Aetolia and the Athoniada (c. 1714–1759)

The first four and a half decades of Konstas — the boy from a mountain village of Aetolia who became Kosmas the monk: birth around 1714 in Mega Dendron, the modest village schooling and the years of learning that culminated in study at the Athonite Academy (Athoniada) under Eugenios Voulgaris and Panagiotis Palamas, and the monastic tonsure as Kosmas at the Monastery of Philotheou around 1759. It traces the formation of a mind and a soul in the impoverished, half-literate Greek world under Ottoman rule, the formation out of which the apostle of the poor would come.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

A Village in Ottoman Aetolia

The man the Church would name Kosmas the Aetolian was born around 1714 in the small mountain village of Mega Dendron (Μέγα Δένδρον, “Great Tree”; also rendered Megalo Dendro), in the district of Apokouro in Aetolia, in west-central Greece, then a poor and remote corner of the Ottoman Empire (Nomikos M. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977, pp. 1–3; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, Equal of the Apostles, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 24). His baptismal name was Konstas (Κωνσταντῖνος / Κώνστας), and his family were ordinary villagers of the Greek countryside; the year of birth is given by the standard accounts as 1714, though, as with most details of an obscure provincial life two centuries before its subject became famous, the date is reconstructed rather than documented (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 1–3).

The world into which he was born was the world of the Tourkokratia, the long centuries of Ottoman domination over the Greek Orthodox lands. The institutional framework of Greek life was the millet system, under which the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople governed the Orthodox population as a recognized religious community, while the burden of taxation, the periodic violence of local power-holders, and the slow attrition of literacy and learning pressed the Christian peasantry toward poverty and, in places, toward Islamization (on the period generally, see Orthodoxy Guide: The Ottoman Period). It was the erosion of Greek Christian learning under these conditions — the closing of schools, the spread of illiteracy, the danger of a faith no longer understood by those who held it — that would define the whole work of Kosmas’s later life. He understood his mission, from the inside, as the answer to the world that had formed him.

The millet arrangement was, in its own way, a double inheritance. On the one hand it preserved the Orthodox Church as the single legally recognized institution of Greek national and religious life, vesting the Ecumenical Patriarch with a civil as well as a spiritual authority over his flock and so keeping intact, through the long centuries of subjection, a continuity of faith, language, and liturgy that no foreign power had managed to dissolve. On the other hand the same arrangement bound the Church to a state that taxed its people heavily, that periodically pressed them toward conversion, and that left the ordinary Christian peasant with little protection against the caprice of local aghas and tax-farmers (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 1–3; see Orthodoxy Guide: The Ottoman Period). In the mountainous and remote districts of Aetolia, far from the comparative security of the great towns, the pressures bore down with particular weight, and it was precisely among such people — the poorest and least lettered of the Greek world — that Kosmas would later choose to spend himself.

Village Schooling and the Hunger for Learning

The sources agree that the boy received only the rudimentary schooling available in such a village — what learning a local cleric or itinerant teacher could give — and that he was drawn early and strongly to letters and to the things of the Church (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 2–4; Cosmas of Aetolia, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, goarch.org). The tradition records that before he went to Mount Athos he taught for a time in his own region, having acquired the elements of grammar; he is associated in the biographical tradition with study under a deacon-teacher named Ananias Dervisanos at Lompotina (Vlasti) and with the school at the Monastery of the Prophet Elias near Sigditsa, in the years before he reached the Holy Mountain (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 3–5; Ioannis Menounos, Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία) [Kosmas the Aetolian, Teachings (and Biography)], Athens: Tinos, 1979, biographical introduction).

To grasp how unusual this hunger was, one must remember how little formal schooling existed in the Greek lands of the early eighteenth century. There was no system of education in any modern sense; what schooling there was depended on the parish church, the monastery, and the occasional learned cleric who would gather a handful of boys to teach them their letters from the Psalter and the Horologion (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 2–4; Cosmas of Aetolia, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, goarch.org). The so-called “secret school” of later patriotic memory has been much romanticized, but behind the legend lies a real and sober fact: that literacy among the rural Greek population had fallen very low, that books were scarce and expensive, and that for most villagers the faith was carried not by the read word but by the heard liturgy, the icon, and the memory of feast and fast. A boy who learned to read at all in such a setting was already exceptional; one who burned to read more, and who would cross the better part of Greece to do so, was rarer still. This is the gap that the Athonite Academy, founded in Kosmas’s own lifetime, was created to close, and it is no accident that the future apostle of letters was among those it drew.

What the sources convey, beneath the uncertain particulars, is a single consistent shape: a poor and gifted villager whose desire for learning could not be satisfied locally and who therefore made his way, as a grown man already in his forties, to the one place in the Greek world where serious education was newly available — the Holy Mountain. The lateness of the move matters. Kosmas did not come to Athos as a youth seeking a monastic vocation in the ordinary way; he came as a mature man seeking the education that the conditions of enslaved Greece had denied him, and he found, on the Mountain, both the learning and the vocation together.

The Athonite Academy under Voulgaris and Palamas

The institution that drew him was the Athonite Academy (Ἀθωνιάς, the Athoniada), the most ambitious school of higher Greek learning founded anywhere in the Ottoman lands in the eighteenth century. It was established in 1749 on the hill above the Monastery of Vatopedi, on whose lands and under whose sponsorship it stood; the standard accounts identify the school as a foundation associated with Vatopedi rather than with the Great Lavra (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, p. 5 — where Vaporis’s own text names the “Great Lavra,” an identification that the broader scholarship corrects to Vatopedi; cf. the entry “Athonias” / “Athonite Academy,” and Constantine Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971, on the school and its setting). [Disputed: Vaporis, Father Kosmas, p. 5, places Kosmas’s study at the Academy as a dependency of the Great Lavra; the prevailing scholarly and reference consensus locates the Athoniada above and under the sponsorship of Vatopedi (founded 1749) — Vaporis’s “Great Lavra” is treated as an error.]

