Confessor Macarius

Saint Macarius of Pelecete, commonly called Macarius the Confessor in the Eastern Orthodox synaxaria, was a Byzantine monk and abbot of the eighth and early ninth centuries. He was born in Constantinople to Christian parents whose names are not preserved in the surviving notices. After their death he distributed his property to the poor and left the capital to take up the monastic life. He entered the monastery of Pelecete (Pelekete) in Bithynia, a house situated near the Hellespont among the monastic settlements of that region. There he was tonsured and, according to the liturgical life, later ordained priest by Patriarch Tarasius of Constantinople, who held the see from 784 to 806 and who had been the imperial and ecclesiastical architect of the Seventh Ecumenical Council’s restoration of the holy icons.

As a monk and then as igumen of Pelecete, Macarius was remembered for ascetic discipline, spiritual counsel, and reported acts of healing. Pelecete belonged to the network of Bithynian monasteries that, in the generations after Nicaea II, became strongholds of iconodule practice. His rule of life followed the ordinary pattern of Eastern monasticism: the liturgical offices, manual work, fasting, and the training of younger brethren. Hagiographical notices present him as a spiritual father whose reputation extended beyond the monastery walls, though they do not supply a long independent contemporary biography of the kind that survives for some of his better-documented contemporaries.

When Emperor Leo V the Armenian renewed imperial iconoclasm in the mid-810s, Macarius refused to accept the prohibition of icons or to enter communion with the iconoclast hierarchy. He was arrested, interrogated, and subjected to beating and imprisonment in Constantinople. The second iconoclastic persecution fell heavily on the abbots of Bithynia, and Macarius is counted among those monastic superiors who would not subscribe to the new imperial policy. After confinement he was sent into exile. The sources treat him as a confessor rather than a martyr: he suffered for Orthodox doctrine and practice but was not put to death.

Under Emperor Michael II (820–829) he was brought back and again pressed to communicate with the iconoclast church. He continued to refuse. He was then banished to the island of Aphusia (Aphousia) in the Sea of Marmara, a place of exile used for prominent iconodules. He remained there in hardship until his death. Orthodox synaxaria give the year of his death as 830. The precise place of burial on the island is not recorded in the notices that have come down.

The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him on April 1. He is remembered with the monastic confessors of the second iconoclastic period, a generation that also includes figures such as Theodore the Studite and Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople. His cult is liturgical rather than popular in the later Western sense; no extensive list of patronages is attached to his name in the principal menologia. Knowledge of his life depends chiefly on the condensed synaxarion tradition rather than on a large dossier of contemporary letters or a full classical vita, and later retellings should be read with that limitation in mind.