The Treatise on Frequent Communion

The Kollyvades treatise Concerning Frequent Communion of the Immaculate Mysteries of Christ (Περὶ τῆς συνεχοῦς μεταλήψεως), first published in 1783: its origin in the Kollyvades circle around St. Makarios of Corinth, its sustained patristic and canonical argument that the rightly prepared faithful should commune frequently — even continually — rather than the prevailing three or four times a year, the eucharistic revival it sought to ignite, and the layered question of its authorship, in which Nicodemus is the editor and reviser who gave the work its enduring form.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

The Problem the Treatise Addressed

By the eighteenth century a custom had hardened across much of the Orthodox world: the laity, and even many monks, received Holy Communion only three or four times a year — at the great fasts and feasts — and approached the Chalice rarely the rest of the time (Kollyvades, Wikipedia; John Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com). The reasons were partly reverential (a sense of unworthiness, a fear of communing unprepared) and partly the simple inertia of long habit. The Kollyvades regarded this rarity as a falling-away from the practice of the early Church and the Fathers, who had urged the faithful to approach the Mysteries often, even daily, provided they came rightly prepared by repentance, confession, fasting, and a clear conscience. To recover frequent Communion became, alongside the liturgical-tradition question, the central cause of the renewal (see The Athonite Renewal).

Origin and Authorship

The treatise on frequent Communion arose within the Kollyvades circle. Its origin is associated above all with St. Makarios of Corinth, the movement’s commissioning patron; the work appeared in print in 1783, the year after the Philokalia (Kollyvades, Wikipedia, listing “Concerning Frequent Holy Communion” among the 1783 Kollyvades publications). The question of precise authorship is genuinely layered, and the sources treat it with care.

[Disputed: the authorship of the frequent-Communion treatise is variously assigned. An earlier form is attributed to St. Makarios of Corinth (sometimes drawing on still earlier Kollyvades material, including work associated with Neophytos Kausokalyvites); the revised and expanded form in which the work became influential is the one prepared by St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite, so that the treatise is commonly cited under his name. Scholarship therefore presents it as a Kollyvades collaborative work — initiated by Makarios, given its developed form by Nicodemus — rather than the unaided composition of either (Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com; Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki)]. Per METHODOLOGY §2.1 and §2.3, the layered authorship is kept explicit; the work belongs to the movement, and Nicodemus is its editor-reviser, the role that runs through his entire output (see The Formation of an Editor).

The Argument

The treatise mounts its case from the two authorities the Kollyvades trusted above all: Scripture and the Fathers, set within the canons. Its argument runs, in substance:

The Eucharist is the Church’s daily bread. The Lord taught his disciples to ask for “our daily (epiousios) bread” (Matthew 6:11), which the Fathers read eucharistically; the early Christians, the Acts of the Apostles attests, “continued steadfastly… in the breaking of bread” (Acts 2:42, 46). Frequent reception is the apostolic and patristic norm, not an innovation.
The Fathers urge frequent Communion. The treatise marshals the witness of St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil the Great, and others who exhort the faithful to approach the Mysteries often and who lament negligent absence from the Chalice. To stay away is itself a fault; the Liturgy is offered that the faithful may partake.
The canons assume frequent Communion. Canonical legislation (notably the canon penalizing the faithful who attend the Liturgy but withdraw before Communion without cause) presupposes that the prepared faithful will commune — a point Nicodemus, the future compiler of the Rudder, was peculiarly equipped to press (see The Rudder).
Worthiness is by repentance, not by rarity. No one is ever “worthy” of the infinite gift; preparation is by repentance, confession, fasting, and amendment of life, not by staying away. To make rarity a substitute for repentance is to misunderstand the Mystery.

The treatise does not counsel reckless or unprepared reception — a point its defenders stressed against the charge of irreverence (see The Controversy). It urges prepared frequency: the faithful should make themselves ready and then come often, as the Church always intended.

The Eucharistic Revival Sought

The treatise’s deeper aim was a renewal of the whole eucharistic life of the Church. The Kollyvades saw the rarity of Communion as both symptom and cause of a wider spiritual coldness — a Church that came to the Liturgy as spectators rather than communicants. To restore frequent Communion was to restore the Liturgy to its purpose and the faithful to their inheritance, knitting the eucharistic and the ascetic-neptic strands of the renewal together: the watchfulness taught by the Philokalia and the frequent Communion urged by the treatise are two aspects of one life in Christ (see Watchfulness and the Senses; Orthodoxy: The Divine Liturgy).

That aim, fiercely resisted in its day, has been substantially realized across the modern Orthodox world, where frequent Communion by the prepared faithful is now widely commended — a vindication treated, with the controversy that preceded it, in the next file.

