St Anthony the Great: Life, Temptations, Prayer and Feast

St Anthony the Great (251-356), also called St Anthony Abbot or St Antony of Egypt, is the hermit who gave away a rich inheritance at about twenty, went out into the Egyptian desert, and became the father of all who have since left the world to seek God as monks. His life was written by his friend St Athanasius, and the Church keeps his feast on 17 January, a feast of the third class in white vestments in the calendar of 1962. Here is who he was, what he is known for, his sayings, why farmers and their animals are placed under his protection, and the prayers of his Mass in Latin and English.

He is not to be confused with St Anthony of Padua, the Franciscan friar and finder of lost things, who lived nine centuries later and is kept on 13 June.

Who was St Anthony the Great?

Anthony was born in 251 at a village south of Memphis, in Upper Egypt, of Christian parents who kept him at home, so that he grew up, Butler says, "in ignorance of what was then regarded as polite literature, and could read no language but his own". His parents died before he was twenty, leaving him a considerable estate and the care of a younger sister.

About six months later he heard read in church the words of Our Lord to the rich young man: "If thou wilt be perfect, go sell what thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven" (St Matthew xix. 21). He took them as spoken to himself. He made over his best land to his neighbours, sold the rest and gave the price to the poor, keeping only what he and his sister needed.

Soon after he heard another Gospel, "Be not therefore solicitous for to morrow" (St Matthew vi. 34), and gave away the rest. He placed his sister in a house of consecrated virgins, which Butler notes is commonly taken to be the first recorded mention of a convent, and went to live as a solitary near his village, learning from an old hermit of the neighbourhood.

The temptations of St Anthony

The devil, St Athanasius relates, set upon the young solitary first with regrets for the good he might have done with his fortune, then with "gross and obscene imaginations", and at last in visible forms meant to seduce or to terrify him. Anthony answered with watchfulness over his senses, with fasting and with prayer. He ate only bread and a little salt, drank only water, never before sunset, and sometimes only once in three or four days; he slept on a rush mat or on the bare ground.

Seeking a harder solitude, he shut himself up in an old tomb, where a friend brought him bread from time to time. There, Butler says, the devil was permitted to beat him so cruelly that his friend found him lying almost dead. When he came to himself Anthony cried out: "Where wast thou, my Lord and Master? Why wast thou not here from the beginning of this conflict to render me assistance?" And a voice answered: "Antony, I was here the whole time; I stood by thee and beheld thy combat; and because thou hast manfully withstood thy enemies, I will always protect thee, and will render thy name famous throughout the earth."

These combats became one of the great subjects of Christian art, the "Temptation of St Anthony". Their lesson is the one he gave his monks: the devil is not to be feared by those who fight him with the arms of Christ. "The Devil," he said, "dreads fasting, prayer, humility and good works... His illusions soon vanish, especially if a man arms himself with the sign of the cross." Whoever is tried in the same way will find the same counsel in our page on what God says about temptation.

The father of monks

About 285, at thirty-five, Anthony crossed the Nile and lived almost twenty years alone among some ruins on a mountain top, seeing scarcely anyone but the man who brought him bread every six months. About 305, yielding to those who wanted to live under his guidance, he came down and founded his first monastery in the Fayum: not yet a great house, but scattered cells of hermits whom he visited from time to time. "Strangers knew him from among his disciples," Butler writes, "by the joy on his countenance."

He did not make holiness consist in austerity but in the love of God, and he taught his monks to begin each morning as if they might not live till night, and each evening as if they might never see the morning. When he once fell into dejection, finding unbroken contemplation beyond his strength, an angel showed him a monk plaiting mats of palm leaves, then rising to pray, then sitting down again to work, and said: "Do thus, and relief shall come to thee." Work and prayer, the pattern of every monastic life since, are already there; the Rule of St Benedict would give it its lasting form in the West.

His last home was a cell on Mount Kolzim, near the Red Sea. The Coptic Monastery of St Anthony, which traces its origins to the disciples who gathered around him there, still stands at the foot of that mountain. The Iter Fidei calendar also keeps, two days before his feast, St Paul the First Hermit, whom, the Roman Breviary tells us, Anthony visited at the age of ninety and buried with his own hands.

