Veneration

The cult of St. Macarius the Great: the dating of his life and his feasts (January 19 in the Eastern Orthodox calendar, 27 Baramhat in the Coptic), the relics venerated at his monastery, and the veneration that honors him across both the Chalcedonian Orthodox Churches and the Coptic Orthodox Church — a saint of the undivided fourth century, genuinely shared across the great divide of 451.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Dating of His Life

The sources do not fix the years of Macarius’s birth and death; both are inferred. The anchor is Palladius, who reports that Macarius lived ninety years, sixty of them in the desert, having withdrawn at thirty (Palladius, Lausiac History 17; trans. Meyer, ACW 34). Working back from the traditional death-date yields the conventional span. [Disputed: the death-year is variously given as 390 (older references, e.g. the Catholic Encyclopedia), 391 (the standard scholarly form), and 392 (some Coptic sources); the birth, correspondingly, is reckoned c. 295–300. None of these is a documented date; all are inferred from Palladius’s reported ninety-year lifespan and the approximate chronology of the desert.] The collection adopts the common scholarly form, c. 300 – 391, while noting the range. Palladius’s affectionate epithet for him — paidarios gerōn, the “aged youth” or “old child,” a young man with the gravity of an elder — became one of the saint’s traditional titles.

The Feasts

Macarius is commemorated on different days in the two calendars that honor him:

  • Eastern Orthodox: January 19 (on the Julian calendar used by many Orthodox Churches, this corresponds to February 1 on the civil calendar). On this day the Orthodox Church keeps the memory of “our venerable father Macarius the Great of Egypt.” The Orthodox synaxaria and the Menaion carry his Life and hymnography for the day.
  • Coptic Orthodox: 27 Baramhat (Paremhotep), corresponding to April 5 on the Gregorian calendar, is his principal Coptic feast; a second Coptic commemoration marks the return of his relics to Scetis on 19 Mesra (August 25) (see The Coptic Inheritance).

That a single saint is kept on different days in the two traditions is a normal consequence of the separate development of the calendars; it does not reflect any difference in the saint himself, who belongs to both.

The Hymnography

The Orthodox office for January 19 sets the pattern of the saint’s liturgical portrait. Its hymns praise Macarius not for ascetic feats in the abstract but for the particular virtues the Apophthegmata attach to him: he is sung as a “lamp of discernment,” a man made “blessed” (makarios, the Greek meaning of his very name) by his humility, a “citizen of the desert” who became through stillness a dwelling-place of the Spirit. The pun on his name — Makarios, “blessed” — runs through the hymnody and through the Lives: the man called “Blessed” was so by the beatitude of the poor in spirit, the first of the Beatitudes, which the desert read as the charter of the monastic life. The troparion and kontakion for the day commend him as a guide who, by the depth of his self-abasement, was raised to the height of vision — the same paradox the sayings dramatize (see The Spiritual Counsel). In the Coptic office, similarly, Macarius is celebrated as the father of Scetis and the Spiritbearer, and his commemoration is woven into the cycle of the great desert saints whom the Coptic Church honors as the founders of its monastic life.

The Relics

The relics venerated as those of Macarius the Great rest at his own monastery, Deir Abu Maqar in Wadi al-Natrun, where the Coptic tradition enshrines them together with the relics of the other two saints named Macarius — the “three Macarii” (see The Monastic Centre). The relics are a focus of Coptic pilgrimage and of the saint’s cult. [The grouping and identification of the relics rest on the monastery’s own long tradition and are reported here as such, per METHODOLOGY §3.5, rather than as independently verified.] Portions of relics venerated as Macarius’s are also held in other Orthodox and Coptic churches, as is usual with a widely venerated saint.

A Saint Shared Across Chalcedon

The most striking feature of Macarius’s veneration is that he is honored, with equal devotion, on both sides of the great Christological divide of the Council of Chalcedon (451). Macarius died around 391 — two generations before the schism that separated the Chalcedonian Churches (the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic) from the Oriental Orthodox (including the Coptic). He belongs, therefore, to the undivided Church of the fourth century, and both communions claim him without reservation as their common father. The Eastern Orthodox venerate him among the great Desert Fathers, alongside Antony and the others of the Apophthegmata; the Coptic Orthodox honor him as a founding patriarch of their monastic tradition and the father of their desert (see The Coptic Inheritance). He is one of a relatively small company of saints — the great fourth-century desert fathers chief among them — who are genuinely shared across that divide, and his common veneration is a quiet witness to the unity that preceded it.

This shared veneration is the proper note on which to close the cult. Whatever the complications of the homiletic corpus attached to his name (Section 04), the man venerated on January 19 and on 27 Baramhat is the camel-driver of the Delta who bore a false accusation in silence, withdrew to the natron valley, founded the most austere of the desert settlements, and became, in the Apophthegmata, the very image of humility and discernment. That Macarius the whole Church — East and Coptic alike — receives without dispute.

See Also

References

  • Palladius. The Lausiac History 17. Trans. R. T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 34. New York: Newman Press, 1964. (The ninety-year lifespan; the “aged youth.”)
  • Venerable Macarius the Great of Egypt. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, January 19. (The Eastern feast and Life.)
  • The Coptic Encyclopedia. Ed. Aziz S. Atiya. New York: Macmillan, 1991. (The Coptic feasts; 27 Baramhat; the relics.)
  • “Macarius of Egypt.” OrthodoxWiki and Wikipedia (used to locate the variant dates and feast-days; cross-checked against the OCA Life and the Coptic calendar).