'A Tramp, a Pilgrim, or a Wandering Scholar'

Quite a few Orthodox are likely to be familiar with William Dalrymple’s book, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East (NY: Holt, 1999), a retracing of the journey of St John Moschos as chronicled in his Pratum Spirituale (St John Moschos, The Spiritual Meadow, trans. John Wortley [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1992]), as well as a lament for the decline of Christianity in the Middle East. To be honest, I never wound up reading the whole thing through. I sort of skimmed, and then blanched a bit when I was told how sad it actually was. But I do remember vividly Dalrymple’s description of Sir Steven Runciman, whom he met after writing him about a passing reference to the Pratum Spirituale in Runciman’s 3-vol. History of the Crusades:

Runciman has always been a most undonnish don: he has been besieged by Manchu warlords in the city of Tianjin, but escaped to play a piano duet with the Emperor of China; he has lectured Ataturk on Byzantium and been made a Grand Orator of the Great Church of Constantinople; he has smoked a hookah with the Celebi Effendi of the Whirling Dervishes and, by reading their tarot cards, correctly predicted the death of King George II of the Hellenes and Fuad, King of Egypt.

He is well into his nineties: a tall, thin, frail old man, still very poised and intellectually alert, but now physically weak. He has heavy-lidded eyes and a slow, gravelly voice, with a hint of an old fashioned Cambridge drawl. During lunch, Runciman talked of the Levant as he knew it in his youth: of Istanbul only a month after the the last Ottoman was expelled from the Topkapı, when there were camels in the streets, when there were still hundreds of thousands of Greeks in Anatolia, and the Turks still wore the red tarboosh; of the Lebanon, ‘the only place I’ve seen books bound in human skin’; of the monasteries of Palestine before the Zionists expelled half the Palestinians and began to turn the country into an American suburb; of Egypt when Alexandria was still the most cosmopolitan city east of Milan. (pp. 18-9)

While I am sometimes tempted to think of these kinds of lists of attributes as a cheesey rhetorical device, they still have their effect on me, though it is different from that of the similar devices in hesychastic hagiographies. This portrait of Runciman quickly and effortlessly makes him into a figure larger than life, a Romantic gypsy-scholar inhabiting the Orient of our dreams.

Well, I recently stumbled across a very similar figure, this one also courtesy of Dalrymple (by way of Andrew Cusack)—Patrick Leigh Fermor. He is a travel writer, one of the best it seems, and so he has had occasion to beat Dalrymple to the punch, comparing himself to ‘a tramp, a pilgrim, or a wandering scholar’. To tell the truth, I was a little surprised that I hadn’t heard of him before. At 18, inspired by Robert Byron’s account of Mt Athos (The Station: Athos, Treasures and Men [Troy, MI: Phoenix, 2001]), he left home with a rucksack containing writing and drawing materials, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and Horace, bound for ‘serpent-haunted dragon-green Byzantium’.

Leigh Fermor stayed in the Balkans, became fluent in Greek, and fell in love with a Cantacuzene, with whom he lived for two years in Moldavia. With WWII, he enlisted in the British army and was sent to help the Greeks. He had to be evacuated to Crete, and then again to Alexandria. Eventually, he went back to Crete with a commando team to help the resistance. According to Dalrymple:

He and an odd collection of recently enlisted Greek-speaking classical scholars and archaeologists were parachuted into the occupied island disguised as shepherds and established a troglodyte existence under the stalactites of mountain caves, commanded by a Fellow of All Souls. The port from which Leigh Fermor set off was captured by Rommel's advancing Afrika Korps the day after he left. ‘It was a low moment in the war: the Germans seemed to be advancing in triumph in all directions.’ It was partly for this reason that Leigh Fermor's bosses gave permission for his wild scheme to raise morale: kidnapping the German commander of the island.

In Leigh Fermor’s own account of the abduction of General Kreipe, the climax comes not as the general’s staff car is stopped at night by a British SOE partly dressed in stolen German uniforms, nor as the Cretan partisans help smuggle the general into the highlands and hence to a waiting British submarine; but instead as ‘a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida’.

‘We were all three lying smoking in silence, when the general, half to himself, slowly said, “Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte”. It was the opening of one of the few Horace odes I knew by heart. I went on reciting where he had broken off… The general's blue eyes swivelled away from the mountain top to mine - and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. “Ja, Herr General.” As though for a moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.’

It is an archetypal Leigh Fermor anecdote: fabulously erudite and romantic, and just a little showy. For his greatest virtues as a writer are also his greatest vices: his incantational love of great waterfalls of words, combined with the wild scholarly enthusiasms of a brilliant autodidact. On the rare occasions he gets it wrong, Leigh Fermor has been responsible for some of the most brightly coloured purple passages in travel literature. But at his best he is sublime, unbeatable.

