Glorification 1961

The formal canonization of Kosmas by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 20 April 1961, by which the long-venerated martyr was officially numbered among the saints and given the title Equal-to-the-Apostles (Isapostolos), with his feast fixed on 24 August, the day of his martyrdom. This file treats the act of glorification, the meaning of the title, the long gap between his death and his formal canonization, and his place in the modern Orthodox missionary revival.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

A Long-Venerated Saint Formally Glorified

Kosmas had been venerated as a saint and martyr from soon after his death in 1779 (see The Cult and the Shrine); his disciple Christodoulides had written his Life and service, his relics and crosses were honored, and his cult was strong across the Greek lands. But his formal glorification by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople came only on 20 April 1961, when the Patriarchate officially numbered him among the saints of the Church (Nomikos M. Vaporis, Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977, pp. 38–40; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, Equal of the Apostles, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, August 24). The 1961 act did not create the cult — that had existed for nearly two centuries — but ratified and universalized it, placing Kosmas formally on the Church’s calendar.

The long interval between his death (1779) and his formal canonization (1961) is itself characteristic of Orthodox practice, in which popular veneration ordinarily long precedes and grounds the formal act; glorification confirms a sanctity the Church already recognizes rather than conferring it (cf. the pattern across the repository’s saints’ collections). In Kosmas’s case the formal act came in the twentieth century, amid a renewed Orthodox interest in mission and in the saints of the Tourkokratia.

It is worth dwelling on what this Orthodox pattern means, since it differs markedly from the juridical canonization processes of the Christian West. In the Orthodox understanding, the Church does not make a saint; God makes the saint, and the Church recognizes what God has done. Glorification — the Orthodox term, preferred to “canonization” — is therefore declarative rather than constitutive: it formally numbers among the saints one whom the faithful already venerate, ratifying and universalizing a cult rather than creating it (cf. the pattern across the repository’s saints’ collections). The ordinary marks the Church looks for are precisely those Kosmas’s case displayed in abundance: a holy life, a death that crowns it, a spontaneous and enduring veneration among the people, the witness of relics, and the report of answered prayers (see The Cult and the Shrine; relic and miracle material reported per METHODOLOGY §3.5). Where these are present and the veneration proves durable, the formal act follows in due course — sometimes quickly, sometimes after centuries — and adds the Church’s authoritative confirmation to what the faithful had already discerned.

The length of the interval in Kosmas’s case — nearly two centuries — is therefore not an anomaly to be explained away but a normal range within Orthodox practice, where formal glorification may wait long after a cult is firmly established. Several considerations bore on the timing of the 1961 act in particular. The conditions of the Tourkokratia and its long aftermath were not favorable to the deliberate canonical processes of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, itself laboring under the constraints of its situation; and it was only in the twentieth century, with the revival of Orthodox missionary consciousness and of scholarly and devotional interest in the new-martyrs and the saints of the Ottoman centuries, that the formal recognition of Kosmas came to seem both fitting and timely (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 38–40). The act of 1961 thus gathered up a cult two centuries old and set the Church’s seal upon it at the moment when Kosmas’s particular gifts — as missionary and educator — had become newly significant to the Orthodox world.

The Title Equal-to-the-Apostles

In glorifying him, the Church gave Kosmas the title Equal-to-the-Apostles (Ἰσαπόστολος, Isapostolos) — the high title reserved for those whose labor in spreading or preserving the faith among a people is reckoned to equal that of the first apostles, borne by such figures as Constantine and Helen, Nina of Georgia, Cyril and Methodius, and (later) Nicholas of Japan (on the title and its bearers, see the sibling collections; Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 38–40; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, OCA). The choice of this title is the Church’s own interpretation of Kosmas’s life: it reads his itinerant preaching, his schools, and his keeping of a people in the faith as an apostolic work — the carrying and preserving of the Gospel among a whole nation in danger of losing it — and not, in the first place, as a national or political achievement (see Education, Faith, and Nation and The Ethnomartyr).

This is the load-bearing point about the glorification: the Church honored an apostle and martyr. The title fixes the religious reading of Kosmas as primary, against the national readings that have grown up around him (see Saint and National Symbol). Whatever Kosmas became in the national memory, the Church glorified him for keeping a people in Christ.

The company in which the title places Kosmas is itself instructive, and confirms the apostolic rather than national reading. Those who bear the title Equal-to-the-Apostles are honored for an apostolic work — the bringing or preserving of the Christian faith among a people — and they are drawn from across the nations and centuries without regard to ethnic frontier. Constantine and Helen are honored for the conversion of the empire; Nina (Nino) for the evangelization of Georgia; Cyril and Methodius for the bringing of the faith and the Scriptures to the Slavs; Nicholas of Japan, in modern times, for the planting of the Orthodox Church in Japan (on the title and its bearers, see the sibling collections; Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 38–40). What unites these very different figures is not nationality but the apostolic character of their labor; the title is, by its own logic, supranational. To place Kosmas among them is to read his life by that same measure — as one who carried and preserved the Gospel among a people — and not as the hero of a particular nation. The very title the Greek nation might wish to claim for its own thus turns out to fix the saint’s significance in terms that transcend the nation entirely (see Saint and National Symbol).

