Chapter 9
Pseudo-Macarius, Messalianism and Synaesthesia

The identity and milieu of Macarius

The late twentieth century produced much scholarly debate about the identity of Pseudo-Macarius, or Macarius Symeon as he is also known.1 As noted in Chapters 7 and 8, the choice of Greek or Syriac for transcribing texts at this date is complex but not necessarily very telling; whilst the two were not interchangeable, the synthetic nature of early Syrian culture perhaps means that Macarius may be said to think in Syriac but write in Greek.

To use Macarius’ own word, Syrian culture is ‘mingled’ with Greek language in his writing, which blends aspects of Greek rhetorical training with imagery and typology (including that of being clothed in the body) which is more typical of Syrian writers.2 The culture he represents is hybrid, incorporating Syrian traditions, references to Roman culture and evidence that Greek was his first language.3 His written style combines elements of desert spirituality with references to contemporary society and is liberally seasoned with biblical citation and references;4 these are taken from Tatian’s Diatessaron and Syrian apocrypha such as the Acts and Gospel of Thomas.5 This intellectual and spiritual heritage allows him to be viewed as a Syrian writer, and at the same time places him in the dangerous vicinity of both encratism and Messalianism.6 By contrast to heresies about Christ’s full humanity (explored in Chapter 11), the heresy most connected with Macarius is also to do with how the human body is used. Macarius is therefore a particularly interesting author to look at in terms of religious anthropology. He sees the human person as an integrated whole, not separated into body and soul; the two parts of the human person work cooperatively and even swap modes of being through synaesthesia. Furthermore, he sees Christ’s humanity as complete, sharing the Cappodocian hostility to Apollinarius.7

Allegations of Messalianism

The difficulty in defining and identifying Messalianism has been amply explored by Plested, who summarises: ‘We know that Messalianism was; we do not know what it was.’8 As so often with heresiological matters which hold sway in syncretistic societies, it is not easy to establish quite how problematic the ‘heresy’ was at the time. The historical evidence for its existence includes references by Ephrem, who comments ‘And the Messalians who live in debauchery – good is he who leads them back to his fold’.9 Epiphanius of Salamis refers to them in a heresiology c. 370s.10 Its official condemnation is readily found in the canons of Ecumenical Councils, starting with Side (385) and Antioch (380), to which Photius refers c. 390,11 the Council of Constantinople in 426 and the Third Ecumenical Council of 431 in Ephesus.12 More contemporary detail comes from one of the earliest church ‘historians’, the Antiochene Theodoret, whose Ecclesiastical History in the 440s names the main Messalian leader as Adelphius with a follower named Symeon.13 Nilus of Ancyra also expressed an opinion about the key figures, identifying Adelphius of Mesopotamia and Alexander the Sleepless as leaders.14

In addition to exciting considerable interest in the late antique world, Messalianism has also exercised modern scholars who put forward various theories which combine historical, political and theological explanations for its existence and influence. Some relate to the contested identity of Macarius and suggest that (as with the case of Origen and Evagrius) a degree of ‘scapegoating’ took place which allowed certain ideas to be smuggled in under the heresiological radar. There are, however, significant differences between Evagrius’ and Macarius’ attitudes to the body; as Golitzin explains, ‘for Evagrios the body has no role in the world to come, while for Macarius it does’.15 Louth asserts that the Macarian Homilies are ‘the product of a sect called the Messalians, and the ascription of these homilies to Macarius was a device to keep them circulating among the orthodox’.16 Ware takes this idea further in arguing that Macarius is, if anything, anti-Messalian but his texts were used by Messalians,17 presumably because they contain many ideas about heart-centred prayer which in itself is unproblematic, indeed may even be seen as fundamental within the ascetic tradition. Going back to the 1970s, Guillaumont expresses an unusually colloquial way of understanding Messalians as ‘kind of hippies’, presumably because of their mendicant tendencies and the suggestion that dream literature such as parts of the Liber Graduum necessitated a lot of sleep, though this would seem to go against the desert practice of akoimetoi and the association with Alexander the Sleepless.18

Another interpretation of the Messalian issue is to see it as a cultural misunderstanding or variation. This is the option preferred by Stewart, who concludes that the controversy was ‘not a heresy but misperceived differences of culture and spiritual idiom’.19 Staats takes a similar view, arguing that it is ‘no less than an obvious irruption of Syrian Christianity, and it could have been taken as heterodox only from the narrow perspective of an imperial orthodoxy’.20

