Among the most famous of the Egyptian Christian ascetics was Saint Anthony the Great. Anthony was himself quite literally a rich young man—the son and heir of a wealthy family who at the age of twenty went to church and heard Christ’s exhortation to poverty and promptly “sold all he had, gave the proceeds to the poor and from then on lived the life of a hermit.”6 His devotion to self-denial was a legendary model for generations of monks who came after him.
