The Fifty Spiritual Homilies

The corpus that bears Macarius’s name. A body of Greek spiritual homilies and letters, transmitted in four distinct collections, the most famous of which is the Fifty Spiritual Homilies (Collection II) printed in Migne as PG 34. This file lays out the corpus, its four collections, its critical editions, and the Great Letter — the necessary groundwork for the authorship question that follows.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

A Corpus, Not a Book

What is loosely called “the Macarian Homilies” is in fact a substantial and complex body of writing — discourses, letters, and questions-and-answers on the spiritual life — that circulated through the Byzantine world under the name of St. Macarius the Egyptian. It is among the most influential ascetic-mystical corpora of the Christian East, the fountainhead of the “spirituality of the heart” (see Grace and Experience), and a formative source for everything from fifth-century Diadochus to fourteenth-century hesychasm to eighteenth-century Wesleyan perfectionism (see Eastern Reception and Wider Reception). The question of who actually wrote it is the subject of the next file (see The Symeon Authorship Question); this file describes the corpus itself, which is the necessary groundwork.

The Four Collections

Modern scholarship has established that the Macarian material survives not in a single edition but in four distinct collections (often called “Types,” I–IV), which overlap in content but arrange and number the homilies differently. The four are (following the standard account in Plested, The Macarian Legacy, 2004, and the editions cited below):

Collection I (Type I) — the largest collection, comprising sixty-four logoi (discourses), and notable for opening with the Great Letter (see below). Critically edited by Heinz Berthold, Makarios/Symeon, Reden und Briefe: Die Sammlung I des Vaticanus Graecus 694, 2 vols., GCS (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1973).
Collection II (Type II) — the Fifty Spiritual Homilies — by far the most famous and historically dominant collection, the one known to the West since the sixteenth century and to the whole later tradition, including John Wesley. This is the collection printed in Migne, Patrologia Graeca 34. The standard critical edition is Hermann Dörries, Erich Klostermann, and Matthias Kroeger, Die 50 geistlichen Homilien des Makarios, Patristische Texte und Studien 4 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964).
Collection III (Type III) — forty-three logoi, including authentic Macarian material absent from Collection II. The newly recovered homilies were first edited by Erich Klostermann and Heinz Berthold, Neue Homilien des Makarius/Symeon, Texte und Untersuchungen 72 (Berlin, 1961); the homilies proper to this collection were given a bilingual Greek–French critical edition by Vincent Desprez, Pseudo-Macaire, Œuvres spirituelles I, Sources Chrétiennes 275 (Paris: Cerf, 1980) — the only Sources Chrétiennes volume of the corpus to have appeared.
Collection IV (Type IV) — the remaining collection, the least independently significant; its contents largely overlap with the other three, and it is the only one of the four without a full modern critical edition.

[The exact logoi-counts assigned to Collections I and III vary slightly between secondary accounts; the figures given here follow the standard scholarly summaries (Plested 2004; the editions’ front matter). The serious user should consult the critical editions directly.]

The Fifty Spiritual Homilies (Collection II)

When earlier writers — Symeon Metaphrastes in the tenth century, the Philokalia in the eighteenth, John Wesley in the eighteenth, and most readers down to the present — speak simply of “the Homilies of Macarius,” they mean Collection II, the Fifty Spiritual Homilies. This is the collection that entered Western knowledge first: it was printed with a Latin translation by Johannes Picus in 1559, and it is the text Migne reproduced in PG 34. Its fifty discourses range over the whole inner life — the indwelling and warfare of grace and sin in the heart, the experience of the Spirit, prayer, watchfulness, the perfection of love — in a vivid, image-laden, biblically saturated prose very different in texture from the terse sayings of the desert Apophthegmata. It is from this collection that the famous Macarian images are drawn: the heart as Christ’s palace and as a workshop of good and evil (Homily 15), the heart as a small vessel holding both the dragons and the treasures of grace (Homily 43), the soul wholly penetrated by the Spirit becoming “all light, all eye” (Homily 1). The standard English translation of Collection II, together with the Great Letter, is George A. Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter (Classics of Western Spirituality; Paulist Press, 1992), whose very title registers the modern doubt about authorship.

