His Last Counsel to the Monks, and on Burial

It is worthwhile for me to tell, and for you to hear, since you want to, what his death was like. For this end of his is worth imitating. As was his custom, he was visiting the monks in the outer mountain, and having learned from Providence that his own end was near, he said to the brothers: “This is the last visit I will make to you, and I will be surprised if we see each other again in this life. The time of my departure has come at last, for I am nearly a hundred and five years old.” When they heard it they wept, and embraced and kissed the old man. But he spoke joyfully, like a man sailing from a foreign city to his own, and urged them: “Do not grow idle in your labors or faint in your training, but live as though dying daily. And, as I have said before, guard the soul zealously from foul thoughts, imitate the saints eagerly, and have nothing to do with the Melitian schismatics, for you know their wicked and profane character. Have no fellowship with the Arians either, for their ungodliness is plain to all. Do not be disturbed if you see the judges protecting them, for it will come to an end; their pomp is mortal and short-lived. So keep yourselves all the more untainted by them, and observe the traditions of the fathers, and above all the holy faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, which you have learned from the Scripture and of which I have often reminded you.” [a]

When the brothers urged him to stay with them and die there, he would not allow it, for many other reasons, as he showed by keeping silent, but especially for this one. The Egyptians are accustomed to honor the bodies of good men, and especially of the holy martyrs, with funeral rites, and to wrap them in linen cloths at death; but they do not bury them underground. Instead they place them on couches and keep them in their houses, thinking that in this way they honor the departed. Antony often urged the bishops to give the people instructions about this. In the same way he taught the lay people and rebuked the women, saying that this practice was neither lawful nor holy at all: “The bodies of the patriarchs and prophets are preserved in tombs to this day, and the very body of the Lord was laid in a tomb, and a stone was laid over it and hid it until he rose on the third day.” By saying this he showed that anyone who did not bury the bodies of the dead after death broke the law, even if the bodies were holy. For what is greater or holier than the body of the Lord? So many who heard him buried the dead underground from then on, and thanked the Lord that they had been taught rightly. [c]