Macarius of Egypt

Macarius of Egypt (c. 300–390/391), also called Macarius the Great, was a Desert Father who settled in the wilderness of Scetis (Wadi El Natrun) in Lower Egypt around 330 CE, presiding over its scattered hermitages for roughly six decades. According to late Coptic tradition he was born in the village of Shabsheer (Shanshour) in the Al-Minufiyah region of Lower Egypt and in his youth traded natron in the vicinity of Nitria. Ordained a priest around 340 CE, he was revered for his discernment, humility, and extraordinary spiritual counsel, earning the paradoxical epithet "the aged youth" (Greek: Paidarion Geron). Around 374 CE he was exiled by the Arian bishop Lucius of Alexandria under Emperor Valens to an island in the Nile Delta, returning to Scetis after Valens's death. His only authenticated literary work is the short letter known as Ad filios Dei ("To the Friends of God"), addressed to younger monks and recognized as genuine by Gennadius of Massilia. The collection of fifty Spiritual Homilies long attributed to him, together with the longer "Great Letter," are now recognized by modern scholarship as the work of an anonymous Syrian writer ("Pseudo-Macarius") writing in a Messalian-adjacent milieu; these texts have exercised profound influence on Eastern Christian mysticism and, through Johann Arndt and John Wesley, on Protestant Pietism and Methodism. Macarius is also attested in sayings preserved in the Apophthegmata Patrum.