The Call to Preach (c. 1760)

The hinge of Kosmas’s life: the decision, taken around 1760, to leave the peace of Mount Athos and go out as an itinerant preacher to the impoverished and half-Islamized Greek Christians of the Ottoman countryside — and the patriarchal blessing that authorized the mission. This file treats the inner logic of the call and the disputed question of which Ecumenical Patriarch blessed it: most lives name Seraphim II for the first permit around 1760, while Kosmas’s own letters name Sophronios — best reconciled as a first blessing by Seraphim II and a renewal around 1774–75 under Sophronios II.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

The Burden That Could Not Stay on the Mountain

By around 1759 Kosmas was a tonsured monk of Philotheou, equipped with the best learning the Greek world could offer and settled, by every ordinary expectation, into the hidden Athonite life of prayer (see Aetolia and the Athoniada). But the years of reading pressed on him a conviction he could not set aside. His biographers report that the Scriptures and the Fathers — above all the apostolic commission to preach the Gospel — confronted him with the spiritual destitution of his own people: Greek Christians sunk in poverty and ignorance, many no longer able to read, some drifting toward Islam, in danger of losing the faith they could no longer understand (Nomikos M. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977, pp. 7–10; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, Equal of the Apostles, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 24).

Kosmas’s own account of the decision survives in his preaching. He told his crowds that he had studied and prayed, and had come to see that the love of Christ obliged him not to save his own soul alone but to spend himself for the souls of his brethren — that to keep his learning to himself while his people perished in ignorance would be to betray the Gospel (the motif recurs in the Didaches; see Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 8–10, and the translated Teachings therein; for the textual character of these sermons, see The Didaches). The call, as he framed it, was not a private mysticism but an apostolic obligation: the duty of one who could teach toward the many who could not learn.

This logic is worth weighing carefully, because at first glance it cuts against the whole grain of the Athonite vocation. The monk who comes to the Holy Mountain comes precisely to leave the world, to die to it, and to seek God in stillness; the abandonment of that stillness for the noise and danger of the world is not, on the face of it, a step a monk should take lightly, and it required a justification drawn from the deepest sources of the tradition. Kosmas found that justification in the example of the apostles and of the great preaching fathers of the Church — above all in the conviction that the love of neighbor commanded by the Gospel could oblige a man, in a time of extremity, to lay down the comfort of his own salvation-in-solitude for the sake of others’ (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 7–10). It is a missionary reading of the monastic calling, ancient in the Church but rarely acted upon with such force, and it placed Kosmas in the line of those monks who have left their cells not out of restlessness but out of obedience to a larger charity. He did not repudiate Athos; he carried it with him, remaining a monk in dress, discipline, and prayer for the rest of his life even as he became the most public man in the Greek world of his day.

This is the point at which the formation of the previous decade becomes a mission. Kosmas left Mount Athos around 1760 and began the itinerant preaching that would occupy the last two decades of his life (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 9–11; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, OCA). He went first, the sources say, to Constantinople, where he made contact with the Patriarchate; the great tours through the provinces followed (see The Preaching Tours).

The destitution he set out to answer was not an exaggeration of pious biographers but the real condition of the Greek countryside under the Tourkokratia. In many districts the churches stood but the priests could barely read the services; the children grew up without letters; the faith survived as custom rather than as understanding, and where understanding failed, the slow pressure of the surrounding Islam — through taxation, through intermarriage, through the simple advantage of conversion — drew families away one by one (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 7–10; see Orthodoxy Guide: The Ottoman Period). Kosmas judged that the remedy for this was not lament but labor: to go to the people, to preach in language they could grasp, to revive the practice of confession and the moral life, and to leave behind in each place a school where the next generation could learn to read the Gospel for itself. The mission, in other words, grew directly out of his own biography — the gifted village boy who had climbed out of ignorance now turning back to lift others out of it.

Why a Blessing Was Necessary

An itinerant preacher in the Ottoman Greek world could not simply set out on his own authority. To preach publicly across many dioceses, to call crowds together, and to do so in a way that would not alarm either the local bishops or the Ottoman authorities, required ecclesiastical sanction — a patriarchal blessing or exarchal commission that placed the preacher under the Church’s protection and gave the local hierarchs reason to receive rather than to obstruct him (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 10–13). Kosmas, who insisted throughout his preaching on obedience to the Church and who took pains never to act as a freelancer, sought and obtained such a blessing, and he referred to it himself. The trouble is that the sources do not agree on the name of the patriarch who gave it.

