Macarius of Pelekete
Our Venerable Father and Confessor Macarius the Wonderworker, Abbot of Pelekete
Venerable · Confessor · Wonderworker · d. c. 830, in exile on the island of Aphousia
Commemorated 1 April — Repose in exile on Aphousia, 18 August — Second commemoration, kept in the Greek and Slavonic synaxaria
Macarius was abbot of the monastery of Pelekete on the Asian shore of the Sea of Marmara, and one of the confessors of the second Iconoclasm. An orphan of Constantinople who gave himself to the reading of Scripture and entered Pelekete as a young man, he was chosen hegumen by the brotherhood on the death of his predecessor Hilarion the New, and became famous in Bithynia as a healer and wonderworker. Under Leo V the Armenian (813–820) and Michael II the Stammerer (820–829) he refused to give up the veneration of the holy icons, was imprisoned, and was finally banished to the island of Aphousia in the Propontis, where he died about 830. The Church keeps him on April 1, the day of his repose, and again on August 18.
Pelekete
The monastery of Pelekete stood near Prusias on the southern shore of the Marmara, by the mouth of the Hellespont — one of the great Bithynian houses which, being close enough to the capital to matter and far enough to be defensible, became in the eighth and ninth centuries the strongholds of the party of the icons. It was already a place of confessors before Macarius: its abbot Hilarion the New had suffered under Constantine V Copronymus in the first Iconoclasm, when the imperial officer Lachanodrakon fell on the monastery on the night of Great and Holy Thursday, and Hilarion died about 754.
Macarius was born at Constantinople and lost his parents while still a boy. The notice says he read the word of God with such absorption that he resolved to give his whole life to God, and he came out to Pelekete and was tonsured there. He was in time ordained priest — the tradition attributes the ordination to the Patriarch Tarasius (784–806), the hierarch of the restoration of the icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council — and on the death of the abbot the brotherhood chose him unanimously to govern them.
He was called, in his own lifetime and in the books after it, the Wonderworker. The Life credits him with healings and with the gift of foreknowledge; what survives of the detail is thin, and the epithet has outlasted the anecdotes.
The second Iconoclasm
In 815 the emperor Leo V the Armenian reopened the iconoclast controversy, deposing the Patriarch Nikephoros and imposing the old decrees again. The Bithynian monasteries were the first target, as they had been sixty years before, and Macarius was among the abbots who would not subscribe. He was imprisoned. Under Michael II (820–829) the persecution was less bloody but no less determined, and Macarius, still refusing, was sent into exile on the island of Aphousia in the Propontis — one of the small islands off the Bithynian coast used as a place of confinement for churchmen. He died there about 830, never having returned, and is numbered with the confessors: he was not put to death, but he lost his monastery, his liberty and his life for the images.
Within thirteen years of his death the icons were restored at the Triumph of Orthodoxy (843), and the Bithynian confessors — Macarius among them, with Theosteriktos of the same monastery and the Studite fathers — were the party that had won.
Feast and commemoration
April 1 (church date; Old Calendar civil April 14) as his principal feast, and August 18 (church date; Old Calendar civil August 31) as his second, within the afterfeast of the Dormition of the Theotokos. No proper service is appointed on either day; the common of a venerable confessor is sung. On April 1 his memory falls beside that of St Mary of Egypt, whose commemoration dominates the day, which is one reason his August notice has survived so tenaciously in the Slavonic books.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable confessor)
By a flood of tears thou didst make the barren desert fruitful, and thy longing for God brought forth fruit a hundredfold; by thy vigils thou wast a shining lamp to the world, and by thy confession of the holy images thou wast approved: O our father Macarius, pray to Christ God to save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Macarius is painted as an abbot and confessor: an elder in the monastic schema and mantle, hooded or bare-headed, the right hand raised in blessing or in the gesture of speech, the left holding a scroll. Where the iconographer wishes to name the cause of his confession, he is given an icon or a small panel of Christ to hold — the attribute regularly used for the confessors of the second Iconoclasm, and the surest way of distinguishing him from the desert Macarii, who hold only the scroll. He belongs also to the composite scenes of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, in the rank of the Bithynian abbots behind the Patriarch Methodius and the empress Theodora. No pre-1900 image of him alone has been located for this collection; the Menologion of Basil II, which would be the natural first resort, covers only September to February and does not reach either of his days.
Disputed questions
- His dates. The Slavonic and OCA notices give his birth as 785 and make him a monk under Hilarion the New, who died about 754. The two statements cannot both stand. Either the birth-year is too late — a birth about 750 would fit the rest of the narrative — or the predecessor whom Macarius succeeded was not Hilarion himself but a later abbot of the house, the two having been conflated because Hilarion is the famous name at Pelekete. The repository records the difficulty rather than choosing, and gives only the date of death, about 830, which the sources agree on.
- Which day is his own. He is commemorated on April 1 and on August 18. The Greek Menaion prints him at April 1, which the tradition treats as the day of his repose, and this collection ranks that feast primary; the Slavonic synaxarion heads its notice with August 18 and calls April 1 "his memory a second time." No translation of relics is recorded that would explain the second day.
- Not to be confused with the many other Macarii of the calendar — above all Macarius the Great of Egypt (January 19), Macarius of Alexandria (January 19), and, among the Bithynians, Macarius of Kios, the new-martyr of 1590. The epithet of Pelekete is the only safe identifier.