Well, of course, I couldn’t resist looking up the Horace quotation. I regret to say I did not immediately recognise the Latin line, but I do have two volumes of Horace translations on my shelves—one prose, the other verse. I will quote the entire ode, I.9, from the latter (Helen Rowe Henze, trans., The Odes of Horace, Newly Translated from the Latin and Rendered into the Original Metres [Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma, 1961], pp. 31-2):

Behold how tall Storacte looms, and how white!
No longer can the laboring forests hold
Their snowy burden; streams are frozen,
Locked in the grip of the piercing coldness.

Dispel the chill air, piling the great logs high
Upon the hearth; unstintingly now bring forth
And pour the mellow, four-year vintage,
O Thaliarchus, from Sabine wine jar.

Leave to the gods the rest, for when they have stilled
The warring winds that battle upon the sea
The cypress is no longer shaken,
No longer vexed are the aged ash trees.

Whate’er tomorrow holds, shun to question now,
And what the day will bring, what of chance or gain,
Set down to profit; now in boyhood
Spurn not sweet loves or the youthful dances,

While from your bloom cantankerous age stands off.
Now ’neath the falling dusk, at the trysting hour
Again, again through field and courtyard
Let the soft whispers be still repeated.

Now from a secret corner a teasing laugh
Betrays a hidden girl, from whose slender wrists
A lover’s pledge is snatched away, or
Else from a finger resisting faintly.

'Hymn of Praise for St Euthymius' from the Prologue

I thought this was one of the more beautiful of the 'Hymns' I've come across in the Prologue. From ‘The Prologue from Ochrid’, by St Nicholas (Velimirović):

Hymn of Praise
Saint Euthymius

The eye which sees all, the ear which hears all,
With all, travels and everywhere they travel;
Without changing place, they are in every place.
Where virtue is being kneaded,
God is the yeast in the dough,
Where light is sought, He gives of Himself;
Where help is cried for, He does not absent Himself;
Quietly and silently, but always on time,
He has the time to reap and to sow the seeds,
He has the time to reproach, He has the time to reward,
To make the young old and to make the old young,
To weed, to trim and to caress fruits -
He reaches wherever He wants and He reaches when He wants.
Whenever a person alone thinks, behold, He listens,
Where two people speak, as a third party, He hears,
Where the weaver weaves the cloth, her threads He counts,
The universal fabric, in His mind He weaves,
O, who will His footsteps and paces know?
Who could enumerate His paths and places?
Eternal and Immortal, Triune and One,
In the roadless net of the universal fabric
Unseen and seen, regardless from where He is viewed
He cuts out the paths and reveals the direction.
In the roadless net, He looks at all the paths,
And does not allow not even an ant to stay.
Thoughts about Him, Saint Euthymius
For eighty years on earth, dedicated to Him.

'The Celebrant of Unfathomed Mysteries'—St Euthymius of Tŭrnovo

On the 20th day of the month of January, along with St Euthymius the Great, who laboured in Palestine, and several other Ss Euthymius as well, we commemorate St Euthymius of Tŭrnovo, Patriarch of the Bulgarians († c. 1402). Fr Georges Florovsky calls him ‘a monk and spokesman for Hesychasm’ as well as ‘a scholar and linguist’, writing, ‘His translations of liturgical and canonical texts into Old Slavonic (an Ustav of the Liturgy of John Chrysostom and a Sluzhebnik which corrected and brought uniformity to liturgical texts) sparked the late medieval Slavonic renaissance’ (Ways of Russian Theology, Part I, trans. Robert L. Nichols, Vol. 5 in The Collected Works of George Florovsky [Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1979], p. 275, n. 37).

Born to a noble family in the third decade of the 14th c., St Euthymius was made a monk when he was still quite young, becoming the spiritual child of the great Bulgarian hesychast, St Theodosius of Tŭrnovo, who in turn had been a disciple of St Gregory of Sinai. In Thomas Butler’s words, ‘Theodosius imparted to Euthemius the essence of Gregory’s teachings regarding the use of the “Jesus Prayer” in meditation, the guarding of the mind during long vigil, and other paths to attain what the Greeks called hesychia or “quietude” (Slavonic bezmlŭvie)’ (Monumenta Bulgarica: A Bilingual Anthology of Bulgarian Texts from the 9th to the 19th Centuries, ed. and trans. Thomas Butler [Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic, 2004], p. 239).

In fact, the young monk advanced so greatly that his elder soon made him abbot of the monastery of Kilifarevo, while St Theodosius himself retired to a cell outside of the monastery. In about 1363, St Kallistos, the Patriarch of Constantinople, invited St Theodosius to the imperial city, and the latter took with him St Euthymius and St Cyprian, future Metropolitan of Kiev. According to St Kallistos, the two junior monks ‘studied carefully and diligently the divine rules and laws’ while they were in the city (qtd. in Butler, p. 239), and it seems they thoroughly absorbed the Greek language at that time if they had not already done so. St Euthymius stayed for a time at the Studion Monastery, where ‘he undoubtedly made use of the monastery’s extensive library and observed the operations of its scriptorium’ (Butler, p. 240).