The reasons such a sanction was indispensable lay in the very structure of the millet world. Each bishop was sovereign in his own diocese, jealous of intrusion, and answerable in turn to the Patriarchate; a preacher who arrived unannounced and gathered crowds without authorization could easily be taken for a troublemaker, a heretic, or — most dangerous of all — a stirrer of sedition against the Ottoman order (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 10–13). The assembling of great multitudes was itself a politically sensitive act under a regime that watched the Christian population warily, and only the cover of the Church, whose Patriarch was himself responsible to the Sublime Porte for the conduct of his flock, could make such gatherings safe both for the preacher and for those who came to hear him. A patriarchal letter of commission turned Kosmas from a wandering enthusiast into an authorized agent of the Church’s own mission of catechesis, one whom the local hierarchs were bound to welcome and whom the civil authorities had less cause to suspect. That Kosmas sought this sanction, and renewed it, is itself characteristic of the man: he understood that the work of reviving the faith could not be done against the Church’s order but only within it.

The Disputed Patriarchal Blessing

The standard hagiographical tradition, followed by the OCA and by the popular Greek lives, holds that Kosmas received his blessing for the mission from Patriarch Seraphim II of Constantinople around 1760 (Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, OCA; the same is reflected in the widely circulated lives and in general reference accounts). Kosmas’s own surviving letters, however, name a Patriarch Sophronios as the authority backing his work. The most economical reconciliation, and the one favored by careful treatments of the problem, is that there were two distinct moments: a first blessing for the mission around 1760, when Seraphim II reigned (his patriarchate ran 1757–1761), and a later renewal of the commission around 1774–75, when Sophronios II held the throne (reigning 1774–1780) — so that both names are correct, each for its own period (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 10–13, and the translated Letters therein, where Sophronios is named; on the reigns, the patriarchal lists of Constantinople).

[Disputed: WHICH patriarch blessed Kosmas’s mission. Most lives, the OCA, and general reference accounts name Seraphim II (reigned 1757–1761) for the first permit, c. 1760; Kosmas’s own letters name Sophronios — best reconciled as a first blessing under Seraphim II (c. 1760) and a renewal of the commission under Sophronios II (reigned 1774–1780), c. 1774–75. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 10–13, discusses the difficulty but mislabels the relevant reign-dates; the patriarchal lists of Constantinople give Seraphim II 1757–61 and Sophronios II 1774–80.]

The disagreement is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over, because it is a model case of the source problem that runs through the whole of Kosmas’s biography. The man himself wrote almost nothing except letters; the lives were composed by disciples and later admirers, who were better at conveying his spirit than at fixing the administrative particulars; and where the disciples’ tradition and Kosmas’s own letters diverge, the historian must hold both rather than choose one (see, for the same problem in the sermons, The Didaches, and on the documentary basis generally, Scholarship and Editions).

It is also a reminder of how thin the documentary record is for even the central facts of this life. We do not possess the texts of the patriarchal commissions; we infer them from Kosmas’s own references and from the testimony of the lives, and the gaps in that evidence are exactly the gaps in which the disagreement over names has grown. To say that both Seraphim II and Sophronios II have a claim — the one for the first permit around 1760, the other for a renewal around 1774–75 — is not to evade the difficulty but to take seriously the most likely reconstruction of a sequence that the sources, each partial in its own way, only partly preserve (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 10–13).

The Shape of the Mission

Whatever the exact sequence of permits, the blessing did its work. Armed with the Church’s sanction, Kosmas could move from diocese to diocese with the cooperation of the local bishops, gather crowds without being treated as a rebel, and present himself — as he consistently did — not as an innovator but as an obedient son of the Church doing the Church’s own work of catechesis (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 11–14). The content of that work was simple and constant: to call people to repentance and confession, to restore the practice of the faith, and — the program for which he is most remembered — to plant schools so that Greek children could learn to read the Gospel and the services in their own tongue (see Founding the Schools). The mission that began with the burden on the Mountain ended only with his death on a scaffold in Albania nineteen years later (see Arrest and Execution).

See Also

References

  • Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977. (The decision to leave Athos c. 1760; the journey to Constantinople; the question of the patriarchal blessing, with the discussion of Sophronios in the translated Letters; the apostolic logic of the call. Note that Vaporis’s reign-dates for the patriarchs are imprecise.)
  • Menounos, Ioannis. Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία). Athens: Ekdoseis Tinos, 1979. (Biography and the textual basis of the Didaches.)
  • Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, Equal of the Apostles. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), August 24. (Blessing of Patriarch Seraphim II, c. 1760; the missionary departure.)
  • The patriarchal lists of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople (used to fix the reigns: Seraphim II, 1757–1761; Sophronios II, 1774–1780).