Athanasius wrote the Vita Antonii between 356 and 362 whilst in hiding from the emperor Constantius and his pro-‘Arian’ policies.Footnote 1 At the time of writing, Athanasius and his theological cause were losing out to an alliance of Church and empire.Footnote 2 During this exile he also wrote the Apologia de fuga, either wrote or completed the Apologia ad Constantium, and wrote the Historia Arianorum.Footnote 3 The first two works both try to conciliate Constantius. By contrast, the Historia declares Constantius to be ‘the image of the Antichrist’.Footnote 4 Several scholars have sought to chart the Vita's position on the emperor within these tempestuous waters.Footnote 5 However, there is no developed analysis of the political theology of the Vita, partly because it is often considered to have none. Though it is sometimes suggested that the Vita represents a yearning for an apolitical sphere, the implications for political theology even of this reading remain insufficiently explored.Footnote 6
In this article it is proposed that the Vita is profoundly concerned with political theology in the sense that it grapples with the theological dimension of political questions; specifically, the nature of imperial authority and the relationship between Church and State. In doing so, it addresses issues arising from the Christianisation of the empire and Constantius' support for the pro-‘Arian’ party, seen through the lens of Athanasius' tempestuous career.Footnote 7
It is not suggested that political concerns are more fundamental than soteriological and anthropological concerns in the Vita, or even that they represent a different strand of the text. Rather, it is argued that Athanasius' soteriology and anthropology in the Vita have an important, and intended, political dimension. Thus the explicit references to imperial officials and politics are explored in the light of the Vita's soteriology and anthropology. Athanasius considers the question of the relationship between Church and State as a question of how heavenly citizenship may be lived out within the fallen world order. The life of the saint who is struggling against the world's temptations is, then, intensely political. Antony is the struggling and triumphant citizen of heaven. The text does not allow an easy division between the hagiographical and the political because, for Athanasius, the spiritual is political.Footnote 8 Colm Lubhéid observes that the Vita is concerned that the fallen world order is a fundamentally problematic arena in which to live in a Christ-like way.Footnote 9 Thus, for Athanasius, the fall presents a political question because the fallen condition is played out partly in the social and political structures of the late Roman Empire: how does the Christian relate to these structures? In the Vita, he seeks to answer that question.
Athanasius suggests that allegiance to the kingdom of heaven is threatened by allegiance to earthly authority. Through the life of Antony and his fellow monks, he explores various ways in which heavenly citizenship may be practised on earth. He presents Antony's life, and to a lesser extent the lives of monastic communities, as models. First, they are models of Christians striving against the fallen world. Second, they sometimes image eschatological existence. Through these models, Athanasius urges his readers to allow themselves to be shaped by the eschatological order, rather than by the present, earthly order.
Heavenly citizenship: living for the land of the meek
The concept of the kingdom of heaven is crucial to the Vita. Antony repeatedly urges listeners to focus on the heavenly kingdom, or the life to come, more than on the present life.Footnote 10 Athanasius writes that when people left their homes to join monastic communities, ‘they registered themselves as citizens in heaven’ (‘ἀπογραψαμένων τὴν ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς πολιτείαν’).Footnote 11 This clearly alludes to Philippians iii.20: ‘our citizenship [πολίτευμα] is in heaven’. In fact, πολιτεία could also mean ‘way of life’. In using it rather than the more political πολίτευμα of Philippians, does Athanasius mean to downplay the political connotations of Paul's words?Footnote 12 This interpretation is undermined by a passage in the Historia, where Athanasius complains that the Arians treat the Church as a ‘πολιτεία of the senate’.Footnote 13 In this case, πολιτεία has an unambiguously political meaning. None the less, in Vita, the ambiguity of πολιτεία fits Athanasius' purpose because, for him, the individual's way of life reflects his or her allegiance, and is therefore a profoundly political affair.
