Ammonas

Who is Ammonas?

Ammonas, Amoun, or Ammonius the Hermit was a 4th-century Christian ascetic and the founder of one of the most celebrated monastic communities in Egypt. Pushed into marriage by his family, he managed to persuade his bride to take a vow of chastity together with him by the authority of St. Paul's Epistle to the Corinthians. They lived together this way for 18 years, when at her wish, they parted, and he retired to Scetis and Mt. Nitria, to the south of Lake Mareotis, where he lived 22 years, visiting his sister-wife twice a year. He died before St. Anthony the Great from whom there is an epistle to him. that is, before the year 365, for the latter asserted that he "saw the soul of Amoun borne by angels to heaven", and as St. Athanasius's history of St. Antony preserves the order of time, he died perhaps about 320. There are generally seventeen or nineteen Rules of Asceticism ascribed to him; the Greek original exists in manuscript; they were published in the Latin version of Gerardus Vossius. Twenty-two Ascetic Institutions of the same Amoun, or one bearing the same name, exist also in manuscript. There is a collection of his letters in the Patrologia Orientalis, volume 10/6.