Saint Macarius and the Publishing Work

St. Macarius of Optina (Mikhail Ivanov, 1788–1860) was the disciple and successor of St. Leonid under whom the Optina eldership became secure and refined. His most lasting achievement was to make Optina a publishing house: in partnership with the Slavophile philosopher Ivan Kireevsky and his wife Natalia, Macarius directed the printing of the Life of St. Paisius Velichkovsky and a long series of patristic and Paisian texts on prayer, restoring the sources of the eldership to the whole Russian Church.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Optina synaxis glorified 1996 local / 2000 general)

Mikhail Ivanov, Elder Macarius

The second great elder of Optina was born Mikhail Nikolaevich Ivanov in 1788, of the minor gentry of Oryol (some accounts Kaluga) province; refined, musical, and bookish by temperament, he entered monastic life at the Ploshchansk Hermitage, where he came under the influence of a disciple of St. Paisius and, later, of the traveling elder Leonid (Blessed Elder Macarius of Optina, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, on his origins and formation; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn i eyo vremya, Jordanville, 1970, on Macarius). Tonsured with the name Macarius, he attached himself to Leonid as disciple and, when Leonid came to Optina, followed him there in 1834, sharing the eldership as co-laborer and, after Leonid’s death in 1841, succeeding him as the principal elder of the skete (Blessed Elder Macarius of Optina, St. Herman Brotherhood; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on Macarius’s arrival in 1834 and succession).

Macarius complemented Leonid as a violin complements a drum. Where Leonid was blunt, powerful, and popular, Macarius was gentle, cultivated, and drawn to books and to the fine direction of educated souls; together, and then Macarius alone, they gave the Optina eldership both its earthy accessibility and its intellectual seriousness (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the contrast and complementarity of the two elders; Blessed Elder Macarius of Optina, St. Herman Brotherhood). Under Macarius the skete became a magnet for the Russian educated class as well as for the peasantry; and it was Macarius who received and formed the young Alexander Grenkov, the future St. Ambrose, making him his cell-attendant, his secretary in the vast correspondence, and his chosen successor (Dunlop, Staretz Amvrosy, Nordland, 1972, ch. 2–3, on Ambrose under Macarius; see St. Ambrose in the Line of Optina).

The Meeting with the Kireevskys

The publishing work that is Macarius’s monument grew out of a friendship. Ivan Vasilievich Kireevsky (1806–1856), one of the founders of the Slavophile movement and a leading Russian philosopher, and his wife Natalia Petrovna Kireevskaya (née Arbeneva), lived near Optina at their estate of Dolbino and became spiritual children of Elder Macarius; Natalia, deeply devout and herself a translator, had long been drawn to the patristic texts, and it was in the Kireevsky household that the idea of publishing them took form (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the Kireevskys and the origin of the publishing project; Gershenzon and later scholarship on Ivan Kireevsky’s Optina years, as summarized in Stanton, The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination, Peter Lang, 1995). Ivan Kireevsky brought to the partnership his stature in Russian intellectual life and his access to the censorship and the university world; Natalia brought her piety and her labor; Macarius brought the manuscripts, the spiritual authority, and the discernment of what should be printed and how (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; Stanton, Optina Pustyn, 1995, ch. on Kireevsky).

The collaboration between an elder and a philosopher is itself significant: it is one of the first and most fruitful meetings of Optina with the Russian intelligentsia, and it set the pattern by which the monastery would speak to educated Russia not by argument but by giving it the fathers (see Optina and the Russian Intelligentsia; Stanton, Optina Pustyn, 1995).

The Optina Editions

The publishing enterprise began in the mid-1840s and was concentrated in the years around 1847–1860. Its first and programmatic fruit was the Life of St. Paisius Velichkovsky, together with his writings and translations — published from Optina in 1847, an act that consciously proclaimed the monastery’s descent from Paisius and made the founder of the revival known to Russia (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, dating the Life of Paisius to 1847 as the first Optina edition; Paert, Spiritual Elders, Northern Illinois University Press, 2010, ch. 4, on the Optina publishing program). There followed, over the next dozen years, a series of the fundamental ascetic and hesychast fathers in Slavonic and Russian: the works of St. Isaac the Syrian, of St. Nilus of Sora, of St. Symeon the New Theologian and St. Mark the Ascetic and St. Barsanuphius and John, of St. Theodore the Studite, and the Ladder of St. John Climacus, among others — the very texts on prayer and the guarding of the heart that the Dobrotolyubie had gathered, now issued in careful editions with the elders’ oversight (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, listing the Optina editions; Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 4; see The Published Inheritance for the fuller catalogue and its significance).

The editorial work was not merely reprinting: the elders — Macarius, with Ambrose and other learned monks, and with the Kireevskys and academic collaborators such as the priest-professors and the Optina monk-scholars — compared manuscripts, corrected the Slavonic against the Greek, and rendered difficult texts into a Russian that educated readers could use (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970, on the editorial method; Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010). The skete library, one of the finest monastic collections in Russia, was the workshop (see The Monastery and the Skete).

The Significance of the Work

The publishing project changed the meaning of Optina. It made the monastery not only a place of eldership for those who could travel to Kozelsk but a source of the fathers for the whole Church — a fountain of the very books on which the eldership itself was nourished, now available to any literate Orthodox Russian (Paert, Spiritual Elders, 2010, ch. 4, on the diffusion of the Optina editions; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970). It also bound Optina to the Russian intellectual awakening of the mid-century, for the Slavophiles saw in the recovery of the patristic tradition the ground of a distinctively Russian, non-rationalist philosophy, and Kireevsky’s own late thought — his idea of “integral knowledge” and of the “believing reason” — was worked out in dialogue with Macarius and the fathers he was helping to print (Stanton, Optina Pustyn, 1995, on Kireevsky’s Optina philosophy; Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970).

Ivan Kireevsky died in 1856 and Natalia continued to support the work; St. Macarius died on 7 September 1860, the date on which his feast is kept (the Optina record and the Synaxis of the Elders). The publishing enterprise he founded was carried on by his disciples — above all by St. Ambrose — for the rest of the century, and it is one of the chief reasons Optina’s influence reached far beyond the walls of its skete (Kontzevitch, Optina Pustyn, 1970; see The Published Inheritance and, for Ambrose’s continuation of the work, St. Ambrose of Optina: Publishing Work).

See Also

References

  • Blessed Elder Macarius of Optina (Optina Elders Series). Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood. (Ivanov’s origins and formation; discipleship under Leonid; arrival at Optina 1834; the eldership; the publishing work; death 1860.)
  • Kontzevitch, I. M. Optina Pustyn’ i eyo vremya. Jordanville, NY: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970. (Macarius and Leonid; the Kireevskys; the Life of Paisius 1847; the catalogue of Optina editions; the skete library.)
  • Stanton, Leonard J. The Optina Pustyn Monastery in the Russian Literary Imagination. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. (Ivan Kireevsky’s Optina years and philosophy; the meeting of the monastery and the intelligentsia.)
  • Paert, Irina. Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010. (Ch. 4: the Optina publishing program and its diffusion.)
  • Dunlop, John B. Staretz Amvrosy: Model for Dostoevsky’s Staretz Zossima. Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972. (Ch. 2–3: Ambrose under Macarius.)