The Spiritual Homilies of Macarius of Egypt

Extract

[The fifty homilies printed in Migne's Patrologia Graece, vol. 34. have until recently been attributed to St Macarius, an Egyptian monk of the fourth century whose miracles are told in Palladius's Lausiac History and Rufinus's History of the Monks. But this authorship has lately been seriously questioned; for some of the teaching contained in the Homilies bears a certain resemblance to the tenets of the heretical sect of the Messalians or Euchites, condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 481. G. L. Marriott, in an article on ‘The Messalians and the Discovery of their Ascetic Book (Harvard Theological Review, vol. xix, No. 2) claims to find most of the eighteen Messalian propositions reproduced in St John of Damascus's De Haeresibus in the Macarian Homilies; but on closer inspection almost all the passages adduced from the latter are capable of a perfectly orthodox interpretation, whereas the condemned propositions are a crude and one-sided exaggeration of their teaching.