Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises

Nicodemus’s two Orthodox reworkings of Western Roman Catholic devotional books, and the scholarly debate they have provoked: Unseen Warfare (Aoratos Polemos), his Greek adaptation of the Combattimento spirituale of the sixteenth-century Venetian priest Lorenzo Scupoli; the Spiritual Exercises (Pneumatika Gymnasmata), his adaptation of an Italian devotional work descending from Ignatius of Loyola through the Jesuit Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti; what Nicodemus changed in transplanting these books into Orthodoxy; the further Russian revision of Unseen Warfare by St. Theophan the Recluse; and the live debate — presented here with named positions — over what this use of Latin sources means.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

The Two Books and Their Catholic Originals

That the great editor of the patristic East drew on Western Catholic books is not in dispute; it is openly attested and is one of the most discussed facts about him. Two works are at issue:

Unseen Warfare (Ho Aoratos Polemos, “The Invisible War”). Its base is the Combattimento spirituale (“The Spiritual Combat”) of Lorenzo Scupoli (c. 1530–1610), a priest of the Theatine order at Venice, first published in 1589 — one of the most popular and influential devotional manuals of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, a book on the inner warfare against the passions and the self-will, structured around four “weapons”: distrust of self, trust in God, the right use of the faculties, and prayer (Unseen Warfare, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer, intro. H. A. Hodges, London: Faber, 1952; Nicodemus the Hagiorite, Wikipedia). Nicodemus, who read Italian (see Naxos and the Holy Mountain), translated and reworked it into Greek.
Spiritual Exercises (Pneumatika Gymnasmata). Its base is an Italian devotional work in the tradition of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, specifically an edition with the meditations and commentary of the Jesuit Giovanni Pietro Pinamonti (1632–1703); Nicodemus adapted from this Italian material a Greek book of structured meditations on the last things, the life of Christ, and the spiritual life (Nicodemus the Hagiorite, Wikipedia; Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, OrthodoxWiki).

What Nicodemus Changed

Nicodemus did not simply translate these books; he reworked them, and the nature of the reworking is the heart of the scholarly question. By the account of his defenders, he passed the Western material through an Orthodox filter: he removed or corrected what was alien to Orthodox doctrine and sensibility, and — most importantly — he infused the books with the hesychast and patristic tradition, above all by setting at their center the Jesus Prayer and the Philokalic teaching on the guarding of the heart, which are absent from the Catholic originals (Unseen Warfare, Hodges’s Introduction, Faber, 1952). The Scupoli original is a fine book of ascetic psychology in a Western key; the Unseen Warfare that emerged is, on this reading, an Orthodox book of the inner warfare in which the prayer of the heart is the decisive weapon. Nicodemus, in short, took useful Western analysis of the spiritual combat and grafted it onto the Orthodox stock of neptic prayer.

The motive was practical and pastoral. The Counter-Reformation had produced a sophisticated literature of methodical self-examination and the analysis of the spiritual struggle of a kind the Orthodox devotional shelf of his day was thinner in; Nicodemus, ever the gatherer of useful things for the edification of the faithful, judged that this material, rightly corrected and re-rooted, could serve Orthodox readers (see Discernment in Borrowing).

The Layered Authorship of Unseen Warfare

Unseen Warfare is, even more than Nicodemus’s other works, a palimpsest, and honest citation requires naming the layers (METHODOLOGY §2.1):

Lorenzo Scupoli (1589) — the original Italian Combattimento spirituale;
St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite (late 18th c.) — the Greek adaptation, hesychast and Orthodox;
St. Theophan the Recluse (19th c.) — a further Russian revision, in which Theophan freely re-edited Nicodemus’s Greek, correcting, abridging, and adapting again for Russian readers (just as he did with the Dobrotolyubie; see The Philokalia and Its Diffusion).

The book most readers know in English — the Kadloubovsky and Palmer translation (London: Faber, 1952) — is made from Theophan’s Russian, and so presents Scupoli at three removes, through two Orthodox saints (Unseen Warfare, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Faber, 1952). The title page rightly names all three; the book is a genuinely collaborative artifact of West and East across three centuries.