As Tim Vivian argues, ‘Antony is homo biblicus’.Footnote 14 He is Christ-like, and therefore a model human being. Antony is remade through ascetic discipline, which partially reverses the effects of the fall and brings him closer to the eschatological state.Footnote 15 For example, Antony claims that ‘if we live our lives … as if we will die each day, we will not sin’.Footnote 16 An active reordering of one's life makes one less sinful and brings one closer to eschatological transformation. The demons ‘want to hinder our ascent to heaven, so that we should not return to the place from which we fell’.Footnote 17 As Brakke argues, in the Vita, Athanasius' wider account of human restoration to God is played out in the person of Antony.Footnote 18 In Antony and in the monastic communities with which he is associated, Athanasius depicts a way of life diametrically opposed to the life of the Roman Empire. So, Antony not only renounces his wealth and status, but also his family commitments.Footnote 19 This severing of his familial ties indicates that the social and political context into which he was born presents a fundamental obstacle to a truly Christian way of life. He removes himself from the political and social structures of the late Roman Empire in order to model himself on Christ and live according to heavenly values. Correspondingly, Antony advises others not to try to acquire wealth, but to seek things that they can take to the heavenly kingdom: ‘moderation, justice, courage, conscience, love [ἀγάπη], love of the poor [ϕιλοπτωχία], faith in Christ, freedom from anger, hospitality’. In that case, he says, they will be welcomed in ‘the land of the meek’.Footnote 20 The ‘land of the meek’ is juxtaposed with this land, the land whose citizens do seek wealth and where the virtues listed are conspicuous by their absence. The kingdom of heaven is contrasted with the earthly kingdom.Footnote 21
Antony's encounter with the Augusti as prophetic
When approached by Constantine, Constans and Constantius, Antony is unwilling to engage with them in the expected way, and is, furthermore, highly suspicious of them. The relevant passage merits extended quotation:
Antony's fame also reached the emperors. For, learning these things, the Augustus Constantine and his sons, the Augusti Constantius and Constans, wrote to him as to a father, wishing to receive a reply from him, but he neither cared much about the letters, nor rejoiced at receiving them. But he was the same as before the emperors wrote to him. Therefore, when he received the letters, he called the monks and said, ‘why are you amazed, if an emperor writes to us, for he is a human being? But rather, be amazed that God wrote the law for human beings, and spoke to us through his own son’. Therefore he did not wish to receive the letters, saying he did not know how to reply to them. However, urged by all the monks that the emperors were Christians, and in order that he should not offend them by refusing the letters, he allowed them to be read. And he replied to them, welcoming them since they worshipped Christ, and advised them about salvation. He advised them not to hold things of the present in high regard, but rather to remember the coming judgement and to know that Christ was the only true and eternal emperor. And he advised that they should be lovers of humanity, and to care about justice and the poor. And receiving this, they rejoiced.Footnote 22
L. W. Barnard has described this passage as ‘cool, yet respectful’, placing it ideologically between the pro-Constantian attitude of the Apologia de fuga and Apologia ad Constantium and the staunch anti-Constantian stance of the Historia.Footnote 23 Believing the Vita, like the Historia, to have been written for private circulation among Egyptian monks, Barnard takes this supposedly ‘cool, yet respectful’ attitude at face value. Brian Brennan, however, notes that the Vita was written for a public audience. There is then no need to invoke an earlier, more positive attitude to the emperor to explain this passage, he argues. It can actually be surmised from Athanasius' remarks to and about his readership that the Vita was written firstly for an international monastic audience and secondly for a wider Christian audience.Footnote 24 Brennan is also undoubtedly right that the Vita's wider audience is sufficient to explain its apparently less hostile attitude, relative to the Historia. It is then possible to go further. In fact, for part of a widely circulated text, this passage is almost confrontational. Antony displays a disregard that would be ‘cool, yet respectful’ towards a twentieth-century prime minister, perhaps, but which is rather shocking towards a Roman Emperor.
There are ways in which the Augusti are represented favourably in this passage – they are Christians, and they defer to Antony. However, their favourable representation here reflects badly on Constantius' behaviour during Athanasius' third exile, as it is depicted in the Historia; Constantius' deference to Antony stands in stark contrast to what Athanasius sees as his persecution of the Church.Footnote 25 Furthermore, at his meeting with Antony, Constantius is said to be owed some respect because he was a Christian – it is because the Augusti are Christians that the other monks encourage Antony to respond to their letter; by the time that the Vita was written, Constantius had abandoned true Christianity by supporting heresy.
The tone of this passage is echoed elsewhere in the Vita. Considering the explicit treatment of empire in the Vita holistically, the impression is of a deep suspicion of imperial power.Footnote 26 This is partly because the reader is encouraged to interpret the earlier events of Antony's life, including this passage, with the benefit of hindsight and thus to link together the various references to imperial power; there is a narrative strand in the Vita, progressing from Antony's hesitation on hearing from Constantine and his sons, to his foretelling of the spread of the Arianism, and then to its spreading.
Firstly, Antony's disregard for the emperors is a response even to their apparent deference – they ‘wrote to him as to a father’. His coldness reflects his prophetic wisdom in seeing beyond this deference to recognise the dangers that empire poses to the Church.Footnote 27 Secondly, the narrative swiftly develops to manifest these dangers. Almost immediately after his meeting with the Augusti, Antony prophesies the spread of Arianism.Footnote 28 The following two sections (83 and 84) reinforce Antony's prophetic authority. Section 83 opens, ‘These are the things of Antony, and we need not disbelieve that such miracles happened through a human being.’Footnote 29 Then, scriptural passages are offered to demonstrate that faith enables miracles. Section 84 starts: ‘Indeed, Antony did not heal by commanding, but by praying and by naming Christ.’Footnote 30 Are the ‘miracles’ referred to at the beginning of section 83 Antony's healings? In that case, 83 – and the beginning of 84 – would seem unconnected to 82. It is more probable that 83 involves reflection on the prophecy in 82. Athanasius has given an instance of a specific miracle – Antony's prophecy. He then insists that what appears to be Antony's power and authority is actually divine power and authority, by demonstrating that this is true of miracles generally. Directly following Antony's prophecy that Arianism will spread, Athanasius both reminds the reader of Antony's power, and insists that God is its source.
