Makarios the Egyptians

Makarios , called the Great or the Egyptian , (* around 300 in the Thebaïs in Upper Egypt ; † around 390 in the Sketian Desert in Egypt) is said to have been a student of Antony the Great and lived as a hermit in the desert for 60 years.

Fifty homilies have been erroneously handed down under his name , which have been known since 1595 and had a great influence on occidental mysticism . He is also to be distinguished from the apologist Makarios Magnes .

Legends and sayings

The "old boy"

Even as a boy he is said to have had a mature, senile disposition; the hagiographic tradition saw in him an "old boy" ( paidariogeron ). In the course of the Arian disputes , the Emperor Valens had him deported with others to a pagan island. After he had converted the islanders to the Christian faith ( Sozomenos , Historia ecclesiatica VI. 20 and others), he fled to the Sketian desert in 341 .

asceticism

Two companions lived there with Makarios, one of whom was his servant and the other lived in a nearby cell. Makarios worked as a priest, fought against the demons and had the gift of healing the sick and prophecy. He had made it a principle to drink wine in the company of his brothers, but then to secretly refrain from drinking water for a day for each cup. When the brothers found out, they stopped giving him wine to drink.

humility

Once the devil is said to have confessed to him that he was defeated by his humility. Indeed, Makarios seemed to see only his own faults, he saw the faults of others as if he didn't see them, heard them as if he didn't hear them. He said to his students: When we revolve around the evil that people do to us, we deprive ourselves of the ability to think of God. But if we realize that the devil arouses this evil, we will be invincible.

Mindfulness

He gave the following exhortations to his students:

Always think of the presence of the Almighty, who sees through the thoughts of all people and searches the hearts.

We should say to ourselves: If you are afraid of sinning before people who are sinners, why should you not fear even more the majesty of the Almighty, before whose eyes everything is open and uncovered!

last words

According to the testimony of Socrates Scholasticus (He IV. 18), Makarios met all who came to him with awe and seriousness. Before his end, the fathers of the desert wished to see him again. He let her come to him and said, Weep, weep, brothers, before we go where our tears burn through our bodies! And they all wept and fell on their faces and said, Father, pray for us! He died at the age of 90.

Adoration of saints

The body of Makarios is venerated in the Amalfi Cathedral (Cattedrale di Sant'Andres). Iconographically he is depicted as a hermit, kneeling on a prayer stool in a rock cell, a book in his left hand, a cross in his right, undeterred by the demonic figures that swirl around him, incumbent on prayer. The historically associated attribute is a stick with a straight handle. A picture by Pietro Laurati shows the death of the saint surrounded by his monks.

Makarios Monasteries

Makarius in Wadi Natrun in Egypt

In the 19th century , Konstantin von Tischendorf met four monasteries in the " Desert of St. Makarios " that bore his name. He wrote about the way of life of the monks: We met fifteen brothers. Their faces were all pale, several of them pathologically yellow. Most of them suffered from their eyes; the headmaster was completely blind. The cells are dark, almost like chambers carved in stone or little chambers facing the ground, without windows; the light only comes in through the door. The monastery food is more than meager. Meat is eaten on a very few days of the year; for most of the year nothing is eaten but bread dipped in a very bad taste broth, lentils, onions and linseed oil. During the service, they all carry a wooden staff with them. This staff is called the Macarius staff. I also always saw St. Makarios depicted with this staff. And about the head of a second monastery he told: The elder of the monastery was an old man of one hundred and twenty years. He has been blind for a long time. In his narrow, dark room he holds on to a crossbar and sings or prays loudly day and night; he only sleeps an hour. This old age has a nice draw. So this old man, who must have seen four generations, hangs so deeply into the narrow valley of the earth the heaven with its sacred traffic lights that his eye, already separated from the world, only sees God, that his lip only prays!

See also: Desert Fathers

literature

• Ernst Benz : The Protestant Thebais. On the aftermath of Macarius the Egyptian in Protestantism of the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe and America (= treatises of the humanities and social sciences class of the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz. 1963, No. 1).
• Derwas J. Chitty: The desert a city. An introduction to the study of egyptian and palestinian monaticism under the christian empire , Oxford 1966.
• Karl Mühlek:  Makarios the Egyptians. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 5, Bautz, Herzberg 1993, ISBN 3-88309-043-3 , Sp. 596-597.
• Joseph Stoffels : The mystical theology of Makarius des Ägypters and the oldest approaches to Christian mysticism , Bonn: P. Hanstein 1908. Digitized

Web links

Commons : Macarius of the Egyptians  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Makarios the Egyptians in the catalog of the German National Library
• Makarios in the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints
• Homepage of the still existing Makarios monastery in the Sketian desert