The Didaches

The central source-critical problem of the whole tradition: Kosmas wrote nothing himself except some letters, so the Didaches — the “Teachings,” the body of his preaching by which he is chiefly known — survive only as transcribed, possibly embellished sermons in second- and third-hand copies written mostly after his death, with no autograph behind them. This file traces the transmission: the disciple-transcriber Sappheiros Christodoulides, the surviving manuscript families, Menounos’s critical edition of 1979, and Vaporis’s English translation, and what it means to read a saint through such a text.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

A Preacher Who Did Not Write

The most important fact to grasp about the teaching of Kosmas of Aetolia is that he did not write it. Apart from a small number of letters — which survive and are genuinely his own composition — Kosmas left no writings at all; he was an oral preacher, and the Didaches (Διδαχές, “Teachings”) that bear his name are not texts he authored but transcriptions of sermons he spoke (Nomikos M. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977, pp. 30–36; Ioannis Menounos, Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία), Athens: Ekdoseis Tinos, 1979, introduction). This single fact governs everything that can responsibly be said about his teaching, and it must be stated plainly at the outset rather than buried, because the whole authority of the Didaches as evidence for Kosmas depends on how that gap between the spoken sermon and the surviving page is understood.

The sermons were taken down by hearers — disciples and others present at the preaching — and then copied, recopied, gathered, and eventually printed. The texts we have are therefore at one, two, or more removes from Kosmas’s actual words: a hearer’s memory or notes, copied by a scribe, recopied by another, the whole circulating in variant forms and gathered into collections mostly after his death in 1779 (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 30–36; Menounos, Διδαχές, introduction). No autograph of any sermon exists, because none was ever written by Kosmas; and the earliest witnesses are copies, not originals.

The Problem of Embellishment

It follows that the Didaches cannot be treated as a verbatim record. The transcribers were not stenographers; they wrote down what they remembered or understood, in their own words as much as Kosmas’s, and later copyists smoothed, expanded, and adapted as copyists do. Vaporis, the translator who has worked most closely with the texts in English, states the caution directly: the surviving sermons may have been “embellished” — elaborated and improved in the course of transmission — so that they convey the substance and spirit of Kosmas’s preaching faithfully but cannot be relied on word-for-word as his (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 30–36, where he discusses the embellishment and the secondhand character of the manuscripts). This is the translator’s own warning, not an external skeptic’s, and it sets the proper confidence level for every quotation from the Didaches: the teaching is Kosmas’s in its themes and tenor; the exact wording is the tradition’s.

This is precisely the situation the repository methodology anticipates for figures “known mainly through compiled sayings” and oral tradition: where the earliest written attestation is late or the transmission chain is weak, the provenance is to be stated as a topic, not hidden as an embarrassment (METHODOLOGY §2.4, §3.5). The Didaches are the flagship case of this discipline in the present collection. They are quoted throughout as what the tradition has transmitted of Kosmas’s preaching, with the transmission named, rather than as a transcript.

The Mechanics of Oral-to-Written Transmission

It is worth being concrete about how a spoken sermon becomes a written page, because the abstraction “secondhand” conceals several distinct steps, each of which introduces its own kind of distance from the original. Kosmas preached extempore, in the open air, to crowds that ran into the thousands, often repeating the same matter from village to village over a mission of some twenty years; there was no single fixed text even in his own mouth, but a body of recurring themes, images, and exhortations delivered afresh on each occasion (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 18–36). What a hearer carried away was therefore not the sermon but an impression of it — a remembered substance, caught in the hearer’s own idiom and ordered by the hearer’s own memory.

That impression then had to be committed to writing, and here a second distance opens. The writing-down was an act of composition, not of recording, in which the transcriber supplied connective tissue, rounded off sentences Kosmas may have left unfinished, and rendered into continuous prose what had been heard as living speech (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 30–36; Menounos, Διδαχές, introduction, on the secondhand and reconstructed character of the witnesses). A third distance opens in copying, as each scribe who reproduced a sermon introduced the ordinary alterations of manuscript culture — slips, harmonizations, and the deliberate “improvement” that Vaporis names as embellishment. Between Kosmas’s voice and the printed Didaches there stand, then, at least these three operations — hearing, writing-down, and recopying — and frequently more, since most surviving copies are copies of copies. The text is not falsified by this process, but it is mediated by it at every point, and that mediation is the reason no single sentence can carry the weight of an autograph.

Sappheiros Christodoulides and the First Lives

The transmission has a known beginning. Kosmas’s first biographer was his disciple Sappheiros Christodoulides, who composed an early Life (Akolouthia / Vios) of the saint not long after his death, and whose work stands at the head of the biographical tradition and is bound up with the early circulation of the teachings (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 31–36; Menounos, Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία), introduction; Constantine Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971). Christodoulides, as a disciple who had known Kosmas, is the most authoritative of the early witnesses, but he too wrote after the fact and shaped his material hagiographically; his Life is a source to be read critically, not a neutral record.

From Christodoulides and the other early transcribers the Didaches descended in several manuscript families — variant collections of sermons, overlapping but not identical, copied across the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and eventually finding their way into print in various nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions of uneven critical quality (Menounos, Διδαχές, introduction, which surveys the manuscript tradition; Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 31–36). For a long time no edition rested on a proper study of the whole manuscript tradition, and the printed Didaches circulated in forms whose textual basis was unclear.

