MARY OF EGYPT

On April 14, the Church honors the memory of Saint Mary of Egypt. Unlike the movable celebration of Mary on the fifth week of Great Lent and on the fifth Sunday of Great Lent, this is a fixed date, a personal day of humble remembrance. The life of Mary of Egypt reflects a certain era, its moods, ideals, ideas, and beliefs. The exact time of her life is unknown; there are only possible dates. It is clear that Mary lived in the era after the legalization of Christianity, the emergence of monastic penitential discipline in the Church, and before the emergence of Islam. April 14 is April 1 according to the Julian calendar. The image of Saint Mary is God’s smile to all those who err on earth, an assurance that repentance and correction in Christ are always possible.

1 The beginning of her commemoration as a saint is connected with the veneration in Palestine of the tomb of a certain Palestinian hermitess named Mary. In “The Life of the Venerable Cyriacus the Hermit,” Cyril of Scythopolis (524–558) mentions this, referring to his interlocutor Abba John, and also provides some details of her life. Tradition attributes the compilation of the text of Mary’s life known to us to St. Sophronius of Jerusalem (560–638). He was a great theologian and witness to the last decades of the Christian past of the Holy Land, who lived through the Arab conquest of Palestine. The text is a kind of verbal icon of female penitential monastic holiness of the Golden Age of the Church Fathers, a kind of summary. Its genius lies in the fact that it contains so few historical details that it could be perceived equally by every era as contemporary. In order to understand the biography of Mary as presented in this text, it is important to try to move away from the legendary and hagiographic aspects as much as possible and focus on the few details that could be related to her biography and history.

2 According to the hagiographer, Mary left home at the age of 12. In the Roman Empire, twelve was the age of civil majority for girls, when it became possible to enter into contracts and marry. Mary settled in Alexandria and lived there for 17 years. The main city of Egypt, Alexandria was the largest metropolis in the eastern part of the Roman Empire and had a population of over 300,000. For those times, such a population was incredibly large. By her own admission, from early youth Mary “had an insatiable desire and uncontrollable passion.” The medieval Christian imagination called her a harlot. The French preferred to call Mary a courtesan. In modern terms, she was a nymphomaniac. That is, she was incredibly drawn to sexual intercourse with men. She herself testifies to this in the text. She was not rich; moreover, she was not interested in money as such. An interesting detail from the same biography says that Mary “she often flax yarn or even lived on alms.”

3 At the age of 29, Mary went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. She later admitted that she had undertaken this journey by ship from Alexandria to Jerusalem not out of religious interest, but for entertainment. “I wanted to go in order to have more lovers to satisfy my passion.” There were many young men among the pilgrims. This pilgrimage was to take place in the autumn and it was timed to coincide with the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. In Jerusalem, Mary was unable to enter the church. “The temple did not accept me, the unfortunate one. It was as if a detachment of soldiers had been posted (…), so some mighty force held me back.“ In the vestibule of the temple, Mary turned to the Mother of God before her image. ”If, as I have heard, God became man, born of You, in order to call sinners to repentance, let me enter.” This “if,” as if accidentally preserved in the text of the hagiography, is very relevant After all, prayers, even the prayers of sinners, like commands, do not contain polite formulas, but are always expressed in the imperative mood. Most likely, Maria knew about Christianity before that, but she was not a believer in practice.

4 Just as she had previously been willing to do anything to satisfy her desire, Mary swore not to return to her former life, if only the Virgin Mary would allow her to enter the church. After such a prayer, she entered. Having received communion in the temple of John the Baptist, she crossed the Jordan in the morning and headed for the desert. Female penitential monasticism as we know it did not exist in Palestine. Some pious wealthy ladies from Roman society devoted themselves to God but remained in their homes, usually together with men who, like St. Jerome or the ascetic Rufinus, provided spiritual guidance. It is impossible to imagine Mary in such a monastery or among the young virgins whose small communities existed in the cities of that time. She would never have been accepted into a pilgrim or scholarly community. Mary’s rejection of human society, her seclusion and withdrawal from church life and even the sacraments were not voluntary. She was constantly forced to flee. Perhaps when she met people, she would have had problems with the law. A lone woman, especially a wandering hermit, always aroused suspicion.

5 For 17 years, exactly the same period of time as she had once spent in sin in Alexandria, she spent in opposition to her own passionate desire to return, which tormented her terribly. For the next 30 years, she lived an extreme ascetic life. The desert, which began not far from Jerusalem, covered an area of about 22 square kilometers. At that time, there were several dozen monasteries in this small territory. Hence, the other name for this area: “The Desert of Fifty Monasteries.” In most cases, these were small ascetic communities.

6 The Life of Mary has preserved for us a very interesting dialogue between Mary and the ascetic Zosima who find her in the desert:

“Tell me, how do Christian people live now? How do emperors live? How does the Church fare?”

Zosima said to her:

“Through your holy prayers, mother, Christ has granted lasting peace to all.”

Perhaps not wanting to disturb the ascetic, Zosima told her about a “lasting and prosperous peace”. In reality, the time of their conversation was a difficult and ominous one. It was a time when Rome, which had seemed eternal, had already fallen (410) or was on the verge of falling. The migration of peoples was beginning, and the end of antiquity was approaching. The destruction of everything that had gone before was coming. It seemed that the time had come for the events described in the Apocalypse.

7 Although the exact dates of Mary’s biography are unknown, there have been attempts to reconstruct the chronology. According to one possible dating of her biography, she made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem around 383, where she experienced a conversion. At almost the same time, another great convert to Christ of that time, the future Father of Western Christianity, Augustine, left his concubine-wife in Milan in 384 to soon enter into a legal marriage with another woman chosen for him by his mother. But since his supposed destiny had not yet come of age (remember the 12 years of Mary of Egypt!), Augustine took up with another woman. Being obsessed with carnal desire, he simply could not and did not want to wait. In 386, when Mary was already in the desert, Augustine heard the story of the conversion of two Roman officials, which took place under the influence of reading the life of the great Egyptian ascetic Anthony the Great. Together with his friends, Augustine withdrew to northern Italy to a place called Cassiciacum, on the border between modern Italy and Switzerland, where he lived in the most common type of communal seclusion at that time—in a small philosophic community. In 387, Augustine was baptized by Ambrose in Milan on Easter. Like many other converts of that time, Augustine wanted to devote himself to monasticism—a dream that would haunt him until his forced ordination as a presbyter in Hippo in 391, against his will, by acclamation of the people in the local church.

8 Other dates in their biographies, that is, the little that is said in Mary’s life about chronology, and the detailed information we find in Augustine’s biography, coincide in a remarkable way. In 401, Augustine completed writing his Confessions. At the same time, that is, 17 years after her departure to the desert, Mary became confident that her repentance had been accepted. She had never been to Rome or to Carthage, the great African city of sin, where Augustine spent his youth. Augustine had never been to the Holy Land or to Egypt. Mary passed away in 430. This means that a year after Maria and Zosima met in Palestine, and she confessed her entire life, St. Augustine was departing to God in his cell in the city of Hippo, besieged by the Vandals, after his last confession and communion. These great saints were contemporaries. They ascended to Heaven at the same time. It is a pity, however, that these two great saints, who had experienced great conversion, were unable to meet on earth, and indeed could never have met.