Abbot Macarius Raises a Dead Man

So too we remember that a dead man was raised to life by Abbot Macarius, who was the first to make his home in the desert of Scete. A certain heretic who followed the error of Eunomius was trying by the subtleties of dialectic to destroy the simplicity of the catholic faith, and he had already deceived a great many people. The blessed Macarius was asked by some catholics, who were terribly disturbed by the horror of such an upheaval, to set the simple folk of all Egypt free from the danger of unbelief, and he came for this purpose. The heretic approached him with his art of dialectic and wanted to drag him, unlearned as he was, into the thorns of Aristotle. But the blessed Macarius put a stop to his chatter with apostolic brevity, saying: “The kingdom of God is not in word but in power. Let us go, then, to the tombs, and call on the name of the Lord over the first dead man we find, and, as it is written, let us show our faith by our works, so that by the Lord’s testimony the plain proofs of a right faith may be shown, and we may prove the clear truth not by an empty discussion of words, but by the power of miracles and by a judgment that cannot be deceived.” [a]

When he heard this, the heretic was overwhelmed with shame before the people who were there. For the moment he pretended to agree to the terms proposed, and he promised to come the next day. But the next day everyone gathered at the appointed place, all of them expectant and the more eager because they wanted to see the spectacle. Then he was terrified by the knowledge of his own lack of faith. He fled, and at once escaped out of Egypt altogether. The blessed Macarius waited with the people until the ninth hour. When he saw that the man had avoided him because of his guilty conscience, he took the people whom the heretic had led astray and went to the tombs that had been chosen. Now in Egypt the flooding of the river Nile has brought in this custom. For no small part of the year the whole breadth of that country is covered by the regular flood, like a great sea, so that there is no way of getting about except by boat. So the bodies of the dead are embalmed and stored away in cells a good height up. The soil of that land, being damp from constant moisture, keeps people from burying them; if it takes in any bodies buried in it, the excessive floods force it to cast them up onto its surface.

So the blessed Macarius took his stand beside a very ancient corpse and said: “O man, if that heretic and son of perdition had come here with me, and while he stood by I had cried out and called on the name of Christ my God, tell me, in the presence of these people who were almost led astray by his fraud, whether you would have risen.” Then the man rose and answered with words of assent. Abbot Macarius then asked him what he had been when he enjoyed life here, in what age of men he had lived, and whether he had known the name of Christ at that time. He replied that he had lived under kings of very ancient date, and declared that in those days he had never heard the name of Christ. Abbot Macarius spoke to him once more: “Sleep in peace with the others in your own order, to be raised again by Christ at the end.”

All this power and grace of his might perhaps have stayed hidden forever, had not the needs of the whole province, which was in danger, and his complete devotion to Christ, and his sincere love, forced him to work this miracle. And certainly it was not a show of glory but the love of Christ and the good of all the people that wrung it from him. The passage in the book of Kings shows us that the blessed Elijah did the same. He asked that fire might come down from heaven on the sacrifices laid on the pyre for this reason: to set free the faith of the whole people, which was endangered by the tricks of the false prophets.