Macarius the Roman Wonderworker of Novgorod

THE LIFE OF
Saint Macarius the Roman
WONDERWORKER OF NOVGOROD

By ANIMPODIST KOROLKOV


Commemorated on August 15

KONTAKION, TONE 4

HAVING LEFT thy homeland, O blessed one,+ thou didst settle in the wilderness on an island in the marshes of Lezna,+ and there thou didst manifest a life of severity,+ and having astounded many by thy life,+ thou didst receive from Christ the gift of miracles.+ Remember us who revere thy memory as we call to thee:+ Rejoice, O Macarius our father.


This rare Life1 is dedicated to the growing number of all those "converts" of today and tomorrow who, like St. Macarius himself, by God's grace have come to see the error of the Western confessions and have left them to join the one saving Church of Christ, Holy Orthodoxy. May our Lord, through the prayers of their patron, St. Macarius the Roman, give them the courage and perseverance to follow this path to the end and bring forth abundant spiritual fruit.

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1 From the church periodical Russki Palomnik, 1895, no. 32; slightly revised.


AMONG THE GOD-PLEASING SAINTS who have shone forth in the wide land of Novgorod the Great, there are two foreigners, natives of Rome, who founded monasteries that became seedbeds of faith and enlightenment, strongholds of Orthodoxy. They came to Russia in search of Orthodoxy, which, their hearts told them, had disappeared from Rome. One of them, St. Anthony the Roman, came in the 12th century, when the schism of the Roman Church had become final, and founded a monastery in Novgorod on the banks of the Volkhov River; and the other, St. Macarius the Roman, came in the 16th century, when the apostasy of Rome had produced the disorders of the Protestant Reformation, and founded a monastery in the region of what was later to become the capital, Petersburg, on the banks of the small river Lezna. This latter monastery, the St. Macarius Hermitage, is 75 miles from Novgorod and 65 miles from Petersburg.

The great lamp of the Orthodox Church, St. Macarius, the wonderworker of Novgorod, was born at the end of the 15th century in the noisy capital of the West, Rome, in a wealthy and renowned family. The pious parents brought up their first-born son in the strict laws of religion and gave him a brilliant scientific education according to the standards of that time. Endowed by nature with a great mind, an enviable future in public service lay before the young Roman. But the youth did not desire perishable glory, did not seek honors, but rather thirsted for another kind of life, a contemplative and spiritual life.

Having attained mature years and renounced all comforts and enjoyments, he resolved to devote himself to the service, not of the passing world, but of its Creator, Almighty God. The study of Holy Scripture and the writings of the Holy Fathers were the constant occupation of the future ascetic. His dream was to live according to the teaching of the Holy Church, to appropriate for himself her truths and dogmas and gradually to prepare himself for a strict ascetic life; and this dream took complete hold of his heart and soul.

But the Church of the West, to which he belonged by birth, at that time was full of outward rebellion and inward disorder, and it could not keep hold of the ardent mind of the young theologian; its rules and rites did not seem to him to be pure and flawless.

With pain in his heart the Lord's zealot looked at the religious life of proud Rome, puffed up with its false might, and at the schism which had broken out among its leading hierarchs and spiritual children. The future ascetic sorrowed and with tears begged God to show him the true path to salvation in the midst of a church which was plunged in the darkness of sin and worldly vanity, but was still the church in which he had been born; and the Lord did not reject the entreaty of His chosen one. He opened his spiritual eyes to the only Church which offers salvation, which had been glorified by the Councils of Holy Fathers for her correctness, for the immutability of her dogmas and teaching, the Church sanctified by the labors of asceticism and prayer of her great men the Eastern Orthodox Church.

"Only under her holy protection, among her children, will I find salvation," he thought, and secretly he left Rome, distributing his wealth to the poor, leaving his relatives and close ones. With the staff of a pilgrim, in an old garment, without funds, trusting only in the Lord, the young confessor of God's law and righteousness set out for a distant land, unknown to him for Holy Russia.

