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Marten de Vos, The Temptation of St. Antony Early Monks, Prayer, and the Devil J. Kevin Coyle It was perhaps inevitable that, in these final years leading to a new millennium, preoccupation with apocalyptic themes should be on the rise, above all through that peculiarly North American phenomenon, televangelism. Much of the televised (and written) fundamentalist Christian message is concerned with signs of the imminent end of the world, special attention being allotted to harbingers of the impending—or already operational—reign of the Antichrist. One notes that concern with the activities of the latter is frequently expressed in terms of diabolic or demonic activity. Satan, the message often goes, is alive and well and, for now at least, he is winning.
Such currents started me wondering about early Christian traditions respecting what Jeffrey Burton Russell and others loosely refer to as ‘diabology’. I was drawn in particular to a series of questions he and others have touched on, but not fully dealt with: what did the idea of ‘Satan’ conjure for early Christians? And, when they prayed for protection against him, for instance in rituals of pre-baptismal exorcism, what did they think they were doing? How were such prayers thought to bring about their intended objective? And, most interestingly from a historical-critical perspective, what trajectories does the theme of prayer as protection against the devil follow in the course of its development in early Christianity?
At this point I invoke the usual disclaimers about brevity of space and vastness of subject, as I attempt to justify the much narrower—but certainly connected—scope of the present discourse: the ascetical literature of monastic Egypt. Since scouting even that less-extended terrain is a task too ambitious for a single article, I will construct this primarily around the Life of Antony, surely the archetype in terms of both chronology and model for much of the hagiography that followed it.
While reconnoitring the topic I was surprised at the absence of any clearly defined ‘diabology’ in early Christianity, especially if those are correct who maintain that early Christians were preoccupied with the devil; and to learn that little in modern times has been written on the origins of ‘prayer and the devil’, indicating—to me at least—that more has been assumed than substantiated in this regard. Therefore, although I find no difficulty in agreeing with Dwayne Carpenter’s assertion that ‘the Fathers utilized certain standardized concepts regarding the origin of the Devil’, I believe that more caution is called for with another remark by the same author, to the effect that ‘the Desert Fathers’ treatment of the Devil is based upon a theological foundation constructed by earlier apologists and theologians. Thus, it was unnecessary for the Desert Fathers to compose elaborate treatises detailing the origin of the Devil, since much of the work had already been assumed by earlier writers’.
There may be alternative reasons which precluded elaborate theological development of this subject (and of many others) in the early monastic literature. What strikes even the casual reader of a work like the Life of Antony is that the devil and the demons are so much a part of that world, needing as little explanation for their existence to the intended audiences as, say, the automobile does to us.
It is generally agreed that the Greek Life of Antony was composed by Athanasius of Alexandria in or about the year 357, that is, shortly after the death of Antony himself; and that one of the author’s intentions was to encourage the ascetical life while warning about its obstacles. Chief among these obstacles is the devil himself, present already in the earliest chapters of the work, even though Antony’s first open encounter with diabolic forces takes place in chapter five, hard on the heels of his decision to live the ascetical life to the full:
The devil, however, being envious and opposed to the good. attempted to use against him the methods in which he is skilled. When, however, the adversary saw that he was powerless against Antony’s resolution—that, instead, it was he who was being defeated...and that he was not succeeding because of Antony’s unceasing prayers, he placed his confidence in the weapon ‘in the belly’s navel’ [LXX Job 40:11]...He troubled him by night and disquieted him by day so that even onlookers noticed the struggle taking place between the two. He presented lewd thoughts; Antony turned them aside by his prayers. He aroused carnal feelings; but Antony...fortified his body by faith, prayers, and fasting. The despicable devil even dared to take on the appearance of a woman...but [Antony] extinguished the burning coal of that illusion by meditating on Christ.
To this recitation, the seventh chapter of the Life adds: ‘This comprised Antony’s first victory over the devil’. The word athlon suggests that the monk is viewed here as an athlete of God, locked in a struggle which will last all his life.
But why was Antony attacked in this head-on fashion at all? The devil was ‘envious and opposed to the good’ (misokalos, a label that reappears in chapter nine and is common enough in later literature of this type); this means, it seems, that the hero is perceived to be already well on the inside track to holiness, is already living according to the classic spiritual rule of love of God and love of neighbour, buttressed by prayer (especially the scriptures), work, and ascetical practices. And then, as Louis Bouyer has remarked, such attacks do not come to the beginner in the spiritual life, but are a sign that one has graduated from the ‘novitiate’.
