The Evergetinos and the Synaxaristes

Two more of Nicodemus’s monumental anthological labors, and the editions that accompanied them: the Evergetinos (1783), the great thematic collection of sayings and deeds of the desert and Byzantine ascetic Fathers; the Synaxaristes, his vast recension of the Lives of the Saints arranged through the Church year; the Exomologetarion, his manual for confessors; and his critical editions of St. Symeon the New Theologian and St. Gregory Palamas, by which he restored two supreme theologians of the experience of God to circulation.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

The Evergetinos (1783)

The Evergetinos (Synagōgē tōn theophthongōn rhēmatōn kai didaskaliōn) is a great thematic anthology of the ascetic Fathers — a systematic gathering of the sayings, counsels, and edifying narratives of the desert monks and the Byzantine ascetic tradition, arranged by spiritual subject (on humility, on the thoughts, on prayer, on obedience, and so forth). Its core derives from the eleventh-century compilation of Paul Evergetinos, founder of the Monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis (“the Benefactress”) at Constantinople, from whom the work takes its name; Nicodemus and the Kollyvades circle re-edited and published it, the first printed edition appearing at Venice in 1783, the year after the Philokalia and alongside the Communion treatise (Kollyvades, Wikipedia, listing the Evergetinos among the 1783 Kollyvades publications; Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki).

The Evergetinos complements the Philokalia. Where the Philokalia gathers the more advanced neptic and contemplative texts, the Evergetinos gathers the practical ascetic wisdom of the desert in narrative and proverbial form — the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and their kin, organized for edification and use. Together the two anthologies put before the reader the whole inheritance of Eastern monastic spirituality, the practical and the contemplative, and both served the Kollyvades aim of a return to the Fathers (see The Athonite Renewal).

The Synaxaristes (Lives of the Saints)

Among Nicodemus’s most laborious works was his recension of the Synaxaristes — the Lives of the Saints arranged according to the calendar of the Church year, a saint or saints for each day. Nicodemus undertook a vast revision and enrichment of the existing Greek synaxarion tradition, correcting, supplementing, and ordering the Lives into a comprehensive collection for liturgical and devotional use (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki; Constantine Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974). The Synaxaristes became a foundational source for the Greek calendar of saints and, through later translations and adaptations, for the hagiographical tradition of the wider Orthodox world. In keeping with METHODOLOGY §3.5, it should be remembered that the Synaxaristes is a hagiographical collection: it transmits the Lives as the tradition has received them, and its accounts are to be read as the Church’s veneration of its saints rather than as critical biography.

The Exomologetarion (Confession Manual)

Closely tied to his canonical work, Nicodemus also composed the Exomologetarion — a Manual for Confessors (and for penitents), a practical guide to the mystery of confession that draws on the canons (the same tradition he gathered in the Rudder; see The Rudder) and on patristic pastoral wisdom. It instructs the priest-confessor in the discernment of sins, the assigning of penances (epitimia) with pastoral measure, and the spirit of healing rather than mere punishment in which the mystery is to be administered (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki). The Exomologetarion is the pastoral application of Nicodemus’s canonical learning, and it sits at the intersection of his canonical and his spiritual writing (see The Handbook of Spiritual Counsel; Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction).

The Editions of Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas

Among the most consequential of Nicodemus’s editorial labors were his editions of two supreme theologians of the direct experience of God:

• St. Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), the Byzantine mystic of the vision of the divine light and of conscious experience of grace, whose works Nicodemus edited and prepared for publication — restoring to the Church one of the boldest witnesses to the experiential heart of the Orthodox tradition (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki; see St. Symeon the New Theologian).
• St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359), the fourteenth-century defender of the hesychasts and theologian of the uncreated energies, who crowns the Philokalia itself. Nicodemus worked toward an edition of Palamas’s writings — a labor of great importance, since much of Palamas remained unpublished and inaccessible, and the recovery of Palamite theology would become a central concern of twentieth-century Orthodoxy (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki; see St. Gregory Palamas).

In editing Symeon and Palamas, Nicodemus was doing for these individual Fathers what the Philokalia did for the neptic tradition as a whole: rescuing the theology of the experience of God — theosis, the vision of the light, the energies of God known in prayer — from neglect and putting it back into the Church’s hands (see Orthodoxy: Theosis; The Patristic Mind). These editions, with the Philokalia, make Nicodemus one of the principal architects of the modern recovery of hesychast and Palamite theology.

The Scale of the Achievement

Taken together — the Philokalia, the Evergetinos, the Synaxaristes, the Rudder, the editions of Symeon and Palamas, the Communion treatise, the spiritual writings, and the hymnography still to be treated — Nicodemus’s output is staggering for one working life on the Holy Mountain, without a university, dependent on monastery manuscripts and distant presses. The unity beneath the variety is the Kollyvades aim: in every genre — spiritual, canonical, hagiographical, liturgical, theological — to recover the authentic sources of Orthodox life and return them, usable, to the Church. The anthologist of the desert and the editor of the mystics is one and the same man, doing one work in many forms.