The name ‘Messalian’ is derived from the Syriac root of the word – tslo, to pray, from which metsalyane is the participle meaning ‘the praying ones’.21 The Greek equivalent is euchites, meaning ‘to pray’. Messalians were seen as promoting perpetual prayer, in the context of an encratic lifestyle, and the assumption was that as a result they failed to engage in other activities (such as earning a living) and promoted a quasi-Gnostic over-validation of the spiritual side of the human person. However, Macarius clearly sees prayer as more than a purely spiritual or intellectual process. The purity achieved through prayer was not simply for its own sake or as a world-rejecting activity, but in order to cleanse the human person in its entirety, and bring it before God in an acceptable state. He describes prayer as being of and from the heart, which, in the context of the Semitic world which informed his thought, did not at all mean that only one part of the human was involved; the heart, as we have seen, was rather a shorthand way of describing the whole person.

Prayer of the heart

At the centre of the issue of Messalianism is whether prayer should be heart-centred, and what this might mean. Messalians claimed this as authentic to their approach, but it is also fundamental to the spiritual teachings of orthodox Syrians. Detractors from the Messalian approach complained that it bordered on dualism, in supposing that they rejected other parts of the human person, and in privileging of a non-material reading of human perfection. But to involve the heart in prayer is to metaphorically and literally use the whole person in prayer; without this integrity, the prayer is useless and empty. The unnaturalness and incompleteness of prayer which does not involve the body is commonly depicted though the image of miscarriage or abortion.22 The heart is at the centre of the human person, and prayer of the heart therefore indicates a withdrawal from the distractions of the world which at the same time takes one inside the self, rather than rejecting the body.

There are biblical precedents for the idea of prayer as a withdrawal into the inner self; indeed, Macarius’ understanding of ‘the body’s share in the Kingdom of Heaven’ is generally seen as profoundly biblical and Jewish in origin.23 The Hebraic understanding of the human person is holistic; the heart ‘directs and governs all the other organs of the body’;24 there are ‘infinite depths’ to it, it is described as having many rooms.25 For Christians, the human person is the ‘palace of Christ’.26 The spiritual laws of a Christian are to be inscribed on the heart, in comparison to the tablets of stone which received the ‘old’ law.27 The monastic practice of learning the psalms and gospels by heart (indeed, with limited levels of literacy this would be the norm in other cultures, too) indicated the importance of the texts and the extent to which their teachings are embedded in the human person.

In common with other Syrian- or Semitic-influenced writers, Macarius uses ‘heart’ as the word to describe the whole person; although he writes about separate ‘body’ and ‘soul’, they are usually described as working in tandem with each other, and ‘heart’ is used to suggest the whole human being as a united entity.28 Prayer of the heart (often expressed elliptically through a reference to the injunction in Matt. 6.6 to ‘pray with the door of your chamber shut’29) thus brings the whole human person in devotion before God. It is the juxtaposition or meeting point of the body and the soul. It has huge symbolic significance, denoting through this unity the mind and will of the ascetic.30 This integration of the material world into an understanding of the human person places Macarius on the fringes of encratism rather than at its heart, an assertion supported by his relationship with the Cappadocians, whose orthodoxy is more unambiguously established.31

Integrated humanity in cooperation with God

In Macarian thought, the complete man cooperates with God; on his own, man can achieve nothing, not because he is irredeemably sinful but because he needs divine grace, as spelled out The Great Letter:

Our labours through which the Spirit is attracted should be undertaken in expectation of the spiritual harvest above. One shares in grace from this, and bears fruit with spiritual enjoyment made active by the Spirit in faithful and humble hearts.32

It is important to Macarius that the ‘self’ which works with God towards salvation is a unity of physical and spiritual; he itemises the body and soul to emphasise this. Neither can work alone, because each element of humanity needs the other, and the united human person needs God:

Woe to the body if it were to rely solely on is own nature, because it would by nature disintegrate and die. Woe also to the soul if it finds its whole being in its own nature and trusts solely in its own operations, refusing the participation of the Divine Spirit because it does not have the eternal and divine life as a vital part of itself.33

