Gave away everything and wrestled 85 years in the desert
Pray with Anthony the Great
Antony the Great (c. 251–356) was an Egyptian hermit remembered as the "Father of Monks." Around the age of twenty he heard the Gospel command to sell all he had, gave away his inheritance, and withdrew into the Egyptian desert, where his decades of solitary prayer — recorded by his contemporary Athanasius of Alexandria — turned the hermit's life into a lasting monastic movement.
The moments worth telling — the astonishing turns of a life.
01
Master of the Osservanza (Sano di Pietro?) · Saint Anthony Distributing His Wealth to the Poor · 1430
c. 271
The one sentence
Antony was about twenty when his parents died, leaving him the family farm and a younger sister in his care. One day in church, still wondering at how the apostles had left everything to follow Jesus, he heard the Gospel read aloud: sell what you have, give to the poor, follow me (Mt 19:21). He took the words as spoken to him — and acted the same day. He gave the land away to the people of his village, some three hundred arourae (about eighty hectares, by the count of Athanasius, who knew him and wrote his Life), sold what remained, and gave the money to the poor, keeping back only a little for his sister. Soon after, a second reading — do not be anxious about tomorrow (Mt 6:34) — took even that: he gave away the rest and entrusted his sister to a community of faithful women.
The Gospel is read aloud in every church every week. What made Antony strange was that he walked out and did it before the day was over.
02
Sassetta · St. Anthony Beaten by Devils · 1423
early years
The tombs
Antony asked a friend to shut him into an empty tomb outside the village — bread brought at long intervals, otherwise alone with his prayers. Athanasius, writing a few years after his death, tells what happened there one night: demons beat the young man so hard that the friend found him on the floor like a dead man and carried him to the village church. Antony came to around midnight and asked to be carried straight back in. The assaults returned, worse than before. Then light broke through the roof of the tomb, and the pain was gone. He asked: where were you all this while? The answer he received has steadied monks ever since — I was here, Antony; I waited, to watch you fight. From now on I will be your helper.
Help does not always arrive early. Sometimes it is present all night and says so only at the end.
03
Master of the Osservanza (Sano di Pietro?) · Saint Anthony Leaving His Monastery · 1430
c. 305
Emerging whole from the fort
Seeking deeper solitude, Antony crossed the Nile to an abandoned fort and had the entrance walled shut behind him. Bread was handed over the roof twice a year — Egyptian loaves keep that long — and there was water within. Friends kept watch outside through whole nights, heard uproar as if he were under attack, and were never let in. After nearly twenty years they broke down the door, braced for what two decades of fasting and darkness do to a man. What stepped out astonished them: his body sound, his mind clear, his temper level — like a man led out of a sanctuary, Athanasius writes. Many of those who saw him stayed; within years the desert around him was filling with monks.
He had gone in there to be rid of people. He came out as the reason a whole generation of them moved to the desert.
+All 6 moments
04
Michael Damaskinos · Saint Anthony (Damaskinos) · 1571
The letter to an emperor
One day letters reached the desert from the emperor Constantine and his sons, addressing the old hermit as a father and begging for a reply. Antony was unmoved. Do not marvel, he told his monks, that an emperor writes to a man; marvel that God has written to us, and has spoken to us through his Son. He would have left the letters unanswered, and relented only when the monks pressed him: the rulers were Christians, and silence would wound them. So he wrote back — without a word of thanks for the honour, and asking for nothing. He reminded them that Christ alone is the true and eternal King, that a judgment awaits everyone, and that they should care for justice and for the poor.
He owned nothing an emperor could take, so he had nothing to gain by flattering one. That is where the plain speech came from.
05
Francisco Rizi · San Antonio Abad · 1665
c. 338
Alexandria, against Arianism
Toward the end of his life a rumour spread that the famous hermit sided with the Arians — the party teaching that the Son of God was a creature, made like everything else. Antony, then close to ninety, came down from his mountain and walked into Alexandria to answer in person. He stayed only a few days and said in public the one thing he had come to say: the Son is not a creature and not made out of nothing — he is the eternal Word and Wisdom of the Father. Crowds pressed into the streets to see the man of God; even pagans wanted to touch him. In those few days, Athanasius records, more people came to the faith than in a whole ordinary year. Then he went back up to his desert.
