Narrating ‘Home’ in Early Christian Biography: Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Its Literary Predecessors

Abstract

In this paper, I provide a close examination of early Christian biographical sources through the heuristic lens of “home studies”, tracing a thread from the New Testament Gospels to martyrdom texts, the apocryphal Acts literature, Eusebius’ biography of Origen in his Church History, and finally, Athanasius’ Life of Antony. I demonstrate that the lens of home allows us to see that in each of these discrete groups of texts, Christ’s call to discipleship is understood to redefine and reconstitute the meaning of home and relatedly, family: to be “home” required a great deal of displacement and mobility as one forsook one’s biological family and household for the sake of obedience to the call of Christ. I argue that three topics, typically examined separately, are fruitfully brought together through the lens of home: (1) the shaping of ancient Christian identity formation, as expressed by the characters’ use of familial language to identify other members of the early Christian movement; (2) the mobile nature of the person who joins the movement, providing insights about the mobility and travel of many of its members; and (3) ancient Christian eschatological thought concerning the final dwelling of Christ-believers in some form of otherworldly home after death.

1. Introduction

In this paper, I make a first attempt at introducing the lens resulting from “home studies”, a burgeoning new interdisciplinary field, to the study of Christianity in Late Antiquity.1 As the title indicates, I will work specifically with key passages from a text that is widely understood as the first Christian biography proper, namely, Athanasius of Alexandria’s Life of Antony (ca. 360 CE). In what follows, I first introduce the field of home studies and what I understand as its potential for the study of late antique Christian texts. Next, given that Athanasius was influenced by a series of prior Christian biography-like texts as he wrote Antony’s life, I will provide a brief account of the theme of “home” within a representative selection of these sources. Finally, I will turn to a close analysis of the relatively under-studied Life of Antony itself, a text that invites analysis with the heuristic lens of “home” due to its presentation of the journey of an individual who began life as the child of a “nuclear family” and eventually came to embrace an ascetic life.2

This analysis, with the assistance of questions being asked in “home studies”, allows me to draw out an important thread of Athanasius’ narrative presentation of the life of the Egyptian ascetic figure, Antony. Christ’s call to discipleship is, in this text, understood to redefine and reconstitute the meaning of home and relatedly, family. For Antony and the young ascetics he would come to draw to himself, to be “home” required a great deal of displacement and mobility as one forsook one’s biological family and household for the sake of obedience to the call of Christ.3 To be home in this text is paradoxically to be on the move. That is, early Christian thinking about home, at least as it is presented by Athanasius concerning Antony, required not only a conceptual shift from an earthly to a future heavenly home, a theme that is of course present to some extent in this material, but it also entailed a shift in one’s understanding of one’s family, city, and homeland. In these early Christian biographical narratives, in one final sense, no earthly place is home, but in another, all earthly places are home in light of the central characters’ response to Christ’s call to discipleship. In fact, both senses contribute to the implicit requirement that one abandons one’s home and biological family to become a mobile disciple.

2. Methodology: The Promise of the Field of Home Studies for Late Antique Christian Literature

“Home” is and has always been a fundamental concern for human culture; the concept has bearing on historical and contemporary concerns about belonging, the nation, who is and is not “at home” in a particular place, as well as debates about the legacies of colonization. It is in part due to the study of recent developments in the global situation, shaped as it is by (forced) migration and the various diasporas that have resulted from our colonial and postcolonial heritage that one can now begin to speak of something called “home studies”. So far, the field has developed particularly in the arena of the study of contemporary literature, and it combines the methodological and theoretical insights of postcolonial and colonial studies; migration studies; studies of globalism and biopolitics; gender studies; and refugee studies.4

The literature of early Christianity has much to contribute to the study of the subject of home, and vice versa. In a diverse set of genres, from letters written by figures in exile, to treatises and homilies dedicated to the issue of dealing appropriately with the homeless or the displaced, early Christians reflected constantly upon an ever-adapting notion of home. Like many today, early Christians were faced with the task of negotiating competing “homes”, such as their home within the Christian community vs. their home within Greco-Roman civic society; home in the body vs. the commonly-held belief in a form of postmortem existence; portrayals of home in contexts of stability vs. mobility, in the case of both voluntary (e.g., pilgrimage, spiritual wandering) and involuntary travel (e.g., exile or military service); and for some, domestic and familial duties vs. a home within a monastic community. The final dichotomy is of course of particular interest in the present article.

Furthermore, these late antique Christian materials were all produced in the period in which the Roman Empire flourished, and they therefore reflect a “globalized” society of intra-cultural exchange, due to the empire’s impressive capacity to connect its disparate parts. In other words, the context in which these textual materials were produced parallels the globalized, that is, culturally interconnected, world in which we now find ourselves (Beck 2020; Dark 2006). This material thus offers a rich set of resources for consultation as we consider afresh the meaning of home, and the lens of home is also appropriate for analyzing them for their own sake, as is the goal in this paper. In particular, scholars working within home studies have recently demonstrated that some forms of homemaking can be understood as a way of dealing with the social transformation required by modernization and globalization (Boccagni et al. 2020). The socio-political, and indeed, intellectual context in which my ancient sources were produced was no less impacted by constant social and cultural transformations, nor are ideological discourses concerning belonging absent from these texts. Such parallels invite us to explore how such features were reflected upon in the writings of the ancient human past, and to what ends.

