Ascetic Culture: Essays in Honor of Philip Rousseau

Chapter 4: Apologetics of Asceticism: The Life of Antony and Its Political Context

C h a p t e r F o u r Apologetics of Asceticism The Life of Antony and Its Political Context SAmuel RubenSon W hy was the Life of Antony written? Was it to promote Antonian tradition or to rectify its influence in egyptian monasticism? Was it part of a campaign against Arianism in egypt, or rather propaganda for egyptian monasticism in the West? Is the text part and parcel of the propaganda and ecclesial struggle of Athanasius of Alexandria, or does it represent the monastic tradition of Antony? And, more basically, is the text, as transmitted in Greek, one literary unit consciously composed by an author or a compilation made from a variety of sources? Although the issues of authorship, literary unity and character, model, and purpose of the text have been discussed extensively since the early and mid-twentieth century, no agreement has yet been reached.1 In the early twentieth century a lively discussion on the literary character was begun by mertel and Holl and continued by list, Cavallin, and Priessnig, but it yielded little consensus and has had almost no impact on recent 75 76 Samuel Rubenson debate.2 The early doubts about the literary unity of the text voiced by Reitzenstein were soon silenced, and the more recent suggestion that bishop Serapion was a coauthor have received little attention.3 To most scholars the unity and integrity of the text is a given. Questions about purpose and literary character have thus become intimately linked to the issue of authorship, and to most scholars the question is why Athanasius wrote or could have written the text.4 Traditionally the reply has been to regard the Vita as part ofAthanasius’s promotion of the monastic tradition in general or of a specific version of it.5 more recent interpretations detect wider polemical purposes and argue that the Life was part ofAthanasius’s anti-Arian campaign directed against Arian monastic sympathizers, or an attempt to redefine Antony and his story in order to integrate his monastic followers into the theological framework or simply the ecclesiastical authority of theAlexandrian bishop, or even a refutation of Greek paideia directed against earlier depictions of an accommodation between Greek philosophy and Christian faith.6 There is here an obvious development from early attempts to interpret the Vita in relation to biographical traditions in late antiquity in general or monastic and hagiographical literature in particular, without much attention to the author, generally assumed to be Athanasius, to later interpretations reading the Vita in relation to internal affairs within the church in egypt, and more specifically to emerging egyptian monasticism and its relationship to the bishopric of Alexandria.7 The issue of purpose has thus been made dependent less on a literary analysis of the text itself and more on external evidence or speculations on how the relations between Athanasius and the early egyptian monks represented by Antony are understood, and how the Life can be related to Athanasius’s anti-Arian struggle and his ecclesiastical politics. Doubts about an Athanasian authorship are, moreover, founded on problems of how to relate the text to Athanasius’s other writings and his preoccupation with the Trinitarian conflict and imperial policies.8 but the purpose of the text is not the only issue that has been made dependent on the interpretation of evidence outside the text. even the specific question of whetherAthanasius wrote the text has been answered primarily on the basis of attributions in the manuscript tradition and the early attestations by Gregory of nazianzus, Jerome, and the Pachomian histories.9 If we look closely at the text itself, it reveals little about the identity of the author. Instead, as I will argue here, the text tells us more about the objectives of the author than has often been recognized. In the preface to the Life of Antony the author is vague about his own identity and connection toAntony. There is nothing to reveal his position, and while on the one hand he gives the impression of being a close relation to the monk, on the other he states that he needed to collect information . He says both that he met Antony “often” (πολλάκις), which could, of course, mean anything from several times to regularly, and that his problem was that he had no time to interview the monks who really knew him and thus had to resort...