I told people that I was leaving St. John's in January to spend several weeks out and about, and they couldn't believe that I was going to New York State instead of going to Florida or someplace more traditional for winter travelers. But for me, this is a real delight. Having heard a good deal about your community, knowing several people from our monastery and others who've been here, I'm very happy to see it for myself and to be with you. What I'd like to do in this first talk, which was advertised as talking about Anthony the Great, is to try to get to him, but to do some other things as a kind of prelude The first thing I'd like to do is make some general remarks about what I intend to do with you over the next few days, then follow that with a kind of official statement about reading early monastic texts before I get carried away and start enjoying it too much, to give you some cautions and some of the principles that I have when I look at these things.

[01:13]

And the third thing I hope to do this morning, then, is to begin the study of Antony the Great. So we'll see how far I get. My purpose in giving these reflections is to enable us to listen to what the early monastic tradition tells us about four basic aspects of a monk's life of prayer. And one of my pet peeves is the phrase prayer life. I prefer life of prayer. And I think you'll see why I prefer that kind of terminology when you see the kind of themes that I'll develop. My assumption, which I'd probably elevate to the level of a conviction, is that there really is something to listen to. and I'll try to pull something out of each of the four writers that we'll look at to prove my point. When I thought about how I could arrange the material, there were a number of options available to me, and I'll tell you what they were, and then tell you what I chose.

[02:25]

The first thing I could have done would be a very traditional survey. kind of start at the beginning and give everybody an order and show you who's where and who's where, give you a paragraph on each writer, and probably leave you very bored and very confused at the end of it. The second thing I could have done would be to take a thematic approach and to say, let's trace the use of Scripture in monastic prayer through all of our authors. Then let's look at the liturgy and trace that through all of our authors. But I think that too easily becomes abstract. So what I've done then is to pick four people, four writers, or in the case of Pacomius, what is really more a tradition than a certain author, because we really don't have much written by Pacomius himself. And I want to use each one of them as a way of getting at a particular aspect of monastic prayer.

[03:29]

And, of course, my assumption in all of this is that it all fits. So, as I was saying just before we started, the great thing about being a Benedictine is that you come at the end of all of this early monastic stuff and you can claim all of it. So, I'm not going to try to oppose any of the four things that I'll talk about. but to argue that ultimately they're just four facets of a whole. And I think when I talk about the rule, I can somehow pull that together for you. Now, I think the advantage to doing what I want to do is that, first of all, it's more natural, because we'll pick up a text and look at it and try to understand it, much like any one of you would do if you wanted to do some Lectio. You pick up the book. You don't start by surveying all of monastic history and spirituality and then pick one. You find a book in the library, it looks good, and you start.

[04:31]

That's kind of what we'll do. The other advantage is that when I got the list of questions you were interested in, they were all over the map. They were all good things, and I would have been happy to do any of them, but they were moving in any number of directions. What I can do by giving you four basic themes with four writers is cover enough ground that almost anything anybody is interested in can fit, so that you can find things that I say, or you can ask your questions, and somehow we can hit the basic problems and issues. The third thing that I think we can accomplish is that if we can get a handle on these four most basic writers, which all of you have probably read time and time again, but are well worth going back to, then all of the rest of it can have a way of sorting out in relationship to those four basic people.

[05:34]

The four I've chosen, as you probably know by now, are first of all, Athanasius' Life of Antony. which we date around 357. Secondly, a tradition of Pacomian writings. I'll talk especially about the life of Pacomius, and we know that in that wonderful translation by Armand Veilleux. We can date that about the end of the fourth century, talking about Pacomius who dies about mid-century. Third, Cassian, and we can date his conferences sometime around the 420s. and then Benedict, and the common date for the rule is 540. I'll say a little bit in a minute about why I chose them, but that's the program. The result of this kind of approach, which has its own problems, is that I'll keep walking a line between an historical and a spiritual reading of these texts. Now, that's a line that I'm very comfortable with, but it's tricky.

[06:39]

Because the danger is that I'm going to veer between the academic and the homiletic, and where we want to be is somewhere in between. So if I'm going to either extreme, I'll count on you to stop me and say, so what does it mean? Or, what is the context for this? How does it relate to so-and-so? As far as the format of it, I will have kind of a formal presentation, I think, for each writer. My suspicion is that there will be more formal as we start this series, these first two or three, and that gives you a chance to size me up and to figure out what my own interests or directions are. And gradually, I hope that you will become comfortable with intervening, stopping me if I say something that's unclear or you disagree with, and we can have a more informal kind of discussion. But we'll see how that develops. I've got plenty to say, but I'm not wedded to my own ideas, so I'd be happy to share with your own experience of it.