In the present paper, I observe that the application of the lens of home to early and late antique Christian literature allows us to integrate several themes and bodies of literature that tend to be studied in isolation from one another. I argue that the lens of home highlights the relationship between the following three topics: (1) the shaping of ancient Christian identity formation, as expressed by the characters’ use of familial language to identify other members of the early Christian movement; (2) the mobile nature of the person who joins the movement, providing insights about the mobility and travel of many of its members; and (3) ancient Christian eschatological thought concerning the final dwelling of Christ-believers in some form of otherworldly home after death. In what follows, I examine how the themes are combined in my selection of texts.

3. Analytical Discussion of Materials: The Proto-Biographical Sources of Athanasius’ Life of Antony

As I indicated above, Athanasius had Christian life-writing predecessors, who likewise operated with a particular understanding of “home”. David Brakke, one of the scholars who has worked the most on the Life of Antony, and who produced a recent English translation of the text, puts it this way:

To be sure, earlier Christians had written books about important persons in the faith: these include the Gospels about Jesus, popular novels about the journeys of the apostles (the “apocryphal acts”, such as the Acts of Thomas), accounts of the trials and execution of martyrs, and a short biography of the Christian scholar Origen that Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea included in his Ecclesiastical History. Athanasius borrowed from these works and from biographies of “pagan” holy men5 to do something innovative: tell the story of an ordinary Christian who, through the hard work of ascetic discipline, achieves such holiness that he can do miraculous deeds and provide spiritual guidance to others.

(Brakke 2020)

While one might dispute Brakke’s characterization of Antony as “ordinary”, he helpfully points us to the biography-like sources at Athanasius’ disposal as he constructed his lengthy biography of Antony. Brakke claims, somewhat vaguely, that Athanasius “borrowed” from these sources. It is certainly not my aim here to demonstrate Athanasius’ literary dependence on or specific use of any of the sources discussed below, as that would be another task entirely. What I wish to demonstrate, rather, is that there is a consistent understanding and presentation of the notion of home that can be traced through the first-century Gospels, and the subsequent texts that made reference to them, namely, the martyrdom texts, the apocryphal Acts literature, and book 6 of Eusebius’ biographical treatment of Origen in his Ecclesiastical History.6 In the case of each body of texts, I present a selective snapshot of the representative aspects of these texts as they pertain to my focus on early Christian understandings of “home”.

3.1. The New Testament Gospels7

Despite the fact that some New Testament scholars continue to debate the genre of the canonical Gospels, most work with the assumption that these accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings are, in some way or another, participants in the biography genre.8

In a recent treatment of the themes of gender and sexuality in the Gospels and Acts, Amy-Jill Levine has nicely articulated the difficulties presented by the nature of the Gospel materials for answering questions concerning their presentations of gender and sexuality, and for my purposes, the related themes of the nature of the family and what it means to be home. Levine helpfully claims that “Despite distinctions among the Gospels, there is a common baseline” concerning these themes.9 Across all these texts, at the very core of Jesus’ teaching was the notion that one must leave one’s father and mother, wife and children, sisters and brothers, i.e., one’s home and one’s family, for the sake of Christian discipleship.10 A certain degree of mobility is thus built into Christ’s call in this first generation. Jesus himself, after all, was one who from an early age (Luke 2:41–52) was a teacher on the move, with no place to lay his head (Matt 8:20; Luke 9:38), and who claimed the God of Israel as his father (e.g., John 5:17).

A few key passages should suffice to demonstrate this central teaching of Jesus for our purposes.11 See, for example, Luke 14:26, in which Jesus addresses a large crowd that was travelling with him saying, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple”.12 In Luke 18:29–30, the teaching becomes a kind of promise as Jesus responds to Peter’s claim that he and the others present for Jesus’ exchange with a rich young ruler have “left our homes and followed you”. Jesus responds with these words: “Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come, eternal life”.13 In his account, on which Luke’s is based, Mark specifies what they will get back in this age, namely, “houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields, with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:30). While Luke’s generalization about what the follower of Jesus can expect to receive upon following Jesus in this life removes the promise’s (negative) connotation concerning persecution, the saying in Mark presents clearly Levine’s apt characterization of the Jesus’ movement’s approach to family: “For Jesus, familial separation and therefore celibacy lead to reconstituting families on a fictive kinship model… Jesus dismisses the biological family” (Levine 2019, p. 297).

Another Markan passage, along with its synoptic parallels,14 puts an even finer point on the matter in a passage in which Jesus’ biological mother and brothers come to speak to him while he addresses a crowd that has gathered around him. When the crowd tells him that his family are there to speak to him, Jesus says, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” (Mark 3:33), and then he turns to those who have gathered around him, claiming that it is in fact they who are his family, for, “Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:35).

