In Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Diarmaid McCullough describes monasticism’s development in Syria and Egypt as a “silent protest” and “implied criticism of Church’s decision to become a large-scale and inclusive organization.”[1] Monasticism was - and remains - a welcome alternative to and refuge from a monarchical and wealth-obsessed church, a way of life that resolves questions held in uneasy tension: namely, how does one remain faithful to Jesus’ imperative to dispossess one’s self of wealth, while also remaining within a church that had thrown open the doors to the wealthy and powerful?
In the third and fourth centuries, the first Christian ascetic hermits stepped out of society -- literally walking out into the desert in many cases -- and followed Jesus’ advice to abandon worldly wealth. They did so even as they and their emerging communities remained under authority of the bishop and therefore part of the orbit of the wider Church.[2] This meant monasticism was able to remain part of the wider Church but not of it, a non-threatening form of “silent protest” against the increasing wealth and power of the rest of the Church.
These same themes and tensions are embedded within the life of Antony of Egypt (c.250-356) who is considered by many to be the father of monasticism. Antony’s hagiography, The Life of Antony, was written by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, shortly after Antony’s death around 356, and “became one of the most popular Christian texts in antiquity and was responsible for making [Antony] paradigmatic for later monastic theory, both in regard to the solitary life and that of the small community.”[3]
The Life depicts Antony as belonging to a Coptic merchant family in Alexandria who became the head of his household at the age of twenty after his parents’ death. Antony experienced a dramatic conversion after hearing the Gospel passage “Sell all and follow me” (Matthew 19.21), and which point he decided to dispossess himself of all that he had for the benefit of the poor, left his little sister behind to be raised by a community of faithful virgins, left Alexandria for the desert, and began his fierce battle with demonic forces.[4]
The Life also portrays how the demonic forces of both wealth and kinship ties tempt Antony again many years later as he is seeking to withdraw even further into the desert. He must once again resist the allure of fame and glory, money and wealth, and the memory of his sister: “[The devil] he tried to lead him away from the discipline, whispering to him the remembrance of his wealth, care for his sister, claims of kindred, love of money, love of glory, the various pleasures of the table and the other relaxations of life , and at last the difficulty of virtue and the labour of it all…”[5] Resolute, Antony walks past these temptations and continues in his life of monastic discipline.
The Life sketches out many of the themes that still demarcate monastic spirituality: an emphasis on the literal dispossession of wealth; a withdrawal into the desert; what one scholar called ‘failed solitude’ (more on that later); a battle with demonic forces - including sexual temptation and kinship ties; and a focus on the discernment of spirits. To this list of more well-known attributes, however, scholars have recently added the origins of Christian anti-blackness, a much-less discussed aspect of monastic spirituality inheritors and admirers of this tradition must come to terms with. 
Unknown, Saint Anthony and the Lobster Devil (c 1470),
illustration in Jacobus de Voragine (1228-1298),
La Légende Dorée (Legenda aurea), France,
British Library, Yates Thompson 49 vol. 1,
fol. 34, British Library, London. Wikimedia Commons.
As I will explore in the final part of this chapter, even as the Life of Antony became “the most successful and widely imitated hagiographical text of all time”, becoming foundational to monastic life and spirituality, it also includes the first-known Christian reference to the devil as a black boy. The sheer popularity of this text meant that the image of the devil’s true self as a black demon - later termed the Prince of Darkness - would be imitated over and over again in later monastic writings, often in shocking terms.[6] Anyone who appreciates the way monasticism offers a spiritual alternative to a worldly and monarchical church must also ultimately wrestle with how it operates along binaries including light versus darkness, wilderness versus corrupt society, male versus female, and how it laid a profound foundation of anti-blackness that is still alive and well in monastic spirituality today.
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Athanasius’ The Life of Antony is considered to be “the most successful and widely imitated hagiographical text of all time” and “the most read book in the Christian world after the Bible” which established Antony of Egypt as the ‘father of monasticism.’[7] [8] As a hagiography, it is not strictly a historical record - “Athanasius painted a portrait of Antony which suited his own purposes: an ascetic who was soundly opposed to Athanasius’ opponents, the Arians, and was a firm supporter of bishops such as Athanasius himself” - and part of Athanasius’ highly successful agenda was to assert Egypt’s spiritual prowess, providing a model for all later monastic life.[9]
In The Life, Antony undergoes a critical conversion experience shortly after his parents’ death which centers on the dispossession of wealth and property. Indeed, the introductory sections of The Life highlight some of the greatest hits of the New Testament which argue for Christians to have a very different approach to wealth and the economy.