Images of the farmer’s cooperation with God whose grace descends like wholesome rain are common in Macarius; regardless of whether the seed of good words falls on stony or rich soil, it will not prosper without the ‘rain from above’, in other words the descent of divine grace.34 Just as the human alone cannot achieve salvation, so no one part of the human person alone can work effectively. The co-dependency between body and soul reflects the reliance of man on God:

As near as the body is to the soul in intimate interrelationship, so much nearer is God who is present to come and open the locked doors of our hearts and to fill us with heavenly riches.35

The integrated human nature depicted as the ideal is the image of Christ who shares, indivisibly, humanity and divinity. Grace is ‘mingled with our nature from our earliest years’, Macarius states.36 The human being must be fully receptive to God, and that human must integrate its component parts, as affirmed in Homily 2: ‘Just as the whole body suffers and not merely one part alone, so also the entire soul was subjected to the passions of evil and sin’.37 It is this unified person which must accept divine grace: only God can ‘calm and turn back this evil wind, inhabiting both the soul and body’.38 This ‘evil wind’ (the reverse of the life-giving ruah of God) affects ‘all his nature (namely, in his soul, thoughts, and mind) … all the members of the body are shaken; not one part of the soul or the body is immune from the passions of sin dwelling in us’.39

Through spiritual synaesthesia the soul which welcomes God has sensory attributes. Homily 33 (1) talks of having ‘an attentive mind, waiting expectantly on God until he comes and visits the soul by means of all its openings and its paths and senses’.40 The soul, which can see, and the body, which can think, are united in both the temptations of sin and redemption from it. It is typical of Macarian thought to attribute qualities to the body and soul which are usually associated with the other; this reinforces the unity of the parts of the human person.

Leading on from this, just as Macarius confirms humanity’s dependence on God, so he insists on the co-dependence of body and soul. This co-dependence may have positive or negative consequences. The soul can experience physical contamination, becoming filled with worms which ‘crawl all over and devour it and thoroughly corrupt it’, such that the soul – not the physical body – is in need of healing.41 Physical corruption is described through a clothing image; Adam in disobeying God sold himself to the devil, who ‘put on Adam’s soul as his garment’, disguising himself in human form. This can only be undone by Christ taking the same path; Christ has to ‘put on humanity’ in order to ‘reclaim man as his very own house and temple’.42 Just as the physical body requires clothing and food, he says, so the soul needs ‘spiritual meat and drink and heavenly clothing’.43

As in any ascetic framework, however, some ways of being are superior to others, and Macarius, whilst insisting on the unity of all parts of the human person, does also present spiritual taxonomies.

Spiritual hierarchies in Macarius

The heart plays a central role at all three stages of spiritual development, bearing some similarities to the taxonomy of John of Apamea, and even Plato.44 Initially the heart is occupied by evil; at a higher level of development the heart is the locus of a struggle between sin and grace; and, finally, the soul, in conjunction with the human will and the aid of the Holy Spirit,45 becomes ‘mingled’ or ‘mixed’ with Christ the heavenly bridegroom, who is ‘the sun of righteousness’.46 Macarius accentuates the ‘mingling’ of body and soul in the human person, comparing this to the ‘mingling’ of divine and human in Christ. This places human unity in relation to Christological integrity, and affirming Christ’s humanity enables him to respond positively to human nature, too.47

Once the body and soul in the human have been integrated, that entity needs to be enlivened by another spirit, that of God. Just as man is made in the image of God, so ‘the body is a likeness to the soul, and the soul an image of the Spirit’. There is mutuality here: the human body without its soul is lifeless, and incapable of doing anything. Similarly, the human soul which is devoid of the Holy Spirit ‘is reckoned dead as far as far as the kingdom goes’, and can achieve nothing.48 Soul and spirit are placed in a hierarchy; merely being alive (having a soul) is the state of all animals; only the Christian also has the divine Spirit within which adds a new dimension to life.

Macarius’ imagery

Although written in Greek, the linguistic nuances of Macarius’ writing are Syrian and include much imagery which is shared with writers such as Ephrem. The language of the heavenly bridegroom is frequently found, and the heart is seen as the ‘moral and spiritual centre of the entire human person’, the palace of Christ in God’s mansion of many rooms.49 Also identified as Syrian is Macarius’ use of allegory to describe Jesus as ‘paradise, tree of life, pearl, crown, builder, cultivator … man, God, Christ’.50 These very material, practical metaphors refute any taint of Messalianism: Macarius envisages Christ as a famer who rolls up his sleeves to get on with the digging! This is not just as a concession to human materiality, and a kinship between the first Adam (who had to dig and delve). It stresses the genuinely dual nature of Christ, whose humanity is anything but docetic.

