January 17 is the feast of St. Anthony Abbot (c. 251-356), the Egyptian hermit venerated as the father of Christian monasticism. The son of a wealthy Coptic landowner, he gave away his inheritance at the age of twenty, after hearing the Gospel read in church: "If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven" (Matthew 19:21). He lived as a hermit in the Eastern Desert of Egypt for eighty-five years, dying at 105.
The life of Anthony, written by St. Athanasius around 360, became one of the most influential books of late antiquity. It spread the ideal of the desert hermit through the Latin West — Augustine, in the Confessions (8.6), tells how two court officials at Trier were converted by reading it — and inspired the monastic movement from Egypt to Ireland. The temptations of St. Anthony, the subject of countless paintings from Hieronymus Bosch to Salvador Dalí, are the temptations of the desert: boredom, lust, hunger, and the devils that tormented him for decades.
The monastery of St. Anthony at the foot of the mountain where he lived, in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, is the oldest continuously inhabited monastery in the world. The church holds his tomb, and the Coptic monks keep the liturgy in the Coptic rite, the descendant of the rite Anthony knew. From Egypt to the Hospitaller Order of St. Anthony, founded in 1095 to care for the sick — the "St. Anthony's fire" of ergotism — the January 17 feast is the feast of the desert and of the animals blessed on his day.
