Naxos and the Holy Mountain (1749–1775)

The first twenty-six years of the future saint: his birth on the Cycladic island of Naxos in 1749 as Nikolaos Kallivourtsis, his first schooling under his parish priest and under Archimandrite Chrysanthos (brother of St. Cosmas of Aetolia), his higher education at the Evangelical School of Smyrna where he mastered Greek, Latin, Italian, and French, his return to Naxos amid Ottoman disturbance, and the decisive journey of 1775 to Mount Athos, where he was tonsured at the Monastery of Dionysiou and received the name Nikodemos.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

Naxos and a Name

The man the Church would come to call Nicodemus the Hagiorite — “of the Holy Mountain” — was born on the island of Naxos, the largest of the Cyclades, in the Aegean, into a pious Greek family living under Ottoman rule. In Holy Baptism he was named Nikolaos; the family surname is given in the sources as Kallivourtsis (also transliterated Kallivroutsis or Kallivourtzis) (Constantine Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974; Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki).

The year of his birth is given as 1749 in the great majority of the sources, and this is the date carried by the standard reference works [Disputed: most sources, including OrthodoxWiki and the Cavarnos tradition, give 1749 (so that he reposed in 1809 “at the age of sixty”); the Orthodox Church in America’s synaxarion gives 1748 (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, oca.org). The one-year divergence follows from differing reckonings of his age at death; this guide follows the majority 1749, noting the alternative]. From childhood, the sources agree, he was marked by an extraordinary memory and an appetite for learning that would define his entire life’s work (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, July 14).

First Schooling

His earliest instruction came, as was usual, from his parish priest, who taught him his letters and the rudiments of the faith. He then studied under Archimandrite Chrysanthos of Aetolia — the brother of the great equal-to-the-apostles St. Cosmas of Aetolia, the wandering preacher and martyr of the Greek enlightenment-under-bondage — who taught the boy “sacred and secular letters” (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, oca.org). The connection is more than incidental: Nicodemus was formed from boyhood within the same movement of Greek Orthodox renewal that produced Cosmas, a renewal that sought, under Turkish rule, to keep alive both the Greek letters and the living faith of the Fathers (on the broader pattern, see The Athonite Renewal).

The Evangelical School of Smyrna

For higher studies the gifted young man was sent across the Aegean to Smyrna (modern İzmir), to the celebrated Evangelical School (Evangelikē Scholē), one of the foremost Greek institutions of learning in the Ottoman world. There, over roughly five years, he studied theology together with ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, and French (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki; Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite). This curriculum is of the first importance for everything that followed. The command of Latin and Italian would, decades later, give him direct access to the Western Catholic devotional books he would adapt into Greek (see Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises); the mastery of patristic and classical Greek would equip him to edit the vast corpus of the Fathers that became the Philokalia, the Rudder, and the rest.

His studies at Smyrna were cut short. Amid the disturbances and reprisals that attended the Ottoman world in the years around the Russo-Turkish war and the Orlov revolt (the early 1770s), the young Nikolaos returned to Naxos, the sources placing the return around 1770 (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki). For a time he served as a secretary to the Metropolitan of Paros and Naxos, putting his learning to the Church’s use while the call to the monastic life ripened.

The Turn to the Monastic Life

What turned Nikolaos decisively toward the Holy Mountain was, the tradition records, his meeting with monks formed in the renewal then stirring on Athos. He encountered three monks of the circle that would become the Kollyvades — among them, the sources name, Gregory, Niphon, and Arsenios — whose example of the strict, traditional, prayer-centered Athonite life drew him powerfully (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite; Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki). He also came under the influence of the towering figures of the movement, St. Makarios (Notaras) of Corinth and St. Silvester of Caesarea, whose acquaintance pointed him toward Athos and toward the editorial vocation that awaited him there.

Mount Athos and the Name Nikodemos

In 1775, at the age of twenty-six, Nikolaos crossed to Mount Athos and entered the Monastery of Dionysiou, on the southwestern coast of the peninsula. There he was tonsured a monk and received the name by which the Church remembers him — Nikodemos (Nicodemus) (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, oca.org; Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki; Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite). His first obedience at Dionysiou was, fittingly, secretarial — the keeping of the monastery’s correspondence — a task that set him at once at the desk where he would spend his life.

He had arrived at the precise moment, and in the precise company, that his gifts required. The Holy Mountain in the 1770s was the seedbed of the Kollyvades renewal, a movement of return to the Fathers and the liturgical tradition (see The Athonite Renewal). Within two years St. Makarios of Corinth would arrive bearing a manuscript he had found at Vatopedi, and would set the young, learned, retentive monk to the labor that became the Philokalia (see Compiling the Philokalia). The boy from Naxos with the prodigious memory had become the Hagiorite editor on whom the renewal would depend.

