The Father of All Monks spent twenty years sealed inside a Roman fort
At thirty-five, Anthony of Egypt shut himself inside an abandoned fort by the Nile, and for about two decades food was tossed to him over the wall. When he finally emerged around 305, followers camped outside expected a wreck. Instead he looked healthy, and he became their guide.
Anthony, born in Lower Egypt in 251 to wealthy landowners, lost his parents at about twenty. Taking literally the gospel instruction to sell everything and give to the poor, he handed land to neighbours, sold the rest, entrusted his sister to a community of Christian virgins and began an ascetic life. His diet was bread, salt and water, eaten at most once a day, with fasts of two or four days.
He was not the first Christian hermit, despite the popular claim. Philo of Alexandria had described communities of ascetics near Lake Mareotis in the first century, and women such as Thecla had withdrawn to the edges of cities. What set Anthony apart was going into the desert itself, around 270. His withdrawal to Pispir drew would-be disciples who settled in caves around his retreat, and his organising them into a community is why he earned the title Father of Monasticism. His disciple Macarius went on to found a community in the Scetic desert.
Fame followed him. Emperor Constantine wrote asking for prayers, and Anthony replied by urging him and his sons to think less of this world and more of the next. In 338 he visited Alexandria to argue against Arius. He dictated letters in Coptic, seven of which survive, and died in 356 at an extraordinary age. Before dying he left his staff to Macarius and sheepskin cloaks to Athanasius and to Serapion of Thmuis.
Athanasius wrote his Life around 360, and its Latin translation made it one of the most-read books of the Christian Middle Ages. Its tales of demonic temptation, from phantoms to desert creatures like a centaur and a satyr, inspired painters from Hieronymus Bosch to Salvador Dalí and a novel by Gustave Flaubert. Skin diseases were once called Saint Anthony's fire.
Source: Anthony the Great
