St. Antony: The New Embodiment of Christian Manliness
When Athanasius composes Life of Antony in around, we're guessing, 356, very shortly after Anthony dies, he produced an instant bestseller and a new genre of literature. It swept the Mediterranean world like wildfire, and the sharing of it would be instrumental in the conversion of many saints, among them Saint Augustine of Hippo, who references it in his Confessions.
It has been said that, after the Bible, the Life of Antony is the most widely known and distributed book of the ancient Christian world, serving as the standard for desert monks and laymen. St. Benedict uses it as he crafts a rule for a new approach to monasticism, for those that can't quite live up to such an intimidating precedent.
In one way, The Life of Antony was patterned on the great “life of the sage” that had become popular in the late Hellenic World. In that sense it fit into the model of the lives of Stoics, Neoplatonists, and other pagan philosophers, which themselves, as we'll discuss in a little bit, were intended to present a new version of the Greek hero. In other ways St. Athanasius anticipates what will become the Christian romance: an amazing Christian hero goes out to do battle and win glory in a Christian context. And yet again, the story is told wrapped in biblical imagery and teaching, serving as a handbook for Christian life and doctrine, and embodying the ideal Christian described throughout the New Testament.
But for the modern reader, very often the book is not only difficult, but at times it is downright repellent in the way it describes things that characterize Anthony. When we read about Anthony’s unwillingness to ever remove his clothes or never let water touch his feet, it is not at all clear how this is someone we are supposed to emulate or admire. How could something so extreme and foreign have been a practical guide to Christian life that inspired so many of our forebears? Indeed, for the early Christians, the Life of Antony was not only inspiring, but a riveting read. Antony captured their imagination the way movie heroes captivate us today.
To appreciate how Antony could be such a dazzling heroic figure, we need to recapture the vision of heroism and courage that filled the minds of those for whom the story was written. That is, we need to undertake what may seem like a very prosaic professorial tour of the history of the philosophy of courage, to better understand the grandeur of the Life of Antony.
The Platonic and Aristotelian Roots
In Plato’s dialogue, Laches, Socrates begins to pursue the question of what is manliness, andrea, the Greek word for courage. What makes a man to be a hero? While the Greek imagination immediately jumps the Greek warrior on the field of battle, Socrates is not so convinced that is a comprehensive account. Specifically, Socrates, as always, wants a universal definition. He does not want to know what makes this or that solider brave but, Socrates states, “For I wished to inquire of you about not only those who are courageous in the heavy-armed soldiery...but also those who are courageous in dangers at sea, and those who are courageous toward sickness and poverty or even toward politics, and yet further not only those who are courageous toward pains or fears but also those who are terribly clever at fighting against desires or pleasures, whether remaining or turning around in retreat—for there are presumably some courageous people, in such things too.”
As the dialogue proceeds, Socrates wonders whether we also need to specify some sort of wise limit to this courage. Are there some things that are simply foolish to endure that would not fall under our image of courage? And in that case, is courage properly a kind of wisdom?
Like so many dialogues, Laches concludes without a definitive answer, but when Aristotle takes up the question of what is courage in his Nichomachean Ethics, he follows the progression of inquiry laid out by Plato in Laches. For Aristotle, courage is not a universal ability to endure through any difficulty whatsoever, but is instead a very specific virtue, that moderates a man’s fear of death or injury on the battlefield. Further, what regulates whether or not a man is willing to risk dangers on the battlefield is his perception of the beautiful: the beauty of his own life, and the beauty of the city for which he is willing to sacrifice.
The Stoics
A lot had happened in the world of Late Antiquity in the eight hundred years since Aristotle first began teaching about the life of virtue, and a major player in that development was Stoicism. The Stoics saw themselves as the true inheritors of the Socratic tradition. In their view, both the Platonists and Aristotelians had fallen short of the Socratic mantel; only the Stoics could live up to the Socratic moral ideal. By painting their own picture of the sage, the Stoics attempted to explain to their contemporaries what it would mean to live like the philosophical hero Socrates.
There were two main stages in the development of Stoicism, first the Greeks, then the Romans. There are not a lot of Greek writings that have survived over the centuries. The Greek Stoics began with Zeno about twenty to fifty years after Aristotle has left the stage. The Greek Stoic school continues strongly through Chryssipus into around 206 B.C. Then there was a historical gap before the emergence of those men who radically the philosophy into the school of Roman Stoicism. And it is this latter group that often still appeals to the popular mind when we think of Stoics, as we imagine men like Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, or Seneca. In between the Roman school and the Greek school stands Cicero, about one hundred years after the death of Chyrssipus. Cicero is clearly Roman, but he sees himself as translating and communicating the work of the Greek Stoics to the Romans.