Born into a Christian family which “possessed considerable wealth”, Antony is described as being “left alone” at “18 or 20” to care for himself and his sister. About six months after his parents’ death, while walking to church, “he communed with himself and reflected as he walked how the Apostles left all and followed the Savior (Matthew 4.20); and how they in the Acts sold their possessions and brought and laid them at the Apostle’s feet for distribution to the needy (Acts 4.35)…”.[10]
Antony is still pondering these texts about the apostles and the communal sharing of property as he enters a church and arrives just in time to hear the Gospel being read: “And the Lord said to the rich man, ‘If thou wouldest be perfect, go and sell all that thou hast and give to the poor; and come and follow me and there shalt have treasure in heaven (Matthew 19.21).”[11] Seeing this as a sign from God, Antony then “went out immediately from the church, and gave the possessions of his forefathers to the villagers” -- possessions that amounted to 300 acres, “productive and fair” -- and sold all else, giving the money to the poor. Upon returning to church another time, the Gospel passage is read in which Jesus says “be not anxious for the morrow (Matt 6.34)”, at which point he immediately leaves and gives even more of his wealth to the poor including (tragically) handing off his little sister to be raised by “known and faithful virgins.” Free at last of his possessions - and little sister - “he henceforth devoted himself outside his house to discipline, taking heed to himself and training himself with patience.”[12]
A brief side note about Antony’s little sister and that community of faithful virgins: one of the questions that remains unresolved among scholars has to do with where the earliest Christian monastics like Antony learned their asceticism from. I came across multiple versions of the question posed by J. Wortley: “The question arises: from whom did they receive instruction in how to lead the solitary life?”[13] One intriguing possibility comes from John McManners who points out that Antony’s being able to leave his sister behind with a community of ‘faithful virgins’ suggests that women’s Christian monasticism likely preceded what Antony and Pachomius are given credit for.[14] “Antony’s innovation was to move from the inhabited area into the remove of desert; but, long before he or Pachomius had ever thought of adopting asceticism, there already existed in Egypt structured communities of what today would be termed nuns...Too often, in ancient as in modern times, monastic history has been written exclusively from a masculine point of view.”[15]
The dramatic conversion story and particularly Antony’s subsequent temptations and battles with the devil made The Life “an immediate success, soon translated into Latin (in two versions) and several other languages, and eagerly read in both the Christian east and west.”[16] It is arguably the case that no other non-biblical Christian text has enjoyed so wide a circulation or been so influential a model for spiritual biographies or in the development of monastic spirituality, a fact which elevated Egypt as a foundational site of Christian spirituality but which would also result, as we’ll see later, in the development of a robust tradition of Christian anti-blackness.
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Through The Life, the major themes of monastic spirituality were established including “first and foremost, the idea of monasticism as a life of withdrawal into the desert. This is on account of the way human society clings to the narrow ribbon of the Nile River in Egypt, and how in most of Egypt the desert is no further than an easy walk.”[17] Antony’s withdrawal into the desert has been “reimagined again and again to include life on rocky outcroppings off the Irish coasts, in the silent vastness of Russian forests and amidst the desolation of modern urban centres.”[18]
A second key theme is that of Antony as “a failed solitary”, to use a term offered by J. Wortley in An Introduction to the Desert Fathers. Even in withdrawing to the desert, Antony and subsequent solitaries did not and could not isolate themselves completely. “For those who placed themselves in solitary confinement, there was always some casement through which they could receive the necessities and life and communicate with their fellow beings.”[19] Further, solitaries like Antony became famous and attracted visitors. In Antony’s case, “a growing number installed themselves willy-nilly not so far away from where the solitary lay” in what would become the first step toward communal (cenobitic) monasticism.[20]
The historian John McGuckin notes how nearly every stage of Antony’s life as depicted in The Life established aspects of monasticism that still exists today. The solitary life he led in the desert (‘ermos’ in Greek) resulted in a monastic tradition of hermits. When Antony organized a colony of disciples under a loose form of communal rule, this came to be known as cenobitic monasticism based on the Greek term for “common life”: koinos bios.[21] Perhaps most importantly for Anglicanism: “Antony’s many different exempla in The Life and the sayings attributed to him in later monastic manuals taught Christian monks to balance their lives in the desert with a pattern of prayer and psalms through the night and the dawn, then rest in the morning with eating and labor, followed by sleep in the afternoon, then study, prayer, and dinner at dusk, and prayers again in the coolness of the night. This formula of daily variety between oral and mental prayer, physical labor, and rest, was said to have been revealed to him by the visitation of an angel since he had no one else to show him standards of ‘desert polity.’”[22] Or, following my previous note, perhaps it was simply patterned off of what women monastics had already established.
