Saint Macarius the Great (300-391)

The "beacon of the desert"

In the memory of the Church, Macarius holds a singular place among the Desert Fathers. He is neither the very first (that honour belongs to Anthony), nor the great lawgiver of the common life (that would be Pachomius): he is the father of the desert of Scetis, the master par excellence of semi-anchoretic monasticism — an intermediate form in which the monks live alone in their cell during the week and gather only on Saturday and Sunday for the Eucharist and teaching^[7]. His reputation for holiness is such that, already in his lifetime, he is called "the Great", and posterity would give him the titles of "beacon of the desert" and "Spirit-bearer"^[8].

Macarius wrote almost nothing with his own hand: like Anthony, he belongs to a world of oral transmission, where wisdom is received from an elder and kept in the memory of the disciples. That is why we know him chiefly through three channels: the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, in which he occupies one of the fullest series; the Lausiac History of Palladius, who knew him indirectly through his disciples; and the Historia Monachorum published under the name of Rufinus of Aquileia^[9][10][11].

Macarius of Egypt and Macarius of Alexandria

A frequent confusion must be cleared up at the outset: in the Egyptian desert of the 4th century there were two Macarii, contemporaries and equally famous.

The two men were friends, shared the same Arian exile, and tradition often associates them; but it is Macarius of Egypt — the one of Scetis — who is designated par excellence as "Macarius the Great", the subject of this article^[12][13].

Shabsheer and the natron trade

Macarius was born around 300 in the village of Shabsheer (Shanshour), in Lower Egypt, in the Nile Delta region^[14]. Coptic tradition gives his parents the names of Abraham and Sarah, a deliberate echo of the great figures of the Old Testament^[15]. It was a modest Christian family of rural condition.

In his youth, Macarius practised a hard and solitary trade: the transport and commerce of natron, the natural saltpetre harvested in the desert depressions near Nitria, used in the making of glass and soap and in embalming^[16][17]. This labour regularly took him to the edges of the desert: without yet knowing it, the young caravaneer was already skirting the solitudes where he would spend his life. Providence was thus preparing, through an obscure trade, the man who would settle those sands.

Marriage, bereavement and first steps in asceticism

At his parents' wish, Macarius married, but he was widowed very early, then lost his parents soon after^[18][19]. Free of every tie, he began to lead a life of asceticism at the edge of his village, under the guidance of an old hermit, and received ordination as lector. Like Anthony before him, it is the stripping away of worldly ties — not by flight, but by total availability to God — that opens his vocation. But before the desert, a trial would mark him like a branding iron.

The unjust accusation

A pregnant young woman of the village publicly accused him of being the father of her child^[20][21]. The accusation was false, yet Macarius did not defend himself. Rather than plead his innocence and enter into quarrel, he accepted the disgrace in silence. Beaten and humiliated by the villagers, he worked with his hands — weaving baskets — to provide for the needs of the woman who accused him, as if he were truly the guilty one^[22].

This scene, which tradition reports with insistence, is not a mere feat of heroic humility: it already reveals Macarius's spiritual doctrine, the one that would structure all his teaching — dying to the judgement of men, depending no longer on either their contempt or their esteem.

Vindication and flight

When the time of childbirth came, the woman could not give birth. In her pains, she ended by publicly confessing the truth and naming the real father^[23][24]. Macarius was cleared; the village that had beaten him now wished to honour him. But Macarius fled this glory as he had borne the shame: to escape men's vain esteem, he sank definitively into the desert of Scetis^[25]. Unjust slander thus became the door of his vocation: he left the world not bitter, but free.

Why Scetis?

Scetis — today Wadi El Natrun, about 90 kilometres south-west of Alexandria — is one of the most inhospitable lands of Egypt: a long saline depression, with no village and no abundant spring, hours of walking from any dwelling^[26]. It is precisely this extreme isolation that Macarius sought. Where Nitria and the Cells remained relatively accessible, Scetis offered the most radical solitude. By settling there, Macarius made this desert the third great centre of Egyptian monasticism.

The foundation of the monastic colony

Macarius settled at Scetis around 330, still young^[27]. Alone at first, he soon attracted disciples who established themselves around him in scattered cells. Thus was born, under his fatherhood, a colony of hermits organised on the semi-anchoretic model: each one prays and works alone in his cell during the week; all gather on Saturday and Sunday for the Eucharistic synaxis and the elder's teaching^[28][29].

Coptic tradition states that he became the spiritual father of several thousand monks of every nationality, making Scetis a true people of the desert^[30]. From this colony would come four great monasteries still alive today in Wadi El Natrun.