Courage as a Form of Virtue
As we examine the features of the Stoic philosophy of virtue two things stand out. First, the Stoics emphasize the unity of all virtue; it is a fundamental characteristic that governs all of the Stoic sage’s action. Any human action that is virtuous will have all the perfections of human action. That means, under this view, that there can never be a weak, limp, dispirited virtue. Every virtuous action must have a spirited, strong, forceful quality. And this forceful quality is called courage. Cicero will say that when the Stoics think about courage, they define courage as, “That virtue which champions the cause of right.” Or, he notes, another way of putting it, courage is “the power of resisting corruptions, denoting firmness of mind in the face of assaults of all kinds.”
This description is a much broader description than what Aristotle meant by courage, where he saw it as principally a martial virtue expressed on the field of battle. Here we are talking about a fundamental spiritedness that always is there for the cause of right. It resists all corruption. It's a firmness of mind, it’s a kind of manliness to always do the right thing. Courage, for the Stoics, has become a universal characteristic of virtue and not just one example of doing the right thing in a particular situation.
Cicero will go on to say that there are two characteristics of the courageous soul. One of these is the indifference to outward circumstances. “Such a person cherishes the conviction that nothing but moral goodness and propriety deserve to be admired, wished for, or striven after and that he ought not to be subject to any man, or any passion, or any accident of fortune.” Nothing but moral excellence matters. Whereas for Aristotle the courageous man acts for the sake of moral excellence when on the battlefield, for Cicero the entire life of virtue has become a battlefield. But this battlefield is now more like tranch warfare. It is characterized by endurance, by patience, and perseverance in the good.
The second characteristic of courage, according to Cicero, is that when one’s soul is so disciplined as to be free from passion, to be free from outer influence, and only concerned with moral greatness, then one will do deeds that are not only great and in the highest degree useful, but extremely arduous, laborious, and fraught with danger both to life and to many things that make life worth living. It is this second part of courage that is the result, that is the part that's useful for us and good for society. This second part of courage Cicero describes as “confident action” either expressed in magnanimity (taking a great souled view of the world), or in magnificence (undertaking generous public works).
This is an amazing transformation: courage went from being principally a flashy virtue, to being first and foremost an internal disposition of endurance that will express itself eventually in more manifest activity. But for now, the fundamental disposition of manliness is patient endurance of hardship. Cicero here taps into an intuition shared by many cultures about what it means to be a manly person in the face of suffering: the stiff upper lip of the Victorians, and Rudyard, Kipling's, poem, “If” which can be summarized perhaps as “If you're tough, you'll be a man. The same sentiment is expressed in the cowboy tradition, if you fall off a horse, “don’t cry, cowboy up!”
This sentiment ran through the Hellenic-Roman world as well. In Late Antiquity, the figure of Philoctetes becomes an image of this person who utterly fails in courage, because he was a wimp. Why was he a wimp? Because he cries. A man should not cry when he is hurt. No matter how bad his foots hurt, he should not cry. And so Philoctetes became a byword for a failure of courage; he lacked patient endurance.
When I think of the ideal Stoic sage, I imagine an elite boxer who in the first found can absorb punch after punch, and then in the second round emerges with terrific force and knocks his opponent from the ring. The Stoic sage is the man that cantake whatever life throws him, all of the pain, all the suffering, and he does not cry or even whimper, and then at the right moment, he explodes forth with dazzling manly action.
The Nature of Happiness
The second key aspect of the Stoic vision of virtue is that happiness lies fully within human power; we are happy or not based solely on what we do. Happiness is therefore defined as virtuous living. Consequently, all of these other things that are not within our power, such as wealth, health, life, death, pleasure, pain, those things do not contribute to happiness. These latter are things to be endured with patience and perseverance, so that, in those moments of great happiness, the sage can explode out and act with confidence and greatness. Yet, following Epictetus, the Stoics note that different men have to decide differently how to endure the challenges that come before them. For some it is unreasonable to endure a hardship, for others, it is reasonable. As Epictetus puts it, “To determine what is reasonable or unreasonable, namely, what is within our power or not, not only do we have to form a judgment about the value of external things, but we have to judge how they stand in relation to our own character. For one man, he will judge it consistent with his character to hold the chamber pot while another man uses it. Because if he does not, he will be beaten and will not receive his food. But to another man the holding of a chamber pot is not only intolerable for himself, it is equally intolerable to have someone hold it for him. If then you ask whether you should hold the chamber pot or not, I say to you that it is true that food is worth more than not having food and being beaten is worse than not being beaten. And if you measure your interest by these things, go and hold the chamber pot. But you say that's not worthy of me. Well, that is for you to know, not I. You must decide at what price you sell yourself for. Men sell themselves at various prices.”