The Patristic Witness in Fuller Depth

The strength of the treatise lies in the density of its patristic appeal, and it is worth drawing out why the Fathers it invokes weigh so heavily. St. John Chrysostom, whose Liturgy the Orthodox Church chiefly serves, repeatedly rebuked those who stood through the Divine Liturgy yet would not approach the Chalice, asking what such people imagined the offering was for if not for their partaking; his homilies treat habitual abstention not as humility but as a failure to honor the Mystery that is set before the faithful (John Sanidopoulos, “The Kollyvades Fathers,” johnsanidopoulos.com; Kollyvades, Wikipedia). St. Basil the Great, asked directly how often one ought to commune, is remembered for commending frequent — indeed daily — reception as good and beneficial, citing the Lord’s own words that to eat his flesh and drink his blood is to have life (cf. John 6:53–56). The treatise gathers these voices not as isolated proof-texts but as the consistent mind of the early Church, in which the Eucharist was the ordinary weekly — often daily — food of Christians, and absence from it required excuse rather than the reverse (Kollyvades, Wikipedia). By restoring this witness, Nicodemus meant to show that frequent Communion was not a Kollyvades novelty but the recovery of an apostolic and patristic norm the Church had quietly let lapse (see The Athonite Renewal).

The Eucharist and the Ascetic Life

A subtler dimension of the treatise is the way it joins the Chalice to the whole ascetic struggle, refusing to let the eucharistic and the neptic strands of the spiritual life fall apart. In the Kollyvades vision, the watchfulness over the thoughts taught by the Philokalia and the frequent reception of the Mysteries are not rival paths but a single life: the purification of the heart through repentance and inner vigilance makes the soul ready for the Chalice, and the Chalice in turn supplies the grace by which the ascetic struggle is sustained (John Sanidopoulos, “The Kollyvades Fathers,” johnsanidopoulos.com; see Watchfulness and the Senses). The neptic Fathers themselves had always understood the goal of watchfulness to be union with God, the theosis in which the human person partakes of the divine life (see Orthodoxy: Theosis); and there is no more concrete participation in that life than the Eucharist, in which Christ is received not as idea but as food. To urge frequent Communion was therefore of a piece with publishing the Philokalia: both were attempts to restore the faithful to the means of deification the tradition had always held out to them (see Orthodoxy: The Divine Liturgy).

Worthiness, Preparation, and the Answer to Scruple

The deepest pastoral knot the treatise had to cut was the one that did most to keep the faithful from the Chalice: the conviction that one was not worthy to receive. The Kollyvades answer is careful and twofold. On the one hand, they grant fully that no creature is ever worthy of the infinite gift; worthiness in any absolute sense is impossible, and to wait for it is to wait forever (John Sanidopoulos, “The Kollyvades Fathers,” johnsanidopoulos.com). On the other hand, they insist that this very fact dissolves the argument for staying away, since rarity makes no one worthier than frequency does — the Christian who communes four times a year is no less a creature receiving an infinite gift than the one who communes weekly. What the tradition asks is not worthiness but preparation: repentance, confession to a spiritual father, fasting, reconciliation with one’s neighbor, and the examination of conscience the apostle commands before one eats of the bread and drinks of the cup (cf. 1 Corinthians 11:28). Preparation, so understood, is something the faithful can and ought to undertake often, whereas a worthiness measured by abstention is a phantom that serves only to empty the Chalice (see The Controversy). In drawing this distinction the treatise turns the very reverence that had produced infrequent Communion back toward the frequent reception that reverence, rightly understood, should inspire.

The Canonical Argument and the Editor’s Hand

The treatise’s appeal to the canons gives it a force that mere exhortation could not, and it is here that Nicodemus’s particular gifts told. The early Church had legislated on the assumption that the faithful present at the Liturgy would communicate; one well-known canon penalizes those who attend the assembly and hear the Scriptures yet withdraw before receiving, without good cause, treating such withdrawal as a disorder to be corrected rather than a piety to be admired (John Sanidopoulos, “The Kollyvades Fathers,” johnsanidopoulos.com; Kollyvades, Wikipedia). To the Kollyvades this was decisive: the very structure of the canonical tradition presupposes frequent Communion as the norm, so that the later custom of rare reception stood not merely without canonical warrant but against the plain sense of the canons. No one in the eighteenth-century Church was better placed to press this point than Nicodemus, who was at that very period immersing himself in the whole canonical corpus he would later issue as the Rudder (Pedalion), the great commentated collection of the sacred canons (see The Rudder). His mastery of that material let the treatise move beyond isolated citations to the architecture of the canonical mind, showing that frequent Communion was woven into the Church’s own legislation. This is the recurring signature of his work: he did not invent the teaching but marshaled the sources — scriptural, patristic, canonical — with an editor’s command that made the inherited tradition speak with new and ordered force (see The Formation of an Editor).

References

Kollyvades. Wikipedia. (The prevailing three-or-four-times-a-year custom; “Concerning Frequent Holy Communion” among the 1783 Kollyvades publications; the daily-Communion ideal.)
Sanidopoulos, John. “The Kollyvades Fathers: The Renaissance of Greek Orthodoxy.” johnsanidopoulos.com (2020). On the origin of the treatise with Makarios, the Kollyvades authorship question, and the patristic-canonical argument.
Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (Nicodemus’s role in the frequent-Communion treatise among his works.)
Scripture cited: Matthew 6:11; Acts 2:42, 46; John 6:53–56; 1 Corinthians 11:28. The patristic exhortations to frequent Communion are gathered in the treatise from Chrysostom, Basil, and others.