The Death of Amun

And this is so. For once again he was sitting on the mountain, and looking up he saw someone being carried upward in the air, and there was great joy among those who met him. Wondering, and thinking such a company blessed, he prayed to learn what this might be. At once a voice came to him: “This is the soul of Amun, the monk at Nitria.” Now Amun had persevered in the discipline up to old age, and the distance from Nitria to the mountain where Antony was was thirteen days’ journey. So Antony’s companions, seeing the old man amazed, asked to know what it was, and heard that Amun had just died. And Amun was well known, for he had stayed there very often, and many signs had been worked through him. [a]

This is one of them. Once, when he needed to cross the river called the Lycus (and it was the season of the flood), he asked his companion Theodorus to stay at a distance, so that they would not see one another naked as they swam across. Then, when Theodorus had gone, he felt ashamed even to see himself naked. While he was pondering this, full of shame, he was suddenly carried over to the other side. Theodorus, who was himself a good man, came up, and seeing that Amun had crossed ahead of him without a drop of water falling from him, asked how he had gotten over. When he saw that Amun did not want to tell him, he took hold of his feet and declared that he would not let him go until he had learned it from him. So Amun, seeing Theodorus’s determination, especially from what he had said, asked him to tell no one before his death, and then told him that he had been carried over and set down on the far side, and that he had not even set foot on the water. Nor was that possible for a human being, but only for the Lord and those whom he permits, as he did for the great apostle Peter. So Theodorus told this after Amun’s death.

The monks to whom Antony had spoken about Amun’s death marked the day. When the brothers came up from Nitria thirty days later, they asked them and learned that Amun had fallen asleep on the very day and at the very hour when the old man had seen his soul carried upward. Both they and the others marveled at the purity of Antony’s soul, how he had at once learned what was taking place thirteen days’ journey away, and had seen the soul as it was taken up.