When I was a teenage anarchist and slightly beyond, friends and I would compete in self-denial and the austerities. I was not particularly good at this and am even worse at it now—at bottom, I’m a finicky suburban-domesticated person who likes dark bars and nice hotel rooms over hardship and washing my armpits in gas station toilets—but I participated nonetheless, because it felt transgressive. My straight-edge friend Doug refused to buy food when we would go out, only eating from Dumpsters and making a kind of Tomato soup with hot water and ketchup when we ate late at Waffle House. I remember meeting a strange German or Dutch guy at a squat outside of Barcelona, he was so weirdly ascetic that he wouldn’t even eat from dumpsters—he would only eat from the compost bin, the vegetable scraps and eggshells of the dumpstered food. When the ancient plumbing broke, he was the first to volunteer to get down to his neck in the muck and raw sewage. Sometimes we had stay awake competitions. Once Doug and Matt dove into a murky hole in an abandoned dog food factory and came up inside the rainwater of an old silo. We had hitchhiking competitions and "homeless nights" where we wandered the city and eventually slept out under the concrete pylon eaves of rumbling bridges, kunk-kunk-klunk-kunk, all night long. Yes, in this lovely new era, it is obligatory to note that we were doing privileged suburban-white-male stuff, running away from our comfortable homes to sleep under bridges (which was considered fun and worthwhile at the time) and it is now offensive and shitty.
Yeah, OK, fine. Its true. It was dumb. But also, go fuck yourself.
Danger and fun and struggle were often followed by moments of luminous brilliance and reward. The color of the sky after driving through a Kentucky summer thunderstorm. Finding a secret apartment complex hot tub after a sweaty night of wandering. A dumpster full of discarded beer and wine. Getting picked up hitchhiking after waiting all day in the hot sun. These things taught me the strange symmetry of the universe, and that if you go in pure of heart, the universe provides. This could be called God or divine law or luck or many things.
In recent years, I go through phases where I devour books about the early Christians and monks and other ascetics—how similar they seem to our communal-minded anarchist milieu! With our dirty collective houses and our burning desire to go against the world and lie in the gutters and become nothing and no one. The idea—and i find it more true today than ever—was that at the bottom, once you shed off the layers of societal accumulation, life is more pure, real, authentic, alive-feeling. People have been doing this for thousands of years, from the Buddha leaving his family to the first anchorites and monks in the Egyptian desert in the second century. This was also the message from so much of the anarchist propaganda of my young adulthood.
Now, I am a modern secular, comfortable cynic, and possess almost none of the ardour that inflames political zealots or hermits or devoted austeres or wanderers, but I still find the life alluring and hypnotic. People run off and give up their indoor lives to hike the Appalachian trail for three months—alluring, but not necessarily for me. I like my vape, I like my bed, I love my bar.
After his parents died, Saint Anthony sold all his belongings. He heard a voice and it said take no thought of the morrow. He worked manual labor to be closer to life and tried to learn what he could from people and emulate their good qualities. According to his biographer Athanasius, everyone loved Saint Anthony—he was the first monk.
Of course, renouncing the world is never easy. Athanasius says that Anthony began thinking about his possessions, his sister's well being, his family's status. The devil "tried to awaken in him a desire for material things or for the fleeting honors of this world, for the pleasures of different kinds of food and all other attractions which belong to a life of indulgence. He also reminded Anthony of how difficult it is to attain the goal of virtue and the very hard work involved in achieving it. He also reminded him of the weakness of the body and the length of time needed. In short, he created the greatest confusion in his thoughts, hoping to call him back from his proper intention."
When the devil failed at this, he used the tactic he often uses against inflamed young people: sex dreams.
Anthony triumphed and resolved to harden himself, testing with sleeplessness, hunger, and pain. He slept on the bare earth. His mantra was from Corinthians: "When I am weak, I am stronger."
Much like the present-day Bikram yoga people, he believed wearing down the body by trials could revive the mind.
"Forgetting the past and growing strong in the future."
At this point, Anthony had been living near home, but he decided to emulate the prophet Elijah and move into the Tombs. The devil beat Anthony to the point of death and the people nearby prepared his funeral rites. But he recovered and slipped away from them in the night.
In Life of Anthony, demons are those who failed through strength of will. There is much emphasis on staying strong, keeping the soul pure, and working through adversity in order to get to eternal life, which seems to be posthumous fame. Life is struggle, do your work, fulfill your purpose, start every day as if it was your last, and struggle with demons that tell you to quit and what you’re doing is completely pointless.
The Life of St Anthony is pocked through with weird encounters with demons and satan—giant silver pieces tempt Anthony, as well as gold littered everywhere around him, which he struggles not to pick up. Satan offers him anything he wants. Impure thoughts come in dream. He clings onto his commitment to the narrow path, away from family, money, success and desire. A demon even comes and asks him for mercy. The message of St. Anthony—like that of some evangelical christian, but also that of someone trying to get clean and simplify—is that the world is beset with temptations and unscrupulous individuals and connections and career opportunities must be avoided at all cost.
Saint Anthony moved further deeper into the desert. Finding a mountain with some water and setting up a garden so people wouldn’t have to bring him food. His message was simple: have faith, pray, give up pride, don’t eat too much, meditate on the scriptures and bear in mind words from the Bible like "let not the sun set upon your anger" and "examine yourselves and test yourselves." His other system was about radical honesty: if you watch your behavior and report your bad behavior to your peers, shame will keep you in check. This is the basis of communal life, and Protestant America, and also Maoist-Marxist self-criticism and “check your privilege” culture.
Soon people came asking to be healed, which annoyed Anthony since he was trying to get away from human beings. Human beings were (and are) disgusting. He had the powers of foresight. Prophecy. Knew when people were going to die and when their souls were in trouble.
Anthony had faith and was often attacked by demons but won. According to Athanasius he was also cheerful and his countenance showed his inner light, neither prideful about victories nor destroyed by failures. "He always maintained the same expression in good times and in bad."
Blank facial expression.
He didn’t go in for any of the many heretical sects wandering around at the time: The Manicheans or Arians, the Melitians. The author Athanasius was engaged in a bitter war against Arianism so there has been some speculation that Life of Saint Anthony had been nothing but anti-Arian propaganda.