The foundation of such a school on the Holy Mountain in 1749 was itself a sign of the times — an attempt, under the patronage of Vatopedi, to gather the scattered learning of the Greek nation in the one place where it could be cultivated in peace and to make of Athos not merely a refuge of prayer but a seedbed of the educated clergy and teachers the captive Church so badly needed (Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos; Vaporis, Father Kosmas, p. 5). Its curriculum reached well beyond the elementary letters available in the villages: the students were led through grammar and the classical Greek authors, through rhetoric and logic, through philosophy and the elements of the sciences, and through theology — the full range, in short, of the higher learning that the age could offer in Greek (Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos; Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 5–6). For a few short years the Athoniada was the foremost school in the Greek world, and students came to it from across the Ottoman lands.

The Academy’s golden years coincided almost exactly with Kosmas’s time there. Its most celebrated director was Eugenios Voulgaris (Evgenios Voulgaris, 1716–1806), the leading Greek scholar of the age — a churchman and philosopher who introduced the new European learning, including elements of Enlightenment philosophy and the sciences, into the curriculum, and who served as director of the Athoniada from 1753 until 1759 (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 5–6; on Voulgaris and the Academy, Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). Voulgaris was a man of extraordinary range, equally at home in the Fathers and in the contemporary philosophy of Western Europe; he read and taught from the moderns, and he carried into the Orthodox world a confidence that the new learning of the age could be received and put to the service of the faith rather than feared as its enemy (Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos; Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 5–6). His tenure at the Athoniada ended in controversy, for his innovations drew suspicion, and he left the Mountain to pursue a distinguished later career that carried him eventually to the patronage of the Russian court; but in the years Kosmas sat under him the school was at the height of its powers. Alongside and after Voulgaris, the teacher Panagiotis Palamas is named among those under whom Kosmas studied (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 5–6; Menounos, Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία)). Under these men Kosmas absorbed grammar, rhetoric, and the wider learning of the school — the equipment that would later let him speak to vast crowds in a plain, vivid, and effective Greek.

It is one of the quiet ironies of his story that the future apostle of the simplest village faith was trained in the most sophisticated school of his nation. He did not use his learning to write treatises; he used it, deliberately, to speak as plainly as possible to the unlettered. But the plainness was a chosen plainness, the plainness of a man who could have done otherwise, and the effectiveness of his preaching — its order, its memorability, its capacity to hold thousands — owed much to the rhetorical training of the Athoniada (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 5–7, 18–22).

Tonsure as Kosmas at Philotheou

After his studies, around 1759, Konstas was tonsured a monk at the Monastery of Philotheou on Mount Athos and received the monastic name by which he is forever known, Kosmas (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 6–7; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, OCA). Philotheou is one of the ancient cenobitic houses of the eastern side of the Mountain, and to enter it was to take up the common life of the Athonite monk in its fullest form: the long cycle of the daily and nightly services, the labor of the community, obedience to the abbot and the brotherhood, fasting, and the unceasing prayer of the heart that is the inner work of the Holy Mountain (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 6–7; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). Athos in the eighteenth century was, for all the poverty and disorder of the wider Greek world, still the living center of Orthodox monasticism — a self-governing republic of monks under the spiritual protection of the Mother of God, where the contemplative tradition of the Christian East was kept alive without interruption. Into this life Kosmas brought both the discipline of the cell and the learning of the Academy, and the two were joined in him as they had been joined in the older Athonite tradition that saw no contradiction between deep prayer and serious study. At Philotheou he was in due course ordained, and there he began the life of prayer and ascetic discipline proper to an Athonite monk. By the ordinary logic of the Holy Mountain this should have been the settled frame of the rest of his life: study, prayer, the monastic round, the slow sanctification of a hidden man.

But Kosmas did not stay hidden. The reading and prayer of his Athonite years pressed upon him a conviction that the monastic enclosure could not contain — the conviction that the Greek Christians beyond the Mountain, sunk in poverty and ignorance and in danger of losing their faith altogether, had a claim on him that he could not refuse. The decision to leave Athos and go out to them, taken around 1760, is the hinge of his whole biography and is treated in its own place (see The Call to Preach). What belongs here is the recognition that the missionary was made before the mission: the apostle of the poor was first a poor man himself, formed in a poor land, who had climbed by hunger and labor to the best learning his nation could give, and who would spend the rest of his life carrying that learning back down to the people he had come from.

References

Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor: The Life of St. Kosmas Aitolos Together with an English Translation of His Teaching and Letters. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977. (The standard scholarly biography and English translation; birth c. 1714 at Mega Dendron; baptismal name Konstas; village schooling; study at the Athonite Academy under Voulgaris and Palamas; tonsure as Kosmas at Philotheou c. 1759. The identification of the Academy with the “Great Lavra” at p. 5 is corrected to Vatopedi in the wider scholarship.)
Menounos, Ioannis. Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία) [Kosmas the Aetolian, Teachings (and Biography)]. Athens: Ekdoseis Tinos, 1979. (The standard Greek critical edition of the Didaches with biographical introduction.)
Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Cosmas Aitolos (Modern Orthodox Saints, vol. 1). Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971. (On the Athonite Academy, Voulgaris, and the setting of Kosmas’s studies.)
Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, Equal of the Apostles. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), Lives of the Saints, August 24. (Tonsure as Kosmas; Philotheou; the shape of the early life.)
Cosmas of Aetolia. Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (goarch.org), Lives of the Saints. (Early life and education in summary.)