Paul Evergetinos and the Monastery of the Benefactress

The Evergetinos carries in its very name the memory of the house that produced it. The Monastery of the Theotokos Evergetis — “the Benefactress” — was founded outside the walls of Constantinople in the eleventh century and became, under Paul Evergetinos (died 1054) and his successor Timothy, one of the most influential centers of Byzantine monastic life, its typikon (rule) shaping the discipline of houses across the Orthodox world (Kollyvades, Wikipedia; Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki). Paul’s great labor was to gather from the vast literature of the desert and the Fathers a systematic anthology of ascetic counsel, arranged by theme rather than by author, so that a monk seeking the mind of the Fathers on humility, or on the warfare of thoughts, or on prayer, could find their voices assembled in one place. When Nicodemus and the Kollyvades circle re-edited and printed this compilation at Venice in 1783, they were not composing a new work but restoring an ancient one to circulation — exactly the editorial vocation that defines Nicodemus’s whole output (see The Athonite Renewal).

The Apophthegmata Tradition Behind the Evergetinos

The deep wellspring of the Evergetinos is the Apophthegmata Patrum, the “Sayings of the Desert Fathers” — the corpus of brief, pungent words and deeds of the fourth- and fifth-century monks of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria, transmitted first orally and then in written collections arranged either alphabetically by elder or systematically by subject (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki). This literature is the foundational document of Christian monasticism, and its genius is its concreteness: it teaches not by abstract treatise but by the remembered word of a abba to his disciple, the story of a temptation overcome, the terse counsel that lodges in the memory. The Evergetinos gathers this and its kindred ascetic narratives into thematic order, and so transmits the desert’s practical wisdom in the form best suited to formation. Where the Philokalia assembles the more advanced neptic and contemplative texts on the guarding of the heart and the prayer of the mind, the Evergetinos supplies the elementary and indispensable ground — the practical ascesis of obedience, patience, and the cutting off of self-will — without which the higher prayer has no foundation (Kollyvades, Wikipedia; see The Patristic Mind).

The Synaxarion Genre and Its Method

The Synaxaristes belongs to a distinct and ancient genre, and understanding that genre is essential to reading it rightly. A synaxarion is a collection of the Lives of the saints arranged according to the liturgical calendar — a saint or group of saints commemorated on each day of the Church year — designed to be read at the synaxis, the gathering for worship, and in monastic refectories and private devotion (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki; Constantine Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974). Its purpose is liturgical and edifying rather than archival: it sets before the faithful, day by day, the living examples of those who have been deified, so that the calendar itself becomes a school of sanctity. Nicodemus’s recension corrected, supplemented, and ordered the existing Greek synaxarion tradition into a comprehensive whole. In keeping with METHODOLOGY §3.5, the Synaxaristes should be read for what it is — hagiography pinned to the tradition’s attestation, not certified as critical biography. It transmits the Lives as the Church has received and venerated them; its accounts are testimony to the Church’s memory and love of her saints, and the honest reader honors that intention without mistaking devotional narrative for documentary history (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, 1974).

The Exomologetarion and the Healing of Confession

The Exomologetarion deserves fuller weight, for it shows how Nicodemus’s canonical and spiritual labors converge in a single pastoral aim. The manual instructs the priest-confessor not merely in the letter of the canons governing particular sins but in the spirit in which confession is to be administered — as a mystery of healing rather than of judicial punishment (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki). The epitimia (penances) the confessor assigns are, on Nicodemus’s understanding, medicines fitted to the wound and to the strength of the penitent, applied with the discernment (diakrisis) that distinguishes the skilled physician of souls from the mere enforcer of rules (see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction). Drawing on the same canonical tradition gathered in the Rudder (see The Rudder) and on the patristic wisdom of the spiritual fathers, the Exomologetarion translates Nicodemus’s vast learning into the intimate setting of the confessional, where doctrine and canon become the cure of a particular soul (see The Handbook of Spiritual Counsel).

Why the Editions of Symeon and Palamas Mattered

The full significance of Nicodemus’s editions of Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas became visible only in the century after his death. By restoring these theologians of the direct experience of God to circulation, Nicodemus laid groundwork for the twentieth-century recovery of Palamite theology that would reshape modern Orthodox thought — the rediscovery of the distinction between God’s unknowable essence and his uncreated energies, of theosis as conscious participation in the divine life, and of the hesychast prayer by which that participation is sought (Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki; see Orthodoxy: Theosis). When the theologians of the modern Orthodox renaissance turned to Palamas as the answer to a Western-captive scholastic theology, they were drawing on a witness whose texts Nicodemus had labored to make available. In this the anthologist of the desert proved also a prophet of the future: the sources he gathered for the edification of his own century became the foundation on which a later century rebuilt the Church’s theology of the experience of God (see St. Gregory Palamas; St. Symeon the New Theologian).

See Also

• The Rudder — Nicodemus’s canonical magnum opus.
• Compiling the Philokalia — the companion anthology of the neptic Fathers.
• The Patristic Mind — the saturation in the Fathers behind all these editions.
• St. Symeon the New Theologian — the mystic Nicodemus edited.
• St. Gregory Palamas — the hesychast theologian Nicodemus edited.
• Orthodoxy Guide: Theosis — the deification at the heart of the theologians he restored.

References

• Kollyvades. Wikipedia. (The Evergetinos, 1783, among the Kollyvades publications.)
• Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (The Evergetinos; the Synaxaristes / Lives of the Saints; the Exomologetarion; the editions of Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas.)
• Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite (Modern Orthodox Saints, vol. 3). Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974. For the catalogue and character of the anthological and editorial works.
• The Evergetinos of Paul Evergetinos (11th c.), re-edited and published by Nicodemus and the Kollyvades circle, Venice 1783; English translations exist of the four-volume collection.