The next two sections depict Antony struggling with the role of advisor to secular authority. Judges beg him to come out from the mountain so that ‘they might simply look at him’.Footnote 31 When Antony eventually relents and comes to them, he advises them to be just and that ‘as they judged, they would be judged’.Footnote 32 The significance of this interaction is two-fold: firstly, Antony again assumes reluctant authority over imperial officials. Secondly, there is a disjunction between the judges' expectations of Antony – that they would look at and admire him – and what actually happens when they meet him – they are instructed. This emphasises the need to connect words with deeds, with reference to secular authority's deference to the Church. Those admiring Antony must heed his advice: imperial authority, if it proclaims itself Christian, must alter its behaviour accordingly. Specifically, the judges are also reminded that they will be judged by God. Like the Augusti, they are warned that their authority is provisional and transient, and must be seen in light of God's authority. Then, in section 85, Antony asserts that involvement with society – particularly with imperial officials – is hazardous, giving a rationale for his reluctance to engage with the judges. A duke begs Antony to prolong his stay with him, but Antony replies, ‘Just as fish die when they remain on dry land, monks weaken if they loiter too long with you.’Footnote 33 The duke responds that Antony's wisdom is proof that he is a ‘servant of God’, thus reiterating Antony's divinely-derived insight – which is manifested in his distance from Roman social and political structures.Footnote 34
So, following his prophecy of the spread of Arianism and the reinforcement of his authority, Antony is visited by various imperial officials, again shows reluctance to involve himself, and reminds them that they are subject to God. This mirrors his encounter with the emperors. Then, he specifically alludes to the danger of his over-involvement with imperial society.
Immediately after this, as Antony predicted it would, the tide turns, with Athanasius' account of the death of the general Balacius, who was notoriously opposed to Athanasius. Balacius was persecuting Christians and supporting Arianism. His actions fulfil not only Antony's prophecy that Arianism would spread, but also Antony's claim that monks ‘weaken’ if they remain within society: the Church has become entangled with the empire, and so has weakened. Antony warns Balacius to stop persecuting Christians or face death, but Balacius ignores him and shortly afterwards dies of a bite from his horse.Footnote 35 This event is described in similar terms in the Historia, and has a similarly anti-Constantian ring there.Footnote 36 By singling out Balacius in the Vita, Athanasius goes as far as he safely may in imputing guilt for the spread of Arianism, and the persecution of Athanasian Christians, to the imperial government. Arianism's growth as a politically significant force was helped by one of the emperors who had written so warmly to Antony; Constantius' support for Arianism shows a disjunction between words and deeds like that alluded to in Antony's interaction with the judges. Athanasius hints heavily at this imperial support for Arianism in the person of Balacius, and offers subsequent, violent events in the relationship between Church and Empire as a framework for interpreting Antony's reluctance to engage with the emperors. Just before Balacius' story commences, Antony's encounter with the emperors is re-enacted with other imperial officials, and Antony sounds a note of caution about his various interactions. The effect is to reinforce the connection between Antony's encounter with the emperors and Balacius' actions. Antony distrusts the apparent friendliness of the imperial government, and his distrust is vindicated.
Turning to the theological basis for Antony's distrust of the Augusti, it is now argued that Antony rejects the worldly value system that the Augusti represent and, ultimately, rejects the power that it appears to offer him, recognising that to accept it would be idolatrous.
Earthly citizenship: idolatry and power
The Christian, striving for heavenly citizenship, stands in opposition not just to demonic hordes, but also to earthly social and political structures, which are concretely represented by those of the Roman Empire. Allegiance to the Roman Empire is problematic, because it involves taking on values other than those of the heavenly kingdom, and this is idolatrous.
When seen as foreshadowing later imperial support for the Church, Antony's interaction with the emperors is one in which he refuses to participate in their value-system. Their letter to him may be numbered among his trials: Antony triumphs by refusing to become enamoured with the emperors. He thus avoids idolatry, and he does so by using the heavenly kingdom, rather than the earthly kingdom, as a basis for interpreting the world. Firstly, in demanding to know why the other monks are amazed by the emperors' letter, since the emperors are human, he implies that to be awed by the emperor is to forget that he is a creature. It is idolatrous. Allegiance to the emperor is therefore a treacherous business. The claim that an emperor is ‘a human being’ is only comprehensible if there are those who might forget this.Footnote 37 Secondly, responding directly to the Augusti, he draws out the implication of his comment to the monks in the words: ‘Christ is the only true and eternal emperor.’ The fact that the emperor is only human relativises and qualifies his power over other human beings, and it does so because there is an eternal emperor, who is not merely human. Antony avoids idolatry by grounding his understanding firmly in the eternal kingdom, and this in turn radically qualifies his allegiance to the earthly kingdom.