In 1364, the great elder, St Theodosius, fell asleep in the Lord, and St Kallistos became the first to write his Life. Upon the death of their elder, Ss Euthymius and Cyprian went to the Great Lavra on the Holy Mountain, where there was a highly active group of translators from Greek into Slavonic that included Elder Joseph, the translator of the Slavonic Triodion (Butler, p. 240). Anthony-Emil Tachiaos writes of these monks, and their counterparts throughout the Balkans, ‘These were men of a high spiritual and cultural level who, having gone beyond the limits of a broad general education, plunged into the prevailing theological and ideological currents in Byzantine society’ (Cyril and Methodius of Thessalonica: The Acculturation of the Slavs [Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary, 2001], p. 139). On the Holy Mountain, among such men, Ss Euthymius and Cyprian were more fully initiated into various aspects of the hesychastic literary movement: the rediscovery of Greek patristic texts, the close adherence to Greek terminology and syntax in translation, the attention to orthography, and the use in original Slavonic compositions of an ornate literary style known as pletenie sloves, or ‘word-weaving’. On these literary qualities of hesychasm, Tachiaos cites one source in English, which I have yet to read—H. Goldblatt, Orthography and Orthodoxy: Constantine Kostenečki’s Treatise on the Letters, Studia Historica et Philologica, 16 (Florence, 1987) (Anthony-Emil N. Tachiaos, Introduction, The Life of Paisij Velyčkovs’kyj, by St Paisius [Velichkovsky], trans. J.M.E. Featherstone [Cambridge, MA: Ukrainian Research Institute of Harvard University, 1989], p. xxix, n. 36). Here, however, is Butler’s characterisation of the effect:

The convoluted word order, the uninhibited stringing together of synonyms, and the idiosyncratic juxtaposition of words for acoustical effect and cadence often present the reader with a kind of ‘monkish’ test or trial. In this meditative blurring of syntactic boundaries, words become rigid, refuse to meld, assume a numinous quality, suggesting that for the hesychast they are icons, whose array provides an esoteric meaning other than the usual one conveyed by grammar and syntax. (p. 266)

Upon returning to Bulgaria in about 1371, St Euthymius almost immediately went to work establishing a school at Holy Trinity Monastery in Tŭrnovo in order to train new translators and writers, a project he continued even after being consecrated Patriarch of Bulgaria in 1375 (Butler, p. 241). All of this had, of course, a profound effect on Slavic letters, not just in Bulgaria but throughout the Slavic world. Fr Florovsky observes:

One notes a sizeable quantity of manuscripts and books in Russian monastic libraries which date back precisely to this period. More importantly, these new writings form a fresh new stream. This time their content was mystical and ascetical, but once again they constituted a complete literature. Indeed, this new translation activity on Mt Athos and in Bulgaria stems from the Hesychast movement with its deeply contemplative spirit and approach. These translations made the works of the ascetical Fathers known in Slavic literature. (p. 10)

Sadly, the mediæval Bulgarian kingdom that had nutured and sheltered this work came to a violent end during St Euthymius’s patriarchate. In 1393 the Turks attacked Tŭrnovo, and St Euthymius urged the citizens to fight the invading Muslim army. In the end the city was sacked, the nobility and clergy were executed, and many were sent into exile, including the Patriarch himself, who settled in Bačkovo Monastery until his death. Butler writes, ‘He died there in 1401 or 1402 AD, having lived a full and exemplary life’ (p. 241).

St Euthymius translated the Sluzhebnik, wrote an Akolouthia for St Theophano, wrote the Lives of Ss Paraskevi, Philothei, Hilary of Moglen, and John of Rila. as well as Eulogies to Ss Constantine and Helen, Nedelja, John of Polybotum, and Michael of Potuka, and wrote numerous letters, of which we still have a few: to St Cyprian, to Metropolitan Antim of Wallachia, and to St Nicodemus of Tismana (Butler, pp. 242-3). St Euthymius’s most prominent disciple, Metropolitan Gregory (Camblak) of Kiev, has written a moving ‘Eulogy’ for his elder which is still the primary source of biographical information on the Saint. Here is the beginning:

If Aaron, ancient priest within the shade of the Law, through the sacrifice of the dumb /animals/, and through sprinkling the profaned with the blood of young oxen and goats and the ashes of heifers, sanctified them for bodily purification and thereby earned himself a memorial appropriate for one of God’s servants, so that the prophet /David/ always mentions him in the temple, as he says in the Book of Psalms: ‘Moses and Aaron among his priests’ and again: ‘He sent Moses, his slave, and Aaron whom he chose for himself’, and again: ‘He led his people out like sheep, through the hands of Moses and Aaron’—is not Euthemius far more worthy of praise, who was the celebrant of unfathomed mysteries and sharer of the apostolic glory, a priest of that great sacrifice and teacher of that truth which angels wish to fathom and which, furthermore, he kept pure and passed on undefiled, and finally a priest who by various sufferings offered himself as a holy sacrifice pleasing to the Lord?