Furthermore, when the Gospels present female characters as followers of Jesus, in one form or another,15 they tend to be depicted either as single or in the process of leaving their husbands. These women too, then, are presented as being on the move, having either left their fathers’ or their husbands’ households. For example, in Matt 20:20, the wife of Zebedee seems to have left her husband as she brings her two sons to Jesus, as does Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward in Luke 8:1–3.16 The Gospel of John also provides examples of this phenomenon. In Jn 19:25, amongst the list of women standing near the cross of Jesus is “Mary, the wife of Clopas”, whose husband is not elsewhere mentioned and is nowhere to be found in this scene. An even more significant example of this pattern is the fact that Mary, the mother of Jesus, is always depicted outside the infancy narratives as unaccompanied by Joseph (e.g., Matt 13:55–56; Mark 6:3; Jn 2:1–12; 19:25).17

Moreover, in a highly relevant passage for our purposes, Mary is commended by Jesus to “the beloved disciple”, i.e., the apostle John, as his mother:

“When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son’. Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother’. And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home”.

(Jn 19:26–27)

This newly constituted family, united by faith in Jesus himself rather than the bonds of kinship, is exemplified by Jesus’ own biological mother, who witnesses the death of her son, and subsequently became a kind of mother to all who would join the movement.

From its earliest decades, then, Christians crafted their own notion of belonging and family, and such traditions were placed, by the first-century Gospel authors, on the lips of Jesus himself in the form of injunctions concerning true discipleship.18 The passages surveyed here were in turn foundational for Christians of the subsequent centuries, as can clearly be seen in the texts to which I now turn.

3.2. Greek Martyrdom Literature

In this section, we will look only at the Greek martyrdom literature that was conceivably known to Athanasius, i.e., that which was produced prior to the 360s.19 This literature is notoriously difficult to date, but since Eusebius seems to be aware of at least the following four traditions, if not the very texts preserved in manuscripts known and identified by scholars, I include the following four texts here20: The Martyrdom of Holy Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonice21; The Martyrdom of the Holy Pionius the Presbyter and his Companions (Rebillard 2017, pp. 52–79); The Martyrdom of Polycarp (Rebillard 2017, pp. 90–105); and The Martyrs of Lyon and Vienne (Rebillard 2017, pp. 150–73). The material can be considered biographical in the sense that it focused on sections of the lives of individual martyrs. While we are not given the entire life stories of these figures, and the works can even begin abruptly in the middle of a trial scene, we are given what the authors considered most notable about these figures’ lives, namely, their obedience to Christ to the point of dying the honorable death of a martyr.

Rather than moving through this literature text by text, we will treat the relevant material thematically, so as to highlight the ways in which the themes identified in the Gospel literature resurface as the authors of this (rather formulaic) material depicted the characters of their narratives as heroically embodying particular aspects of the Gospel’s teachings about discipleship. The authors of the martyrdom narratives in this next section portrayed their heroic protagonists as those who were certainly willing to leave parents, spouses, and children to follow Christ, not simply for another earthly location, as we saw prominently above, but rather for an otherworldly destination. Moreover, like the earliest followers of Christ from the Gospel narratives, they too took on the tradition of a reconstituted family made up of fellow believers in Christ, both on earth and beyond in the afterlife.

In the opening of The Martyrdom of Polycarp, the author makes an explicit connection between “the gospel” and the act of martyrdom committed by Polycarp:

We write to you, brothers, about those who suffered martyrdom and about the blessed Polycarp, who concluded the persecution when he, so to speak, set a seal on it with his own martyrdom. For almost all the events leading up to it occurred so that the Lord might set again for us an example of martyrdom according to the gospel (τὸ κατὰ τὸ εὐαγγέλιον μαρτύριον).

(1.1)22

The author goes on to liken Polycarp to Christ in that both figures waited to be betrayed for the sake of those who might imitate them by choosing to have regard not only for one’s own salvation, but also that of one’s neighbors (1.2).23 It is the neighbor, we should note here, not the martyr’s immediate biological family, whose salvation he is concerned about.

A similar echo of the Gospels’ sentiment concerning the required abandonment of home, biological family, and possessions can be found in Eusebius’ preface to his presentation of The Martyrs of Lyon and Vienne in his Ecclesiastical History. While not part of the original martyrdom text of course, Eusebius’ framing nonetheless expresses the sentiment I wish to highlight throughout this paper: Christian discipleship, for ancient Christian authors, required a redefinition of home via the abandonment of one’s traditional household and family, resulting in the reconstitution of a new family and a new home, which required a good deal of mobility. Eusebius introduces the martyrs in this way:

Others who have written historical narratives would simply have set forth in writing victories in war and trophies won from the enemy, the excellence of generals and the courage of soldiers defiled with blood and numerous murders for the sake of their children, homeland, and other possessions. Instead, our narrative account of the government according to God will inscribe on eternal tablets the most peaceful wars for the peace of the soul and the men who acted courageously in these wars for the sake of truth rather than for their homeland and for the sake of piety rather than for their loved ones…24

Here the martyrs are celebrated specifically for their placing of the truth and piety of the Christian tradition above their homeland and family.

