Makarios of Corinth

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Makarios of Corinth (1731–1805), born Michael Notaras in the Corinthia of the Ottoman Peloponnese, was a Greek Orthodox bishop and ascetic best known for conceiving the Philokalia, the anthology of Eastern Christian writing on inner prayer and the watch over the heart. He came of the Notaras family — a lineage that traced itself to Constantinople, to the megas doux Loukas Notaras who stood near the throne at the city’s fall in 1453, and that in the generations before Makarios had given the Church two Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Dositheos II and Chrysanthos. His parents, George and Anastasia, were people of means and devotion; the boy was schooled at home and then, after a stint keeping the family accounts, drawn instead to teaching and to the priesthood. He served briefly as metropolitan of Corinth before the upheavals of his age cost him the see, and spent his remaining decades on the Aegean islands and on Mount Athos, living the monastic discipline he spent his life gathering into books.

The lost see

Makarios was consecrated metropolitan of Corinth in 1765, at the age of thirty-four — a young bishop set over an old and depopulated see, where he set about closing taverns, founding schools, and pressing a stricter standard on clergy who had grown comfortable. The reform was cut short by war. When the Russo-Turkish conflict of 1768–1774 broke into the Peloponnese as the Orlov revolt of 1770 — a Greek rising encouraged by a Russian fleet that the Ottomans then crushed — the Notaras family, of Byzantine blood and suspected sympathies, was caught in the reprisals. Makarios fled. By the time the country quieted the Holy Synod of Constantinople had appointed another to Corinth, partly for reasons of state; he was not restored. He was, however, left free to serve and live where he chose, an unattached bishop without a flock, and he turned that freedom toward a different vocation. The loss of office was, in the long reckoning, the condition of everything he is remembered for.

The Kollyvades

He belonged to the Kollyvades, a movement of Athonite monks that arose in the mid-eighteenth century out of a quarrel over when memorial services for the dead might be held. The name itself came from kollyva, the boiled wheat offered for the departed; a faction on Mount Athos held that such services and the offerings that went with them belonged to Saturday, the Church’s appointed day for the dead, and not to Sunday, the day of resurrection, into which lax custom had let them drift. Behind that narrow dispute lay a larger aim: a return to the older sources of Orthodox worship, to the Desert Fathers and the conciliar canons, and to frequent communion, against what its members saw as a slackened, half-secularized church life under Ottoman rule. The controversy turned bitter. The Kollyvades were condemned by synodal act, defended, condemned again, and some of their number expelled from the Holy Mountain; the dispute over a point of liturgical timing became a proxy for the deeper question of whether the Church should reform itself toward its own past. What survived the controversy was their work of recovery — the editing and printing of neglected ascetic and mystical texts for a wider readership. The setting sharpened the stakes. Under Ottoman rule the Greek Church had no civil power and a thinned educated clergy, and a current of Western Enlightenment learning was reaching the Greek world through Venice and the Danubian courts; the Kollyvades answered not with novelty but with retrieval, holding that the cure for a slackened piety was the Church’s own deep memory. Makarios led that movement without ever being an Athonite monk himself, and around him gathered the men who carried it: Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Athanasios Parios, the latter of whom would write the first life of the saint.

The editorial act

The Philokalia was the chief fruit of that labor, and it began as an act of salvage. Across the second half of the 1770s Makarios went through the libraries of Mount Athos — the great manuscript-houses of the Holy Mountain, where the patristic literature of inner prayer had lain copied and recopied but largely unread — and assembled the texts. He brought the gathered material to the younger Nikodemos, a monk of the skete of Pantokrator, whom he met on Athos in the late 1770s and who undertook the visible editorial work: collating the manuscripts, composing the biographical notices and prefaces, and arranging the whole into a single ordered corpus. The collection was printed at Venice in 1782, at the press of Antonio Bortoli, the printing financed by Prince John Mavrocordatos of Moldavia — one of the Phanariot rulers of the Danubian principalities who patronized Greek letters under Ottoman suzerainty.

The result was a folio of roughly twelve hundred pages, the Philokalia of the Holy Neptic Fathers — neptic, from nepsis, the sober watchfulness that is the tradition’s name for the work itself. It gathered some thirty-six authors spanning the fourth century to the fourteenth: Antony and Evagrius Ponticus from the Egyptian desert, the Macarian homilies, Mark the Ascetic, Diadochus of Photike, Hesychius of Sinai, Symeon the New Theologian, Nikephoros the Hesychast, Gregory of Sinai, and Gregory Palamas, whose fourteenth-century vindication of the hesychasts had given the tradition its mature theological grammar. The arrangement was roughly chronological, each author prefaced with a short biographical notice — Nikodemos’s hand — so that the reader passed through the tradition as through a single long history of the prayer of the heart. Two things make the 1782 edition decisive. By aggregating these texts under one rubric it constituted the Philokalia as a canon — the standing library of Eastern Christian contemplative literature, where before there had been only scattered manuscripts. And it opened with a programmatic preface arguing that these writings were for all Christians and not for monks alone — that the inner prayer of the cloister was the common inheritance of the baptized. In an age that took the contemplative life to be the monk’s enclosed business, this was a quietly radical claim, and it set the terms of the book’s whole later career.

