The Desert Fellowship

Macarius did not invent the desert life; he entered a movement already underway and gave it one of its great centers. This file sets him within the fellowship of the Lower-Egyptian pioneers: St. Antony the Great, whom the tradition makes his model and teacher; Amoun, the founder of nearby Nitria; and the relationship of the three neighboring colonies — Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis — that together formed the heartland of fourth-century Egyptian monasticism.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

Antony as Model

By the time Macarius went to the desert, around the 330s, the eremitic life had a living patriarch: St. Antony the Great (c. 251 – 356), whose long solitude in the deep Egyptian desert had drawn imitators and made him, through Athanasius’s Life of Antony, the icon of the monastic vocation for the whole Christian world. The tradition consistently makes Macarius a spiritual heir of Antony, and in some tellings his disciple. The Orthodox synaxarion relates that the young Macarius sought out Antony at his mountain, was received by him “with love,” was clothed by him in the monastic habit, and became “his devoted disciple,” and that he was present at Antony’s repose and received the old man’s staff as a token of succession (so the OCA Life of Macarius the Great, January 19; cf. OrthodoxWiki). The Apophthegmata preserve sayings that show the two in contact — Antony greeting and instructing Macarius, and Macarius carrying Antony’s counsel back to Scetis (Apophthegmata Patrum, Antony and Macarius the Great; trans. Ward).

The discipleship should be read with the calibration the sources require. That Macarius knew and visited Antony is well embedded in the early sayings tradition; the fuller framing — formal tonsure by Antony, presence at his death, the inherited staff — belongs to the later hagiographic lives and is best presented as the tradition’s claim of spiritual succession rather than as fixed biographical chronology [the “received Antony’s staff” motif is hagiographic, attested in the synaxarion lives rather than in Palladius or the earliest sayings]. The point the tradition is making is theological as much as historical: it places Macarius of Scetis in direct line from Antony, so that the deep desert of Scetis is the inheritor of the deep desert of Antony’s mountain — the eremitic charism handed on.

Amoun and the Founding of Nitria

The other great pioneer of Lower-Egyptian monasticism, and a near-contemporary, was Amoun (Amun) of Nitria (d. c. 347). A married Alexandrian who lived in continence with his wife and then withdrew to the desert, Amoun founded, around 325–330, the colony of Nitria — the monastic mountain nearest the Delta, named (like Scetis) for its salt deposits (Palladius, Lausiac History 8, on Amoun; cf. Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History 1.14). Antony and Amoun were known to one another; the tradition reports that Antony saw in a vision the soul of Amoun carried up to heaven at his death (Palladius, Lausiac History 8). Nitria was the elder of the great colonies, and from it the other settlements of the region grew.

Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis

The heartland of fourth-century Lower-Egyptian monasticism was not one settlement but three neighboring centers, related by descent and by degree of solitude (Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966):

1. Nitria — founded by Amoun c. 325–330, the colony nearest to the settled Delta and the most accessible; a populous center where, Palladius reports, thousands of monks eventually lived, with a great church, guest-quarters, and even bakeries and a physician.
2. Kellia (“the Cells”) — an offshoot of Nitria, founded c. 338. As Nitria grew crowded, those who wanted deeper solitude withdrew some miles farther into the desert to a place of scattered cells set “out of earshot” of one another. The Coptic and Palladian tradition records that Amoun founded Kellia on the advice of St. Antony, who counseled the withdrawal of the more advanced to a greater solitude (Palladius, Lausiac History; Chitty, The Desert a City, 1966). It was at Kellia, not Scetis, that Macarius of Alexandria lived — one more reason the two Macarii are confused (see The Two Macarii).
3. Scetis — founded by Macarius the Egyptian around the same period, the deepest and most remote of the three, lying well to the south and west (see Founding of Scetis).

The three formed a gradient of solitude: Nitria nearest and most communal, Kellia farther and more secluded, Scetis farthest and strictest. A monk might begin in the relative shelter of Nitria, advance to the greater silence of the Cells, and — if he sought the most austere solitude of all — go out to Scetis. They were a single spiritual landscape, their fathers in constant contact, their sayings freely circulating between them; this is why the Apophthegmata read as the record of one fellowship rather than of separate houses.

[A note on “the four deserts”: the present collection’s subject is sometimes described as one of “four desert centers.” The standard scholarly distinction is of three sites — Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis. The number “four” properly belongs not to the desert centers but to the four later monastic congregations within Scetis itself, each with its own church, which organized around the great fathers near the end of the fourth century; see The Monastic Centre. The two should not be conflated.]

The Generation of the Great Fathers

The fellowship Macarius joined and led was not a succession of solitary geniuses but a remarkable concentration of holiness in a single generation and a single corner of desert. Around him at Scetis and in the neighboring colonies moved a company of fathers whose names fill the Apophthegmata: Pambo of Nitria, famed for the gravity of his silence; Moses the Black, the converted brigand who became one of the gentlest of the fathers and would die a martyr in the first sack of Scetis (see The Monastic Centre); John the Short (Colobos), whose obedience in watering a dry stick until it bloomed became a byword; Pishoi (Bishoi), the great ascetic of Scetis; Arsenius the Great, the former tutor of emperors who came to Scetis seeking the most radical silence; and the “Roman” brothers Maximus and Domitius of Baramus. These were Macarius’s contemporaries, juniors, and heirs, and the sayings show them in constant exchange — visiting, questioning, correcting, and learning from one another. The portrait the Apophthegmata compose is of a living community of discernment, in which the wisdom of each father was tested and refined against the others, and in which Macarius held a place of special honor as the deepest and most discerning of them all.

A Fellowship, Not a System

What bound these settlements together was not a single rule or a central authority but a shared way of life and a web of personal relationships among the elders. Monks traveled between the colonies; an abba of one might send a struggling brother to an abba of another; the word of a great father at Scetis would be carried to Nitria and remembered. Antony stood over the whole as the venerated patriarch; Amoun, Macarius the Egyptian, Macarius of Alexandria, Pambo, Moses the Black, John the Short, and many others were its lights. Macarius’s distinctive place in this fellowship was as the father of its most remote and austere center, and as the elder whose discernment and humility the others held in special honor — the abba of the deep desert, in direct succession, as the tradition tells it, from Antony himself.

See Also

• Founding of Scetis — the settlement Macarius founded, deepest of the three colonies
• The Two Macarii — Macarius of Alexandria, who lived at Kellia
• The Monastic Centre — the four congregations of Scetis (the proper “four”)
• Macarius in the Sayings — the fellowship as the Apophthegmata record it
• Orthodoxy: Church Fathers — the patristic and monastic context

References

• Palladius. The Lausiac History 8 (Amoun of Nitria), 17 (Macarius the Egyptian). Trans. R. T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964.
• Sozomen. Ecclesiastical History 1.14. NPNF II/2. (Amoun and the founding of Nitria.)
• The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Antony and Macarius; the fellowship of the desert.)
• 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 relationship of Nitria, Kellia, and Scetis; Kellia founded on Antony’s advice.)
• Venerable Macarius the Great of Egypt. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, January 19. (The visit to Antony; the habit; the inherited staff.)