The theme of leaving one’s homeland is central to another of our four martyrdom texts, The Martyrdom of Holy Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonice. All three martyrs named in the title were willing to leave their home in order to follow Christ faithfully in their circumstances. Carpus and Papylus were said to be eager to “be quickly released from the world” (36).25 Agathonice, introduced to the reader as a woman standing in the crowd who “saw the glory of the Lord that Carpus had seen” and who felt compelled to follow suite (42), did so, leaving behind even her own son. With respect to her decision, the crowd becomes involved in the exchange, crying out to her, “Pity your son!” (43). Agathonice responds, claiming that her son has God to pity him, and then asks, “why am I here?”, jumping naked onto the stake at the horror of the crowd for what they deemed to be terrible judgement (44–45).

Another female figure of the martyrdom literature is given similarly striking speech within the narrative of The Martyrdom of the Holy Pionius the Presbyter and his Companions. Sabina, upon reimprisonment, is asked by an onlooker, “Couldn’t you die in your homeland?” to which she responds, “What is my homeland? I am the sister of Pionius” (18:7), presumably indicating that if Pionius’ homeland is otherworldly, so too is her own.26

In The Martyrs of Lyon and Vienne, Sanctus, a deacon from Vienne, is likewise portrayed as refusing to provide his name, race, social standing, or city in the face of great torture at the hands of pagan soldiers, claiming only, “I am a Christian” (20). Sanctus, as so many other martyrs of these accounts, possessed the same longing for his otherworldly home with Christ, and to use the language of the text, he thus received “the crown of immortality” (36; 42).

There are also instances in this literature that the faithful follower of Christ inevitably becomes, like Jesus’ apostles, mobile even as he or she is given new family members and a new home. For example, in The Martyrdom of Polycarp, despite his wishes to remain in the city of Philomelion in Phrygia, Polycarp was forced to withdraw to a small estate outside the city, where he, in the presence of only a few others, did nothing but pray for Christians the world over (5.1–2).27

The theme of a reconstituted family is also prominent in this literature. The account of the martyrdom of Carpus, Papylus, and Agathanice begins with Carpus and Papylus before the proconsul at Pergamum. In response to the proconsul’s insistence that they sacrifice to “the gods” as per the emperor’s decree, both Christians refuse on the grounds that these gods are mere dead idols (4–41). Within this dialogue, the proconsul asks Papylus whether he has children, to which Papylus responds that he has “many, thanks to God” (28–29). We are then told by an onlooker in the crowd that “he has children according to his faith, that of the Christians” (Κατὰ τὴν πίστιν αὐτοὐ τῶν Χριστιανῶν λέγει τέκνα ἔχειν), which the proconsul, in his frustration, does not recognize (30–31) (Rebillard 2017, p. 40). Papylus confirms in his own words that he has “children according to God in every province and city” (32).

Likewise, the martyr Pionius seems to understand himself as a father to many in the text, The Martyrdom of the Holy Pionius the Presbyter and his Companions. After being imprisoned, Pionius received visitors, many of whom were fellow believers in Christ, whom he addresses with the (puzzling) words of the apostle Paul,28 “my little children, for whom I feel again the pain of childbirth so long as Christ is not formed in you! (Gal 4:19)”.29

Similarly, Sabina, the imprisoned Christ-believing companion of Pionius, as mentioned above, claims to be the sister of Pionius (18:7), indicating once again that the use of familial language by the early Christian movement went beyond that of parent to child, but included also a redefinition of the sibling relationship.

Thus, in this martyrdom literature, the martyrs, in their imitation of Christ (and his apostles), were presented as willing to leave their biological families for the promise of an otherworldly home with Christ, often leaving their homeland, and in some cases, such as that of Polycarp, even enduring forced mobility. The redefinition of the family set in motion by Jesus and his apostles was developed as well in this literature, as the martyrs considered their fellow martyrs and other members of the movement to be their true children and siblings.

3.3. Apocryphal Acts Literature

We now turn to another body of literature, that of the so-called apocryphal Acts, which is roughly contemporary to the martyrdom literature discussed above. Again, we will look at four Greek texts, and again we will treat them synthetically rather than moving through them text by text. While the apocryphal Acts literature does not fit neatly into the genre of biography, the texts do focus on the lives and works of individual apostles.30 The discussion will draw on the following texts: The Acts of Andrew; The Acts of John; The Acts of Paul, which includes The Acts of Paul and Thecla; and The Acts of Peter.31 Here too we find the striking use of familial language used by the apostolic figures and those they draw to the movement as they continue the tradition of redefining the family and the home.32 We also find that the featured apostles and their converts are highly mobile, as we have seen regarding the characters in the literature discussed above.

Particularly prominent in this literature is the use of familial language by the apostles after whom the texts are named. This provides further evidence of the early Christian reconstitution of home and family. The authors of these texts clearly understood the apostles as father figures, as this is one of the most common ways in which this theme arises in this literature.33 A few examples will suffice.

