The Rudder (Pedalion)

Nicodemus’s great work of canon law: the Pēdalion — “the Rudder” — compiled with the hieromonk Agapios the Monk and completed in 1800, which gathers the canons of the Holy Apostles, the Ecumenical and local councils, and the Fathers, and surrounds them with Nicodemus’s own interpretations (hermēneiai), footnotes, and pastoral observations. For more than two centuries it has been the most widely used handbook of Orthodox canon law in the Greek tradition; this file treats its making, its method, the troubles of its first printing, and its English rendering by D. Cummings (1957).

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

What the Rudder Is

The Pēdalion tēs noētēs nēos, tēs Mias, Hagias, Katholikēs kai Apostolikēs tōn Orthodoxōn Ekklēsias — “The Rudder of the Spiritual Ship of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church of the Orthodox” — is a complete collection of the sacred canons of the Orthodox Church, furnished with interpretation. It assembles:

the Apostolic Canons;
the canons of the Seven Ecumenical Councils;
the canons of the recognized local (regional) councils;
the canons of the Fathers received into the Church’s canonical tradition;

and to each canon Nicodemus appends his interpretation (hermēneia) — a paraphrase and explanation in the simpler Greek of his day — together with footnotes on the canon’s history, its relation to other canons, and its pastoral application (The Rudder, OrthodoxWiki; The Rudder, trans. D. Cummings, Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957). The metaphor of the title is exact: as a rudder steers a ship, the canons steer the Church through the world; the Pedalion is the instrument that makes that steering possible by putting the canons, intelligibly, into the pilot’s hands.

It is essential — and METHODOLOGY §2.2 insists on the distinction — to separate the canons themselves (the authoritative legislation of the councils and Fathers) from Nicodemus’s interpretations and notes (the work of a learned eighteenth-century editor). The canons bind; the interpretations carry the weight of Nicodemus’s great authority and wide reception, but they are commentary, sometimes reflecting his own theological and disciplinary judgments, and they are cited as his, not as conciliar law.

The Making (with Agapios, completed 1800)

Nicodemus compiled the Rudder in partnership with Agapios the Monk (Agapios Leonardos, a hieromonk of the Peloponnese), the two working from the existing canonical collections and the manuscript tradition (The Rudder, OrthodoxWiki; Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki). The compilation was completed around 1800. Agapios appears to have supplied much of the gathering of materials; Nicodemus, the dominant scholarly mind, supplied the interpretations and the framing apparatus that give the work its character. As with the Philokalia and the Communion treatise, the Rudder is thus a collaborative product in which Nicodemus is the interpreting and shaping editor (see The Formation of an Editor).

The Rudder belongs to the same Kollyvades program as the rest of Nicodemus’s output. A Church that was to recover the integrity of its liturgical and eucharistic tradition needed also its disciplinary tradition — the canons — in usable form; the Rudder supplied it, putting the Church’s own law back into the hands of bishops, confessors, and clergy who had often known it only at second hand. It is the disciplinary counterpart to the Philokalia‘s spiritual and the treatise’s eucharistic recovery (see Tradition Against Innovation).

The Troubled First Printing

The Rudder‘s path into print was the hardest of all Nicodemus’s works, and the episode reveals both the conditions under which he labored and the suspicion the Kollyvades attracted. The manuscript was approved and sent to be printed, but in the process of publication (the first edition appeared at Leipzig in 1800) the text was altered and tampered with by those overseeing the printing — interpolations and changes were introduced without Nicodemus’s consent (The Rudder, OrthodoxWiki). Nicodemus was grieved by the corruption of his work and protested it; the episode left a permanent caution attached to the Rudder’s text, and it is one reason METHODOLOGY §2.2 flags that the printed Rudder must be used with awareness of its textual history. Later Greek editions corrected and stabilized the text, and the work passed through several editions across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to become the standard Greek canonical handbook.

The Rudder in Orthodox Canon Law

The Pedalion occupies a peculiar and powerful place in Orthodox canon law. It is not itself a source of canons — the canons it collects are the sources — but it became the practical vehicle through which the Greek-speaking Orthodox world has known and applied the canons, much as a standard commentary becomes inseparable from the law it expounds. Its interpretations shaped how generations of Greek bishops, confessors, and canonists read the tradition, and on some contested points (the reception of converts and the question of the validity of non-Orthodox sacraments, for example) Nicodemus’s interpretations have themselves become objects of canonical debate — a debate that turns precisely on the distinction between the canons and his reading of them. The broader Orthodox treatment of the sources, authority, and use of the canons is set out in the repository’s canon-law material, against which the Rudder’s specific positions should be weighed.

The English Rudder

The Rudder reached English through the labor of Denver (D.) Cummings, whose translation — made from the fifth Greek edition — was published in 1957 by the Orthodox Christian Educational Society of Chicago (The Rudder, trans. D. Cummings, Chicago, 1957; The Rudder, OrthodoxWiki). The Cummings Rudder is the standard English presentation of the Greek canonical tradition with Nicodemus’s interpretations, and it is the form in which most English-speaking readers encounter both the canons and Nicodemus’s commentary. As with every translation of a layered work, the reader is rightly reminded that Cummings renders Nicodemus’s edition — canons, interpretations, and notes together — and that the interpretive material is Nicodemus’s, not conciliar law.

