The Formation of an Editor

How a monk became the great editor of the Orthodox East: the prodigious memory and the languages that contemporaries marvelled at, the move from Dionysiou to the skete of Pantokrator under Elder Arsenios, the ascetic and prayerful monastic life within which the editorial labors were undertaken, and the distinctive vocation — not preaching, not governance, but the gathering and publishing of the patristic and liturgical inheritance — that defined St. Nicodemus.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

A Memory Out of the Ordinary

Every account of Nicodemus dwells on his memory, and the tradition presents it as the natural instrument of his vocation. His contemporaries reported that he “knew the Holy Scriptures by heart, and even remembered chapter, verse, and the pages they were on,” and that “he could recite long passages from the writings of the Holy Fathers from memory” (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, July 14). Cavarnos, gathering the early testimonies, records the same: a near-photographic recall of texts that allowed Nicodemus to work, edit, and cross-reference at a speed and scale that astonished those around him (Constantine Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974). Per METHODOLOGY §3.5, these accounts are reported as the hagiographic and biographical tradition attests them, not certified as measurable fact; but they are unanimous, and they explain how one monk, in a single working life of some thirty years, could produce or edit the immense library of works that bears his name.

To the memory was joined the learning gathered at Smyrna: theology, the Greek of the Fathers and the classics, and the Latin, Italian, and French that gave him access to Western books (see Naxos and the Holy Mountain). The combination was rare on the Holy Mountain — a monk equally at home in Evagrius and in a sixteenth-century Venetian devotional manual — and it is the precondition of the whole achievement.

From Dionysiou to Pantokrator

Nicodemus’s first years on Athos were not spent in scholarly isolation. After his initial obediences at Dionysiou, he moved to the Skete of Pantokrator (Kapsala, near Karyes), where he lived under obedience to Elder Arsenios of the Peloponnese, “under whose guidance he studied Holy Scriptures and the writings of the Holy Fathers” (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, oca.org). The detail matters: the editor was first a disciple. His immersion in the Fathers was not merely academic but ascetic and obediential, undertaken within the discipline of the spiritual life and under a guide, exactly as the books he would later publish insist the spiritual life must be (see the treatment of guidance in Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction). He attained in time the Great Schema (megaloschemos), the highest grade of the monastic life (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki).

For long stretches he lived as a hesychast in a small cell (kelli), in poverty and stillness, giving the night to prayer and the day to the pen — copying, collating, correcting, annotating. The picture the sources give is consistent: a quiet, retiring, intensely industrious monk, sought out by others for counsel and for the loan of his learning, but himself happiest at the desk in his cell.

The Vocation of the Editor

It is worth pausing on the singularity of Nicodemus’s calling, because it is the key to his sanctity. The Orthodox calendar is full of bishops, martyrs, ascetics, and wonderworkers; Nicodemus is none of these in the usual sense. He held no see, founded no monastery, led no army of disciples. His was a vocation of the desk — of gathering. The eighteenth-century Orthodox world under Ottoman rule had lost much: manuscripts were scattered, decaying, or inaccessible; the great patristic and liturgical inheritance lay unpublished and unread; the living transmission of the hesychast tradition had thinned almost to a thread. Nicodemus’s life’s work was to gather that inheritance, put it in order, annotate it for use, and get it into print — through the Greek presses of Venice, the publishing capital of the Orthodox East under Turkish rule (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite; on the works, see Compiling the Philokalia and The Rudder).

This is editing raised to the level of a spiritual vocation. To choose what to include, to establish a text from corrupt manuscripts, to supply the introductions and notes that make a difficult Father usable — these are acts of judgment, of diakrisis (discernment), and Nicodemus performed them with a confidence rooted in his total saturation in the tradition. He did not merely transcribe; he interpreted, framed, and applied. The Rudder is canon law made usable by his commentary; the Philokalia is the hesychast corpus made into a coherent course of formation by his selection and arrangement (see The Patristic Mind).

The Working Conditions

The labor was carried on under real privation. Nicodemus worked without the resources of a university library, dependent on the manuscripts of the Athonite monasteries (it was a manuscript found by St. Makarios at Vatopedi in 1777 that became the Philokalia; see Compiling the Philokalia). Printing meant sending texts across the sea to Venice and entrusting them to publishers and patrons, with all the delays, expense, and loss of control that involved. Several of his works appeared only after long waits or posthumously, and the printed texts sometimes departed from his intentions — a problem that would attach, in particular, to the Rudder (see The Rudder).

Toward the very end of his life, infirm and worn by his labors, Nicodemus went to live at the kelli of the iconographers, the hieromonks Stephen and Neophytos Skourtaioi, who cared for him; there he reposed on 14 July 1809 (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, oca.org). The whole of that life had been given to a single end: that the Orthodox faithful — monks first, but laypeople too — should have the Fathers in their hands. The chapters that follow take up the works themselves.