In The Acts of Andrew, as Andrew teaches those under his charge about “the seal of the Lord”, he addresses them as “my children” (11).34 Andrew also prays for Maximilla, the proconsul’s wife, who intends to leave her husband to join the Jesus movement, with these words: “I pray to you, my God, Lord Jesus Christ…and I entrust to you my child, the worthy Maximilla” (16). She in turn clearly perceived Andrew as a father, for after disguising her servant Euclia to resemble herself so as to take her place with her husband, Maximilla is said to have “never left Andrew” (17, 19).35 Similarly, in The Acts of John, John heals Cleopatra, the wife of Lycomedes, the city’s commander in chief, and subsequently instructs Cleopatra to raise her husband from the dead (23–24). After these events, John addresses Lycomedes as “my beloved child”, and Lycomedes reciprocates, addressing John as “father” (27).36 In The Acts of Peter, as Paul is summoned to Spain, the Christians of Rome lamented, begging him to return after a year, saying, “We know your love for your brothers; forget us not when you come to Spain and do not desert us like children without a mother” (1).37

It is not only the apostles of this literature who gain new family members, i.e., children, in the movement’s reconstitution of the family. New members of the movement also gain new siblings in a manner that disrupts the very fabric of the established Roman household model. For example, in The Acts of Andrew, once the proconsul’s wife Maximilla joins the movement, along with her servant Euclia, Maximilla now calls her servant “sister” (27), and what the Lord does for Maximilla, he does also for her servant (30). In The Acts of Peter, the ship captain who takes Peter from Jerusalem to Rome gains a brother in the apostle Peter once he joins the movement (6). Similarly, in The Acts of Paul and Thecla, Queen Tryphaena of Antioch gains a second daughter in Thecla, whom she explicitly calls “my second child” after having lost her own daughter (29).

In this literature, the apostles, like Jesus in the Gospels,38 are highly mobile, never remaining in one city for too long for the sake of furthering the gospel message.39 They have left their own kin, becoming itinerant teachers of the Jesus movement, gaining new brothers and sisters, and indeed, children, along the way. For example, the first fragment we have from The Acts of John begins with John hastening to Ephesus (18), and while he clearly intends to leave Ephesus for Smyrna, he tells the Ephesian inhabitants, “I shall not leave until I have weaned you like children from the milk of the nurse, and have set you on a firm rock” (45). The people of Smyrna, however, clearly expect an apostle of Jesus to be itinerant as well, for they are portrayed as beckoning him, “come to Smyrna and the other cities…” (55). Paul, likewise, in The Acts of Paul and Thecla, is as itinerant as he is in the canonical Acts and has his own letters show him to be. At the outset of this apocryphal text, he is presented as traveling from Antioch to Iconium (1), out of which he is later expelled, together with Thecla, back to Antioch (21–26).40 Likewise, in The Acts of Peter, Paul is to travel to Spain from Rome (1), and Peter travels from Jerusalem to Caesarea to Rome in response to a vision that gives him such instructions (5).

The apostles beckon those they encounter to follow Christ, inviting them to the same kind of life of mobility and abandonment of family and home. For example, in The Acts of Andrew, upon healing Stratocles, the brother of the evil proconsul, Aegeates, Andrew calls him to believe in Christ, and though he is not yet fully convinced, Stratocles recognizes Andrew’s power and says, “I too will not separate from you until I recognize myself by having despised all those things about which you rebuked me for idly squandering my time in them” (7–8). Stratocles left his own home and possessions, choosing to stay with the apostle day and night so as to watch and learn from him (8; 12). In The Acts of Paul and Thecla, Thecla herself becomes highly mobile as a result of joining the apostle Paul and becoming a disciple of Christ; as she leaves her fiancé, Thamyris, in Iconium, she travels to Antioch, telling Paul, “I shall follow you wherever you go” (25).41 Thecla then returns to Iconium, and finally, goes to Seleucia (41).

In The Acts of Andrew, Maximilla, the wife of the proconsul, is also moved by Andrew’s teachings to follow Christ, and in her case, it requires that she leave her husband (with the divine aid so characteristic of this literature), a pattern we already witnessed in the Gospels themselves.42 She is described as having “bidden farewell to her whole life as well as to wickedness” (46), choosing instead “a life holy and quiet” (64).

This literature also tends to depict the perspectives of those family members being left behind by those joining the Jesus movement. For example, The Acts of Andrew also depicts in great detail the perspective of Maximilla’s husband, Aegeates, as his wife seeks to abandon him to join the movement (36).43 Similarly, in The Acts of Paul and Thecla, as Thecla abandons Thamyris to follow Paul (and Christ), her family is depicted as weeping bitterly, her fiancé due to his losing a wife, and her mother at the loss of a child (10). Paul himself, the bringer of the gospel to Iconium, is understood by some people in the town in this way: “…he deprives the husbands of wives and maidens of husbands” (12).

Unsurprisingly, the reconfiguration of home takes on an otherworldly dimension in this body of literature as well, though it is less pronounced than in the martyrdom material. The words of Andrew in The Acts of Andrew characterize well this strand of early Christian teaching. Andrew gives a pair of lengthy speeches before he dies at the hands of the proconsul, and concludes by crying out, “O Christ, you whom I desired…whose I am, receive me, so that by my departure to you there may be a reunion of my many kindred, those who rest in your majesty” (63).44

Once again, the apocryphal Acts literature is replete with stories of the mobile apostles, who are presented in a pronounced way as those who understood themselves as spiritual fathers. Once again, family and home are reconstituted in this literature, both on earth and beyond.