While not confined to Christianity (demons appear, for instance, in Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius of Tyana), the type of encounter related in chapter five of the Life of Antony was to become a classic feature of early Christian writings that had a bearing on Egyptian monasticism. In the above passage—the first recorded narrative on ‘the monk and the devil’ theme—aspects emerge that will serve as typical topoi in later writings of the genre. The first of these is that in the Life of Antony, ‘adversary’ (echthros) is a common appellation for Satan, as indeed it is in this literature as a whole. Probably inspired by New Testament antecedents (notably Matthew 13:24 and Luke 10:19), the adversary is Satan, though sometimes the appellation applies as well to demons, here understood as the devil’s underlings. Secondly, the means whereby Antony resists the adversary’s attacks are fairly consistent, being primarily ‘unceasing prayers’, or ‘prayers’, or ‘faith, prayers, and fasting’, or finally, ‘meditating on Christ’. We will be returning to this idea.
A third noteworthy aspect of this passage is its short citation from the Book of Job, to which there are also references in chapters 29, 44, 51, 52, and 82, while the description of the devil in chapter 24—eyes like the morning star, fire from his mouth, smoke from his nose, and so on—unquestionably relies on Job 41. In one sense these references are surprising, while in another they are not. The researcher might be forgiven for expecting that, given the similar circumstances of Jesus’ temptations by Satan, and in the desert at that, the Matthaean pericope (4:1–11) or its Synoptic parallels (Mk. 1:12–13 and Lk. 4:1–10) would do explicit service as the biblical point of reference here, or at least would appear frequently in the literature as a whole. Yet references to it in the Life of Antony, while not totally absent, are scarcely abundant: there is but a single direct quotation from the Matthaean pericope (4:10) in chapter thirty-seven. Despite that single explicit reference, it is Bouyer’s belief that the account of Jesus’ conflict with Satan in the desert forms the context of the encounter narrated in chapters 9–10 of Antony’s Life—an assertion which has to be weighed alongside the fact that an explicit reference to the biblical account as a whole first appears only in the appendix to a Syriac collection of Sayings of the Desert Fathers (perhaps first compiled in the fifth century), where we read:
Our Lord treated with contempt three kinds of passions, wherein are included and contained all the various classes of passions; and these are the love of the belly, the love of money, and vainglory. By means of these the Calumniator fought against our Redeemer, who through his steadfastness in the desert, and silent contemplation, and fasting, and prayer, overcame Satan. Therefore, to all the monks who travel in his footsteps, and who by means of fasting, and prayer, and silent contemplation put away all thought of sin, and who perform their tasks with righteousness, our Lord gives power to conquer by his strength, and overcomes the demons who are their enemies.
Similarly, the Life of Antony makes no reference to the seventh petition of the Lord’s Prayer, which in Matthew’s version (6:13) reads: ‘Deliver us from evil’, or ‘from the Evil One’. This petition seems to have held no place at all in early monastic literature, even though it receives commentary in third-century treatises like Origen’s De oratione (in 233 or 234) and Cyprian’s De dominica oratione (250). However, those early commentators avoid addressing exactly what God is to deliver the petitioner from, or how one will be delivered: the focus is on why one needs deliverance in the first place, that is, on the harm the Evil One has done or may do.
It is not Jesus, then, but Job who is—and who will long remain—the favoured exemplar of the righteous person subjected to temptations or other sufferings arising from demonic intervention. If the references to him in the Life of Antony are part of a resurgence of interest, shared by Athanasius, in this biblical figure during the fourth century, it cannot have escaped its author’s notice that Job’s sufferings were at least indirectly due to Satan’s intervention, and that Job sought comfort (if not release) from those Satan-inspired sufferings in his prayer to God (for example at 1:21; 42:1–6). This perception has become explicit by the time of Jerome’s Life of Hilarion of Gaza (written in 390 or 391): ‘The example he put forward in this matter was that before [the devil] was allowed to tempt the blessed Job, he first had to destroy all his [Job’s] possessions’.
After the first encounter with the devil in chapter five, the Life of Antony eventually begins what is arguably the best known section of the work, and surely the most dramatic:
Antony went out to the tombs that were some distance from the village. After asking an acquaintance to bring him bread now and again, he entered one of the tombs and, when the acquaintance had closed the door on him, remained inside alone. Now, the adversary could not endure this. Fearing that in a short time Antony would fill the desert with his asceticism, he came one night with a crowd of demons and so cut him with whip-blows that he lay on the ground speechless from the intense pain.
