Macarius of Egypt

Macarius was born in Upper Egypt about 300. He worked as a camel driver hauling natron from the salt lakes, which is how he came to know the empty country west of the Nile delta. At about thirty he went out to live there, in the wilderness of Scetis, and stayed roughly sixty years.

He was ordained a priest so that the men who had gathered around him could receive the sacrament, and the settlement he founded became one of the four great monastic centers of the Egyptian desert. It survives: the monastery that bears his name in the Wadi Natrun has been continuously inhabited for about sixteen hundred years.

He is called Macarius the Great and Macarius the Egyptian, partly to distinguish him from his friend Macarius of Alexandria, who lived in the same desert at the same time. Both were disciples in spirit of Antony, and both were exiled briefly to an island in the Nile delta by an Arian bishop of Alexandria under the emperor Valens. Macarius the Great died about 391.

The stories about him in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers are consistent in one thing: he refused to condemn people. A monk who had stolen from him he helped load the cart. Brothers who came to him about another's sin got a story about his own. Asked how to be saved, he told a man to go to the cemetery and abuse the dead, then to go back and praise them, and then to notice that the dead answered neither, 'be like that.' His most quoted line is the shortest prayer in the desert literature: 'Lord, have mercy.' Asked why he did not use more words, he said God knows what we need.

A large collection of Greek homilies and letters travelled under his name, the Fifty Spiritual Homilies, plus other discourses, and they became one of the most influential spiritual texts in Christian history. They teach that the heart is the field where God and evil contend, that grace is genuinely felt and not merely believed, that the Christian should expect real experience of the Spirit, and that no one is safe from falling until the end.

Modern scholars have argued for more than a century that these homilies were probably not written by the Egyptian Macarius but by a Syrian author of the later fourth or early fifth century, sometimes linked to the Messalian movement. The debate is not settled. What is not in doubt is where the book went. It shaped Gregory of Nyssa, ran through the whole Byzantine tradition of the prayer of the heart, was collected in the Philokalia, was read and loved by John Wesley, who published an English selection in his Christian Library, and through Wesley touched the beginnings of the Methodist revival.

Sources: The Sayings of the Desert Fathers (Apophthegmata Patrum); the Fifty Spiritual Homilies of Macarius; Palladius, The Lausiac History; Rufinus, Historia Monachorum; John Wesley, A Christian Library (for the later reception).