The Temptation of Saint Antony

About

Flaubert worked on his prose poem The Temptation of Saint Antony for nearly thirty years across three radically different versions (1849, 1856, 1874), producing a work he described as 'the book of my whole life.' Cast in dramatic form — Antony debates a parade of heresies, gods, and visions in a hallucinatory sequence — it is less a play than a vast philosophical spectacle for the mind's stage. Flaubert drew on every heterodox theology and mystical tradition he could find; the result is encyclopedic, visionary, and deliberately impossible to stage in any conventional sense. It deeply influenced Symbolist and Surrealist artists, and Foucault called it the founding document of the library as imaginative space.