The Great Letter

Distinct from the homilies but central to the corpus and to the authorship debate is the Great Letter (Epistola Magna) — a substantial treatise-letter on the ascetic life that stands at the head of Collection I and circulates also independently. It was critically edited by Werner Jaeger in Two Rediscovered Works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius (Leiden: Brill, 1954), and again, with the decisive synoptic comparison to Gregory of Nyssa, by Reinhart Staats, Makarios-Symeon, Epistola Magna (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984). The Great Letter matters out of proportion to its length because it runs closely parallel to a genuine work of Gregory of Nyssa, the De instituto christiano — a parallel so close that one text must depend on the other, and the question of which depends on which is one of the contested hinges of the whole problem (see The Symeon Authorship Question).

The Character of the Writing

It is worth pausing on what kind of texts these are, because their literary character is itself part of the evidence in the authorship debate. The Macarian Homilies are not systematic theology in the manner of the Cappadocians, nor terse desert apophthegms in the manner of the Apophthegmata. They are sustained, warm, image-saturated discourses on the inner life, addressed to monks and ranging freely over the experience of grace, the warfare of the heart, the indwelling of the Spirit, and the soul’s transformation. Their prose is biblical to its marrow — woven through with the language of the Psalms, the Prophets (Ezekiel’s chariot is a favorite), and St. Paul — and it works by accumulating concrete images rather than by argument: the heart as a palace, a workshop, a tomb, a field to be plowed; the soul as a bride, a chariot, an eye; grace as fire, light, leaven, and living water. This affective, experiential, image-driven texture is precisely what distinguishes the corpus from the desert father’s recorded sayings and aligns it instead with the Syrian ascetic literature of Ephrem and the Liber Graduum — one of the internal grounds on which scholarship reassigned it to a Syro-Mesopotamian author (see The Symeon Authorship Question and Wider Reception). The very qualities that made the Homilies beloved across the centuries — their immediacy, their psychological depth, their fire — are also the fingerprints by which their true milieu was identified.

A Note on Citation

Because the four collections number and divide the material differently, and because translations (Maloney’s CWS edition; the older A. J. Mason version) follow different schemes, a citation of “the Homilies” must specify the collection and, ideally, the translation. This collection cites the Fifty Spiritual Homilies as “Collection II” with the homily number (e.g., Fifty Spiritual Homilies [Collection II] 15; trans. Maloney, CWS), reserves “PG 34” for the Collection II text where confidently applicable, and names the Great Letter explicitly when that text is in view. The variation in numbering is not pedantry; it is a direct consequence of the textual history of a corpus that was transmitted, redacted, and re-collected over centuries — itself part of the evidence that the corpus is a living tradition of texts rather than a single authored book.

References

Maloney, George A., trans. Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1992. (Collection II and the Great Letter; preface by Kallistos Ware.)
Dörries, Hermann, Erich Klostermann, and Matthias Kroeger. Die 50 geistlichen Homilien des Makarios. Patristische Texte und Studien 4. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964. (Critical edition of Collection II.)
Berthold, Heinz. Makarios/Symeon, Reden und Briefe: Die Sammlung I des Vaticanus Graecus 694. 2 vols. GCS. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1973. (Collection I.)
Klostermann, Erich, and Heinz Berthold. Neue Homilien des Makarius/Symeon. Texte und Untersuchungen 72. Berlin, 1961. (Collection III material.)
Desprez, Vincent, trans. and ed. Pseudo-Macaire, Œuvres spirituelles I: Homélies propres à la Collection III. Sources Chrétiennes 275. Paris: Cerf, 1980.
Jaeger, Werner. Two Rediscovered Works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius. Leiden: Brill, 1954. (The Great Letter.)
Patrologia Graeca 34. Ed. J.-P. Migne. Paris, 1860. (The Fifty Spiritual Homilies under the name of Macarius of Egypt.)
Plested, Marcus. The Macarian Legacy: The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (The four collections and their relationship.)