[07:50]

With that, here comes the kind of warning statement on the big package about reading early monastic texts. I feel obligated to issue some words of caution and prudence because I can tend to get a little bit carried away with this stuff because I like it so much. So let me first get us to keep our feet on the ground before we start talking about these writers and their ideas. Scripture scholars have taught us the necessity of being informed and critical readers when we look at a text. And I think this is something that was understood far better by early Christian exegetes and commentators than by us today, but that's another topic. I think our own monastic crisis of textual study, the whole rule, the master rule of Benedict thing, which all of you are familiar with, at least in the outlines of it, has brought us to the sober realization that monastic writers, just like biblical writers,

[08:58]

are at one and the same time rather more limited in their originality than we at one time might have thought because they're dependent on place and time and the writings of others. In other words, they're human. And they're also at the same time much more complicated, in other words, human, than was once thought to be the case. We are confronted with a series of texts that we call the monastic tradition. These are texts that are torn out of their immediate context and kind of washed up on the beach of time for us to peruse curiously and gratefully and with some passion, but there they are kind of set out for us. The amazing quality of these things is that they radiate a life of their own, even though they're taken from their time and place.

[10:01]

So we read them gratefully and thirstily, but sometimes perhaps a bit uncritically, a danger. Sometimes also their very richness is daunting to us, because we don't know where to begin. We don't understand the terminology, we don't fully appreciate the background, and we don't know how to take those texts, which still live, and make them live within us. A challenge. The problem, I think, that we have to deal with most basically is that these texts always point beyond themselves to the real monastic life of the people who wrote them. And the real monastic environment which produced those people and the things they wrote is lost to us. We simply can't recover it. Because in actuality, if we want to look at Pacomian monasticism or the life in the desert that Antony led, a text really is not a starting point in their monastic life.

[11:12]

It's a way station. It's part of a journey or a development. And the text that we read is something that got left behind as the journey continued. Because as soon as you write something, it's frozen and it's dated. And there's something which is continuing and growing even after the text has been set down. So, for example, if we want to speak strictly, we can't identify Benedictine spirituality with just the rule of Benedict. The Rule is no portrait or photograph of Benedict's monasticism, nor is it a complete program, but it's more an impression of it. To use an image that I've used in this context before, the Rule of Benedict is kind of like a peak rising out of the clouds of historical mystery, which obscure the rest and really the greater part of the mountain. which was Benedict's monastic life and his vision of monastic life.

[12:16]

That applies to all these things. Now, having said that, we have to realize that we're stuck. All we have is the evidence, and we have to use the evidence to discern the reality, that living quality of these things that draws us to them and that makes us want to take them and make them live in us. If we realize what these writings are in themselves, then we can accept the fact that they're related, and we can also accept the fact that sometimes they're incomplete or excessive, but often they're the work of genius. Each one of these texts comes from a distinctive linguistic, cultural, theological, and so on, atmosphere. And getting hold of these atmospheres is like trying to spot the hydrogen content of the air in this room. We know it's there.

[13:18]

We rely on it. But we sure can't sit here and look at it and see it and say, there's the hydrogen and there's the oxygen. The thing about these monastic writers and the different atmospheres and traditions they're from is that they overlap. They intertwine. They're related. Or, to switch models, to an evolutionary one, we could say that these traditions and the texts which represent them build on one another, correct one another, and often collide with one another. And if we want to find the pure monasticism of Antony, or the pure monasticism of Pacomius, or pure monasticism before anybody, we just can't do it. There's no monastic Adam or Eve. And monasticism itself is something arising almost imperceptibly out of the life of the church. Now, the reason I say all of those things, which sound like a dose of cold water right at the outset, is not to destroy what we're trying to do, but to try to get us to move beyond idealization of these writings to a genuine appreciation and to be able to accept all of them.

[14:38]

In other words, we don't have to sit down and say, everybody who likes Pacomius and regards that as the monastic interpretation worth living, step over here. Everybody who likes Cassian, over here. People like Basil can be somewhere in the middle. We don't have to do that. And when we realize that these things are constantly intertwined, even the life of Antony depends on a lot of other things before it. Then we begin to get a sense of what it's like to wade into this collection of texts. So from the outset, let us accept the fact that we will find in some of these writings things that bother us. Some will think, have an inadequate ecclesiology sense of the church. We might want something much more corporate, in touch with the rest of the church. We may not find it in some. Others may seem to lack an appreciation for liturgical prayer, which we consider so fundamentally important.

[15:44]

Others may condemn forms of personal prayer that we find very helpful. Some may offend modern sensibilities about psychological or physical well-being. But let us remember that none of these folks set out to write a comprehensive monastic spirituality. They wrote what had to be written at the time when they wrote. And reaction and complementarity underlie these monastic texts like any other kind of writing. But the thing I think that consoles us in this is that our writers, like us, live in the body of Christ. And the fine thing about it is that we can take all of them and incorporate all of them. All of this is my justification for trying to discern the particular genius or contribution of each writer.