Both Christ and man are described as being clothed: Christ in the body, through a kenotic exchange (‘leaving behind every principality and power’), and Christians by ‘putting on’ the Holy Spirit.51 The power of the Holy Spirit is the ‘divine and heavenly garment’ which everyone needs, and, if anyone is lacking ‘the spiritual garment’, they need to beg God with tears to send it down from heaven so that they may become complete.52

Rather like Climacus, Macarius draws on images from the secular world to reinforce his point about the fully human aspect of Christ; he draws an analogy between the physical flesh of Jesus and the ‘royal purple’ worn by the emperor to denote his status; the royal/divine status is inextricable from the physical means by which this status is shown:

For just as the purple is glorified together with the emperor, and the emperor is not venerated apart from the purple, so the flesh of the Lord is glorified together with the divinity, and Christ is venerated together with his flesh.53

Imagery to do with the organs of the body stresses the integral nature of the human person. The relationship between eyes and soul are described in terms of light and darkness, with the fate of the one affecting the other:

Just as the eyes are the light of the body and when the eyes are healthy and sound, then the whole body is enlightened, so also on the contrary, if anything should happen to render the eyes darkened, then the whole body is in darkness.54

Refuting adoptionism, the full humanity of Christ is denoted through clothing images. The Lord ‘produced a new work from Mary and clothed himself in it’, Macarius writes, but he insists that the actual body of Jesus was not simply drawn down from heaven but made of the same substance as Adam: ‘He fashioned the heavenly breath that had entered into Adam and mingled it with the divinity. He then put on human flesh, forming it in the maternal womb.’55 The insistence that Christ is not just a heavenly figure descended to earth, but actually made from the same material substances as Adam again affirms the full humanity of Christ.

Pauline phraseology and statements about the unity of the human person and its total engagement in the process of sanctification are frequently used; Golitzin goes so far as to suggest that the whole Macarian corpus ‘comprises a kind of extended meditation’ on 1 Cor. 3.7–4.6.56 Macarius adopts the Pauline image of the body as comprising the totality of communal parts, each of which has its own function. These component parts only work when in conjunction with the other parts, having their own separate roles to play.57 The human soul is responsible for animating the whole, but without the Holy Spirit nothing can happen: ‘Just as in the human body there are many members, even though there is one soul animating all, so there is only one Spirit working in diverse ways’.58 Macarius mirrors this integrated sense of the human person with the Pauline idea of a church community being various parts of one body (1 Cor. 12.12), and this is seen explicitly in terms of prayer for one another.59

The integrity of the human person at prayer: a mirror of Christ’s unity of natures

Macarius’ Homily 4 is a key text on the integrity of body and soul, which is explained through the interchange of cognitive and sensory faculties. The soul has a (rational) ‘faculty of understanding’; there is a ‘similarity between the body and the soul’ as between ‘those things that are visible and those that remain hidden’.60 By being clothed in the body, the soul has a will to protect ‘the members of the body’ from evil and worldly activities.61 The soul ‘gains heavenly praise from its God and the angels for having kept unstained the garment of its body as well as itself’.62 Conversely, souls which become contaminated ‘crawl along the ground with their earthly thoughts’.63 In other words, even souls have physical modes of operating; indeed the soul has ‘five rational senses’ if it has received grace from above,64 and without the ‘house of our body’ is rendered homeless.65 The soul, like a physical body, being ‘wounded by love for Christ’ is ‘clothed’ by the Lord ‘in the garments of salvation’; it is wrapt ‘in a cloak of integrity like a bridegroom wearing his crown, like a bride adorned in her jewels’.66 Here the image is not of the soul being clothed in the body, but the soul being clothed as a body. The swapping of physical and spiritual attributes suggests the integrity of the two.

