literary tradition set by St. Athanasius that the term began to mean those individuals and communities that had withdrawn spatially from society.[5] The crux of his argument comes in chapter five (“The Encroaching Desert: Literary Production and Ascetic Space in Early Christian Egypt”), where he claims that the desert monasticism represented in the narratives of Athanasius and Jerome is selective and anachronistic. For “ideological” reasons, urban monasticism falls outside the narratives in favor of anchoritic and coenobitic monasticism, represented by St. Anthony and St. Pachomius. This led to an ecclesiastical encouragement of desert monasticism, almost to the exclusion of urban monasticism, and in fact all other forms of monasticism that did not conform to the desert model were regarded by some as heretical.[6] In chapter six (“Withdrawing from the Desert: St. Pachomius and the Development of Village Monasticism in Upper Egypt”) Goehring argues that St. Pachomius’ coenobitic communities were not located in the desert at all, but were to be found in the heart of fertile lands along the Nile, which makes his monastic movement, if not necessarily “urban,” at least a form of monasticism that did not withdraw from cities. The Pachomian system of confederated monasteries, as it turns out, is an urban phenomenon, for the most part, and in some sense it shows an interesting tension between “desert” and “urban” forms of coenobitic life.
So the question that Goehring’s observations pose for this study is to what extent we can justifiably call monasticism a “desert” experience, given its multi-faceted nature as both a desert and an urban phenomenon.[7] While it may be too much to say, from the sources, that monasticism was “purely” an urban phenomenon at its inception, it is interesting to note that in fact both forms of coenobitic life flourished at around the same time. But a further question must be posed: What made St. Athanasius prefer St. Anthony’s form of desert withdrawal, and what impact did the “philosophy of withdrawal” have on the later development of urban monasticism and asceticism? We can attempt an answer to this question after some thought and reflection on the Bohairic Life of St. Pachomius, which gives us a window into the urban nature of the early ascetic movement, albeit influenced to some degree by the anchoritic tradition which St. Athanasius would popularize.
The Bohairic Life of St. Pachomius begins by connecting the ascetic life of the monks with the flow of redemptive history, beginning with Abraham, fulfilled in Christ, the preaching of the Apostles, and the period of the martyrs. It is with the martyrs that the writer of the Bohairic Life of St. Pachomius sees the most intimate connection:
The Word of God, who made all things, came to our father Abraham and ordered him to sacrifice his only son. He said to him, I will shower blessings upon you, I will make your descendants as many as the stars of heaven; all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in your seed. After our father Abraham, he spoke to Moses, his prophet and servant, and to all the prophets; then he appeared and spoke as man and as the seed of Abraham, for he had promised to him a blessing for the nations, and he commanded his disciples, Go and teach all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Then as his Gospel spread throughout the whole world, by God’s permission and to put faith in him to the test, pagan emperors stirred up a persecution against Christians everywhere. Many martyrs offered themselves to various tortures unto death and received the crown, the last of them being the courageous Peter, patriarch of Alexandria. The faith increased greatly in the holy Churches in every land, and monasteries and places for ascetics began to appear, for those who were the first monks had seen the endurance of the martyrs. Therefore they revived the conduct of the prophet Elijah and of those of whom the apostle Paul said, They were afflicted, maltreated; they wandered over deserts and mountains, in caves and ravines of the earth. Then they offered their souls and bodies to God in strict ascesis and with a befitting reverence, not only because they looked day and night to the holy Cross, but also because they saw the martyrs take up their struggles. They saw them and imitated them.[8]
The connection is made for the reader, and it is a rather organic connection, which unites the experience of the martyrs with those of the earliest ascetics. For the anonymous author, certainly a disciple of St. Pachomius, the connection between ascesis and martyrios could not be clearer: the monks, in effect, through their strict ascesis, have taken up the banner of the martyrs. The connection he then makes with St. Anthony[9] seems to give the ascetic experience a decidedly “desert” flavor, but Professor Goehring causes us to pause and ask the question: what kind of ascesis does the Pachomian Koinonia really represent? It is clear that, given the scholarship Goehring and others[10] have done on Pachomius and his monastic communities, he represents an urban asceticism that is co-terminus with, if not actually preceding, the desert monasticism of St. Anthony The urban nature of the Pachomian communities gives us one of the earliest forms of “withdrawal.”
