HE was by extraction of a noble Phrygian family, but born at a country
seat near Constantinople, where his parents lived retired for fear of
the persecution and infection of the Iconoclasts. From twelve years of
age he served God with great fervor, in a monastery of the city, which
some moderns pretend to have been that of Studius. In process of time he
was chosen abbot, and, upon the death of Stephen, brother to the emperor
Leo VI., surnamed the Wise, or the Philosopher, patriarch of
Constantinople in 893. His predecessor had succeeded Photius in 886,
(whom this emperor expelled,) and labored strenuously to extinguish the
schism he had formed, and restore the peace of the church over all the
East. St. Antony completed this great work, and in a council in which he
presided at Constantinople, condemned or reformed all that had been done
by Photius during his last usurpation of that see, after the death of
St. Ignatius. The acts of this important council are entirely lost,
perhaps through the malice of those Greeks who renewed this unhappy
schism. A perfect spirit of mortification, penance, and prayer,
sanctified this great pastor, both in his private and public life. He
died in the year 896, of his age sixty-seven, on the 12th of February,
on which day his name is inserted in the Greek Menaea, and in the Roman
Martyrology. See an historical panegyric on his virtues, spoken soon
after his death by a certain Greek philosopher named Nicephorus, in the
Bollandists. Le Quien, Oriens Christianus, t. 3; also t. 1, p. 250.
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