Frequent communion, and the price of it

The Philokalia was the largest of Makarios’s projects but not the only one. He was behind a recension of the Evergetinos, the eleventh-century anthology of monastic sayings and patristic counsel compiled by Paul of the Evergetis monastery, which the Kollyvades circle issued at Venice in 1783. In the same year appeared the work that drew the sharpest attacks of his career: a treatise Concerning Frequent Communion of the Immaculate Mysteries of Christ, set down by Makarios and given its published form by Nikodemos. Against the prevailing custom — which had let lay communion dwindle to a few times a year, hedged with fasts and preparations that made it a rare event — the treatise argued from scripture, the canons, and the Fathers that the faithful should approach the chalice as often as they were rightly prepared, that frequent communion was the ancient norm and the Church’s own intent. It struck at a settled habit, and the reaction was fierce: the book was denounced, its author accused of novelty, and the Kollyvades position on communion entangled with the older quarrel over the memorials of the dead until the two were prosecuted together. The treatise was for a time condemned, and only later did its argument become the ordinary teaching of the Orthodox world.

The two campaigns — for frequent communion and for the recovered prayer of the Philokalia — were of a piece. Both rested on the same conviction: that the fullness of the contemplative and sacramental life was not a specialist preserve but the ordinary calling of every Christian, and that the Church under Ottoman pressure had let that fullness contract into something rare, monastic, and remote. To restore frequent communion and to put the neptic fathers into print were the same act seen from two sides — the chalice and the book, each returning to the laity what custom had reserved. It is why the disputes ran together, and why the same men were attacked on both fronts at once.

Hesychasm, the tradition he served

The literature Makarios gathered is centered on hesychasm — from hesychia, stillness — the Byzantine contemplative tradition of inner quiet, the descent of the attention from the head into the heart, and the unceasing invocation of the name of Jesus in the formula known as the Jesus Prayer. Its authors held that through this watch of the heart, sustained over a lifetime of ascetic discipline within the common life of monasticism, the practitioner is drawn into genuine communion with God and may come to perceive the uncreated light — the same light, on the tradition’s reading, that shone from Christ on Mount Tabor, defended by Gregory Palamas as the energies of God himself and not a created thing. The architecture of this philokalic discipline — its stages of purification, illumination, and the prayer of the heart — is the subject of the texts Makarios assembled; his own contribution was not to add to it but to put the whole of it back within reach.

The division of the work, and the saint

How far the design was his and how far Nikodemos’s has been discussed by historians, since the two collaborated closely and Nikodemos did the visible editorial labor — the collation, the prefaces, the ordering that gives the printed book its shape. The conception, the search of the Athonite libraries, and the gathering of the texts are generally credited to Makarios; the realization, to Nikodemos. They were a pairing of initiator and editor, and the Philokalia belongs to both.

After 1782 Makarios kept moving among the islands — Hydra, where the work of compilation had largely been done; Chios, where he settled at last; Patmos, where he founded a hermitage. He spent his final years in seclusion on Chios, at the hermitage of St. Peter, given over to prayer and to the editing that never stopped, and died there on 17 April 1805. In 1808 his relics were taken up; the Orthodox Church venerates him as a saint, with his feast on the day of his death. Athanasios Parios, his companion in the Kollyvades, composed the account of his life from which the later tradition descends.

The book’s afterlife

The reach of the Philokalia exceeded anything its compilers could have foreseen, and it ran chiefly eastward. Within a decade Paisius Velichkovsky, the monk who had revived ascetic life at Neamț in Moldavia, rendered a large part of the Greek anthology into Church Slavonic; that Dobrotolyubie — a calque of Philokalia, the love of the beautiful or the good — was printed at Moscow in 1793 and carried the hesychast inheritance into the Slavic world. Nearly a century later Theophan the Recluse, bishop turned hermit, made a freer and much-expanded Russian version across five volumes between 1877 and 1890. It was within Theophan’s editorial orbit that the anonymous Russian classic The Way of a Pilgrim appeared — the narrative of a wanderer learning the Jesus Prayer that, more than any treatise, carried the practice to lay readers — and through the twentieth-century translations the collection reached the West as a living manual of contemplative prayer, drawn on by readers far outside the Orthodox fold — the complete English Philokalia begun by G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware in 1979 made the whole corpus available in a Western language for the first time, and the slim earlier selection Writings from the Philokalia on Prayer of the Heart had already seeded the practice among Anglophone seekers. What Makarios had argued in his 1782 preface — that the prayer of the heart belonged to all the baptized and not to monks alone — proved truer than its first opponents allowed: the book went out from the Holy Mountain to the parish, the emigration, and the lay reader, and the inner prayer it carried became, two centuries on, one of the most widely diffused contemplative disciplines in the world. He is remembered less for office held than for what he saved from neglect and put back into circulation.

Texts and scholarship

The 1782 Venice folio survives and has been digitized; its second Greek edition was issued at Athens in 1893 and underlies most later Greek printings. The standard scholarly route into the saint’s life in English is Constantine Cavarnos’s St. Macarios of Corinth (Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Belmont, MA, 1993), volume two of the Modern Orthodox Saints series, which prints a translation of Athanasios Parios’s life together with a study of his work. For the texts themselves, the complete English Philokalia of G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (Faber, 1979–) remains the indispensable translation, its general introductions the standard Anglophone account of the collection’s making. The Bortoli edition’s contents and history are surveyed in the annotated bibliography of the Philokalia assembled by scholars of the tradition, and the editorial history of the book is set out at OrthodoxWiki. The comparative question of how the hesychast prayer of the name relates to the Sufi practice of dhikr — real parallels of phenomenon without demonstrable historical contact — is weighed by Eiji Hisamatsu in Hesychasm and Sufism (Religions 15:12, 2024). The fullest single-volume biographical synaxarion in English of Makarios Notaras and his Kollyvades circle remains Cavarnos’s.

→ Related: Mount Athos · Byzantine Hesychasm · Jesus Prayer · Nikodimos The Hagiorite · Philokalic Hesychast Asceticism · Paisius Velichkovsky · Theophan The Recluse · Gregory Palamas · Monasticism · Asceticism · Eastern Orthodox Christianity · Evagrius Ponticus · Desert Christian Monasticism · Apophatic Theology