What does “withdrawal” mean for an urban monastic community like that of St. Pachomius? We know that the rigor of ascetic life was quite high, especially as we go on the testimony of sources like the Bohairic Life of St. Pachomius. More than once, the anonymous author refers to the brothers engaging in ascesis: disciplines involving “prayers, vigils and fasting.”[11] It is said of the young St. Pachomius that his superior, Apa Palamon, wanted to try the young novice “by vigils from evening to morning in prayers, recitations and numerous manual labors,” in order to test his resolve and strength.[12] The Saturday vigil was especially rigorous, with labors undertaken at daybreak on Sunday in order to stave off sleep.[13]
What attracted St. Pachomius to this life of endless vigils, prayer and fasting, in short, was strict ascesis. We read that the young St. Pachomius was raised by a pagan family in Seneset, but he “received from the great mercy of God the grace to become a Christian in the Diocese of Diospolis, in a village called Seneset.”[14] Besides some miraculous instances of being preserved from the pagan practices of his parents, resisting attacks from the devil, and also resisting the advances of the “pretty daughters” of a neighbor, he exhibited, upon his conversion to Christianity, a natural predilection for ascetic renunciation, often preferring to fast for long periods of time.[15] His contest with demons at a young age, as the Bohairic Life portrays it, not only portends a great ascetic career ahead of him, but in fact shows him to be an exceptionally virtuous youth.[16] From an early age, especially after his conversion to Christianity (in the midst of the persecution under Diocletian) he exhibits a predilection for withdrawal, which, after the end of the persecution, he would fulfill, especially after a brief stint as an army conscript in Constantine’s war with Persia in 313 (which was over before he saw any combat).[17]
When the order was given for the army conscripts to be released, he chose to go south to a deserted town called Seneset, where the “Spirit of God seized him” telling him to “struggle and settle down there.”[18] What was the nature of his ascetic withdrawal? When the question of desert monasticism is raised, it is usually in relation to a withdrawal from human society, in favor of going deep into the desert, far from any kind of civilization. Here we are forced to confront the question of the extent to which this characterized early monasticism. Goehring argues that very little of the “desert” variety of monasticism was normative.
A geographical survey of the areas where the Pachomian communities flourished paints for us a picture of communities that were distributed along the lush Nile valley, with a significant amount of village life surrounding them. Wherever there is any mention of “deserts,” they are usually enclosed geological spaces encircled by vegetation, so that the monks and solitaries didn’t venture very far from the towns and villages that dotted the Nile valley.[19] In several instances, St. Pachomius and his companions are said to take boats to visit several monasteries, suggesting that these monasteries are along the lush Nile valley, and not deep in the desert. The Pachomian style of ascetic life, in other words, is best described as a type of withdrawal that takes place near or in villages of varying population density, and can be usefully described as “urban asceticism.”.”[20] Thus, far from the desert solitary, the Pachomian model, which might arguably be the earliest expression of monastic life, is itself a form of “urban” asceticism, or the kind of withdrawal that takes place either within, or not far from, a population center, whether of a village or city variety. This gives us a sharp contrast with St. Athanasius’ treatment of St. Anthony’s style of asceticism.
So the question remains: Why the desert? The question can be posed this way: What motivated St. Athanasius to see in St. Anthony the model of monastic ascetic endeavor? And most importantly, what, in fact, constitutes a spiritual “desert”? The desert, more than just a geographical demarcation, becomes, in the hands of St. Athanasius, a spiritual reality, the place where the contest with the devil, the passions, and an encounter with God takes place.[21] Thus, St. Athanasius’ Life of Anthony, and The Pachomian Koinonia, will constitute two different modes of ascetic “withdrawal”: one, a retreat from human community in order to engage in the fight against the passions and to find God in solitude deep in the desert, and the other, as a way to engage in ascetic struggle within, or near, a city or village. Desert and urban asceticism both have the same goal: withdrawal, and through that withdrawal, reaching spiritual enlightenment through self-imposed poverty. Anthony would become the representative par excellence of desert monasticism, and it would be Athanasius who would push this ideal of desert withdrawal through the Life of St. Anthony.