Returning, then, to the notion of monasticism as a form of ‘silent protest’ against an increasingly wealth-obsessed and monarchical church, The Life of Antony -- from the initial conversion story of literal dispossession to withdrawn to emphasis on receiving visitors to different modes or organizing ‘desert polity’ - opened an attractive alternative for many Christians who sought refuge from the monarchical and increasingly wealthy Church. In my own denomination, monastic spirituality - with its emphasis on withdrawal to the wilderness, retreat from society, discernment of spirits, emphasis on self-knowledge, and pattern of daily prayer - is deeply admired and has been fundamental in shaping repeated patterns of prayer found in the Book of Common Prayer. Yet we should also recognize, and begin to wrestle more directly with, The Life of Antony’s anti-blackness and the imprint of racism it would leave on monastic spirituality for centuries to come.
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Among Antony’s first spiritual battles with demons in the desert, the devil is described as finally casting off his many outward forms and appearing to Antony at last ‘as his true self’ -- ‘a black boy, taking a visible shape with the color of his mind.’[23] This is an erotically-charged encounter as the boy describes himself to Antony as ‘the friend of fornication’ and ‘the spirit of lust.’ Scholar David Brakke notes that in portraying the devil’s true self as a black boy, Athanasius’ The Life was drawing on longstanding fears and stereotypes of Egyptians toward their darker-skinned Ethiopian enemies, who they and the wider Roman Empire regularly portrayed as dark black, hypersexualized, and dangerous.
The unconquered Ethiopians neighboring the Egyptians had long been a source of both fascination and fear for the Roman Empire generally and Egyptians, in particular, although Egyptian stereotypes about Ethiopians tended to be more distinctly negative as they were founded in immediate fears. “While persons elsewhere in the Mediterranean may have been able to romanticize the mythic military power of the Ethiopian people, Egyptians had a more palpable sense of an ‘Ethiopian threat’ and thus were more likely to scapegoat darker-skinned persons in their midst.”[24] The black-skinned Ethiopians became depicted as both dangerous and hypersexual, themes which Athanasius would pick up and baptize for Christianity in his writing of the Life of Antony.
The impact of this depiction on monastic spirituality - with its binaries of light and darkness now cast onto skin color - is hard to overstate. From the fourth century well through the medieval period, monastics in both the east and west imitated and energetically expanded upon The Life’s antiblackness. Black boys and black women were regularly depicted as demons that monks had to resist or violently overpower. Brakke writes:
“[The Life of Antony] was not the last time the devil or one of his demons would appear with black skin to an Egyptian monk, according to tales preserved in the monastic literature from the fourth and fifth centuries. A young monk beset by thoughts of sex encountered an Ethiopian woman with a foul smell. An older monk found an Ethiopian girl he remembered seeing in his youth sitting on his knees; driven mad, he struck her, and a foul odor adhered to his hand. Afflicted by pride, another monk was divinely instructed to reach for his neck, where he found a small Ethiopian, which he cast into the sand. A monk who disobeyed his elder discovered an Ethiopian lying on a sleeping mat and gnashing his teeth. Ethiopian or black demons continued to tempt or frighten Christian ascetics into the medieval period.”[25]
Surveying the monastic literature that followed The Life, Brakke argues that the blackness of Ethiopian demons came to serve three important functions. First, blackness became a useful means of highlighting a monk’s ability to discern evil in a morally complicated situation. “The blackness of the demons, by providing an unmistakable sign of evil at work, confirms the clarity of vision given to the ‘man of God.’”[26] In the Dialogues of Gregory the Great, Benedict of Nursia is shown as possessing unique powers of discernment through his ability to perceive a black demon when no one else could. Whereas other monks struggled to understand why one of their brothers was never able to make it through his prayers, Benedict alone was able to see a black boy pulling on the monk’s cloak during worship.[27]
Second, monastic stories regularly relied on the stereotype of Ethiopian hypersexuality. When Athanasius depicted the black boy in the Life of Antony as ‘fornication’s lover’ and the ‘spirit of lust’, he was building on longstanding Roman fears and fascinations about the erotic power of both Ethiopian men and women.
