Makarios the Roman, the Isles of the Blessed, and the journeys to Paradise
- Daniel Oltean
- 13 hours ago
- 7 min read
Throughout history, humankind has sought to understand the world and explore the Earth to its furthest boundaries. In the medieval Christian imagination, this natural curiosity was intertwined with the desire to visit, or at least identify, the Paradise, imagined as a physical space situated at the edge of the world. Consequently, Byzantine hagiography contains unusual tales that, with the charm of folk stories, narrate the adventures and discoveries of monks who supposedly travelled to the ends of the Earth. Even though some of these monks, such as Macarios the Roman, were included in the Byzantine calendar, their travel journals are merely literary fantasies intended to satisfy the religious interests of their time. The authors drew heavily on the Romance of Alexander the Great, one of the most widely read texts throughout the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages.
Journeys to the ends of the Earth in Byzantine hagiography
Makarios the Roman is a relatively little-known saint, celebrated on October 23. [1] His Life (BHG 1104-1005i) is a complex narrative, written around the 5th/6th century. Its first part describes the journey of the monks Theophilus, Sergius, and Hygienos to the end of the world. Setting out from Mesopotamia, they travel eastward, passing successively through the lands of the Androgynes, the Cynocephali (dog-headed men), and the Pygmies. The monks also encounter fabulous creatures such as the unicorn (a legendary animal with a single horn) and the onocentaur (an animal with the head and torso of a man and the body of a donkey). From afar, the travellers gaze first upon the eternal pit for sinners and then the realms of the righteous and the fountain of Immortality. At the end of their journey, at the edge of the Earth, they find Makarios, who lived naked in a cave only 20 miles from Paradise. [2]
The author of the Life of Makarios drew inspiration from the Alexander Romance, a work that blends historical facts and legends about the emperor Alexander the Great (356-323 BC). The earliest version of the text dates back to at least the 3rd century. According to this account, Alexander also travels beyond the limits of the known world, crossing the lands of the Cynocephali and the Pygmies, and encountering unicorns and centaurs. Like the three monks, Alexander arrives at the source of the water of Life, but he does not recognise it. At the border between the human world and the realm of spirits, the emperor builds an arch on which he inscribes advice on the path to follow. [3] This last element is relevant to the later use of the text, since in the Life of Makarios, the three monks arrive at this arch and read Alexander’s inscription. [4]
A text comparable to the Life of Makarios is the Account of the life of the Blessed by the monk Zosimos (BHG 1889-1890f, CAVT 166), which may date to the 5th or 6th century. According to this narrative, Zosimos travels to the place where “the Blessed” or “the Rechabites” lived, the descendants of Rechab whom the prophet Jeremiah had praised for their ascetic lives several centuries earlier (Jer. 35:1-19). After a miraculous crossing of a great river, Zosimos encounters the Blessed, who lived naked amidst paradisiacal nature and prayed constantly. The trees provided them with food every day, except during Lent, when they received heavenly manna. Families had only two children, one destined for marriage and the other for virginity. The members of this utopian community lived between 300 and 700 years. [5]
In this narrative, the motif of the naked man living like in Paradise at the end of the world echoes not only the Life of Makarios, whose name means “blessed,” but also the Alexander Romance. According to legend, in India, the emperor met the gymnosophists, the naked sages, also known as the Brahmans. They lived for 150 years and had two children, one to replace the father and the other the mother. These Hindu sages are sometimes confused with “the Blessed Ones” and placed on one or more paradisiacal islands at the eastern edge of the world. [6] In other instances, the Blessed Ones and the Brahmans formed two distinct categories, as in a 4th-century Account of the Whole World and its Peoples, but their countries remained the two regions of the world closest to Paradise. [7] In any case, in Zosimos’s narrative, the Rechabites are simply the Christian version of the gymnosophists, a much older literary model.
Byzantine authors thus appear to have been quite familiar with the place of the Blessed. According to the Acts of Matthew in the city of the Blessed (CANT 268), the apostle visited this land where the inhabitants breathed the fragrance of Paradise and drank water that flowed from the garden of Eden. [8] The exact location of the city has not yet been revealed. However, according to the Syrian monk Agapios, who also described his journey to Paradise (BHG 2017), the isle of the Blessed was surrounded by walls that reached to the sky. Nearby was the fountain of Immortality, accessible only to the apostles and the righteous. For Agapios, the island thus became a place of eternal rest for humans after their death. [9]
The myth of Paradise Lost
All these Byzantine legends sought, in fact, to maintain readers’ interest in Paradise and lost eternal life. However, this motif is very ancient. Long before Makarios and Alexander, in Sumerian mythology, King Gilgamesh (3rd millennium BCE) also travels to the ends of the Earth in search of a cure for death. After meeting a “blessed” man who lived on an island surrounded by the waters of Death, Gilgamesh manages to collect the plant of Youth, even though he will not be able to keep it for long. [10] In a similar Mesopotamian legend, the mythical king Etana, who had no children, ascends to Paradise to obtain the herb of Life. [11]
According to Taoist tradition, the “immortals” (xian) already enjoy paradisiacal life in their abode, located in the Eastern Sea, on the Isles of the Blessed. Envious, the early emperors of the Qin and Han dynasties (3rd-2nd centuries BCE) are said to have organised missions to this distant land, but no one returned with the elixir of youth. [12] As for Hindu mythology, it places the Isle of the Blessed, called Svetadvipa, to the north, in the region of the sacred mountain Meru. According to the Mahabharata (Shantiparvan, §337) (c. 3rd century BCE-3rd century CE), the island would be a paradisiacal space where people live in great happiness longer than ordinary mortals and dedicate their existence to God alone. [13]
In Greek mythology, Heracles journeys to a divine garden at the edge of the world to obtain the golden apples guarded by a hundred-headed dragon. Later, this garden of the Hesperides was believed to be located at the westernmost edge of the known world, in the Atlantic Ocean. [14] The Isles of the Blessed were not far away. According to Pindar (6th-5th century BC) and later authors, followed by the monk Agapios, their role was not to house utopian communities, but to receive heroes, sages, and virtuous souls after their death. [15]
The geography of Paradise and the Isles of the Blessed remains, therefore, fluid. Throughout history, the location of the earthly Paradise has shifted several times, reflecting the religious and social functions that different ethnic groups wished to assign to it. For the Byzantines, Paradise lay to the east, but Christopher Columbus, upon reaching the Orinoco estuary, was convinced he had discovered one of the four rivers that flow from Paradise. This cultural diversity, however, never prevented false prophets from believing that one day, Paradise on Earth can and must be visited by all. [16]
[1] H. Delehaye, Synaxarium Ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae, Acta Sanctorum Propylaeum Novembris, Bruxelles, 1902, col. 160.37. See also Vatican, BAV gr. 1613 (10e/11e s.), p. 334, cf. PG, 117, col. 268 (January 19).
