The Cross and the Poor

Two intertwined pillars of Kosmas’s teaching: the Cross of Christ, which he made the visible center of every preaching-place and the heart of his catechesis, and his special love for the poor, which turned the commandment of neighbour-love into concrete justice — against usury, against exploitation, for the relief of the needy. It treats the theology of the Cross in his preaching, his teaching on the sign of the Cross, and the social conscience that earned him the name “apostle of the poor.”

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

The Cross at the Center

Kosmas made the Cross of Christ the literal and figurative center of his mission. Literally: at every preaching-place he had the people raise a tall wooden cross, set his stool before it, and preach in its shadow, leaving the cross standing when he moved on (see The Method of the Missionary). Figuratively: the Cross was the hinge of his catechesis, the sign in which he summed the whole economy of salvation — the love of God shown in the crucified Christ, the means of redemption, the standard under which the Christian lives and dies (Nomikos M. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977, pp. 19–24, 40–60; Constantine Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971).

The standing wooden cross gave his whole method a visible theology. The crowd did not gather around the preacher but around the Cross, and the preacher placed himself beneath it as one more servant of the Crucified; when he departed the Cross remained, a permanent sermon left rooted in the village, marking the place where repentance had been preached and reconciliation made (see The Method of the Missionary; Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 19–24). The literal and the figurative centre were thus the same: the wood raised in the field proclaimed the same economy of salvation that the catechesis unfolded in words, so that the eye and the ear received one message. The Cross was where God’s love met the world, and Kosmas would have his hearers stand, quite physically, in that place.

He is especially remembered for teaching the people to make the sign of the Cross rightly — slowly, with the fingers correctly joined, and with understanding of what each motion confesses (the Trinity, the Incarnation, the death and descent and resurrection of Christ) (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, with the translated Teachings; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). In a population where the faith was decaying into unreflective rote (see Founding the Schools), teaching the right and conscious making of the Cross was a way of putting the whole confession of faith into a gesture every Christian made many times a day — catechesis carried in the hand.

He drew out the meaning of the gesture motion by motion, so that the hand should confess what the mind believed. The joining of the three fingers proclaimed the Trinity, one God in three Persons; the bringing of the hand from the head, where the divinity dwells, down to the body confessed the Incarnation, God come down to take flesh; and the movement across the shoulders gathered up the death, the descent into Hades, and the Resurrection by which Christ redeemed the world (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, with the translated Teachings; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). A people who could not read could thus carry the whole creed in their right hand and rehearse it many times a day; the most ordinary act of Orthodox piety became, under his teaching, a conscious confession of the central mysteries of the faith. To make the Cross rightly was to preach the Gospel to oneself, and Kosmas would not let so great a sermon be made carelessly or by rote.

The Cross as the Christian’s Standard

Beyond the catechesis, the Cross was for Kosmas the pattern of the Christian life: the way of self-denial, patience under suffering, and love poured out — the way he himself would follow to a literal cross-shaped death by hanging in Albania (see Arrest and Execution). He preached to a people under a heavy and often cruel servitude, and the Cross gave that suffering meaning: not a misfortune to be merely endured but a participation in Christ’s own suffering, to be borne in faith and turned toward repentance and love (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 40–60). The theology of the Cross and the social teaching meet here: the crucified Christ is both the object of the people’s faith and the model of the love they owe one another.

This was a teaching of immense pastoral weight for a subject people. The Greeks Kosmas addressed lived in a bondage they had not chosen and could not throw off, and the temptation before them was either despair or the apostasy that promised relief; the Cross answered both. By setting the people’s hardship within the suffering of Christ, Kosmas gave them a way to carry it that was neither resignation nor revolt but participation — a suffering joined to the Lord’s own and so made redemptive rather than merely bitter (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 40–60; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). The patience he urged was not passivity; it was the active bearing of one’s cross in faith, the refusal to be broken into despair or sin by affliction, and it stood alongside his summons to repentance and love as part of one Christian standard. The same Cross that taught the meaning of suffering also forbade self-pity and idleness, for the one who takes up his cross must deny himself and love his neighbour as he goes.