The path of the ascetic for the Lord's sake was difficult. He suffered much while travelling, until finally he reached what for him was a promised land, an Orthodox land – the northern parts of Russia, in the region of Novgorod the Great. Here the splendor of the churches and the great number of monasteries, the strict life of the monks, the solemnity and fervency of the Divine services all left a deep impression on the foreigner.

What must have been his astonishment, and what consolation it must have given him, to discover that one of the leading monasteries of Novgorod had been founded three centuries earlier by one like himself in spirit and circumstances, his own compatriot, who was revered in Novgorod as a saint of the Orthodox Church – ST. ANTHONY THE ROMAN.


SAINT ANTHONY THE ROMAN WONDERWORKER OF NOVGOROD

17th-century icon depicting St. Anthony standing on the rock that brought him to the walls of Novgorod, where he founded a monastery, which he dedicates to the Mother of God by offering Her a symbolic miniature of it.


The Cathedral dedicated to the Nativity of the Theotokos in the Monastery of St. Anthony. Begun in 1117.


The board pathway leading through the marshes to the little island where St. Macarius built his first cell and laid the foundation of his monastery.


Born in 1067 in Rome of wealthy Orthodox parents, St. Anthony was tonsured a monk at the age of 19 in one of the many Greek monasteries of Italy which had not followed the Pope of Rome into heresy. For several years he lived a strict hermitic life in this monastery, living most of the time alone in his cell, and coming to pray together with the other brethren and receive Holy Communion on Great Saturday and Pascha. When the Pope began a persecution against the monks, they fled in all directions. St. Anthony, going from place to place, came finally to a rock at the edge of the sea, and there he lived for a year in prayer and fasting. But then a storm arose on the sea, and the rock was torn from its place by the waves, and the Saint found himself sailing on the sea, miraculously unharmed. In this miraculous way he arrived in Novgorod in 1106, thanking God for His wondrous Providence in bringing him to an Orthodox land. With the blessing of St. Nicetas, Bishop of Novgorod, he built a church on the river Volkhov dedicated to the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos, on which feast he had gone to live on his rock. Within a year local fishermen brought up in their nets a barrel containing valuables from his parents' estate, which he had thrown into the sea in Italy, and with them he built a monastery, where he was abbot until his repose in 1147, on August 3, on which day he is commemorated by the Orthodox Church.

On completing his pilgrimage to the monasteries of Novgorod, St. Macarius came to the monastery of St. Alexander on the banks of the river Svir, where the Saint himself, the founder of the monastery, was still abbot.

St. Alexander, weighed down by years and illness, joyously greeted the pilgrim who had come from afar to live in the Svir Monastery as a novice and disciple of its great abbot. After blessing his good intention, St. Alexander, in spiritual converse, revealed and explained to him what it was that his heart and soul were thirsting for, thus receiving the Western convert into the bosom of Holy Orthodoxy and guiding him in the life of the Church's highest ideal: monasticism.

The traveller from Rome did not spend much time as a disciple of the abbot of Svir. Following the example of many like himself who were spiritual children of the holy abbot, he resolved, after being tonsured a monk with the name Macarius, to shut himself up in a recluse's cell for life and bury himself to everything that suggested the world.

After visiting once more the holy places of Novgorod which had become so dear to him, he chose for himself in the region of Novgorod an impenetrable forested marshland which spread out for several miles along the shores of the river Lezna; and here, on a small island in the marsh, he built a cell.

BURNING WITH LOVE for God, crying out with tears over his sins, exhausting his flesh and humbling his spirit, in the severe labors of vigil, fasting, and unceasing prayer, removed from the world, unknown to men, living on the meager fruits and grasses of the severe wilderness – St. Macarius spent a long time in the hope of attaining the Kingdom of Heaven on the path he had chosen, the path of sorrow and deprivation.

