Mark the Ascetic

The man and his times

Mark belongs to the fourth and fifth centuries, to the golden age of the desert fathers, though the record of his life is so overlaid by later tradition that his precise dates and even his homeland are debated (see Disputed questions). The oldest and strongest strand of the tradition makes him a disciple of Saint John Chrysostom, by whom, the accounts say, he was tonsured a monk about the age of forty; and this places his formation in the last decades of the fourth century and his maturity in the first half of the fifth. He is styled in the calendars the Ascetic (ὁ Ἀσκητής) and the Faster (ὁ Νηστευτής) for the severity of his abstinence, and the Monk (ὁ Μοναχός) or the Hermit (ὁ Ἐρημίτης) for the solitary life he embraced. After years in community — the tradition variously sets him as abbot of a monastery near Ancyra (Ankara) in Galatia and as a monk of the Egyptian desert — he withdrew into the deep wilderness as a hermit, and there gave the remainder of his long life to prayer, fasting, and the writing of the works that are his monument.

Of his personal holiness the tradition is unanimous: he was gentle, humble, and pure of soul, and from his youth his one delight was the reading of the Holy Scriptures, of which — the accounts insist — he came to know the whole Bible by heart. He was granted the gift of wonders, and the calendars honour him as a wonderworker; he reposed, after a life of exceptional length spent in the solitary struggle, in the peace of the desert.

The ascetic writings

Mark's enduring greatness lies in his spiritual writings. The tradition speaks of some thirty discourses, of which about nine survive, and the surviving corpus made him, for the whole later East, one of the small company of masters whose ascetical theology was gathered into the Philokalia. His two most celebrated works stand at the head of that anthology:

• On the Spiritual Law (Περὶ νόμου πνευματικοῦ) — two hundred short, proverb-like sentences on the inner law of the Gospel written in the heart, on watchfulness, on the movements of thought, and on the way the commandments of Christ are fulfilled from within.
• On Those Who Think They Are Made Righteous by Works (Περὶ τῶν οἰομένων ἐξ ἔργων δικαιοῦσθαι) — a like series of sentences against the illusion that a man can put God in his debt by his own achievements, and for the truth that all is of grace, received and made active through faith and the keeping of the commandments.

To these the tradition adds On Repentance, On Baptism, On Fasting, the Letter to Nicolas (a tender pastoral letter of counsel to a young monk troubled by the passions), a Disputation with a Lawyer, and polemical works — one against the Nestorians, defending the unity of Christ, and one against the Melchizedekians, who blasphemously exalted Melchizedek above the Son of God. Three of the treatises stand in the first volume of the English Philokalia.

The heart of Mark's teaching is the relation of grace and freedom. Against every reliance on human merit he insists that no one is justified by his own works — that Christ's redemption is a free gift, and the kingdom is "not a wage paid for works, but a gift of grace prepared by the Master for his faithful servants." Yet against every passivity he insists with equal force that grace, fully given in Baptism, is made manifest and active only through the keeping of the commandments: the whole of the spiritual life is the labour of uncovering, by obedience and repentance, the grace already dwelling within. This poised refusal of both works-righteousness and quietism — a via media between a Pelagian trust in effort and a Messalian trust in feeling — is what gave his little books their authority, and is why the Byzantine schools set so high a price on him: the proverb "Sell everything and buy Mark" (πάντα πώλησον καὶ Μᾶρκον ἀγόρασον) passed into the language of the monks as a measure of his worth.