The Structure of the Canonical Tradition

To grasp what the Rudder gathers is to grasp the architecture of Orthodox canon law itself, and that architecture explains the ordering of the book. The canonical tradition is not a single code promulgated at one moment but a layered deposit accumulated across the Church’s first millennium and received by consent. At its foundation stand the eighty-five Apostolic Canons, ancient disciplinary rules ascribed to the apostolic age and ratified by the Council in Trullo (692); above them the canons of the Ecumenical Councils, from Nicaea (325) to Nicaea II (787), which carry the highest legislative authority because they express the mind of the whole Church gathered; alongside them the canons of the local councils received into the common tradition; and finally the canons of the Fathers — disciplinary letters and rulings of bishops such as Basil the Great whose authority the Church canonized by reception (The Rudder, trans. D. Cummings, Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957). The Pedalion reproduces this hierarchy faithfully, so that the reader meets the canons in the order of their authority, and Nicodemus’s apparatus continually situates each canon within the whole — noting where a later council confirmed, modified, or superseded an earlier ruling (The Rudder, OrthodoxWiki). The book is thus not merely a list but a map of how the canons relate, which is precisely what a working confessor or bishop needs.

Akribeia and Oikonomia

The deepest interpretive principle that runs through the Rudder — and through all Orthodox application of the canons — is the distinction between akribeia (“strictness,” the exact application of the canon’s letter) and oikonomia (“economy,” the prudent, pastoral relaxation of the letter for the sake of the soul’s salvation). The canons set the norm; oikonomia is the Church’s authority, vested in the bishop, to depart from the norm in particular cases when strictness would do more harm than good, without thereby abolishing the norm. Nicodemus’s interpretations repeatedly turn on this distinction, weighing when a canon binds in its rigor and when the healing aim of all canon law — for the canons are medicine, not penal code — counsels a gentler course (The Rudder, trans. D. Cummings, 1957). His temperament inclined to akribeia, the recovery of the exact tradition, which is of a piece with the whole Kollyvades program; yet the Rudder itself preserves the Church’s freedom of oikonomia, and much of the later debate over Nicodemus’s positions is in fact a debate over where the line between strictness and economy should fall (The Rudder, OrthodoxWiki).

The Reception of Converts: A Contested Interpretation

The clearest instance in which Nicodemus’s interpretations — as distinct from the canons — have themselves become objects of canonical controversy concerns the reception of non-Orthodox into the Church and the related question of the validity of sacraments performed outside her visible boundaries. Here Nicodemus advanced a rigorous reading: that the canons requiring the baptism of certain heretics express the Church’s strict mind (akribeia), and that the reception of converts by chrismation or confession rather than baptism is to be understood as an exercise of oikonomia which the Church may grant but is not bound to grant (The Rudder, trans. D. Cummings, 1957; Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki). This interpretation has been influential and is invoked to this day, but it is contested within Orthodoxy, for other readings hold the reception of converts without rebaptism to rest on a settled tradition rather than on case-by-case economy. The controversy is instructive precisely because it falls on the seam the Rudder itself draws (METHODOLOGY §2.2): the canons are received by all, while the interpretation is Nicodemus’s, and a reader may honor the one while debating the other (The Rudder, OrthodoxWiki).

The Rudder in the Confessor’s Hands

Whatever the scholarly debates, the Rudder‘s enduring life has been practical. It was made not for the library but for use — for the confessor discerning the right epitimion (penance) for a penitent, for the bishop ruling on a marriage impediment or a clerical irregularity, for the parish priest who needed to know what the tradition required and permitted. Nicodemus’s interpretations translate the often terse and archaic language of the ancient canons into the working Greek of his day and supply the pastoral footnotes that tell the confessor how a canon has been applied, where economy is customary, and what the healing aim of a given penance is (The Rudder, trans. D. Cummings, 1957). In this the Rudder is the canonical sibling of the Exomologetarion, Nicodemus’s manual for confessors, the two together equipping the priest to administer the medicine of the canons with both fidelity and mercy (see The Evergetinos and the Synaxaristes; Orthodoxy Guide: Spiritual Direction). For two centuries it is in this pastoral use, far more than in academic citation, that the Pedalion has steered the Greek-speaking Church (The Rudder, OrthodoxWiki).

References

The Rudder (Pedalion), trans. D. Cummings. Chicago: Orthodox Christian Educational Society, 1957 (translating the fifth Greek edition of the Pēdalion compiled by Nicodemus and Agapios, first published 1800). The canons with Nicodemus’s interpretations and notes.
The Rudder. OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (Compiled by Nicodemus and Agapios the Monk in 1800; the title and contents; the corruption of the first printing; the Cummings translation of 1957 from the fifth edition.)
Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (The Rudder among his canonical works; the collaboration with Agapios.)
Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974. On the Rudder and its place in Nicodemus’s output.