Macarius of Corinth

Saint Macarius Notaras, Metropolitan of Corinth (1731-1805), was a hierarch, scholar and spiritual father, one of the leaders of the Kollyvades movement and, together with Saint Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, the maker of the Greek Philokalia. The Church remembers him on 17 April.

He was born in 1731 at Trikala in Corinthia and was named Michael at baptism. His father, George, was a leading man of the region, and his mother was called Anastasia. The Notaras family had given the Church well-⁠known hierarchs, among them Chrysanthos Notaras, and was related to Saint Gerasimos of Kephalonia. After the school of his native place he went at fifteen to Kephalonia, to the teacher Eustathios (1746-1750), and then came to the monastery of Megaspilaion in the Peloponnese. From 1758 to 1764 he returned home and taught the children of the region without pay.

In 1764 he was chosen by the vote of clergy and people to the see of Corinth, succeeding Parthenios, and took the name Macarius. In 1770, when the Russian-⁠backed uprising broke out in the Morea, he fled to Zakynthos after its failure, although it seems he had taken no active part in preparing it. The Ecumenical Patriarchate, pressed by the Sublime Porte to replace the fugitive bishops of the rebel regions, asked him to resign. He refused and kept the title of former Metropolitan of Corinth.

There followed years of wandering through the Greek world: Kephalonia, Zakynthos again, Hydra (1773-1774), where he met Nicodemus the Hagiorite, then Chios (1775-1776) and, in 1777, the Holy Mountain. There he became, without intending it, the occasion of the Kollyvades dispute, by refusing to perform a memorial service for the departed on a Sunday at the Koutloumousiou monastery. The opponents of the Kollyvades denounced him to Patriarch Sophronios, and the saint left in disappointment for Chios, where he received a sharp letter from the patriarch. Serbian sources add that he was expelled from Athos for taking the side of the Kollyvades.

After Chios he came to Patmos, where he taught children for a few years, and then to Smyrna, where he met John Mavrogordatos. Together with Saint Nicodemus he put together the five volumes of the Philokalia, printed in Venice in 1782. The publication of these spiritual texts of the Holy Fathers led to a renewal of the hesychast movement in the Orthodox Church.

He wrote other works as well, among them the "New Limonarion" and a treatise on frequent communion of the Holy Mysteries, which belongs to the same Kollyvades current. He reposed on 17 April 1805 on the island of Chios. The Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints, and his memory is kept each year on 17 April.