The Content of the Preaching

What Kosmas actually preached, drawn from the Didaches: a Gospel of repentance, the Cross, the love of neighbour, and concrete justice — against usury, against cheating the poor, for confession and reconciliation. It also treats, honestly and with sources, the harder material: his reported statements about Jews and Muslims, which the standard accounts sometimes soften and which Vaporis’s translation omits in part (four anti-Jewish passages were left out). The aim is to report the preaching as the sources give it, neither flattened nor sanitized.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

The Core: Repentance, the Cross, Love

The substance of Kosmas’s preaching, as the Didaches transmit it (on their character as transcribed and possibly embellished sermons, see The Didaches), was a plain and urgent Gospel aimed at the conversion of ordinary lives. Its center was repentance: Kosmas called his hearers to examine their consciences, confess their sins, forgive their enemies, and amend their lives, and he made confession and reconciliation the practical pivot of every visit (Nomikos M. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977, pp. 18–24, 40–60, with the translated Teachings; Constantine Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971).

Repentance for Kosmas was not a mood but a transaction with consequences, and its practical pivot was confession and reconciliation. He pressed his hearers to make a true confession of their sins to a priest, to restore what they had taken unjustly, and above all to be reconciled with those they had wronged or who had wronged them before approaching the mysteries; forgiveness of the neighbour he treated as the indispensable condition of receiving God’s forgiveness, so that a quarrel left standing was, in his preaching, a sin left unrepented (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 18–24, 40–60, with the translated Teachings; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). On this account the fruit of a mission was measured concretely — confessions made, enmities composed, restitution paid, households set in order — and the whole apparatus of his preaching, the crowds, the crosses, the exhortations, bent toward that practical end.

Around repentance he set the Cross of Christ — the great theme he made visible by raising a wooden cross at every preaching-place (see The Method of the Missionary) and taught by instructing the people to make the sign of the Cross rightly and with understanding — and the love of neighbour, which he pressed as the test and proof of love for God (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, with the Teachings; on these themes see Repentance and Love and The Cross and the Poor). The Cross was for Kosmas both proclamation and catechesis. The wooden cross he set up became the pulpit and the altar of the open-air mission, the sign under which the people gathered and to which he returned them; and he gave plain instruction in the sign of the Cross — how to join the fingers, the meaning confessed in the gesture, the Trinity and the Incarnation traced upon the body — so that a movement the people made daily by habit might be made with understanding and faith (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, with the Teachings; see The Cross and the Poor). The love of neighbour he made the touchstone of the whole, teaching that love of God which does not issue in love of the neighbour is empty, and binding the two commandments so tightly that the second became the visible proof of the first. His Christianity was practical and affective: he wanted not assent but changed lives — enemies reconciled, the poor relieved, the faith understood and lived.

Concrete Justice: Against Usury and Injustice

Kosmas’s love-of-neighbour had a sharp social edge. He preached repeatedly and pointedly against usury — the lending at interest that ground down the poor — and against the cheating, exploitation, and injustice by which the strong fed on the weak (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, with the Teachings; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). Usury he treated not as a regrettable necessity of commerce but as a sin against the neighbour, a way of devouring the substance of the poor under the appearance of lawful exchange; and his attack on it stood for a wider indictment of every dealing in which the powerful enriched themselves at the expense of the weak (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, with the Teachings; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos).

From this followed a positive social teaching. He urged honest dealing in the market, true weights and measures, and the payment of just wages to the labourer, so that the worker should not be defrauded of his hire; he pressed the relief of the poor as a duty and not a favour; and he taught the keeping of Sunday as a day of rest and worship rather than of market and gain (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, with the Teachings; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). The Sunday teaching had a social as much as a devotional point: the day of rest protected the poor and the labouring from being worked or traded into the ground without respite, setting a limit, sanctioned by God, on the claims that gain could make upon a person’s life. He directed the wealthy to fund schools, fonts, and charity as the fruit of repentance (see The Method of the Missionary). This concern for the poor, woven through the whole preaching, is what earned him the name by which Vaporis titled his book: the apostle of the poor (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, title and pp. 18–30). The phrase is not merely affectionate. It marks the centre of gravity of his mission: a Gospel addressed first to the unlettered and the hard-pressed, carried to the remote villages the learned neglected, and aimed at lifting the poor by both the relief of their bodies and the schooling and salvation of their souls.

The Harder Material: Statements About Jews and Muslims

A responsible account of Kosmas’s preaching cannot stop at the irenic themes, because the Didaches as transmitted also contain harsh material about non-Christians — Jews and Muslims — and the honest course, prescribed by the repository methodology for sensitive topics (METHODOLOGY §4), is to report this with sources rather than to flatten or sanitize it.

