02 — Synaxi and Epi tas Pigas
Nellas’s most durable achievement is not a book but two institutions: the patristic series Ἐπὶ τὰς πηγάς (“To the Sources”), launched in 1968 on the model of the French Sources Chrétiennes, and the quarterly journal Σύναξη (“Synaxi”), founded in 1982 and still appearing more than forty years later. Together they constitute a programme: put the Fathers in Greek hands in reliable editions, and give contemporary Orthodox theology a place to argue.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Journal Synaxi | The 1982 foundation; the subtitle “a study in Orthodoxy”; the quarterly form and the thematic issue; the readership Nellas aimed at; the journal after his death, including its role as the venue of the Greek personalism debate |
| Epi tas Pigas | The 1968 patristic series; the Sources Chrétiennes model; the first volume, Cabasilas’s three Marian homilies; the method of original text, modern Greek rendering and apparatus; what the series meant for Greek church life |
Why This Section Comes Second
The ordering is deliberate. A reader who comes to Nellas from the English-language literature knows him for one book and may assume that the book is the life’s work. In Greece the proportions are different. Synaxi has appeared quarterly without interruption since 1982 and is, by common consent among Greek theological writers, one of the two or three most important venues of contemporary Orthodox theology in the language (Synaxi, “The Identity of Synaxi,” synaxi.gr; Yangazoglou, “The Renewal of Modern Greek Orthodox Theology,” describing Synaxi as the mature fruit and the fertile, critical expression of modern Greek theology). Epi tas Pigas put patristic texts, in the original with facing modern Greek, into the hands of clergy, teachers and educated laity who could not read them otherwise.
Neither project was an accident of temperament. Both follow directly from the methodological conviction stated in Zōon theoumenon: that the Fathers are to be approached “from within the Church and using faith as our basic method” rather than as ancient documents (Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 24; glossed in Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 82). If that is true, then two things follow practically — the texts must be available, and the Church must have somewhere to think aloud. Nellas built both.
An Editorial Judgement Worth Naming
There is a distinctive shape to Nellas’s institutional work, and it is worth naming because it is unusual among theologians of comparable stature: he spent his scarce time on other people’s writing. He had eighteen working years, a full-time teaching job, and one great book in him. He gave a large part of that time to editing a patristic series and to founding and running a journal whose pages were mostly filled by others. Bishop Kallistos, writing shortly after his death, gives the journal a paragraph of its own in a foreword of six pages — an indication of the proportion Nellas’s contemporaries assigned to it (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas 1987, 9–14).
See Also
- Life and Formation — the Paris years in which the Sources Chrétiennes model was learned
- Cabasilas Scholarship — the first Epi tas Pigas volume was Cabasilas
- Legacy and Assessment — where the institutional legacy is weighed against the written one
- Holy Tradition — the framework within which a “return to the sources” is intelligible
- The Church Fathers — the corpus the series set out to make available
References
- Kallistos of Diokleia (Ware), Bishop. Foreword to Panayiotis Nellas, Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person, 9–14. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987.
- Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell. Contemporary Greek Theologians 5. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987.
- Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
- Synaxi (Σύναξη). “Ἡ ταυτότητα τῆς Σύναξης” [“The Identity of Synaxi”], synaxi.gr (accessed 2026).
- Yangazoglou, Stavros. “Ἡ ἀνανέωση τῆς νεοελληνικῆς ὀρθόδοξης θεολογίας” [“The Renewal of Modern Greek Orthodox Theology”], Frear (mag.frear.gr, accessed 2026).