The Scholarly Debate

The use of Latin sources by the foremost champion of patristic Orthodoxy is, unsurprisingly, contested. The positions:

[Disputed: scholars and Orthodox commentators divide on Nicodemus’s use of Western Catholic sources. (1) The defending view (the dominant one, represented in H. A. Hodges’s introduction to Unseen Warfare, Faber 1952, and broadly by the Philokalic translators) holds that Nicodemus thoroughly “baptized” the Western material — stripping out what was un-Orthodox and re-centering the books on the Jesus Prayer and the neptic tradition — so that the result is genuinely Orthodox and the Western origin is incidental raw material rightly used. (2) The critical view holds that, however much he revised, Nicodemus imported into Orthodox spirituality elements of a Western (Counter-Reformation, methodical-meditative, “Latin”) spirit — a more systematic, imaginative, and discursive style of meditation foreign to the apophatic and imageless hesychast tradition — and that this represents a “Western captivity” or pseudomorphosis of Orthodox spirituality at this point (a concern voiced in the lineage of Georges Florovsky’s critique of Western influence on Orthodox theology). (3) A mediating scholarly view (associated with the detailed source-studies of Elia Citterio and others) maps precisely what Nicodemus took and changed, concluding that he was a discerning adapter who Orthodoxized his sources substantially while inevitably carrying some of their cast — neither a naïve borrower nor a mere translator. The debate concerns the degree and significance of the Western element, not the fact of borrowing, which all sides accept (Unseen Warfare, Hodges’s Introduction, Faber 1952; Nicodemus the Hagiorite, Wikipedia, on “the extent of Western influence”; the Florovsky-line critique and the Citterio source-studies as represented in the scholarship surveyed in Influence and Scholarship)]. Per METHODOLOGY §4, the matter is presented with its named positions rather than adjudicated; the next file takes up the underlying principle.

A Saint and a Question

It is worth stating plainly, because it is sometimes obscured by polemic on both sides: the Church canonized Nicodemus knowing all of this. His use of Western sources was no secret; it was discussed in his own century and ever since. His glorification in 1955 (see Glorification and Feast) is the Church’s judgment on the man and his sanctity, not a canonization of every editorial decision he made. One may hold — as serious Orthodox scholars do — both that Nicodemus is a saint and that his adaptations of Scupoli and Pinamonti are the most questionable items in his vast output. Sanctity and editorial debate are not in competition; the saint was an editor, and editors make contestable choices.

Scupoli and the Career of the Combattimento

To weigh what Nicodemus did, one must know what he started from. The Combattimento spirituale of Lorenzo Scupoli was among the most widely read devotional books of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, printed in scores of editions and translated across Europe in the decades after its first appearance at Venice in 1589; it was prized for its psychological acuity, its sober concentration on the inner discipline of the will, and its freedom from the more elaborate visionary excesses of some contemporary devotion (Unseen Warfare, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer, intro. H. A. Hodges, London: Faber, 1952). It was famously a favorite of later Catholic spiritual masters and circulated as a small, intensely practical handbook of the war against the passions. That a book of such standing should have reached the Holy Mountain and been judged worth adapting tells something of both its quality and Nicodemus’s confidence; he was not scraping the bottom of the Western shelf but engaging one of its acknowledged masterpieces (Nicodemus the Hagiorite, Wikipedia).

The Four Weapons

The architecture Scupoli gave the spiritual combat — preserved in Nicodemus’s adaptation — rests on four weapons, and naming them shows both what Nicodemus retained and where he added. The first is distrust of self (diffidenza di sé): the recognition that the soul has no strength of its own and that every reliance on one’s own resources is the gateway of defeat. The second is trust in God: the corresponding confidence that all strength comes from grace, so that the combatant fights from weakness leaning wholly on God. The third is the right use of the faculties — the disciplined governance of mind, will, memory, and the bodily senses, the training of the inner powers in the war against the passions. The fourth is prayer (Unseen Warfare, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Faber, 1952). It is at this fourth weapon above all that Nicodemus’s hand is felt, for where the Western original treats prayer in a more general and methodical key, the Orthodox adaptation fills it with the Jesus Prayer and the Philokalic discipline of the guarding of the heart, so that the decisive weapon of the inner war becomes the unceasing invocation of the Name (Unseen Warfare, Hodges’s Introduction, Faber, 1952; see Orthodoxy Guide: The Jesus Prayer).