[16:46]

And it also, I think, frees us to assess their contributions in comparison to other writers and traditions. So we don't have to pick up a text and just regard it as an absolute. buy everything that's in it, or reject everything that's in it because it bothers us. We can set it in dialogue with other writings and also with ourselves. I've told you the four writings, but let me tell you the four aspects. First of all, Antony, as portrayed by a sympathetic non-monk, Athanasius, The great message of the life of Antony, as far as prayer goes, in my view, is the transformative or resurrectional nature of a monk's life of prayer. And I'll develop that at length when I talk about Antony. Now, obviously, when we look at Antony, the stress will fall on individual or solitary prayer.

[17:53]

So that's kind of one aspect. The second tradition, as I said, is that of Pacomius and his koinonia, or community. We'll continue throughout to talk about the transformative nature of prayer, but here we'll talk about it in the communal context of the synobium, characterized by mutual service, which runs from the top down And in Pacomius, we'll see an ecclesial dimension of prayer and a liturgical dimension and the relationship between those two. And we'll also realize yet again the foolishness of drawing two rigid distinctions between private and public or individual and communal prayer, which was absolutely no consideration of early monks. They didn't have such a distinction. And I think we still, despite our best efforts to train ourselves to break that, still think that way.

[18:58]

The third writer is John Cashin, and we'll look especially at Conferences 9, 10, and 14, 9 and 10 on prayer, 14 on spiritual knowledge, and the use of scripture. What Cashin does is deal explicitly with a theme which is implicit in all of his monastic writings, and that is the centrality of scripture in Christian prayer, and the role of language and words in prayer. And Cassian, of course, will generate some questions for us about practical issues of method, to use a horrible word, of prayer. Fourth will be Benedict. has the good fortune to stand at the end of this great monastic flowering, this first great monastic flowering. And Benedict pulls most of this stuff together in a very cogent understanding of these various dimensions of monastic prayer.

[20:05]

Even so, sad to say, he may himself have had his limits, and we'll look at some of those problems. Now, to anticipate your criticism or your questions, I should tell you why I chose these writers. First of all, most obviously, I know them best, so I'm most comfortable with these. But I've omitted some that I'm equally comfortable with, like Basil and Augustine, simply because we don't have time. To study Basil is to wander off into the mists of Cappadocian history and mysticism, which is wonderful stuff. But I think that would take us a bit outside of this more central focus that we can deal with in the amount of time that we have. And with Augustine we get into a whole theological system, which again is really interesting, but I think we have to stick to the others. Another reason I have for doing this, for choosing things that you've all started with a hundred times in your own reading and study, is that because these four writers or traditions are so fundamental and basic, they suffer the most from generalization and obfuscation.

[21:24]

And they can always stand a reexamination or a fresh look. These writers raise for us then the issues we need to consider at the outset, and we won't get any farther than the outset in these few days. I hope that they'll be for us springboards for reflection and discussion, and they'll lead us in discussion inevitably to other monastic writers whom I won't treat explicitly. but who will inevitably arise, and I hope you bring those up, that you make the connections and talk about them and put me on the spot if you want to about how all these things fit together. But that's going to happen inevitably, I think, as we look at these things. I hope that you'll take it where you want to and that your concerns, those that I read on the list I got in the letter from Father Martin and others, will find kind of a touchstone or base in the things that I'll say, and that we can do something with it to try to figure out how these writings can affect our effort to live out our baptismal life as monks.

[22:39]

Then a personal confession underlying all this stuff is the fact that I love this material, and I hope that that shows, and I hope I can communicate that to you. So I've discharged my academic duty by giving you all those cautions about not abusing the text, and now we can just enjoy them, which is my approach to it. We'll see where that leads us. So let's start with Anthony and see how far we get. It might be a kind of cliche to begin a series on early monasticism with Athanasius' life, Anthony. although I think we've satisfied ourselves that Antony was not the first monk, and with the fact that we've become aware of the problems in reading the life of a monk written by a bishop, himself not a monk, although he was sympathetic, doesn't take away the fact that love for this work has motivated people both in ancient times and in our own

[23:49]

to explore this monastic thing. And this prominence of the Life of Antony is not something restricted to people who could read Greek, the language it was written in, but it influenced the West tremendously. And everybody knows that business of Augustine, hearing about the Life of Antony and the impact it had on him. So we can say that although the Life of Antony may have been written by an outsider, by a witness to monastic life rather than by a participant, I don't think we can be so chauvinistic as some 19th century historians who assume that, therefore, Athanasius had to get it all wrong simply because he wasn't writing from the inside. For our purposes here, with our concern about monastic prayer, I'd like to suggest that Athanasius' greatest contribution to us in the life of Antony is not his account of Antony's inner struggle with the demons, which so often is the focus of attention.