Knowing what we know about the urban nature of Pachomian monasticism, it is intriguing to read the beginning of Athanasius’ address to what is definitely a monastic audience. It addresses an audience that Athanasius refers to as entering into “noble rivalry with the monks of Egypt,” which gives an indication that scarcely a year after Anthony’s death, monastic life had spread well beyond Egyptian borders, as far as “the western provinces.”[22] Whoever these monks were, the fact that Athanasius can speak of people making the same kinds of ascetic choices as Anthony, and inspired by Anthony himself, is itself an instance of what a powerful hold the Vita Antonii had on the Christian ascetic imagination.[23] A year after Anthony’s death, Athanasius speaks of monks from other parts of the Roman world wishing to “imitate the monks of Egypt” and, perhaps, Anthony himself. What was it about Anthony and his way of ascetic withdrawal that made such an appeal?
Anthony, described by Athanasius as a man who would “fill the desert with the discipline” of ascetic struggle, would be a key part in the transition from the one type of martyrdom to the other, as demons replace Roman legions as the chief tormentors: “And when the enemy could not endure it, but was even fearful that in a short time Anthony would fill the desert with the discipline, coming one night with a multitude of demons, he so cut him with stripes that he lay on the ground speechless from the excessive pain. He affirmed that the torture had been so excessive that no blows inflicted by man could have caused him such torment.”[24] Here Athanasius draws the connection between martyrdom and ascetic withdrawal: just as Roman procurators were fearful of the empire with “the discipline” of Christianity, so now a worse enemy, the devil and his legions, are afraid that Anthony would fill the desert, their “last stronghold,” with the “discipline” of a new kind of martyrdom: the “white martyrdom” of ascetic struggle.
In the life of Anthony himself, at least in the way Athanasius represents it, the commitment to poverty was evident at a very young age.[25] Anthony’s contentment with his “daily bread” would signal a greater commitment to poverty in later life, as he would go the extra mile and forsake even a moderate house for the life of the desert. A person reading this could very well imagine an alternative scenario, one where a young man like St. Anthony would take to the pleasures that members of his class affords, but this is not the man he is. He rejects luxury from a very early age, and thereby prepares himself for the life of a desert dweller. The crucial turning point for him came after the death of his parents, as he was pondering how the Apostles were told to leave all for Christ’s sake.[26] This turning point is significant for Anthony, since it connects his desire for poverty with the apostolic life. As he imitates the Apostles, he also imitates Christ, the ultimate expression of voluntary poverty.[27] Athanasius makes clear that for St. Anthony, the call to poverty is an apostolic call, a call to spiritual self-denial and solitude. He is portrayed as following in an already established path of perfection, but he will take it to its most logical conclusion-the distant desert. It is there, in the desolation of the desert, where he will take up the task of engaging in the new kind of martyrdom-self-denial and fighting passions.
Every great ascetic, like every great martyr, must be tested, and this opportunity presents itself in a remarkable way to St. Anthony. Athanasius makes sure that this sine qua non of ascetic endeavor is given its central role, and Anthony is its greatest representative.[28] Instead of a Roman procurator tempting him from his purpose by appealing to his appetites, Anthony gets an even more powerful and crafty foe-the devil. Already we see the martial aspect of the ascetic struggle. Anthony is almost cast here as a warrior in gladiatorial combat, felling one temptation after another. This recalls Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, and like Christ, he comes out victorious. His struggle with the demon of lust[29] would be the first of many struggles, which intensify to the point of outright physical confrontation. The more intense the confrontation, the more he puts himself under a tight discipline: “More and more he repressed the body and kept it in subjection, lest haply having conquered on one side, he should be dragged down on the other.”[30]
Athanasius also highlights Anthony’s severe mode of life, which would ultimately lead him to live in the tombs, where some of his greatest struggles would take place. When the devil could not derail him from his purpose through lust, avarice and greed, he takes on tougher measures. The greater Anthony’s resolve, the more intense the attacks.[31]
This ascetic dimension gives rise to the question of the nature of the “desert” experience. hat is “the desert”? Is it necessarily a place, or a spiritual state of being? For St. Athanasius, the Nitrian Desert in Egypt was a place for ascetic struggle against the passions. As St. Athanasius represents Anthony in the Vita Antonii, he was eager for martyrdom, but with its cessation, he sought a more intense contest: a struggle against demons and the unruly passions which, in comparison with a quick act of martyrdom, is more rigorous, involving a lifetime of struggle. The martial aspects of this sort of “white martyrdom” are brought out in great relief in St. Athanasius’ account. This quality of ascetic fight comes out as he portrays him “conquering” the desert.[32] The desert, once the abode of demons, becomes, in the hands of Anthony (and his biographer, Athanasius) the abode of spiritual warriors that would banish them. The “fleeing reptiles” become, in St. Athanasius’ hands, types of the fleeing demons. The Christian ascetic thus acts in the capacity of an “exorcist,” driving out evil through prayer, fasting and discipline.