Epictetus goes on to tell the story of Senator Priscus Helvidius who would be put to death by the Roman Emperor Vespasian for opposing him. Helvidius was going into the senate, and the emperor told him “Don't go.” The senator responded, “It is in your power to tell me not to go, if you make me not be a member of the senate, but as long as I am a member of the senate, I must go.” The Emperor answered, “Well, then go in but say nothing.” “Don't ask my opinion, and I'll be silent.” “But I must ask your opinion.” “And I must say what I think.” “But if you do so, I shall put you to death.” “When did I become immortal? You must do your part and I will do mine. It is your part to kill and mine to die, but not in fear; yours to banish me, mine to depart without sorrow.”
Epictetus then added his own commentary to the story: “But in such circumstances, you say, another would have replied to Caesar who forbade him to enter the Senate, “Thank you for sparing me. Of course I won't go in.” But such a man would not have been needed, would not have needed to be told don't go to the Senate, for he would have been no threat to the emperor.”
“So you will ask” Epictetus goes on to say, “How do I know what is suitable to me?” Does the bull know when the lion has attacked that he has powers within himself and must defend the whole herd? How does he do this? He just knows. Now a bull is not made suddenly, nor a brave man. But we must discipline ourselves in the winter for the summer campaign and not rashly run upon that which does not concern us. Consider at what price you sell your own will, if for no other reason that you sell it not for a small sum.”
The Field of Courage
If courage is now a universal form of virtue, and if virtue must be what is within one’s power, it follows, for the Stoics, that courage must be something that can be done in any state of life. Cicero, therefore, describes various venues for courage: military courage on the battlefield, political courage, in the case of a senator confronting a tyrant or speaking against the mob according to the truth of conviction. And lastly, Cicero notes the courage of the philosopher, the courage of the one who retires from public affairs. Such field for courage, Cicero concedes, is rare since it is hard to know whether one retires from public affairs out of cowardice or out of courage to pursue the great ideal. But what matters for our story at present is that Cicero formally introduced this third field for heroic courageous action. The hero can now emerge on the philosophical stage in an even more radical way than did Socrates; this hero would never have to confront even a political court in order to be courageous.
The Neo-Platonic School
Before we can treat of St. Antony, we need to consider one more philosophical school, the Neoplatonists, as embodied in the writings of Plotinus which he composed in Rome, around 245 AD. Plotinus, as a student of Plato noted three different images of courage that Plato presented. First, the martial view of courage that was taken up in the Republic; second a view of courage as a form for all spirited virtuous action as the Stoics develop based on their reading of the Phaedrus; and lastly, the view of courage Socrates gives in his deathbed conversation in Plato’s Phaedo:
“We cannot think, my friend, if you are really a philosopher, that you will fear death. For you will confidently believe that you will find pure wisdom nowhere else than in the other world. And if this is so, it would be very foolish to fear death. Now there are some who appear to be brave, but only the philosophers are truly brave. For all else are brave through fear. That is, they are brave because of the fear of losing some other good. But only the philosopher is truly brave, for it is absurd to be brave through fear. Therefore, I suspect that this is not the right way to purchase virtue by exchanging pleasures for pleasures, pains for pains, some fear for other fears. Rather, what must be exchanged is wisdom. All things are to be sold for wisdom. And true courage exists only with wisdom, whether pleasures and fears and other things of that sort are added or taken away. And virtue, which consists in the exchange of such things for each other without wisdom, is but a painted imitation of virtue, and is really slavish, and has nothing healthy or lasting in it. But truth is in fact a purification from all these things, and self-restraint and justice and courage and wisdom itself are a kind of purification.”
For Plotinus the question was, how do we harmonize Socrates’ claim in the Phaedo that real courage is a purification that is intended to prepare the soul for a journey to another world with the claim in the Republic that courage is for protecting the goodness and beauty of the city?