[24:54]

When people read it for the first time, they're always put off by that, and they've got to read it again and again to get past that, to understand it. It's not so much that that I want to talk about, but rather Athanasius' testimony to the outward transformation, and I mean outward in a dynamic sense, coming from within and working outward, the outward transformation of Antony, which followed from years of monastic discipline. And if you read this latest translation of the life of Antony in the Paulist Press series, every time they use the word discipline, which is almost every other sentence it seems, that's translating the Greek word ascesis. It's the outer peace or gentleness mentioned on several occasions in the life of Antony, which I think provides our best clue to what Antony's life of prayer was about.

[25:54]

And we can be grateful to Athanasius for giving us the first account of the happy truth that monastic life can work. It can work on someone, it can transform someone, it can affect someone in such a radical way that the transformation is both physical and spiritual. Athanasius writes in the Life of Antony that someone who embraces ascesis is changed from within, but so deeply and thoroughly that by the constant interplay between spiritual growth and the nurturing of bodily sanity, which I think is an underappreciated theme of the Life of Antony, This relationship between spiritual growth and bodily sanity that our monastic forefathers and foremothers, I think, understood better than we do, despite their frequent use of strong language against bodily pleasure.

[26:57]

We find that Antony's growth in Christ through prayer became manifest in his very bearing, in his face, in the way he carried himself, in the way he dealt with people who came to him, his hospitality. I can no longer read the Life of Antony without my mind straying to Benedict. And here I am skipping to the end while we're still at the beginning. But I think at this point it's useful to remind ourselves of Benedict's twelfth degree of humility. That the monk always manifests humility in his bearing, no less than his heart, so that it is evident the work of God, the oratory, the monastery, the garden, journey, in the field, anywhere else. I'll probably talk about that text later on when we get to Benedict, and I'll save the rest of it for then. But let me simply mention, so we can start making these connections we need to make, that Benedict's source

[28:05]

for the twelfth degree of humility, by way of the master is John Cashion. Cashion sources the desert, and the desert is forever associated with Antony. My own sense of this is that it is the healthiness and the wholeness of Antony, and not only his monastic athleticism, which gives this first monastic biography its power to edify readers of today as much as it edified and inspired those who read it in its original Greek or who, like Augustine, read it in one of the very early translations. This thing was translated as soon as it was off the presses, and it had an extremely rapid, extraordinarily rapid diffusion throughout the known world for a document of its times. Most things would kind of slowly progress and get translated here and there and people would read them.

[29:10]

This thing was like a modern novel, a bestseller. It got abroad fast, and Athanasius was thinking of that kind of distribution when he wrote it. In any event, we today, like those people reading the text near the time of its composition, come to understand that the very essence of monastic life, whether we call that essence integration, or transformation, or conversion, or whatever type of term we want to use, comes down to the amazing power of God and God's grace to change a sinful life. And that is so manifest in the life of Anthony that Athanasius resorts to descriptions of how the man looked. That's the best way that he can express the point he's making about Anthony's monastic life. So therefore, we begin with this man,

[30:13]

not only because our literary tradition places him first, despite St. Jerome's best efforts to advance the cause of Paul the Hermit, but because our interest in the prayer of early monks makes us see Antony as a wonderful example of what must be one of our central concerns in wondering about a monk's prayer. Where does it lead him? What does it do to him? And the answer we find in the life of Antony is no surprise. Prayer leads the monk to himself, because the self is the place of encounter with God. So we start our review of Antony and these other monastic writers with the results. The emphasis then, in the case of Antony, will be on the prayer of an individual monk. which although it certainly does not exclude a communal perspective, and again the ancients weren't hung up on that kind of distinction, certainly is not the same as the phenomenon we'll deal with when we look at Pacomius, where prayer in the body of Christ, any monk's prayers in the body of Christ, become seen as the body of Christ made very much visible in the community.

[31:34]

Athanasius gives us a solid scriptural foundation for Antony's life in prayer, and the expected references to chanting psalms and memorizing scripture are there, but we won't find here the thorough treatment of the role of scripture in monastic prayer that we find in Cassian. So that topic will wait for Cassian. So my approach to Antony will be twofold. First of all, I want to say something about the work itself, a little bit of context, and then look at a couple of important passages where it's clear that Athanasius is talking about Antony's prayer as a matter of transformation or even transfiguration. The text of The Life of Antony as we have it is a classic piece of early Christian writing. and it displays a number of literary conventions which show that it relied on things before it.