But what sort of worldly praises shall we offer one who, while eloquent in the perfected word, was teaching lovers of the word to celebrate virtue with silence instead of the word? Who transcended the limits of nature itself? Who, totally enraptured by the contemplation of the divine, maintained that life was not in the body but in the language of the divine? And about whom the Psalmist, as he was weaving a homily, was saying: ‘My tongue is the quill of the fastwriting scribe’ (Ps
44:1)?

And so . . . do we dare to praise him? We do dare, by all means, drawn by our zeal. (Butler, p. 269)

'A Child Who Will Bear the Name of Confidence'—St Euthymius the Great

Around the year 377 AD in the Armenian city of Melitene near the Euphrates, two ‘noble and distinguished persons’ (in St Nicholas’s words), Paul and Dionysia, had been entreating God for a child. One night they heard a divine voice say, ‘Be confident, be confident; for behold, God has granted you a child who will bear the name of confidence (euthymia), since at his birth he who grants you him will give confidence to his churches.’ The child was born ‘in the month of August in the fourth consulship of Gratian’, and from that moment he was called ‘Euthymius’ and was dedicated to God by his parents (Cyril of Scythopolis, The Lives of the Monks of Palestine, trans. R.M. Price [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1991], pp. 4-5). An immediate predecessor of Ss Sabas (St Euthymius’s disciple) and Theodosius (a disciple of his disciples), Derwas Chitty says of St Euthymius:

He is the real effective founder of that Judaean monasticism which for the next four crucial centuries was to be the primary formative influence in East Christian monastic order, and to play a leading part also in the development of liturgy, hymnody, and dogma. Generally unknown in the West, he is placed in the Byzantine hymns of the Ascetics second only to St Antony. (The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire [Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary, 1995], p. 97)

St Euthymius was baptised by Bishop Otreius of Melitene (a correspondent of St Basil) and under his supervision was raised and ‘carefully educated in secular culture as well as in Sacred Scripture. . . . In a short time Euthymius had surpassed a great many of his contemporaries in the soul’s love of God and love of learning; for he showed a keenness beyond his age’, causing amazement ‘at his inspired mental grasp’ (Cyril, pp. 6-7). Tonsured a reader at an extremely young age, he grew up daily participating in the divine services of the Church ‘with undistracted heart and unwavering mind . . . with fear and compunction’ (Cyril, pp. 7-8). Besides this, he was a frequenter of monasteries and spent his time at home ‘in prayer, psalmody and reading the divine sayings all day and all night’ (Cyril, p. 8).

When he was at last ordained a priest, however, and given charge over the monasteries near Melitene, St Euthymius, ‘ever of an austere character seeking retirement and solitude’ (Chitty, p. 82), fled to Jerusalem in the year 405 and settled in a hermitage near the Lavra of St Chariton (which now belongs to the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission under ROCOR). Of his time there, Cyril writes:

Freeing himself from every earthly care he had as his one sole aim how to please God through prayer and fasting. In his concern for every virtue he cut off the thorns of the passions at the root, like a good cultivator, ‘clearing away thoughts and every high thing raised up against the knowledge of God’ (2 Cor 10:5), and fulfilling the prophetic saying that runs, ‘Break up your fallow ground and do not scatter seed on thorns’ (Jer 4:3). (Cyril, pp. 9-10)

Chitty points out that a habit of St Euthymius’s from his days in Melitene (reported by Cyril on p. 9)—his custom of departing for greater solitude after the Feast of the Theopany, only to return for Palm Sunday—‘was to have considerable influence on the future of Judaean monasticism’ (Chitty, p. 82). This was in part simply because it became so widely imitated, but also in that it determined the location of various important monasteries. St Euthymius’s first was founded in a remote gorge while on one of these Lenten retreats with his co-struggler, St Theoctistus, when other monks decided to join them there. Fleeing again into solitude in a cave, however, the venerable Euthymius soon founded another monastery 3 miles from the first, when he was ordered by God to accept three Cappadocian postulants, ‘since God has sent them’, and to stop sending the others to St Theoctistus at the previous monastery (Cyril, p. 21). Meanwhile, he had also established a third monastery halfway between these for a tribe of Arabs he had converted to the Christian faith.

