Page:Ivan the Terrible - Kazimierz Waliszewski - tr. Mary Loyd (1904).djvu/97

 Rh Mineï,' or readings for every month (from μήν, month, and tchitat, to read), are a collection of instructions, a sort of composition very common in the fifteenth century, but which in this case takes a singularly extended form. As a rule, these instructions only aimed at supplying edifying reading for every day in the month, appropriate to the memory of the saint mentioned in the calendar for that day. Macarius set himself the task of gathering the whole literature of his country into twelve huge volumes. Sacred books, with the commentaries on them, lives of the Russian saints (pateriki) and of the Greek saints (sinaksary), the works of the Fathers of the Church, earlier encyclopedic works, such as the 'Bee,' travels—he used them all. He did not exhaust the whole of his material. Either by deliberate omission or by a copyist's error, several books of the Bible are not present. In the case of the Song of Solomon, the former conjecture seems the most probable. The work, as it stands, is an unrivalled authority on the intellectual history of that period, and the hagiographic portions of the book bear curious testimony to the process then in course of accomplishment in the national mind. The saints of the ancient instructions had been local heroes and wonder-workers. Those of Novgorod were unknown at Moscow, and vice versâ. Macarius shows them all united in a glory and a worship shared by every corner of the Empire. Here we have the triumph of the Moscow policy, asserted in the Christian Olympus which invaded the churches of the Kremlin, and shared the secular glories of the united monarchy.

The Metropolitan, as may be imagined, was not able to do more than oversee the preparation of his work. Surrounding himself with a carefully chosen band of fellow-workers, he founded the first literary circle ever known in Russia, and gave the initial impulse to a movement which grew around him and survived him. He ascribed great importance to style, and insured the predominance of his own tongue—the ecclesiastical Slavonic—in the national literature, instead of that popular form of speech in which the lives of the saints had been originally written. But the critical spirit must not be looked for in his works, any more than in those of Maximus the Greek. He never troubled himself to verify the authenticity of the texts he piled up in his book, and side by side with the most silly inventions he introduced biographies of absolutely imaginary saints, including those of forty canonized, all in a lump, at the Conciles of 1547 and 1549. But in this matter, again, the Moscow policy gave the law; it must have a heaven to suit itself, blazing with a glory suddenly widened by the huge area of the provinces lately added to the common stock.

Macarius, in his own person, was a writer of many books.