But the wilderness could not conceal the great ascetic. Almighty God desired to reveal him to the world and through him to bring many to God-pleasing life and to the salvation of their souls.

Late one inclement night St. Macarius was standing at prayer. Someone knocked at the door of his cell, begging him to open in the name of God. The ascetic yielded to the entreaty, and several unknown people entered his cell-hunters, to judge from their clothing, and evidently tired to exhaustion. The desert-dweller, in accordance with monastic custom, greeted them with peace. "The Saint's face shone with a special light of God's grace, like the face of an angel," relates the writer of the Saint's Life; "and the few words of his greeting evoked a wondrous grace in the hearts of those who had entered." Astonished at the divine appearance of the ascetic, and having asked his blessing, they told him: "Only by your prayers, O man of God, did the merciful Lord help us to find your cell and get to it without perishing in these forest marshes where we had come to hunt."

"It is not my sinful prayers, but the good will of the Almighty which has directed you here!" the Saint replied humbly, offering the travellers food from his meager stores. Having showed the exhausted travellers much kindness, St. Macarius calmed them and, after a brief conversation with them and common prayer, and having blessed them, he sent them off, showing them the way out of the marsh.

On leaving his cell the hunters were astonished alike at the modest humility and at the mind of the solitary desert-dweller. "They were also astonished," relates the writer of the Saint's Life, "at the patience of the ascetic of God; it seemed to them incredible that he could survive surrounded on all sides by a marsh from which there arose clouds of mosquitoes and flies which sting a man quite painfully."

But what seemed impossible for simple people of the world was indeed the fortunate lot of God's chosen one. He patiently bore everything: hunger and thirst, summer heat and winter cold. He lived only for God, for the spiritual, heavenly world, and not for the world that passes; and the Lord helped him. In the old manuscript Life of the Saint it is related that even the wild animals who frequently visited the Saint did not touch him; without fear he stroked bears and fed them from his hands just as one would a domestic animal.

Over one thing only was the Saint concerned now: his peace and silence might be broken by people, for his refuge had become known. And indeed, soon the report of the ascetic's holy life amidst the forest marshes of the river Lezna attracted many who thirsted for his counsel, instructive teaching, and prayers. The Saint did not refuse his spiritual help to the suffering, but his renown weighed upon him and he decided to leave the place of his first solitary ascetic labors.

St. Macarius, on leaving his island, settled even deeper in the forest marsh. Choosing a small, slightly elevated place surrounded by a dense, tall forest on the left bank of the Lezna, he built himself here a second humble cell. But here too the Saint could not long conceal himself from the world. In wondrous fashion the Lord revealed to people his new refuge. "By his ascetic labors," we read in the Saint's manuscript Life, "he attracted to this place a special grace of God which was manifested to the inhabitants there-abouts sometimes in the form of a fiery pillar which was visible to many at night, and sometimes in the form of a cloud of fragrant smoke which ascended to the sky and poured out fragrance throughout the area."

These manifestations made the local inhabitants penetrate into the depths of the wilderness, and there, "having been saddened by the first departure of the Saint, being deprived of his sweet conversation," with joy they found him again. "Then finally they understood those wondrous manifestations of the fiery pillar and the smoke of incense which had drawn them there, and they began to revere the man of God even more."

Great was the love of the people for St. Macarius. Many did not leave his wilderness for long periods; and some ardently begged him to allow them to stay with him for life and build themselves cells near his modest dwelling. "And then the Saint saw that he had not the strength to refuse their entreaties, and that this was the Lord's will." Having fervently prayed to the heavenly Creator, he gave permission for the zealots of ascetic labor and monastic life to build cells, and thus he laid the foundation for his desert monastery.

The brethren who assembled soon built a small wooden church in honor of the Dormition of the All Holy Mother of God. This was about in the year 1540. The first abbot was the Saint himself, ordained to holy orders by Macarius, Bishop of Novgorod, who later became the celebrated Metropolitan of All Russia.