As can be seen, St Euthymius exerted an enormous influence during his lifetime. His co-struggler was St Theoctistus, who acted as abbot of St Euthymius’s first monastery; his Arab convert, ‘Peter’ in baptism, was active in the Third Œcumenical Council, at Ephesus in 431; his immediate disciple was St Sabbas the Sanctified, whose monastery became a centre of Orthodox liturgy; St Euthymius acted as an Elder to St Cyriacus the Hermit; two of his disciples were the Elders Marinus and Luke, who trained St Theodosius the Cœnobiarch when he came to that region shortly after the death of St Euthymius. When he departed this life,—

on 20 January of the eleventh indiction, in the year 5965 since the creation of the world, from when time began to be measured by the course of the sun, and in the year 465 since the Word of God became man from the Virgin and was born in the flesh, according to the chronologies composed by the holy fathers Hippolytus the Ancient, disciple of the Apostles, Epiphanius of Cyprus, and Hero the philosopher and confessor (Cyril, p. 56)

—the news ‘brought together an immense crowd of monks and laypeople’, including Patriarch Anastasius of Jerusalem, who arranged for the building of a tomb in the cave where St Euthymius had struggled (Cyril, p. 57). Indeed, through its many tales of miracles performed after the venerable Father’s blessed repose, ‘The rest of Cyril of Scythopolis’ Life of the saint makes it abundantly clear how Euthymius continued to reign from his tomb over the wilderness’ (Chitty, p. 97). In his final testament to his monks, St Euthymius said:

My beloved brethren, I myself am setting out on the path of my fathers; you yourselves, if you love me, must keep these commandments. In all things aim at pure love, the source and goal of every good work and ‘the bond of perfection’ (Col 3:14). Just as it is not done to eat bread without salt, so it is impossible to achieve virtue without love. For each virtue is made secure through love and humility, with the aid of experience, time, and grace. While humility exalts to a height, love prevents falling from this height, since ‘he who humbles himself will be exalted’ (Lk 18:14) and ‘love never fails’ (1 Co 13:8). Love is greater than humility, for it was on account of love for us that God the Word humbled himself to become like us. Therefore we ought to confess him from our hearts and address him with hymns and thanksgivings without ceasing, specially we ourselves who are separate from the manifold affairs of this life, not only because of our pledges to him but also by reason of the undistracted life we lead, freed as we are from the confusion of the world. Therefore let us make every effort to offer up to him purity of soul, chastity of body, and pure love. (pp. 54-5)

'The Great Secrets of the World Above'—The Spiritual Homilies of St Macarius

Although I wanted to focus my St Macarius post on his life, it seems appropriate to say something briefly about the Homilies that have come down to us under his name. Written in Greek toward the end of the 4th century, they are widely agreed to be one of the pinnacles of spiritual literature, not only in the Orthodox Tradition, but also by many outside of it. In his ‘Preface’ to the Classics of Western Spirituality Series edition of the Homilies, Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) has famously quoted the diary entry for 30 July 1736 of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, ‘I read Macarius and sang’ (Preface, Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter, trans. and ed. George A. Maloney, SJ [NY: Paulist, 1992], p. xi). But John Wesley also included extracts from St Macarius’s Homilies in his A Christian Library (available here), writing of the author:

Whoever it was that first seasoned this holy vessel of mercy with the heavenly odour of Divine grace, it seems plain from the following homilies, that he was educated like Timothy, in the Holy Scriptures, and that his acquaintance with those Sacred Writings was not merely literal or speculative, but that it was a true and practical knowledge, able to save his soul; for whatever things he spoke or wrote came from himself, and were (as we are informed of the writings of the late Dr Henry More,) purely the genuine emanations of his own mind, a description of his own heart and soul.

Metropolitan Kallistos writes that the Homilies ‘are written with a warmth of feeling, an affectivity and enthusiasm, that are instantly attractive. Their message is one of hope, light and glory’; but he also observes that St Macarius is perfectly clear that the Christian life ‘is a struggle, a spiritual combat that continues right up to the end of our life’ (p. xi). Fr Andrew Louth, at the time a clergyman of the C of E though he has now come into the Orthodox Church, called them ‘a moving and profound account of the soul’s experience of God in prayer’ (The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys [Oxford: Clarendon, 1981], p. 115). The Jesuit, George Maloney (who, rumour has it, is also Orthodox now), calls the Homilies ‘a source of solid orthodox teaching for all who seek more seriously to journey inwardly and to surrender to the indwelling Trinity’s infinite love and transforming power’ (Introduction, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 25). Finally, according to Ivan Kontzevich (‘The Life of St Macarius the Great’, Fifty Spiritual Homilies, by St Macarius the Great, trans. A.J. Mason [Willits, CA: Eastern Orthodox, 1974], p. xix):

[St Macarius’s] Homilies are founded on personal experience, and therefore their language is clear, expressive, and possessed of an extraordinary imagery and power. His teaching is the writings of a dweller of heaven, a heavenly man. To him, who had attained perfection, the spiritual world and its laws were open. He beholds the soul and sees all that takes place in it. He indicates to it the path to perfection. He is entirely caught up in the contemplation of God and in exaltation. To him the great secrets of the world above are open.