It may be suggested that when he hears from the Augusti, Antony undergoes a trial in the form of a temptation – specifically a temptation to earthly power.Footnote 38 In depicting this temptation, Athanasius employs a paradigm that is important to his treatment of both Arianism and demonic forces: he connects idolatry with the promise of power, structuring his connection around the New Testament accounts of Christ's temptation in the wilderness.Footnote 39 So, Antony declares:
[S]etting on [fearful people], the demons mock them and say ‘fall down and worship us’. In this way, they deceived the Greeks, but, as for us, the Lord did not allow us to be deceived by the devil. Whenever such apparitions came to him, the Lord chastised them and said ‘Get behind me, Satan. For it is written, “worship the Lord your God, and serve only him”.’Footnote 40
Athanasius alludes to the words that devil spoke to Christ when showing him ‘all the world's kingdoms’: ‘fall down and worship me, and I will give all this to you’; and to Christ's response: ‘worship the Lord your God, and serve only him’.Footnote 41 The temptation that the devil offered Christ is left for the reader to infer. The reference strongly implies that the demons purport to offer power in exchange for worship. One can easily comprehend how Athanasius perceived there to be a correlation between idolatry and earthly power. ‘The Greeks’ – whom the demons tricked into worshipping them – had wielded power until very recently and, during Athanasius' third exile, the supposedly Christian emperor supported the Arians, whom Athanasius regarded as idolaters. The view that Arianism is idolatrous is especially prominent in Orationes contra Arianos, where Athanasius argues that Arian Christology involves worshipping a creature.Footnote 42 He reiterates this idea in the Vita, in which Antony says that the Arians, ‘saying that the Son of the Father, the Word of God, is a creature, are no different from the gentiles, worshipping a creature in place of God the creator’.Footnote 43
A comparison with the Historia elucidates the relationship between idolatry and earthly power. In the Historia, it is clear that the Arians, for their part, have acquired power by throwing in their lot with the emperor: they ‘have no king but Caesar and … this is how they accomplish whatever they want’.Footnote 44 Eusebius was not able to advance Arianism, Athanasius writes, until he had found a patron in the emperor.Footnote 45 Similarly, the Arians are compared to Herodias's daughter, dancing before Herod for political purchase.Footnote 46 Constantius, for his part, tries to play God by the role that he assumes within the Church: ‘Proudly, he sets himself against the Most High.’Footnote 47 This alludes to Isaiah xiv.14, which Athanasius elsewhere applies to the fall of the devil, who wanted to be like God: ‘I will be like the Most High.’Footnote 48 Athanasius implies that the Arians have succumbed to yet another kind of idolatry by making a deal with Constantius (perhaps he also hints that it is, after all, a sin about which they have few qualms). This idolatry is exactly what Antony seeks to guard against when reminding his fellow monks that the emperor is only ‘a human being’.
In both the Historia and the Vita, the emperor is a potential recipient of idolatrous worship. Also in both texts, Athanasius connects idolatry and the promise of power: idolatrous worship is rendered in exchange for earthly power. In the Historia, this paradigm clearly operates with reference to the emperor. The connection between idolatry and the emperor in the Vita can best be understood if it is assumed that in the Vita also the paradigm of idolatry in exchange for power operates with reference to the emperor. Perhaps, then, the narrative about demonic offers of power and idolatry is also intended to make a point about human offers of power and idolatry. The text may be read on multiple levels, each of which elucidates a different aspect of the human struggle to live as a heavenly citizen.Footnote 49 This would allow Athanasius to convey a subversive message in a widely circulated text. Reading the text as multi-layered, and taking one of the layers to be consciously concerned with imperial politics, casts Antony's advice ‘not to hold things of the present in high regard’ in a fresh light. As well as warning the Augusti to alter their worldviews, he informs them that he has no interest in the earthly power that they offer him.
Admittedly, Antony seems to accept power from the Augusti. Approached as a father, he acts in that role and instructs them, albeit after extreme hesitation. It is, indeed, through his assumption of authority in the Roman Empire that he issues prophetic warnings to its rulers. Antony is like Samuel, the holy prophet to whom the king is subject. Accepting power from the emperor and idolatrous deference to the emperor might appear to be alternatives. However, the rapid spread of Arianism, supported by the supposedly Christian Constantius, gives the lie to this appearance. It turns out that Constantius did not really want Antony's advice. Antony tries to exercise his proper authority over the Augusti, but his authority is ultimately ignored, at least by Constantius. His apparent deference to Antony is dependent on Antony's taking on an earthly value system.
