Saint Anthony the Great: The Father of Monks Who Made the Desert a City
A Son of Upper Egypt and the Voice in the Gospel
Saint Anthony the Great was born around the year 251 in the village of Koma — a quiet settlement in Upper Egypt near Herakleopolis Magna, in what is today the governorate of Beni Suef in central Egypt, roughly 130 kilometers south of Cairo along the Nile. His parents were wealthy Coptic Christians of illustrious lineage, devout and refined, and they raised him in the rhythms of the early Egyptian Church — a Christianity that had already endured Decius, was about to endure Diocletian, and would soon give the world its most enduring spiritual invention: the monastic life.
He was a serious child, sober beyond his years. He preferred the silence of the church to the conversation of his peers, and Athanasius, his eventual biographer, tells us that he listened to the readings of Scripture with such attention that what he heard once he kept for life. By the time he was twenty, both his parents had died, leaving him guardian of his younger sister and master of a considerable estate.
Then came the moment that changed the spiritual landscape of the Christian world.
The Gospel Heard as a Personal Address
About six months after his parents' death, Anthony walked into church and heard the Gospel read aloud — the encounter between Christ and the rich young ruler, with its piercing command: If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me. He understood the words as spoken directly to him.
He gave away the family's lands to his neighbors, sold the remaining property, and distributed the proceeds to the poor of the village. He placed his sister with a community of consecrated virgins — a kind of proto-nunnery already forming in those years — and walked out of his inherited life entirely.
He did not yet go into the deep desert. He began, modestly, by apprenticing himself to a local hermit on the edge of his village, learning the ascetic disciplines that other Egyptian Christians had already begun to practice. Anthony was not the first ascetic. What he became was the first to go further than anyone had gone before.
The Tombs, the Fort, and Twenty Years of Combat
After some years among the village ascetics, Anthony withdrew to a tomb on the outskirts of his settlement. There he wrestled with the demons that the Life of Antony describes in such vivid detail — the temptations of memory, of pride, of despair, of the body — that medieval painters from Hieronymus Bosch to Salvador Dalí could not stop returning to them across the centuries.
Then he went deeper still. He crossed the Nile to an abandoned Roman fortress at Pispir, on what is today Mount Pispir near Dayr al-Maymun, in Egypt's Beni Suef Governorate. He sealed himself inside. For twenty years he would not emerge — receiving bread tossed over the wall, speaking to no one, contending alone with God and with the powers of the air.
When he finally came out, the brethren who broke down the door expected to find a wasted, broken man. Instead, Athanasius tells us, his body was unimpaired and his soul was lit from within. He had not been damaged by his solitude; he had been forged by it. From that moment, disciples began to gather around him, building cells in the surrounding mountains, and the famous line was set down for the ages: the desert was made a city.
The Brief Returns to the World
Twice, Anthony left his solitude for the affairs of the wider Church.
The first was in 311, during the persecution under Maximinus Daia. Anthony walked into Alexandria openly, visiting Christians in prison, comforting confessors before their trials, and standing visibly in the public square in the hope of being arrested himself. The governor, recognizing him, refused to give him the martyr's crown he sought and ordered him out of the city.
The second was around 335, when the Arian crisis was tearing the Eastern Church apart. At the urging of Saint Athanasius — his disciple, friend, and future biographer — Anthony came to Alexandria again, this time to defend the divinity of Christ. The Arians had attempted to claim him for their cause. He stood before bishop and crowd and disowned them publicly, and many pagans, witnessing his testimony, were converted in those few short days.
Then he returned to the desert and never came back.
The Inner Mountain by the Red Sea
Seeking deeper solitude than even Pispir afforded, Anthony was led — tradition says by a band of Bedouins he met along the way — to a mountain in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, between the Nile and the Red Sea. There, beneath the cliffs of what is today Mount Colzim in Egypt's Red Sea Governorate, he founded the hermitage that would become the Monastery of Saint Anthony (Dayr Mari Antonios) — the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery in the world. Coptic monks have prayed there without interruption for more than seventeen hundred years.
