Founding the Schools

The work for which Kosmas is most remembered: the founding, across his apostolic journeys, of hundreds of schools — both elementary “common” schools and a smaller number of more advanced “Greek” schools — so that the children of the enslaved Greek Christians could learn to read the Gospel and the services in their own tongue. It treats the school numbers as a disputed range (a conservative, letter-based count against a larger devotional one), and the principle that drove the whole effort: that literacy was the survival of the faith.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

“I Have Left You Schools”

If Kosmas had a single practical program beyond the call to repentance, it was the school. Wherever he preached he urged the people to found a school, to staff it, and to send their children to it; he treated the school not as an adjunct to the faith but as its condition of survival (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 his hearers, in effect, that he was leaving them schools so that they might come to know what they believed — that an unlettered Christian, unable to read the Gospel or follow the services, was a Christian in danger of losing the faith without even understanding that he was losing it (the theme is constant in the Didaches; see Vaporis, Father Kosmas, and on the content Education, Faith, and Nation).

The schools came in two kinds, following the educational categories of the day. The ordinary, elementary schools — teaching reading, writing, and the basics of the faith to village children — were the “common” schools (koina scholeia), and these he founded in great numbers. A smaller number of more advanced institutions, teaching at a higher level and oriented toward classical Greek learning, were the “Greek” schools (hellenika scholeia) (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; Cosmas of Aetolia, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, goarch.org). The two figures — the count of common schools and the count of Greek schools — are the basis of the well-known but disputed statistics of Kosmas’s educational work.

The distinction between the two was not merely one of scale but of purpose, and it is worth drawing out. The koina scholeia were the broad foundation: they took the village child who knew no letters and brought him to the point of reading the sacred books and writing a plain hand, with the rudiments of arithmetic and the catechism alongside (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). They were cheap to keep, needed only a single literate teacher — often a priest or a monk — and could be planted in the smallest settlement. The hellenika scholeia were the rarer and costlier apex of the system: there a smaller body of pupils went on to the grammar of ancient Greek, the reading of the Fathers and the classical authors in their own language, and the formation that produced a clergyman, a notary, or a schoolmaster. The first reached the many and secured the floor of literacy on which the faith stood; the second reached the few and supplied the teachers and clergy by whom that floor could be laid again in the next generation (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; Cosmas of Aetolia, GOARCH). Kosmas pressed for both, but the weight of his effort, and the great mass of the numbers, lay with the common schools, because it was there that the ordinary Christian was made literate enough to keep his faith.

How Many Schools? A Disputed Range

The number of schools Kosmas founded is one of the most frequently cited facts about him, and one of the least settled. Two sets of figures circulate, and per the repository methodology (§4) they are given here as a range rather than reduced to a single invented number.

The conservative, letter-based count — the figure favored by the scholarly literature and by sober reference accounts — is roughly ten “Greek” (secondary) schools and more than two hundred “common” (elementary) schools (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; the same order of magnitude in the Encyclopedia of Religion entry on Kosmas and in the GOARCH / Alexander Veronis accounts). This count is anchored in what can be supported from Kosmas’s own letters and the contemporary record. The devotional count, common in popular Greek piety and in mission-society literature, is far larger: about two hundred and ten “Greek” schools and some eleven hundred “common” schools (the figures of c. 210 + 1,100 are given in the Orthodox Missionary Fraternity literature and repeated by writers such as John Sanidopoulos).

[Disputed: the NUMBER of schools Kosmas founded. The conservative, letter-based scholarly count (Vaporis; Encyclopedia of Religion; GOARCH/Veronis) is roughly ~10 “Greek” (secondary) + 200+ “common” (elementary) schools; the devotional/popular count (Orthodox Missionary Fraternity; Sanidopoulos) is roughly 210 “Greek” + 1,100 “common” schools. The lower figures rest on documentary support; the higher are traditional and devotional. No single exact number is asserted here.]

The gap between the two counts is itself worth understanding. The lower figures are what the documents will bear; the higher figures reflect the enormous later reputation of Kosmas as the founder of Greek popular education and the tendency of devotional tradition to magnify. Both belong to the historical record — the first as the conservative estimate, the second as the figure that Greek piety has carried — and a responsible account names both rather than choosing one and presenting it as fact (cf. METHODOLOGY §4 on contested statistics; see also Scholarship and Editions).

How the Schools Were Built

The schools were not founded by decree but built into the fabric of each community as part of the preaching visit. Kosmas would call on the people to provide a building and a teacher’s maintenance, press the wealthier hearers to fund the work as an act of charity and penance, and place the new school under the care of the local church (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). Because the schools were locally owned and locally maintained, many of them outlived him; the network of village schools across the Greek lands in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries owed a real and acknowledged debt to his work, even where the exact founding cannot be traced to him.

