This book revolutionizes our understanding of the life and thought of the great anchorite father of the Egyptian desert. It is a signal contribution to our knowledge of Egyptian Christianity in the third and fourth centuries.—Birger Pearson, Institute for Antiquity and Christianity Samuel Rubenson, by means of a fresh analysis of the letters of St. Antony, exposes the distortion of the picture of early Christian monks as unlettered and primitive. Rubenson describes the desert monasteries as centers of theological reflection in Egypt, showing how they combined the speculative philosophy of the Greeks and the biblical tradition. Included in this volume is a new translation of the letters themselves, which are shown to be authentic and an important source for the study of the desert fathers and the early monastic tradition. The later image of Antony is demonstrated to be influenced by church politics of the latter part of the fourth century. Samuel Rubenson is Associate Professor at Lund University, Lund, Sweden.

Athanasius, one of the most influential church fathers in history, records in his Life of Antony of Egypt the story of another extremely influential figure of early Christianity. Albert Haase's paraphrase of this important work gives us access to a masterwork of spiritual formation, that we too might know God as richly as Athanasius did.

The book reproduces the cleaned paintings for the first time. It also describes and analyzes their amalgam of Coptic (Egyptian Christian), Byzantine, and Arab styles and motifs as well as the religious culture to which they belong. In 1996, funded by the United States Agency for International Development and at the request of the Monastery of St. Antony, the Antiquities Development Project of the American Research Center in Egypt began the conservation of the paintings in the church. The paintings revealed by the conservators are of extremely high quality, both stylistically and conceptually. While rooted in the Christian tradition of Egypt, they also reveal explicit connections with Byzantine and Islamic art of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Some newly discovered paintings can even be dated back to the sixth or seventh century.

Charles Warren Stoddard St. Anthony of Padua - lector, orator, contemplative, wonder-worker - is considered to be the most popular Saint in the Catholic Church. He was of French descent, from Portugal, but worked in Italy as a Franciscan priest. Renowned for his incredible miracles - including preaching to the fish when people would not listen to him - he is most famous as "The Patron Saint of Lost Objects," but he bears many other great titles, e.g., Doctor of the Church, Hammer of Heretics, Storehouse of Sacred Scripture, Father of Mystic Theology, Ark of Both Testaments, Champion of the Sacred Heart, Apostle of Mary's Assumption, Protector of Seafarers and Patron of a Bountiful Harvest. St. Bonaventure said of him that "He possessed the science of the Angels, the faith of the Patriarchs, the foreknowledge of the Prophets, the zeal of the Apostles, the purity of virgins, the austerities of confessors, and the heroism of martyrs." In all, one will search hard in the annals of the Saints to find a more fascinating and inspiring life than that of St. Anthony of Padua.

Instrumental in the conversion of many, including Augustine, The Life of Antony provided the model for subsequent saints' life and constituted, in the words of patristics scholar Johannes Quasten, 'the most important document of early monasticism.'

Thomas Merton wrote The Silent Life a decade after he took orders. In his Prologue, Merton describes the book as "a meditation on the monastic life by one who, without any merit of his own, is privileged to know that life on the inside . . . who seeks only to speak as the mouthpiece of a tradition centuries old." It is a remarkable work-one that combines a lucid and informative description of the nature and forms of monasticism, communal and solitary, with a passionate defense of the contemplative's quest for God. The intense beauty of Merton's meditation, radiating from beneath its surface calm, makes The Silent Life a classic of its kind.