But so far in Athanasius’ account, Anthony’s life differs very little from the Pachomian tradition, especially in his decision to withdraw from “the world,” but not too far; after all, where he chooses to withdraw is not far from the urban and village centers along the Nile. It is his life as a solitary that is of special note here, differing somewhat from the Pachomian coenobitic tradition, but the abandoned fort where he has his combat with demons, and where he takes up his abode for twenty years, is just across the Nile, and therefore, not far from the urban and village centers where many would have access to him.[33] It is not until after the last persecution of 311 that he takes up his journey into the “inner desert.”[34] It is at this time that Anthony receives the divine command to “go deeper” into the “inner desert,” further than anyone else has gone into the desolate landscape. Having left the abandoned fortress along the Nile that had been his home, away from all human company, and having re-connected with the people again, teaching and casting out demons, he felt a need for further withdrawal, and this was confirmed by a divine command he received to go further into the inner desert, since there were yet many more demons to combat. The reason for his concern was that he feared too much contact with people, who would flock to him, given many signs that marked him off to others as one consecrated to God, and therefore running the danger of being “puffed up” with pride, and thereby lose his reward. He thus goes into deep desert territory, where no one, or at least very few, had ever dared to enter. The mountain he escapes to is solitary enough for him to engage in the kind of anchoritic discipline he craves, but close enough to the Nile so that a spring is readily available for him to drink water and plant a few basic crops for his own use. St. Athanasius sees this as the setting for his greatest contest with demons:
So he was alone in the inner mountain, spending his time in prayer and discipline. And the brethren who served him asked that they might come every month and bring him olives, pulse and oil, for by now he was an old man. There then he passed his life, and endured such great wrestlings, “not against flesh and blood,” as it is written, but against opposing demons, as we learn from those who visited him. For there they heard tumults, many voices, and as it were, a clash of arms. At night they saw the mountain full of wild beasts, and him also fighting against visible beings, and praying against them. And those who came to him he encouraged, while kneeling he contended and prayed to the Lord. Surely it was a wonderful thing that a man, alone in a desert, feared neither the demons that rose up against him, nor the fierceness of the four-footed beasts and creeping things, for all they were so many. But in truth, as it is written, “he trusted in the Lord as Mount Zion,” with a mind unshaken and undisturbed; so that the demons rather fled from him, and the wild beasts, as it is written, “kept peace with him.”[35]
At this point, his dominion over demons and wild beasts indicates the presence of divine power over both the supernatural and nature itself, as with the instance of the hyenas, sent by demons to devour him, and Anthony commanding them to either devour him if they are sent by God, or to depart if they are sent by demons. Athanasius’ model of monastic life-the desert solitary-is one who is so exercised in spiritual discipline that demons can’t conquer him, and wild beasts obey him.[36] The inner desert is the arena where this struggle takes place.
For Athanasius, the motivation for Anthony to go deeper into desert life is predicated on an impulse to seek out heightened ascetic struggles against passions he discerned within himself (especially pride): in short, a more rigorous ascetic experience than the Pachomian system could offer him, with an emphasis on total isolation and solitary engagement in the struggle with demons. The life of the “desert” solitary is attractive to Athanasius precisely because it exemplified, for him, a deeper and more rigorous ascetic life, one that takes ascetic withdrawal to a new and more literal level. While the “inner mountain” was still close enough for monks and “Saracens” to take him food once a month, it was still far enough to make a strong impression on his disciples, and for Athanasius, it was the model of ascetic withdrawal. In many ways, Athanasius would have an impact on the vocabulary of desert asceticism, especially on the coenobitic tradition’s self-understanding.[37] This is why, I think, Goehring’s strict distinction between Pachomian monasticism and Antonian eremiticism, with the latter having no effect on the former, is not tenable, given the fact that Athanasius would have an almost universal impact on the parlance of ascetic spirituality. In the Bohairic Life itself, Anthony is mentioned at the very beginning as a model of spiritual struggle. It is true that some of the ascetic “desert-dwellers” in the Bohairic Life are actually not deep in the desert, but in a desert spot enclosed by a lush valley. But does this really matter? Desert withdrawal seems to be something that was accessible to the Pachomian monasteries, making available an eremitic life. This, in many ways, gives strength to the concept of a “desertification” of the city, and, conversely, to the concept of the “urbanization” of asceticism. The desert dwellers that the Bohairic Life were still inhabiting literal deserts. So the point still seems to hold that one meaning of ‘desert’ is a literal, barren, uninhabited placed, and that such physical places are a necessity to live extreme ascetic lives of white martyrdom. At the same time, however, the urban place is deemed to be worthy of ascetic endeavor, since the temptations that one finds pose challenges to the monk’s spiritual life, which is precisely why ascetics go into the desert in the first place.