Near the end of his life, he made one final pilgrimage of love — across the desert to find Saint Paul of Thebes, the First Hermit, whom he buried with his own hands in a tunic given to him by Athanasius. Tradition says two lions came out of the wilderness and dug the grave.
The Hidden Tomb and the Vita Antonii
Anthony reposed on January 17, 356, having lived 105 years. He instructed his two final disciples to bury him in a secret grave so that his body would not become an object of public veneration — a final lesson in humility from a man who had spent eight decades fleeing his own renown. He left one of his sheepskin mantles to Saint Athanasius of Alexandria and the other to Saint Serapion of Thmuis.
Saint Athanasius then sat down and wrote The Life of Antony — the first full biography of a non-martyr saint, the founding document of Christian monastic literature, and one of the most consequential books in the history of Western spirituality. Saint Augustine, reading it in a garden in Milan a generation later, would credit it as one of the proximate causes of his own conversion.
Liturgical Memory and the Apolytikion
The Apolytikion of Saint Anthony hails him as one who imitated the zeal of the Prophet Elijah and the straight paths of John the Baptist, who became a dweller of the desert and confirmed the universe by his prayer. The Kontakion sings of him as the one who forsook the uproars of life and completed his course in quiet — a fellow of the Baptist, and Father of Fathers.
His relics, which he had so wished to remain hidden, were translated to Alexandria in the year 544, then to Constantinople after the Saracen conquest of Egypt, and eventually to a diocese near Vienna in the tenth or eleventh century, where many remain to this day.
Spiritual Lessons from Saint Anthony
The Word Heard as a Personal Address — Anthony's whole life turned on a single sentence of the Gospel. Scripture is not informational. It is a voice. Until we let it speak to us in the second person singular, we have not yet really heard it.
Solitude as the Forge — He did not avoid the world because he hated it; he withdrew because he understood that the soul must first be confronted alone before it can love anything truly. Modern life conspires to keep us company every waking moment. Anthony reminds us what an hour of true silence costs and is worth.
The Desert Made a City — Holiness is not a private project. The deepest withdrawals into prayer become, paradoxically, the most fertile grounds of community. What we cultivate in secret, others will eventually find.
Doctrine and Solitude Belong Together — Anthony left the desert for Alexandria when the faith was under threat. The hermit was also the theologian's ally. Real prayer is never indifferent to the truth of who Christ is.
The Hidden Grave — He refused even the dignity of a marked tomb. The saints we remember most are often the ones who fled remembrance hardest. Humility is the signature of authentic holiness.
How to Honor Saint Anthony Today
Read a passage from The Life of Antony by Saint Athanasius — even a single chapter — and let his desert speak into yours.
Practice a deliberate silence today. Half an hour with no phone, no music, no company. Notice what surfaces. That is the desert in miniature.
Read Matthew 19:16–22 slowly, and ask which possession — material, emotional, ambitional — Christ is gently asking you to release.
Pray his closing intercession: Holy Father Anthony, dweller in the desert and Father of Fathers, who imitated Elijah and the Baptist and confirmed the universe by prayer, intercede with Christ our God for the salvation of our souls.
Sources & Further Reading
Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, The Life of Antony (Vita Antonii, c. 360)
Venerable and God-bearing Father Anthony the Great, Orthodox Church in America (oca.org)
Anthony the Great, OrthodoxWiki
Anthony the Great, Wikipedia
Apolytikion and Kontakion of Saint Anthony the Great, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (goarch.org)
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum), trans. Benedicta Ward
The Life of Saint Anthony the Great, the Anchorite of Egypt, Saint Sophia Greek Orthodox Cathedral
Through the prayers of our holy and God-bearing Father Anthony the Great — who heard the Gospel as a word spoken to him, who made the desert a city by his stillness, and who slept in an unmarked grave so that no glory might come to him save the glory of Christ — may we, too, learn the courage of solitude, the discipline of prayer, and the freedom of a soul that has nothing left to keep.