The interweaving of soul, mind and body in the human described in Homily 4 (9) is seen explicitly as reflecting the unity of divine and human in Christ. Adopting the kenotic language of Phil. 2.6, he writes: ‘The infinite, inaccessible, and uncreated God has assumed a body’ in order to make human beings ‘participators of divine life.’ He acknowledges that created beings may be angelic, human or demonic but that each of these has a ‘subtle body’. Through synaesthesia, the soul has eyes and ears and ‘blends with these’ in order to achieve salvation for the whole human person.67

The dual nature of Christ is reflected in the duality or plurality of man, whose form unites spiritual and material aspects. This unity is most evident when man is in communication with God, in prayer. Macarius says this should be constant so that intellectual, spiritual, and physical endeavours are integrated into the offering of the whole person before God. As noted in Chapters 7 and 10, imagery of miscarriage or abortion denoting an unnatural, incomplete synthesis of spiritual and physical is extremely common throughout the Eastern Christian tradition.68 Macarius adapts the metaphor, talking of how the ‘seed of God’ implanted in the inner man grows and bears fruit;69 when the body is ‘wrapt in prayer’ the ‘brothers’ can see whether the mind is at one with the body, so that the body is a ‘stranger to the world’.70 This is not to say that it is wrong to have a body, just that it must be detached from the things of the world into order to bear fruit. Prayer helps the body to engage the whole person. It is as a united whole, with each part playing an appropriate part, that the human person is redeemed, corroborating the Patristic assertion that what is not assumed is not healed.71

So in the Macarian texts we see man as a united body and soul, animated by the Divine Spirit so that the body is purified. The body and soul are co-dependent, and their unity reflects the perfect union in Christ of divine and human. Christ’s full humanity is asserted through images of graphic materiality which counterbalances accusations of a religious sect which renounced and denigrated the physical world. Macarius synthesises philosophical and intellectual threads, combining a Syrian focus on heart-centredness with a Hellenic interest in the nous.72 This holistic approach informs writers in the later Byzantine world, and the experiential nature of his mysticism (perhaps that part which owed most to Messalianism) especially lent itself to the later Hesychast movement. Gregory of Sinai (1255–1346), Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022) and Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) are all indebted implicitly or explicitly to Macarius. In yet another context, Wesley wrote in his diary for 30 July 1736: ‘I read Macarius and sang.’73 Macarius’ reputation evidently shrugged off the accusations of heresy, and his heart-centred, integrated view of the human person made a huge contribution to Christian thought, both Eastern and Western. His writings model how to be an ascetic who lives in the body, and uses it for God’s glory, being neither consumed by physicality nor obliged to denigrate it as inferior to the life of the spirit.

1 He is not the Coptic desert Father known as St Macarius of Egypt but a ‘person of high culture’ who ‘belongs to the Greek world as well as the Syrian.’ Kallistos Ware, Preface in G. Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius (1992), 6–7. Marcus Plested’s monograph The Macarian Legacy: The Place of Macarius-Symeon in the Eastern Christian Tradition (Oxford, 2004), pp. 13–14, discusses the internal evidence for the same issue. Alexander Golitzin discusses possible reasons for pseudonymity extensively in his web article: ‘A Testimony to Christianity as Transfiguration: The Macarian Homilies and Orthodox Spirituality’ at www.marquette.edu/maqom/Macmetho.html (accessed 13 October 1010). Stuart Burns also explores the issue in detail in ‘Charisma and Spirituality in the Early Church: A Study of Messalianism and Pseudo-Macarius’ (PhD Thesis, University of Leeds, 1998).

2 Burns, ‘Charisma’, p. 237.

3 Plested, Macarian, p. 14, where he notes that ‘his graphic and poetic symbolism recalls the thought-world of Ephrem and Aphrahat’.

4 Golitzin, ‘Testimony’ (please note that page numbers are not available for this online article).

5 Plested, Macarian, p. 14.

6 Colomba Stewart’s Working the Earth of the Heart: The Messalian Controversy in History, Texts, and Language to AD 431 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) lists in appendix 2 a synopsis of anti-Messalian lists.

7 Marcus Plested, ‘The Christology of Macarius-Symeon’, SP, vol. 37 (2001): pp. 593–6, at p. 595.

8 Plested, Macarian, p. 21.

9 Madrasa 22 of Against Heresies CSCO 169, p. 79, cited by Plested, Macarian, p. 17: ‘And the Messalians who live in debauchery – good is he who leads them back to his fold.’ Both Ephrem and Theodoret were Syrian.