Naxos Under Ottoman Rule

To understand the world that formed Nikolaos Kallivourtsis, one must picture the condition of an Aegean island under the long Ottoman dominion. Naxos, the largest and most fertile of the Cyclades, had been a center of Greek and Venetian life for centuries before the Turkish conquest, and even under Ottoman rule it retained a vigorous Orthodox population alongside a Latin Catholic minority left from the old Venetian Duchy of the Archipelago. The Cycladic islands, lying at the maritime margins of the empire, often enjoyed a measure of administrative looseness that the mainland did not, and within that space the local Church carried much of the ordinary burden of communal life — schooling, charity, the keeping of records, the marking of the year by its feasts and fasts (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki; Constantine Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974). It was a piety lived close to the parish and close to the soil: the round of the liturgical seasons, the cult of the local saints, the home and the church as the two poles of a Christian life conducted under a non-Christian sovereign. From such a world a boy went out to learn his letters from the parish priest, and into such a world the deeper currents of Greek Orthodox renewal reached even the small islands.

The Greek Enlightenment Under Bondage

The eighteenth century was, for the enslaved Greek nation, a period historians have called the era of the Diaphotismos — a Greek “enlightenment,” but one carried on “under bondage,” within and against the conditions of Ottoman subjection (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite). It was an age of reviving Greek letters: of new schools, of teachers who travelled from town to town, of the slow recovery of an educated class that had nearly disappeared in the bleakest centuries after the fall of Constantinople. This revival had two faces, and the tension between them runs straight through the life of Nicodemus. One face turned toward the West and toward secular reason, drawing on the European Enlightenment and pressing for the reform and modernization of Greek thought. The other was an ecclesial and patristic revival — a return to the Fathers, the liturgy, and the inner life of prayer — that sought to renew the nation precisely by renewing its Orthodoxy (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki). Nicodemus belonged wholly to this second movement, yet, formed in the schools of the first, he commanded its learning and its languages and could meet it on its own ground. His teacher Archimandrite Chrysanthos, brother of St. Cosmas of Aetolia, stood squarely within the ecclesial renewal — the same renewal that sent Cosmas tramping the villages of Greece to found schools and rekindle the faith (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, July 14). Nicodemus’s later vocation, the gathering and printing of the patristic inheritance, is unintelligible apart from this larger struggle to keep a Christian people Christian and Greek under the conditions of captivity.

Smyrna as a Center of Learning

Smyrna, on the Anatolian coast, was in the eighteenth century one of the great commercial and intellectual capitals of the Greek world — a teeming port where Greek merchants, Western consuls, and the cosmopolitan traffic of the Levant met. Its prosperity supported a corresponding flourishing of Greek education, and the Evangelical School, where Nikolaos studied for some five years, ranked among the foremost Greek institutions of the age (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki; Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite). A school of this kind offered the gifted islander what no parish or provincial teacher could: a systematic curriculum in theology and in the ancient and modern languages, exposure to the contending intellectual currents of the day, and the company of other able young Greeks. The languages he acquired there — Latin, Italian, and French alongside the Greek of the Fathers and the classics — were not ornamental. They were the very instruments his vocation would later require, granting him direct access both to the Western devotional literature he would adapt into Greek and to the whole patristic corpus he would edit. That a future Athonite hesychast should have been so thoroughly schooled in the learning of his time is one of the quiet providences of his story.

Tonsure and the Change of Name

When Nikolaos crossed to the Holy Mountain in 1775 and was tonsured at Dionysiou, receiving the name Nikodemos, he passed through one of the most ancient and weighty rites of the Eastern Church (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, oca.org). Monastic tonsure is reckoned in Orthodox tradition a second baptism — a death to the old life and a rebirth into the angelic life of repentance — and the cutting of the hair signifies the offering of the whole self in obedience to God. The giving of a new name belongs to the heart of this symbolism: as the convert is buried with Christ in baptism and rises a new creature, so the monk lays down the name and identity of his life in the world and takes up a new name as a sign that he now belongs wholly to God. That the boy Nikolaos of Naxos should become the monk Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain was thus no mere change of label but the outward seal of an inner self-offering. The name “Nikodemos” itself — recalling the cautious night-visitor of the Gospel who came at last to confess Christ openly — would be carried by its bearer into a life of labor utterly hidden and yet, in its fruits, utterly public.

See Also

References

  • Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite (Modern Orthodox Saints, vol. 3). Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974. The standard English-language life-and-works; for the Naxos birth, the Smyrna education, the languages, and the arrival on Athos.
  • Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, Lives of the Saints, July 14. (Birth on Naxos; Archimandrite Chrysanthos, brother of St. Cosmas of Aetolia, as teacher; tonsure at Dionysiou; age sixty at death in 1809.)
  • Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (Surname Kallivourtsis; the Evangelical School of Smyrna and the languages; return to Naxos c. 1770; entry to Dionysiou 1775; the Kollyvades context.)
  • Nicodemus the Hagiorite. Wikipedia (used to locate dates; chronology cross-checked against the OCA and OrthodoxWiki accounts): born 1749 on Naxos; Mount Athos 1775; Dionysiou; died 14 July 1809; canonized 31 May 1955.
  • Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite. Encyclopædia Britannica, britannica.com. (Athonite monk, theologian, and anthologist; the Philokalia with Makarios of Corinth.)