2. ‘Apart from its numerous miracles, the general tone of the Vita is unhistorical. It is a perfect romance of the desert, without a trace of human sinfulness to mar its beauty. The saint is an idealized ascetic hero, the mons Antonii a paradise of peaceful holiness. We cannot pass from the Scriptores Erotici to the Vita Antonii without noticing the same atmosphere of unreality in both. From Anthanasius there is all the difference of the novel writer from the orator—of the Cyropaedia from the de Corona.’
3. ‘Though Athanasius had ample room for miracles in the adventures of his long life, he never records anything of the sort.... But miracles, often of the most puerile description, are the staple of the Vita Antonii, and some of them are said to have been done before the eyes of Athanasius himself, who could not have omitted all reference to them in the writings of his exile.’
Again, the argument from silence.
4. ‘Antony is represented as an illiterate Copt, dependent on memory even for his knowledge of Scripture.’ Yet he alludes to Plato, Plotinus, &c., and in general reasons like a learned philosopher.
5. ‘The Vita Antonii has coincidences with Athanasius in language and doctrine, as we should expect in any professed work of his.... But the divergences are serious’....
6. It is implied throughout the Vita Antonii that the monks were extremely numerous throughout the East during Antony’s lifetime. Now there were monks in Egypt, monks of Serapis, long before; but Christian monks there were none’ (Studies of Arianism, pp. 100-2).
Now I am not for a moment going to disparage this display of learning. It is very clever; it is very scholarly: in the state of knowledge when it was written it was at least very excusable in its statements. Altogether it was as brilliant a piece of criticism as one would wish to see. To this day the objections read quite formidably. And yet the inference drawn from them is pretty certainly wrong; indeed the whole array is little more than an impressive bugbear.
With such warnings from the past before our eyes, I think we should be inclined to scrutinize rather closely arguments of a like kind when they meet us in the course of our present investigation.