MACARIUS THE GREAT

MACARIUS THE GREAT, monk, ascetic, St. (ca. 300-ca. 390). He is one of the first of the Desert Fathers (q.v.) of Egypt and founder of the monastic settlement of Scete during the 340s in the desert of Nitria (Wadi-el-Natrun) some fifty miles south of Alexandria (qq.v.). Macarius’s foundation, still inhabited today by several monasteries of Coptic (q.v.) monks, was in its origins a kind of midway point between the eremitic life of Antony and the communal organizations of Pachomius (qq.v.). The monks lived apart in separate huts, cells (kellia), but would gather at Scete’s central church on Saturday night for all-night vigil and Divine Liturgy (q.v.). This pattern is followed today in a number of monastic settlements in the Orthodox world, notably on Mt. Athos (q.v.). Macarius himself emerges in the tradition as an ascetic of extraordinary austerity and remarkable charismatic gifts for which he is given the epithet “the Great.” His presence looms large in the various collections about the early monks, for example the Lives of the Desert Fathers and the Sayings of the Fathers, and in the histories and anecdotes recorded by such as Jerome, Rufinus, and Palladius (see Lausiac History). Evagrius of Pontus (q.v.) is said to have revered him.