by It’s the fifth week of the Great Fast, known as Lent (“spring”) in the northern hemisphere. Year after year, the Orthodox of Byzantine tradition read—or so they are supposed to do—the sixth-century hagiographical account, Life of Saint Mary of Egypt, traditionally attributed to Saint Sophrony of Jerusalem. It’s their way of getting ready to celebrate the awesome life of a woman, the only woman the Byzantines honoured by dedicating a Sunday—the fifth, precisely—to her memory. Incidentally, most years this Sunday falls around 1 April, the saint’s day of remembrance. Mary, Mary of Egypt, Mary the Egyptian, Mary of Jordan, Mary of Palestine… She was Egyptian, but she became an extraordinary woman in Palestine, in Jordan’s deserts.
Her amazing trajectory, from the strange and prodigal licentiousness that led her to leave the home of her parents when she was yet to become a teenager—to make her life an ongoing party or, as she later confessed, to insult her body by giving it gratis to everyone—to elevating the same body to the status of God’s very temple, is known. Whoever doesn’t know the story can read it in various places, such as the 1996 translation of Maria Kouli (in the volume Holy Women of Byzantium: Ten Saints’ Lives in English Translation, ed. Alice-Marie Talbot, Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection). This is a story of transformation that lifts up the veils hiding the human potential and that show it, our potential, in all its splendour, actualised, realised. For Mary embodied in her later life the promise of the Lord Yeshua, known by his colonial name as Jesus, that “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Matthew 13:43), thus joining other witnesses of like achievements. Which brings me to the challenging title of this piece, where I speak of “gods” walking among us.
I should therefore explain what I mean, against the backdrop of Clement of Alexandria’s theological anthropology. In various parts of his wide corpus of writings, Clement, in short, claims that our species subsists in three categories of human beings, that is, beasts, people, and gods. Or, as Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny have it in Deus Irae,
The world [is] a teeming zoo … Human, supra-human, quasihuman, pseudohuman … every type imaginable and a few that were not.
Clement’s people are most of us, going day by day according to their routine, living imperfectly, both blissfully ignorant of the human potential for transformation and not doing much in the way of damaging our nature. Beasts are those of us who abuse their nature, degrading it to a quasihuman and pseudohuman state, usually by choosing to hurt both others and themselves in all sorts of horrible ways. Saint Mary’s early life abundantly exemplifies pseudohumanity. And, then, Clement’s gods are human beings who—as heroically as Mary did—reinvent themselves, rework their lives to such an extent, that they “shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father,” for want of a better analogy. We know what that means. We’ve seen it in the transfigured body of our Lord (Matthew 17:1-5). We’ve seen it occurring again and again through history. As a desert witness has it,
They said of the face of Abba Pambo that it was glorified as much as Moses’ when the latter received the image of Adam’s glory. In the same way, the face of Abba Pambo radiated like a lightning and he was like an emperor sitting on his throne. Abba Silvanus and Abba Sisoes experienced a similar [divine] working (Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetic Collection, Pambo 12)
It is in this light that I turn to Mary’s achievements. How, in God’s grace and under the guidance of the Lord’s Mother, she reworked her life—how she transformed the hellhole into a temple—is known from the hagiography. She challenged herself, pushing her nature to the limit, even exceeding its limitations. The readers of her Life know too well how she conquered herself during more than forty years of solitude in the desert. But, here, I’m only interested in the outcomes. Why? Well, because we are a pragmatic culture, an outcomes-oriented culture. We do stuff that works, leading to our wellbeing. Of course, not many of us, comfortable first-worlders, would dare to challenge themselves as much as Saint Mary did, but at least it’s useful to know, I reckon, that we can become “gods,” as she did.
In what follows, I just list the extraordinary signs of her accomplishments, as the readers find them in Life of Saint Mary of Egypt. First, she had the capacity to scan deep inside people’s minds, being able to “read” who her interlocutor was, that he was a priest and that his name was “Zosimas,” without ever meeting him before. Second, she levitated while in prayer. Third, while telling the story of her life, Mary shared with Zosimas about the divine light that enveloped her from time to time, both as an encouragement to stay the course and as a reward for her steadfastness on changing her life. Fourth, remote viewing. She asked Zosimas to tell John, the abbot, that there were some irregular behaviours in the monastery—a monastery located on the other side of the Jordan. Fifth, foresight. At the end of their first encounter, she told the monk to stay in the monastery during the Great Fast of next year, for he will be sick; which he was. Sixth, she was able to cross the Jordan by walking on the water. Seventh, translocation. After her last encounter with Zosimas, Mary traversed the desert almost instantly, whereas the monk had to travel for twenty days to get to where he found her dead body. Eighth, her body remained incorrupt, a year after death, when Zosimas found it. Ninth, ecosystemic agency. She was dead, but the imprint of her holiness determined a wild lion to help Zosimas to bury her body.
Now, most of this might seem outrageous exaggeration to many readers, ancient and modern. No wonder that the author of the hagiography emphasises the veracity of this account both in the prologue and in the epilogue of the story. But the recurrence of this kind of experience through history bespeaks a real phenomenon, which deserves the attention of researchers. It is encouraging to see that even agnostic authors such as Carlos Eire (see his They Flew: A History of the Impossible, Yale University Press, 2023) begin to pay attention to it, but much more should be done. The cognitive study of prayerful states is another encouraging recent development.
Now, what remains to be seen is how many of us, beasts or people, human, quasihuman, or pseudohuman, will dare to become “gods,” superhuman, through the prayers of Saint Mary of Egypt, a “god” who walked among us…
5 April 2025 © AIOCS
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