Ascetic Teaching

The practical counsel attached to Macarius’s name: on prayer (brief, constant, of the heart), on the warfare of the passions, and on the watchfulness (nepsis) that guards the inner life. Drawn from the sayings of the Apophthegmata and harmonized with the spirituality of the corpus, this is the working core of what “Macarius” teaches a monk — or anyone — about the inner life.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

On Prayer

The Macarian teaching on prayer, in both the desert sayings and the homiletic corpus, is marked by two convictions: prayer should be brief and constant rather than long and occasional, and it should be prayer of the heart rather than of the lips alone. When a brother asked Macarius how one ought to pray, the Apophthegmata preserve a characteristically spare answer: there is no need of many words; it is enough to stretch out the hands and say, “Lord, as you will and as you know, have mercy” — and if the conflict grows fierce, “Lord, help!” God knows what we need, Macarius taught, and is full of mercy (Apophthegmata Patrum, Macarius the Great 19; trans. Ward). The counsel against many words is not against constancy: it is precisely because prayer is to be unceasing — the heart turned to God through all the hours of the cell — that it must be short enough to be carried into every task. This is the seed of the later tradition’s continual prayer of the heart and of the brief, repeated invocation of the Jesus Prayer (see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer).

The homiletic corpus deepens this into the spirituality of the heart: prayer is the heart’s attention to the indwelling Spirit, the conscious turning of the whole person toward the God who dwells within (see Grace and Experience). But the desert sayings already insist on the practical conditions: prayer requires the stilling of distraction, the discipline of the cell, and above all humility — for the prayer God hears is the prayer of the contrite, not of the self-satisfied.

The Warfare of the Passions

The Macarian tradition takes with deadly seriousness the reality of inner warfare. The passions — the disordered movements of anger, lust, vainglory, despondency, pride, and the rest — are not abolished by baptism or by the monastic vow but remain in the heart, warring against grace, and must be fought through the whole of life (the teaching on the coexistence of grace and sin; see The Messalian Boundary). The heart, in the great Macarian image, is a workshop in which good and evil are both manufactured, and a small vessel in which dragons and the treasures of grace lie together (Fifty Spiritual Homilies [Collection II] 15, 43; see Grace and Experience). The ascetic life is the long, patient labor of working that earth — clearing the heart of the passions so that grace may reign in it.

Macarius’s own asceticism, as the sources remember it, was severe — long fasts, long vigils, hard labor of the hands — but his counsel to others was tempered by discernment. The desert tradition over which he presided was wary of asceticism pursued for its own sake or as a ground for pride; the point of the fast and the vigil was never the feat but the purification of the heart, and an austerity that bred contempt for the less austere had defeated its own purpose. This is why humility stands at the center of his teaching (see The Spiritual Counsel): the passions are conquered not by force of will alone but by the self-knowledge and the dependence on grace that humility brings.

Watchfulness (Nepsis)

The guard of the inner life is watchfulness — nepsis, the sober vigilance over one’s own thoughts that the desert made the front line of the spiritual war. The fathers taught that sin enters first as a logismos, a thought or suggestion presented to the mind; that the thought, if entertained, grows into consent, and consent into passion, and passion into act; and that the place to wage the war is therefore at the threshold, in the watching of the thoughts as they arise. To “guard the heart” — to keep the inner door, to notice the suggestion before it takes root, to meet it with prayer — is the whole discipline of nepsis. Macarius’s counsel of brief, constant prayer is the practical instrument of this watchfulness: the short cry to God, repeated through the day, keeps the mind recollected and gives it a weapon ready at the moment of temptation.

Watchfulness is inseparable from the keeping of the cell and from spiritual direction. The monk watches his own thoughts, but he does not trust his own discernment alone: he brings his thoughts to his abba, lays them open, and receives a word — the practice of the disclosure of thoughts that the desert made central and that the later tradition of spiritual fatherhood inherited (see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction). The whole apparatus — cell, watchfulness, brief prayer, disclosure to the elder — is a single integrated method for the purification of the heart.

Discretion and the Royal Road

For all its severity, the Macarian ascetic teaching is governed by discretion (diakrisis) — the measured discernment that the desert ranked above every other virtue, even above asceticism itself. The fathers warned constantly against immoderate zeal: the monk who fasts beyond his strength, who undertakes feats to outdo his neighbor, or who drives his body past what it can bear, falls as surely as the negligent, and often more dangerously, because his fall is dressed as virtue and breeds pride. The desert image for the right path is the “royal road” (the via regia of Numbers 21:22) — the middle way that turns neither to the right hand of excess nor to the left of laxity. Macarius, the discerning abba par excellence, is remembered as a teacher of this measure: the goal is the purification of the heart, and any asceticism that serves vainglory rather than humility has missed it entirely. The same discernment governs his counsel to others — he met each soul where it was, prescribing not a uniform severity but what that person could bear and what would heal that person’s particular passions. This is the pastoral wisdom that the later tradition of spiritual fatherhood inherited from the desert (see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction): the elder discerns the measure, and the disciple keeps it in obedience.

The Shape of the Teaching

The ascetic teaching attached to Macarius is, in the end, of a piece with everything else in his dossier. It begins where his life began, in humility; it works through the patient warfare against the passions; it is guarded by watchfulness; and it is sustained by brief, constant prayer of the heart. Its goal is not the accumulation of ascetic achievements but the transformation of the heart into the dwelling-place of God — the small vessel emptied of its dragons and filled with the treasures of grace, the soul made “all light, all eye” by the indwelling Spirit (Homily 1). The desert father and the homiletic corpus, however distinct in authorship, here speak with one voice: the whole of the ascetic life is the labor of preparing the heart for the conscious, deifying presence of the Holy Spirit.

See Also

References

  • The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984. (Macarius the Great 19, on prayer; the sayings on watchfulness and the passions.)
  • 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, on the heart and the passions.)
  • Chitty, Derwas J. The Desert a City: An Introduction to the Study of Egyptian and Palestinian Monasticism under the Christian Empire. Oxford: Blackwell, 1966. (The desert discipline of nepsis and the disclosure of thoughts.)