Maron the Hermit

The witness of Theodoret

Almost everything securely known of Maron comes from a single, precious, and early source: the Religious History (Philotheos Historia, or History of the Monks of Syria) of Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, written about the year 440 — within a generation of Maron's death, in the very district where Maron had lived and where his disciples still flourished. Theodoret devotes his sixteenth chapter to Maron, and writes not from hearsay but from the living memory of the region he governed. This gives the account of Maron an unusual solidity among the lives of the desert fathers: it is contemporary, local, and sober.

The open-air ascetic

Maron, Theodoret tells us, "adorned the choir of the holy men" of the Cyrrhestica — the upland country between Antioch and the Euphrates. He chose a form of asceticism that the Syrians particularly loved: the hypaethral or open-air life, lived without a roof, exposed to sun and rain, frost and heat. Taking to the summit of a hill once held sacred by pagan worship, he cleansed it and consecrated it to the true God, and there he dwelt in the open, with only a small tent or hut of skins to shelter him — and that, Theodoret says, he used rarely. To the customary labours of the ascetic — standing, fasting, sleepless prayer — he "added others of his own devising," pressing his body with a rigour that his biographer marvels at. He sought not the applause of men but the hiddenness of God, and yet, as so often, the more he hid the more he was sought.

The gift of healing

For God "granted him so rich a spring of grace," Theodoret writes, "that his fame ran everywhere." Sufferers came to Maron's hilltop from far off, and he sent them away healed: those burning with fever and those shaking with chills and ague, those wasted by long disease, and those bound and tormented by demons, whom he freed. Nor did he heal only bodies. Theodoret is careful to add that Maron "cured not only the ailments of the body but also those of the soul" — quenching greed in one, anger in another, teaching temperance here and justice there, correcting the disordered passions of those who came, so that his medicine reached the inner man. His mountaintop became a place of resort for the whole region, a clinic and a confessional under the open sky.

The garden of disciples

Maron's greatest work, in Theodoret's reckoning, was not any single wonder but the community of ascetics he raised up. "Having planted for God the garden that now flourishes in the region of Cyrrhus," Theodoret writes, "he received the reward of his labour." From his teaching and example came a whole generation of Syrian holy men — Theodoret names, among the fruit of Maron's planting, the ascetic James and others whom he treats in his own chapters — and through them the manner of life Maron had shaped spread through the hills. He was, in the truest sense, a father of monks, and the network of ascetic settlements that looked to his memory would in time give rise to a monastery and a people.

Friend of John Chrysostom

To this Syrian ascetic the tradition attaches one of its most cherished friendships. Among the surviving letters of John Chrysostom, written from the loneliness of his exile (after 404) at Cucusus in the Armenian mountains, is a short and affectionate note — Letter 36 — addressed "To Maron, priest and monk" (presbyteros kai monazon). In it the exiled patriarch tells Maron that he holds him bound in love and remembrance, that he counts him among his truest friends, and begs the prayers of "so watchful and wakeful a soul." The Church has long identified this Maron with the hermit of Cyrrhus, and it is on this letter above all that his title "friend of Chrysostom" rests — a bond between the golden-mouthed preacher of Antioch and Constantinople and the barefoot ascetic of the Syrian hills. (The identification, though ancient and probable, is not beyond question; see Disputed questions.)

Repose and the contested relics

Maron died after a short illness, about the year 410 — Theodoret says he "endured the toil of virtue for many years" and then passed to the life without toil. His death set off an event that measures the veneration he had won in life: the neighbouring villages fought over his body. The people of the region, each community desiring the blessing of his remains, came in numbers and all but to blows; in the end, Theodoret reports, the most populous of the villages carried off the holy body, drove away the rest, and raised over it a great shrine, from which — the bishop adds — they still reaped the benefit, honouring the martyr-like hermit with a public festival. His grave became, and remained, a centre of pilgrimage and healing.

Beth-Maron, and the people who bear his name

Here the history of the man opens into the history of a Church, and it must be told plainly and charitably. Around the memory and — the tradition holds — the relics of Maron there grew, on the Orontes near Apamea, the great monastery of Beth-Maron ("the House of Maron"), which by the fifth and sixth centuries had become one of the leading monasteries of Syria Secunda and a firm defender of the Council of Chalcedon (451) against the anti-Chalcedonian (Miaphysite) party that prevailed in much of the Syriac world. The monks and the faithful gathered around Beth-Maron came to be called, after their patron, Maronites.

Through the upheavals of the following centuries — the Arab conquest, the isolation of the Lebanese mountains, the theological quarrels over the wills of Christ — the Maronites emerged as a distinct Church and people, with their own patriarch (traditionally traced to a John Maron of the late seventh century) and their own Syriac-Antiochene liturgy, sheltering in the fastnesses of Lebanon. A historical controversy attends their middle centuries: certain Byzantine and later writers charged the community with Monothelitism (the teaching of a single will in Christ, condemned in 681), while the Maronite Church has consistently held that it was never other than orthodox and Chalcedonian and never in schism from the faith of the councils. From the era of the Crusades the Maronite Church entered, and has since maintained, full communion with Rome, and it remains today the largest Christian community of Lebanon. These later divisions — Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian, Roman and Byzantine — are the inheritance of the centuries after Maron, and none of them is his doing. Maron himself belongs to the undivided age: a Syrian saint of the one Church, honoured by the Orthodox in the Byzantine synaxarion on February 14, by the Maronite Catholic Church as its father and patron (kept in their calendar on February 9), and reverenced by all who look to the ascetic springtime of Syria. In him the traditions that later parted still meet.