Macarius in the Sayings

The forty-one sayings gathered under “Macarius the Great” in the alphabetical Apophthegmata Patrum are the primary witness to the historical man. This file reads the narrative sayings — the talking skull, the lesson of the corpse — and the portrait of the abba they compose, and clears up one famous misattribution along the way.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Source

The Apophthegmata Patrum (Sayings of the Desert Fathers) are the great repository of the wisdom of fourth- and fifth-century Egyptian monasticism: short anecdotes and pronouncements, remembered first in oral circulation, then gathered and written down in the fifth century. The alphabetical collection arranges them by the name of the father to whom each is attached, and under “Macarius the Great” it preserves forty-one sayings (numbered I–XLI; English in Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection, 1984). These sayings are the closest thing we have to a portrait of the historical Macarius of Scetis drawn from those who knew him or knew men who had. They are not a biography and were never meant as one; each was preserved because it carried a usable word of salvation. Read together, however, they compose a remarkably consistent figure: an abba of extraordinary discernment and yet more extraordinary humility, slow to condemn, quick to take the lower place, and possessed of a quiet authority the whole desert acknowledged.

The Talking Skull

The most famous of the narrative sayings is the encounter with the skull (Apophthegmata Patrum, Macarius the Great 38; Ward). Walking in the desert, Macarius struck with his staff against a dry skull lying on the ground, and the skull spoke. Macarius asked whose it was, and it answered that it had been the skull of a pagan priest of the place. Macarius asked after the state of the dead, and the skull described the souls in hell as sunk in a great fire, bound back to back, unable to see one another’s faces. But, it said, when Macarius prays for the dead, they receive some small relief: “when you pray for us, each of us can see the other’s face a little.” And it told him that below themselves, in a yet deeper torment, lay those who had known God’s name and yet despised it and had not kept his commandments — these were punished still more severely than the pagans who had never known.

The saying is hagiography of a distinctive kind, and the discipline of this collection is to report it as the tradition’s, not to certify it as fact (per METHODOLOGY.md §3.5). Its purpose is plainly catechetical. It teaches the efficacy of prayer for the departed — that the prayers of the living mitigate the suffering of the dead — and it teaches, with a fearful edge, that those who have received the knowledge of God and betrayed it stand in greater peril than those who never received it. The skull’s words about the dead seeing “one another’s faces a little” through Macarius’s intercession became a touchstone for the Orthodox theology of prayer for the departed.

The Lesson of the Corpse

A second narrative saying gives, in compact dramatic form, the whole Macarian teaching on detachment from human opinion (Apophthegmata Patrum, Macarius the Great 23; Ward). A young monk came to Macarius asking for a word of salvation. Macarius sent him to the cemetery and told him to go and revile the dead — to heap insults and abuse upon them. The monk did so and returned. Macarius asked what the dead had answered. “Nothing,” said the monk. Then Macarius sent him back to praise them — to call them apostles, saints, righteous men. Again the monk returned, and again Macarius asked what they had said. “Nothing.” Then Macarius drew the lesson: “You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they did not answer. So you too, if you wish to be saved, must become a dead man. Like the dead, take no account either of the scorn of men or of their praises, and you can be saved.”

This is the same lesson Macarius had first learned not in teaching but in living — in the false accusation he bore in silence and then in the flight from the honor that followed his vindication (see Lower Egypt and the Call). The deadness he counsels is not indifference to people but freedom from the tyranny of their judgment, the inner liberty of one who is moved neither up by praise nor down by blame, and who is therefore free to seek only the judgment of God.

“Flee, Be Silent, Be Still” — A Necessary Correction

A celebrated three-word watchword of the desert — fuge, tace, quiesce, “flee, be silent, be still” (sometimes “be at rest” or “pray always”) — is frequently and loosely attached to Macarius. It is not his. The saying belongs securely to Abba Arsenius, who came to Scetis a generation after Macarius: when Arsenius prayed to be shown the way of salvation, a voice answered him, “Arsenius, flee, be silent, be still [fuge, tace, quiesce], for these are the roots of sinlessness” (Apophthegmata Patrum, Arsenius 1–2; Ward). The formula is one of the great hesychast watchwords, and it does express a counsel of stillness fully congenial to Macarius’s own teaching (see The Spiritual Counsel) — but in any careful citation it must be assigned to Arsenius, not to Macarius. The collection notes the point because the misattribution is common and because the discipline of this guide is to label sayings to their actual source rather than to the more famous name.

The Garden and the Bunch of Grapes

A third narrative saying deserves notice for the picture it gives of Macarius’s standing among the fathers — the saying of the bunch of grapes (transmitted in the desert tradition; cf. the Apophthegmata). A fresh bunch of grapes was brought to Macarius, who longed for it but, mastering his desire, sent it on to a brother he thought more in need. That brother, with the same self-denial, sent it to another; and the grapes passed in this way around the whole settlement, each monk forgoing them for the sake of his neighbor, until at last they were brought back, untouched, to Macarius — who marveled at the abstinence of the brethren and gave thanks. The saying is a small parable of the whole Scetiote ethos: a community in which each preferred the other, in which self-denial circulated like a gift, and at whose center stood Macarius, both the source and the beneficiary of the love that bound the desert together. Whatever the precise transmission of any single version, the story shows how the tradition imagined the fellowship Macarius fathered.

The Portrait

Beyond the narrative sayings, the Macarian apophthegms compose a consistent character. He is shown deflecting praise and concealing his own gifts; declining to condemn a brother caught in sin, and instead bearing the brother’s shame as his own; reading the hidden thoughts of those who came to him, yet using that discernment only to heal; and answering the question “How should one pray?” with a counsel of brevity and constancy rather than many words (see Ascetic Teaching). The clairvoyant gifts the sayings attribute to him are treated in their own place and pinned to their source-texts (see Attested Accounts). What the sayings as a whole insist upon is that the greatest of the desert fathers was also the most self-effacing — that the depth of his discernment was the fruit of the depth of his humility. This is the Macarius the Church venerates: not the supposed author of a body of homilies (a separate question; see The Symeon Authorship Question), but the abba of the Apophthegmata, whose every remembered word turns on humility.

References

The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Macarius the Great 1, 23, 38; Arsenius 1–2 for “flee, be silent, be still.”)
Ward, Benedicta. The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks. London: Penguin, 2003.
Vivian, Tim, trans. St. Macarius the Spiritbearer: Coptic Texts Relating to Saint Macarius the Great. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004. (Coptic parallels to the sayings.)