10 Plested, Macarian, p. 19; see also J.M. McGuckin, The SCM Press A–Z of Patristic Theology (London, 2005), p. 211.

11 Plested, Macarian, p. 19. Burns stresses the context of such conciliar debate in attributing heretical labels to spiritual groupings within the church. ‘Charisma’, p. 245.

12 It is in Epiphanius’ Refutation of all the heresies, in 377. See Plested, Macarian, p. 21, with a more detailed discussion on pp. 23–7; see also Ware in his preface to Maloney’s Pseudo-Macarius, p. xii.

13 Plested, Macarian, p. 21.

14 Stewart, Working, pp. 45–6.

15 Golitzin, ‘Testimony’.

16 Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition from Plato to Denys (Oxford, 1981), p. 114.

17 In Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. xii.

18 See the introduction to Robert A. Kitchen and Martien F.G. Parmentier, The Book of Steps: The Syriac Liber Graduum (Kalamazoo, 2004), p. x.

19 Golitzin favours this interpretation, citing him as saying the culture clash was experienced by Greek bishops encountering the vocabulary of ‘Semitic earth of Syria-Palestine’. ‘Testimony’.

20 R. Staats, ‘Messalienerforschungen und Ostkirchenkunde’, in Werner Strothmann (ed.), Makarios-Symposium über das Böse (Wiesbaden, 1983), cited by Golitzen, ‘Testimony’.

21 Golitzin, ‘Testimony’.

22 See Isaac of Nineveh, John of Apamea and the anonymous eighth-century East Syrian Symeon, cited in A. Mingana (ed.), ‘Early Christian Mystics’, in Woodbrooke Studies 7 (1934), p. 58 on this.

23 Golitzin, ‘Testimony’.

24 Homily 15 (20), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 116.

25 Ibid., p. 20.

26 Like a physical house, the soul needs to be kept in good repair. For a more detailed discussion of this, see Burns, ‘Charisma’ pp. 94–5.

27 Homily 47 (3), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 233.

28 As shown, for example, in Homily 21 (5), where he advocates withdrawing the heart from external passions, so that the spiritual athlete may ‘persevere wholeheartedly in body and soul’. Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, pp. 154–5.

29 This advice is also frequently found in the Odes of Solomon. See Sebastian Brock, Studies in Syriac Spirituality (Kerala, 1988), ch. 5, esp. p. 45.

30 Ware discussed this in the Preface to Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. xvi.

31 Marcus Plested’s Macarian (Oxford, 2004) deals thoroughly with the earlier assertion by Jaeger that the Great Letter which forms part of Collection I of Macarius’ opus was in fact by Gregory of Nyssa. Werner Jaeger, in his Two Rediscovered Works of Ancient Christian Literature: Gregory of Nyssa and Pseudo-Macarius (Brill, Leiden 1954), pp. 10 and 43, believes Macarius is ‘deeply indebted to Gregory of Nyssa’ and refers disparagingly to Macarius’ ‘so-called “great letter”’ as a ‘miserable compilation that is in part a literal copy of Gregory’s treatise’. Plested sees it in completely opposite terms, believing Gregory of Nyssa to have ‘paid it the compliment of reworking it as his “De Institutio Christiano”’. Macarian, pp. 10 and 15. He asserts the ‘now universal recognition of the anteriority of the Epistola Magna’.

32 Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 269.

33 Homily 1 (11), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 43.

34 These are explored in my forthcoming paper, ‘“Working the Earth of the Heart”: Images of Cultivation and Harvest in Macarius and Ephrem’, SP (2012).

35 Homily 1 (15), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 97. Elsewhere in this Homily, Macarius suggests that it is the soul not the body of Christ which needs to be renewed as the image of God; the use of first and second Adam typology is conventional but the suggestion that it is the soul not the body that needs refashioning puts an original slant of the relative status of soul and body. Homily 11 (6), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 92.

36 Homily 8 (2), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 81.

37 Homily 2 (1), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 45.

38 Homily 2 (3), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 45.

39 Homily 2 (4), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 46.

40 Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 201.

41 Homily 1 (5), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 40.

42 Homily 1 (7), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 41. A neat Trinitarian formula repeats the message: ‘The Spirit clothes [Christians] in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit forever.’ Homily 6 (7), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 78. Just as you would not hesitate to live in a house that someone else has built, or to wear a garment someone else has made, Macarius points out, so it is acceptable for a soul to live in a body. Homily 1 (7), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 41.

