NPNF2-04. Athanasius: Select Works and Letters

The above are the principal materials for a decision as to the genuineness of the Vita: and I do not see how they can justify any opinion but that stated at the outset. Against the Vita we have certain historical difficulties (intercourse with Athanasius, peregrini fratres, Balacius), and arguments ex silentio, a kind of evidence seldom conclusive. For it, we have a quite unusual array of external evidence, including an almost contemporary version, the absence of any room for its date at a safe distance from its traditional author, and the many points of contact, as well as the characteristic differences between the Vita and the writings of Athanasius. Moreover on the kindred question of the origin of monasticism, Weingarten’s theory breaks down, and leads him to suicidal steps in more than one direction. Although, therefore, it is permissible to keep an open mind on the subject, we must recognise that the enterprise of the recent assailants of the Vita is at present at a dead halt, that overwhelming probability is against them.

But if Athanasius wrote the Vita, it does not follow that all its less edifying details are true, nor that its portraiture is free from subjectivity982. At the same time, to the present writer at least, the lineaments of a genuine man, ὁμοιοπαθοῦς ἡμῖν, stand out from the story. Doubtless there is idealisation, panegyric, an absence of sinfulness (Gwatkin, Studies, p. 100). But the moderate value set on miracles (38, 56), the absence of the element of fear from his religion (42, &c.), his serene courtesy (73) and uniform cheerfulness (67, 70), the caution against being tempted to excess in ascetic exercises (25), the ready half-humorous good sense (73, 85) of the man, are human touches which belong to flesh and blood, not to hagiographic imagination. But here the question is one of individual taste. At any rate the Vita embodies the best spirit of early monasticism. It was the pure desire to serve God and fulfil the spirit of the Gospel that led Antony to part with all that might make the world precious to him, and to betake himself to his long voluntary martyrdom of solitude, privation, and prayer. We see nothing but tenderness and love of men in his character, nothing of the fierce bloodthirsty fanaticism which in persons like Senuti made fifth-century monasticism a reproach to the Christian name. Had Antony lived in our time, he might have felt that the solitary life was a renunciation of the highest vocation of which man is capable, the ministry to the material and spiritual needs of others.

The Vita has undoubtedly exercised a powerful and wide-spread influence. Upon it Jerome modelled his highly idealised tales of Paul and Hilarion; at Rome and all over the West it kindled the flame of monastic aspirations; it awoke in Augustine (Conf. viii. ubi supra) the resolution to renounce the world and give himself wholly to God. The ingens numerus of Latin manuscripts, and the imitation of its details in countless monastic biographies, testify to its popularity in the middle ages. Like monasticism itself, its good influence was not without alloy; but on the whole we may claim for it that it tended to stimulate the nobler of the impulses which underlie the monastic life.

A few words may be added on the evidence of the Vita as to the form and motive of early monachism. In the Life of Antony, the stages are (1) ascetics living in the towns and villages, not withdrawn from society (§§3, 4); (2) solitary monasticism in the desert, away from human society; and, as the fame of Antony increases, (3) the formation (§44) of clusters of cells centering round some natural leader, the germ of the λαύρα (such as the community of Tabennæ under Pachomius). Of organised monastic communities the Vita tells us nothing. With regard to the motive of the earliest monasticism, this has been variously sought in (1) the development of the ascetic element present in Christianity from the very first; (2) in the influence of the Alexandrian School, especially Origen, who again is influenced by the spirit of revolt against the body and detachment from the world which characterised neo-Platonism (see Bornemann’s work mentioned above); (3) in the persecutions, which drove Christians to the desert (Eus. H. E. vi. 42), which some adopted as their home; (4) to the (not necessarily conscious) imitation of analogous heathen institutions, especially the societies of ἁγνεύοντες which were gathered round or in the temples of Serapis (Weingarten, R. E., X. 779–785.

Revillout, p. 480 n, refers to Zoega, p. 542, for the fact that Pachomius himself was a monk of Serapis before his forced baptism by his Christian neighbours; and that after it he continued his ascetic life with no external difference. (5) To the desire to avoid civil obligations, already marked in the Rescript of Valens (Cod. Th. xii. 1. 63, quidam ignauiæ sectatores desertis civitatum muneribus, &c.). Of the above motives the Vita gives no support to any but the first, which it directly confirms, and perhaps indirectly to the second. The date of the Vita depends mainly on the view to be taken of §82, where see note 16.