What is offered in return for taking on these earthly values is not what it seems, either, because taking on earthly values involves taking on a counterfeit identity oneself. Idolatry transforms the idolater into something contrary to his or her true nature.Footnote 50 So, in the Historia, through their relationship with the emperor, the Arians falsify the Church's identity. They ‘make the church a polity of the senate’.Footnote 51 In the Vita Athanasius argues that the demons do not even have power (ἐξουσίαν) over pigs, and, so, much less do they have it over ‘human beings, made in God's image’.Footnote 52 By placing themselves under the authority of demons, human beings deny the image of God in themselves. In both cases, allegiance and identity are bound up with each other. In Vita, Athanasius hints at an idea made explicit in Historia: that one may gain a kind of power through allegiance to the earthly kingdom, but one will lose oneself in the process. Correspondingly, Antony is not transformed by his encounter with Constantine and his sons. Afterwards, he ‘was the same as before the emperors wrote to him’.Footnote 53 Antony is transformed instead by Christ, ‘the only true and eternal emperor’.Footnote 54
Antony's authority – which he reluctantly attempts to wield over the Augusti – similarly derives from the heavenly kingdom, and corresponds to its values.Footnote 55 This relates to the belief that, in the eschatological kingdom, the saints will wield authority:
When we have persevered in the ascetic life for the whole of eighty years – even a hundred years – we will not similarly reign for a hundred years, but instead we will reign for all the ages of eternity.Footnote 56
We give up earthly power in order to keep ourselves and so to reign, for ever, in the kingdom of heaven. Like the power that the devil offered Christ, the power that the empire offers the Church is mutually exclusive with the power of the kingdom of heaven. For this reason, Antony is more often, and more explicitly, depicted as a Daniel figure than a Samuel figure. For example, in an extended speech to a group of monks, Antony identifies the life of the ascetic with that of Daniel and his Israelite companions in Babylon. He says that the flames conjured by demons ‘hurt no one who believes’.Footnote 57 This is reminiscent of the story in Daniel, about Sedrach, Misach and Abdegnago, who are thrown into the fiery furnace, but are not burnt.Footnote 58 Again, at the end of the speech, Antony advises his listeners to interrogate apparitions, observing that ‘the enemy did not escape the notice of the questioning Daniel’.Footnote 59 Antony invokes an instance in which Daniel defends Susannah against false accusations from Babylonian judges, standing up for justice contra mundum, and specifically in opposition to deceitful authority figures. Admittedly, the Book of Daniel had ambiguous, and increasingly favourable, implications for the emperor in fourth-century Christian interpretation.Footnote 60 However, Athanasius' preferred interpretation can be inferred from his selection of passages; both describe events where the people of God are at odds with an unjust and impious empire.Footnote 61 Daniel's ambiguity renders him a relatively safe point of reference, but Athanasius' deployment of Daniel clearly casts him as a figure challenging to imperial power. It is in this light that Antony's prophecy about Arianism should be seen. After narrating Antony's correspondence with the emperors, Athanasius writes that Antony would often, like Daniel, stop speaking for long periods, and then resume what he was saying.Footnote 62 In the following paragraph, Antony prophesies a violent Arian takeover in the Church. Two paradigms – Samuel and Daniel – then sit side by side. In what follows, Antony returns to but struggles with the former, and ultimately, accurately, prophesies divine vengeance for imperial persecution of the Church. Theocracy failing, he exchanges the role of Samuel, so reluctantly accepted, for that of Daniel. This reflects Athanasius' doubt about the viability of exercising heavenly power in this world order.
The temptation from the emperors comes later than the others to which Antony is subjected; as Brakke observes, Antony is principally tempted, as distinct from being tested in other ways, relatively early in his ascetic career.Footnote 63 The encounter with the Augusti comes later. This initially seems either to undermine the interpretation of this encounter as a temptation, or simply to suggest that its place within the Vita is determined by other narrative concerns, to which it is subordinate. However, the lateness of Antony's encounter with the emperors in some ways helps to reinforce its nature as a temptation. As it was for Christ in the wilderness, the offer of earthly power in exchange for false worship is the last in a series of temptations. The implication is that, for both Christ and Antony, this is the greatest temptation, because it would apparently advance the kingdom of God. In Matthew, the devil offers Christ ‘all the world's kingdoms’. This offer looks as though it would establish Christ's reign. The power offered, however, cannot be used to establish the kingdom of Christ; its exercise requires idolatry. In the Vita, this idolatry is connected with allegiance to the earthly kingdom. The choice with which Antony is presented in the emperors' letter is a microcosm of the choice with which the Church was struggling in Athanasius' lifetime. It is tempted by the offer of imperial help. Imperial support appears to be a boon, and a good way to advance the heavenly kingdom on earth. So it had seemed to Eusebius of Caesarea when he wrote the Laudibus Constantini.
Athanasius' much earlier De incarnatione can contextualise the Vita's treatment of imperial involvement in the Church because it gives us a window onto his own feelings about the rise of Christianity, in the wake of the Constantinian Revolution, as a young man: Christianity, Athanasius argues, advocates values antithetical to those of the world, and seemingly incredible, but yet it finds many adherents.Footnote 64 He then continues
Before, when they were idolatrous, Greeks and barbarians warred against each other, and were cruel to their own families … But when they have converted to Christ's teaching, then, paradoxically, as if struck in conscience, they have laid aside their savage murders and no longer think of war.Footnote 65
Athanasius continues this theme through the next two sections. Two aspects of his treatment need our attention here. Firstly, he argues that the former wars were encouraged by the idols that people used to worship, and that, once they have turned to Christ, people ‘arm themselves against the devil and against demons’.Footnote 66 Secondly, he argues that no ‘human being, or magus, or tyrant, or king’ has ever been able to transform people in this way.Footnote 67 Athanasius sees the advance of Christianity as establishing a more virtuous and peaceful order on earth, and doing so through the power of Christ, held in contradistinction to the power of earthly authority. Furthermore, he associates Christian virtue especially with asceticism, writing of virginity as a uniquely Christian virtue;Footnote 68 the Christian life that Athanasius envisages in De incarnatione is not divorced from that in the Vita.
