Modern Scholarship

The century of critical work that re-mapped the Macarian corpus and untangled it from the desert father. From Villecourt’s 1920 discovery through Dörries’s “Symeon” hypothesis, Staats’s reversal of Jaeger, Stewart’s reframing of the Messalian question, and Plested’s reception-history, to the critical editions and translations — Dörries–Klostermann–Kroeger, Desprez, Maloney — that made the whole problem legible. The bibliography behind everything this collection says about the corpus.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Shape of the Field

The modern study of “Macarius” is really the study of a textual and historical puzzle: how a great body of Greek spiritual writing came to be transmitted under the name of a fourth-century Egyptian desert father who almost certainly did not write it, and what that corpus actually is. Over the past century a series of scholars built, layer by layer, the account now taken as standard — that the corpus is the work of an anonymous Syro-Mesopotamian author of the late fourth or early fifth century, brushing against but distinct from condemned Messalianism, and enormously influential on the whole later tradition. This file surveys the scholarship that established that account, supplying the bibliography behind the collection’s central section (see The Symeon Authorship Question).

Villecourt and the Opening of the Problem (1920)

The modern problem opens with Louis Villecourt‘s 1920 study (“La date et l’origine des ‘Homélies spirituelles’ attribuées à Macaire,” Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres), which observed that the Macarian Homilies parallel, nearly item for item, the propositions condemned as Messalian in the ancient heresiological lists — and concluded that the corpus could not be by Macarius of Egypt and stood close to the Messalian movement. Villecourt set the agenda for everything that followed: the authorship question and the Messalian question, which have remained intertwined ever since.

Dörries: The “Symeon” Hypothesis (1941, 1978)

Hermann Dörries (1895–1977) did more than any other single scholar to define the field. His Symeon von Mesopotamien: Die Überlieferung der messalianischen “Makarios”-Schriften (Texte und Untersuchungen 55.1; Leipzig, 1941) proposed that the author was a Messalian named Symeon of Mesopotamia, identified from manuscript headings bearing the name “Symeon” and from Theodoret’s notice of a Messalian leader of that name — the hypothesis that gave the corpus its scholarly name, “Macarius-Symeon.” Dörries’s mature study, Die Theologie des Makarios/Symeon (Göttingen, 1978), substantially moderated the “Messalian” reading and offered a fuller, more sympathetic account of the author’s theology. Dörries also stands behind the critical edition of the Fifty Spiritual Homilies (with Klostermann and Kroeger, 1964; see below). His work remains the foundation, even where later scholarship has qualified it.

Jaeger, Staats, and the Gregory of Nyssa Question

Werner Jaeger‘s Two Rediscovered Works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius (Leiden: Brill, 1954) edited the Macarian Great Letter and argued that it depends on Gregory of Nyssa’s De instituto christiano (Gregory prior). Reinhart Staats reversed this in Gregor von Nyssa und die Messalianer (Patristische Texte und Studien 8; Berlin, 1968) and in his synoptic critical edition Makarios-Symeon, Epistola Magna (Göttingen, 1984), arguing that the Macarian Letter is prior and that Gregory rewrote it. The direction of dependence remains formally disputed (see The Symeon Authorship Question), but Staats’s reversal has been widely accepted, and it carried consequences downstream — notably for the reading of John Wesley’s debt to Macarius, which had been framed (via Albert Outler) on Jaeger’s now-weakened assumption (see Wider Reception).

Stewart: Reframing the Messalian Question (1991)

Columba Stewart‘s “Working the Earth of the Heart”: The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to A.D. 431 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) is the decisive modern treatment of the Messalian question. Stewart traced the characteristic Macarian vocabulary to its roots in the Syriac ascetic world — Ephrem, Aphrahat, the Liber Graduum — and argued that the “Messalian controversy” was in large part a misperception by Greek-speaking bishops of a Semitic spiritual idiom, “not a question of heresy, but of misperceived differences of culture and of spiritual idiom.” Stewart’s philological demonstration of the Syriac substratum reframed the whole debate, shifting the question from “was the author a heretic?” to “how did a Syriac ascetic vocabulary come to be read as heresy?” (see The Messalian Boundary).