A name earned in solitude was worth something only when it was spent. He came down, said the one thing that needed saying, and went back up.
06
Master of the Osservanza · Saint Anthony the Abbot in the Wilderness · 1435
c. 356
A hidden grave
In Egypt it was the custom to keep the bodies of holy men unburied — wrapped in linen and honoured at home — and Antony had spoken against it for years: the patriarchs and the Lord himself were laid in the earth. Dying on his inner mountain at about a hundred and five, he gave away all he owned in four bequests: one sheepskin and the cloak he lay on to Bishop Athanasius, who had once given it to him new; the second sheepskin to Bishop Serapion; the hair shirt to the two monks who had nursed him. Then he made those two promise to bury his body in the ground and tell no one the place. They kept the promise: when Athanasius wrote his Life, no one knew the grave but those two.
He spent his last strength making sure he could not be turned into an exhibit. What he wanted kept was never stored in his body.
II
Who was Anthony?
Antony was born around 251 in Koma, a village in Middle Egypt, to prosperous Christian landowners. He grew up speaking Coptic, and Athanasius describes him as a young man of few words who avoided schooling — a detail later sources exaggerated into "illiterate," though his surviving letters show a man steeped in Scripture and comfortable with ideas.
The turn of his life is well documented and startling in its plainness. When Antony was about twenty, his parents died, leaving him a substantial estate and the care of a younger sister. Not long after, he walked into church as the Gospel was being read — "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor" (Matthew 19:21). He took it as spoken directly to him. He gave the family's fertile land to his neighbours, sold the rest, kept a little for his sister, then heard "do not be anxious about tomorrow" and gave that away too, placing his sister with a community of Christian virgins.
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He first apprenticed himself to an old hermit near his village and learned asceticism from other solitaries in the region — Antony did not invent the hermit's life, but he pushed it further than anyone had. Athanasius records the psychological warfare of these years: crushing boredom, memories of his old wealth, and what Antony experienced as demonic assault, once in the tombs where he had shut himself away. Whether we read these as literal demons or the inner storms of a man alone, they are the heart of his early story.
Around age thirty-five he crossed the Nile and sealed himself inside an abandoned Roman fort at Pispir for some twenty years, food passed over the wall. When admirers finally broke the door down, the expected wreck of a man stepped out healthy and calm. This is the famous image: Antony emerging whole. Disciples settled around him, and — reluctantly — he organized them, becoming a teacher to a scattered desert community. His fame reached the Emperor Constantine, who wrote to him; Antony answered soberly, telling him not to think too much of earthly power.
Twice he left his solitude for public reasons that Athanasius (an eyewitness ally) treats as documented history: he went to Alexandria around 311 during the persecutions to encourage imprisoned Christians openly, and again around 338 to speak against Arianism, siding with Athanasius's defense of Christ's full divinity.
He spent his last decades deeper still, at the "Inner Mountain" near the Red Sea — today the site of the Monastery of St. Antony (Deir Mar Antonios), the oldest inhabited Christian monastery. He died there around 356, reportedly aged 105, asking to be buried secretly so his body would not become a shrine.
Much that later ages loved about him is legend: the temptations dramatized in medieval and Renaissance art, the visit to the hermit Paul of Thebes, encounters with a centaur and a satyr, a swineherd's job in his youth. These grew in the retelling. The sober core — the renunciation, the desert, the letters, the death — is remarkably firm for a man of the third century.
The writings
What Anthony wrote
The writings that survive — and what tradition only ascribes.
Seven Lettersattributed(attributed / widely accepted as authentic), 4th c.spiritual letters to monastic communities, likely dictated in Coptic; survive in Georgian, Latin, Syriac, Arabic and Coptic fragments. Their authenticity was long doubted but was strongly defended by Samuel Rubenson (1990/1995) and is now broadly
Sayings in the *Apophthegmata Patrumattributed* (attributed)38 sayings preserved orally by disciples and written down in the late 4th–5th c.; genuinely rooted in his teaching, though transmitted through others.