Writing De incarnatione, Athanasius was optimistic about the new role of Christianity within the Roman Empire. None the less, his sharp contrast between Christ's power, and earthly authority's impotence, to transform lives indicates that he does not, like Eusebius, give Constantine a central role in the changes that Christianity has wrought.Footnote 69
De incarnatione was most probably written in the immediate aftermath of Nicaea;Footnote 70 as Sara Parvis argues, Athanasius would have ‘been stimulated to think about the status of Christianity across the whole Eastern empire, intoxicated with the splendour of the Council, and fired up by its politics and by the debate between Christian and pagan philosophers'.Footnote 71 It was, indeed, a moment at which it was natural to be especially excited about the growth of Christianity. Parvis herself also argues, persuasively, that Constantine forced a compromise between the Eusebian party and the Alexandrian party at Nicaea.Footnote 72 Drawing on this observation, we might reasonably wonder whether Athanasius' insistence that it is Christ, as opposed to the emperor, who transforms reflects the fact that he was already wary of the emperor's involvement in the Church because of Constantine's unwelcome interference at Nicaea. Whether or not this is the case, De incarnatione holds together an excitement about the advance of Christianity with reservations about the emperor's role in its advance.Footnote 73
Seen in light of these passages from De incarnatione, the Vita's relative pessimism about the possibilities of earthly society carries a strong sense of disappointment. From Athanasius' point of view, the Christianisation of the empire has not really occurred. The empire's involvement in the Church has promoted the ‘Arian’ cause and has been turned against Athanasius. Even in the 320s Athanasius was hesitant about the idea that the emperor could advance the kingdom of God. By the time of his third exile, his hopes for the Christianisation of the empire have been dashed, and his reservations about the emperor vindicated; the apparent good that the emperor can bring the Church conceals the high cost that the Church will pay for the emperor's support. In Antony's dilemma, Athanasius represents the crossroads at which the Church is standing. It may gain power on earth, but only by seeing the world from the viewpoint of the earthly kingdom.Footnote 74
Athanasius wants the Church to understand the world and itself in light of the heavenly kingdom, and so to be shaped by it. He finds that allegiance to earthly authority problematises attempts to do so, as it involves taking on an alternative, this-worldly frame of reference. For this reason, he is extremely dubious about the potential for an alliance between Church and empire to advance the heavenly kingdom. On this basis, he explores other ways in which heavenly citizenship may be enacted this side of the eschaton.
Manifestations of the kingdom of heaven
The kingdom of heaven is primarily an eschatological reality, but it has pressing implications for how human beings ought to live in the present life. Antony insists that ‘the whole life of a human being is short compared to the centuries of eternity’.Footnote 75 As well as acting as a reminder of the transience of current political institutions, the eschatological emphasis reminds the reader of the coming judgement, and is therefore a warning to amend behaviour.Footnote 76 Though the kingdom of heaven is not here, it defines what it should mean to be here.
Athanasius also suggests that the eschatological kingdom may be partially realised now; it may break into the current world order in the lives of monks and virgins. So, the monks' community is ‘a land according to itself, of piety and justice’.Footnote 77 Similarly, living on his own, Antony succeeds in re-establishing the order of Eden in his immediate vicinity. The animals are no longer violent towards him, but obey him.Footnote 78 This recalls Adam and Eve's lordship over creation in the Garden of Eden.Footnote 79 It also perhaps hints at the eschatological order in which ‘the wolf shall eat with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid’.Footnote 80 The violence that entered the created order with the fall ceases, and humankind's benevolent rule is restored.Footnote 81 The authority that Antony will receive in the kingdom of heaven exists here, too. This is also the case when he assumes authority over the emperors, though they will not recognise his authority. This is an important paradigm in Vita's political theology: firstly, it is the eschatological kingdom that matters, and to which allegiance is owed; secondly, the eschatological kingdom can be manifested, in some ways, in the present, but it is the Church, and emphatically not the empire, in which and through which it is manifest.
There are both communal and solitary manifestations of the kingdom in the here and now. On one hand the monks create a just society, while on the other, Antony establishes a private Eden. There is a tension between withdrawal and community as the arena in which citizenship of the heavenly kingdom is embodied.
