Hello and welcome to Literature and History, Episode 92, Athanasius' Life of Antony.

In this episode, I'm going to tell you a story about a bishop and a monk.

The bishop in question is Athanasius of Alexandria, who lived from roughly 297 to 373,

and over the course of the 4th century ended up being one of the champions of what would

soon become Orthodox Catholicism.

And the monk is St. Antony the Great, or sometimes Anthony the Great, a man about two generations

older than Athanasius of Alexandria, who between about 270 and 356 lived an ascetic lifestyle

mostly in solitude in the remote Egyptian countryside and became the most famous pious

hermit in Christian history.

Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria wrote a book about St. Antony the Monk in the years following

the old hermit's death in 356, and this biography, our main text for today, was the Life

of Antony.

The Life of Antony was an immediately popular text.

In an era of Christian factionalism, an era during which bishops were politicking against

one another in partnerships with Roman emperors, Athanasius's Life of Antony showed Christianity

in its purest and most raw form, telling the tale of a holy monk who went out into the

desert, ate and drank nearly nothing, slept on the dirt, and devoted himself to praising

Christ and resisting the ravages of Satan.

One of the oldest Christian biographies to have survived from late antiquity, the Life

of Antony had a formative role in establishing the ideals of monasticism, with its valorous

portrait of the most monkish monk of all monks.

As famous as St. Antony the Hermit eventually became, though, monks by the 300 CE were

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