Note:The long discourses and speeches placed in Antony's mouth in Athanasius's Life of Antony are Athanasius's composition, not Antony's own words.
III
Prayers
The prayers themselves, and how each one came to be.
The Church's prayer
Collect for the Feast of Saint Anthony, Abbot
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 be granted through 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.
Roman Missal / Roman Breviary — the proper Collect (Oratio) for the feast of St. Anthony, Abbot, 17 January (traditional / Tridentine proper
In the original · Latin
Intercéssio nos, quǽsumus, Dómine, beáti Antónii Abbátis comméndet: ut, quod nostris méritis non valémus, ejus patrocínio assequámur. Per Dóminum nostrum Jesum Christum Fílium tuum, qui tecum vivit et regnat in unitáte Spíritus Sancti Deus, per ómnia sǽcula sæculórum. Amen.
Prayed alongside for centuries
Psalm 27 (Vulgate 26): 'The Lord is my light and my salvation' — the psalm Antony sang against fear
1. The psalm of David before he was anointed. The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the protector of my life: of whom shall I be afraid?
2. Whilst the wicked draw near against me, to eat my flesh. My enemies that trouble me, have themselves been weakened, and have fallen.
3. If armies in camp should stand together against me, my heart shall not fear. If a battle should rise up against me, in this will I be confident.
4. One thing I have asked of the Lord, this will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. That I may see the delight of the Lord, and may visit his temple.
5. For he hath hidden me in his tabernacle; in the day of evils, he hath protected me in the secret place of his tabernacle.
6. He hath exalted me upon a rock: and now he hath lifted up my head above my enemies. I have gone round, and have offered up in his tabernacle a sacrifice of jubilation: I will sing, and recite a psalm to the Lord.
7. Hear, O Lord, my voice, with which I have cried to thee: have mercy on me and hear me.
8. My heart hath said to thee: My face hath sought thee: thy face, O Lord, will I still seek.
9. Turn not away thy face from me; decline not in thy wrath from thy servant. Be thou my helper, forsake me not; do not thou despise me, O God my Saviour.
10. For my father and my mother have left me: but the Lord hath taken me up.
11. Set me, O Lord, a law in thy way, and guide me in the right path, because of my enemies.
12. Deliver me not over to the will of them that trouble me; for unjust witnesses have risen up against me; and iniquity hath lied to itself.
13. I believe to see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.
14. Expect the Lord, do manfully, and let thy heart take courage, and wait thou for the Lord.
Book of Psalms — Ps. 26 in Vulgate/Septuagint numbering = Ps. 27 in Hebrew/Masoretic numbering. Tie: Athanasius of Alexandria, Life of Anton
In the original · Latin (Clementine Vulgate)
1. Psalmus David, priusquam liniretur. Dominus illuminatio mea et salus mea; quem timebo? Dominus protector vitae meae; a quo trepidabo?
2. Dum appropiant super me nocentes, ut edant carnes meas, qui tribulant me inimici mei, ipsi infirmati sunt et ceciderunt.
3. Si consistant adversum me castra, non timebit cor meum. Si exsurgat adversum me praelium, in hoc ego sperabo.
4. Unam petii a Domino, hanc requiram, ut inhabitem in domo Domini omnibus diebus vitae meae, ut videam voluptatem Domini, et visitem templum ejus.
5. Quoniam abscondit me in tabernaculo suo; in die malorum protexit me in abscondito tabernaculi sui.
6. In petra exaltavit me, et nunc exaltavit caput meum super inimicos meos. Circuivi, et immolavi in tabernaculo ejus hostiam vociferationis; cantabo, et psalmum dicam Domino.
7. Exaudi, Domine, vocem meam, qua clamavi ad te; miserere mei, et exaudi me.
8. Tibi dixit cor meum, exquisivit te facies mea; faciem tuam, Domine, requiram.
9. Ne avertas faciem tuam a me; ne declines in ira a servo tuo. Adjutor meus esto; ne derelinquas me, neque despicias me, Deus salutaris meus.
