Marcus Eremita

Mark the Hermit — Marcus Eremita in Latin, Mark the Ascetic in English translations — wrote in Greek in the first half of the fifth century. The record of his life is thin and partly legendary. Later Byzantine writers say he was a disciple of John Chrysostom, that he was abbot of a monastery near Ancyra in Galatia, and that he later withdrew to the desert; none of it can be confirmed from his own writings. He is generally reckoned to have died around 430. What survives is a set of short treatises, and one of them has a title that stops readers cold: On Those Who Think They Are Made Righteous by Works. Its argument is direct. The kingdom of heaven is not the wage owed for work done; it is the gift of a master to his servants. Christ died for us; we are not saved by our obedience but by his blood. Good works are the duty of a free man, not the purchase price of freedom. Whoever thinks his labour has earned him anything has not understood what happened at the cross. Mark states it in two hundred and twenty-six short sentences, each one a hammer stroke, and he keeps circling back to the same point: grace is given, not bought. He is not a Protestant born early, and it distorts him to say so. He is a monk writing to monks, and everything he says about grace is aimed at men whose whole day is discipline — men in the exact position to imagine that God owes them something. In his other works he presses just as hard the other way, insisting on repentance, watchfulness over thoughts, and the necessity of keeping the commandments. His teaching on baptism is that the grace of Christ is given whole and complete there, hidden in the depths of the heart, and that the Christian life is the uncovering of what was already given rather than the accumulation of merit. Other surviving pieces include On the Spiritual Law, a companion set of aphorisms; a treatise on repentance; one on baptism; and a discourse against the Nestorians. His reception has been remarkable. The Byzantine tradition ranked him very high — one old saying ran, 'Sell all you have and buy Mark.' Selections from him open the first volume of the Philokalia, the eighteenth-century anthology of Eastern spiritual writing that is still the standard collection. In the West he was read in Latin, and Reformation-era writers who came across the treatise on works quoted it with visible relief; the sixteenth-century editors printed it because it said, in a father of the ancient church, what they were being told was a novelty. Sources: Mark the Ascetic, On the Spiritual Law and On Those Who Think They Are Made Righteous by Works (in The Philokalia, volume 1); Nicephorus Callistus, Ecclesiastical History (for the later traditions about his life); the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.