Eastern Reception

How the Macarian spirituality of the heart entered the mainstream of Eastern Christian theology: Diadochus of Photike, who drew on Macarius while correcting his Messalian-sounding edges; the parallel with Gregory of Nyssa; the use Maximus the Confessor made of the corpus; the decisive Macarian roots of hesychasm and the theology of Gregory Palamas; and the entry of the Homilies into the Philokalia through Symeon Metaphrastes’ paraphrase, under Macarius’s name.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Standard Study

The reception of the Macarian corpus in the Christian East is the subject of Marcus Plested’s The Macarian Legacy: The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), which traces the corpus’s influence through Mark the Monk, Diadochus of Photike, Abba Isaiah, and Maximus the Confessor, and on into hesychasm. Plested’s thesis is that the Macarian inheritance, far from being a Messalian embarrassment quarantined at the margins, runs through the central channel of Eastern spirituality — and that it does so precisely because the great receivers drew on Macarius while correcting whatever in him leaned toward the condemned errors. This file follows that channel.

Diadochus of Photike

The single most important early receiver is Diadochus of Photike (fifth century), whose On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination (the “Hundred Chapters” or Gnostic Chapters) is, in Plested’s judgment, “a profound synthesis of the Evagrian and — especially — Macarian legacies.” Diadochus took over the Macarian language of spiritual perception (aisthesis) and the conscious experience of grace, but he corrected the point at which Macarius came nearest the Messalian edge — the apparent teaching that grace and sin co-inhabit the intellect of the baptized, which could be read to imply that baptism leaves the soul still in the demon’s grip (see The Messalian Boundary).

Diadochus’s solution was to specify the structure of grace’s presence. At baptism, he taught, grace takes up residence in the very depths of the heart and drives the demonic power out to the surface; grace is then hidden in the depths, concealed even from the soul’s own perception, and is revealed and consciously felt only as the soul learns to love God with its whole resolve. His own words are explicit: “Before holy baptism, grace encourages the soul towards good from the outside, while Satan lurks in its depths… But from the moment that we are reborn through baptism, the demon is outside, grace is within” (ch. 76); and “from the instant we are baptized, grace is hidden in the depths of the intellect, concealing its presence even from the perception of the intellect itself. When someone begins, however, to love God with full resolve, then in a mysterious way, by means of intellectual perception, grace communicates something of its riches to his soul” (ch. 77; trans. Palmer–Sherrard–Ware, Philokalia, vol. 1). This is the Macarian schema of hidden-then-revealed grace, made anti-Messalian by the insistence that grace is fully given and present at baptism whether or not it is yet felt. Through Diadochus, the Macarian experience of grace passed into the tradition cleansed of its dangerous reading.

The Gregory of Nyssa Parallel

Set beside the reception runs the contested parallel with Gregory of Nyssa, whose De instituto christiano shares extensive verbatim material with the Macarian Great Letter. Whether Gregory drew on Macarius or Macarius on Gregory is disputed (Jaeger held Gregory prior; Staats reversed it — see The Symeon Authorship Question). For the history of reception, the bare fact of the close relationship is what matters: it ties the Macarian corpus, at the very headwaters of its transmission, to the most philosophically sophisticated of the Cappadocian fathers, and it is part of why the corpus could be read as belonging to the mainstream of fourth-century theology rather than to a heretical fringe.

Maximus the Confessor

Plested devotes a full chapter to Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662), arguing for a “palpable Macarian dimension” in his great synthesis of Eastern theology. Maximus, on this reading, follows Macarius in making the heart the locus of the spiritual struggle, the place where the human person meets God, and uses this Macarian heart-anthropology to balance the primacy of the intellect inherited from Evagrius — yielding the more holistic account of the human person characteristic of his thought. Through Maximus, whose authority stands behind so much of later Byzantine theology, the Macarian emphasis on the heart was carried into the central dogmatic tradition.