10. Quoniam pater meus et mater mea dereliquerunt me; Dominus autem assumpsit me.
11. Legem pone mihi, Domine, in via tua, et dirige me in semitam rectam, propter inimicos meos.
12. Ne tradideris me in animas tribulantium me, quoniam insurrexerunt in me testes iniqui, et mentita est iniquitas sibi.
13. Credo videre bona Domini in terra viventium.
14. Expecta Dominum, viriliter age, et confortetur cor tuum, et sustine Dominum.
Prayed alongside for centuries
Psalm 68 (Vulgate 67): 'Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered' — Antony's psalm of demons put to flight
1. Unto the end, a psalm of a canticle for David himself.
2. Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered: and let them that hate him flee from before his face.
3. As smoke vanisheth, so let them vanish away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.
4. And let the just feast, and rejoice before God: and be delighted with gladness.
5. Sing ye to God, sing a psalm to his name, make a way for him who ascendeth upon the west: the Lord is his name. Rejoice ye before him: but the wicked shall be troubled at his presence,
6. Who is the father of orphans, and the judge of widows. God in his holy place:
7. God who maketh men of one manner to dwell in a house: Who bringeth out them that were bound in strength; in like manner them that provoke, that dwell in sepulchres.
8. O God, when thou didst go forth in the sight of thy people, when thou didst pass through the desert:
9. The earth was moved, and the heavens dropped at the presence of the God of Sina, at the presence of the God of Israel.
10. Thou shalt set aside for thy inheritance a free rain, O God: and it was weakened, but thou hast made it perfect.
11. In it shall thy animals dwell; in thy sweetness, O God, thou hast provided for the poor.
12. The Lord shall give the word to them that preach good tidings with great power.
13. The king of powers is of the beloved, of the beloved; and the beauty of the house shall divide spoils.
14. If you sleep among the midst of lots, you shall be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and the hinder parts of her back with the paleness of gold.
15. When he that is in heaven appointeth kings over her, they shall be whited with snow in Selmon.
16. The mountain of God is a fat mountain. A curdled mountain, a fat mountain.
17. Why suspect, ye curdled mountains? A mountain in which God is well pleased to dwell: for there the Lord shall dwell unto the end.
18. The chariot of God is attended by ten thousands; thousands of them that rejoice: the Lord is among them in Sina, in the holy place.
19. Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity captive; thou hast received gifts in men. Yea for those also that do not believe, the dwelling of the Lord God.
20. Blessed be the Lord day by day: the God of our salvation will make our journey prosperous to us.
21. Our God is the God of salvation: and of the Lord, of the Lord are the issues from death.
22. But God shall break the heads of his enemies: the hairy crown of them that walk on in their sins.
23. The Lord said: I will turn them from Basan, I will turn them into the depth of the sea:
24. That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thy enemies; the tongue of thy dogs be red with the same.
25. They have seen thy goings, O God, the goings of my God: of my king who is in his sanctuary.
26. Princes went before joined with singers, in the midst of young damsels playing on timbrels.
27. In the churches bless ye God the Lord, from the fountains of Israel.
28. There is Benjamin a youth, in ecstasy of mind. The princes of Juda are their leaders: the princes of Zabulon, the princes of Nephthali.
29. Command thy strength, O God: confirm, O God, what thou hast wrought in us.
30. From thy temple in Jerusalem, kings shall offer presents to thee.
31. Rebuke the wild beasts of the reeds, the congregation of bulls with the kine of the people; who seek to exclude them who are tried with silver. Scatter thou the nations that delight in wars:
32. Ambassadors shall come out of Egypt: Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands to God.
33. Sing to God, ye kingdoms of the earth: sing ye to the Lord: Sing ye to God,
34. Who mounteth above the heaven of heavens, to the east. Behold he will give to his voice the voice of power:
35. Give ye glory to God for Israel, his magnificence, and his power is in the clouds.
36. God is wonderful in his saints: the God of Israel is he who will give power and strength to his people. Blessed be God.