Encroaching onto enemy territory, Antony has gone to the tombs, the abode of the dead—and of evil spirits. The devil’s increasing desperation, born of the fear that ‘Antony would fill the desert with his asceticism’, results in his return ‘with a crowd of demons’, and in further resort to physical violence. Antony’s acquaintance discovers him next day, and brings him to the village church. When Antony begins to rally, he asks to be carried back to the tomb, where he is shut in once again:
Because of the blows, he was unable to stand, but he prayed as he lay there...But the adversary [echthros], hater of good [misokalos], marvelled that he possessed the courage to come back...Then [Antony] prayed a Psalm: ‘Though they set up their camps against me, my heart will not fear’ (LXX Ps. 26:3).
Given the citation which immediately follows it, there seems little reason to interpret the verb epsallen here other than literally as ‘prayed (or sang) a Psalm’, which has repercussions for the task of working out what ‘prayer against the devil’ may mean in this context. Peter Resch has correctly pointed out that:
in studying prayer among the ancients we run headlong into a difficulty. When they speak of oratio, what precise meaning are we to give to this term: vocal prayer, meditation, union with God, mystical prayer? They have furnished no definition; the context alone can reveal it to us, and even then less than smoothly.
We shall need to keep these words in mind as we go on.
Moving now more deeply into the ninth chapter of Antony’s Life, we come upon this:
During the night, then, the demons made such a racket that the whole place seemed to shake to its foundations. They appeared to break through the room’s four walls, coming in the shape of beasts and reptiles. Suddenly the place had become filled with the forms of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves, each of them behaving in a natural way. The lion roared, ready to attack; the bull appeared to charge with its horns; the serpent kept writhing, though it never reached him; and the wolf kept checking itself each time it rushed him. The noises of all the apparitions together in the same place were terrible, and their outbursts of fury were ferocious.
From an initial level of ‘carnal’ temptations and ‘lewd thoughts’ in chapter five, and thence to the physical attacks recorded earlier in chapter nine, the demonic forces have escalated to psychological assaults in the form of a terrible light and sound show. But, while the exegesis of these apparitions would be fascinating, they will not detain us here. Suffice it to say that Antony emerges from it all victorious, and that the encounter ends on a positive note. The roof opens, a ray of light descends, the demons disappear, and Antony’s bodily pain ceases ‘at once’. In a vignette which hints that he had not felt as supremely confident about the outcome of his ordeal as the biographer would have the reader believe, Antony asks the vision, ‘Where were you? Why did you not appear at the start to end my pains?’ And a voice tells him, ‘I was here, watching your struggle’. Then the voice makes a promise: ‘Because you were steadfast and did not give in, I will always be your helper, and I will make your name known everywhere’. The ultimate test for verifying ‘steadfastness’ lies, it would appear, in a successful confrontation with demonic forces. This ties in with the notion of ‘graduation from novitiate’ mentioned earlier.
Antony’s subsequent encounters with those forces all take place in the desert, towards which he has been steadily directing his steps, and where it is now his intention to live, even though (his biographer observes) this was ‘not yet the customary practice’. It is revealing that, when Antony ends up in an abandoned desert fort, the spirits who were thought to inhabit all such places (the biographer says they were ‘demons’) challenge him to ‘be gone from our dwelling’, and ask him, ‘what have you to do with the desert?’. The notion that the devil and demons are habitually drawn to both the desert and deserted places is far more ancient than the beginnings of Christian monasticism (as can be seen from Lev. 16:10, Is. 34:14 and Mt. 12:43). But it is a commonplace, too, that one of the objectives motivating Christians, from the time of Antony onwards, to go and live in the desert, was the prospect of battling evil spirits on their home turf. This much is reflected in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ temptations in the desert. The idea itself will not detain us here—we are more interested in the nature of the weapons than in the course of the battle—but it is interesting to speculate on the rewards which might await the explorer of possible parallels between the various versions of ‘the monk and the devil’ accounts and the Synoptic model of Jesus’ confrontations with Satan (if not with temptation). The Synoptic pericopes might also supply the model for the theme of prayer as a rebuff to demonic temptation in monastic literature.
The idea of living out Christian asceticism in the desert may not have originated with Antony, but his example, and above all his Life, must have been major factors in its spread. According to their biographies, anchorites—those living their asceticism mainly in solitude, as Antony himself was wont to do—are the preferred targets of demonic attacks. The Lives of anchorites abound with such accounts, much more than do those of cenobitic monks, setting a trend that will continue into the fifth century. Hilarion, for instance, is portrayed by Jerome as relishing the prospect, arising from the fact that he finds himself alone in the desert, of having to contend with many demons. This pattern is reflected in a Sahidic life of Pachomius, which has the latter engage in open combat with demons only during his solitary period. Indeed, if we may rely on Resch, ‘nowhere, perhaps, in the lives of Pachomius is the influence of the Life of Antony as evident as in the description of his temptations’.