This local rooting was the secret of the schools’ endurance, and it was deliberate. Kosmas built nothing that depended on himself: he raised no central institution, endowed no chain of foundations under his own name, appointed no successors to administer a system. Instead he turned each community into the owner and guarantor of its own school, so that the maintenance of letters became a standing charge upon the village — a thing the people had pledged before God to keep, a work of almsgiving that the well-to-do undertook as penance and the whole community sustained as its own (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). A school built this way did not collapse when the preacher moved on; it stood because the people who had built it kept it. This is why a single itinerant, with no resources but his word, could leave behind an educational network that persisted and even grew after his death: he had not founded schools so much as founded the habit of founding schools, and that habit reproduced itself.

The scale of what he was answering can hardly be overstated. Under the long Ottoman captivity the structures of Greek education had largely collapsed: schools were few and scattered, whole regions had gone without letters for generations, and the danger was real that an illiterate Christian populace would slide into the surrounding Islamic society and forget what it had been (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; Cosmas of Aetolia, GOARCH). Kosmas’s school-founding was not the embellishment of an existing system but the re-laying of a foundation that had crumbled — an attempt, village by village, to rebuild the minimal literacy without which the faith could not be held by understanding. It is against this background of educational ruin that both the urgency of his preaching and the magnitude of his reputation are to be measured.

The teaching was rooted in the Church. The “common” schools taught reading from the Psalter, the Horologion, and the other liturgical books, so that learning to read and learning the faith were the same act; the “Greek” schools added the grammar and classical learning that produced the teachers, clergy, and educated laity the nation would need (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; see Education, Faith, and Nation). The whole structure was designed to reproduce literate Orthodox Christians who could carry the faith forward under their own power.

It is worth dwelling on what it meant to learn one’s letters from the Psalter and the Horologion. The child did not first acquire a neutral literacy and then turn it, as a separate step, to religious use; the very texts on which he learned to read were the prayers of the Church, the psalms of David, the fixed hours of the daily office. To master reading was therefore already to have the services and the psalms in one’s mouth and memory, and catechesis and literacy arrived together in a single act (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). A graduate of such a school could not read at all without being able to follow the Church’s prayer; the skill and the faith were learned as one thing and could not easily come apart. This fusion was not an accident of poverty — that the only books to hand were liturgical — but the heart of Kosmas’s design, for he wanted no literacy that was not at the same time a holding of the faith.

Literacy as the Survival of Faith

Behind the program lay a single conviction, which Kosmas stated repeatedly: that the faith could not survive among a people who could no longer read it. An illiterate Christianity, he argued, was a Christianity at the mercy of forgetting and of Islamization — a faith held by rote, without understanding, easily lost in a generation (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; on the theology of this, see Education, Faith, and Nation). The school was therefore not a worldly improvement but a spiritual necessity, the means by which a people in danger of losing its soul could keep hold of it. This is why Kosmas, the apostle of the simplest village piety, was also the most energetic school-founder of his age: in his understanding the two were one work. The school served the Gospel, and without the school the Gospel itself was at risk.

The letters Kosmas pressed upon the people were thus always letters in the service of the soul, never learning prized for its own sake or as a ladder to worldly standing. He held, with the whole monastic tradition behind him, that knowledge which does not bend the soul toward repentance and the keeping of the commandments is knowledge that puffs up and leaves the heart untended; the literacy he wanted was the literacy that lets a Christian know God, examine his conscience, and pass the faith on whole (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos; and the fuller treatment in Education, Faith, and Nation). For this reason it would be an error — though a common one — to read his schools as the opening move of a program of national enlightenment or worldly advancement. Whatever long consequences they had for the Greek people, and they had many, Kosmas’s own aim in founding them was apostolic: to keep a people in the faith of Christ. The title the Church would later give him, Equal-to-the-Apostles, fixes that reading and marks the schools for what their founder meant them to be — an instrument of the Gospel, not of the nation (see Education, Faith, and Nation; Glorification 1961).

References

Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977. (The school-founding program; the “Greek” and “common” school categories; the conservative letter-based figures of c. 10 Greek + 200+ common schools; literacy as the survival of faith.)
Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Cosmas Aitolos. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971. (The educational work and its character.)
Cosmas of Aetolia. Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (goarch.org); and Alexander Veronis, “Saint Cosmas Aitolos” / Missionaries, Monks, and Martyrs. (The school categories and the conservative figures.)
Encyclopedia of Religion, entry on Kosmas Aitolos. (The scholarly order of magnitude for the schools.)
Orthodox Missionary Fraternity (Thessaloniki) and John Sanidopoulos (johnsanidopoulos.com), devotional accounts. (The larger traditional figures of c. 210 Greek + 1,100 common schools.)