Macarius, St, of Egypt

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Macarius, St, of Egypt (c.300–c.390). One of the Desert Fathers, also known as ‘the Great’. At about the age of 30 he founded a settlement of monks in the desert of Scetis (Wadi al-Natrun), which became an important centre of Egyptian monasticism.

The Macarian Homilies traditionally ascribed to him seem to come rather from a writer in N. Mesopotamia in the 4th–5th cents. In modern times the Fifty Spiritual Homilies have been an influential mystical text (e.g. on John Wesley, who translated twenty-two of them into English).

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