Some Comments on Officialdom, the Sacred Canons, St. Nicodemos of the Holy Mountain and the Continuity of Byzantine Thought
A Letter from Archbishop Chrysostomos of Etna
Dear Father ________:
Evlogeite.
Thank you for the excerpts from
your exchange on the Internet. In response to your several
questions, let me make some general observations that might help
you to put a number of issues in perspective.
First, I would not reduce your
arguments down to the level of adolescent debates about whose
Church is "official" or "canonical." We once
had a priest from an "official" Orthodox Church visit
the monastery. He presented what was essentially a not very
intelligent summary of his ecclesiology, drawn from various
secondary sources and formed by distinctly Western ideas about
the Church. He had no knowledge of Greek, no knowledge of the
Fathers (despite constant references to them), and, while a
rather nice man, such a simplistic understanding of our
resistance movement as to be insulting. I said little to him,
until he appeared to challenge me with regard to the canonicity
of the "Old Calendarists" (about whom, despite his
pretensions, he knew virtually nothing, aside from gossip and
rumors). I told him that, since the time of St. Paul, the
Orthodox in my family had followed the Church Calendar. I noted
that I simply stand in accord with them and that such accord
gives me comfort. "So does my traditional way of life,"
I told him, "as does my immersion into the Hesychastic life
of our monastery." In response, he said: "But I need
the official sanction of a canonical Patriarchate." As I
told him, "I draw on Christ and Holy Tradition; you draw on
administrative pillars that help you in your unbelief." He
left here shaken. I was enlightened by him.
True spiritual life is not
artificial, but is natural. And true authority is not a matter of
what is official, but concerns that which arises organically and
naturally from the heart. Converts who fail to draw on the heart
of Orthodoxy, turning to their own standards of authenticity,
never really touch what is genuine. Rather, they reject what is
genuine in defense of their concocted beliefs, giving apparent
life to their creation by the breath of an "official"
Orthodoxy which is moribund. You cannot reach such people, since,
were you to do so, they would have to begin their spiritual
search anew. Few are willing to do that.
Second, there is nothing to be
gained in arguing with those who want Christ to be a monolithic
idea and not a way of life within His Body, the Church. Such
individuals find the Holy Canons legalistic, Holy Tradition
stifling, and orthopraxy too rigid. They have gone seeking God,
and in this search they use what is convenient and discard what
they think is unnecessary. For those of us who experience God in
a Faith guided, but not defined, by laws and spiritual customs,
every spiritual act of obedience or every sacred Mystery brings
us closer to God. For we know that it is not we who search out
God, but God Who seeks us. And He reaches us in those things
which reify him in our daily lives: transforming us inwardly by
transforming the way that we eat, talk, dress, and relate to one
another, all disciplines therein guided by the rudder of the
Sacred Canons and by Holy Tradition. We do not disdain the world
because it is evil, but we turn from the empty and evil effects
of living a worldly life which is not harmonious with God. We
take on the life of those who come into a natural oneness with
the simple and pure things of God’s world. And this life is
the life dictated to us, again, in our fasting regulations, in
the way that we divide our days (the Festal Calendar), and in the
way that we relate to the disharmony of the fallen world around
us (that is, as a peculiar people). There is chasm between our
Orthodoxy and the presumed Orthodoxy of the world that is as
great as the chasm between genuine spiritual life and fabricated
ideas of "canonicity" and "officialdom."
Third, the Pedalion (the Rudder)
should be approached with great piety. To imagine that it or its
compiler, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, belongs to a single era
(the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), or is
outmoded, is not unlike believing that Scripture is irrelevant
because it does not directly address us in our own time, but
belongs to the first centuries of Christian history. These
Western ideas are not only blasphemous but, despite the many
defenses of such thinking (some intelligent, some thoughtless and
simply trendy), they are foreign to the spiritual ethos of
Orthodoxy. They belong to the realm of systematic theology,
religious relativism, progressive revelation, and those other
desires of the mind that betray an essential ignorance of the
inner path of knowledge that leads to Orthodox enlightenment.
Applied to the Rudder, of course, they become absurd,
since its contents span many centuries of Christian history and
are hardly the product of a single period of time. Some may claim
that St. Nicodemos’ commentaries are restricted to a certain
time frame; but in so doing, they must thus cease to be Orthodox
in their outlook, in so doing, since such a leap backwards in
faith challenges the universality and timelessness of Patristic
wisdom (not withstanding the fact that such backward action is
all around us today).
Fourth, no one with basic and
adequate knowledge of the history of the post-Byzantine era could
possibly refer to the Greek world of St. Nicodemos—that of the
latter part of eighteenth century and after, as an era of
intellectual decline! To do so, in view of an historiographical
reassessment of the post-Byzantine Greeks that is founded in the
best possible scholarship, is comparable to holding forth the
view, in contemporary epidemiology, that those who developed the
principles of germ theory were superstitious witch doctors. As
Constantine Cavarnos has noted, following the darkness of the
collapse of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, there was,
in the second half of the eighteenth century, "a remarkable
outburst of religious, moral and intellectual energy among the
Greeks, an outburst without parallel since the disintegration of
the Byzantine Empire" (Modern Greek Thought, 1969).