Witness for the faith at Alexandria

Twice Anthony left the desert for Alexandria. In 311, during the persecution of Maximinus, he went there to encourage the martyrs, standing in sight of the governor in his white sheepskin tunic, though careful, Butler says, never to provoke the judges or denounce himself, "as some rashly did". About 355, at the request of the bishops, he went again to confute the Arians, preaching that the Son of God is not a creature but of the same substance as the Father. Pagans flocked to see him, saying, "We want to see the man of God." His friend and biographer, St Athanasius of Alexandria, accompanied him to the city gate. Asked to stay longer, he answered: "As fish die if they are taken from the water, so does a monk wither away if he forsake his solitude."

The Emperor Constantine and his sons wrote to him, asking his prayers. His monks were astonished; Anthony was not: "Do not wonder that the emperor writes to us, a man even as I am; rather be astounded that God should have written to us, and that He has spoken to us by His Son."

How did St Anthony the Great die?

Having made a last visitation of his monks, he went back to his cell on Mount Kolzim, fell ill there some time after, and died in 356, probably on 17 January, at a hundred and five. Until that last illness, Butler says, he had lived without sickness, his sight unimpaired and not one tooth lost. He forbade his disciples Macarius and Amathas to embalm his body, as was becoming the fashion, and ordered them to bury it secretly in the earth: "In the day of the resurrection I shall receive it incorruptible from the hand of Christ."

He left one of his sheepskins and his cloak to St Athanasius, in token of his communion in faith with him, the other sheepskin to the bishop Serapion, and his sackcloth to his two disciples. "Farewell, my children. Antony is departing, and will no longer be with you." Then he stretched out his feet and calmly ceased to breathe.

His relics are said to have been discovered about 561 and carried to Alexandria, then to Constantinople, and at last to the region of Vienne in France.

Quotes and sayings of St Anthony the Great

The words of St Anthony come to us chiefly through St Athanasius and through the old collections of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. A few of the best known:

• "Humility, Antony!" — the answer he heard when, seeing in a vision the whole earth covered with snares, he asked who could escape them all.
• "The Devil dreads fasting, prayer, humility and good works; he is not able even to stop my mouth who speak against him."
• To philosophers who asked how he could live without books: nature was his great book. And when others mocked his lack of learning, he asked them which came first, good sense or book learning; they answered good sense. "This, then, is sufficient of itself."
• "A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad, you are not like us.'" (attributed to him in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, Anthony 25.)
• And a maxim he often repeated, Butler says: the knowledge of ourselves is the necessary step by which we rise to the knowledge and love of God.

What is St Anthony the Great the patron saint of?

St Anthony's Fire. In the eleventh century, about the time his relics were brought to France, an epidemic called "St Anthony's Fire", usually identified with ergotism, the poisoning caused by diseased rye, raged across Europe, and many cures were credited to his intercession. The Hospital Brothers of St Anthony, the Antonines, founded at the end of that century, nursed the sick, and his invocation against the disease made him one of the most popular saints of the Middle Ages.

Animals and farmers. The pig in his pictures first stood for the devil he had overcome. But the Antonines obtained in many places the right to let their pigs feed freely on the acorns of the woods, a bell hung on the neck of the herd, and so pig and bell became his emblems, and he became, Butler says, the patron of domestic animals and farm stock, to whom butchers and brushmakers placed their guilds. That is why animals are blessed on or around his feast in many Catholic countries.

His emblems. In art he carries a T-shaped staff or cross (the tau), a little bell, a pig, sometimes a book (the book of nature), and sometimes flames, for St Anthony's Fire.

The prayers of the feast of St Anthony (Missal of 1962)

St Anthony's Mass is Os justi, from the Common of Abbots, with the Gospel of the servants who wait with their loins girt and their lamps burning (St Luke xii. 35-40). Its three prayers name him:

Collect, 17 January

Intercessio nos, quaesumus, Domine, beati Antonii Abbatis commendet: ut, quod nostris meritis non valemus, ejus patrocinio assequamur. Per Dominum nostrum Jesum Christum Filium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitate Spiritus Sancti Deus, per omnia saecula saeculorum. Amen.

May the intercession of blessed Anthony the Abbot commend us to Thee, we beseech Thee, O Lord, that what we cannot obtain by our own merits we may gain by his patronage. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.

Secret

Sacris altaribus, Domine, hostias superpositas sanctus Antonius Abbas, quaesumus, in salutem nobis provenire deposcat. Per Dominum nostrum.

May the holy Abbot Anthony, we beseech Thee, O Lord, ask that the offerings laid upon Thy sacred altars may avail us unto salvation. Through our Lord.