43 Homily 1 (10), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 43.

44 Golitzin writes shrewdly when he states that he cannot think of any patristic writer ‘who does not owe a fair bit to Plato’. ‘Testimony.’ Golitzin aruges against Hans Veit Byere’s belief that Macarius’ focus on doxa constitutes a ‘surrender to neo-Platonism’. Earlier in this article he balances Macarius’ use of the Platonic influences on Alexandrian allegorising with his being rooted in a Semitic understanding of the body.

45 Macarius argues strongly against Pelagianism, insisting that the active participation of the human will is essential but fruitless without the acceptance of divine grace.

46 Mal. 4.2, quoted in Homily 25 (5), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 161.

47 Golitzin, ‘Testimony’, and see also Homily 44 (1), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 47. Louth, Origins, p. 117 notes that the language in mingling is used by other heart-centred writers, Symeon the New Theologian being a case in point. The term also has considerable currency in the Christology of Greek Fathers, such as the Cappadocians.

48 Homily 30 (3), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 191.

49 Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, pp. xv and xvi. Plested notes as Syrian traditional motifs such as the portrayal of the Holy Spirit as feminine, symbolism, clothing metaphors and nuptial imagery. Macarian, p. 30.

50 Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 20, quoting from Homily 31 (4), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 195. Golitzin sees Macarius’ use of allegory being more generally derived from the Alexandrian exegetical methods; the eschatological glorification being one in which ‘the illumined and glorified soul shares its splendor and light with the risen body’. ‘Testimony.’

51 Homily 26 (15), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 169.

52 Homily 20 (1), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 150.

53 I. 10.4.5, cited by Plested, ‘Christology’, p. 595.

54 Homily 1 (4), Maloney Pseudo-Macarius, 39. This resonates with Ephrem’s insistence that body and soul must share the responsibility or blame for misdoing. The image of the eyes of the soul is repeated in Homily 1 (2), where it is seen ‘totally covered with spiritual eyes of light’, has ‘no imperfect part’ but is covered all over with the ‘ineffable light of the glory of Christ, who mounts and rides upon the soul’. The soul has ‘spiritual eyes of light’ to confound the darkness. Homily 1 (2), Maloney Pseudo-Macarius, p. 37.

55 II. 11.9, cited in Plested, ‘Christology’, p. 594.

56 Golitzin, ‘Testimony.’

57 Homily 3 (2), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 47, and see also Homily 7 (8), which answers the question about whether the soul and mind are different by saying that one body has ‘many parts, yet they designate one man’. Ibid., p. 80.

58 Homily 12 (4), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 98. We must all, therefore, be crucified with Christ, he asserts. Homily 12 (5), p. 99.

59 Homily 3 (2), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 47.

60 Homily 4 (1), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 50. The soul is also ‘an intellectual being’. Homily 9 (10), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 86.

61 Homily 4 (3), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 51.

62 Homily 4 (4), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 51.

63 Homily 4 (6), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 53.

64 Homily 4 (7), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 53.

65 Homily 5 (7), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 72.

66 Great Letter, Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 257.

67 Homily 4 (9), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 54. As Macarius’ translator points out, he ‘uses the word body in the Semitic sense to apply to the whole person, including good angels, demons, and saints in glory’. See n. 16 on p. 274 of the translation.

68 For example, in Symeon the New Theologian, as discussed in my ‘The Reforming Abbot and his Tears: Penthos in late Byzantium’, in Eugenia Russell (ed.), Spirituality in Late Byzantium: Essays Presenting New Research by International Scholars (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 13–21, esp. pp. 15–17.

69 Homily 43 (5), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 221.

70 Homily 27 (8), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 181.

71 Homily 4 (25–6), Maloney, Pseudo-Macarius, p. 61.

72 Plested sees Macarius at ‘the centre of the on-going encounter between Hellenic and Semitic thought-worlds’ but concludes that the ‘type-antitype, noetic-sensible framework’ he employs is more Hellenistic than Syrian. Macarian, pp. 1 and 30.

73 Ware, in the Preface to Pseudo-Macarius, p. xiv, where he also makes a link to Blake, ‘the great prophet of the 18th century’, quoting: ‘Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that call’d Body is a portion of the Soul discern’d by the five Senses.’