Chapters 16 to 43 of the Life of Antony consist of a long discourse to monks. Of these, all but the first five have to do entirely with the devil and demons—the very first presentation of its kind in extant Christian literature. The discourse first addresses the necessity of discerning good from bad spirits. ‘We have terrible enemies [echthrous], filled with cunning’, declares Antony. ‘These are the bad demons [ponerous daimonas], and we must struggle against them.’ Antony then describes the methods of the latter for derailing the unwary monk from his vocational path. Primarily, their weapons are ‘illusions’ (phantasiai) and ‘impure thoughts’ . Against these, he says, the sign of the Cross works particularly well, as (no doubt recalling Mk. 16:17 and Acts 16:18 and 19:13) does invoking the name of Christ—in one instance, while blowing on the demon, an act which figures in ancient baptismal rites. Prayer and fasting also work, of course (as suggested by some readings of Mt. 17:21), but they are judged useless without faith.
For the researcher, a frustrating aspect of all this is that there is no effort to explain why the sign of the Cross, the name of Christ, or prayer in general, are considered effective items of anti-demonic weaponry. One has to conjecture—always a dangerous exercise. Do we have here a simple influence of pre-Christian (perhaps Egyptian) religiosity? Or are more genuinely Christian institutions at work? There is no statement sufficiently articulate to help out on this.
It remains that in the Life of Antony prayer is only one piece of ordnance for fighting demons: ‘the great weapon against them’, it says, ‘is a virtuous life and confidence in God’. Nevertheless, while it certainly requires that context for effectiveness, prayer is never excluded, even if it goes mostly unmentioned and is nearly always left imprecise. Emile Amelineau has argued that it was mentioned so seldom because it was so fundamental to the monk’s life; in other words, it was not made explicit because it could be taken for granted. Thus, in chapter 48 of his Life, those who approach Antony for release from evil spirits are simply told to pray—a piece of advice which proves highly effective. And it is only natural that prayer would be seen to constitute an anti-demonic device, especially where the view prevailed that a prime objective of demonic harassment was deterrence of the intended victim from prayer.
The precise nature of the prayer invoked against demons remains, then, generally unspecified, here and throughout Egyptian monastic literature. This is common to early Christian writing in general, as in a passage of the Syriac Sayings of the Desert Fathers, where a demon relates to Pachomius: ‘A certain monk, against whom I am waging war, is very intractable, and whenever I come near him to sow bad thoughts in him, he turns to prayer; and I...have to leave his presence’. The complaint epitomises the view of the devil and his associates in the Sayings (in whatever version): they are looked upon more with contempt, even pity, perhaps annoyance, but not with fear.
They used to say of a certain old man that, whenever he sat in his cell engaged in the struggle, he saw demons face to face, but treated them contemptuously, showing them scorn by [the way he engaged in] the contest. When Satan saw that he was losing to the old man, he appeared to him in human form, and said to him, ‘I am Christ’. The old man, on seeing him, winked and [in this way] mocked him. Satan said, ‘Why are you winking? I am Christ, I tell you!’ And the old man answered, ‘I don’t wish to see Christ here’. When Satan heard that, he fled, and was seen no more.
If prayers against evil spirits as a rule go undescribed, we remember that an early chapter of the Life of Antony referred to praying the Psalms. This is the form that prayer against the demons takes in chapters 39 and 40. It would seem, in fact, that (at least in the present context) the Psalms are interchangeable with ‘prayer’. Antony himself mentions only the Psalms as a specific example of prayer against evil spirits, in the two chapters of his Life just mentioned. In his instructions on how monks are to live (chapter 55) he again seems to identify the two—if the verb psallein is to be taken here in so literal a sense. But why the Psalms are deemed so effective, Antony does not report. It is left to his biographer Athanasius, when introducing his Commentary on the Psalms, to essay an explanation:
Since David was a prophet, having his inner eyes open, and knowing that the evil spirits rejoice over human beings who fall, but are saddened to see those who after falling return to the right path, he composed these prayers against them in a wholly spiritual sense, such that the corporeal enemies [he speaks of] metaphorically signify the evil spirits...Myriad times David says, ‘May all my enemies be confounded and covered in shame, but may I not be confounded’. Let us not believe that the prophets and friends of God spoke these words with any meaning other than the one I have just explained. This is how the attentive person is to understand the prophet when he utters imprecations, passing from corporeal enemies to spiritual ones.
