MACARIO, Metropolitan of MOSCA—Archbishop of Novgorod, in 1543 Metropolitan of Mosca. Born in 1482, died in 1563, he was one of the most distinguished metropolitans of the latter city. His government marks the height of the influence of the politico-religious tendencies of Giuseppe di Volokalamsk and thereby the culmination of the Russian Middle Ages. On his own authority M. crowned the young Ivan the Terrible Tsar of Russia and gave him a spiritual father of his own temper in the person of the monk Silvestro.
He was the first to compile the “menaia,” that is, the lives of Russian saints arranged according to the days and months of the year (12 vols., Mosca 1868 ff.). On two occasions he canonized a great number of new saints. He also wrote a new chronicle of the ruling family, no longer arranged by years but according to its generations (steps) (the “Book of Degrees”). Alongside Ivan’s book of civil legislation, he published in one hundred chapters a series of directives for ecclesiastical life (the Stoglav). M. promoted a new kind of religious art, less traditional and more Muscovite than the preceding one, which no longer avoided symbolism and representations of living persons; this shows the end of Platonic conceptions in this field. He encouraged the Tsar in the war against Kasan and Astrakan, thus opening for Muscovy the way toward the East and Siberia.
BIBL. A. M. Ammann, Storia della Chiesa russa e dei paesi limitrafi. Torino 1948, V. indice, with bibliography: P. Pascal, Le métropolite Macaire et ses grandes entreprises littéraires, in Russie et chrétienté, Parigi 1949, nos. 1–2, pp. 7–17. Alberto M. Ammann