Arkiv, Høytlesning
Ørkenfedrene 2
Below is the text of the second episode in the series Desert Fathers in a Year. You can find it in video format here – a dedicated page – and pick it up in audio wherever you listen to podcasts.
The Devil, who hates and envies what is good, could not bear to see such zeal in this young man, so he undertook to do to him those things he is accustomed to do.
Antony began his contemplative pursuit near his village. There were no monasteries he could refer to; but there were, here and there, devout women and men who lived a consecrated life. These he zealously looked up. ‘If he heard of a good man anywhere, he went like a prudent bee to seek him’. He observed ‘the graciousness of one, the unceasing prayer of another; he noted this one’s freedom from anger, that one’s loving-kindness’, then he set about emulating their qualities, improving himself. He was mild-mannered, liked by all. Some called him ‘my son’, others ‘brother.’ There is a Brother Sun, Sister Moon quality to this early part of Antony’s life. Reading it, we can almost hear a lilting sound-track full of cheerful tunes and bright major chords.
A storm, though, was brewing, designed to drive Antony off course. Behind it stood the enemy Scripture refers to as the devil, ‘the divider’. Athanasius, Antony’s biographer, has another name for him. He calls him Misokalos, ‘the hater of good’. This serpentine, seductive, sadistic agent, whose enterprise Scripture traces from the tripping up of Eve through the trials of Job to the tempting of Christ in the desert, was furious to see a young man like Antony live such a radiant Christian life, and thriving on it. He put spanners in the works, proceeding in three stages. It will be profitable to say a few words about each, for these age-old integrity-defying tricks are still in use. We may encounter them in our lives, so do well to be prepared.
What the devil does first is to sweeten retrospect. He fosters nostalgia for things left behind. He ‘whispered’ to Antony, says Athanasius. It is a telling choice of word, for at this stage all seems confidential. He ‘whispered to him remembrance of his wealth, care for his sister, claims of kindred, love of money, love of glory, the pleasures of the table and other relaxations of life.’ Antony was stirred in his appetite and in conscience. Living now on beans he remembered the fat food he used to like and thought, ‘Surely one can pray and enjoy oneself a little?’ Then he thought of his sister, an orphan like himself, of old ailing uncles, and wondered: ‘Have I the right to adopt this form of life when other people love me, and may need me?’ Such questions are legitimate, at times necessary. The trouble is, we often use them as excuses for sluggishness. Instead of rising up to follow a call, we say, ‘Mañana, … perhaps.’ Meanwhile time passes, grace is lost.
Antony saw through this. He yielded neither to sentimentality nor to self-pity. So the devil proceeded to stage two. ‘He armed himself with the weapons of the navel’, we read, ‘the arrows he prefers to hurl against the young.’ The stratagems explain the riddle. The devil hurled foul thoughts at Antony, ‘raised up pleasurable desires in him’, prompted lustful dreams. The navel, to the ancients, was the seat of carnal passion. What Antony experienced was relentless sexual temptation. Man’s sexual self is part of his iconic nature. It belongs to the mystery of our being made in the image of God, and is called to be sanctified. The trauma we call ‘the fall’ has left us wounded, however, and nowhere more than in this intimate aspect of our lives, so difficult, and so embarrassing, to talk about.
Sexual temptations have many dimensions. They may point to affective needs that must be owned and channelled. It is perilous just to try to suppress them. What they call for is conversion — and illumination. Let us be aware, though, that the hater-of-good will exploit our fragilities, and tangle loose threads in our navel-region. The remedy is transparency, a will to let disorder be ordered, and recourse to grace. Of course, patience is called for. In Antony’s case, the devil kicked up ‘a dust-cloud of thoughts to prevent him from making right choices.’ Antony held on to his resolve and endured. He waited for the dust to settle. Thereby he gave the enemy no leeway.
Such fortitude induced the devil to embark on the third, most sensational stage of his campaign. He unleashed on Antony a host of demons that attacked him in mind and body. Once he was so badly bruised that his friends had to bring him back into the village on a stretcher. This aspect of his life has variously attracted and repelled readers. Some, like the Protestant scholar Adolf von Harnack, considered it a descent into heathendom: he called Athanasius’s biography ‘the most disastrous book ever written’. Others were titillated. ‘The Temptations of St Antony’ is a weird genre in medieval art. What are we to make of them?
The hermeneutic key is found towards the end of the text, when Antony, a radiant old man, tells his friends with authority that the devil is in fact nothing but ‘a bound sparrow’, powerless against Christ’s grace. If Athanasius says much about particular temptations, it is by way of encouragement to us, his readers. He basically tells us: ‘Whatever your inner trial or terror, Antony has been through it. He turned out well. So can you. In Christ’s name: Courage!’
That is a true and evangelical message, one we all need to hear.
The Temptations of St Antony were to become a topos in painting. Here is a sketch, now in the Asmolean Museum, for the famous canvas by Pieter Bruegel the elder dated to ca. 1556. This motif made a great impression on Flaubert, inspiring him to write his hallucinatory, very long poem on this topic.