[1] Indeed, the final fait accompli of the Christianization of the empire may have been the rate of conversions that occurred in the major urban centers of the empire. Constantine’s Edict of Milan, in this light, was a result of the growth of Christianity to such an extent that it succeeded in supplanting a good number of pagan religions in the major cities. See Rodney Stark’s first and sixth chapters, titled respectively “Conversion and Christian Growth,” and “Christianizing the Urban Empire: A Quantitative Approach” in The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
[2] Wayne Meeks, The First Urban Christians. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) p. 11, cited in Stark, 129.
[3] “From the third century the question was being put with steadily increasing pressure whether the Church could occupy a position of influence in high society without losing something of its moral power and independence.” Henry Chadwick, The Early Church. (Middlesex: Penguin, 1967) 175. This question becomes especially relevant when bishops are occupying positions of civic importance.
[4] J.E. Goehring, Ascetics, Society and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian Monasticism. Studies in Antiquity and Christianity. (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity International Press, 1999) Cf. John Binns, Ascetics and Ambassadors of Christ: The Monasteries of Palestine, 314-631. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) 121-147, where Binns makes the case that ascetic withdrawal did not keep the monks from engaging the urban and imperial culture, often taking part in important imperial and ecclesiastical affairs.
[5] Goehring, 68-69. Cf. A. Emmett, “Female Ascetics in the Greek Papyri.” In Wolfram Horander et al., eds. XVI Internationaler Byzantinistenkongress Wein, 4-9. Oktober 1981. JOB 23, 2. (Wien: Der osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1982), 507-515, and Walter E. Crum, Varia Coptica: Texts, Translations, Indexes (Aberdeen: University Press, 1939). See also the review by Andrew Crislip, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 121, no. 4, (Oct. to Dec., 2001), 699-700.
[6] Ibid., 82ff: P. 83. Cf. Goehring, “The World Engaged: The Social and Economic World of Early Egyptian Monasticism.” In James E. Goehring et al., eds., Gnosticism and the Early Christian World: In Honor of James M. Robinson. Sonoma, CA: Poleridge Press, 1990, 134-144; Leslie S.B. MaCoull, Discourses of Aphrodito: His Works and His World TCH 16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Otto Meinardus, “Dayr Anba Antuniyus: History.” In Aziz. S. Atiya, The Coptic Encyclopedia. (8 volumes). (New York: Macmillan, 1991), vol.3,719-21
[7] For the purposes of this study, I present “urban” and “desert” forms of asceticism as dichotomies, with little discussion of villages. ‘Village’ is close to ‘rural’ which is on the way to ‘desert’ –so there is a continuum here, stretching from the big city to the desert, with the village falling somewhere in the middle. I will continue to assert the distinction between desert and city, but with the caveat of a continuum between the two, with the village being a kind of midpoint.
[8] Anonymous, “The Bohairic Life of St. Pachomius.” In The Pachomian Koinonia: The Life of St. Pachomius and His Disciples (Vol. I). (Trans. Armand Veilleux) (Cistercian Studies Series: Number 45) (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications Inc. 1980), Chapter 1. The Pachomian vitae fall into three types: the Bohairic Life (Bohairic being the northern Coptic dialect), the First Greek Life, and the Arabic Life. See Fr. Armand’s Introduction on the various recensions of the Pachomian lives, 1-17
[9] Ibid., Chapter 2: “Such was the virtuous life of our holy father Apa Antony, like that of the great Elijah, of Elisha, and of John the Baptist.”