First, Plotinus accepts courage as a virtue in the way that the Stoics had taken it, as a controlling action, a controlling governing virtue for all human action. Then he makes a distinction between civic virtue and purifying virtue. Civic virtue, according to Plotinus, is moderating the passions under reason to manifest some glory for the good of the city. Plotinus argued, however, that since man is intended for a life after death, the ultimate goal of human excellence must be more than a flourishing in this life. Therefore, there needs to be a class of virtues that prepare for this other life in a way that is distinct from the virtues contributing to civic flourishing.
This other class of virtue is the purifying virtue of courage that Socrates talked about. In purifying virtue, according to Plotinus, the situation is vastly different from civic courage. In civic courage, a man overcomes his fear of death for a greater good; in purifying virtue, a man is purified from his fear of death. The mortal who fears death does not rightly perceive how good it is to live life in the company of the gods. If he did, he would be purified of any attachment to this life and be straining for the next. Courage in this sense is what purifies us of an animal attachment to life and frees us for divine life.
In this context, a new literary genre emerges that glorifies the kind of hero who lives out this kind of purifying virtue of courage; and that hero is not a classic Greek warrior. Plato had already begun this trend in promoting Socrates, in his Apology, as a replacement to the Homeric hero of Achilles. But as genre this takes off around the later part of the third century. There’s a Life of Plotinus, various lives of the sages about the Stoic sages, etc. And they are all dedicated to evidencing the at times superhuman and manly virtue of being a philosopher. This genre becomes a dominant ‘fun read’ of Late Antiquity, and immensely popular in the cultured classes, replacing Homer in popularity. Homer had to be allegorized, but these books were about the real lives of real sages that were purifying themselves for entrance into the eternal temple of the gods.
The Biblical Context
So far the focus has been on the philosophcial context of the Life of Antony, but we also need to take into account the biblical ideal of the courageous hero. The original Old Testament/Hebraic framework saw courage as evidenced in fulfilling the law and relying on God in an extraordinary way. At the time of the great Babylonian captivity of Israel, not only were the Jews dispersed into Persia, they also spread throughout the Hellenic world, establishing enclaves of the Jewish diaspora. On of those enclaves, Alexandria in Egypt, and became a center for Jewish thought, and especially for Jews to reflect on their relationship to Greek thought. There, for example, the Jew Philo of Alexandria devoted his philosophical reflection to harmonizing the teachings of Plato, and the Stoics with the teaching of Scripture. This work was so successful that it is often seen as laying the groundwork for the development of NeoPlatonism as taught by Plotinus.
In anticipation of Plotinus, Philo adopted a two-tiered structure of virtue: the first tier was concerned with the active political life here on earth, and then there was a tier, called contemplative virtue, prepared man for communion with God. Also in Alexandria, either predating Philo, or perhaps contemporaneous with him depending on which biblical scholar is asked, The Book of Wisdom emerges with a similar focus to Philo. The Book of Wisdom has two aims, one, to identify wisdom with living according to the divine Law given by Moses, and secondly, in some way to identify this life of wisdom according to the Law with the life of virtue according to the Stoics and the Platonists. Therefore, this book is the only place in all of Scripture where there is a listing of the four cardinal virtues, (Wis. 8:7): “If anyone loves righteousness, her labors are virtues, for she teaches self-control, and prudence, justice and courage (andrea in Greek). Nothing in life is more profitable to men than these.”
This seems to be the end of our story about how to link the Biblical context with the philosophical developments of the Hellenic world. The Book of Wisdom has given divine sanction to courage as a cardinal virtue, and has identified that virtue as a component of fulfilling the law of God. The Stoics, Neo-Platonists, and the Bible all agree.
The New Testament Challenge
When the New Testament emerges, however, a major question arose. Nowhere in the New Testament is the word Greek word andrea used; courageous manliness never comes up. There are other words such as kuros for being mighty, tharsos for being brave, but there is no mention of the Hellenic cardinal virtue of andrea. This deafening silence makes it hard to say that courage is a fundamental virtue of the Christian life.
Beyond omission, many in Late Antiquity wondered whether Christianity was compatible with the ideals of manly courage. ‘Turning the other cheek’ is not just endurance, but a forgiving of the offender. forgiving this person. Pagan critics like Celsus in the 2nd century, or Emperor Julian in the fourth argued that Christianity was opposed to the heroism of the Greek heroes or even of the Hellenic sages. In fact, Julian explicitly compared Christ to Philoctetes, who embodied the vice opposed to manly endurance. For Julian, Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane appears sweating blood, sobbing, beginning not to half to endure the test, in much the way the Philoctetes miserably laments his fate. Julian taunted the Christians with their lack of a hero, noting, like Celsus before him, that Christianity was an effeminate movement dominated by women and the poor. Manly courage is inimical to the Christian ideal.