The Cell and the Discipline of Obedience

The framework within which all of Nicodemus’s editing was carried out was the framework of Athonite monasticism: the cell, the rule of prayer, and obedience to an elder. These are not incidental circumstances but the very soil in which the work grew. In the Orthodox monastic tradition the kelli — the small cell or hermitage where a monk lives, often with one or two others, under the authority of a senior monastery — is not a retreat from the spiritual struggle but its arena; the cell is where the monk wrestles, prays, and is slowly remade (Constantine Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974). Within the skete of Pantokrator Nicodemus lived precisely this life, and his immersion in the Fathers proceeded under the obedience he owed to Elder Arsenios (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, July 14). Obedience, in the Orthodox understanding, is no mere external compliance but the chosen cutting-off of one’s own will, the root remedy for the self-love the Fathers diagnose as the source of the passions; it is the school in which discernment is learned. That the great editor was first and throughout a man under obedience is the guarantee that his learning never became merely his own possession. He read the Fathers as a disciple within the life they describe, not as a scholar inspecting them from outside, and it is this that gives his editions their inward authority (see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction).

Greek Printing in Venice

The material precondition of Nicodemus’s whole achievement was the existence, far from the Holy Mountain, of the Greek presses of Venice. From the sixteenth century onward Venice had become the publishing capital of the Orthodox East: under Ottoman rule the enslaved Greek lands had no presses of their own adequate to the task, and it was the Greek community of Venice and its printing houses that supplied the service books, the lives of the saints, and the patristic editions on which the Church under bondage depended (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite). For an Athonite editor this meant that publication was an undertaking of remarkable difficulty. A manuscript prepared in a cell on the Holy Mountain had to be sent across the sea, entrusted to printers and to the lay patrons who financed the work, and then awaited — sometimes for years — with the author powerless to oversee the press. Texts could be delayed, altered, or printed only after their editor’s death, and the labor of correction could not always reach across that distance (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki). To grasp this is to measure the cost of the work: every printed volume that bears Nicodemus’s hand represents not only the editing but the long patience of committing a finished text to a process he could not control, in the conviction that the Fathers must reach the faithful whatever the obstacles.

Memory in the Patristic Tradition

It is worth setting Nicodemus’s celebrated memory within the spiritual meaning that the patristic tradition itself gives to memory, for the two are not unrelated. In the neptic literature he spent his life editing, mneme — memory, remembrance — is a central spiritual category: the “remembrance of God” (mneme Theou) is the soul’s continual turning toward its Lord, and the “remembrance of death” is among the foundational disciplines of the monastic life. Memory, in this tradition, is not a neutral faculty but a power to be purified and rightly directed, so that what fills the mind is God and the things of God rather than the images of the passions (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite). Nicodemus’s prodigious natural recall of Scripture and the Fathers thus found its proper end: a memory saturated with the sacred texts is the very condition the neptic Fathers prescribe for the inner life, and in him the gift and the discipline coincided. The man who could recite long passages of the Fathers from memory had made his mind a storehouse of exactly the kind the tradition prizes — and from that storehouse the editions flowed (Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite, oca.org).

The Editor as a Vocation

Finally, it is worth dwelling further on the singularity of the calling itself, for the editor-as-saint is a rare figure in the calendar. The Church readily recognizes the holiness of the martyr who dies, the bishop who governs, the ascetic who fasts, the wonderworker who heals. The sanctity of one who spends thirty years at a desk, collating manuscripts and supplying notes, is harder to see — and yet the tradition came to see it clearly, glorifying Nicodemus in 1955 (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki). The vocation of the editor, in his hands, was a genuine form of love of neighbor and of the Church: to gather what was scattered, to mend what was corrupt, to make usable what had become inaccessible, and so to feed the people of God with the bread of the Fathers. It demanded the ascetic virtues no less than any other calling — patience, humility, self-effacement, the willingness to labor in obscurity for fruits one might never see — and it was sustained by prayer and obedience exactly as the contemplative’s struggle is. In Nicodemus the desk became an altar of a kind, and the labor of the pen a liturgy offered for the whole Church (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite).

References

Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite (Modern Orthodox Saints, vol. 3). Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974. For the memory, the learning, the working life, and the catalogue of works.
Repose of the Venerable Nicodemus the Hagiorite. Orthodox Church in America, oca.org, July 14. (The memory of Scripture and the Fathers; Pantokrator skete and Elder Arsenios of the Peloponnese; the kelli of Stephen and Neophytos; death 14 July 1809 at age sixty.)
Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (The Great Schema; the catalogue of works; the Venice printings.)
Saint Nicodemus the Hagiorite. Encyclopædia Britannica, britannica.com. (His role as anthologist and theologian of the hesychast revival.)