Book of Psalms — Ps. 67 in Vulgate/Septuagint numbering = Ps. 68 in Hebrew/Masoretic numbering. Tie: Athanasius of Alexandria, Life of Anton
In the original · Latin (Clementine Vulgate)
1. In finem. Psalmus cantici ipsi David.
2. Exsurgat Deus, et dissipentur inimici ejus; et fugiant qui oderunt eum a facie ejus.
3. Sicut deficit fumus, deficiant; sicut fluit cera a facie ignis, sic pereant peccatores a facie Dei.
4. Et justi epulentur; et exsultent in conspectu Dei, et delectentur in laetitia.
5. Cantate Deo, psalmum dicite nomini ejus; iter facite ei qui ascendit super occasum. Dominus nomen illi; exsultate in conspectu ejus. Turbabuntur a facie ejus,
6. patris orphanorum, et judicis viduarum; Deus in loco sancto suo.
7. Deus qui inhabitare facit unius moris in domo; qui educit vinctos in fortitudine, similiter eos qui exasperant, qui habitant in sepulchris.
8. Deus, cum egredereris in conspectu populi tui, cum pertransires in deserto,
9. terra mota est, etenim caeli distillaverunt, a facie Dei Sinai, a facie Dei Israel.
10. Pluviam voluntariam segregabis, Deus, haereditati tuae; et infirmata est, tu vero perfecisti eam.
11. Animalia tua habitabunt in ea; parasti in dulcedine tua pauperi, Deus.
12. Dominus dabit verbum evangelizantibus, virtute multa.
13. Rex virtutum dilecti, dilecti; et speciei domus dividere spolia.
14. Si dormiatis inter medios cleros, pennae columbae deargentatae, et posteriora dorsi ejus in pallore auri.
15. Dum discernit caelestis reges super eam, nive dealbabuntur in Selmon.
16. Mons Dei, mons pinguis. Mons coagulatus, mons pinguis:
17. ut quid suspicamini montes coagulatos? Mons in quo beneplacitum est Deo habitare in eo; etenim Dominus habitabit in finem.
18. Currus Dei decem millibus multiplex, millia laetantium; Dominus in eis in Sina in sancto.
19. Ascendisti in altum, cepisti captivitatem, accepisti dona in hominibus; etenim non credentes inhabitare Dominum Deum.
20. Benedictus Dominus die quotidie: prosperum iter faciet nobis Deus salutarium nostrorum.
21. Deus noster, Deus salvos faciendi; et Domini, Domini exitus mortis.
22. Verumtamen Deus confringet capita inimicorum suorum, verticem capilli perambulantium in delictis suis.
23. Dixit Dominus: Ex Basan convertam, convertam in profundum maris;
24. ut intingatur pes tuus in sanguine, lingua canum tuorum ex inimicis, ab ipso.
25. Viderunt ingressus tuos, Deus, ingressus Dei mei, regis mei, qui est in sancto.
26. Praevenerunt principes conjuncti psallentibus, in medio juvencularum tympanistriarum.
27. In ecclesiis benedicite Deo Domino de fontibus Israel.
28. Ibi Benjamin adolescentulus, in mentis excessu; principes Juda, duces eorum; principes Zabulon, principes Nephthali.
29. Manda, Deus, virtuti tuae; confirma hoc, Deus, quod operatus es in nobis.
30. A templo tuo in Jerusalem, tibi offerent reges munera.
31. Increpa feras arundinis; congregatio taurorum in vaccis populorum; ut excludant eos qui probati sunt argento: dissipa gentes quae bella volunt.
32. Venient legati ex Aegypto; Aethiopia praeveniet manus ejus Deo.
33. Regna terrae, cantate Deo; psallite Domino; psallite Deo.
34. Qui ascendit super caelum caeli, ad orientem: ecce dabit voci suae vocem virtutis.
35. Date gloriam Deo super Israel; magnificentia ejus et virtus ejus in nubibus.
36. Mirabilis Deus in sanctis suis; Deus Israel ipse dabit virtutem et fortitudinem plebi suae. Benedictus Deus!
IV
How Anthony prayed
Antony's prayer, as Athanasius and the sayings describe it, was continuous, physical, and stripped bare. He kept the ancient monastic rhythm of psalmody — reciting the Psalms from memory — woven together with manual work (he plaited baskets and mats) so that the hands stayed busy while the mind stayed on God. Athanasius reports that he often prayed through the whole night and was found still at prayer at dawn, and that he was ashamed to be seen eating or sleeping when he could be praying instead. Fasting was part of this: bread, salt and water, sometimes only every second or fourth day.
