Bosch’s paintings of the Temptation of St. Anthony (Photos)

St. Anthony the Abbot has a colorful history. Born to wealthy parents in 3rd-century Egypt, as a young man he heard the call of God to give everything away he’d inherited from them and disappear into the desert to fast, pray, and do battle with his sins. Stories abound about how the solitary eccentric lived in a hole in the ground and personally battled the devil.

He was so inspiring that would-be monks flocked to meet live near him, which caused Anthony to go to even more remote areas. His life is the stuff of (true) legend, but ultimately his goal was quite simple – he wanted to overcome sin and love God the best he could.

Typically, we don’t think of the calm, patient, and frustrating work of overcoming our habitual vices as glamorous. There’s very little of the Arthurian knight or Odyssean hero in all those repeated trips to the confessional to admit to the same old sins. Personally, I’m not out battling dragons and sailing a sea populated with sirens. I’m just a guy in the confessional naming off my boring sins for the thousandth time. We think of sin as glamorous but all I’ve experienced is the numbness of it. Occasionally it gets so repetitive that it’s embarrassing.

Perhaps we’ve been thinking about our spiritual disciplines all wrong, though, and the story of St. Anthony is one of those signposts we’re occasionally graced with that point to the heroic nature of the interior life. It’s an exciting and challenging journey, and we ought not take it lightly.

If sin is boring, the battle against them is every bit as heroic as Beowulf hunting monsters.

The artist Hieronymus Bosch certainly thought of it this way. He had a great interest in St. Anthony and painted him repeatedly. He painted two versions of the temptation of St. Anthony, both of which depict the saint deeply absorbed in his usual pursuit – sitting quietly by himself and struggling against the temptation to sin. The saint himself might be solitary and focused, but Bosch splashes out the drama of the interior battle in depictions of wild monsters and evil-looking demons.

But what I want to focus on is the pig.

The Temptation of St. Anthony shows the saint sitting by a stream, lost in thought. There’s a pig next to him looking for all the world like a domesticated pet. It looks slightly more at peace than its master, even though a wild, bird-monster thing is about to take a swing at it with a hammer. Bosch is famous for painting imaginatively horrifying scenes and his paintings of St. Anthony are no exception. They’re crawling with terror.

In the Triptych of the Temptation of St. Anthony (similarly named but a completely different painting), the middle panel is the one with the pig. St. Anthony is inside his cell in quiet prayer near a crucifix. Outside, all sorts of temptations compete for his attention. Among them is a pig-faced man wearing a black robe. It’s a truly odd-looking creature.

(See the PHOTO GALLERY at the end of this article to view The Temptation of St. Anthony as imagined by Bosch and other painters.)

Saints are often depicted with symbols. The Blessed Virgin Mary, for instance, often holds a white lily, and there’s always St. Peter with his keys. Well, for St. Anthony it’s pigs.

During my research for this article I came across a website called porkopolis.org (the internet can be a wonderful place), which has archived, of all things, a song dedicated to St. Anthony and his special pig:

I sing St. Anthony and his fav’rite swine:
Who, strange to tell, like you and I could speak,
When other grov’ling pigs could only squeak.

No one is quite sure of the exact symbolic meaning of the pig, but there are some guesses.

One explanation would have it that the pig is a symbol of the uncleanness of sin. St. Anthony, in taming the pig, is taming his own temptations.

A similar line of thought would have it that the pig is an embodiment of the demonic. St. Athanasius, in his biography of St. Anthony, mentions that sometimes when the devil appeared to tempt him in the desert, he took the form of a pig.

Another possible connection could be the role of St. Anthony in interceding for people with skin disease. In the ancient world, pig fat had a medicinal use in controlling symptoms.

Perhaps the most convincing explanation, though, came much later. The Hospitallers of St. Anthony was founded around 1095 by Gaston of Dauphiné. The order raised money for their charitable activities by raising and selling pigs.

The exact reason will never be known, but thanks to Bosch and his paintings, the connection of St. Anthony to pigs will never be lost. If anything, what it reveals to me when I look at those paintings is that the interior life of every Christian is a wild desert. We shouldn’t ever make the mistake of thinking that our spiritual disciplines are boring because, in fact, we are every day in the midst of a heroic battle, a battle we can win.