3.4. Eusebius’ Biography of Origen of Alexandria

Many of the themes explored in the literature discussed above surface again in Eusebius’ account of Origen of Alexandria’s life,45 which a new generation of scholars of Eusebius’ historiography consider to be a miniature embedded biography.46 We will see that Origen, presented by Eusebius as the ideal pious Christian intellectual, acts in accordance with these patterns we have highlighted, albeit in an altered manner, due in no small part to his historical position. After his father is martyred, we witness a shift in Origen’s home and family life. That is, we witness a settled youth, who was born into a Christian family in which his devout father taught him scripture (and other subjects), become more and more devout and simultaneously more and more mobile.47

Despite Origen’s wishes to become a martyr himself, a testament to his mature devotion to Christ as a youth, Eusebius says, “but for the fact that divine and heavenly providence, taking thought for the aid of the many, placed an impediment in his way in the form of his mother” (6.2.4). Origen and his mother and six younger brothers are left destitute after his father’s martyrdom (6.2.12–13).48 At this juncture, Origen is taken in by a wealthy woman, who supports his academic pursuits, and despite the fact that she also housed an Alexandrian heretic, Eusebius assures his reader, Origen maintained his orthodoxy and harbored “disgust” for this man’s heresy (6.2.14).49

Origen, depicted by Eusebius as a devoted sagacious youth, like Jesus and his apostles, becomes highly mobile as he takes on the role as the head of the Alexandrian catechetical school in the vacuum left by the persecutions (6.3.1–3). In this role he was a great support to the martyrs, which infuriated “the Gentiles”, who “were close to stoning him, except for the fact that every time he obtained the aid of God’s right hand and miraculously escaped” (6.3.4). He was so eager and bold concerning “the doctrine of Christ”, that the unbelieving inhabitants of Alexandria “waged war against him” on a daily basis, to the point that “he could no longer stay anywhere in the whole city, but went from house to house”, pressed on all sides, both by those who wished him ill and by those who came to hear his divine teaching (6.3.6). Such was his faith and position in the city that mobility quickly became part of his way of being, much like the itinerant apostles of the apocryphal Acts literature, and the depictions of Jesus himself in the New Testament Gospels.

This likeness becomes explicit as Eusebius presents Origen as one who not only studied the scriptures, but who sought to live by them, particularly the words of Jesus:

And for many years he lived this philosopher’s life, removing from himself every material thing [conducive to] the desires of youth. He filled every day wish ascetic labors of no small order, and set himself to studying the divine writings throughout most of the night…Sometimes he exercised himself with fasting, at others with measured periods of sleep, which in his diligence he never took on a sleeping mat, but on the floor. Most of all, he thought it necessary to follow the Saviour’s evangelical sayings that exhort not having two cloaks or shoes, and, moreover, having no concern about the future.

(Matt 10:10; 6:34) (6.3.9–10)

Thus, Origen in his devotion to Christ, became homeless, divesting himself of his possessions,50 and he “persevered in the cold and naked and drove on to the height of exceeding poverty…” (6.3.11). He is presented here as an extreme ascetic, a proto-monastic wanderer, having taken to heart the call of Christ, forsaking home and family to follow the gospel. He subsequently incited many of his pupils to do likewise, and some of these even became martyrs themselves (6.3.13). Here we should note that Eusebius does not explicitly present Origen as a father figure to his pupils, though it is likely that they considered him thus.

Origen’s itinerancy does not end there, however. In Eusebius’ account, he continues to be mobile throughout his career, despite eventually having a homebase in Alexandria after the end of the Decian persecutions. He is summoned by the Arabian governor to share lectures in Arabia, and after a brief return to Alexandria, is off to Palestine, settling in Caesarea for a brief period before returning once more to Alexandria (6.19.15–16, 19). This mobility continued as Origen’s fame spread, so much so that the emperor’s mother, Mamaea, requested that he come to her in Antioch to provide his divine teaching (6.21.3–4), and he was subsequently sent to Greece via Palestine “to take care of the pressing needs of ecclesiastical matters”, received ordination on a stopover in Caesarea (6.23.4), where he eventually moved permanently (6.26). Even after he settled in Caesarea, Origen was not able to remain stable, but he was summoned by Firmilian, the Cappadocian bishop of Caesarea to his region on various occasions, at other times to Judea, whence he also received many visitors seeking his teaching in Caesarea (6.27), and he was frequently required back in Arabia to correct false teaching at gatherings small and large (6.33.2; 6.37).

For Eusebius, Origen embodied the pattern we have seen in each set of texts explored thus far, even if his life had a more intellectual inflection. Once again, serious discipleship and obedient devotion to the teachings of Christ required that this particular disciple, Origen, leave behind home and family and perhaps paradoxically, this newfound home and family resulted in a high degree of mobility.

4. Discussion of Athanasius’ Life of Antony

In Athanasius’ Life of Antony, many of the themes explored above come together in the first such full-length Christian treatment of a significant life, focused on the Egyptian ascetic. In this final section, I explore how Athanasius worked with the themes he inherited from the above-discussed literature, again, not so as to trace specific literary dependence and wording, but rather the general concepts and imaginaries provided by the prior tradition.

A demonstrable shift in the home life of Antony is immediately evident as Athanasius’ text begins with his family life in a manner reminiscent of Eusebius’ account of Origen’s beginnings. The following is said of Antony’s early years:

“Antony was an Egyptian by birth, and his parents were well-born and possessed considerable wealth. Since they were Christians, he was raised in a Christian manner. As a child, he lived with his parents and was familiar with nothing other than them and their house”.