The desert itself was his method. He believed a monk had to stay in his cell for prayer to deepen, and warned that wandering out dissipated the interior watchfulness he called stillness. His most quoted image makes the point exactly: a monk who lingers outside his cell loses his inner intensity as surely as a fish dies out of water (Apophthegmata Patrum, Antony 10 — a saying preserved only in modern, copyrighted translations, so paraphrased here).
Much of what popular imagination attaches to Antony's prayer — the lurid demonic temptations painted by Bosch and Grünewald — belongs to legend and to Athanasius's dramatization. What is soberly documented is subtler: a man who understood prayer as a lifelong combat with his own thoughts (logismoi), who expected to be tempted "to his last breath," and who located the whole of the spiritual life not in visions but in humility, self-knowledge, and perseverance in the cell.
Praying with the saints
Anthony, Mary, and the rosary
Antony died around 356, almost a thousand years before the rosary took the shape we know, and he never held its beads. But both things the rosary is made of come out of his desert: the short prayer repeated until it becomes as steady as breathing, and the Gospel scene held before the eyes until it asks something of you.
Athanasius records the two rules of his life: work with the hands, and pray without ceasing (1 Thess 5:17). The generations of monks he inspired counted their repeated prayers with pebbles; in time the pebbles became knots on a cord, and the knots became beads. Every rosary is, at the far end of that line, a desert tool — a way of keeping the body faithful while the heart learns to stay.
To pray the rosary with Antony is to borrow his method. Its one short prayer is made of scripture — the angel's greeting to Mary and Elizabeth's blessing (Lk 1:28.42) — said again and again until the noise settles; and one Gospel scene at a time is held before the eyes, taken as seriously as he took the sentence that sent him out of the church and into the desert.
Take it further
Hand-strung in Europe
The Anthony rosary
Anthony on the centrepiece, faceted glass in your colour, the crucifix in your finish.
Some of it a life decided. Some of it a pope declared.
Monks and Hermits
Anthony is honoured across the Church as the "Father of All Monks." Around AD 270 he withdrew into the Egyptian desert to live as an ascetic, and his example gave shape to organized Christian monasticism. The Life written by Athanasius of Alexandria spread that model through the Latin West and made Anthony the pattern for hermits and monastic communities that followed.
Athanasius of Alexandria, Life of Anthony (Vita Antonii); Catholic Encyclopedia, "St. Anthony" (New Advent); Britannica.
Domestic Animals
His patronage of animals grows from his medieval iconographic attribute, the pig. The Hospitaller Order of St. Anthony (Antonines, founded c.1095) raised swine whose fat was used to treat sufferers of "St. Anthony's Fire"; their pigs were granted the right to roam freely, marked with a bell. From this the saint became protector of swine and, by extension, of livestock and domestic animals. On his feast, 17 January, animals are still brought to be blessed in his name.
Order of Hospitallers of St. Anthony / "St. Anthony's Fire" tradition; Vatican News, "St. Antony, Abbot"; iconographic tradition (pig and bell).
Basket-Makers
According to Athanasius's Life of Anthony, the hermit supported himself in the desert by weaving mats and baskets from palm leaves, praying while he worked. This handwork made him the traditional patron of basket- and brush-makers.
Athanasius of Alexandria, Life of Anthony (Vita Antonii); iconographic and craft tradition.
Butchers
His patronage of butchers flows from the same swine tradition: the pig long associated with Anthony (through the Antonine Hospitallers and his emblem) drew swineherds, pork trades, and butchers under his protection.
Antonine swine tradition; iconographic tradition (pig as emblem).
Against Skin Diseases (St. Anthony's Fire)
The burning skin affliction known as ergotism and erysipelas came to be called "St. Anthony's Fire" because the Antonine Hospitallers, who cared for its victims, placed their work under his name. He is invoked against skin diseases, rashes, and the ailment that bears his name.
