St. Anthony gave away three hundred acres at nineteen

COMA, Middle Egypt, 270 AD — It took about three and a third acres of Egyptian farmland to feed one person for a year. All over Roman Egypt, families rented patches of ground smaller than that. Saint Anthony was about nineteen, and he owned three hundred acres. That was enough land to feed about ninety people for a year.

He had just buried his father and his mother. The family lived at Coma, a village in Middle Egypt near the old city of Heracleopolis. They were Christians, and they were rich. Now the house, the land and his little sister were all his.

St. Anthony now had to decide what happened to the land. He had to decide about the people who worked it too. His parents had already let him run the house while they were alive. The three hundred acres were not one huge square field. Farms in Egypt were made up of lots of separate patches, scattered around the village’s ground. His patches were good ground, and they grew a great deal of food.

He did not have to do the digging. His family owned slaves. A farm that size was usually rented out in pieces to tenants. They brought their own tools with them.

Less than six months after the funerals, he was walking to church, the way he always did. On the way he got to thinking about the apostles, who had left all they had and followed the Saviour. He came in while the Gospel was being read. What he heard was the Lord’s answer to a rich young man: “If you would be perfect, go and sell that you have and give to the poor; and come follow Me and you shall have treasure in heaven.”

St. Anthony took the words as spoken to him, and he did not go home to think it over. He walked straight back out of the door. Then he handed all three hundred acres to the people of his own village. That way the land would not be a burden on him or on his sister.

Then he sold everything in the house that could be carried out. He gave the money to the poor. He kept back a little for his sister. At another Sunday’s reading he heard “be not anxious for the morrow”. He gave her share away too.

That left the sister. She was still small, and her brother was about to go off and live on his own. Before he settled anything, St. Anthony talked to his sister about love, about truth and about the fear of God. By the end she wanted the same thing he wanted.

Then he took her to some women who lived nearby and had promised God they would never marry. He knew them and trusted them. He left with them what she needed to be brought up and taught there.

There were not many monasteries in Egypt yet, and no monk had ever gone off to the deep desert. Anyone who wanted that kind of life lived alone near his own village. St. Anthony started in a house just outside Coma. Over the years he moved further and further out. In the end he was living in the desert across the Nile, and monks settled on the mountains near him.

He was an old man when those monks asked him to come down and visit them. He set out with a camel carrying loaves and water. There was no water fit to drink anywhere in that desert except at his own mountain. The water ran out on the way. The heat was fierce, and the men with him could go no further.

St. Anthony walked a little way off, knelt down and prayed. At once the Lord made water come up out of the ground.

When he came down to the monks’ cells, his sister was there. She was old by then. She had never married, and she was the one in charge of the other women. He was glad to see her.