Not being a patristics scholar, I will not venture to comment upon the controversies surrounding the authorship of the Homilies, except to say that whatever the evidence may be against St Macarius the Great having written them, in the words of Fr Alexander (Golitzin), to call the author ‘St Macarius’ is ‘to give our author the name he has gone by for centuries’ (‘A Testimony to Christianity as Transfiguration: The Macarian Homilies and Orthodox Spirituality’). However uncertain we are of their precise identity, I refuse to bow to such conventions as referring to Holy Fathers as ‘Pseudo-Anybody’, as though there was something ‘false’ about them.

My reasoning about the supposed connection of the Homilies with something called ‘Messalianism’ is similarly based on Orthodox tradition. There is nothing heretical about the Homilies, or else they would not have been passed down with reverence by centuries of Orthodox Fathers. On the other hand, it seems to me that there were indeed some heretical tendencies not simply to be identified with Orthodox ‘Syrian Christianity’, since the Third Œcumenical Council, at Ephesus in 431, saw fit to condemn such tendencies, calling them ‘Messalian’. Now, as Maloney observes, it was from a ‘book of the Messalians, the Ascetikon’, that the Council took the propositions it condemned (p. 9). This leads me to think that Fr Seraphim (Rose) may be right when he suggests that these ‘Messalians’ had taken the teachings in the Ascetikon out of the full context of the Homilies, twisting them and ‘making them to serve a dualistic philosophy’ (‘A Note on “Pseudo-Macarius” and the “Messalian Origin” of the Spiritual Homilies’, Mason, p. xxxi). Similarly, Fr Alexander (Golitzin) writes that the propositions ‘appear to have been misconstrued’ (‘Et Introibo ad Altare Dei’: The Mystagogy of Dionysius Areopagita, with Special Reference to Its Predecessors in the Eastern Christian Tradition [Thessaloniki: Patriarchal Institute for Patristic Studies, 1994], p. 374, n. 167). But again, it seems more likely to me that they were misconstrued by the ‘Messalians’ than by the Council, and that it was the propositions in the context of ‘Messalian’ doctrine that the Council was condemning rather than the in the context of St Macarius’s Homilies. This interpretation is lent great credence by the example Fr Seraphim chooses on p. xxx of his ‘Note’: comparing Homily 27:19 (Maloney, p. 182) with Proposition 2 (see St John of Damascus, ‘On Heresies’, Writings, trans. Frederic H. Chase, Jr. [Washington, DC: Catholic U of America, 1999], p. 132). Finally, Fr Georges Florovsky observes that, ‘One can note in The Spiritual Homilies only individual Messalian motifs. Moreover, the author not only does not share many Messalian views, but rejects them outright. . . . An orthodox author can also be close to, but not identical with, the Euchites [Messalians]’ (The Byzantine Ascetic and Spiritual Fathers, trans. Raymond Miller, et al., Vol. 10 in The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky [Vaduz, Europa: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1987], p. 153).

Anyway, I apologise, dear readers, for this foray into polemics and scholarly controversies on which I’m not really qualified to comment. I just mean to emphasise the point that all of this is rather silly. The Homilies are Orthodox, and their author has always been called ‘St Macarius’. That is good enough for me.

I shall close with two passages of practical spiritual wisdom from the Homilies themselves:

15.8. Christians, therefore, should strive in all things and ought not to pass judgment of any kind on anyone, neither on the prostitute nor on sinners nor on disorderly persons. But they should look upon all persons with a single mind and a pure eye, so that it may be for such a person almost a natural and fixed attitude never to despise or judge or abhor anyone or to divine people according to categories. If you see a man with one eye, do not make judgment in your heart, but regard him as though he were whole. If someone has a maimed hand, see him not as maimed. See the crippled as straight, the paralytic as healthy. For this is purity of heart, that, when you see the sinners and the weak, you have compassion and show mercy toward them. For it can happen that the holy ones of the Lord sit as though they were in the theater, watching the follies of the world, but in the interior they are conversing with God. According to their exterior they seem to be looking with their eyes at the things of the world. (Maloney, p. 111)

19.7. Therefore, it is necessary that whoever wishes truly to please God and receive from him the heavenly grace of the Spirit and to grow and be perfected in the Holy Spirit should force himself to observe the commandments of God and to make his heart submissive, even if he is unwilling according to the saying, ‘Therefore, I observe all thy commandments and every false way I abhor’ (Ps 119:128). As one pushes and compels himself to persevere in prayer until he succeeds, similarly, if he wishes and forces and compels himself to practice all the virtues and develops a good habit, he thus asks and begs of the Lord always. And obtaining his request and receiving a taste for God and becoming a participator of the Holy Spirit, he makes the gift given to him to increase and to thrive as he rests in humility, in charity, and in meekness. (Maloney, p. 149)

St Macarius the Roman of Novgorod (†1550)