Plested: The Reception-History (2004)

Marcus Plested‘s The Macarian Legacy: The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) is the standard study of the corpus’s influence. Plested traces the Macarian inheritance through Mark the Monk, Diadochus of Photike, Abba Isaiah, and Maximus the Confessor, and into hesychasm, arguing that the corpus stands in the central channel of Eastern spirituality rather than at a heretical margin, and that its great receivers drew on Macarius while correcting his Messalian-sounding edges. Plested’s adoption of “Macarius-Symeon” as a deliberate scholarly compromise, and his judgment that “Macarius cannot be regarded as a Messalian,” represent the current consensus (see Eastern Reception). His work is the principal authority behind this collection’s reception sections.

The Critical Editions and Translations

The textual foundation of all this study is the modern critical editions of the four collections:

Collection II (the Fifty Spiritual Homilies): H. Dörries, E. Klostermann, and M. Kroeger, Die 50 geistlichen Homilien des Makarios, Patristische Texte und Studien 4 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964).
Collection I: Heinz Berthold, Makarios/Symeon, Reden und Briefe, 2 vols., GCS (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1973).
Collection III: Klostermann and Berthold, Neue Homilien des Makarius/Symeon, TU 72 (1961); and Vincent Desprez, Pseudo-Macaire, Œuvres spirituelles I, Sources Chrétiennes 275 (Paris: Cerf, 1980).
The Great Letter: Jaeger (1954) and Staats (1984), as above.

For English readers the standard translation is George A. Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter (Classics of Western Spirituality; Paulist Press, 1992), whose very title — “Pseudo-Macarius” — registers the settled scholarly judgment on authorship, and whose preface by Kallistos Ware situates the corpus within Orthodox spirituality. The historical Macarius, as distinct from the corpus, is best approached through Benedicta Ward’s translation of the Apophthegmata (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, 1984) and Tim Vivian’s St. Macarius the Spiritbearer (2004) for the Coptic texts.

What the Scholarship Has Established

The cumulative result of this century of work is the account this collection follows: the Spiritual Homilies are not by Macarius of Egypt; their author was an anonymous Syro-Mesopotamian ascetic of the late fourth or early fifth century, conventionally “Macarius-Symeon”; the corpus shares the idiom of the Syrian ascetic world out of which Messalianism also grew but stands, on the decisive doctrinal points, against the condemned Messalian propositions; and, far from being a heretical curiosity, it became one of the formative sources of the whole Eastern tradition of the prayer of the heart, from Diadochus to Palamas, and reached even the Protestant West through Wesley. The discipline of distinguishing the venerated desert father from the borrowed-name corpus — the discipline that organizes this entire collection — is itself the gift of that scholarship.

References

Villecourt, Louis. “La date et l’origine des ‘Homélies spirituelles’ attribuées à Macaire.” Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. Paris, 1920, 250–258.
Dörries, Hermann. Symeon von Mesopotamien. Texte und Untersuchungen 55.1. Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1941; and Die Theologie des Makarios/Symeon. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978.
Dörries, Hermann, Erich Klostermann, and Matthias Kroeger. Die 50 geistlichen Homilien des Makarios. Patristische Texte und Studien 4. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964.
Jaeger, Werner. Two Rediscovered Works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius. Leiden: Brill, 1954.
Staats, Reinhart. Gregor von Nyssa und die Messalianer. PTS 8. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968; and Makarios-Symeon, Epistola Magna. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984.
Stewart, Columba. “Working the Earth of the Heart”: The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to A.D. 431. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.
Plested, Marcus. The Macarian Legacy: The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Maloney, George A., trans. Pseudo-Macarius: The Fifty Spiritual Homilies and the Great Letter. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1992.
Desprez, Vincent, trans. and ed. Pseudo-Macaire, Œuvres spirituelles I. Sources Chrétiennes 275. Paris: Cerf, 1980.
Ward, Benedicta, trans. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Rev. ed. Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1984.
Vivian, Tim, trans. St. Macarius the Spiritbearer: Coptic Texts Relating to Saint Macarius the Great. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004.