Showing himself to be an example for the brethren, the Saint in truth was a "good pastor." Laboring for many years in "good and unflagging labors," and having acquired the gift of clairvoyance and miracle-working, he travelled resolutely the path of asceticism, guiding many. Humbling himself, exhausting himself with labors and vigils of prayer, he zealously planted and strengthened the Faith of Christ in this region, instructing the brethren not to grow faint in emulating him.

Not long before his repose, St. Macarius, having given over the direction of the monastery to one of his disciples, went off to the little island which he loved so much, the place of his first asceticism, and there he peacefully reposed in the Lord, having given his blessing to the brethren and entrusted his young monastery to the will of Almighty God. This was shortly after the year 1550, on the 15th of August, the Dormition of the Theotokos.

With lamentation the monks buried their beloved abbot by the wall of the Dormition church which he had founded, on the left side outside.

THE MONASTERY founded by St. Macarius from the very first days of its existence was distinguished, not for its material well-being or large number of monks, but for the high spiritual life of the brethren, who were seeking not corruptible wealth but the Kingdom of Heaven. St. Macarius' testament to his monastery was the splendor of the Divine services, the strict attention to the Rule and the monastic vows, missionary activity, the spiritual enlightenment of the region and responsiveness to its needs; and this testament was sacredly kept.

Through the zeal of pious benefactors, soon after the Saint's repose a second wooden church, dedicated to St. Sabbatius of Solovki, was erected near the Dormition church; and the whole number of monastic buildings was limited to these two churches, a few essential constructions, and three monastic cells. The monastery's holdings in land were also not large.

No official historical records have been preserved of the St. Macarius Hermitage. It lived its own secluded life, its abbots were not chosen for high positions in the hierarchy and were not invited to ecclesiastical or State gatherings; but faithful to the testament of its founder, it went its own narrow, thorny path, far from everything worldly.

In the sad Time of Troubles, the monastery of St. Macarius suffered the same fate as the other monasteries of the Novgorod region. In 1615 the Swedish troops, having plundered the churches and monasteries of Novgorod, likewise laid waste St. Macarius' monastery. The monks fell under the swords of the enemy, and the churches and monastery buildings, including the library with its manuscripts, perished in flames.

Re-established soon after this, the Hermitage never had much income, and by the first half of the 18th century it lost its independence, becoming a holding of the St. Alexander Nevsky Lavra in Petersburg. Under Catherine's persecution of monasticism it was abolished altogether in 1764 and turned into a parish church, and later it lost even this significance and was threatened with complete oblivion. Its buildings were falling into ruin and services were held only on the Saint's feast days at the request of the local inhabitants and pilgrims who still came to venerate the Saint's relics.

Then, however, around the middle of the 19th century, some pious benefactors began to repair the two churches and the miraculous spring near the Saint's cell. This spring had been dug by the Saint himself, by whose prayers a healing, crystal-clear water gushes from it. Accounts have been preserved of the Saint's appearance to the severely ill with the counsel to drink water from this well with prayer, and the sick, obeying this counsel, have obtained relief and often complete healing from their infirmities. Pilgrims to the Hermitage always used to take back with them some of this healing water in small glass jars. They would come by the thousands on the monastery's feast days – August 15 and January 19 (the Saint's namesday).

Shortly after the churches were repaired one old priest settled near them and celebrated Divine services there until his death. Finally, in 1894, the Hermitage of St. Macarius once again became a functioning monastery, having a missionary purpose for the fighting of sectarianism in the region, under the direction of its abbot, the well-known missionary, Hieromonk Arsenius.

St. Macarius' Hermitage was once again destroyed by the Soviets, the new northern barbarians, in 1932, but the memory of its founder, St. Macarius, lives still and testifies to how wondrous God is in His saints. To our God, glorified in the Holy Trinity, may there be glory forever. Amen.


Interior of the Dormition Church in 1895, the shrine over the relics of St. Macarius at the left.