The Letters of St. Antony: Origenist Theology, Monastic Tradition and the Making of a Saint (review)

Samuel Rubenson's aim in this work is twofold. First, he seeks to rehabilitate and set on a firmer critical foundation a neglected work of early monastic literature: the Letters of St. Antony. Second, he wants to revise the conventional view of St. Antony and of early monasticism as arising largely from the world of uneducated Coptic-speaking peasants ignorant of Greek language and culture. Arguing that St. Antony has been handed down to posterity more as an ideal than as an historical figure, and that our understanding of early monasticism has been distorted as a result, Rubenson aims to recover the elusive "historical Antony" and situate him within a more complex, richly textured understanding of monastic origins. A proper appreciation of the Letters is crucial to this project according to Rubenson, for they reveal Antony to be not an illiterate monk but a person who "shared a Platonic view of man, his origin, nature and destination and was dependent for the integration of Christian thinking into this framework on Clement of Alexandria and Origen" (12).

In Part 1, Rubenson makes a compelling case for the authenticity of the Letters and provides an overview of their world-view. A meticulous comparative analysis of the numerous versions of the Letters (in Coptic, Syriac, Georgian, Latin, Arabic and Greek) leads him to the conclusion that they were originally composed in Coptic, a fact consonant with the attribution of the Letters to Antony. Other evidence also points to the Letters' authenticity: the nearly unanimous agreement of the early manuscript tradition in favor of Antony as author of the letters, in their Coptic original and in Greek translation; Jerome's mention of seven letters by Antony; citations from the letters by Shenute and Besa; the presence of passages from the Letters in the major fifth-century collections of Apophthegmata; and evidence, noted in several ancient sources, that Antony wrote letters. In a long chapter entitled "The Gnosis" Rubenson outlines the world-view of the Letters. The Antony of the Letters is well-acquainted with current philosophical ideas from the Middle and Neoplatonic tradition, has a penchant for allegorical interpretation of Scripture and sees the acquisition of self-knowledge as central to the spiritual quest. This is strikingly different from the ethos of either the Apophthegmata or the Vita Antonii, the other primary sources of information about Antony, and raises the question of which of these sources can be considered most historically reliable.

Rubenson addresses this question at length in Part 2. He draws upon documentary evidence preserved in contemporary papyri to show that it is inaccurate to think that the vast majority of the early monks were largely uneducated (as the Apophthegmata and the Vita suggest). The papyri, he argues, indicate a broader level of education and literacy in rural Egypt than has heretofore been imagined: they reveal consistent contact between Alexandria and the towns of upper Egypt, the presence in rural regions of a wide variety of scholars, philosophers, poets and bibliophiles and examples of book trade, calligraphers and Greek literature in the villages. This, together with evidence from the monastic sources themselves for literacy and education among the monks, leads Rubenson to conclude that "a large number of the first monks had a fairly high social background and some education and cannot have been strangers to the philosophical and religious ideas around them" (121). And this is more consistent with the picture presented by the Letters than by either the Apophthegmata or the Vita Antonii.

Rubenson tackles this question directly by arguing for the unreliability of the Vita and the Apophthegmata as sources for a historical reconstruction of Antony's life (and by implication for early monasticism as a whole). Rubenson asks, for instance, whether Athanasius' strong hagiographical and theological interests in composing the Vita, especially his desire "to enhance the concept of Antony as taught exclusively by God" (40), undermines the...