passion for relics. His words are thus reported by Athanasius: "Do not let them carry my body into Egypt, lest they store it in their houses. One of my reasons for coming to this mountain was to hinder this. You know I have ever reproved those who have done this, and charged them to cease from the custom. Bmy, then, my body in the earth, in obedience to my word, so that no one may know the place, except your- selves. In the resurrection of the dead it will be re- stored to me incorruptible by the Saviour. Distribute my garments as follows : let Athanasius, the bishop, have the one sheepskin and the garment I sleep on, which he gave me new, and which has grown old with me. Let Serapion, the bishop, have the other sheep- skin. As to the hair shirt, keep it for yourselves. And now, my children, farewell ; Anthony is going, and is no longer with you." He died in 356, being one hundred and five years old, and unburdened by old age. His whole conduct indicates the predomi- nance of a glowing and yet gloomy fancy, which is the proper condition of religious ascetism. Like many of the mystics, he affected to despise human science ; one of his reported sayings is, "He who has a sound mind has no need of learning." At the same time, Athanasius states that he was a diligent student of the Scriptures. ' ' The whole Nicene age venerated in An- thony a model saint. This fact brings out most char- acteristically the vast difference between the ancient and the modern, the old Catholic and the evangelical Protestant conception of the nature of Christian re- ligion. The specifically Christian element in the life of Anthony, especially as measured by the Pauline standard, is very small. Nevertheless, we can but ad- mire the miserable magnificence, the simple, rude grandeur of this hermit sanctity, even in its aberra- tion. Anthony concealed under his sheepskin a child- like humility, an amiable simplicity, a rare energy of will, and a glowing love to God, which maintained it- self for almost ninety years in the absence of all the comforts and pleasures of natural life, and triumphed over all the temptations of the flesh. By piety alone, without the help of education or learning, he became one of the most remarkable and influential men in the history of the ancient church. Even heathen contem- poraries could not withhold from him their reverence, and the celebrated philosopher Synesius, afterward a bishop, before his conversion reckoned Anthony among those rare men in whom flashes of thought take the place of reasonings, and natural power of mind makes schooling needless" (Hook). Although the father of monachism, St. Anthony is not the author of any mo- nastic "rules;" those which the monks of the Eastern schismatic sects attribute to him are the production of St. Basil. Accounts of his life and miracles are given in the Acta Sanctorum of the Bollandists, under the date of the 17th of January, on which day his festival is kept. Many marvelous stories are told of him. The principal source of information concerning him is his life by Athanasius (Opera, vol. i, ed. Benedict), which is supposed, however, to be much interpolated. On this biography Isaac Taylor remarks, " It may be read with edification, taken for just so much as it is worth ; but as an exemplar of the Christian character one may find as good, nay, some much better, among the monkish records of the worst times of Romanism. In all these fifty-four pages, scarcely so much as one sen- tence meets the eye of a kind to recall any notions or sentiments which are distinctively Christian. There is indeed an unimpeachable orthodoxy and a thorough- going submissiveness in regard to church authority ; and there is a plenty of Christianized sooffeeism, and there is more than enough of daemonology, and quite enough of miracle, but barely a word concerning the propitiatory work of Christ; barely a word indicating any personal feeling of the ascetic's own need of that propitiation as the ground of his hope. Not a word of justification by faith ; not a word of the gracious
influence of the Spirit in renewing and cleansing the heart ; not a word responding to any of those signal passages of Scripture which make the gospel * glad tidings' to guilty man. Drop a very few phrases bor- rowed from the Scriptures, and substitute a few drawn from the Koran, and then this memoir of St. Anthony, by Athanasius, might serve, as to its temper, spirit, and substance, nearly as well for a Mohammedan der- vish as for a Christian saint" (Taylor, Ancient Chris- tianity, i, 278). His seven epistles to the different monasteries in Egypt, translated out of the Egyptian tongue into Greek, are given with the commentaries of Dionysius the Carthusian upon Dionysius the Areop- agite, printed at Cologne, 1536, and in the Bill. Pa- trum, iv, 85. — Bibliotheca Sacra, vol. i, 468 sq. ; Giese- ler, Ch. Hist, i, 172, 270 ; Neander, Ch. Hist, ii, 228 sq. ; Butler, Lives of Saints, i, 165; Newman, Church of the Fathers (Lond. 1842) ; Hook, Eccles. Biography, i,*229 ; Schaff, in Meth. Qua?: Rev. 1864, p. 29 sq.
St. Anthony's Fire.— Butler, in his Lives of the Saints, gives the following account of the origin of this name: "In 1089 a pestilential erysipelatous distem- per, called the sacred fire, swept off great numbers in most provinces of France ; public prayers and proces- sions were ordered against this scourge. At length it pleased God to grant many miraculous cures of this dreadful distemper to those who implored his mercy through the intercession of St. Anthony, especially before his relics ; the church [of La Mothe St. Di- dier, near Vienne, in Dauphine] in which they were deposited was resorted to by great numbers of pil- grims, and his patronage was implored over the whole kingdom against this disease." The "order of Can- ons Regular of St. Anthony," a religious fraternity founded about 1090 for the relief of persons afflicted with the fire of St. Anthony, survived in France till 1790. See Anthony, St., order of.