The Temptation of St. Anthony, true story Author unknown, circa 1300 Discovered and translated by K. Kuznetsov

This is the correct version of events that happened to St. Anthony, written down by your humble servant from the words of an honourable stranger who should remain unknown, but whose qualification and honesty are in high esteem. His honour never informed me on the exact nature of his connection to these events, yet the amount of detail provided during that one conversation proved the authenticity beyond any doubt.

It is well known that St. Anthony spent a night in an abandoned tomb and was assaulted by demons. However that assault was not the battering typically depicted in funny pictures so popular now, but an assault of a totally different kind.

St. Anthony woke up and heard a voice behind his back: “I think you are wrong.” He turned around and on discovering that there was no one else in the tomb decided to disregard the situation. “Must be the devil” - thought St. Anthony and proceeded to pray.

The voice with no body repeated after a while: “You know that opinion you have, yeah that one - it‘s wrong.” This slightly upset St. Anthony, but he was not in the habit of arguing with unseen strangers, and so he remained silent.

Next day right after breakfast the second voice, even nastier than the first one suddenly proclaimed: “You know, I think he’s right and you are indeed wrong.” This time St. Anthony couldn’t hold his tongue:

“Why are you such a dick, devil? I’ve always been right, I’m used to being right, why do you need to prove me wrong now? All of these years I’ve talked to people and they listened to me, and had no reason to doubt. Now I’ve said one controversial thing and you want me to admit I regret it?”

“You know you’re wrong because you doubt yourself. If you were an untainted saint I would have nothing on you, but here I am, Anthony. You’ve lost,”  replied the voice.

“Shut up devil, worst case scenario I will just apologise and everything will be alright again.”

The Devil did not answer, but the next day a full chorus of voices assaulted St. Anthony:

“Your opinion does not matter, because you are nothing and we are the legion.”

“Your apology does not matter, because we already know you are a liar and so will always stay a liar.”

“I will do unspeakable things to your friends and family, because you made me angry and I need to channel this anger.”

“I will cancel everything you’ve done, because of this one mistake - one mistake is all that matters.”

This buzzing greatly upset St. Anthony. He could no longer separate a singular voice from the crowd to argue, there was just one massive impenetrable wall of voices, and you cannot argue with a wall. So he started arguing with himself:

“What did I do to deserve this? Why am I fighting the whole world? How can you even win against the crowd, if no one listens to you? Should I give up? That would mean not only an admission of guilt, but the fact that I was actually wrong this whole time. Then what kind of saint am I? I wronged and I deceived people as a result. I was the devil all along.”

And thus St. Anthony lost.