The Spiritual Counsel

Distilled from the sayings: the three notes that sound through all the Macarian apophthegms — humility, the refusal to judge a brother, and the stillness (hesychia) that is the desert’s whole method. Where the narrative sayings dramatize his life, these gather his teaching into its essential counsel.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A Teaching Made of Few Words

The Macarius of the Apophthegmata Patrum is not a systematic teacher. His counsel comes in fragments — a sentence given to a brother who asked for “a word,” a gesture, a refusal to answer where an answer would condemn. Yet across the forty-one sayings under “Macarius the Great” (Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 1984) the same few themes recur with such consistency that they amount to a coherent spirituality. They are the themes the whole desert tradition prized, but in Macarius they are concentrated and given their characteristic gentleness: humility, non-judgment, and stillness. This file gathers them; the narrative sayings that dramatize them are treated in Macarius in the Sayings, and their application to prayer and the passions in Ascetic Teaching.

Humility

Humility is the foundation of everything in the Macarian sayings, and it is taught less by precept than by example. Macarius is shown again and again declining the lower place’s opposite — refusing honor, hiding his gifts, taking the blame that belonged to another. The pattern was set in his own life by the false accusation he bore in silence (see Lower Egypt and the Call), and it runs through the sayings as a settled disposition: the great elder of Scetis behaving as the least of the brothers. The lesson of the corpse — that one must become “like a dead man,” unmoved by either praise or blame (Macarius the Great 23; Ward) — is the most concentrated form of this teaching. Humility, for Macarius, is not a feeling of lowliness but a freedom: the liberty of a soul no longer governed by what others think of it, and therefore able to attend only to God.

This is why his discernment never curdled into severity. A father who reads the secret thoughts of those who come to him could easily become a judge; Macarius used the gift only to heal, never to expose, and the sayings are careful to show him concealing what he saw rather than wielding it. The depth of his insight was, in the tradition’s reading, the direct fruit of the depth of his self-abasement — a man sees clearly into others only when he has stopped defending himself.

Non-Judgment

From the humility flows the refusal to judge. One of the most quoted of all desert counsels is preserved among the Macarian sayings: asked how one is to be saved, he gives, in effect, the negative of the whole law — do not condemn your neighbor. The desert held this with peculiar seriousness, because the solitary life, for all its severities, breeds in the unwary a subtle contempt for those who do less; and the fathers taught that to judge a brother is to usurp the seat of God and to forfeit one’s own forgiveness. Macarius embodies the counsel in the well-known type of saying in which a brother has fallen into sin and the other monks gather to condemn him: Macarius comes carrying a leaking basket of sand behind him, and when asked what it means, says, “My sins run out behind me where I cannot see them, and I have come to judge the sins of another” — and the brother is spared. [This saying of the basket of sand circulates widely in the desert tradition and is variously attributed among the fathers; it is given here as a representative apophthegm of the desert’s non-judgment teaching rather than as securely numbered to Macarius alone.] The settled Macarian principle stands whatever the attribution of any single anecdote: the monk’s business is with his own sins, never with his brother’s.

Non-judgment, in this teaching, is not moral indifference. The desert took sin with deadly seriousness — Macarius’s own asceticism was severe (see Ascetic Teaching). What it refused was the inward act of condemnation, the soul’s verdict against another, which the fathers regarded as itself among the gravest of sins because it imitates the prerogative of God and poisons the love that is the whole point of the commandments.

Stillness (Hesychia)

The third note is stillness — hesychia, the inner and outer quiet that the desert made the very method of its prayer. The watchword “flee, be silent, be still” belongs, strictly, to Abba Arsenius and not to Macarius (see Macarius in the Sayings), but the counsel it expresses is fully Macarian and fully Scetiote. The pattern of life Macarius founded — the solitary cell through the week, broken only for the weekend synaxis (see Founding of Scetis) — was an architecture for stillness: a deliberate stripping-away of distraction, conversation, and human regard, so that the monk might attend, in the silence, to the warfare of his own heart and to the presence of God within it. The sayings show Macarius counseling brevity in prayer, attention to the single thing, and the keeping of the cell as the place where the monk is taught everything: “Sit in your cell,” runs the recurrent desert counsel, “and your cell will teach you all things.”

This stillness is not emptiness but attention. Its aim is the prayer of the heart — the continual, recollected turning of the whole person toward God — which the later tradition, drawing the name of Macarius into its inheritance, would develop into the hesychast prayer of the Christian East (see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). It is one of the deep ironies of the Macarian dossier that the spirituality of the heart most fully associated with his name comes not from the desert father’s own recorded sayings but from the homiletic corpus attributed to him (see Grace and Experience); yet the sayings of the historical Macarius already point in that direction. The abba who taught his monks to sit still in their cells and guard their thoughts was teaching, in seed, the prayer of the heart that the tradition would later read back into his name.

The Unity of the Three

Humility, non-judgment, and stillness are not three separate counsels but one. Stillness is the condition in which the heart can be watched; watching the heart reveals one’s own sin, which breeds humility; and humility, by emptying the soul of self-regard, removes both the appetite and the standing to judge another. The Macarian counsel is a single circle, and at its center is the one thing the Apophthegmata will not let the reader forget: that the way of salvation runs not through great deeds but through the patient, hidden labor of becoming small — “like a dead man,” free, and at rest in God.

See Also

• Macarius in the Sayings — the narrative sayings that dramatize this counsel
• Lower Egypt and the Call — the humility learned in the false accusation
• Ascetic Teaching — the counsel applied to prayer and the passions
• Grace and Experience — the spirituality of the heart later read into his name
• Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer — the prayer of the heart and ceaseless prayer

References

• The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Macarius the Great, the sayings on humility, non-judgment, and stillness.)
• Ward, Benedicta. The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks. London: Penguin, 2003.
• 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 desert teaching on hesychia and the cell.)