Order of Hospitallers of St. Anthony; medieval tradition of "St. Anthony's Fire" (ergotism/erysipelas).
Farmers
As protector of livestock and the household animals a farm depends on, Anthony became a patron of farmers. His feast on 17 January is kept in many regions as a day to bless animals and stables for the year's work.
Rural custom of animal blessings on his feast (17 January); patronage of domestic animals.
Frequently asked
What is Saint Anthony the Great the patron saint of?+
Anthony the Great is the patron of monks and hermits (he is called the "Father of All Monks"), of domestic animals — especially pigs — and of the trades tied to them, such as butchers and swineherds. He is also patron of basket-makers, because he wove baskets and mats in the desert, and he is invoked against skin diseases and the burning affliction long known as "St. Anthony's Fire" (ergotism).
When is the feast day of Anthony the Great?+
His feast is celebrated on 17 January in the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican and Lutheran calendars. In the Coptic Church, to which he is especially dear, it falls on Tobi 22. In many countries the day is marked with the blessing of animals.
Is Anthony the Great the same as Anthony of Padua?+
No — they are two different saints often confused because of the shared name. Anthony the Great (c.251–356) was an Egyptian desert hermit and founder of Christian monasticism, with a feast on 17 January. Anthony of Padua (1195–1231) was a Franciscan friar and preacher, patron of lost things, whose feast is 13 June. When people speak of "St. Anthony" for lost keys, they mean Anthony of Padua.
Why is Saint Anthony the Great shown with a pig?+
The pig comes from the Middle Ages, not from his desert life. The Hospitaller Order of St. Anthony (Antonines) cared for people suffering from "St. Anthony's Fire," and raised pigs whose fat was used as a remedy; these pigs were allowed to roam the streets wearing a bell. Over time the pig and bell became his emblems, which is why he is also invoked for the health and protection of animals.
What did Anthony the Great actually do, and why is he famous?+
Born to a wealthy Egyptian family around 251, Anthony heard the Gospel read in church — "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor" (Matthew 19:21) — and took it to heart. He gave away his inheritance, provided for his sister, and withdrew into the desert to live in prayer and asceticism. His decades of solitude and spiritual struggle, recorded by Athanasius of Alexandria in the Life of Anthony, made him the founder and enduring model of Christian monasticism.
How long did Anthony the Great live?+
Tradition, following the Life by Athanasius, holds that Anthony died in 356 (or 356–357) at the age of about 105. Having taken up the ascetic life as a young man of about twenty, he spent some eighty-five years in prayer and solitude — an extraordinary span that itself became part of his renown.
Did Anthony the Great pray the rosary?+
No. Anthony lived in the third and fourth centuries, some eight hundred years before the rosary took its present form (13th–15th century), so he could not have prayed it. His prayer was the Psalms, the Scriptures, and the ceaseless inner prayer of the desert. Any image of him with a rosary is a later devotional convention, not history.
Why pray with Saint Anthony the Great?+
Anthony is the saint of those who want to strip life down to what matters — he heard one line of the Gospel and gave everything away to seek God alone. People turn to him for courage in spiritual struggle, for perseverance in prayer, for the sick (especially with skin ailments), and for the protection of their animals. To pray with him is to ask that same single-hearted trust in God.
Sources & further reading+
Athanasius of Alexandria, *Life of Antony (Vita Antonii)*, c. 360** (English at newadvent.org/fathers/2811.htm) — birth, conversion, desert — authenticity and content of the seven Letters; corrects the "illiterate primitive" image · reliability: high (leading scholarly study).
Derwas J. Chitty (trans.), *The Letters of Saint Antony the Great* (SLG Press, c. 1975) — modern English translation of the Letters; in copyright (Chitty d. 1971), consulted for content only, NOT quoted · reliability: high.
Benedicta Ward (trans.), *The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection* (1975) — the first complete English translation of the alphabetical Apophthegmata (Antony 1–38); in copyright, consulted for content only, NOT quoted verbatim · reliability: high; the sayings are early-transmitted tradition rooted in his teaching.
Encyclopædia Britannica, "St. Anthony of Egypt" — dates, feast day (17 January), patronages, general biography · reliability: high.
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