In that Latin tradition, this critique of Christianity was dealt with in a large part through the felicity of translation. In Latin translation, the Greek Old and New Testament are filled with the latin word fortitudo, which translates kuros, tharos, and andrea. And when Cicero extols the virtue of courage, he also calls that same virtue fortitudo. St. Ambrose took Cicero's book On Duties, and write an imitation of it addressed to clerics and firmly make fortitudo a fundamental Christian virtue. It is within this work that Ambrose coins the phrase “cardinal virtue” to describe the foundational role that fortitudo plays as a form of virtue in the Christian life. This is the tradition that will continue into Aquinas, who himself readily adopts Aristotle, Cicero and Ambrose in his own treatment of fortitudo.
The majority of the Christian world, however, was not Latin-speaking, and so they did not have this simple solution available to them. The Greek Christians had to look for another solution. They first pouint out that the word tharsos, meaning brave, was used in Homer as equivalent to the way the Aristotle and Plato used the word andrea. And the New Testament is full of exhortations to bravery. Our Lord gives the command to be tharsos, to be brave, multiple times: when he heals the paralytic, when the Apostles see him walking on water, when he heals the hemorrhaging woman. In John 16, when Christ is talking about the coming tribulation, he says “Be brave, have confidence, I have conquered the world.”
At the very end of the Acts of the Apostles, when our Lord appears to St. Paul as he is being sent to Rome, he exhorts Paul to be brave. This last exhortation is especially important. There is an awareness that St. Luke is perhaps imitating the epic, imitating the Iliad and the Aeneid in the way he narrates the Acts of the Apostles, and so when St. Paul is told to be brave when he goes to Rome, it is seen as Paul being commissioned to re-found the city in the faith of Christ. Such civic minded effort is readily associated with the civic virtue of andrea; so even within the Greek New Testament there may be a certain resonance between tharsos and the unspoken virtue of andrea.
The other key Pauline virtue that is used throughout the New Testament is endurance (hupomoneh), or words associated with that, such as carteria, the Greek word that was used in the definition of courage in Plato’s Laches, when courage is described as an endurance of suffering.
The Greek Christian world then puts these two together, this command to be brave and this command for endurance, and they say, perhaps we can put those together and we can say that put together is basically the virtue of andrea, but there is a hesitancy to use the word. Unlike the in the Latin world where fortitude is readily invoked in Christianity, it does not become normative until relatively late in the Greek-speaking Christian world to use andrea to denote a virtue.
Regardless of the word, however, endurance and bravery are seen as fundamental to the Christian life. St. Paul highlights the importance of endurance as foundational step in Christain development (Rom. 5): “More than that, we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint because God’s love has been poured out into us by the Holy Spirit.”
St. Athanasius (at last)
Having laid out this backdrop of Hellenic and Biblical ideals of courage, we can finally turn to St. Athanasius. St. Athanasius was writing in the 4th century in Alexandria, the hub of Neoplatonic thinking for philosophy. Some 20 years before writing the Life of Antony, Athanasius composed On the Incarnation, and in that work he framed his overall vision of Christianity with the intent of presenting Christ to the philosophers and Hellenistic Jews of Alexandria. For our purposes, we will focus on two themes that come up in On the Incarnation. First, the proof of Christ's divinity for the Gentiles, and, second, how Christians participate in Christ.
To the first one, St. Athanasius argues that the glory of Christ, the victory of Christ, the divinity of Christ is manifested because Christ does the Greek philosophers’ jobs better than the Greek philosophers could do, and he does the Greek heroes’ jobs better than the Greek heroes could do. Wen Athanasius discusses the Greek philosophers, he writes:
“As for Greek wisdom and the grand eloquence of so-called philosophers, I think that no one needs an argument, as the wonder is before the sight of all, that while the wise men among the Greeks had written much about virtue, they were unable to persuade even a few from their neighborhoods about immortality and the virtuous life. Christ alone, by means of simple words and by means of humans no wise in speech, has throughout the inhabited world persuaded whole churches full of human beings to despise death and to think rather of things immortal, and to disregard what is temporal and consider things eternal, thinking nothing of earthly glory, but rather to purify themselves for immortality.”