Third, in a step that strikes me as critical for the eventual association of whiteness with light and holiness, blackness became a useful means to demonstrate the power and possibility of Christian transformation. These stories hinge on the notion that even dangerous blackness can be tamed through the powers of monastic spirituality, with emphasis placed on darkness becoming light and blackness becoming as white as snow. The early church historian Sozoman’s record of Moses the Black (330-405), also known as Moses the Robber, is illustrative of this point. Moses is described as beginning his spiritual journey as an Ethiopian slave dismissed by his master on account of his many thefts. When Egyptian monks complained about his presence among them, Moses said to himself “They have acted rightly concerning you, you ash-skinned one, you black one. You are not a human being, so why do you go among human beings?”[28] Later, in a scene that could just as easily come from that genre of American movies that revels in the reformation of blackness (e.g. Dangerous Minds, The Blind Side, Freedom Writers), the abbot of the monastery takes Moses to the roof to watch the first rays of dawn come over the dark horizon. There the abbot tells him, “Only slowly do the rays of the sun drive away the night and usher in a new day, and thus, only slowly does one become a perfect contemplative.”[29]
There is a fourth function which historian David Brakke does not specifically mention but which is important to name -- namely, the way that these stories emphasize power over blackness. In cases like the story of Moses the Black, it is the power of the Egyptian monks to reform or transform blackness, but more often than not the focus is on the monk’s power to banish or even violently destroy the black demon. Demons often appear in ways that suggest utter powerlessness. They are depicted as little boys, or “foul-smelling” women, and in some cases are even held down in chains. In Athanasius’ tale, Antony tells the boy “You are very despicable then, for you are black-hearted and weak as a child. Henceforth I shall have no trouble from you, ‘for the Lord is my helper, and I shall look down on my enemies.’”[30]
A particularly graphic example of this fourth theme comes from the apocryphal collection of stories called the Acts of Peter and Paul. Composed in the latter half of the fourth century, these tell of Peter and Paul’s journey to Rome, their activities there, and of their subsequent martyrdoms. Told from the perspective of a man named Marcellus, the text relates Peter’s various spiritual contests with a contending spiritual leader named Simon Magus. There Marcellus has a dream in which he sees “a very ugly woman, according to her appearance an Ethiopian, no Egyptian, but very black, clad in filthy rags, but with an iron chain about the neck and a chain on her hands and feet; she danced.” In this dream, the apostle Peter tells Marcellus to behead the woman but Marcellus objects saying that as a senator of noble race he has never even killed a sparrow. Peter then calls out to “our true sword, Jesus Christ” to “cut off not only the head of the demon, but break all her members in the presence of all these, whom I have tested in thy service.” At once an angel came “with a sword in his hand and knocked her down.”[31]
By the fourth century, then, a disturbing transformation in Christianity had already taken place. Biblical imagery in both the Old and New Testament that contrasted light and darkness and God’s declaration that “light was good” (Genesis 1:3-4) had resulted in regular associations of the color black with evil.[32] It is, however, in Athanasius’ Life of Antony and in subsequent monastic literature where we see the earliest Christian examples where evil and darkness are affixed to a people’s black skin. Egyptians’ pre-existing stereotypes about black Ethiopians were readily incorporated into the tales of spiritual prowess of monks, and then exported as this monastic literature inspired new generations of monastics across Eastern and Western Christianity.
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Monasticism began as and continues to be seen as an attractive alternative to a monarchical and wealth-obsessed church -- but it is an extremely fraught one. I appreciate Diarmaid McCullough’s description of monastic spirituality as a form of ‘silent protest’ insomuch as it depicts how this way of life is a positive alternative which nevertheless stays within the bounds of the church’s hierarchy. The Life of Antony is considered a foundational text of this movement -- widely considered to be second only to the Christian scriptures in its influence - and its main protagonist considered ‘the father of monasticism.’
Yet if we are going to continue to admire and draw from the wisdom and insights of this tradition, we are also going to have to wrestle with and carefully approach the many binaries that this form of spirituality operates along. These include pitting desert wilderness versus a corrupt society, the inner mountain versus the outer mountain, male versus female (his poor sister), light versus darkness, and - perhaps most surprisingly and least-discussed, shocking anti-blackness. This latter trait has been ignored for far too long. Even the beloved Thomas Merton couldn’t bear to bring himself to face this aspect of monasticism’s legacy and so in his portrayal of Moses the Black he describes him as simply wearing a long black robe.[33]
Like the monastic structures that The Life of Antony gave rise to, so too the monastic spirituality that it continues to inspire today operates along these binaries, and it is perhaps one reason why, at least in the United States, so many monastic and retreat settings are painfully white spaces. From my perspective, at least, The Life unfurled a long tradition of anti-blackness which continues to profoundly impact the shape and nature of monastic spirituality and its descendants today.
