Wider Reception

The corpus’s roots and its more surprising afterlife. Behind the Greek Homilies lies the Syriac ascetic world from which their author came; and ahead of them, much later and across the confessional divide, lies an unexpected reception among German Pietists and in the perfectionism of John Wesley. The roots are now well established; the Western afterlife is reported here soberly, with care for what is actually documented and what remains contested.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Syriac Roots

The author of the Macarian corpus wrote Greek, but he belonged to the Syrian Orient, and modern scholarship has steadily uncovered the Syriac substratum of his thought. He worked within the same ascetic world as Aphrahat (“the Persian Sage”), Ephrem the Syrian, and — most importantly for the textual parallels — the anonymous Liber Graduum (“Book of Steps,” composed in Syriac in the late fourth or early fifth century; ed. and trans. Kitchen and Parmentier, The Book of Steps, Cistercian Studies 196). Columba Stewart’s “Working the Earth of the Heart” (Oxford, 1991) is the decisive demonstration of this: Stewart traced the characteristic Macarian vocabulary and imagery to this Syriac milieu and argued that the whole “Messalian controversy” was in large part a culture-clash — Greek-speaking bishops reading a Semitic ascetic idiom as doctrinal error (see The Messalian Boundary and The Symeon Authorship Question). The very phrase Stewart took for his title, “working the earth of the heart,” is a Macarian image for the patient labor of asceticism, and it is thoroughly Syriac in flavor.

The Liber Graduum shares with the Macarian corpus a developmental, two-tier spirituality (its “Upright” and “Perfect”), the same intense interiority, and the same Messalian shadow — but the relationship is one of common milieu rather than demonstrable direct dependence, and no source establishes literary borrowing in either direction, so none should be claimed. What is settled is that the corpus is a Greek monument of Syrian Christianity, and that recognizing its Syriac roots is the key to understanding both its distinctive power and its brush with heresy.

Maximus and the Bridge to the Whole Tradition

Maximus the Confessor, treated more fully under the Eastern reception (see Eastern Reception), is also the bridge by which the Macarian inheritance passed beyond any regional sphere into the common dogmatic patrimony of the Church. Because Maximus’s authority was received everywhere the Greek Fathers were read, the Macarian heart-anthropology he absorbed traveled with him — into Byzantine theology, into the Latin reception of Maximus through John Scotus Eriugena, and into the modern retrieval of patristic spirituality. The “wider reception,” in this sense, begins with Maximus’s universalizing of what had been a Syro-Egyptian current.

German Pietism: Gottfried Arnold

The most surprising chapter of the reception opens more than a millennium after the corpus was written, among the radical Protestant ascetics of late-seventeenth-century Germany. The Homilies became a favorite text of the Pietist and “Protestant Thebaid” circles that looked back to the desert fathers as models of an interior, experiential Christianity (the foundational study is Ernst Benz, Die protestantische Thebais, Mainz, 1963). The central figure is Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714), the radical Pietist historian, whose devotional and historical work was deeply shaped by the Macarian Homilies; his Die Erste Liebe (Leipzig, 1696) draws heavily on them, and he also produced a German translation of the corpus. [The date of Arnold’s translation is given variously in the literature — German reference works place a translation around 1696, while some recent studies date his rendering to 1715–16; the 1696 date for Die Erste Liebe itself is secure, but the translation date should be hedged.] Through the Pietists, the Greek desert spirituality of “Macarius” entered the Protestant devotional bloodstream — and it was through this channel that it reached John Wesley.

The Wesleyan Reception, Reported Soberly

That John Wesley (1703–1791) read, abridged, and prized the Macarian Homilies is documented fact; the degree to which they shaped his doctrine of Christian perfection is genuinely contested, and this collection reports both as such.

The documented facts. Wesley did not read Macarius in Greek. He used the English translation by Thomas Haywood, Primitive Morality: or, The Spiritual Homilies of St. Macarius the Egyptian (London, 1721), which rested in turn on the Greek edition of J. G. Pritius (Pritz), Leipzig, 1699. [A correction of a common error: the Greek edition behind Wesley is Pritius 1699; 1721 is the date of Haywood’s English translation, not of the Greek text.] Wesley placed his abridged selection of Macarius’s homilies at the very head of volume 1 of A Christian Library (50 vols.; Bristol, 1749–1755), with a short introduction “Of Macarius” — a position of honor that signals how highly he valued the text. [The number of homilies Wesley included is edition-dependent and is variously given as around twenty to twenty-two abridged homilies; his numbering does not map cleanly onto the modern critical editions.] He deployed Macarius at theologically load-bearing moments concerning the sin remaining in believers after justification and the gradual character of sanctification — for instance in the sermon The Scripture Way of Salvation (1765) — using the desert master as a witness that the Christian life is a continuing struggle of grace against remaining sin, exactly the Macarian teaching on the coexistence of grace and sin (see The Messalian Boundary).