[32:40]

And you all know about that letter form and a lot of phrases taken from pagan biographies and so on. The point is that this text doesn't spring from the earth as the prototype of all monastic writing. It has a prehistory. The author is a churchman of international repute, fine theologian, a great controversialist, and himself the victim of severe persecution, which I think is very important to keep in mind. Although Athanasius was himself the source of a good deal of polemic, especially against the Arians, and we find that kind of stuck into the life of Antony, when all of a sudden Antony takes on the Arians, when he probably had very little idea of who these people were, but that's part of the work. Given the authorship by Athanasius, his mark on the life of Antony is undeniable, and we've got to accept that. His knowledge of literature and literary conventions, that's a letter addressed to the monks abroad, so it's a PR piece for what's happening in Egypt.

[33:51]

A lot of people have talked about parallels with non-Christian biographies and so on. And at the same time, as I mentioned, Athanasius is not above using this biography for his own purposes. And he places some rather sophisticated anti-Aryan or anti-pagan arguments in the mouth of this uneducated Egyptian monk, Antony. Some people have argued that Athanasius is trying to domesticate monasticism by writing the biography and underscoring this man's relationship to the Church. Well, let's not get hung up on that. I think we can concede almost all of those criticisms of the life of Antony without compromising utterly the value of the text as a source for early monastic wisdom. These days, fortunately, we're no longer arguing over whether or not Antony actually existed. That was kind of the first line of attack when critics went after the life of Antony.

[34:56]

I think we accept that. Athanasius may exalt him, but he doesn't invent him, which gives us some comfort. What we have, I think, is Athanasius writing the life of someone who impressed him greatly. whether their direct contact was great or little. We really don't know how much personal contact Athanasius had with him. But he sure talked to a lot of people who knew Antony. And we can assume that there's a good deal of real biographical material here. But I think more importantly, as I mentioned earlier, the depth of Athanasius' own experience of suffering and also of consolation, make him a rather appropriate biographer. If we can't have a monk do it, this is the perfect man to do it, and perhaps even better than a sympathetic disciple. We need to remember that Athanasius got thrown out of his sea in Alexandria five times.

[36:02]

in the course of his tenure as bishop, due to pressure from various quarters, and he wrote the Life of Antony during his third period of exile, from 355 to 362, which he spent in the desert with the monks. The beginning of his exile, 355, coincided very closely to the death of Antony in 356, and the accepted date for the Life of Antony is 357. and the first Latin translations come very shortly thereafter. So I think we can get a good deal of appreciation for the biographer by understanding the conditions of his life. The work as we know it falls into two basic sections. The first part is a life, a vita, which runs from chapters 1 to 55 and 89 to 93. The second part is a history of Antony's acts and miracles, an acta, which runs from chapters 56 to 88.

[37:10]

My principal concern will be with the vita, with the life, because that is where we have the account of Antony's growth in charity through the discipline, ascesis, practiced in solitude. A lot of people have pointed out the fact that the geography of Antony's monastic life, this progressive withdrawal first to the outskirts of his village, then to the tombs, then to the outer mountain, and then finally to the inner mountain, can be read metaphorically as descriptive of his interior journey, progressively deeper, towards the essential human unity with Christ. I like that interpretation. I wouldn't go so far as to argue that that geographical stuff is all made up as a way of explaining his spiritual life. I think they're both genuine. But I think that's a really helpful approach. The outer movement of Antony to progressively greater solitude expresses his inner need for greater solitude and self-knowledge.

[38:26]

And I think the inner quest manifests itself in Antony's renewed and transformed face to the world, which is talked about at the end of the work when he comes forth and greets people in need and becomes a tremendously effective minister to others, something which we might not expect in the life of someone who's revered as this first great hermit. So let's look at prayer in the life of Antony. As far as a method of prayer, to use an awful phrase, there's none shown to us. Antony's prayer is described as verbal, as intentional. He prays for certain things. And his prayer is that of supplication. He's constantly calling on the Lord for aid. And this unceasing reliance on God is the best way to characterize Antony's unceasing prayer.

[39:31]

The Life reads in chapter 34, We ought neither to pray that we might have the power to know things before they occur, nor ought we to ask such a favor as a reward for our escases. but rather we are to pray that the Lord may be our fellow worker for the conquest of the devil." This quotation points us to an essential aspect of Antony's prayer. It's not a goal, it's a means. There's no treatise on the nobility of contemplation in this writing, nor is there anything like a vagaries distinction between the life of prayer or of the life of prayer into various stages, progressive stages of contemplation. I don't want to suggest a conflict between the noble simplicity of Antony and the horribly confused complexity of Evagrius.