Toward Muslims (the Ottoman “Turks”), the preaching stands in a complex position. Kosmas lived and worked under Ottoman authority, sought and held Ottoman toleration for his mission, and counseled his Christian hearers to live peaceably and to render what was due to the authorities; he is not, in the main, an anti-Muslim polemicist, and part of his caution was simply the prudence required to preach at all under Ottoman rule (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30, 40–60). This political prudence is itself a historical fact about the preaching and not a later apology for it: a missionary moving freely through Ottoman territory, gathering crowds in the thousands, depended on the toleration of officials who could have stopped him at a word, and the restraint of his public language toward the ruling faith was the condition of his being heard at all (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 24–30). At the same time his Christianity was unambiguously confessional: he preached Christ as the one Saviour and the Orthodox faith as the only saving faith, held the non-Christian outside the way of salvation, and the Didaches contain passages that disparage Islam as a false religion (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, with the Teachings). The two facts are not in tension once their orders are distinguished — the prudence governed his public conduct under a Muslim power, the exclusivity expressed the unqualified claim of his Gospel — and both belong to the record.

Toward Jews, the transmitted Didaches contain genuinely anti-Jewish passages — hostile statements that draw on the long and grievous tradition of Christian anti-Judaism, including the association of Jews with the death of Christ and with hostility to Christians. This material is part of what the manuscripts transmit, and it is reported here, with its source, as such (Vaporis, Father Kosmas; the anti-Jewish content is discussed in the scholarly literature on Kosmas, reported per METHODOLOGY §4). It is not endorsed; it is named, because to omit it would be to present a sanitized Kosmas that the sources do not support.

These passages must be set in their proper frame, which neither excuses nor enlarges them. The anti-Judaism they voice was not original to Kosmas but belonged to a long and grievous current running through much of Christian preaching from late antiquity onward — the charge of deicide, the casting of the Jewish people as the type of enmity to Christ — a current the Orthodox Church, with the wider Church, has come in the modern era to repudiate (scholarly discussion of the anti-Jewish passages in the Didaches, per METHODOLOGY §4). To place the passages in that history is to explain their provenance, not to soften their content: they are hostile, they are part of the transmitted preaching, and they are named as such. The repository’s discipline is to report the fact with its source and context, refusing both the suppression that falsifies and the quotation that gives the offensive matter fresh circulation (METHODOLOGY §4). The passages are therefore reported, not reproduced.

Vaporis’s Omission of Four Passages

The editorial history of this material is itself part of the record. Vaporis, in preparing his English translation, omitted four anti-Jewish passages from the Didaches — a deliberate editorial choice not to reproduce the most offensive material in his translation (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, 1977; the omission of four anti-Jewish passages is noted in the scholarly discussion of his translation and of the textual tradition). The present collection notes this omission rather than silently inheriting it. The point is not to circulate the offensive passages, but to be honest about the text and about its handling: the standard English translation is, on this point, an abridged and softened witness, and a reader who relies on Vaporis alone will not know that the omitted material exists. Stating the fact is the methodology’s requirement (METHODOLOGY §4) and the only honest course.

How to hold this together is a matter the Church and its scholars must face squarely. Kosmas is a canonized saint and a genuine apostle of repentance and charity; the Didaches as transmitted also carry anti-Jewish polemic of a kind the Church today rejects. These facts are not reconciled by suppressing either. The saint is venerated for his apostolic labour and his martyrdom; the harsh material is acknowledged as belonging to the transmitted text and to the anti-Judaic currents of his era, neither projected as the heart of his message nor edited out of existence. Sanctity in the Orthodox understanding is not a claim that the saint was free of the errors of his age, but that his life was given to God and bore the fruit of holiness; to venerate Kosmas is not to canonize every sentence the manuscripts place in his mouth, and to acknowledge the harsh passages is not to unmake the saint. The honest course holds both without collapsing either into the other.

The transmission problem compounds the difficulty in a way peculiar to a figure who wrote nothing. Because the Didaches are secondhand and possibly embellished (see The Didaches), the precise extent to which any given hostile passage reproduces Kosmas’s own words rather than a transcriber’s, an early copyist’s, or a later editor’s is itself uncertain (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 30–36, on the secondhand and possibly embellished character of the texts; Menounos, Διδαχές, 1979). This is not an argument that the passages are spurious — they belong to what the tradition transmits, and a disciplined account must own them — but it is a real and double-edged caution: where there is no autograph, no single line can be assigned to Kosmas’s own lips with the certainty that the gravity of the matter would otherwise demand. The uncertainty cuts in more than one direction at once, and it is part of the honest picture rather than an escape from it.

A Preaching of Conversion

Set whole, the content of Kosmas’s preaching is the preaching of a missionary of conversion: repentance, the Cross, love of neighbour, justice for the poor, the maintenance of the faith and its learning — carried in plain speech to vast crowds, and aimed at the remaking of lives. The harder material does not define it, but neither can it be edited out of an honest account. The collection treats the spiritual core in its own section (see Repentance and Love and The Cross and the Poor) and has here set the whole content, including its shadows, in view.

References

Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977. (The core preaching of repentance, the Cross, love of neighbour, and justice against usury; the apostle-of-the-poor framing; the translated Teachings. Vaporis omitted four anti-Jewish passages from his translation — a fact noted, not reproduced, here.)
Menounos, Ioannis. Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία). Athens: Ekdoseis Tinos, 1979. (The critical Greek text, including the difficult passages, on which an honest account of the content depends.)
Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Cosmas Aitolos. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971. (The themes of the preaching.)
Scholarly discussion of the anti-Jewish passages in the Didaches and of Vaporis’s omission of four of them (the secondary literature on Kosmas’s sermons and their editions), reported per METHODOLOGY §4 on sensitive topics.