This supranational reading is, moreover, peculiarly apt to Kosmas’s own circumstances, which the title quietly honors. He preached and died among the Orthodox of regions now divided by the Greek-Albanian border, addressing Christians not all of whom were Greek (see The Cult and the Shrine). The apostolic title, indifferent to such frontiers, fits a saint whose mission and whose shrine alike straddle them; it names what he shares with the apostles to many peoples rather than what attaches him to one. In this the Church’s chosen title and the historical facts of Kosmas’s mission agree against the narrower national claim.

The Feast of 24 August

Kosmas is commemorated on 24 August, the date of his martyrdom in 1779 (see Arrest and Execution; Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 38–40; Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, OCA). The fixing of the feast on the day of his death follows the ancient martyrological principle by which a martyr’s feast is his dies natalis, the day of his birth into eternal life. The liturgical service used on the feast descends ultimately from the Akolouthia composed by Christodoulides and developed in the later tradition (see The Didaches). That the modern feast-day service should trace back to the disciple who knew the saint gives the commemoration a direct line to the cult’s origin: the hymns sung now in honor of the glorified saint stand in continuity with those first composed within a few years of the martyrdom, so that the formal glorification of 1961 did not replace the early devotion but raised it, with its own ancient texts, into the universal calendar of the Church (see The Cult and the Shrine).

Kosmas and the Modern Missionary Revival

The twentieth-century glorification coincided with, and helped to inspire, a renewed Orthodox interest in mission. Kosmas — the great itinerant missionary, the founder of schools, the apostle of the poor — became a natural patron and model for the modern Orthodox missionary movement, especially in the Greek-speaking world. The Orthodox Missionary Fraternity (Porefthentes) and related movements took him up as an exemplar; he is honored as a patron of Orthodox missionaries and of Orthodox education, and his example has been pressed in the modern revival of external mission (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 36–40; on the missionary reception, see also Scholarship and Editions and the work of Alexander Veronis and others). In this reception the glorification of 1961 marks not only the close of a long-delayed canonical process but the opening of Kosmas’s modern career as a model of Orthodox mission.

The fit between Kosmas and the modern missionary revival was a close one, and explains why he was taken up so readily as its patron. The twentieth-century recovery of Orthodox mission — associated in the Greek world with Porefthentes (“Go ye,” from the Lord’s missionary command) and the Orthodox Missionary Fraternity, and with figures such as Alexander Veronis — sought to recall the Orthodox Church to an apostolic task it had in many places let lapse during the long centuries of survival under hostile rule (Vaporis, Father Kosmas, pp. 36–40; on the missionary reception, see also Scholarship and Editions and the work of Alexander Veronis and others). In Kosmas the movement found a saint who was not a remote ancient figure but a missionary of the modern Orthodox centuries, who had gone out on foot to preach to the neglected and the poor, who had built schools as instruments of the faith, and who had sealed his mission with martyrdom. He offered the revival a model that was at once authentically Orthodox, recent enough to feel near, and concrete in its methods — preaching, teaching, the raising of crosses, the care of the simple faithful.

There is a further fitness, often noticed, in the connection between Kosmas and the leading figure of the modern Orthodox missionary movement, Archbishop Anastasios (Yannoulatos) of Albania, who came out of the missionary fraternities and later, as primate of the resurrected Albanian Church, restored the very land where Kosmas had preached and died (see The Cult and the Shrine). The patron of the modern revival thus presided, in the providence the tradition discerns, over the re-evangelization of the saint’s own mission field. The glorification of 1961 stands near the head of this whole development: it placed the Church’s seal on Kosmas at the moment when his missionary example was most needed, and so helped to set in motion the modern career by which the apostle of the eighteenth-century poor became a model for the Orthodox mission of the twentieth century and after.

The Saint the Church Keeps

The glorification of 1961 is, finally, the Church’s authoritative word on who Kosmas is: an apostle and martyr, Equal-to-the-Apostles, commemorated on the day of his death for Christ. It is this word that orders all the rest — the schools, the prophecies, the ethnomartyr, the national symbol — and keeps them in their place. The man the Church glorified was the missionary of repentance and the martyr of the Cross; that is the saint the Church keeps, and that is the saint this collection has tried, with the methodology’s discipline, to present (see Scholarship and Editions for the sources on which the presentation rests).

See Also

References

  • Vaporis, Nomikos Michael. Father Kosmas, the Apostle of the Poor. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977. (The glorification of 20 April 1961 by the Ecumenical Patriarchate; the title Equal-to-the-Apostles; the feast of 24 August; the missionary reception.)
  • Venerable Cosmas of Aetolia, Equal of the Apostles. Orthodox Church in America (oca.org), August 24. (Glorification 1961; title; feast.)
  • Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Cosmas Aitolos. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1971. (The saint’s standing and veneration.)
  • Veronis, Alexander, and the Orthodox Missionary Fraternity (Porefthentes) literature. (Kosmas as patron and model of modern Orthodox mission.)