Epi tas Pigas: A Greek Sources Chrétiennes

In 1968, the same year he took up his teaching post at the Arsakeio, Nellas launched Ἐπὶ τὰς πηγάς (“To the Sources”), a series of patristic texts published in the original with modern Greek translation, introduction and notes — expressly, as Bishop Kallistos put it, “a Greek equivalent to the French collection Sources chrétiennes.” Its first volume was Nicholas Cabasilas’s three Marian homilies. The series was a service to the Greek church rather than to the academy: it put the Fathers where a priest, a schoolteacher or an educated layman could read them.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Foundation of 1968

Nellas founded the series in 1968 (Armos Publications, author page for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας, recording that he was appointed to the Arsakeio in 1968 “and the same year founded the series of editions of patristic texts Epi tas pigas”; Pemptousia, author page, to the same effect). The fullest English notice is Bishop Kallistos’s: “In 1968 Panayiotis launched the series Epi tas Pigas, ‘To the Sources,’ a Greek equivalent to the French collection Sources chrétiennes” (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 9–14). Norman Russell records the same, and treats it as one of the two things about Nellas that a survey of modern Greek theology must mention: “One of Nellas’s important contributions to the revival of patristic studies in Greece is a series he founded called Epi tas pēgas (To the Sources) on the model of the French Sources chrétiennes” (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 89 n. 16).

The full series title, as it appears on the volumes, is Ἐπὶ τὰς πηγάς: Ἐκλεκτὰ πατερικὰ κείμενα — “To the Sources: Selected Patristic Texts” (series statement on Nellas’s edition of Cabasilas, Ἡ Θεομήτωρ, 1968).

The First Volume: Cabasilas on the Mother of God

Volume 1 of the series was Nicholas Cabasilas, Ἡ Θεομήτωρ: τρεῖς θεομητορικὲς ὁμιλίες [“The Mother of God: Three Marian Homilies”], with the Greek text, introduction, modern Greek rendering and commentary by Nellas, published at Athens by the Panhellenic Sacred Foundation of the Evangelistria of Tinos in 1968, 228 pages (bibliographic record for Ἡ Θεομήτωρ, Google Books, giving the series as “Ἐπὶ τὰς Πηγάς. Ἐκλεκτὰ Πατερικὰ Κείμενα,” vol. 1; library catalogue record, Koventareios Municipal Library of Kozani, giving “κείμενο, εἰσαγωγή, νεοελληνικὴ ἀπόδοση, σχόλια Παναγιώτου Νέλλα”).

The choice is characteristic in three ways.

It was Cabasilas. Nellas had already fixed on the fourteenth-century lay theologian who would occupy the rest of his scholarly life; the doctoral dissertation on Cabasilas’s doctrine of justification was still seven years off (see The Doctrine of Justification).

It was the Marian homilies. Cabasilas’s three homilies on the Mother of God — on her Nativity, her Annunciation and her Dormition — are the least-read part of his corpus, overshadowed by The Life in Christ and the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, and they are the part in which his Christ-centred anthropology appears at its most concentrated: the Theotokos as the human person who realises what humanity was made for (see The Marian Homilies and The Theotokos).

It was published by a shrine, not a university press. The Panhellenic Sacred Foundation of the Evangelistria of Tinos is the great Marian pilgrimage foundation of the Cyclades. The series began, that is, inside the devotional economy of the Greek Church rather than in academic publishing — which is exactly the placement Nellas wanted.

The Method and Why It Mattered

The Sources Chrétiennes model, which Nellas had encountered at first hand during his Paris years, is a specific editorial form: a critically established text in the original, a facing translation into the modern vernacular, a substantial introduction, and explanatory notes, published in an affordable series aimed at working clergy and educated readers rather than at the manuscript specialist. Jean Daniélou, under whom Nellas studied in Paris, was one of its founders, together with Henri de Lubac (Armos and Pemptousia, author pages, on the Paris studies “near Jean Daniélou”; Russell 2006, 89 n. 16, on the Sources chrétiennes model; and see Paris, the Arsakeio, and an Early Death).

Transposed to Greece, the form solves a specific and often underestimated problem. The Fathers wrote in Greek, and modern Greeks cannot simply read them. The patristic Greek of the fourth century and the learned Greek of the fourteenth are not modern Greek; the linguistic continuity that Greek Christians rightly cherish conceals a real gap. A Greek priest confronting Cabasilas without help is in a position not unlike an English reader confronting Chaucer — closer than a foreigner, but not close enough to read at speed and with confidence. Before Nellas’s generation, the ordinary route to the Fathers for a Greek reader ran through the massive but forbidding Bibliothēkē Hellēnōn Paterōn or through Migne, neither of which offered a modern rendering.

Putting text and modern Greek on facing pages does three things at once:

it makes the Father readable, so that he can be quoted with understanding rather than with reverence;
it keeps the original visible, so that the reader knows the rendering is a rendering and can check it;
it establishes that the Fathers are the common property of the Church, not the preserve of a faculty.

That third point is the theological one, and it connects the series directly to Nellas’s book. If, as Zōon theoumenon argues, the Fathers are to be met “from within the Church and using faith as our basic method” (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987, 24), then the Church has to be able to get at them. The series is the practical corollary of the method.

Scope and Limits of What Can Be Said

This file states what is verifiable and stops. The founding date, the model, the series title, and the identity and details of the first volume are attested in the sources cited above.

What could not be verified for this collection, and is therefore not asserted:

the full list of volumes in the series, or how many appeared in Nellas’s lifetime;
whether Nellas edited later volumes himself or chiefly commissioned them;
whether the series continued after 1986, and under whose direction;
the print runs or circulation, and therefore any quantitative claim about reach.

Readers requiring a complete series bibliography will need a Greek research library; the online booksellers and publishers’ pages that supply most of the accessible information about Nellas do not carry it.

The Judgement of His Contemporaries

Both of the men best placed to weigh Nellas’s work in English singled out this series. Bishop Kallistos gave it a place in a six-page foreword to a book that has nothing to do with it; Russell made it the subject of one of the two substantive footnotes he devoted to Nellas in a survey covering four theologians and two centuries. That is a considered verdict: whatever else Nellas did, the founding of Epi tas Pigas was, in Russell’s words, “one of Nellas’s important contributions to the revival of patristic studies in Greece” (Russell 2006, 89 n. 16).

It is also a form of theological work that is systematically undervalued. Editions do not generate arguments, are not cited in reception histories, and do not make reputations outside the language in which they appear. They do, over decades, change what a church is able to read — which is a slower and larger effect than any monograph. Nellas is one of the clearest modern cases of a theologian whose most consequential act was an editorial one.

References

Cabasilas, Nicholas. Ἡ Θεομήτωρ: τρεῖς θεομητορικὲς ὁμιλίες. Text, introduction, modern Greek rendering and commentary by Panayiotis Nellas. Ἐπὶ τὰς Πηγάς: Ἐκλεκτὰ Πατερικὰ Κείμενα 1. Athens: Πανελλήνιον Ἱερὸν Ἵδρυμα Εὐαγγελιστρίας Τήνου, 1968. 228 pp.
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. (The series at 89 n. 16.)
Armos Publications and Pemptousia, author pages for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας (accessed 2026).
Google Books and Koventareios Municipal Library of Kozani, catalogue records for Ἡ Θεομήτωρ (accessed 2026).