St Antony the Great

251 to 356. That is one hundred and five years. The dates are disputed but the tradition insists on a very long life, and there is something theologically fitting about this: the man who started the whole movement lived long enough to see what it became.

Antony the Great is the founding figure of Christian monasticism. In his early twenties, he heard the gospel read in church — "Go, sell what you have and give to the poor" — and took it completely literally. He gave away his inheritance and went into the desert. Within a generation, thousands of people had followed him out there, drawn by a hunger for something the ordinary world was not providing.

He was not primarily a theologian. He was not primarily a writer. He was primarily a practitioner — someone who went somewhere difficult and stayed there, who prayed and struggled and wrestled with what the tradition calls the passions, and who eventually became a person that other people traveled hundreds of miles to sit with. What they were coming for was not his ideas. It was what he had become.

The 170 texts attributed to him in the Philokalia were almost certainly written down by disciples rather than by Antony himself. What matters is that the tradition wanted his name on them — wanted the authority of the originator, the man who started the river, attached to these practical instructions on how to live in it. He is the source. Everything else in the Philokalia is, in some sense, downstream from the choice he made as a young man when he heard that gospel reading and believed it meant him.