These twin models of heavenly citizenship on earth parallel a tug of war between solitude and sociability within Antony's own life, represented by different phases of his ascetic career. He spends long stretches of time alone in the desert, but also leads a thriving community. Antony longs for solitude, and he breaks new ground in isolation. So, Athanasius writes that, when he first goes into the deep desert, this is unprecedented.Footnote 82 Antony's moral achievement is bound up with his withdrawal from society and this might suggest that those hoping to achieve the former must enact the latter.Footnote 83 Recent scholarship has placed question marks over this reading in two respects: firstly, by observing that Athanasius wished to render monasticism complementary to the episcopate;Footnote 84 secondly, by demonstrating that fourth-century monasticism, in general, was a profoundly social movement. Graham Gould, arguing this, notes a tension in the Desert Fathers between ‘solitude and interaction’.Footnote 85 Similarly Peter Brown notes that the very harshness of the Egyptian desert required a kind of replication of society within it.Footnote 86 Athanasius offers an ambivalent treatment of solitude that largely echoes this more complex picture.Footnote 87
Social interaction is something that Antony seeks to limit, but it is not one of the devil's snares. It enables and supports the ascetic, and even the eremitic, life. Athanasius emphasises the inescapability of community as a warning about the necessary limits of solitude. Keenly aware of the problems of being a citizen of heaven in the fallen world, Athanasius finds the idea of solitude extremely enticing. Through the events of Antony's life, he experiments with total isolation as a model for the Christian life, and he ultimately finds it wanting. In Antony's own life, community proves necessary. Early in his life, having withdrawn to the tombs, Antony is so savagely attacked by the devil that he nearly dies. Another monk is there just in time, by divine providence, and saves his life by carrying him to a nearby village.Footnote 88 Not only is the interruption of Antony's solitude a beneficial and providential occurrence, Antony is even dependent on his friend to resume his solitude – he needs to be carried back to the tombs.Footnote 89 Total withdrawal from society is a collaborative enterprise. Antony also suggests that community fosters ascetic practice, urging the monks to improve their own discipline by observing each other.Footnote 90
If eremitism is dependent on monastic society, it also supports it. So, Antony spends twenty years alone in the desert, and then emerges to establish and lead a community of monks.Footnote 91 His solitude culminates in the creation of a holy society. Isolation, in this case, has acted as a training ground for holy community. The support that Antony provides to community also extends beyond the desert. Antony is an exemplar of Christian living and perfected humanity, not just for other monks, but also for the wider Christian community and the whole human race:Footnote 92 ‘even if these people work secretly, even if they wish to remain hidden, the Lord reveals them to all, like a lamp, so that those who hear may know in the same way that it is possible to keep the commandments, and may receive zeal for the way to virtue’.Footnote 93 Desire for anonymity is thwarted, just like desire for solitude, because both impede the spread of the heavenly kingdom for which they strive. Solitude is at once necessary and self-defeating.
Athanasius' reluctant rejection of total withdrawal has two implications for his political theology. Firstly, it implies that the heavenly kingdom is not served by an asocial and apolitical response to the earthly kingdom. Heavenly citizenship is citizenship of a society. It is in the more obviously social manifestations of Christ-like living that the heavenly kingdom is most closely imaged. It is also in these manifestations that it is most threatening to the Roman Empire; the monks' ‘land … of piety and justice’ is an alternative society, on earth, established on principles diametrically opposed to those of the Roman Empire. Rather than avoiding society, the monks reconstitute it. Athanasius does not wish to reject society in rejecting its current, fallen, forms.
Secondly, it is worth wondering whether there is a hint of unease at the prospect of an altogether separate, heavenly society on earth. Athanasius was not a monk, but a bishop; he was the head of an ecclesiastical community – he thus has an interest both in promoting ecclesiastical community per se, and in all Christians within his jurisdiction being part of his community;Footnote 94 monasticism sets up a separate society – or rejects society entirely. Furthermore, he only left Alexandria, a buzzing urban hub of the eastern Empire, under duress. Might he not be conscious of a parallel between his own dilemma and that which he depicts in Antony's life? This would have the implication that, as the individual ascetic cannot withdraw, entirely and permanently, from the monastic community, so the monastic community cannot withdraw from wider society. This may be why Athanasius repeatedly advocates attention to the eschaton, and why his descriptions of the heavenly kingdom are primarily future-oriented, despite the sometime manifestation of heaven in the here and now. He is uncomfortably conscious that not all of his readers can extract themselves from Roman society and build the kingdom.Footnote 95 The small manifestations of the kingdom act as images of the heavenly reality, giving his readers a sense of the kingdom which they await, and in relation to which they understand themselves.
The Vita's vision of a separate heavenly society on earth is indicative of Athanasius' greater political pessimism, by the late 350s–early 360s, relative to his youth. In De incarnatione Athanasius remarks on how astounding it is that Christian virtues are coming to be widely – although, of course, not universally – adopted.Footnote 96 In the Vita, it is extending through the desert, in a setting removed from the society embedded within the Roman Empire. Athanasius' early optimism about the manifestation of the heavenly kingdom in the here and now, and through the transformation of the social and political structures of the Roman Empire, has given way to a sense that this manifestation is only possible by withdrawing from those structures.Footnote 97
Heavenly strength amidst earthly upheaval
The idea that the kingdom of God can only be established outside of the Roman Empire's social and political structures might suggest rather a bleak political theology if Athanasius also, reluctantly, concludes that total withdrawal from society is not always possible. There is, indeed, profound uncertainty about the current life at the heart of the narrative. The Vita was written amidst great upheaval. Athanasius himself, having been deposed and reinstated several times, is likely to have been especially attuned to this.Footnote 98 Athanasius' discourse on heavenly citizenship has a partly pastoral purpose in this context.
