Discernment in Borrowing

The principle beneath the controversy: Nicodemus’s conviction that what is true and useful may be gathered from any source and “baptized” into Orthodoxy — the ancient patristic practice of “spoiling the Egyptians” — set against the opposing worry that style and spirit travel with content, so that borrowed forms can import a foreign cast of devotion. This file draws out the principle, places it in the patristic and Orthodox tradition of selective appropriation, and weighs how Nicodemus’s own gift of discernment (diakrisis) has been judged.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

“Spoiling the Egyptians”

Nicodemus’s adaptation of Western books was not, for him, a compromise of Orthodoxy but an exercise of a long-sanctioned patristic principle. The Fathers had always held that truth is the Lord’s wherever it is found, and that the Christian may take what is good and true from outside the Church and put it to the Church’s service — the principle the Fathers figured as the Israelites carrying off the gold of Egypt for the building of the Tabernacle (cf. Exodus 12:35–36), a figure St. Gregory of Nyssa and St. Augustine both used for the Christian use of pagan learning. St. Basil the Great’s address To Young Men, on How They Might Profit from Greek Literature is the classic charter: the bee gathers from many flowers but makes its own honey. Nicodemus, on this understanding, was doing nothing novel in principle — he was gathering useful Western analysis of the spiritual combat as Basil gathered useful pagan rhetoric, to be transformed and put to Orthodox use (see The Patristic Mind).

The transforming was the point. As his defenders insist, Nicodemus did not present Scupoli or Pinamonti as they were; he re-rooted them in the hesychast tradition, making the Jesus Prayer and the guarding of the heart the center of gravity of books that had not had it (see Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises). The gold of Egypt was melted down and recast.

The Counter-Principle: Spirit Travels with Form

Against this stands a serious counter-principle, and even-handedness requires giving it full weight. The worry is that spirit and style are not separable from content as cleanly as the “spoiling the Egyptians” image suggests. A method of prayer carries an implicit anthropology and a characteristic mode of relating to God; a Counter-Reformation manual of methodical, imaginative, discursive meditation on, say, the scenes of Christ’s Passion embodies a Western devotional sensibility that differs from the apophatic, imageless, name-centered prayer of the hesychast East. To adopt the Western form, on this view, is to risk importing the Western spirit, however carefully the doctrine is corrected at the surface — and the result can be a subtle deformation, a Latinizing of Orthodox devotion at the very moment one means to enrich it. This is the concern that the Florovsky lineage names “pseudomorphosis” — an Orthodox content forced into a Western mold (see the debate in Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises and the scholarship in Influence and Scholarship).

[Disputed: the two principles yield opposed verdicts on Nicodemus’s borrowing. (1) On the selective-appropriation view, Nicodemus rightly exercised the patristic freedom to baptize useful material from any source, and his hesychast re-rooting succeeded in making the borrowed books Orthodox; the borrowing is a model of confident, discerning engagement. (2) On the foreign-spirit view, the Western forms carried a Western sensibility that no amount of surface correction fully removes, so that the adaptations sit uneasily within the very neptic tradition Nicodemus elsewhere championed; the borrowing is the one place where his discernment is most open to question. Most balanced assessments grant that Nicodemus was a remarkably discerning adapter who succeeded substantially but not perfectly — that the books are genuinely useful and genuinely Orthodox in their main thrust, while retaining some Western coloring a purist would prefer absent (synthesizing Hodges, the Citterio-line source-studies, and the Florovsky-line critique; see Influence and Scholarship)].

Nicodemus’s Own Discernment

What is striking, and tells in Nicodemus’s favor, is that he was himself a master teacher of discernment (diakrisis) — the very virtue at issue. His whole neptic teaching (see Watchfulness and the Senses) is about the careful sifting of thoughts, the testing of what enters the soul, the rejection of what is alien and the retention of what is good. His use of Western sources was not careless or ignorant: he knew exactly what these books were, read them in their own language, and made deliberate, theologically informed choices about what to keep, change, and remove. Whether or not one judges every choice correct, the borrowing was an act of judgment by a man who had thought hard about judgment — not the lapse of someone who did not know better.

This is why the most useful framing keeps two things together. Nicodemus’s borrowing is a real test case for the limits of “baptizing” foreign material, and reasonable Orthodox judgments differ on whether he stayed within those limits. But it is also an instance of exactly the discerning, confident, tradition-rooted engagement with the wider world that the Fathers practiced and that Nicodemus practiced more deliberately than almost any of his contemporaries. The question his borrowing raises — how far may Orthodoxy take from outside without ceasing to be itself? — is a permanent one, and Nicodemus is one of its most instructive cases precisely because he was so learned, so deliberate, and so manifestly Orthodox in intent.

The Verdict of Use

In the end the books were received and used. Unseen Warfare, through Theophan’s revision, became a beloved classic of Russian and then of world Orthodox spirituality, read for two centuries as a genuinely Orthodox guide to the inner warfare (see The Philokalia and Its Diffusion). The Church that debated the sources also kept the books and canonized their adapter. That reception is not the end of the scholarly question, but it is a weighty datum: the living tradition has, on the whole, judged Nicodemus’s borrowings useful and safe, while continuing to discuss their Western roots — which is exactly the both-and posture this collection’s methodology commends (METHODOLOGY §4).