[2] S. Papaioannou (ed. et trad.), Life of Makarios the Roman, in Saints at the Limits: Seven Byzantine Popular Legends (Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 78), Cambridge (MA), 2023, p. 78‑127 (§7-8, land of the Androgynes; §9, land of the Cynocephali; §10, unicorn and unocentaur; §14-17, places of the sinners; §19, places of the blessed; §20, Pygmies). BHG refers to Bibliotheca Hagiographica Graeca.
[3] The Greek Alexander Romance, trans. R. Stoneman, London, 1991, p. 146 (§3.28, land of the Cynocephali); 125 (§2.44, land of the Pygmies); 184 (§3.17, unicorns); 124 (§2.41, centaurs); 121 (§2.39, water of Life); 122 (§2.41, ark of Alexander).
[4] Papaioannou, Life of Makarios the Roman, p. 88-89 (§12).
[5] J. H. Charlesworth (ed. and trans.), The History of the Rechabites, I: The Greek Recension, Chico (CA), 1982. CAVT refers to Clavis Apocryphorum Veteris Testamenti.
[6] The Greek Alexander Romance, p. 121 (§2.40) ; 131-133 (§3.5-6) ; 179 (§2.35) ; Pseudo-Palladius, On the Life of the Brahmans, trans. R. Stoneman, Legends of Alexander the Great, London, 2012, p. 35-38 (§1.4-14). See C. Jouanno, Des Gymnosophistes aux Réchabites : une utopie antique et sa christianisation, in L’antiquité classique, 79 (2010), p. 53-76, https://www.persee.fr/doc/antiq_0770-2817_2010_num_79_1_3982.
[7] Expositio totius mundi et gentium, ed. and trans. J. Rougé (Sources chrétiennes, 124), Paris, 1966, p. 142-149 (§4-8); 350-351; 356.
[8] J.-N. Pérès (trans.), Actes de Matthieu dans la ville de Kahnat, in P. Geoltrain – J.‑D. Kaestli (ed.), Écrits apocryphes chrétiens, vol. 2, Paris, 2005, p. 910-913. CANT refers to Clavis Apocryphorum Novi Testamenti.
[9] R. Pope (ed. and trans.), The Greek Text of “The Narration of Our Pious Father Agapios the Syrian”, in Cyrillomethodianum, 8-9 (1984-1985), p. 233-260. See D. Penskaya, Hagiography and Fairytale. Paradise and the Land of the Blessed in Byzantium, in A. Rigo et al. (ed.), Byzantine Hagiography: Texts, Themes & Projects (Byzantioς. Studies in Byzantine History and Civilization, 13), Turnhout, 2018, p. 141-155.
[10] A. R. George The Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, Oxford, 2003, vol. 1, p. 686-725 (§10-11).
[11] J. V. Kinnier Wilson (ed. and trans.), The Legend of Etana: A New Edition, Warminster, 1985, p. 118-123.
[12] D. Holzman, Immortality-Seeking in Early Chinese Poetry, in W. J. Peterson et al (ed.), The Power of Culture: Studies in Chinese Cultural History, Hong Kong, 1994, p. 103-118; Z. Kirkova, Roaming into the Beyond: Representations of Xian Immortality in Early Medieval Chinese Verse (Sinica Leidensia, 129), Leiden, 2016, p. 14-42; 160-202.
[13] K. Rönnow, Some Remarks on Śvetadvīpa, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, 5.2 (1929), p. 253-284.
[14] Pliny, Natural History, §19.22.2, ed. and trans. H. Rackham et al. (Loeb Classical Library), vol. 5, Cambridge (MA), 1961, p. 460-461.
[15] The Geography of Strabo, §3.2.13, ed. and trans. H. L. Jones (Loeb Classical Library), vol. 2, Cambridge (MA), 1949, p. 52-57.
[16] M. Eliade, Traité d’histoire des religions, Paris, 1949, p. 169-170; 246-252; 316-324; 361-363; U. Eco, The Book of Legendary Lands, trans. A. McEwen, London, 2013, p. 145-181.
