The founder of monasticism in the desert of Scetis.
He was loved by the priests and the people of his village, was ordained a Reader.
His parents obliged him to marry, as they hoped that he would be ordained a priest. After the wedding ceremony had been performed he feigned illness, asking his father to accompany the camel-drivers who used to bring natron from Wadi el- Natroun. God sent him a Cherub, who accompanied him almost all his life. On his return to his village he found his virgin wife had a fever,and then she died.
He started his ascetic career in a village, and then moved to another village to escape ordination into the clergy. There he was falsely blamed for the pregnancy of a girl and he did not defend himself. When he was cleared, he fled and came to Scetis.
He was greatly influenced by St. Anthony the Great and visited him at least twice.
His original settlement is thought to have been somewhere in the region of the surviving DeirEl Baramous (Monastery of the Roman Brothers) towards the western end of the valley. As numbers increased, he seemed to have moved to slightly higher ground beyond a low ridge at the eastern end, near the monastery that now bears his name.
By Cassian’s time there were four congregations in Scetis of which the third is now represented by the twin monasteries of Abbot Pishoy and of the ‘Syrians’ (Monastery of the Virgin Mary) while the fourth, that of St. John the Short, has been deserted for a number of centuries, though its site is known.
Even in the desert of Scetis, St. Macarius used to flee from the crowd of people. Palladius tells us that he made a tunnel running under the ground from his cell for half a stade and finished it off at the end with a cave.
He was said to be in a continual ecstasy and to spend a far longer time with God than with things earthly.
At an advanced age he was exiled to an island in the Nile by the Arian Bishop Lucius, who felt authorized to do so by an edict of Emperor Valens.
What he wrote
Neither Palladius nor Rufinus know of any literary works of St. Macarius but later manuscripts attribute quite a number of writings to him, such as sayings, letters, prayers, homilies and treatises.
Some scholars say that St. Macarius is not the real author of the famous fifty-seven SpiritualHomilies attributed to him. The homilies of St. Macarius the Egyptian, is preserved in the Syriac MS and 12175 in the British Museum.
These homilies have a pre-eminent position in the history of early Christian mysticism and have proved a source of inspiration to modern mystics.
Some of his sayings are preserved in the Apophthegmata Patrum.
Abba Macarius said to the brothers at Scetis when he dismissed the assembly, “Flee, my brothers.” One of the old men asked him, “Where could we flee to beyond this desert?” He put his finger in his lips and said, “Flee that,” and he went into his cell, shut the door and sat down.
Abba Macarius also said, “If slander has becometo you the same as praise, poverty as riches,deprivation as abundance, you will not die.Indeed it is impossible for anyone who firmlybelieves, who labors with devotion, to fall into theimpurity of the passions and be led astray by thedemons.”