[40:35]

I don't believe that. But the point is, that for Antony, the partnership between his ascasis, his discipline, and his prayer appears not as a phase, something that he later gets over as he moves to a different form of prayer, but as the charter for a lifetime. Okay? So, what I'm saying is that this form of supplication and prayer for aid and support is the only kind of prayer that we see. And it has a lot of characteristics which we would identify with later monastic writers, but that's the only evidence Athanasius gives us of how Antony prayed. So maybe we can't do a whole lot with that. Even the description of the life Antony led at the inner mountain, a description which is presented after the passage that I'll talk about later,

[41:35]

which is the great description of his equilibrium or integration, presents Anthony in this way. He was alone in the inner mountain, devoting himself to the prayers and to the discipline. Note the plural, the prayers. The singular form, UK, prayer, the kind of thing that we would tend to think of, the sort of term that we would use, appears only one time in the life of Antony. Everywhere else, it's plural. Either the word appears as a verb, tupre, or it appears as a noun in that plural form. There's something very practical conveyed by such language. underscored by the fact that in almost every case in the life of Antony, prayer is directly tied to the discipline, ascesis. Whenever ascesis is mentioned, so is prayer. Whenever prayer is mentioned, so is ascesis.

[42:38]

Or it's tied to struggle with the demons, or it's tied to a specific act of healing. Such is Athanasius' understanding of Antony's continual or unceasing prayer, the scriptural commandment which has haunted early Christians much more than us moderns, and which was the basic concern of the monastic movement and of those whose zeal spun them right out of the church, like the Messalians and other people who felt that there ought to be folks to come and take care of them and feed them so they could pray unceasingly. Where Athanasius employs the phrase, pray always or unceasing prayer, he does so either as part of a list of the various aspects of monastic discipline or with regard to fighting the demons. What comes of Antony's life of ascesis in the prayers is growth in knowledge.

[43:44]

Knowledge not as a kind of arcane Gnosis, like the Gnostics would think of, but the knowledge of discernment and insight, what we would think of as monastic knowledge or wisdom. In Antony, we see the first great monastic teacher of that scriptural value, which becomes so central to monastic spirituality later. And in the life of Antony, it's clear that the first role of this discernment The first object of this discernment and knowledge is comprehension of the self. It is in this regard that all the demon stuff in the life of Antony has to be understood. As Antony summarizes in chapter 42 in an extended speech about the monastic life, and we hope that some of it is Antony's and it's not all Athanasius, and I think a good deal of it is Antony, the demons respond to the state in which they find someone.

[44:47]

And Antony thus anchors the demon's power within the individual. And Antony speaks of the demon's powerlessness in the face of someone who recognizes their essential unreality and calls on the name of the Lord. And what enables that recognition and that ability to say to the demon, you don't exist, is the twin prayer and asceticism. The task then, set before us by Antony, could be characterized in this form, words taken from chapter 7. As one always establishing a beginning, Antony endeavored each day to present himself as the sort of person ready to appear before God. He used to tell himself that from the career of the great Elijah, as from a mirror, The ascetic must always acquire knowledge of his own life.

[45:54]

My sense is that that's enough of my sort of going through formal stuff just now. Where I'll pick up when I return to this will be the descriptions of Antony's applying those principles to himself. But I wonder if at this point you have any reactions or comments or questions either the stuff I laid out at the beginning, or to the basic approach I'm taking to the life of Antony. Because I know some of you have been rereading it lately, so you can call me on some of the stuff I say. When Antony says, you kind, does he mean Solomon? No, it's different. He makes a pretty firm distinction between the word UK or UKI, depending on the singular or the plural, and psalmody. So he uses words like chanting psalms and uses a verbal form, psalem, to chant psalms.

[46:59]

And that seems to be a different notion for him. than talking about the prayers. Prayers in the life of Antony seem to be these specific intentional appeals for support or mercy, especially in the description of Antony's combat against the demons. That's what I came up with the last time I went through it. It's probably less clear-cut than that. In fact, in Acts, when the Apostles set aside the obligation to work on the table, as they say, we have to be faithful to the prayers. That's where Catholicism is getting its plural, prayers. Nobody's doing the same as the Apostles did. We don't know quite what the prayers were. I guess my assumption is that that text from Acts is talking about the formal prayer, which would have been expected of any pious Jew, along with certainly private prayer.