The Patristic Theology of Appropriating Truth

The “spoiling of the Egyptians” was never, for the Fathers who used it, a mere license to plagiarize the pagans; it rested on a theology of truth. Because all truth is God’s truth and the Logos is the source of every right reason, whatever is genuinely true and good — even when found outside the Church — belongs by right to the Church and may be reclaimed for her. St. Basil the Great, in his Address to Young Men, on How They Might Profit from Greek Literature, gives the classic charter, comparing the Christian student to a bee that visits many flowers yet takes from each only what serves the making of its own honey, leaving the rest (St. Basil, To Young Men). St. Gregory of Nyssa, in the Life of Moses, reads the Israelites’ carrying off of Egyptian gold (Exodus 12:35–36) as a figure of the Christian’s right to take the wealth of pagan learning into the service of the true worship — the gold that adorned idols becoming the gold of the Tabernacle (St. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses). On this understanding Nicodemus did nothing novel in principle: he gathered useful Western analysis of the spiritual combat as Basil gathered useful pagan rhetoric, to be melted down and recast in an Orthodox mold (see The Patristic Mind).

Apophatic and Imaginative Prayer

What gives the counter-principle its real force is a specific and recognizable difference in the grammar of prayer. The hesychast tradition that Nicodemus elsewhere champions is apophatic and imageless: it strips the mind of forms and pictures, gathers the intellect into the heart, and rests on the bare invocation of the Name of Jesus, distrusting the imagination as a gateway by which illusion (plani, prelest) enters (see Orthodoxy Guide: The Jesus Prayer). The methodical meditation of the Counter-Reformation — and pre-eminently the Ignatian “composition of place,” in which the one praying vividly imagines the scenes of Christ’s life and Passion, populating the inner eye with detailed sensory representation — moves in the opposite direction, using the imagination as the very instrument of devotion. The worry of the critical view is not that imaginative meditation is wicked but that it embodies a different anthropology and a different mode of relating to God, so that to adopt the Western form is to risk importing the Western spirit, however carefully the surface doctrine is corrected (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology). This is the concrete shape of the “foreign-spirit” concern, and it is why the Spiritual Exercises, more even than Unseen Warfare, sits at the center of the dispute.

The Counter-Principle and Its Limits

The defenders answer that the very re-rooting Nicodemus performed addresses this worry at its root. He did not transplant the Ignatian method whole; he subordinated whatever he kept to the hesychast center of gravity, making the Jesus Prayer and the guarding of the heart the governing discipline into which the borrowed analysis was absorbed (Unseen Warfare, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer, intro. H. A. Hodges, London: Faber, 1952). Where the critic sees a Western form carrying a Western spirit, the defender sees Egyptian gold genuinely melted down — the analytic structure retained, the alien sensibility burned away. The mediating view, grounded in the source-studies of Elia Citterio, declines to resolve the matter by principle and resolves it instead by inspection, asking of each passage what was kept and what was changed, and concluding that the recasting was substantial but not total — that some coloring of the original cast survives the transformation (Citterio source-studies; see Influence and Scholarship). The “spoiling the Egyptians” principle, in other words, states the permission but does not settle whether in this instance the permission was perfectly executed; that remains a question of judgment on which serious Orthodox readers differ (see Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises).

Reception as the Tradition’s Verdict

There is a final consideration that neither resolves the scholarly question nor can be ignored in weighing it: in Orthodox understanding, the reception of a work by the living tradition functions itself as a kind of verdict. A book is not made Orthodox by the intention of its author alone; it is proved over time by the use the praying Church makes of it, by whether it nourishes genuine holiness or breeds illusion, by whether the discerning fathers of succeeding generations commend it or warn against it (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974). On this measure Nicodemus’s adaptations have largely been received: Unseen Warfare, through Theophan’s revision, was taken up by the spiritual fathers of Russia and the wider Orthodox world and read for two centuries as a trustworthy guide to the inner warfare (see The Philokalia and Its Diffusion). This reception does not silence the critics — the Florovsky lineage would reply that a deformation can be received and still be a deformation — but it is a weighty datum, and it is why the most balanced assessments hold the two truths together: that the books are genuinely useful and genuinely Orthodox in their main thrust, and that they retain some Western coloring a purist would prefer absent, the living tradition having on the whole judged them safe while continuing to discuss their roots (METHODOLOGY §4).

See Also

References

  • Unseen Warfare, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer, intro. H. A. Hodges. London: Faber, 1952. Hodges on the “baptizing” of Scupoli and the legitimacy of the borrowing.
  • Scripture and Fathers on selective appropriation: Exodus 12:35–36 (the “spoiling of the Egyptians”); St. Basil the Great, To Young Men, on How They Might Profit from Greek Literature; St. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Moses (the figure of the Egyptian gold).
  • Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology, for the “pseudomorphosis” framework of the foreign-spirit critique.
  • Citterio, Elia. Source-critical studies of Nicodemus’s adaptations (Italian scholarship), for the inspection-based mediating view (see Influence and Scholarship).
  • Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974. On Nicodemus’s deliberateness and discernment as an adapter, and on the reception of a work by the living tradition.