[10] See Ewa Wypszicka, “Le monachisme egyptien et les villes,” Travaux et memoires 12 (1994) 1-44. Goehring takes issue with Peter Brown’s assessment in “The Rise and Function of the Holy Man in Late Antiquity,” Journal of Religion 61 (1971) 83 that urban monasticism naturally flows from desert monasticism, as well as Derwas Chitty’s argument of the same in The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir Seminary Press, 1995). See also Douglas Burton-Christie, The World in the Desert: An Introduction to Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. (Oxford: Mowbray’s, 1968).
[11] Bohairic Life, Chapter 7
[12] Ibid., Chapter 8. [I would tend to put periods at the end of these things in footnotes.]
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid., Chapter 3.
[15] Ibid., Chapters 4ff.
[16] The author of the Bohairic Life has Pachomius himself, already a monk, telling his monastic followers about his youth in order to inspire them to be “on their guard.” In reference to the attacks of demons that he would experience as a youth, before his monastic profession, he warns his followers that it wasn’t because of future ascetic greatness that the demons would flee from him, but because “they saw the I hated evil even then-for God made man upright.” Ibid. Chapter 6.
[17] Ibid., Chapter 8.
[18] Ibid.
[19] The Life of Pachomius suggests as much insofar as the monasteries under Pachomius’ care were dotted along the Nile. Ibid., Chapter 59
[20] Goehring, “Withdrawing from the Desert,” HTR, p. 270. See footnote 7.
[21] Ware gets at the very heart of the question of the “desert” when he writes that “the meaning that the desert possessed for these early Christian ascetics…(is that it) was both the place where God was to be found-here the classic prototype was Moses, who met God face to face in the desert of Sinai-and at the same time it was the place where demons dwell…So the solitary in withdrawing into the desert, has a double aim: to meet God and to fight the demons.” Kallistos Ware, “The Way of the Ascetics: Negative or Affirmative?” Asceticism (ed. V. Wimbush and R. Valantasis) (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Cf. James McKinnon, “Desert Monasticism and the Later Fourth-Century Psalmodic Movement,” Music and Letters, Vol. 75, No. 4 (1994) 505-521 on the use of the Psalms in an effort to “tame the desert.”
[22] The non-Egyptian nature of Athanasius’ audience is quite clear in the prologue, with perhaps a hint that he is addressing “monks” in the “western provinces”: Spain, Gaul, and Rome itself. See Prologue, and chapter 93. Brian Brennan makes this inference in “Athanasius’ Vita Antonii: A Sociological Interpretation.” In Vigiliae Christianae 39 (Brill, Leiden, 1985), 210.
[23] This, of course, is assuming that the extent of Anthony’s popularity in Gaul, Spain and Rome is not just a hyperbolic literary device.
[24] Athanasius, "Vita Antonii," "Life and Affairs of our Holy Father Antony," Athanasius: The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus (trans. Robert C. Gregg) (Classics of Western Spirituality) (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), Chapter 8.
[25]Ibid., Chapter 1.
[26] Ibid., Chapter 2.
[27] Ibid., Chapter 3.
[28] Ibid., Chapter 5.
[29] Ibid., Chapter 6.
[30] Ibid., Chapter 7.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid., Chapter 12.
[33] Ibid., Chapters 12 and 13.
[34] Athanasius draws a clear line of relationship between martyrdom and monasticism here, given the fact that after Bishop Peter of Alexandria “had borne his testimony,” Anthony, who had desired martyrdom but was passed over, “again withdrew to his cell, and was there daily a martyr to his conscience, and contending in the conflicts of the faith.” It seems that his adopting a stricter ascetic life, with constant fasting, eschewing bathing (except in extreme necessity), etc. was a direct result of his having missed his opportunity for “bearing testimony”-martyrdom. Ibid. Chapter 47. See Otto Meinardus, Monks and Monasteries of the Egyptian Deserts. The American University at Cairo Press, 1963 pp. 4ff. Cf. Goehring, “Withdrawing from the Desert,” in HTR, pp. 268ff.
[35]Ibid., Chapter 52.
[36]Ibid., Chapters 88-89 See Goehring, Ascetics, Society and the Desert, 75-76 for the relationship between asceticism and contests with demons which is central in desert asceticism.
[37] Marilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middles Ages. (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000) She seems to treat the eremitic and coenobitic movements in more of a thematic than a chronological format in the first two chapters, though she does accept the argument that eremitic asceticism came first. Cf. Goehring, “Withdrawing from the Desert,” HTR, 271ff.
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