Saint Macarius the Great

Saint Macarius the Great, also called the Egyptian, was a priest and abbot, one of the Desert Fathers of the fourth century. He began the settlement of monks in the desert of Scetis in Egypt, and he was remembered as a humble man, gentle toward the weaknesses of others. The Church commemorates him on January 19.

He was born about the year 300 in Egypt; the exact date is not known. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers preserve the report that in his youth he was a camel driver and carried natron. He himself related that when he was already living alone near a village, a girl falsely named him as the father of her child. He bore the beating and the disgrace without a word in his own defense, and even worked harder in order to support her. When the truth came out and the villagers wanted to ask his forgiveness, he left for the desert.

He settled in Scetis, today’s Wadi El Natrun, when he was about thirty. Palladius, the author of stories of the monks of Egypt, reports that because of his gift of discernment he was called the young old man, and that at the age of forty he became a priest. Macarius used to visit Saint Anthony the Abbot. In time many disciples gathered around him.

His teaching was brief. Asked how one ought to pray, he answered that there is no need of many words: it is enough to stretch out one’s hands and say, “Lord, as you will and as you know, have mercy,” and when the struggle grows harder, “Lord, help.” A brother who asked him for a word he told to go to the cemetery, first to insult the dead and then to praise them, and he explained that, like them, a monk should pay no heed either to insults or to praise.

What was remembered most was his gentleness. It was said that he became like a god on earth, because just as God shelters the world, so he covered the faults of others: he saw them as though he did not see, and heard of them as though he did not hear. One of the stories puts into the mouth of the devil the admission that he cannot overcome Macarius because of his humility.

After the death of Saint Athanasius in 373, the Arian bishop Lucius took control of the Church in Alexandria. On his orders Macarius was banished, together with his namesake Saint Macarius of Alexandria, to an island in the Nile. As the historian Socrates Scholasticus writes, the monks won its pagan inhabitants for the faith there. Later they were allowed to return. Macarius died in Scetis about 390; Palladius reports that he lived to the age of ninety.

He has been venerated as a saint since antiquity, without a formal canonization, in the West and in the Churches of the East. The monastery in Wadi El Natrun that bears his name exists to this day. In Cairo in 2000 John Paul II named him alongside Anthony and Pachomius among the founders of Christian monasticism. The spiritual homilies attributed to him for centuries are, in the view of scholars, probably not his work. The Roman Martyrology, which on the same day also commemorates Saint Macarius of Alexandria, says of Macarius the Great that, dead to the world and to himself, he lived for God alone and taught his disciples to do the same.