[48:04]

And in Antony, surprisingly enough, we don't have much discussion of formal hours of prayer or morning and evening prayer, which any Christian would have been expected to do, hermit or not. I'm not sure why that is. Maybe it's just Athanasius' own interests. This seems to be different from psalmody. You're saying that when Pharaoh Daphne says to the devil, you don't exist, but you're also saying that he doesn't exist either. That he himself? That Anthony doesn't, yeah. Spin it out a little more. Oh no, I think rather what Anthony is saying is that I myself am quite real, because I myself

[49:07]

have this relationship with God. Okay, so what is real is, you know, is himself. And himself is real because of his relationship in Christ. And that the devil is powerless because of the strength of this relationship. And the trick is remembering and then leaning on that reality. And I think he's really got something there. Is there any notion of hierarchy behind the prayer, like usually the prayer petition is considered to be a very fundamental thing? Is there, you said most of it's with supplications? We don't really find that kind of, like Origen does, or like Cashen does. There's none of that kind of sorting out and ranking. Now certainly Athanasius would have been familiar with those traditional distinctions. But the kind of frustrating thing about this is that whenever you get a list in the Life of Antony, and there are several places where they give kind of a checklist of things that a monk ought to do, the order is different every time.

[50:29]

And it's very hard to find any kind of sense of a ranking or progression, which is kind of refreshing, really. But it does make it kind of hard to fit him in with some of those other schemes. That doesn't seem to be a concern of Athanasius. I've heard the Pantheon say, and I don't know what they are, but we've seen that they're formulating prayers, or spontaneous prayers of his own, passing words, phrases from Scripture. Well, it's tricky to know because, you know, we've got Athanasius kind of projecting what Antony's prayer life was like. Probably our closest way of getting at how Antony prayed was through the life of other monks who would have been Athanasius' source or who have left us other traces of how they prayed.

[51:30]

whether it's in the sayings or whatever. And the few bits of prayer that we do have, these calls for mercy, seem to be very much akin to what scholars have discerned as kind of the desert approach to prayer, the whole origin of the use of a line or a word. You know, the whole beginning of the Deus Noe Deuterium thing, or the Jesus prayer, seems to be rooted in these appeals for mercy and for aid. Hosier has written a number of things on this, and one article in particular, where he talks about this brief formulaic prayer. And he roots it in the kind of brief pleas for mercy and supplication of the sort that we find in the life of Antony. And they later get kind of polished up and become formulas. But originally they seemed to be either scriptural or closely scriptural. pleads for assistance.

[52:33]

And we find a number of those in Antony. But they always seem to be of that sort. Little of what we would think of as kind of contemplative. Much more practical and directed towards situations. But we really can't know. Has there been any concentration on the the type of temptation that he gets hit with. I know there's parallelism in communism. It's the same kind of sort of format, and also you see little, it shows up once in a while in the apothecary, little types, you know, of temptation, not just lust or gluttony or something, but certain actual, well, like in anatomy you see an awful lot of abuse, physical abuse, you know, where he really thinks he's abandoned, and there's other things where they, They try to make him laugh, you know, and catch him off guard and things like this.

[53:38]

Has there been any kind of systematizing or quantifying or any kind of categorizing of these types of levels of attack as a stimulus towards a growth in knowledge of self? Do you sense any kind of progression, or is it just sort of a buckshot? Well, I mean, it seems to me that you could compare them. I think the paradigm for most of the writings about temptation in the desert is the temptation stories in the Gospels. And I think often you find a progressively more sophisticated form of temptation, and I think Athanasius does that in the life of Antony. I mean, the obvious stuff, I mean, you start off with snakes and lions and this kind of stuff, and eventually you find that the tempter becoming much more human, personified, until finally that point in the life of Antony when Satan knocks on the door.

[54:46]

It was kind of the highest form of temptation. That's the only thing I can think of. I mean, I know people write about the demons, but I don't know of anybody who's really categorized them to see if there was a standard way of setting up those descriptions. Just what I mentioned. That seems to make sense to me, kind of experientially, too. I wonder, does this have, the battles, the demons, does it, in the beta, give the impression of something of cosmic dimension? In other words, is it something that he sees? he sees evil, not just demons of some kind, but really something more global.

[55:50]

Essentially, of course, when Satan is in that context, it is clear. Because that is the temptation and the desert of Christ. The other thing, is this just foreplay, so to speak, to lead up to this? I guess I don't have much of a sense, explicitly in the text, of Antony kind of leading the fight on a cosmic level, although clearly it's a paradigm for the ongoing confrontation with evil. I think that raises a good point, though, which I hinted at, which is this integrity of body and spirit, which I'll say more about later. I think it's really important when you read these monastic texts to realize that when they talk about things like resurrection, they're talking about resurrection of the body.

[57:03]

Ancients inevitably were hung up on resurrection of the body because the immortality of the soul was just a commonplace. They assumed that. So they had a natural understanding of kind of the embodiment of these kinds of things that I think it's very easy for us to get away from. When we look at the demons, we tend to psychologize them and say, oh, this is just his own psychological struggle and he works it out. And when we read about the demons, you know, picking them up and throwing them down on the ground, we get bothered by that. And we just say that's excess, that's rhetorical excess. But I think they're getting at something which is instructive for us, and that is a more kind of whole creational perspective on the individual, which then relates to this kind of cosmic perspective. Because when they talk about the resurrection of an individual, it is inevitably tied to the restoration of all creation. And Athanasius would certainly be thinking in those kind of terms on his own part whether or not he writes that explicitly or not.

