04 — The Macarian Writings Problem
The methodological core of the collection. A great corpus of spiritual writing — the Fifty Spiritual Homilies and three further collections — has come down under the name of St. Macarius the Egyptian. This section describes the corpus and then gives the flagship source-critical treatment of the question that has occupied scholarship for a century: did Macarius write it, and if not, who did?
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)
This is the most important section of the guide for anyone who wants to understand what we mean when we speak of “Macarius” in theology. The historical Macarius of Scetis (Sections 01–03) is known through his sayings. But the name “Macarius” carries, in the history of Christian spirituality, an enormous further weight: a body of homilies and letters that shaped the whole subsequent tradition of the prayer of the heart. The trouble is that the corpus is almost certainly not the desert father’s. Since 1920, critical scholarship has detached it from Macarius the Egyptian and reassigned it to an unknown Syro-Mesopotamian author of the late fourth or early fifth century, conventionally called “Macarius-Symeon” or “Pseudo-Macarius,” and has wrestled with the corpus’s unsettling proximity to the condemned Messalian heresy.
The first file lays out the corpus itself — the four collections, the critical editions, the place of the Fifty Homilies. The second file is the flagship: a full presentation of the authorship and Messalian debate, with the positions named and sourced, on the model of the repository’s source-criticism flagships (per METHODOLOGY.md §4).
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Fifty Spiritual Homilies | The corpus: the four collections (Types I–IV), the Fifty Spiritual Homilies (Collection II), the Great Letter, the critical editions, and PG 34. |
| The Symeon Authorship Question | The flagship source-criticism: Villecourt, Dörries, and the “Symeon of Mesopotamia” hypothesis; the Messalian question; the Gregory of Nyssa parallel; what is settled and what remains contested. |
See Also
- The Two Macarii — the third, literary “Macarius” set beside the two historical ones
- Grace and Experience — the theology of the corpus whose authorship this section weighs
- The Messalian Boundary — the doctrinal question the authorship debate turns on
- Modern Scholarship — the scholars and editions that re-mapped the corpus
- METHODOLOGY.md — the repository citation and verification standard, esp. §4
References
- Maloney, George A., trans. Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1992.
- Dörries, Hermann, Erich Klostermann, and Matthias Kroeger. Die 50 geistlichen Homilien des Makarios. Patristische Texte und Studien 4. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964.
- Plested, Marcus. The Macarian Legacy: The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Stewart, Columba. “Working the Earth of the Heart”: The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to A.D. 431. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.