Among the other Macarii commemorated today, I’d like to mention St Macarius the Roman of Novgorod (†1550), also commemorated 15 August it seems (The Northern Thebaid: Monastic Saints of the Russian North, compiled and trans. Hieromonk Seraphim [Rose] and Hieromonk Herman [Podmoshensky] [Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1995], p. 140). This St Macarius was born into a wealthy family in Rome and was well educated. But between the religious turmoil of the Protestant Reformation and the decadence of the 16th-c. papal church in Rome, the young man was concerned for the salvation of his soul and searched the Scriptures and the writings of the Fathers for guidance. Astonishingly, our Lord revealed to him that he needed to be Orthodox, and so St Macarius took a staff and left home as a literal pilgrim to Orthodoxy. He journeyed all the way to Novgorod and to the monastery of St Alexander of Svir. According to Nun Taisia, ‘There he was warmly received. St. Alexander united the newcomer to the Orthodox Church, accepted him into the brotherhood and, finally, tonsured him, giving him the name Macarius’ (‘Two Converts from Rome’, Orthodox America).

Soon, however, St Macarius was drawn to the life of the desert-dwelling anchorites. He withdrew into the forests and settled on a small island in the river Lezna, 45 miles from Novgorod, where he built a cell, dug a spring, and gave himself to ceaseless prayer and ascetic struggle.

Although the venerable one tried to conceal himself, the Lord led the faithful to him, and sometimes fiery pillars or fragrant clouds were seen over his hermitage. Eventually, people began to ask him for guidance, and a church and monastery dedicated to the Dormition of the Most-Holy Theotokos were built. St Macarius was ordained and enthroned as abbot of the monastery around the year 1540. He worked many miracles and had the gift of clairvoyance. Many people were healed by drinking water from the spring he had dug. He fell asleep in the Lord on the feastday of the monastery, 15 August 1550. According to Nun Taisia, ‘In his testament, St. Macarius enjoined the monks to adhere strictly to the monastic rule, to spread the Gospel and take care for the spiritual enlightenment and the needs of the local people.’ She concludes:

St Macarius’ Hermitage was always poor and small in number. Over the years it suffered many misfortunes and by the mid-19th century there remained little but ruins. Local inhabitants, however, piously recalled its holy founder. They continued to take holy water from the spring and, on the days of his commemoration, gathered by the thousand. Finally, in 1894, the hermitage was restored by a missionary abbot, Arsenius, and became a missionary monastery with a strict Athonite typicon. It belonged to those numerous but little-known, small monasteries which had such a great influence on their surrounding populations.

One can see a picture of the Dormition Monastery church and another of the pathway to St Macarius’s island through the marshes of that region in Northern Thebaid, p. 141. Here is St Macarius’s Life told briefly in Russian.

'Arise, O Follower of the Lord'—St Macarius the Great

Today, 19 January on the Church’s calendar, we commemorate Ss Macarius the Great, Macarius of Alexandria, and Macarius the Roman of Novgorod. Because there are three, and particularly because there is so much material on the first of them, I will have to confine myself to just a few comments and observations.

If you’re like me, you often get the two Ss Macarius of Egypt confused. St Macarius the Great was born in 300 in the village of Ptinapor, near the Nitrian desert—in an observation reminiscent of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’ (which I am not the only one to recall of late), Ivan Kontzevich refers to the ‘melancholy and solemnity of the place, the eternally clear sky, the majestic pyramids with their severe lines, the ruins of gigantic temples and buildings’ and observes that ‘all this earthly grandeur reduced to dust involuntarily called forth thoughts of the instability of everything earthly’ (‘The Life of St Macarius the Great’, Fifty Spiritual Homilies, by St Macarius the Great, trans. A.J. Mason [Willits, CA: Eastern Orthodox, 1974], p. ix). At any rate, it seems a far cry from bustling Alexandria, where the second St Macarius was born in 293 and worked as a merchant until the age of forty, when he was finally baptised and withdrew into the desert. In addition to these differences, one cannot but be struck by the fact that St Macarius the Great gets 41 sayings in the Gerontikon (Benedicta Ward, trans., The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, rev. ed. [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1984], pp. 124-38), whereas St Macarius of Alexandria only has 3 (Ward, pp. 151-2). Finally, it is St Macarius the Great to whom the famous Spiritual Homilies have always been attributed, though Norman Russell seems to have become confused on this point (see The Lives of the Desert Fathers: Historia Monachorum in Aegypto, by Rufinus of Aquileia, trans. Norman Russell [Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian, 1981], p. 137, n. 1 on Macarius of Alexandria)! According to Kontzevich, the two were ‘close friends’ and fellow spiritual children of St Anthony, and ‘often met for conversation and prayer’ (p. xvii).