For Athanasius, Christ preached the purifying virtue described by Socrates, Philo, and Plotinus, but he has done so better and more effectively than they ever could. Thousands have been converted to this noble task. Christ has conquered death and the demons, and the proof is that those who claim Christ’s name also despise death and drive out demons with the Sign of the Cross.
Not content with beating the philosophers, Athanasius also compares Christ to Hercules, noting that Hercules became a god by fighting some other humans and guilefully killing some wild beasts. But Christ is God in his nature, and he has banished death and demons from human nature, and thus unlike Hercules, who only earned a right to be called a god, he gives us the right to share in his divinity and share in his glory and share in his victory. Christ becomes the new reference for Greek heroism and manly courage, not Hercules. Christ teaches andrea better than Plotinus and manifests andrea better than Hercules.
This brings us to the second point of On the Incarnation. The good news of Christ’s triumph is that he invites us all to share in the victory. To do so, Athanasius adds, the Christian needs to be purified in a way similar to what Plato describes in the ascent from the city out of the cave to the sun. In fact, Athanasius explicitly invokes that image at the end of On the Incarnation when he writes:
“There is needed a good life and a pure soul and a virtue according to Christ, so that the mind guided by it may be able to attain and comprehend what it desires as much as it is possible to learn about God, the Word. Without a pure mind and a life modeled on the Saints, no one can comprehend the words of the Saints. For just as if someone would wish to see the light of the sun, he must first wipe and clear his eyes, purifying himself with confidence and strength to be almost like that which he desires, so that as the eye has become light it may see the light of the sun. In the same way, one wishing to comprehend the mind of the illusions must wash and cleanse his soul by the courageous manner of his life and approach the Saints themselves by imitation of their work, so that, sharing in a common conduct of life with them, he may understand the things revealed, avoid the peril of the sinners and receive the glory laid out for the Saints in the Kingdom of Heaven.”
Here Athanasius lays out several key points that will govern his presentation of the life of Antony: the power and the strength of the Christian derive from something outside of the creation. Just as the Sun exceeds Plato’s cave and transcends the existence of those withing, so does Christ transcend the existence of any creature. To approach Christ requires a purification: an ability to live for the transcendent reality, and that requires a new kind of virtue, one that can only happen by drawing near to Christ by imitation and letting Him work within you. And thus, the saints serve as witnesses to us: examples for us to imitate, so that as we imtiate them, we are purified and able to focus on the life beyond this one. But this purification requires a new form of courage. The things that were fearful before, are not fearful in Christ, but to be conformed to Christ requires a virtue: the purifying virtue of courage.
The Life of Antony
This brings us, at last, to the Life of Antony. It is a new genre, a book that is going to tell the story of the Greek hero, the Greek sage, and the Christian Gospel all wrapped up so that the reader can imitate the hero himself.
As part of this new genre, St. Athanasius lets us know that like the Aeneid, this is a story about the founding of a city, which needs to always be accompanied by heroic virtue. Antony, while not the first monk, is the first person to go out into the wilderness and start living as a monk, out in the mountains, out in the desert. And when he does that, others follow. The wilderness is conquered for Christ, and a new city, a new civilization is created and preserved by a new battle of virtue. Athanasius writes: “So their cells in the hills were like tents filled with divine choirs, people chanting, studying, fasting, praying, rejoicing in the hope of future boons, working for the distribution of alms, maintaining love and harmony among themselves. It was as if one truly looked on a land all its own, a land of devotion and righteousness, for neither perpetrator or victim of injustice was there, nor complaint of a tax collector. There was a multitude of ascetics, but among them all there was one mind set on virtue, so that when one saw the cells again, and such orderliness among the monks, he was moved to exclaim and say, how lovely are your dwellings, oh Jacob, your tents, oh Israel.” Antony has made the wilderness a city, and he has founded it by doing “constant battle in contests of faith”.
By the time St. Athanasius is writing, he is attempting to summarize about 100 years of developing desert spirituality. There were already scattered collections of sayings from desert monks and anecdotes of their lives, and these stories contain a teaching about the various virtues associated with this life. And courage is a major focus of these texts. Tharsos (bravery) is always used first in these anecdotes, followed by andrea as a synonym, as if there is an explicit attempt to take the scriptural word tharsos and lay claim to all of the wealth that was associated with andrea.