To speak of “manuscript families” is to name the grouping that textual scholars use when copies of a work descend along separate lines and accumulate distinctive readings as they go. A family is a cluster of manuscripts that share a common ancestor and therefore share its peculiarities — its omissions, additions, and characteristic wordings — over against the readings preserved in clusters descending from a different ancestor (Menounos, Διδαχές, introduction, on the grouping of the witnesses). With the Didaches the families diverge for reasons rooted in the very mode of their origin. Because there was no single authoritative original to which every copy could be referred, but rather a body of repeated oral preaching captured in independent acts of transcription, different witnesses sometimes preserve genuinely different sermons, different orderings of the same material, and longer or shorter versions of the same exhortation — differences that may go back not to scribal error but to the variety of the preaching itself or to the choices of different early transcribers (Menounos, Διδαχές, introduction; Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 30–36). The practical consequence is that there is no one Didaches but a tradition of Didaches, and that establishing what Kosmas’s hearers transmitted requires first sorting the families and weighing their testimony — exactly the labor that no edition undertook before Menounos.

Reading a Saint Through Secondhand Text

The discipline this demands is one the repository methodology treats as a general problem and not a local embarrassment. To read a saint through a secondhand text is to hold two truths at once: that the text is a real and often the only witness to the saint’s mind, and that it is a witness mediated by others whose hands cannot be fully separated from his (METHODOLOGY §2.4, §3.5). One temptation is to collapse this distance, building doctrine, biography, or polemic on the precise wording of sentences whose precise wording is exactly what the transmission cannot guarantee; the opposite is to treat the mediation as fatal and the witness as worthless. Neither serves the truth (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The middle course is to receive the Didaches as substantially reliable evidence for the shape of Kosmas’s preaching — its themes, pastoral aims, and characteristic emphases, all attested across the tradition and cohering with the independently witnessed facts of his mission — while declining to rest any claim on the unsupported wording of a single line (METHODOLOGY §2.4, §3.5; Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 30–36). It governs not only what may be quoted but with what confidence, and it bears with particular force on the most sensitive material, where the question of whose words are being read is gravest of all (see The Content of the Preaching).

Menounos’s Critical Edition (1979)

The decisive scholarly advance came with Ioannis Menounos, whose Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία) (Athens, 1979) is the standard Greek critical edition of the Didaches, the first to base the text on a systematic study of the surviving manuscripts and to supply a critical apparatus and a scholarly biographical introduction (Menounos, Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία), 1979; on its standing, see Scholarship and Editions). Menounos’s edition is what makes a disciplined reading of the Didaches possible: it distinguishes the better-attested material from the weaker, sorts the manuscript families, and gives the modern reader a text whose transmission is documented rather than assumed. Any serious citation of the Didaches now runs through Menounos.

What a critical apparatus supplies, and why it matters here, deserves to be made explicit. An apparatus is the editor’s record, set beside the text, of the variant readings found in the several witnesses: where the manuscripts disagree, it reports which copies read one way and which another, so that a reader is shown not a single smoothed text presented as beyond question, but the actual range of what the tradition transmits and the editor’s grounds for one reading over another (Menounos, Διδαχές, 1979, whose apparatus and introduction document the manuscript evidence). For a body of literature as fluid as the Didaches this converts the transmission problem from a vague caution into a documented and inspectable thing: a reader can see whether a phrase rests on the whole tradition or on a single late copy, whether a passage is firmly attested or marginal, whether a striking wording is the consensus of the witnesses or the peculiarity of one family. Without such an apparatus every quotation stands on equal and unexamined footing; with it, the confidence proper to each can be measured.

Vaporis’s English Translation (1977)

For the English reader the standard access is Nomikos M. Vaporis’s Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor (1977), which prints a biography of Kosmas together with an English translation of the Teachings and the Letters (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, 1977). Vaporis’s translation is the one cited throughout this collection for the English wording of the Didaches; it is also the work in which the embellishment-caution is most clearly stated for English readers, and — as discussed in The Content of the Preaching — the work in which certain difficult passages (notably four anti-Jewish passages) were omitted, a choice that the present collection notes rather than reproduces silently. Vaporis’s translation slightly predates Menounos’s critical edition, a fact relevant to the textual basis of the English version (see Scholarship and Editions).

The chronology is small but consequential. Vaporis published in 1977, Menounos in 1979, and so the standard English translation appeared two years before the standard Greek critical edition (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, 1977; Menounos, Διδαχές, 1979). Vaporis therefore could not have worked from Menounos’s critically established text, because it did not yet exist; he translated from the printed Didaches available to him, the very editions whose textual basis the later critical work would put on a firmer footing. This does not impugn Vaporis’s translation, which remains the standard and substantially faithful English access to the teaching, but it does mean that the English reader is at one further remove still: reading a translation, made before the critical edition, of texts that were themselves secondhand transcriptions of oral preaching (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 30–36; Menounos, Διδαχές, introduction). Where a particular wording bears weight, the Greek critical text — not the prior English translation — is the court of appeal.

How to Read the Didaches

The upshot is a discipline of reading. The Didaches are an indispensable and substantially trustworthy witness to what Kosmas preached — his themes, his images, his pastoral aims, the shape of his Christianity — and they are quoted in this collection for exactly that. But they are not a transcript, and no argument should be built on the precise wording of a single sentence as if Kosmas had penned it. The teaching is approached, throughout, as the well-attested substance of a great oral mission transmitted by its hearers, with the transmission held in view; the prophecies attributed to Kosmas, whose transmission is weaker and whose later accretion is heavier, are treated with even greater caution in their own place (see The Prophecies and Their Transmission).

References

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 critical apparatus, survey of the manuscript tradition, and biographical introduction.)
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 English translation of the Teachings and Letters; the explicit caution that the sermons may have been “embellished” and survive in second-/third-hand copies; Christodoulides as first biographer.)
Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Cosmas Aitolos. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971. (Christodoulides and the early biographical tradition.)
METHODOLOGY.md §2.4, §3.5 (the repository discipline for compiled sayings, oral tradition, and late attestation).