The Founding of Scetis

Around the 330s, in his thirtieth year, Macarius withdrew to the most remote of the great desert valleys of Lower Egypt — Scetis, the natron valley later called Wadi al-Natrun — and there laid the foundation of a monastic settlement whose distinctive shape was neither the hermit’s full solitude nor the Pachomian common life, but a semi-anchoritic pattern of scattered cells and weekend gatherings. From that pattern, more than from any rule, the spirituality of the Apophthegmata grew.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Place

Scetis (Greek Skētis; Coptic Shiêt, traditionally glossed as “the weighing of hearts” or “the balance of the heart”; Arabic Wadi al-Natrun, “valley of natron”) is a depression in the Western Desert of Lower Egypt, some sixty-odd miles south of Alexandria and well west of the Nile, named for the natron salts gathered from its lakes — the very commodity the young Macarius had once hauled by camel out to the towns of the Delta (see Lower Egypt and the Call). Of the cluster of monastic centers that grew up in this corner of Egypt, Scetis was the deepest and most isolated, lying farther from settled land than either Nitria or Kellia (see The Desert Fellowship). Its remoteness was its attraction: men who sought a stricter solitude than the more accessible colonies allowed went out to Scetis (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966).

The Founding

The tradition credits Macarius the Egyptian with the founding of monastic Scetis. He went out to the valley around the 330s — Palladius’s chronology, that he “retired to the desert as a young man of thirty” and spent sixty years there before his death around 391, places the move in that decade (Palladius, Lausiac History 17; trans. Meyer, ACW 34). [Disputed: the founding is conventionally dated c. 330 from this back-reckoning, but no source gives a precise year; the Coptic monastery tradition likewise speaks only of “around 330.” It should be read as the 330s, not a fixed date.] He came not as the abbot of an organized house but as a solitary; the settlement formed around him as other seekers came to share the valley and to live near so discerning an elder. He was in time ordained priest for the growing community, presiding over its common worship — the office that made the gathering a church and not merely a scatter of hermits.

The Semi-Anchoritic Pattern

The form of life that took shape at Scetis is the most historically significant thing about the place, because it became the classic “middle way” of Egyptian monasticism and the seedbed of the Apophthegmata Patrum. It stood between two poles:

The fully eremitic life of the solitary hermit, the path of St. Antony the Great, who lived alone in the deep desert.
The fully coenobitic (common) life of the Pachomian monasteries of Upper Egypt, where monks lived together under one roof, one rule, and one superior, sharing work, meals, and worship in a tightly regulated community.

The Scetiote pattern took something from each. Each monk lived alone in his own cell — often little more than a hut or a cave, set at a distance from his neighbors — and there passed the working days of the week in solitude: prayer, the recitation of the Psalter, manual labor (chiefly the plaiting of palm-leaf rope and baskets, which gave both a livelihood and a discipline for the hands while the mind prayed), fasting, and the warfare of the thoughts. But on the weekend the monks left their cells and came together at a common church for the synaxis — the gathering for the night vigil, the Liturgy and reception of the Eucharist on Sunday, and a shared meal (the agapē) — after which they returned to their cells for another week of solitude. This rhythm of solitude punctuated by communion is the defining structure of Scetis (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966; cf. the picture of the weekly synaxis throughout the Apophthegmata).

The arrangement had a spiritual genius to it. The solitude gave the depth of the hermit’s prayer and the full confrontation with one’s own heart; the weekend gathering gave the sacraments, the correction of an elder, the restraint of fraternal accountability, and a guard against the spiritual dangers of unchecked solitude — delusion, despair, and pride. The young monk did not strike out alone into the deep desert but lived near an abba, sought from him the “word of salvation,” and submitted his thoughts to a more experienced discernment (see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction). It is precisely this setting — a junior going to a senior for a word, the exchange of counsel between cells — that generated the sayings now gathered in the Apophthegmata (see Macarius in the Sayings).

The Work of the Hands

A feature of the Scetiote pattern worth drawing out is the place of manual labor. The monk’s solitary week was not given to prayer alone but to the steady work of the hands — above all the plaiting of palm-leaf and reed into rope, mats, and baskets, which the monks sold to buy their bread and to give alms. This labor was not a grudging concession to bodily need but an integral part of the spiritual method. It kept the monk from idleness, which the fathers regarded as the soil of every temptation; it humbled him in honest poverty; it disciplined the restless body while freeing the mind to pray, since the simple, repetitive work of the hands could be carried on with the heart’s continual prayer running beneath it. The combination — hands at work, lips or heart at prayer — is the practical form of the “pray without ceasing” that the desert took with such seriousness, and it stands in pointed contrast to the Messalian rejection of labor in favor of prayer alone (a contrast that became doctrinally significant for the corpus later attached to Macarius’s name; see The Messalian Boundary). The baskets Macarius himself wove during the false-accusation episode (see Lower Egypt and the Call) are the same labor he would make the daily bread of his settlement.

Macarius as the Father of the Valley

Within this loosely gathered settlement Macarius held a peculiar authority — not the institutional authority of an abbot over a rule, but the moral authority of the discerning elder to whom the rest deferred. The Apophthegmata repeatedly show him as the one whose word settled a matter, whose discernment read the hidden state of a soul, and whose humility set the tone of the place (see The Spiritual Counsel). The Coptic tradition gives him the title pneumatophoros, “the Spiritbearer,” and remembers him as the father from whose cell the whole life of Scetis radiated (Vivian, St. Macarius the Spiritbearer, 2004). Around his cell the four great congregations of Scetis would in time organize themselves, each with its own church — the structure treated in The Monastic Centre.

What Macarius founded, then, was less an institution than a way: a disciplined solitude held within a sacramental fellowship, governed by humility and discernment rather than by a written rule. That way outlived him by fifteen centuries — it is, in essence, still the life of Wadi al-Natrun’s monasteries today — and it shaped, through the Apophthegmata and through the spirituality of the heart that gathered to his name, the whole subsequent monasticism of the Christian East.

References

Palladius. The Lausiac History 17. Trans. R. T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964. (The retirement to the desert at thirty; sixty years there.)
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (The cell-and-synaxis life of Scetis throughout.)
Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The semi-anchoritic pattern; the geography of Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis.)
Vivian, Tim, trans. St. Macarius the Spiritbearer: Coptic Texts Relating to Saint Macarius the Great. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004. (Macarius as the Spiritbearer and father of Scetis.)