Education, Faith, and Nation

The meaning Kosmas gave to his schools and the long consequences they had: education understood first as the safeguard of Orthodox faith, and only secondarily — though in fact powerfully — as the foundation of a Greek national revival. It treats his teaching that letters serve the soul, his insistence that the mother tongue carries the faith, his pairing of school with church, and the way his educational legacy was later read as a cornerstone of the Greek national awakening — a reading examined here with the care the topic requires.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

Letters in the Service of the Soul

Kosmas’s educational program (see Founding the Schools) rested on a theology of learning, not a philosophy of progress. For him the school existed to save souls: to make Christians who could read the Gospel, understand the services, examine their consciences, and pass the faith on whole to their children (Nomikos M. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977, pp. 24–30; Constantine Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971). He is remembered for telling the people that the school opens the church — that without learning, the churches and monasteries themselves stand empty of understanding, and the faith decays into ignorance (the theme recurs in the Didaches; see Vaporis, Father Kosmas, and on the sermons The Content of the Preaching).

This ordering matters for understanding him rightly. Kosmas did not value education as an end in itself or as a path to worldly advancement; he warned, as monastic teachers always have, against learning that puffs up and leaves the soul untended. What he valued was the literacy that lets a Christian know God and keep the commandments — learning bent to repentance and love (see Repentance and Love). The school was a means of grace, not a rival to it.

This is the proper distance between Kosmas and the secular educators who came after him and sometimes claimed him. The Enlightenment ideal of letters as the engine of human progress, of knowledge as the cure for the ills of the world and the path of a people to maturity, was not his; he stood, on the contrary, in the older Christian and monastic understanding that learning is a tool which saves or harms according to the use the soul makes of it (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). Letters that taught a man to read the Gospel, search his conscience, and pray the services were letters in the service of the soul; letters pursued for vanity, gain, or the swelling of the self were a danger, not a good. The Apostle’s warning that knowledge puffs up while love builds up (cf. 1 Cor. 8:1) stands behind the whole of Kosmas’s educational labor, which is why he could be at once the most tireless school-founder of his age and a man wholly indifferent to learning for its own sake. The end was always the soul; the school was the means; and a means that forgets its end becomes its own enemy. To read Kosmas as a herald of secular progress is therefore to mistake him at the root, however much later progress in fact drew on what he built.

The Mother Tongue and the Faith

A particular emphasis of Kosmas’s, much remarked, was the Greek language itself. He urged the people to maintain their Greek — to teach their children Greek letters — and he is reported to have said that the Greek tongue was bound up with the Church and the mysteries, the language in which the Gospel and the services had come down to them (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). In a world where the pressure of Islamization and of linguistic assimilation threatened to dissolve the Christian population into the surrounding Ottoman society, the maintenance of the language was, in Kosmas’s understanding, inseparable from the maintenance of the faith. To keep the Greek of the Gospel was to keep the Gospel.

The logic of this emphasis is worth making explicit, for it is easily misread. Kosmas valued Greek not as the badge of a people or the speech of a homeland but as the vessel in which the faith had reached his hearers: the Gospel was written in it, the Liturgy and the offices were prayed in it, the Fathers had thought and taught in it (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; Menounos, Διδαχές). A Christian who lost the language lost his access to the sacred texts at first hand and was thrown back on hearsay and rote, the very condition Kosmas dreaded; a community that let its Greek dissolve into the surrounding tongue would in time find that the faith had dissolved with it. So the maintenance of the language was, for him, a department of the maintenance of the faith — not a parallel cause but the same cause seen from another side. It is in this exact and limited sense that his insistence on Greek must be read: as the safeguarding of the means by which the Gospel was held, not as the assertion of a nation’s claim to its tongue.

This linguistic emphasis is the seam along which Kosmas’s religious mission and his later national reputation join — and it must be handled with care. In Kosmas’s own framing the priority is unmistakably religious: he wanted Greek kept because the faith was in it, not the faith kept because the nation was in it. The later reading that made him a prophet of the Greek nation reversed this priority, and that reversal is examined in its own place (see Saint and National Symbol).

School Beside Church

Kosmas’s standard practice paired the school with the church and placed it under the Church’s care (see Founding the Schools). The teaching matter of the elementary schools was the liturgical books themselves — the Psalter, the Horologion — so that learning to read and learning to pray were a single curriculum (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30). The “Greek” schools, in turn, produced the clergy, teachers, and educated laymen who would staff the churches and the common schools of the next generation, making the whole system self-reproducing. Education and the institutional Church were not separate spheres for Kosmas but two organs of one body, and he labored to strengthen both together.