[58:10]

There's a whole body of assumption and richness and wealth to this stuff. And we just don't have that same set of baggage. Our baggage is different. Maybe good, maybe bad. But to that extent, I'd say yeah. Are you saying... If I understand correctly, the book was written when I was in exile. I'm wondering whether some of the Athenian values... I'm just considering some aspects that Athanasius puts his own, how do you say, his own life into the book. I mean, about the temptations, whether or not, or better, struggles, whether or not, that if he was in exile, he must have felt abandoned a lot of times about various things that you feel.

[59:22]

A lot of people use that as a bad thing for me. I think so. Something that intrigues me and that, you know, I'd love to do something with sometime would be to, you know, to look at that whole angle on it. I think of that one especially harsh scene in the early part of the life when Antony, it's the part that has that physical, you know, kind of being picked up and thrown against the walls and thrown on the ground, and all of a sudden there's that healing beam of light, which is kind of the first direct consolation of Antony by God. you know, and the voice comes or the message is, you know, I've tested you and you've persevered. And there's also a very strong element in that consolation of underscoring the divinity of Christ. There's kind of an anti-Aryan point there. And it seems to me that that would be a kind of place to look for that biographical connection. you know, athanasious, abandoned, struggled, persecuted, and then comforted by this statement about the divinity of Christ, which is why he was exiled.

[60:38]

Because he was, you know, battling those people who downplayed that. That's what I think makes him such a good biographer. His struggles, I guess, were different from Antony's, but I think that it helps him. importance of the self as being the place where we encounter God. Therefore? If you were to choose one word, may your one word be as many words as you choose. What would you use to define, would you choose to define self? That place? One word, huh?

[61:43]

You mean to be more specific about what I mean by self? I guess I would go back to what I said about the essence of monastic life. I think the Self is that which is integral, integrated, that which is whole, that which is healed, any one of those number of words. Because I think the Self is many things which have to be unified, and then the point is the unity. So I guess that's how I would think of it. That's kind of where I am now. I mean, I've thought a lot lately about that kind of paradox. But that's what I would say. I could say a lot more about it, but that's the short version. That said, that you were talking about something that has to be

[62:49]

I'll say more about that later, but to answer your question, I would say it is It sounds like cliché, but I don't know any other way to say it. He is to be who he is, or he is to be who he was intended to be. And there's that whole creation theme again that I mentioned a minute ago. The whole perspective of these patristic writers, especially the Greek ones, is we are made as something good and perfect originally, and the whole course of salvation history is getting back to where we started. And I think that's underlying this. So it's not kind of wiping out something and putting something in its place, it's more uncovering. A real common image in these patristic writers is, we are the image of God, and it's just a dirty mirror, and if we find the right rag, we can wipe off the mirror, and there it is.

[64:02]

There it is. Exactly. And it's there. And I think that's different from the way that we tend to think, and what is so powerful about, especially these Eastern Fathers. I have one more question. This is a practical question. Do we know anything about these, it seems to be, formal communities of women that, before started his journey was at hand for his sister. That's always a treat to see if people catch that. I mean, it's one of the quirky things in the life is he's going to go become the first monk so he puts his sister in a convent.

[65:06]

What do you do with that? That's a real problem. You know, I teach a survey course in early monasticism and almost all the students who take it are Benedictine women. Now, that's a whole other issue that we don't have to get into why they're sending people to study monastic studies and the men aren't. But I feel really bad because I can't hand them something comparable to the life of Anthony or the Bukomian things about women. Really all we have are illusions. We have some biographies later of people like Sinclaidica and so on. But we find illusions like that in the life of Antony or in the Pacomian stuff. His sister Mary becomes superior of a community of women. And you find little hints about what the relationship is and, you know, Appa Peter goes and kind of takes care of them and so on. But as far as their own life, And if you go to the sayings, and this is something I've done some work on, sayings by women we have a handful, you know, compared to the number by men.

[66:15]

And the literary tradition is so skewed by that sort of later monastic fear of women, it's very difficult to find anything. Very difficult. So, I mean, I really can't help you. I wish I could. I keep dreaming we're going to discover something, but it hasn't happened yet. It seems to suggest, though, that there was some sort of community life for women pretty early on. Is there any evidence of any early stuff? simply in the margin or to tell them to these communities of women? Well, part of the murkiness of this whole question of monastic origins is, you know, the fact of the presence of things like widows and virgins and so on, I mean, from the start.

[67:12]

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