Postcommunion

Protegat nos, Domine, cum tui perceptione sacramenti beatus Antonius Abbas, pro nobis intercedendo: ut et conversationis ejus experiamur insignia, et intercessionis percipiamus suffragia. Per Dominum nostrum.

May blessed Anthony the Abbot, interceding for us, protect us, O Lord, together with the reception of Thy sacrament: that we may both experience the marks of his way of life and receive the help of his intercession. Through our Lord.

The Collect is the simplest prayer to St Anthony the Great for any day of the year.

The blessing of animals with the prayer to St Anthony

The Rituale Romanum gives, among its blessings reserved to the priest, a blessing of horses and other animals in which St Anthony is twice invoked. Its two proper prayers run:

Omnipotens sempiterne Deus, qui gloriosum beatum Antonium, variis tentationibus probatum, inter mundi huius turbines illaesum abire fecisti: concede famulis tuis; ut et praeclaro ipsius proficiamus exemplo, et a praesentis vitae periculis eius meritis et intercessione liberemur. Per Christum, Dominum nostrum. ℟. Amen.

Almighty and everlasting God, who didst cause the glorious blessed Anthony, tried by divers temptations, to pass unharmed through the whirlwinds of this world: grant Thy servants both to profit by his shining example and to be freed from the perils of this present life by his merits and intercession. Through Christ our Lord. ℟. Amen.

Benedictionem tuam, Domine, haec animalia accipiant: qua corpore salventur, et ab omni malo per intercessionem beati Antonii liberentur. Per Christum, Dominum nostrum. ℟. Amen.

May these animals receive Thy blessing, O Lord, whereby they may be saved in body and freed from every evil by the intercession of blessed Anthony. Through Christ our Lord. ℟. Amen.

(Then the animals are sprinkled with holy water.)

St Anthony is also invoked by name, among the monks and hermits, in the Litany of the Saints: Sancte Antoni, ora pro nobis.

When is the feast day of St Anthony the Great?

His feast is 17 January, the day on which the most ancient martyrologies commemorate him, probably the day of his death. In the Roman calendar of 1962 it is a feast of the third class, in white vestments; the Breviary reads his life at Matins, closing with his passing "on the sixteenth day before the Kalends of February" in his hundred and fifth year. The calendar of 1969 kept him on the same day. You will find him among the January feasts of our traditional Catholic calendar of 1962 and in our guide to the Catholic saints.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is St Anthony the Great a Catholic saint?

Yes. He is in the Roman calendar on 17 January, his name is in the Litany of the Saints, and the Roman Breviary and Missal have honoured him for centuries. He is venerated just as much by the Eastern Churches, Catholic and Orthodox, and by the Copts of his native Egypt.

Was St Anthony the Great a Copt?

He was an Egyptian, born in Upper Egypt, who spoke only his native tongue, which is why he spoke with Greek philosophers through an interpreter. The Coptic Church honours him as one of its greatest saints, and the monastery that bears his name near the Red Sea is Coptic Orthodox; but he lived long before the division of the fifth century, as a member of the one Church.

Was St Anthony the Great a hermit?

Yes, for most of his long life. He also founded and visited communities of monks, which is why he is called Abbot and the father of monks, but he always returned to his solitude.

Was St Anthony the Great a philosopher?

No. He had no schooling in Greek letters, and he answered the philosophers who came to dispute with him with the good sense and faith that, as he told them, are sufficient of themselves.

When was St Anthony the Great born, and when did he die?

He was born in 251 and died in 356, at the age of a hundred and five.

What is the difference between St Anthony the Great and St Anthony of Padua?

St Anthony the Great was an Egyptian hermit of the third and fourth centuries, kept on 17 January. St Anthony of Padua was a Portuguese Franciscan of the thirteenth century, kept on 13 June, and invoked above all for lost things.

The Iter Fidei app carries the Roman Missal and the Breviary of 1962, with the prayers of St Anthony's feast and the traditional calendar, in Latin and English. Join early access here.

Sources. Alban Butler, Lives of the Saints, 17 January (St Antony the Abbot). Roman Breviary, 17 January, lessons of Matins, and 15 January (St Paul the First Hermit). Roman Missal (1962), Proper of Saints, 17 January, and Common of Abbots. Rituale Romanum (1925), Appendix, blessing of horses and other animals. Holy Bible, Douay-Rheims version, St Matthew vi. 34 and xix. 21.