One of the anecdotes recounts the story of a monk who had been practicing the monastic life in a city during the last great persecution of Christians. As part of the persecution, the monk was placed in an iron chair and roasted as part of a prolonged torture. The Emperor Constantine, we are told, saves him, and the monk returns painfully limping to his monastic cell and declares, “Oh, now I have come to a place of true suffering.”
In Antony’s dictated letters, preserved distinct from Athanasius, we find the same view: the monastic life takes place on a field of battle. “We in the desert are in a house of war, engaging in constant struggle with our thoughts and the demons who try to defend them.” That it is there where the battle is, there is where courage is really manifested, and here where the wild lands are claimed and something even greater than Rome is being founded out in the desert.
Now to engage in this battle the monk must practice enduring all sorts of “little” struggles, such as eating six month old, rock-hard bread. And as they practice on these little struggles, they are practicing endurance to be able, like the Stoic sage, to break out with an act of glorious greatness. “We are stripping ourselves, as the wrestler does,” the desert fathers will say, “We strip ourselves down, anoint ourselves with oil so that the devil can't get a grip on us.”
In ancient wrestling, the way someone would get a hold on his opponent, would be to throw dirt up on him so that there was some texture that the wrestler could take hold of and then throw his opponent to the ground. The monks say, therefore, that the key for winning the battle against the demons is to strip oneself of dirt, of terrestrial attachment. And such stripping requires great bravery and endurance.
In St. Athanasius’ account, Antony achieves every mark of courage considered by the ancient world.
In the first place, Antony serves as an exemplar of the courage that Socrates described in the dialogue Laches.
First, there is a slow progression of acts of courage, proceeding as Socrates notes, through poverty, through sickness, in the face of desires, in the face of pleasures, iand lastly in the face of fear and pain. As Antony first goes into the desert, he is beset by a series of temptations which offer, in sequence the various fileds for exercising courage that Socrates mentions.
The first set of temptations try to make him worry about security. He finds himself worrying, “What if I get sick? What about back home? Should I have saved a little bit of money to take care of myself?” The devil even throws some money on the road in front of him as he goes out. Antony resists them all.
Once Antony has overcome those foes, Athanasius writes that the next cycle of temptations beset him, namely, the temptations of desire, the temptations of the belly. After overcoming desire and pleasure, then comes the challenge of fear and pain. It is then that the devils attack Antony in the form of wild beasts, beating him and roaring at him, wrestling with him and physically threatening his life.
This progression of courage, Athanasius tells us, is the progression of the Christain life. Christian courage starts small. We begin by trusting in God about money, about relationships, and we culminate with wrestling with devils in the face of death.
Secondly, Athanasius points out Antony’s endurance. Antony stays in the cell even when he's beaten by demoniac animals. People come to take him home and he demands to return to his cell, and he goes back to the grave, back to the tomb. Over and over he desires to go further into the wilderness, into the inner mountain where we are told, he sees more demons than when he is surrounded by crowds. By retreating inwards, he is beset by ever more pain, and is called to offer ever more endurance.
Antony also embodies the Stoic ideals for andrea. He desires only virtue without passion, the first characteristic of courage, according to Cicero. He desires to put his mind solely on the glory of virtue, with the intellectual part of his soul, directing him to heaven.
The second characteristic of courage, Cicero notes, is that courage especially achieves glory. And Athanasius is quick to point out, this is in fact what Anthony has done. Anthony has achieved more glory, in fact, than most of your pagan philosophers. He writes: “If the need arises, read this story to pagans as well, so they may understand this by means that Our Lord Jesus Christ is God and Son of God and additionally Christians who are sincerely devoted to him and truly believe in him not only prove that the demons whom the Greeks considered gods are not gods, but trample and chase them away as deceivers and corruptors of mankind.” That is a glory, for the pagans to know, but right before, Athanasius describes the glory that will be recognized by Christians: “That the monks may believe that Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ glorifies those who glorify him, and not only leads those who serve him to the end into the Kingdom of heaven, but even here, though they conceal themselves and seek to retire he makes them known and celebrated everywhere because of their own virtue and because of their assistance to others.”
This is a distinctive mark of the glory of Christian courage: it tries to hide in humility, because humility purifies the Christian. The glory is always to be directed to the Lord; Antony will deliberately not try to work miracles so that Our Lord receives the credit for them. Yet this still redounds to Antony’s glory. The Christian hero shares in the Lord's glory. He is sharing in the godhood of Christ; granted this sharing takes place through grace, but it is still a real participation in divine glory.