The great Argentinian classicist and philologist, Saul Tovar, has
traced the continuity of Hellenic scholarship and letters from
ancient times to the present, providing ample and indisputable
evidence for the intellectual excellence that held forth in the
post-Byantine Greek world. (See his comprehensive Biografia de
la Lengua Griega, 1990 [pass], and his Hellenike
Bibliographia peri tou Platonos apo tes Ptoseos tes
Konstantinoupoleos mechri Semeron, 1990). Constantine
Cavarnos has also delivered a series of brilliant lectures on
this very subject at Harvard and at Boston University, a number
of which has appeared in book form (The Hellenic-Christian
Philosophical Tradition, 1989) and which Professor Stephen
Salamone of Boston University, in his introduction to the book,
hails for their defense of the continuity of Greek culture from
an "integrated standpoint" that one seldom finds among
less-erudite and less-objective "professional
Hellenists."
Certain outdated accusations by
Western scholars against post-Byzantine Greek thinkers have
survived in the backwaters of academic life, but there are few
objective scholars in the East or West who would fail to
acknowledge the pivotal contributions of the following brilliant
representatives of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Greek
letters to modern Western civilization: St. Cosmas Aitolos,
Neophytos Kafsokalyvitis, Lambros Photiades, Neophytos Doukas,
Benjamin of Lesvos, Evgenios Voulgaris, Panagiotis Palamas,
Sergios Makraios, Adamantios Koraes, Theodore Trapezountios, as
well as countless other scholarly luminaries. These men were
educated in the classical sciences and in languages. And many of
them were well-known, in better Western scholarly circles, as
equals to the Greek ancients. Moreover, they studied in, and at
times helped establish, superb centers of knowledge in the
post-Byzantine Greek world, schools which could rival anything
that the West had to offer in the eighteenth or nineteenth
centuries: the Patriarchal Great School of the Nation, the
Evangeliki School, the Academies in Bucharest and Jassy (which
were Greek schools), the Athonias Academy, and some two hundred
higher schools established by St. Cosmas Aitolos. Such Western
scholars as Philip Sherrard, in contrast to the prejudices of the
past and the backwater academic voice to which I referred above,
have rightly characterized the post-Byzantine intellectual life
of the Greeks as one of the highest order.
Finally, need I point out that St.
Nicodemos the Hagiorite, about whom only a few rather poor books
have been written in the West—several jaundiced, as even the
writings of Greek scholars in the West often are, by outmoded
Western historiographical traditions—, was a product of the
aforementioned era? He was not a cretin or a man of limited
outlook, as some have said. The accusations made against him by
poor theologians and amateur historians—some to the effect
that he fell to Western influence, others to the effect that he
suffered from cultural myopia—are the accusations of
scholars who have not done their work or who have too limited a
knowledge of Greek history. St. Nicodemos was a brilliant student
and teacher, had a fluent grasp of Latin and a number of European
languages (French and Italian, among them), was interested in
science, objectively studied and delved into the teachings of the
heterodox confessions, was described by many of his
contemporaries—men of letters themselves—as a genius of
immense accomplishment (the great teacher, Archimandrite
Chrysanthos, brother of St. Cosmas Aitolos, was among those who
recognized the tremendous genius of St. Nicodemos), and studied
at the finest schools of his day (including the Evangeliki
School) and under a number of famous Churchmen and scholars (St.
Macarios of Corinth, Sylvestros the Hagiorite, et al.).
St. Nikodemos was a brilliant
theoretician of the Hesychastic life, writing complex
philosophical and theological discourses on the subject of human
transformation, the cleansing of the spiritual mind and passions,
the enlightenment of man, and man’s union with God through theosis.
His essays on ethics rank among the major philosophical works of
modern times. His scholarship was astonishing. He edited almost a
dozen major Patristic collections, including the Philokalia,
the Evergetinos, the works of St. Symeon the New
Theologian, and the works of St. Gregory Palamas; he translated
(from foreign languages and from Patristic to Modern Greek) and
edited more than six major works (the Lives of the Saints
and Unseen Warfare, to mention two); he wrote nine major
books; he composed scores of liturgical texts; and he authored
numerous discourses on various spiritual subjects. He was a
scholar unparalleled in his wisdom and insight. No
one—absolutely no one—who has read his works thoroughly
(something which demands a good grasp of Greek) would ever
suggest that he was a man of limited outlook or intelligence. And
his witness alone would dispel any notion of the post-Byzantine
Greek world as a place of intellectual decline. Such views are
simply wrong and should be dismissed as having no basis in fact.
They belong to the polemics of the West.
Intellectual brilliance, Father,
is not the path to inner satisfaction or to spiritual
authenticity. If it were, the post-Byzantine Greeks would have
reached the zenith of spiritual eminence with their minds alone.
But this is not the case. They reached that zenith through piety,
self-sacrifice, the simplicity of heart that comes from inner
wisdom, and that spiritual trust in humility which is not
available to those who, embracing a faith that they cannot truly
live, decide to distort it, denigrate it, and condemn those who
live it as charlatans. In this upside down world, where the
insane are considered sane and the sane are considered insane,
you must, as I always tell you, go to bed at night in peace,
feeling sorrow in your heart for those disturbed and tormented
souls who find no solace in their self-declared canonicity and
officialdom. Arguing with them accomplishes nothing. Put the
truth before them, for the sake of those who might be misled by
their sophistry, and rest your case.
In short, keep your eyes fixed on
what has been passed down to us, revere and protect it, and shake
the dust from your feet in the face of those who will not hear,
who will not listen, and who seek to destroy and innovate.
My warmest brotherly and paternal affection to you.
Least Among Monks,
+ Archbishop Chrysostomos
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