The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Marcus Eremita
died c. 430Patristic
The desert writer who insisted no one is justified by works, eleven centuries before that argument split Europe.
Summary
- Lived died c. 430.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived8 moments · AD 313–600
- 367Athanasius's Easter letter lists the twenty-sevenHis thirty-ninth Festal Letter names exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament we use today, the earliest surviving list that matches ours. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list in the West.
- 380Nicene Christianity becomes the empire's official religionThe Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, commanded all his subjects to hold the faith of Nicaea. Legal protection had become legal privilege, and pressure on everyone else.
- 381The Council of ConstantinopleAround a hundred and fifty bishops confirmed Nicaea and expanded its article on the Holy Spirit, who "proceeds from the Father" and "together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." This 381 text is the creed most churches actually recite as the Nicene Creed.
- 386Augustine converts in a Milan gardenA thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric, weeping under a fig tree, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and stopped running. His mother Monica had prayed for him for years; Bishop Ambrose's preaching had already broken his objections.
- c. 397–400Augustine writes the *Confessions*He told his whole story, theft, ambition, a long affair, a slow surrender, as one long prayer addressed to God. Nothing quite like it had been written before, and it invented the spiritual autobiography.
- c. 405Jerome finishes translating the Old Testament from HebrewCommissioned by Bishop Damasus in 382, Jerome worked for decades in Bethlehem, learning Hebrew so he could go behind the Greek to the original. His Latin Bible, later called the Vulgate, was the Bible of the West for a thousand years.
- 410Rome is sacked; Augustine begins *The City of God*Alaric's Goths took the eternal city, and pagans blamed the Christians for abandoning the old gods. Augustine answered across thirteen years (413–426) with a book about two cities, one built on love of self, one on love of God, and only one of them permanent.
- 431The Council of EphesusBishop Nestorius objected to calling Mary *Theotokos*, "God-bearer," and Cyril of Alexandria pressed the point that the title is a claim about the child, not the mother: the one she bore was God. The council agreed, though the politics around it were ugly.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Marcus Eremita at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Insisted no one is saved by their own good works, eleven centuries before that argument split Europe.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.