Venerable and Godbearing Father Anthony the Great

Anthony was born c. 251 to a Christian family in a village of Middle Egypt. His parents died when he was about twenty. Hearing in church the Gospel words "Go, sell what you have and give to the poor", he gave away his family’s land, placed his young sister with a community of virgins and went to live as an ascetic, first near his village, then shut up in a tomb, then for twenty years in an abandoned fort in the desert.

When he came out, disciples gathered around him, and he is remembered as the father of Christian monasticism. He spent his last decades on a mountain near the Red Sea, where the Monastery of Saint Anthony stands today. He died in 356, aged about 105, asking that his grave be kept secret. His Life, written by Athanasius of Alexandria, was read across the Christian world.