The pairing of school with church was no mere matter of convenient siting. Placing the school under the local church’s care meant that its survival was bound to the survival of the parish, its teacher answerable to the same community of faith that the priest served, its purpose held within the Church’s own life rather than set beside it as a secular institution with secular ends (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). The church gave the school its books, its rationale, and its guardians; the school gave the church the literate Christians and the future clergy without whom the church would in time fall silent. Each sustained the other, and Kosmas designed them to do so. There is a deliberate closing of the circle here: the hellenika scholeia trained the priests and schoolmasters; those priests and schoolmasters kept the churches and the koina scholeia; and the common schools, reading from the liturgical books, formed the next generation of Christians from whom the next priests and teachers would come. A people could, on this model, hold and hand down its faith under its own power, without the constant intervention of an outside missionary — which is precisely what Kosmas, a single man who could not be everywhere and would not live forever, most needed his work to be able to do.

The Educational Legacy and the National Awakening

In the longer view, Kosmas’s schools came to be seen as a cornerstone of the Greek educational and national revival that culminated in the War of Independence (1821) and the founding of the modern Greek state. The network of village schools he promoted, the literacy he spread, and above all the linkage he forged between Greek letters, Orthodox faith, and communal identity were later read — by Greek historians, churchmen, and patriots — as essential preparation for the awakening of the nation (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30, 36–40; and the broader Greek historiography of the Tourkokratia and the national revival, on which see Orthodoxy Guide: Greece, Bulgaria and Others).

This reading is not baseless. Kosmas did spread literacy on a large scale, did insist on the maintenance of Greek, and did strengthen the Orthodox communal identity against assimilation; the effects of all three outlived him and fed into the national revival. But the reading is also, in its strong nationalist forms, an interpretation laid over Kosmas rather than drawn from him — for Kosmas’s own stated purpose was the salvation of souls, not the liberation of a nation (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 36–40; see the fuller treatment in Saint and National Symbol). The honest account holds both: a religious mission that had, as one of its real consequences, a national one, and a later memory that sometimes inflated the second at the expense of the first.

The precise danger in the national reading is that it reverses Kosmas’s own order. For Kosmas the chain ran from the faith outward: he wanted souls saved, and to that end he wanted Christians who could read, and to that end he wanted Greek kept and schools built — so that the awakening of the people, such as it was, served the keeping of the faith. The strong nationalist account runs the chain backward, making the nation the goal and the faith, the schools, and the language so many instruments of its rising (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 36–40; see Saint and National Symbol). The two pictures share almost all their facts and differ entirely in their direction, and it is the direction that decides whether one has understood the saint or merely annexed him. A faithful account does not deny the schools their place in the awakening of 1821; it insists only that the place was a consequence Kosmas did not seek as his end, and that to read the consequence back into the man as his purpose is to lose the man. Souls first, and the nation only after and beneath them: this is the order in Kosmas, and reversing it is the characteristic error.

The Title “Equal-to-the-Apostles”

When the Church glorified Kosmas in 1961 it named him Equal-to-the-Apostles (Isapostolos), the title reserved for those who, like the first apostles, brought whole peoples to the faith or kept them in it (see Glorification 1961). The title fixes the Church’s own reading of his educational work: not nation-building but apostolate — the keeping of a people in the faith of Christ by every means, the school not least among them. Kosmas’s schools were, in the Church’s judgment, an apostolic labor, and that is the frame in which his educational legacy is most truly understood.

It is significant that the Church did not name him patriot, liberator, or father of the nation, titles a purely national hero might have drawn, but reached for the company of the apostles. Isapostolos sets him beside figures such as Constantine, Helen, and the enlighteners of the Slavs — men and women whose work was the bringing of peoples to Christ and the holding of them there — and so reads his schools, his letters, and his Greek not as the scaffolding of a state but as the instruments of an apostolate (see Glorification 1961). The Church, in other words, ratified the order that runs through all his work: the soul first and the nation after. Whatever the historians and patriots have since made of him, the title under which he is venerated holds the schools to their founder’s own purpose. They were built to keep a people in the faith, and it is as an apostolic labor — letters bent wholly to the salvation of souls — that the Church remembers them and asks that they be understood.

References

Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977. (Education as the safeguard of faith; the emphasis on the Greek language; school paired with church; the educational legacy and the national revival; the religious-vs-national ordering of Kosmas’s own purpose.)
Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Cosmas Aitolos. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971. (The theology of Kosmas’s educational work.)
Menounos, Ioannis. Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία). Athens: Ekdoseis Tinos, 1979. (The sermons in which the teaching on letters and language is found.)