The Letters of St. Antony: Origenist Theology, Monastic Tradition and the Making of a Saint by Samuel Rubenson (Review)

Samuel Rubenson's aim in this work is twofold. First, he seeks to rehabilitate and set on a firmer critical foundation a neglected work of early monastic literature: the Letters of St. Antony. Second, he wants to revise the conventional view of St. Antony and of early monasticism as arising largely from the world of uneducated Coptic-speaking peasants ignorant of Greek language and culture. Arguing that St. Antony has been handed down to posterity more as an ideal than as an historical figure, and that our understanding of early monasticism has been distorted as a result, Rubenson aims to recover the elusive "historical Antony" and situate him within a more complex, richly textured understanding of monastic origins. A proper appreciation of the Letters is crucial to this project according to Rubenson, for they reveal Antony to be not an illiterate monk but a person who "shared a Platonic view of man, his origin, nature and destination and was dependent for the integration of Christian thinking into this framework on Clement of Alexandria and Origen".