Hesychasm and Gregory Palamas

The deepest reception is in hesychasm — the tradition of inner, ceaseless prayer of the heart that flowered on Mount Athos and received its dogmatic defense from Gregory Palamas (1296–1359). The Macarian roots of hesychasm are direct: the teaching that the heart is the locus of prayer, that grace is consciously experienced, and that the indwelling Spirit transfigures the person into light (the soul become “all light, all eye,” Homily 1; see Grace and Experience) is the very substance of hesychast spirituality. Palamas, in the Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts (1330s–40s), repeatedly cites Macarius among his authorities, including the Macarian teaching that the heart governs the whole organism and is the seat of the mind and the thoughts.

There is a sharp irony here. Palamas’s opponent, Barlaam of Calabria, accused the hesychasts of being Messalians — the very heresy entangled with the corpus the hesychasts revered. Palamas answered by distinguishing the hesychasts’ experience of the uncreated divine light — the light of Tabor, a perception of God’s energies and not of his essence — from the Messalian claim to a bodily vision of the divine essence, and the hesychasts’ sacramental, ecclesial life from Messalian anti-sacramentalism (Meyendorff, ed., Gregory Palamas: The Triads, 1983; Plested 2004). The Macarius–Palamas line is the through-thread of the whole Eastern reception: the spirituality the corpus pioneered, purified by Diadochus and dogmatically secured by Palamas, became the official mystical theology of the Orthodox Church (see St. Gregory Palamas and Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer).

Symeon the New Theologian and the Theology of Experience

The Macarian insistence that grace is consciously experienced — not merely possessed by faith but felt, with “full assurance” (plerophoria) and spiritual perception (aisthesis) — found one of its most powerful later expressions in Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), the great Byzantine theologian of the conscious experience of grace and the vision of the divine light. Symeon’s whole theology turns on the conviction that the Christian must come to a conscious, perceptible awareness of the Holy Spirit and of the light of God — the very emphasis the Macarian corpus had made central, and which it had bequeathed to the tradition through Diadochus and the hesychast stream. Symeon, like the Macarian author before him, was suspected in his own day of claiming too much for experience; and, like the corpus, he was vindicated by the Church and received as a master of the spiritual life. The line from Macarius through Symeon to Palamas is the great trajectory of the Eastern theology of experienced grace, and the Macarian corpus stands at its head.

The Philokalic Metaphrasis

The corpus entered the canonical anthology of Orthodox spirituality, the Philokalia, by a particular route. In the tenth century, Symeon Metaphrastes (“the Metaphrast”) produced a paraphrase — a condensation and reworking — of the Macarian homilies. It is this Metaphrasis, not the original homilies, that Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain and Makarios of Corinth included in the Philokalia (first published Venice, 1782), under the name of “Saint Makarios of Egypt.” In the standard English Philokalia (Palmer–Sherrard–Ware), it appears in volume 3 as “St Symeon Metaphrastis: Paraphrase of the Homilies of St Makarios of Egypt,” arranged into six thematic discourses: Spiritual Perfection; Prayer; Patient Endurance and Discrimination; The Raising of the Intellect; Love; and The Freedom of the Intellect. [Disputed: the Metaphrastic corpus is traditionally said to comprise 150 chapters, but the Palmer–Sherrard–Ware volume presents it as these six thematic sections, not as 150 numbered chapters; a reader checking volume 3 will find the six discourses.] Through the Philokalia — translated into Slavonic by Paisius Velichkovsky and carried across the Orthodox world — the Macarian spirituality of the heart reached, under Macarius’s name, the monastic and lay revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and beyond.

References

Plested, Marcus. The Macarian Legacy: The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Diadochus, Maximus, hesychasm.)
Diadochus of Photike. On Spiritual Knowledge and Discrimination, chs. 76–77. In The Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1979.
Gregory Palamas. The Triads. Ed. John Meyendorff, trans. Nicholas Gendle. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1983. (The defense against Barlaam’s charge of Messalianism.)
The Philokalia, vol. 3. Trans. and ed. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1984. (The Metaphrasis of the Homilies of St Makarios of Egypt.)