The notion of the kingdom of heaven as a framework for self-understanding offers, among other things, resources for coping with uncertainty. So, the text offers recurrent reassurance; the reader is advised that ‘one need fear only God’.Footnote 99 The uncertainty of the political (and ecclesiastical) landscape inhabited by Athanasius is mirrored by the tempestuous and highly changeable demonic attacks that Antony faces. For example, in a speech to other monks, Antony declares:
The attack and appearance of evil spirits stirs up trouble with crashing and noise and screaming … from this comes fear in the soul, disorder and confusion of thoughts … whenever you see something that makes you afraid, if your fear is immediately removed and replaced by unspeakable joy, confidence and courage and a recovered calmness of thought … have courage and pray; for joy and a settled soul display the holiness of the one who is there.Footnote 100
Antony is described as similarly composed after twenty years of solitude, and, at the end of the Vita, Athanasius asserts that Antony ‘from youth to old age, persevered in constant eagerness for asceticism’.Footnote 101 Antony's steadfastness is grounded in faith, which enables an ‘untrembling soul’ in the face of bodily pain.Footnote 102 Moreover, he exhorts his listeners that demonic attacks can be vanquished if we ‘think on the Lord's things, and let the soul rejoice with hope’, suggesting that we can overcome present difficulties by orienting our thoughts to the future;Footnote 103 the implication is that we are to think on the eschaton. In the Vita, then, Athanasius contrasts the chaotic and warlike vagaries of the demonic order with the calm and peace that is brought through faith, and through focusing on ‘the Lord's things’ and the kingdom of heaven. Once again, Antony's struggle with the demons has implications for the Christian's relationship to social and political structures of the Roman Empire. In this instance, it has implications for the Christian's relationship to the inconstancy and chaos of these structures: the Christian need not – indeed ought not to – rely on them. Understanding oneself in relation to the heavenly kingdom similarly offers spiritual and emotional resources in the face of volatility.Footnote 104
A fundamental premise of the Vita’s theology is that human beings should strive to be heavenly citizens. At the time of writing, Athanasius was acutely conscious of the problems that earthly social and political entities could pose to this endeavour; he saw an alliance between Church and empire advancing a cause which he considered to be heretical, and he personally lost to this advance. Allegiance to earthly authority encourages the assumption of its values and worldview, which undermines allegiance to the heavenly kingdom and strays dangerously close to idolatry. It also prevents the human being from realising his or her true, Christ-like identity.
The social and political structures of the Roman Empire manifest the fallen nature of human beings. The Church stands in a problematic relation to the Roman Empire – its members are striving towards a reality in which political and social relationships will be radically reconstituted, and the empire represents that which is in need of reconstitution. Athanasius believes that Christians, transformed by Christ, can live Christ-like lives this side of the eschaton, and this leads him to believe, also, that the kingdom of heaven could be anticipated on earth, if only the Church could extract itself from corrupted social and political structures and practices. He realises that such an extraction could only ever be partially realised. The bishop, disillusioned by the world, is tempted by the life of the hermit, but his own, more worldly, experience causes him to treat the eremitic life with a certain caution. Anthropological optimism – based on the transforming power of Christ – is tempered by political pessimism.
Read in this way, the Vita sheds important fresh light on Athanasius' political theology. In the Vita, as in the Historia, Athanasius suggests that deference to and involvement in earthly power can be idolatrous, and links this with the alliance between Constantius and the Arians. However, whilst the Historia is primarily concerned with that alliance, the Vita explores the wider implications of the relationship between idolatry and earthly power for political theology and anthropology. Here, the relationship between idolatry and earthly power is more obviously treated as a fundamental problem facing fallen humanity, and in this sense the Vita is a more radical text. However, it is also more ambivalent about the right manner of engagement with earthly social and political structures, grounded in a sense of the fragility of human integrity.Footnote 105 It therefore reveals continuity and development between the Historia and the early optimism of De incarnatione. The Vita shares and extends many of the Historia's sensibilities, but also reflects on them as the failure of De incarnatione's hopes for the transformation of earthly society.
The Vita's exploration of the limits and possibilities for transforming earthly political structures also both grounds and reflects on Athanasius' more conciliatory interactions with Constantius. It is often observed that Athanasius behaved pragmatically towards imperial authority to promote his own interests and those of his theological cause, and that this resulted in extremely varied interactions with that authority.Footnote 106 The Vita suggests that Athanasius became agonisingly conscious of the peril and cost of his approach. It also shows a beleaguered sense that the alternatives – represented by total withdrawal from the empire and total assimilation to it – are likewise inadequate. Athanasius seeks a route for Christian self-understanding that acknowledges this painful reality.
The Vita raises more political questions than it answers; we might justly be dismayed by its eschatological focus as inadequate to address the evils to which it responds. None the less, there is an honesty in the Vita's searching, which tries to respond to a treacherous situation with integrity. This text, from a highly uncertain moment in the Church's history, offers resources for coping with uncertainty. In the face of the fickle and often violent vagaries of life within the late Roman Empire, Antony represents an earthly existence lived according to an order that is eternal. The monastic life cannot be a programme for building heaven on earth, at least insofar as such a programme would have to be universal. It can, however, act both as a model for struggling against the fallen world order, and as a kind of image of the heavenly kingdom, encouraging us to live in light of it. It is widely recognised that Athanasius holds up Antony as a model for Christian living. In so doing, Athanasius hoped to encourage his readers to reconsider the role of earthly power structures in shaping their identity.
