By Fr. George Dorbarakis
Saint Athanasios the Great, that ecumenical Father and Teacher of our Church, who also wrote the Life of Saint Anthony — in reality an extended letter — says that it is “great profit for a person even to remember Anthony alone.” Saint Augustine, that great Saint of the Church, made the definitive decision to convert to the Christian faith and to be baptized, under the guidance of course of the Bishop of Milan, Saint Ambrose, when he studied the Life of Saint Anthony. The great ascetic of the Gerontikon, who asked God to reveal to him all the great saints of his time, saw his request fulfilled — except for Anthony. And when he asked the Lord why this had happened, he received the answer: “Anthony is very close to Me, and you cannot see him.” Therefore, when we speak about Saint Anthony, we are not speaking of a simple saint of the Church. His spiritual stature is exceedingly great, reaching even to those “borders” of the Trinitarian Godhead.
The Hymnography of our Church compares him to the Prophet Elijah and to Saint John the Baptist. Whatever Saint Anthony himself saw as a way of life in the earlier ascetic Saint Paul of Thebes (“a companion of Paul the Theban”), the same he struggled to practice. Saint Paul the Theban was a new Prophet Elijah and a new John the Forerunner; likewise also Saint Anthony. As his Apolytikion says: “Imitating the zealous Elijah in your ways, and following the straight paths of the Baptist, O Father Anthony.” Furthermore, the Church also likens him to Moses, calling him a “new Moses,” because “in the desert you set up the trophy against enemies and adversaries, leading the people.” It is therefore no surprise at the titles our Church bestows on him through her hymns: “Father of Fathers,” “luminary of luminaries,” “the glory of the inhabited world,” “an angel on earth and a man of God in heaven.”
The Holy Hymnographer, making — on the basis of the Saint’s life and with divine illumination — a spiritual “radiograph” of Anthony, focuses on his heart: it was a blazing furnace of love and eros, whose flame continually rose to the utmost of what can be desired, to the highest summit of love — God Himself. “Divinely-inspired eros set you aflame and gave wings to your soul to desire the true summit of love” (that is, God Himself). This love was the driving force that enabled him to break free from all the attractions of this deceitful present world and then, through intense asceticism and stillness, to grow in this love of God, to be fully united with Him, and to be filled with all the good things that God knows how to give — not something of Himself, but His very Self. “Then you despised flesh and blood and fled the world, being united to Him through great asceticism and stillness; therefore you were filled, as you sought, with the good things from above, and you shone like a star, illuminating our souls, O Anthony.”
With these words, the Hymnographer also gives an answer to a question that may arise for us today: what was it that moved God to give so much grace to Anthony? Does God show favoritism? Did He love Anthony more than He loves us or people of other times? The answer is no. God loves all equally. “God shows no partiality.” The love He had for Anthony He also has for us and for all people. What, then, was Anthony’s “secret”? “As you sought,” notes the Hymnographer. The answer lies in this small phrase. Saint Anthony was set ablaze by the grace of God and became entirely fire because he himself sought God. And here lies our own deficiency. We do not seek God — or if we do seek Him, we do so in a very anemic way. God offers Himself to a person in proportion to that person’s desire. Great is the seeking? Great will be the offering. Small is the seeking? Small will be the offering. In other words, we too could have become saints of the stature of Saint Anthony. But do we place our heart and disposition before God in an absolute way, without prerequisites, as Saint Anthony did? The responsibility for the little — or even negligible — grace of God within us must be sought in ourselves.”
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