The disciple of Saint Anthony

Macarius desired to meet the greatest of the hermits. He went to Saint Anthony the Great, whose disciple he became, receiving from him the purest tradition of the anchoretic life^[31][32]. Tradition reports that, seeing the limpidity of his soul, Anthony said of him what Christ said of Nathanael:

"Here is a true Israelite, in whom there is no guile." — words attributed to Saint Anthony concerning Macarius, echoing John 1:47^[33]

This bond between the two men is decisive: it makes Macarius the direct heir of Anthony, the link through which the spirit of the first hermit was passed on to all the monastic posterity of Scetis.

Priest of the desert at about forty

At about forty years of age (thus around 340), Macarius was ordained priest^[34][35]. This ordination was not sought after by the monks, who distrusted honours; it answered a concrete need: a priest was required to celebrate the holy mysteries on Sunday for the benefit of the hermits of Scetis. Macarius thus became the de facto hegumen (father-abbot) of the colony, dispensing both the Eucharist and the spiritual word.

The battle against the demons

Like all the Desert Fathers, Macarius is a man of spiritual combat. The Sayings and the Lausiac History show him confronting the demons not by violence, but by humility and prayer. A famous saying reports that the devil, meeting him, confessed his own defeat:

"I suffer much violence from you, Macarius, for I cannot overcome you. For behold, all that you do, I do also: you fast, and I eat nothing at all; you keep vigil, and I never sleep at all. There is only one thing in which you surpass me: your humility." — Sayings, Macarius the Great series^[36]

This saying sums up the whole spirituality of the Fathers: asceticism alone does not save — the demons "fast" more than men do; it is humility that disarms the Enemy.

Discernment and gentleness

Palladius and the Sayings stress Macarius's gentleness, which contrasts with the spectacular austerity of his Alexandrian namesake. His firmness was never harshness. Asked about how to flee the sin of judgement, he taught by example rather than by speeches, refusing to condemn the sinner even when caught in the act, covering the brother's fault as one covers nakedness^[37].

"Become dead": dying to the judgement of men

The heart of Macarius's teaching lies in a scene that has become one of the most famous sayings of the desert. A brother asked him how to be saved. Macarius sent him to the cemetery to insult the dead, then to praise them. The brother returned: the dead had answered nothing, neither to the insults nor to the praises. And Macarius concluded:

"You know how you insulted them and they answered you nothing; how you praised them and they said nothing to you. You too, if you wish to be saved, become dead: care neither for the contempt of men nor for their praises, like the dead; thus you will be able to be saved." — Sayings, Macarius the Great series^[38]

This is exactly the lesson Macarius had learned in the trial of slander: inner freedom is born of death to the gaze of others. So long as the soul depends on men's opinion, it remains enslaved; dead to that dependence, it becomes free for God alone.

Brief and continual prayer

Macarius is also a master of prayer. To those who believed length of discourse necessary, he opposed the simplicity of continual supplication:

"There is no need at all to make long discourses; it is enough to stretch out one's hands and say: 'Lord, as you will and as you know, have mercy.'" — Sayings, Macarius the Great series, 19^[39]

This saying heralds from afar the tradition of the Jesus Prayer and of prayer of the heart, which would become the riches of Eastern monasticism. Another time, dismissing the assembly of monks, Macarius simply laid his finger on his mouth, saying: "Flee this" — that is, vain chatter — before returning to his cell^[40].

The skull in the desert: prayer for the dead

A striking saying shows the supernatural dimension attributed to Macarius. Walking in the desert, he found a dried skull; touching it with his staff, he questioned it, and the skull answered him: it was that of a pagan priest. Questioned on the fate of the damned, the dead man declared that, at the very bottom of the abyss, when Macarius prays for the departed, the damned themselves receive a moment of relief, being able to glimpse one another's faces a little^[41]. This story, to be read with the supernatural realism proper to the Fathers, illustrates the power of the saints' intercession and the value of prayer for the dead — a theme dear to Catholic tradition.

Facing Arianism: exile under Valens

In the 4th century, the Church was torn by the Arian crisis, which denied the full divinity of the Son. The monks of the desert, Macarius in the first rank, remained unshakeably faithful to the faith of Nicaea and to Saint Athanasius of Alexandria, the defender of orthodoxy.

Under Emperor Valens, favourable to the Arians, the Arian bishop of Alexandria Lucius undertook to break the monks' resistance. Around 374, the two Macarii — the Egyptian and the Alexandrian — were arrested and exiled to an island of the Nile populated by pagans^[42][43]. Far from silencing them, the exile turned to their glory: through their prayers, they healed the pagan priest's daughter of the island; overwhelmed, the inhabitants converted and turned their temple into a church^[44]. Learning of this reversal, Valens himself allowed the two saints to return to their desert^[45].

