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The saints

St. Anthony of Egypt

He heard one line of the Gospel, and walked into the desert.

Feast: 17 January · about 251 to 356 · The early Church · Egypt

Read the story 1 min read
The Monastery of St. Anthony in the Egyptian desert: palm trees and pale buildings at the foot of bare red mountains.

Tentoila, 2006. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

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A church in Egypt, late 3rd century

A young Egyptian is standing in church when the Gospel is read: “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell all thou hast”.1

He receives the words as spoken to himself, gives away all his property, and devotes himself to prayer.1

The desert was empty when he went in. By the time he died it was full of monks.

Patron of butchers, gravediggers and people with skin diseases2

01St. Anthony of Egypt

Father of monks

For five or six years he organized the great body of monks that had grown up around him.1

Then he withdrew into the inner desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, to a mountain where the monastery that bears his name still stands.1

The Monastery of St. Anthony in the Egyptian desert: palm trees and pale buildings at the foot of bare red mountains.
The Monastery of St. Anthony, Egypt, at the foot of the mountain where he lived. Tentoila, 2006. Wikimedia Commons, Public domain.

02St. Anthony of Egypt

A hundred and five

His Life, by St. Athanasius, says he died at the age of a hundred and five.1

Every monastery in the world owes something to a man who took one sentence of the Gospel at its word.

Live it this week

Find your desert for an hour

Anthony heard one line of the Gospel and walked into the desert. You probably can’t do that. But you can take one hour this week with no phone, no music and no plans, alone in a church or on a walk, and let God talk first.

Notes

How we know · 2 sources for this page
  1. Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), “St. Anthony”. New Advent edition. newadvent.org
  2. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saint Anthony of Egypt”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.