A powerful story is told of St Macarius the Great when he was still living near the villages. A widower, he was already struggling as a monk, and had been ordained deacon against his will. But a young girl found pregnant out of wedlock told the villagers that St Macarius was the father. He was beaten to within an inch of his life and told to support the girl. The venerable one began to work harder, and said to himself, ‘Now, Macarius, you have a wife and children, and therefore you have to work day and night to furnish their support’ (Kontzevich, p. x). When the due date came, however, the girl went into labour for several days, but was unable to deliver the baby. She realised that she was being punished for her lie and finally confessed, naming her true paramour. The villagers were terrified that God would punish them for their treatment of the holy man and went to beg his forgiveness. Kontzevich writes, ‘But [having been forewarned,] Macarius, who had willingly accepted dishonor, did not desire to receive honors and glory. At night he secretly left for the desert of Nitria’ (p. x).

In Conferences XV.iii.1, St Cassian also tells us that St Macarius the Great ‘was the first to make his dwelling in the desert of Skete [Scetis]’ (The Conferences, trans. Boniface Ramsey [NY: Newman, 1997], p. 539). Scetis was an arid desert farther south from Nitria and Cellia, which in St Macarius’s day were already inhabited by monks (see all three to the upper left on this map). After spending some time in a cave in Nitria, and as a disciple of St Anthony in the Desert of Pharan (apparently in the Sinai peninsula; see Derwas Chitty, The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism Under the Christian Empire [Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary, 1995], p. 38), St Anthony sent Macarius to Scetis, to give ‘himself over to ascetic labors, unceasing prayer, and contemplation of God’ (Kontzevich, p. xi). According to Rufinus:

It is in a great valley, a day and a night’s journey from the monasteries of Nitria, and the way to it is not found or shown by any track or landmarks on the ground, but one journeys by the signs and courses of the stars. Water is hard to find, and when it is found it has a bad smell, bituminous, yet inoffensive to the taste. Here men are made perfect in holiness, for none but those of austere resolution and supreme constancy can endure such a terrible spot. But their chief concern is the love they show one another and those who happen to arrive there. (pp. 152-3)

The necessity of cœlestial navigation for finding Scetis is one of the coolest things about it to me. If one is interested in learning more about this lost art, ‘Celestial Navigation Net’ is an excellent place to start.

But of course we must get back to St Macarius the Great. The venerable one dwelt in Scetis for 60 years, working miracles and attracting many disciples despite the austerity of the place. One of my favourite stories that has come down to us about him in the Gerontikon is this:

39. They said of Abba Macarius the Egyptian that one day he went up from Scetis to the mountain of Nitria. As he approached the place he told his disciple to go on ahead. When the latter had gone on ahead, he met a priest of the pagans. The brother shouted after him saying, ‘Oh, oh, devil, where are you off to?’ The priest turned back and beat him and left him half dead. Then picking up his stick, he fled. When he had gone a little further, Abba Macarius met him running and said to him, ‘Greetings! Greetings, you weary man!’ Quite astonished, the other came up to him and said, ‘What good do you see in me, that you greet me in this way?’ The old man said to him, ‘I have seen you wearing yourself out without knowing that you are wearing yourself out in vain.’ The other said to him, ‘I have been touched by your greeting and I realize that you are on God’s side. But another wicked monk who met me insulted me and I have given him blows enough for him to die of them.’ The old man realized that he was referring to his disciple. Then the priest fell at his feet and said, ‘I will not let you go till you have made me a monk.’ When they came to the place where the brother was, they put him onto their shoulders and carried him to the church in the mountain. When the people saw the priest with Macarius they were astonished and they made him a monk. Through him many pagans became Christians. So Abba Macarius said, ‘One evil word makes even the good evil, while one good word makes even the evil good.’ (Ward, p. 137)

So in the year 390, being 90 years of age, St Macarius came to the end of his life. His immanent death was anounced to him in a vision by Ss Anthony and Pachomius the Great, and then—

On the day of his death a Cherubim appeared to him with a multitude of angels and said: ‘Arise, O follower of the Lord, and come with us into eternal life.’ The Cherubim indicated to him the throngs of saints who had come out to meet him: ‘Behold the assembly of apostles, behold the throng of prophets, behold the multitude of martyrs, behodl the choir of holy hierarchs, fasters, monks and righteous men. Give unto me now your soul, which I was commanded by God to preserve during its earthly life.’ With the words, ‘Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit,’ St Macarius departed to the Lord. (Kontzevich, p. xviii)

This is the Cherubim protrayed in the above icon, for which, HT to Moses’s wonderful, and aptly named patristic florilegium blog, ‘The Burning Bush’.

Although I’ve already mentioned some of the details from his life, I thought it fit before ending this post to cite one of the three sayings of St Macarius of Alexandria in the Gerontikon:

2. Abba Macarius went one day to Abba Pachomius of Tabbenisi. Pachomius asked him, ‘When brothers do not submit to the rule, is it right to correct them?’ Abba Macarius said to him, ‘Correct and judge justly those who are subject to you, but judge no-one else. For truly it is written: ‘Is it not those inside the church whom you are to judge? God judges those outside.’ (I Cor. 5:12-13)

St Macarius the Roman of Novgorod warrants a second post, I think, simply by virtue of being so obscure.