Venerable Macdonius lived in the late 4th and early 5th centuries. He began his ascetic life as a wanderer, roaming the mountains of Phoenicia, Cilicia, and Syria for twenty-five years.
Venerable Macdonius chose mountain summits for his labors, avoiding contact with visitors. He lived forty-five years in a cave, and later, at the request of pilgrims, built himself a cell in which he lived for twenty-five years, not coming out to the brethren or to outsiders.
In all, the saint struggled in asceticism for seventy years. For more than forty of those years he lived on seed alone, and later he began to take a little bread with water. The Lord glorified him with the gift of wonderworking: he cast out demons and healed diseases. Once a woman was brought to him, suffering from an illness expressed in excessive eating; through the saint’s prayers she was healed. Venerable Macdonius reposed peacefully in the Lord around the year 420, at the age of seventy.
