MACARIO, metropolitan of MOSCOW - Archbishop
of Novgorod, in 1543 metropolitan of Moscow. Born in
1482, died in 1563, he was one of the most prominent metropolitans
of the latter city. His rule marks the acme of
the influence of the politico-religious tendencies of Joseph
of Volokolamsk and with it 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 Silvester.
He was the first to compose the "menei," that is, the lives of the
Russian saints distributed according to the days and months of the year
(12 vols., Moscow 1868 ff.). He canonized in two rounds a great
number of new saints. Moreover he wrote a new chronicle
of the reigning family, no longer according to the years but according
to its generations (steps) (the "Book of Steps").
Alongside Ivan's book of civil legislation he published
in one hundred chapters a series of directives for ecclesiastical
life (the Stoglav). M. was a promoter of a new kind of
religious art, less traditional and more Muscovite than that
which preceded it, which no longer avoids symbolism and the figurations of living persons, which shows the end of the Platonic
conceptions in this field. He encouraged the Tsar to
war against Kazan and Astrakhan and thus opened for Muscovy the way toward the east and toward Siberia.
BIBL. A. M. Ammann, Storia della Chiesa russa e dei paesi
limitrafi. Turin 1948, see index, with bibl.: P. Pascal, Le métro-polite Macaire et ses grandes entreprises littéraires, in Russie et
chrétienté, Paris 1949, nos. 1-2, pp. 7-17.
Alberto M. Ammann