The Three-Author Palimpsest in Detail

The layered authorship deserves to be felt as a living history, for each layer reworked the last with the same freedom. Scupoli’s Italian became, under Nicodemus’s hand, a Greek book re-centered on hesychast prayer; Nicodemus’s Greek became, under Theophan the Recluse, a Russian book abridged and adapted again for a different readership in a different century (Unseen Warfare, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Faber, 1952). Theophan did not treat Nicodemus’s text as fixed scripture; he edited it as freely as Nicodemus had edited Scupoli, correcting, shortening, and re-pitching it for Russian monastic and lay readers — exactly the liberty he took with the Dobrotolyubie, his Russian Philokalia (see The Philokalia and Its Diffusion; St. Theophan the Recluse). The book most English readers know, the Kadloubovsky and Palmer translation, descends from Theophan’s Russian, so that a reader in English meets Scupoli at three removes, refracted through two Orthodox saints. This is not a defect to be apologized for but the very mode of the tradition’s life: a useful text is received, reworked, and handed on, each transmitter making it his own (Unseen Warfare, Hodges’s Introduction, Faber, 1952).

The Three Positions Stated Fully

Because the debate is the heart of this file, it is worth restating the three positions in their fullest form, each in the strongest version its proponents would recognize, without adjudication (METHODOLOGY §4). The defending view, classically stated in Hodges’s introduction and broadly shared by the Philokalic translators, holds that the act of adaptation was so thorough — the un-Orthodox doctrine removed, the Jesus Prayer and neptic teaching set at the center — that the result is a genuinely Orthodox book and the Western origin is incidental raw material rightly used; on this reading Nicodemus “baptized” Scupoli as the Fathers baptized pagan learning (Unseen Warfare, Hodges’s Introduction, Faber, 1952). The critical view, in the lineage of Georges Florovsky’s account of the “Western captivity” of Orthodox thought, holds that form and spirit are not so cleanly separable, and that the methodical, imaginative, discursive cast of Counter-Reformation meditation entered Orthodox spirituality with the borrowed books, a subtle pseudomorphosis at odds with the apophatic and imageless hesychast tradition (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology). The mediating view, grounded in the detailed source-studies of Elia Citterio and others, maps line by line what Nicodemus took, kept, and changed, and concludes that he was a discerning adapter who Orthodoxized his sources substantially while inevitably carrying some of their cast — neither a naïve borrower nor a mere translator (Citterio source-studies; see Influence and Scholarship). The dispute, all three agree, is over the degree and significance of the Western element, never over the fact of the borrowing.

References

Scupoli, Lorenzo / Nicodemus the Hagiorite / Theophan the Recluse. Unseen Warfare, trans. E. Kadloubovsky and G. E. H. Palmer, intro. H. A. Hodges. London: Faber and Faber, 1952. The English (from Theophan’s Russian); Hodges’s introduction is the standard English statement of the source-question and the “baptizing” defense.
Nicodemus the Hagiorite. Wikipedia (used to locate the source-facts, cross-checked against OrthodoxWiki): the Combattimento spirituale of Scupoli behind Unseen Warfare; the Pinamonti/Loyola Spiritual Exercises behind the Pneumatika Gymnasmata; “an ongoing controversy concerns the extent of Western influence.”
Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. OrthodoxWiki, orthodoxwiki.org. (The two adaptations among his works.)
Citterio, Elia. Source-critical studies of Nicodemus’s adaptations (Italian scholarship), as surveyed in the secondary literature on the Western-source question (see Influence and Scholarship).
Florovsky, Georges. Ways of Russian Theology and related essays, for the framework of the “Western captivity”/pseudomorphosis critique invoked in the debate.