"They were sent into exile to an island of Egypt where Christianity had never been heard of… and there, by their miracles, they converted all the inhabitants." — after Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, IV^[46]

The dead man raised against the heretic

Tradition reports another dazzling prodigy. To confound a heretic who denied the resurrection of the dead, Macarius is said to have led him to a tomb and, by his prayer, made a dead man speak from the depths of the sepulchre, attesting the reality of the life to come^[47][48]. Whether these stories are read as history or as hagiographical tradition, they say one true thing about Macarius in the Church's memory: he was held to be a thaumaturge, a man through whom God manifested His power against error.

The Macarian corpus: the Fifty Spiritual Homilies

Under the name of Macarius of Egypt there has circulated, since antiquity, a body of spiritual texts — foremost among them the famous Fifty Spiritual Homilies (Homiliae spirituales)^[49]. This corpus, of great depth, describes the Christian life as an inner experience of the Holy Spirit's action, a transformation of the heart in which the soul, wounded by sin, is progressively inhabited and divinised by grace. Admirable pages are found there on the indwelling of Christ in the heart:

"The soul that really loves God and Christ, though it may do ten thousand righteousnesses, esteems itself as having wrought nothing, by reason of its insatiable aspiration after God." — attributed to Macarius, Spiritual Homilies^[50]

This spiritual current exercised a considerable influence, in East as in West, on all mysticism of the heart and on the doctrine of continual prayer.

The question of attribution — and its limits

Part of contemporary exegesis doubts the attribution of these homilies to the historical Macarius of Scetis. Several scholars (notably following the work of Hermann Dörries) attach them rather to an anonymous Syro-Mesopotamian author of the late 4th century, designated by convention as "Pseudo-Macarius", and suspect that this corpus circulated in circles marked by Messalianism, a spiritual movement suspected of overvaluing the sensible experience of grace to the detriment of the sacraments^[51][52].

This hypothesis deserves to be set out honestly, but also weighed with prudence:

• It rests on literary and doctrinal parallels, not on a decisive document naming another author; it is a scholarly reconstruction, revisable, not a closed demonstration.
• The manuscript tradition has constantly transmitted these texts under the name of Macarius: this ancient and unanimous witness is not to be swept aside with the back of the hand.
• The suspicion of Messalianism assumes precisely what would need proving: several passages of the corpus are on the contrary fully orthodox, insisting on humility, combat and the need for grace, and the Church has read them with profit for centuries without seeing heresy in them.

It is therefore right to say that direct attribution to the Macarius of Scetis is debated, without thereby disqualifying either the saint or the spiritual richness of this corpus. The historical Macarius remains first of all the one of the Sayings — brief, ancient sources solidly rooted in the desert's memory — where his spiritual physiognomy is best assured.

Death around 391

After more than sixty years of life in the desert, Macarius died around 391, at about ninety years of age^[53][54]. He passed away amid the community he had founded, leaving behind him not a written work, but a people of monks and a living spiritual tradition.

The monastery of Saint Macarius (Deir Abu Maqar)

From the colony of Scetis came the monastery of Saint Macarius — Deir Abu Maqar — one of the four great monasteries still active in Wadi El Natrun. Inhabited without interruption since the 4th century, it is one of the oldest working monasteries in the world^[55]. It houses the saint's relics and was long the place where many Coptic patriarchs of Alexandria were ordained and buried. For the organised communal monastic life according to a written rule, which developed in parallel, see Saint Pachomius; for its later influence in East and West, see Saint Basil the Great and Saint Benedict of Nursia.

Cult and liturgical feast

Macarius is venerated as a saint in all the great Christian traditions. His feast is celebrated:

• on January 19 in the Byzantine calendar (Orthodox Churches);
• on January 15 in the Roman Martyrology (Latin Church);
• on 27 Paremhat (April 5) in the Coptic Orthodox Church^[56][57].

Iconography depicts him as an old man with a very long white beard, dressed in the monastic cowl; one tradition shows him accompanied by a cherub, in memory of a vision reported by the desert accounts.

Spiritual posterity

Macarius's influence far exceeds his own figure. Through Scetis, he shaped semi-anchoretic monasticism, which was to spread throughout the East. Among the monks formed in the wake of Scetis was Evagrius Ponticus, one of the greatest theoreticians of the spiritual life, whose thought passed to the West through John Cassian. Through the Sayings, the voice of Macarius — his gentleness, his humility, his "become dead" — has never ceased to nourish Christians' inner life. With Anthony, he remains one of the two great pillars of the Egyptian desert, that desert which, in the famous saying, "became a city".

• Saint Anthony the Great — the father of all monasticism, Macarius's master.
• Saint Pachomius — the founder of cenobitism, Macarius's contemporary.
• Saint Athanasius of Alexandria — the defender of Nicaea whom the desert monks supported.
• Arianism — the heresy that earned Macarius exile.
• Saint Basil the Great and Saint Benedict of Nursia — the great monastic lawgivers who gathered the desert's legacy.