Makary of Optina

Saint Macarius of Optina (secular name Mikhail Nikolaevich Ivanov) was a Russian Orthodox monk and starets of Optina Pustyn, counted among the principal Optina Elders of the nineteenth century. He was born on 20 November 1788 into a family of the provincial nobility in the village of Zhelezniki, Dmitrovsky district, Oryol Governorate, in the Russian Empire. His patronymic records his father as Nikolai Ivanov. After a period of ordinary secular life connected with family property and estate affairs, he entered the Bogoroditskaya Ploshchanskaya Hermitage in 1810, in his early twenties, and remained there for more than two decades.

At Ploshchansk he was formed in the hesychastic and Philokalic tradition associated with Saint Paisius Velichkovsky. His chief spiritual guide was Elder Athanasius of Ploshchansk, a disciple of Paisius who transmitted the practice of the Jesus Prayer and the study of Greek and Slavonic ascetical texts. Macarius was tonsured a monk, ordained deacon and priest, and occupied himself with obedience, the copying of patristic manuscripts, and the beginnings of spiritual direction. In 1834, at the invitation of the Optina abbot Saint Moses, he transferred to the Saint John the Baptist Skete at Optina, where a deliberate restoration of eldership was under way.

At Optina he became one of the central figures of the monastery’s period of starchestvo. He served as a leading confessor of the skete and of a wide circle of monastic and lay visitors, and his surviving letters, later issued in several volumes, show a sober, exacting, and practical spiritual father who applied patristic teaching to family life, illness, and the struggle with the passions. Together with the Slavophile Ivan Kireevsky and other educated lay collaborators, he organized the translation and printing of ascetical works, including texts of Saints Isaac the Syrian, Barsanuphius and John, and other Fathers connected with the Paisian tradition, thereby spreading the Philokalic heritage in Russian. Contemporary accounts emphasize his humility, his acceptance of chronic bodily weakness, and his accessibility to people of every rank.

Macarius died at Optina on 7 September 1860 and was buried at the monastery. After the Soviet closure of Optina the site of his grave was disturbed; his relics were later recovered and are venerated at the restored monastery. He was glorified among the Optina Elders by the Russian Orthodox Church, first for local veneration in the Kaluga diocese in the 1990s and then for church-wide veneration at the Jubilee Bishops’ Council of 2000. His principal feast is 7 September (20 September in the civil calendar), and he is also commemorated with the Synaxis of the Optina Elders.