The Apostle of the Poor

The other pillar is Kosmas’s love for the poor, so central that Vaporis made it the title of the standard biography. Kosmas’s whole social teaching flowed from the commandment of neighbour-love (see Repentance and Love) into concrete defense of the weak: he preached pointedly against usury, the lending at interest that crushed poor debtors; against cheating, exploitation, and the injustices by which the strong fed on the weak; and for honest dealing, just wages, the relief of the needy, and the keeping of Sunday as a day of rest that protected the poor from being worked or traded into the ground (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 40–60; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos; see also The Content of the Preaching).

The condemnation of usury stood at the centre of this social preaching because it was the instrument by which the poor were most efficiently destroyed. Lending at interest could turn a single bad harvest into a permanent bondage, the debtor’s land and labour and even his children swallowed up to feed a debt that never shrank; against this Kosmas preached without softening, naming the practice a cruelty dressed as commerce (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 40–60; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos). Beside it he set the demand for honest weights and dealing, for just wages to the labourer, and for the keeping of Sunday — for the day of rest was itself a protection of the poor, a barrier against the masters and merchants who would otherwise have worked or traded them without ceasing (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 40–60). His social teaching was thus not a vague benevolence but a series of concrete commandments, each one a guard set around the weak at the precise point where the strong were accustomed to prey on them.

Vaporis’s title, the Apostle of the Poor, fixes the centre of gravity of the whole mission, and rightly. Kosmas was no social agitator setting class against class; he was an apostle, calling all to repentance, but his Gospel had a manifest preference for the small, and the practical edge of his preaching fell most heavily on the injustices the poor suffered (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 18–30, 40–60). He directed this teaching at both ends of the social order. To the poor he preached dignity, patience, and the love of God in their hardship; to the well-off he preached the duty of charity, urging them to fund schools, fonts, and the relief of the needy as the fruit of repentance — turning the wealth of the few into the instruction and relief of the many (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 18–30). He did not denounce wealth as such, but he stripped it of any innocence that did not issue in mercy: the rich man’s repentance was to be measured by what his riches now did for the poor. The schools themselves were, in part, an act of this social love: literacy for the poor, the safeguard of their faith and a measure of their advancement (see Education, Faith, and Nation).

Cross and Poor Together

The two pillars are finally one teaching. The Cross of Christ is the love of God poured out for the world; the love of the poor is that same love poured out through the Christian into the world. To venerate the Cross rightly, in Kosmas’s preaching, was to take up its pattern — to deny oneself, to bear suffering, and to love the neighbour, above all the poor neighbour, in deed (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 40–60). There is no seam between the doctrine and the social conscience, because both are the single descending love of God: at the Cross that love is given to the world, and in the Christian who has received it that same love is passed on to the neighbour who needs it. The man who venerated the Cross with his lips but lent to the poor at usury had, by Kosmas’s measure, understood neither the Cross nor his neighbour; the man who relieved the poor had begun to grasp what the Cross meant. The catechesis of the Cross and the defence of the poor were one continuous movement of charity, flowing from God through the Crucified into the Christian and out through his hands into the world (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 40–60; Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos).

His own death sealed the unity: the apostle of the poor died on a gallows, his preaching of the Cross completed by his sharing in it (see The Ethnomartyr). The end of his life made literal what his whole mission had taught — that to follow the Crucified is finally to be crucified with him, and that the love poured out from the Cross is poured out to the last. He had raised a wooden cross in every village and loved the poor in every village; in the end he was himself lifted up, so that the standard he had preached and the love he had practised were joined in his own person. The Cross he raised in every village and the poor he loved in every village were, in the end, the same Gospel preached two ways.

References

Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977. (The centrality of the Cross; the teaching on the sign of the Cross; the love of the poor; the preaching against usury and injustice; the funding of charity and schools by the well-off; the apostle-of-the-poor framing.)
Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Cosmas Aitolos. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971. (The theology of the Cross and the social conscience in the preaching.)
Menounos, Ioannis. Κοσμᾶ τοῦ Αἰτωλοῦ Διδαχές (καὶ Βιογραφία). Athens: Ekdoseis Tinos, 1979. (The critical text of the sermons containing these themes.)