Macarius was a young camel driver who at thirty fled the world for the Egyptian desert. He settled in the wilderness of Scetis (modern Wadi El Natrun) and lived there for sixty years — the central elder of the great monastic community that grew up around him.
He was one of the foundational generation of the Egyptian Desert Fathers, alongside Anthony, Pachomius, and Macarius of Alexandria (a different person). His sayings, preserved in the Apophthegmata Patrum ('Sayings of the Desert Fathers'), are among the most-quoted texts of the desert tradition. The Coptic Macarian Homilies — a series of fifty spiritual conferences attributed to him — became enormously influential in both Eastern and Western mystical tradition.
The Monastery of St. Macarius the Great at Wadi El Natrun, which he founded around 360, is one of the oldest continuously functioning monasteries in the world — still operating today after over sixteen centuries, with a community of over a hundred Coptic monks.