You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute,

an Apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.

Hi, and welcome to Form Now. I'm Taylor Kemp. And with me is Dr. Elizabeth Klein, a professor of theology here at the Graduate School of Theology. Welcome. Dr. Klein. Today we were talking about St. Anthony of Egypt, also known as St. Anthony the Great, we celebrate his feast on January 17th.

Before we get into just some very general information about him, Dr. Klein, would you like,

do you have any introductory remarks? Sure. I mean, I'm really happy to talk about St. Anthony because St. Anthony, often when we say St. Anthony now, people think of St. Anthony of Padua,

but this St. Anthony is the original,

St. Anthony the Great. And he really was like an all-star, incredibly popular saint of the early

church, one of the most well-known saints. And so it's good to be able to talk to him and tell

people a little bit why. Why he was so impopular? People may be surprised that he was so popular

because you, well, for one, you can read about him.

So a lot of what we're going to be talking about today comes from a document written by St.

Athanasius called The Life of Anthony.

You can Google this.

You can find PDFs online.

But you can find it and read it for yourself.

But he lived a very radical life.

So it's kind of surprising that people read this and not surprising they're inspired by it,

surprising that they, it was a popular piece of literature.

And it's interesting, you know, kind of in each stage of history, you know, people need heroes,

and it is really reflective of the time of the spirit to look at who those heroes were and why they were so heroic.

In the earliest period, a lot of the greatest heroes were martyrs.

And as you move out of the period of martyrdom, then in the next period of Christianity, really

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