If, as noted at its beginning, the scope of this essay had to be progressively narrowed, so too did the assumptions I brought to it. Despite Carpenter’s assertion, earliest Christianity offers no coherent theology of the devil. Doubtless this is due in part to the variety and imprecise chronology of works like those referred to here; but it must also be because the practice of asceticism would have needed to reach a certain pitch before a real ‘diabology’ could be attempted. Basil Studer has observed that it was in the ascetico-moral field that ancient Christian demonology found its broadest scope. It should therefore come as no surprise that Evagrius Ponticus would be the first, late in the fourth century—but doubtless influenced by earlier writings, the Life of Antony among them—to attempt to speculate on the devil and demons in a systematic way. Particularly in his Centuries (or Gnostica), Evagrius envisions the ascetical life as a single uninterrupted battle with demons; but the demons with whom the righteous struggle have become to some extent interiorised. They are directly responsible for disturbing memories and unsettling (or ‘bad’) thoughts (logismoi), with which, however, they are not to be completely identified. In time, the most subtle and threatening temptation to which the desert monk could be subjected would be ‘that of akedeia, i.e. dissuading the monk from remaining in the desert’.
Palladius, who identifies himself as a disciple of Evagrius, reflects his master’s influence, particularly in regard to demonology. Evagrius’ authority on this point is even more noticeable in Cassian’s Conferences (written between 420 and 430), where a developed demonology can also be found. But in these writings the prime preoccupation is with what demons are and how they attack us, rather than how we repel them. The demonology developed by Evagrius, Palladius and Cassian was to become a classic, at least in Christian ascetical literature, and so was their hierarchy of concerns, among which the question of how prayer works effectively to repel the forces of evil does not seem to be foremost. But that all comes later than the early monastic literature of Egypt, whose true context, far from being an already existing theology, is made up of ascetical objectives and scriptural reflection. As for Antony himself, Francois Vandenbroucke has pointed out that ‘we discover in this Vita a demonology few of whose traits contribute to theology…But it reveals a very exact conception of the demon’s place in the spiritual life’.
Now, besides taking that particular scriptural and ascetical context into account, the person who aspires to further research in this direction needs to deal with the dearth of explicit references to the theme of prayer as a defensive weapon, and to deal with even less in the way of specific examples of prayers against attacks by demonic forces. As for the influence of scripture, which offers specific examples in Jesus’ own confrontation with Satan in the desert (or on other occasions) and in his instruction to pray for delivery from evil (or ‘the Evil One’), the preponderant question becomes: Why, then, is the exemplar of the desert monks not Jesus, but Job? The possible role of anti-Arian concerns cannot be excluded. Despite the disclaimer of Hebrews 4:15, there might have been a reluctance even to suggest that Jesus had endured temptation, no matter the outcome. In any event, Athanasius’ own theological agenda is doubtless involved : we remember that in chapter 69 of the Life Antony goes to Alexandria with the express purpose of denouncing Arianism.
In theological terms, apart from scripture, the idea of prayer as a defence against attacks of the devil has already made its appearance with Origen, for whom the struggle with diabolic forces is a keynote of the Christian life. But this theme, to which he gives some attention, certainly does not originate with him. We should not fear the devil, says Hermas, a century earlier, but the devil’s works. ‘We pray to Christ’, says Justin around the same time, ‘in order to guard us "from strangers", which is to say, from evil and false spirits’. He says this in his Dialogue with Trypho, a Jew. But, if demons are also mentioned in his Apologies, addressed to pagans, Satan himself is almost totally absent from them, because classical mythology provides no equivalent to a ‘leader of demons’ as a counterbalance for the leader of the gods. Even before Justin, of course, we have ample scriptural references like the Johannine allusions to the ‘prince of this world’ (for example Jn. 12:31) and that of Ephesians to ‘the princes of the power of the air’ (2:2; see 6:12), as well as some evidence in ritualised exorcisms associated with baptism. But the beginnings of a true ‘theology of demons’ have to wait until the end of the fourth century.
How correct then is it to say that the little in the Life of Antony and other related biographies which explicitly prescribes prayer as a weapon against the devil and demons is due to the climate in which unceasing prayer is to be simply assumed? For, by the time we reach the Greek Sayings of the Desert Fathers in the fifth century, the assumption has been made explicit, as in this saying attributed to Agathon: ‘No other labour can be compared to praying to God. For when a person wishes to pray, the adversaries [echthroi] rush to distract, for they are aware that nothing slows them down except prayer to God’.
But in general the Sayings show no great concern with neutralising the power of the devil, who is not considered capable of inflicting real harm, nor with getting rid of demons, who are portrayed as targets for the monks’ mockery, rather than as sources for their fear. In this respect, at least, we are a long way from the Life of Antony and, on another temporal plane, from the outlook of apocalyptic enthusiasts of the late twentieth century.
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