The life of St Ammon of Egypt
On their wedding night he persuaded his bride to embrace a life of shared chastity instead, reading to her from Scripture though she could not read herself, and she agreed; for eighteen years they lived together as brother and sister in the same house, he tending a balsam grove by day and both keeping to prayer. At her own urging, since she felt his gifts should not remain hidden on her account, they parted by mutual consent: she turned their home into a house for women pursuing the same life, and he withdrew into the Nitrian desert, where hardly any monks had yet settled, and lived alone in asceticism for another twenty-two years.
He became a close friend of Antony the Great and drew many disciples to Nitria, helping found what grew into one of the great monastic settlements of Egypt. Ammon reposed around the middle of the fourth century; Antony himself, according to his own near-contemporary biographer, saw Ammon's soul carried up to heaven by angels at the hour of his death.