(1)51

Athanasius goes on to make his famous claim that the boy did not go to school to learn letters with his peers, but rather wished to be “unformed” and remained at home, leaving home only to attend church, where he took from the scriptural readings what was beneficial (1).52

Like Origen, Athanasius loses his parents as a young adult and is left alone with his sister (2). After being orphaned, he continues to attend the church, where he is subsequently inspired by the apostles “who abandoned everything to follow the saviour” (Matt 4:20; 19:27); sold their possessions for distribution to the needy (Acts 4:35–37), and had hope stored up in heaven (Col 1:5) (2). From the outset, then, the very themes we have traced throughout the literature of our focus are encapsulated in a matter of a few lines of key scriptural citations.

On one occasion in particular, upon entry into the church, Athanasius tells us that Antony heard these words: “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell all your possessions, and give the proceeds to the poor, and come, follow me, and you will have treasure in heaven” (Matt 19:21) (2).53 We are told next that Antony went immediately and sold his considerable inheritance so that he and his sister would no longer be burdened by them, giving the proceeds to the poor, though keeping a portion back for his sister (2). Antony, then, is presented as one who obeys the words of Jesus in the Gospels exactly, thus forsaking everything for the sake of following Christ. After entrusting his sister to “known and faithful virgins”, Antony left home to seek wise ascetic figures around his village, not returning until he had seen those about whom he had heard, and until he had received from them “travel supplies for the road to virtue”, now motivated never to return to the things of his parents and his previous way of life (3). Indeed, all throughout this text, Antony is presented as one who is on the move as he seeks a secluded place to reside to practice his discipline and combat the demons in the desert, whether it be a mountain (11; 71; 84), or a deserted military fort (12).

Not only is Antony’s home life altered drastically, in that he is now constantly on the move as a result of his devotion to Christ, but as we have seen in the previously-discussed texts, so also is his family reconfigured as the wise men he seeks become like father figures, some of whom “welcomed him as a son” and others, “as a brother” (4). Indeed, Athanasius sets up a striking contrast between Antony’s biological family and his newfound ascetic fathers and brothers, writing the following:

But the devil, who hates and envies good…set out to do against Antony the kinds of things he usually does. First he tried to dissuade him from the discipline by suggesting the memory of possessions, the care of his sister, the intimacy of family, love of money, love of glory, the varied pleasure of food, and the other indulgences of life—and finally the difficulty of virtue and the great effort that it requires.

(5)

In this construal, Antony’s memory of and potential concern for the welfare of his sister, along with the memory of his family’s intimacy, are presented within a list of temptations, and indeed indulgences, pitted starkly against the brotherhood and sonship he has now gained through “the discipline”.

In time, Antony himself would become a father figure to many as he persuaded them to choose the solitary (itinerant) life, “and the desert was made a city of monks, who left their homes and enrolled in the heavenly commonwealth” (Phil 3:20; Heb 12:23) (14; 87–88). Athanasius puts Antony’s newfound fatherhood this way:

By his constant discourses he increased the zeal of those who were already monks, and most of the rest he moved to a love for the discipline. Soon, thanks to the drawing power of his speech, there came to be many monasteries, and he directed them all like a father.

(15)

Furthermore, just as we saw in the case of Eusebius’ presentation of Origen, Athanasius presents Antony as surviving persecution, in his case, that of Maximian, despite his bold care for the martyrs and confessors, spared so that he might teach many the scriptures (46). However, despite such providential care for Antony, which in Athanasius’ view was given for the sake of his fatherhood to the many, he still sought solitude and was eventually guided to “the inner desert”, which he came to recognize as “his home”, and at last he remained stable there (49–50). For Athanasius, Antony could not avoid his calling as monastic father, and word of his whereabouts spread quickly: “when the brothers learned of the place, like children remembering their father, they took care to send to him…” (50). Antony accordingly took it upon himself to cultivate the land so that he could feed and care for those who came to him (50). Many came even from foreign lands to see Antony, Athanasius tells us, and they too “…received benefit and returned, as if sent off by a father” (88).

Despite his love for his home in the inner desert, his call as father to the ascetics of the desert meant that Antony continued to travel with them, providing for them through his prayers, and visiting them in “the outer monasteries” (54):

When he came to the outer monasteries, they all greeted him, looking on him as a father. And he, as if he were giving them travel supplies from the mountain, gave them hospitality with words and shared what was beneficial…he too rejoiced when he saw the monks’ enthusiasm and that his sister had grown old in virginity and was herself directing other virgins.

(54)54

We should note here again the privileging of the family of believers, or more specifically here, the monastic community, over the biological family. Antony is not presented as showing affection for his sister as his sister, but rather as a fellow ascetic and leader of other such ascetics.

According to Athanasius, even the Roman emperor and his sons sought out the fatherly wisdom of Antony: “for when Constantine Augustus and his sons Constantius Augustus and Constans Augustus heard about these things, they wrote to him as to a father and begged him to write back” (81).55 Despite his decided indifference to the letters, Antony wrote back to the imperial family, “commending them for worshipping Christ, and giving them salutary advice not to think highly of the things of this world, but rather to bear in mind the judgment to come; and to know that Christ alone is the true and eternal King” (81). Athanasius reports that they were happy to receive a response from the monk, and he concludes the section saying, “So was he beloved by all, and all wished to have him as a father” (81).

