Grace and Experience

The positive theology of the Macarian corpus: the heart (kardia) as the governing center and meeting-place of God and the soul; the insistence that grace is not merely inferred but consciously perceived, in “full assurance” (plerophoria) and spiritual “sensation” (aisthesis); the deifying indwelling of the Holy Spirit; and the famous contrast — and deeper complementarity — between this spirituality of the heart and the intellectualist spirituality of the nous.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Heart as the Center

The single most characteristic feature of the Macarian Homilies — the feature that gave the whole corpus its enduring influence — is the location of the entire spiritual life in the heart (kardia). The heart, for “Macarius-Symeon,” is not the physical organ alone but the deep center of the human person: the place where mind, will, and the soul’s faculties converge, and where God and the powers of evil contend for possession. “The heart governs and reigns over the whole bodily organism,” runs the famous passage of Fifty Spiritual Homilies (Collection II) 15, “and when grace possesses the ranges of the heart, it reigns over all the members and the thoughts; for there, in the heart, is the mind [nous], and all the faculties of the soul.” The heart is the throne-room: where grace takes possession of the heart, it rules the whole person; where it does not, the person is ruled by sin.

The corpus renders this in unforgettable images. The heart is Christ’s palace, with its “reception-rooms and bedchambers, doors and porches,” in which the King dwells (Homily 15). It is a workshop “of righteousness or of unrighteousness,” the forge where both virtue and vice are manufactured (Homily 15). And, in the locus classicus of the whole corpus, it is a small vessel of immeasurable depth: “Within the heart are unfathomable depths… It is but a small vessel, and yet dragons and lions are there, and poisonous creatures and all the treasures of wickedness; rough, uneven paths are there, and gaping chasms. There likewise is God, there are the angels, there life and the Kingdom, there light and the Apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasures of grace: all things are there” (Fifty Spiritual Homilies [Collection II] 43.7; trans. Maloney, CWS). The heart simultaneously houses the treasures of wickedness and the treasures of grace — and the whole drama of salvation is the contest waged in that small, bottomless space.

The Conscious Experience of Grace

The second great Macarian emphasis follows from the first: grace is not an abstraction inferred from doctrine but a presence consciously perceived. The corpus insists that the Holy Spirit, dwelling in the heart, is known by a real, felt awareness — and it carries this insistence in two Greek technical terms that became part of the permanent vocabulary of Eastern spirituality:

plerophoria — “full assurance” or “full certainty.” The Spirit ministers in the heart “in full assurance,” so that the soul does not merely believe but knows, with an inward certainty, the presence of God (cf. Fifty Spiritual Homilies [Collection II] 15, on “tasting” that the Lord is good, after Psalm 34).
aisthesis — “spiritual perception” or “sensation.” The soul has spiritual senses by which it perceives the working of grace as directly as the body perceives the world. The recurring Macarian formula pairs the two: the experience of grace is had “with all perception and full assurance” (meta pasēs aisthēseōs kai plērophorias).

Kallistos Ware summarized the Macarian aim as “the awakening of our spiritual senses, so that we attain a direct, palpable awareness of God’s Holy Spirit dwelling in our hearts” (Ware, in the preface to Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, 1992). This emphasis on conscious experience is at once the corpus’s great gift to the tradition and the source of its danger: it is precisely the language of felt, perceived grace that brought the Homilies under suspicion of Messalianism, and the careful work of distinguishing the two is the subject of the next file (see The Messalian Boundary). The Macarian author himself builds a safeguard into the teaching: grace is present from baptism, but at first hidden and unfelt, and is revealed and consciously experienced only progressively, through ascetic struggle — a schema later sharpened by Diadochus of Photike (see Eastern Reception).

The Deifying Spirit

The corpus is intensely pneumatological: the grace experienced in the heart is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and that indwelling is deifying — it transfigures the whole person into the likeness of God. The most famous image is drawn from Ezekiel’s vision of the fiery chariot (Homily 1): the soul wholly penetrated and possessed by the Spirit becomes itself “all light, all face, all eye” — every part of it radiant, every part turned toward and seeing God. This is the experiential face of the doctrine of theosis (see Orthodoxy: Theosis): not deification as a metaphysical formula but as a perceptible transformation of the person by the indwelling Spirit, the soul made luminous from within. It is this rendering of deification as conscious, transfiguring light that made the Macarian corpus foundational for the later hesychast theology of the vision of the divine light (see Eastern Reception).

The Two Souls and the Indwelling of Christ

A further characteristic note of the corpus is its vivid sense of the soul as the bride and the dwelling-place of Christ. The Macarian author returns again and again to the nuptial and the indwelling images of Scripture: Christ knocks at the door of the heart and asks to enter; the soul that opens to him becomes his bridal chamber and his temple; the Spirit makes his home within and transfigures the whole person from within. This is not metaphor loosely used but the corpus’s deepest conviction about what salvation is — not merely the forgiveness of sins or the promise of a future heaven, but the real, present indwelling of God in the heart, begun now and consummated in glory. The heart is where this indwelling happens; and because the indwelling is real and present, it can be — in the corpus’s bold claim — really and presently experienced. The conscious experience of grace is thus not an optional intensity for spiritual athletes but the proper, intended condition of the baptized soul: to know, with the heart’s own perception, that Christ dwells within. This conviction is the engine of the whole Macarian spirituality, and the source both of its power and of the controversy it provoked (see The Messalian Boundary).

Heart and Intellect: Macarius and Evagrius

Scholarship has long drawn a contrast between two streams of early monastic spirituality: the Evagrian, centered on the nous (the intellect) — a mysticism of pure prayer, the purging of logismoi (thoughts), and the ascent of the mind to God; and the Macarian, centered on the kardia (the heart) — an affective, whole-person, experiential mysticism of the indwelling Spirit. The contrast was popularized especially by Irénée Hausherr and Tomáš Špidlík, who read the whole history of Eastern spirituality as a counterpoint of these two tendencies.

The contrast is real as a difference of emphasis, but it should not be overdrawn, and the recent scholarship is at pains to correct the simpler version of it. Marcus Plested argues that the dichotomy is “too simple,” memorably putting it that “Evagrius’ nous is contained within Macarius’ kardia” (Plested, The Macarian Legacy, 2004, ch. 2). That is: the Macarian heart is the larger, more inclusive category — it is where the intellect itself dwells (recall Homily 15: “there, in the heart, is the nous”) — so that the two spiritualities are complementary rather than opposed. The great later syntheses of the tradition prove the point: Diadochus, Maximus, and above all the hesychasts, whose whole method was to “bring the nous down into the heart,” fused the Evagrian discipline of the intellect with the Macarian experience of the heart into a single path of prayer (see Eastern Reception and Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer). The Macarian contribution to that synthesis was decisive: it gave the tradition its language for the place of prayer (the heart) and for the mode of grace (conscious, deifying experience).

References

Maloney, George A., trans. Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1992. (Homilies 1, 15, 43; plerophoria and aisthesis; Ware’s preface.)
Dörries, Hermann, Erich Klostermann, and Matthias Kroeger. Die 50 geistlichen Homilien des Makarios. Patristische Texte und Studien 4. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964. (The critical Greek text of Collection II.)
Plested, Marcus. The Macarian Legacy: The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Heart and intellect; “Evagrius’ nous is contained within Macarius’ kardia.”)
Ware, Kallistos. Preface to Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius (1992); and The Inner Kingdom (Collected Works, vol. 1). Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The awakening of the spiritual senses.)