St. Antony’s Sister

Posted on December 28, 2002 in Morals & Ethics Myths & Mysticism

It makes a sweet story if you don’t think it through. When he was twenty, St. Antony of Egypt heard the Gospel story where Jesus tells the rich young man that if he wants to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, he must give away everything he has to the poor. Antony had just inherited his parents’ property and their palace. He felt that the message was intended expressly for him and so he gave everything away to the poor, except a small amount for his sister.

The money wasn’t used to provide her a dowry: he placed her in a community of virgins living out in the desert. Here she spent her life, presumably purifying her soul for the next world by denying her body. Antony went off to live in a tomb for a while, then a remote abandoned fort, and finally in a cave far out in the wilderness. He fought the demons of lust for fifteen years. They came and beat him in the night, about which parts the hagiographies do not mention.

Out of his ultimate victory over this temptation came a strong dread on the saint’s part of allowing others to see him naked. One story tells of a time when he asked a brother monk to follow him at a distance so that when the time came for the pair to swim a river, the other monk would not see his body. When the brother got to the other shore, however, Antony was completely dry. It seems that God, seeing the saint’s dilemna, bore him across fully clothed.

Antony went on to found monasteries for others who hungered for the renunciation of the flesh and to minister to Christians being persecuted by Roman colonial authorities in Alexandria and Arianist heretics.

As an old man, he met his aged sister again. St. Anthanasius says that the two met in joy and that the sister was not bitter.

Such a sweet end, some of the pious conclude, for both “choose” the same life.

By the time Antony got around to seeing his sister again, she had completely given up any hope of escaping the company of the virgins. Long before, as her beauty waned, she’d abandoned the idea of marriage. Presumably, because this is a story of chastity, she also resisted any advances of her fellow virgins. Any anger she had harbored against her brother had subsided. She forgave him what he did to her and, at this point, she disappears from the lives of the saints, apparently never earning the aureole for herself.

There’s an insidious and evil notion at play here, one that I have seen invoked elsewhere. A suspect and possibly cruel act becomes “good” because the victim forgives the tormentor. Anthanasius never raises or answers the question whether or not the sister wanted to marry. It seems that her brother, as her guardian, simply assigned her to the community. Because this was for Christ, we must gather, it’s all right for him to have done so. Antony’s nameless sister has no voice in the matter. She must go where he tells her, use the money that should have gone for her dowry as he instructs.

The same who relate Antony’s story with relish loudly protest against fathers who force their virginity-inclined daughters to marry and have sex.

I do not deny the religious impulse to live a life without sex nor do I call it evil when it is freely chosen by the individual. I’ve met men and women who’ve been satisfied with the life: they are good people. But Antony sets a dangerous precedent here, one which has brought suffering to every Christian who has fought to choose her or his life for himself: in this act, the monasteries and convents which served as prisons for maiden aunts and seconds son spring. People get given to God without much consideration for their wishes. And these institutions founded on poverty and chastity suffer severely as the “offerings” subvert the system with extravagant living and secret meetings in the dark.

To Antony we must trace the curse of the modern priesthood, the forced celibacy which has led to the deflowering of unwilling virgins at the hands of men who have human needs. To Antony’s biographer, we must assign blame for a dark notion of forgiveness, where vile acts become good or repeatable because the victim comes to peace with the suffering.

I forgive others, but that is no cause for their canonization nor does it sanctify the cruelty which they have done to me in the past.

What is missing from the story is Antony’s conscience and his apology to a wronged woman.