The theme of Antony as father is also central to Athanasius’ presentation of Antony’s death, concerning which he says: “No doubt when he died, they all, like orphans deprived of a father (Jn 14:18), consoled themselves only with his memory, preserving both his admonitions and his exhortations” (88). More concretely, Athanasius records Antony’s actual death, in a highly scripturalized manner, and has him give a concluding speech for the two other ascetics at the inner mountain, who were there to attend to him in his old age. Antony says: “…rather be zealous to attach yourselves chiefly to Christ and next to the saints, so that after death they may receive you as familiar friends into the eternal tents” (Luke 16.9). Finally, in keeping with the figure’s apparent self-understanding as a father, which we have seen throughout this text, Antony says, “if you care about me and remember me as a father…bury my body yourselves; farewell children…” (91). Thus, the hints of the apostle’s spiritual fatherhood we saw in the apocryphal Acts literature is in full bloom here in Athanasius’ Life of Antony.

The otherworldly or eschatological reconfiguration of home is of course also present in this text, as in the others we have discussed. For example, when the ascetics ask Antony for a long discourse,56 he encourages them in their decision to have chosen the ascetic path with such words:

If, then, even the whole earth is not equal in value to heaven, certainly one who gives up a few acres must not boast nor be careless; for what he leaves behind is practically nothing, even though it be a home or a tidy sum of money he parts with… Therefore, let none of us have even the desire to possess riches. For what does it avail us to possess what we cannot take with us? Why not rather possess those things which we can take along with us—prudence, justice, temperance, fortitude, understanding, charity, love of the poor, faith in Christ, meekness, hospitality? Once we possess these we shall find them going before us, preparing a welcome for us in the land of the meek”.

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In this construal, then, one’s faith in Christ and one’s acquisition of the virtues is bound up with one’s future otherworldly home, though Athanasius would later have him claim that the kingdom of heaven is present to them in some way already now:

Greeks go abroad and cross the sea to study letters; but we have no need to go abroad for the Kingdom of Heaven nor to cross the sea to obtain virtue. The Lord has told us in advance: The Kingdom of Heaven is within you (Luke 17:21). Virtue, therefore, has need only of our will, since it is within us and springs from us.

(20)58

This “realized eschatology” is inextricably connected to one’s progress on the path to virtue, and in fact, Athanasius presents Antony as teaching his hearers to remain where they are, somewhat ironically given how mobile Antony himself was throughout this narrative.

Nevertheless, Athanasius also presents Antony as one desiring his otherworldly home. Antony is said to “sigh daily as he thought of the heavenly dwelling places” (Jn 14:2), but although he desired them, for the sake of the brothers, he ate with them on occasion, though he knew that the soul ought to take precedent over the body (45). Again, in a kind of Pauline-like manner in this case,59 Antony’s desire for his otherworldly home is also bound up with his self-understanding as a kind of father or brother figure to the other ascetics throughout the Egyptian desert. That is, it is for their benefit that he knows he must remain.

Once again, we see in this text the forging of a new kind of family that displaces biological kinship in favor of the enduring bond between members of the Christian movement, though here, it is even more specifically focused on the bond between members of the nascent monastic community. The acceptance of the call to Christian discipleship entails leaving one’s former home and embracing, as a result, a mobile lifestyle, particularly as one remembers that one’s true, final home is eschatological and otherworldly. As we saw in the biography of Origen above, Athanasius presents Antony, in an even more thoroughgoing manner, as exemplary with respect to each of these features: he is a mobile spiritual father who longs for his true home.

5. Conclusions

We have seen that in each set of texts examined here, from the New Testament Gospels to Athanasius’ Life of Antony, the heuristic lens of home has allowed us to observe some consistent features of the Christian biographical literature of the first four centuries. Each of these texts, though most foundationally, the New Testament Gospels, contributed to the shaping of the early Christian self-understanding as newly constituted members of a family based not on kinship relations, but rather on participation in the movement. Home, understood as a kind of belonging in this construal, required that one eschew the biological family and household and become mobile like Jesus himself. This we saw was how the apostles and martyrs of the NT Gospels, martyrdom texts, and apocryphal Acts were presented, just as were Origen and Antony in the writings of Eusebius and Athanasius. In particular, whereas the apostles of the canonical acts were presented as brothers to those who joined their movement, the apostles of the apocryphal Acts literature were presented as proto-spiritual fathers, a tradition that saw its culmination in the ascetic, and later, the monastic movement itself, as evidenced in this paper by the Life of Antony.60

Whether or not the majority of historical Christians acted in line with these values in the first few centuries of the church, the literary model was unmistakable: the true or most serious Christ follower was mobile, at once at home everywhere and nowhere until reaching her final eschatological home. In particular, the martyrs, and later, ascetics and monastics, were presented in the relevant texts as embodying this in their journeys to an otherworldly home and to the desert, respectively. A focus on “home” accordingly provides concrete material for this age-old comparison of martyrs and ascetics.