Whether dealing with misogyny or anti-Jewish or anti-blackness, what this means is that we, the inheritors of these texts, must think critically even as we appreciate some of the insights that come from this tradition. Personally, I have a deep appreciation for certain aspects of monastic spirituality - including its preservation of the Gospel's focus on the literal dispossession of wealth - but I’m also struck by the deep denial of the long legacy of anti-blackness in monastic literature and its subsequent impact on Christianity, particularly in Anglicanism with its rootedness in the English Benedictine tradition. We have to face these binaries and the long history of anti-blackness within our own spiritual tradition if ever we are to begin to build a Church that is more embracing of all people.
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[1] McCullough, Dharmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. 200-206
[2] McCullough, Dharmaid. Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. 201-202
[3] McGuckin, John. First Thousand Years. Page 394
[4] McGuckin, John. First Thousand Years. Page 394
[5] Athanasius. The Life of Antony . Kindle Edition. H. Ellershaw translator, Location 181. Part 5
[6] McCullough, Diarmaid. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. 205
[7] The Early Christian World: Volume 1 (Routledge Worlds) (p. 312). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition. Anthony the Great > Page 1010 · Location 35962
[8] McCullough, Diarmaid. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. Page 205
[9] McCullough, Diarmaid. A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. 205
[10] Athanasius. The Life of Antony . Kindle Edition. H. Ellershaw translator. Parts 1-2
[11] Athanasius. The Life of Antony . Kindle Edition. H. Ellershaw translator. Part 2. Refers to Matthew 19: 21.
[12] Athanasius. The Life of Antony . Kindle Edition. H. Ellershaw translator. Part 2.
[13] Wortley, J. (2019). Beginnings. In An Introduction to the Desert Fathers (pp. 16-27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108646116.002, Page 17
[14] McManners, John. The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, 132-133
[15] McManners, John. The Oxford Illustrated History of Christianity, 132-133
[16] The Early Christian World: Volume 1 (Routledge Worlds) Anthony the Great > Page 1011 · Location 35984
[17] The Early Christian World, Monasticism > Page 312 · Location 11502
[18] The Early Christian World, Monasticism > Page 312 · Location 11502
[19] Wortley, J. (2019). Beginnings. In An Introduction to the Desert Fathers (pp. 16-27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108646116.002, page 18
[20] Wortley, J. (2019). Beginnings. In An Introduction to the Desert Fathers (pp. 16-27). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108646116.002, page 18
[21] McGuckin, John. The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years. 394-395
[22] McGuckin, John. The Path of Christianity: The First Thousand Years. 395-396
[23] Athanasius. The Life of Antony . Kindle Edition. H. Ellershaw translator. Part 6
[24] Brakke, David. “Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self” in Journal of the History of Sexuality Vol. 10, No. 3/4, Special Issue: Sexuality in Late Antiquity (Jul. - Oct., 2001), pp. 501-535.
[25] [9] Brakke, David. “Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self” in Journal of the History of Sexuality Vol. 10, No. 3/4, Special Issue: Sexuality in Late Antiquity (Jul. - Oct., 2001), pp. 501-535.
[26] Brakke, David. “Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self” in Journal of the History of Sexuality Vol. 10, No. 3/4, Special Issue: Sexuality in Late Antiquity (Jul. - Oct., 2001), pp. 501-535.
[27] Dialogues 2.4
[28] Brakke, David. “Ethiopian Demons: Male Sexuality, the Black-Skinned Other, and the Monastic Self” in Journal of the History of Sexuality Vol. 10, No. 3/4, Special Issue: Sexuality in Late Antiquity (Jul. - Oct., 2001), pp. 501-535.
[29] https://web.archive.org/web/20110829205900/http://stmosestheblackpriory.org/about_history.html
[30] Athanasius Vita Antonii 6. Section 6
[31] Acts of Peter 22 - Apocryphal Acts of Paul, Peter, John, Andrew & Thomas, American Theological Library Association Historical Monographs, 1909.
[32] Brakke highlights Gen. 1:3-4, 1 Thess. 5:5, Revelations 6:11, 7:13
[33] Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert [New York, 1960], 36; cf. Apophthegmata patrum Moses 8 [Pg 65:286].
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