There's No Need to Go It Alone

One of the early Church Fathers, Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, provides a telling story of a courageous monk who found communion with God in a shanty, located on a lofty Egyptian mountainside. This monk, Saint Anthony of Egypt, was transformed by the hearing of scripture while attending church one morning. His heart became transfixed on the following passage and later it took root as a portent of faith to come:

After the death of his father and mother he was left alone with one little sister: his age was about eighteen or twenty, and on him the care both of home and sister rested…Pondering over these things he entered the church, and it happened the Gospel was being read, and he heard the Lord saying to the rich man, ‘If thou wouldest be perfect, go and sell that thou hast and give to the poor; and come follow Me and thou shalt have treasure in heaven.’ Antony [Anthony] as though God had put him in mind of the Saints, and the passage had been read on his account, went out immediately from the church, and gave possessions of his forefathers to the villagers (Schaff & Wace, 2004, p. 196).

Saint Anthony interpreted the reading of scripture as his invitation into a spiritual vocation that the early Church was in the process of coming to grips with in the 4th century CE—asceticism.

Asceticism became the mode of best practices for those searching for communion with God. These practices entailed solitude, contemplation, fasting, and prayer. The goal of asceticism is to denounce aspects of living that are common to most (companionship, food, entertainment, etc.) in the hopes of gaining something purer and better for the ascetic—the glory of God.

The early Church was caught within this tension of the individual search for God and its institutional belief that communal worship equates to salvation. It was to the Church’s credit that it soon reconciled itself with the ascetic through the support and encouragement of the taking of vows or orders from monastic communities which centered its life and ministry from the guidance of a rule or set of communal guidelines, e.g., the Rule of Saint Benedict and of Saint Francis. Although we often think of the ascetic life as a solitary endeavor, the search for the glory of God soon became known as a communal one where communities of monks and nuns centered their lives through the teachings of the great ascetic figures of their time.