Lazarus El Anthony was born into a Protestant Christian family in Tasmania, Australia, where he attended Methodist and Roman Catholic church services as a child.
He was married to Ruby and held a teaching position at Ballarat University in the late eighties.
After his mother died he had a personal crisis left his wife and become a monk at the St. Sava Serbian Orthodox Monastery near Geelong in Australia and then at Mount Athos in Greece.
There, he currently lives an ascetic life in the footsteps of Saint Anthony the Great and the other Desert Fathers.
[4] He has also been featured in a full-length episode of the BBC's Extreme Pilgrim,[5] and in The Last Anchorite,[6] a documentary film by filmmaker Remigiusz Sowa.