This heavenly glory of Antony is also good for the city on earth, that is, for the city of monks. As part of his address to the monks, Antony offers a first-person narrative so that his example can strengthen his city of monks in their quest against the demons. He manifests the magnificence that Cicero references as a mark of courage, in his distribution of his wealth. Antony manifests his magnanimity by the absolute humility he has, but in his humility he is raised up to share Christ’s power such that he is able to brush demons away with a gesture of a hand.
While Athanasius seems aware of a two-tiered view of virtue, the civic and the purifying, he wants to claim that Antony achieves the goods of both. Antony, having pursued courage in retirement, in the desert, is pursuing purifying virtue. Yet he heals the sick people of the villages, he arbitrates disputes, he teaches the monks, he writes letters to emperors, he gives advice to judges, he shows up in courtrooms. In short, Antony assumes the role of a patron for the community. He is the real patronus, he's the one who is standing over and governing and caring for the people and thereby achieving everything that Cicero says courage should achieve in the political realm. He speaks bravely to emperors, he advises, he makes sure debts are forgiven, he makes sure there's just arbitration.
Nor is Antony short of the martial aspect of courageous virtue. He fights alligators, other wild beasts, and demons. He beholds souls trying to go to heaven while demons try to pull them down, and Antony responds by confidently swatting demons aside. He endures demonic attacks, certainly, but he does wo with discernment, because he is always the wise soldier.
At this point, however, we need to ask a crucial question about this courage. Antony over and over says that death and demons are not things to fear because they are things that cannot harm a person. If that is so, why is it virtuous to not fear them? When children fear tiny bugs, we are understanding, but we do not praise men for being courageous in the face of ladybugs. There is nothing praiseworthy about that because there is not something objectively fearful before them. Aristotle had written that it is ridiculous if someone fears something that is not to be feared. There is no virtue in that.
How do we explain this purifying virtue of courage as a virtue? How can we say the was here a Christian hero that inspires us as we read of his brave endurance and explosive glorious action?
Athanasius puts the answer on Antony’s lips. The true courage of the Christian is the strength, commitment, endurance and glorious vision that enables one to fight with oneself. Demons? death? Those things are shadows. But the reason to enter the desert is to encounter one’s own inner thoughts. The inner mountain becomes an image for what every Christian needs to do, namely, to retreat into the depths of one’s self and to find the things that are fundamentally opposed to God, that are fundamentally holding oneback from entering into life. And this encounter is terrifying.
Demons only have power over us because of those things deep down inside in our inner mountain. Demonic terror is a result of the things within. Death is not terrifying, except insofar as a person is gripped by these thoughts and these passions deep inside; then death becomes terrifying because it ends in fire.
The courage of the monk is like the courage to encounter his shame, his failings, his wounds, and not to be hardened by those, but to let them be healed. All the other things redound to glory and establish the church on Earth, but the fundamental activity of the Christian is wrestling in the inner mountain, with thoughts, doubts, and passions. Death, by comparison, is nothing. Demons by comparison are nothing.
And thus courage, in the hands of Athanasius, in this new telling of this new genre of story, has become a heroic Christian virtue. The immanent virtue results in glory and the good of the city. It arises, though, from leaving the city, either literally or internally, and battling with oneself while relying on the power and courage of Christ.
As for the Stoics, such virtue this is accessible to all, no matter whether one’s external circumstances allow for physical retreat to the desert. Later in his career, St. Athanasius will spend a lot of time writing about how to balance the lay life with the ideals of the monastic life, but, in the end, he concludes the layman can live the virtue of the monk.
It is accessible to each one of us, but the motivation is what matters. The wisdom of the desert will be summarized in the 7th century by Saint John Climacus, and therein S.t John syas that every Christian must decide what motivates them for this great contest. It can be fear. It can be reward. Or it can be the love of the beautiful. This last motivation St. John names philokalia. The love, the philos one feels for a brother, but not for the sake of bodily kin, nor an earthly city, but rather the beauty of our Lord. And so we are back to Aristotle: courage is motivated by a vision of the beautiful.
With this motivation in Christ we become manly. We put on the new man and pummel our bodies, those inner thoughts, those inner doubts, and strive to be conformed to the image of the truly courageous so that the glory of God will be revealed in the glory of men truly alive, straining to enter into a glory that eye has not seen and ear has not heard, but which already echoes in the deserts of Egypt.