The contested point. How far Macarius formed Wesley’s distinctive doctrine of Christian perfection is openly debated:

The maximalist reading (Albert C. Outler, John Wesley, 1964; Howard A. Snyder, “John Wesley and Macarius the Egyptian,” 1990) holds that what captivated Wesley in Macarius was the conception of perfection as a process rather than a state, which fused with his Anglican holiness tradition into “his own most distinctive doctrinal contribution” (Outler).
Two caveats weaken that line. First, Outler read Macarius (following Jaeger) as closely dependent on Gregory of Nyssa, so that Wesley’s Macarius meant high Cappadocian theosis — but Jaeger’s “Gregory-prior” thesis was reversed by Staats (see The Symeon Authorship Question), weakening that chain. Second, Richard Heitzenrater and Mark Kurowski (“The First Step Toward Grace,” Methodist History 36, 1998) showed that Wesley systematically “de-Orientalized” his Macarius — dropping, in his abridgment, “nearly every time Macarius mentioned a typically Eastern idea,” even where Haywood’s translation had preserved it.
The minimalist/mediating readings (Randy Maddox, “John Wesley and Eastern Orthodoxy,” 1990; Kenneth Collins, The Theology of John Wesley, 2007; Ted Campbell, John Wesley and Christian Antiquity, 1991) treat Macarius as one Eastern voice among many in an eclectic synthesis, and caution explicitly against reading Wesley as a hidden path to Eastern Orthodoxy.

[Disputed: the degree of Macarius’s influence on John Wesley’s doctrine of Christian perfection. Outler (1964) and Snyder (1990) make Macarius a formative source of Wesley’s “perfection-as-process”; Heitzenrater and Kurowski (1998), Collins (2007), and Campbell (1991) treat him as one corroborating witness among many within a deliberately de-Orientalized, eclectic synthesis. The fact of Wesley’s reading and abridgment of Macarius is not in doubt; the formative weight of that reading is.]

A Sober Summary

The wider reception, then, runs from the Syriac ascetic world that produced the corpus, through Maximus into the common patristic patrimony, and — by the long Pietist bridge — into the Protestant West, where it left its clearest mark on Wesley’s account of sanctification. The Orthodox interest in this Western afterlife is real but should not be overstated: it is a striking instance of how the spirituality of the heart, born in the Syrian desert and canonized in the Christian East, could speak even across the confessional divide of the Reformation — but Wesley’s “Macarius” was already a domesticated, de-Orientalized figure, read through an English translation and an Anglican lens, and the recent scholarship rightly asks not “what remains of Macarius in Wesley” but “who was Wesley’s Macarius” (Maria Fallica, “An Anglo-Syrian Monk: John Wesley’s Reception of Pseudo-Macarius,” Open Theology 7, 2021).

References

Stewart, Columba. “Working the Earth of the Heart”: The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to A.D. 431. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. (The Syriac roots; Ephrem, Aphrahat, the Liber Graduum.)
Kitchen, Robert A., and Martien F. G. Parmentier, trans. The Book of Steps: The Syriac Liber Graduum. Cistercian Studies 196. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 2004.
Benz, Ernst. Die protestantische Thebais. Wiesbaden: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz, 1963. (Pietist reception; Gottfried Arnold.)
Outler, Albert C. John Wesley. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. (The maximalist reading of Macarius’s influence.)
Snyder, Howard A. “John Wesley and Macarius the Egyptian.” Asbury Theological Journal 45/2 (1990): 55–60.
Heitzenrater, Richard P., and Mark Kurowski. “The First Step Toward Grace: John Wesley and the Macarian Homilies.” Methodist History 36 (1998): 113–24. (Wesley’s de-Orientalizing.)
Maddox, Randy L. “John Wesley and Eastern Orthodoxy: Influences, Convergences, and Differences.” Asbury Theological Journal 45/2 (1990): 29–53.
Fallica, Maria. “An Anglo-Syrian Monk: John Wesley’s Reception of Pseudo-Macarius.” Open Theology 7 (2021): 491–500.