The Patristic Mind

The method beneath all of Nicodemus’s work: the “patristic mind” — the total saturation in, submission to, and inhabiting of the Fathers that was at once his scholarly equipment, his theological criterion, and his sanctity. This file sets out how the return to the Fathers functioned as Nicodemus’s method and norm, how it differs from mere antiquarianism, and how it makes him a forerunner of the “return to the Fathers” that became the dominant movement of twentieth-century Orthodox theology — the neo-patristic synthesis.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox / Athonite (canonized 1955)

A Mind Furnished with the Fathers

Everything in the foregoing sections — the Philokalia, the Rudder, the Evergetinos and Synaxaristes, the editions of Symeon and Palamas, the Handbook, the hymnography — proceeds from a single root: Nicodemus’s total immersion in the Fathers. His prodigious memory (see The Formation of an Editor) was not a mere curiosity; it was the instrument of a mind so furnished with Scripture and the Fathers that he could think in them, cross-reference them at will, and bring the whole tradition to bear on any question. This is what is meant by the patristic mind (phronēma): not knowledge about the Fathers held at a distance, but a way of thinking that has so absorbed the Fathers that it shares their criteria, their instincts, and their vision.

For Nicodemus this was not first an academic but an ascetic and ecclesial achievement. He studied the Fathers under obedience to an elder (Arsenios at Pantokrator; see The Formation of an Editor), within the prayer and worship of the Holy Mountain, and as a man seeking his own salvation — not as a scholar collecting data. The patristic mind is acquired, in the Orthodox understanding, only so: by living the life the Fathers lived, within the Church they served. Nicodemus’s learning was the overflow of his discipleship.

The Fathers as Living Norm

The decisive thing about Nicodemus’s relation to the Fathers is that they were for him a living norm, not a closed past. The Kollyvades program (see Tradition Against Innovation) was precisely a return to the Fathers as the criterion of present practice — the measure against which the day of memorial services, the frequency of Communion, the discipline of the canons, and the method of prayer were all to be tested. The Fathers, on this view, are not merely revered ancestors but the abiding voice of the tradition, as authoritative now as ever; to “return to the Fathers” is not to retreat into antiquity but to recover the permanent mind of the Church.

This is why Nicodemus’s editing is never antiquarian. He did not gather the Fathers as a collector gathers curiosities; he gathered them as a physician gathers medicines — for use, for the healing of a Church he believed had drifted from its own mind. Every introduction he wrote, every note he appended, every selection he made was an act of applying the Fathers to the present. The patristic mind is intrinsically practical: it reads the Fathers in order to live by them.

Not Repristination but Discernment

It would be a misreading to take the “return to the Fathers” as a wooden repristination — a mechanical copying of the past. Nicodemus’s patristic mind was a mind of discernment (diakrisis). He selected and arranged (the Philokalia is a work of judgment, not transcription); he interpreted (the Rudder‘s hermēneiai are his own); he even, controversially, adapted Western material when he judged it useful, passing it through the patristic filter (see Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises and Discernment in Borrowing). The patristic mind, rightly understood, is not the abdication of judgment to the past but the formation of judgment by the past — a mind so shaped by the Fathers that it can discern, in any new question or any foreign source, what accords with the tradition and what does not. The very freedom of Nicodemus’s engagement with non-Orthodox material is a sign of the confidence a thoroughly patristic mind possesses.

Forerunner of the Neo-Patristic Synthesis

Nicodemus’s deepest legacy to modern Orthodoxy is this method itself. The “return to the Fathers” that he and the Kollyvades enacted in the eighteenth century became, in the twentieth, the dominant movement of Orthodox theology — the call, associated above all with Georges Florovsky, for a “neo-patristic synthesis”: a theology that thinks with the mind of the Fathers rather than in the categories of Western scholasticism or modern philosophy, and that seeks to acquire the patristic phronēma as the only authentic basis for Orthodox thought (see Influence and Scholarship). Whatever the ironies — Florovsky’s own lineage also voiced the sharpest critique of Nicodemus’s Western borrowings (see Discernment in Borrowing) — the basic program was the same: to recover the Fathers as the living norm of Orthodox life and thought. Nicodemus did with the printing press, two centuries early, what the neo-patristic theologians would do with the lecture hall and the critical edition. He put the Fathers back into the Church’s hands, and the Church has been returning to them ever since.

The Editor’s Sanctity

This is, finally, the key to understanding why an editor is a saint. Nicodemus’s holiness was not separate from his learning; it was his learning, sanctified — the patristic mind acquired through a life of prayer, obedience, watchfulness, and labor, and poured out in service to the whole Church. He is the saint of the return to the Fathers: the one who, more than any other single figure, made the patristic inheritance available to modern Orthodoxy and modeled the discerning, living, practical relation to the Fathers that the tradition requires. The Church glorified him (see Glorification and Feast) not despite his being an editor but because of what his editing was: a life given to ensuring that the Church would never lose its own mind.

The Phronema as Ascetic Achievement

It is worth dwelling on what the Orthodox tradition means by the phronēma of the Fathers, because the word resists the assumptions of modern scholarship. A phronēma is not a body of information but a mind-set — a way of perceiving, judging, and loving that has been formed by long habituation in the tradition (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974). One does not acquire it by reading more books but by becoming a certain kind of person, and in the Orthodox understanding that becoming is ascetic: it requires prayer, obedience, the purification of the heart, and the watchfulness that frees the mind to see rightly (see Watchfulness and the Senses). This is why the tradition can say that theology is the fruit of purity and that the true theologian is the one who prays. Nicodemus’s vast learning was credible precisely because it grew from this root: his command of the Fathers was the overflow of a life lived under their discipline, not the accumulation of a researcher (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, 1974). The patristic mind, so understood, is a sanctity before it is a scholarship, and the two are inseparable in him.

The Living Voice Against Drift

The conviction that the Fathers are a living norm rather than a closed past had sharp practical consequences in Nicodemus’s hands. The Kollyvades controversies — over the day of memorial services, the frequency of Communion, the discipline of the canons — were at bottom disputes about authority: whether present custom or the inherited mind of the Church should govern (see Tradition Against Innovation). Nicodemus’s answer was to set the Fathers as the measure against which every present practice must be tested, treating their voice as no less authoritative now than when it was first uttered (Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, 1974). This is the opposite of antiquarianism, which reveres the past precisely by sealing it off as past; Nicodemus revered the Fathers by obeying them, by letting their judgment correct and reform the living Church. The “return to the Fathers” was for him a return to a present authority that the Church had partly forgotten, and his editorial labors were the means of restoring that voice to audibility — the physician gathering medicines for the healing of a body grown forgetful of its own health.

Forerunner and Case-Study

The deepest irony of Nicodemus’s relation to the modern neo-patristic movement deserves to be stated plainly, for it is part of what makes him so revealing a figure. He is, on the one hand, the great forerunner of the twentieth-century “return to the Fathers” — the call, associated with Georges Florovsky, for a neo-patristic synthesis that thinks with the mind of the Fathers rather than in borrowed Western categories, pursued by Vladimir Lossky and John Meyendorff and bound up with the recovery of hesychasm and Palamism (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; see Influence and Scholarship). On the other hand, the same Florovskian framework that prizes the patristic mind also supplies the sharpest critique of Nicodemus’s borrowings from Western devotional books (see Discernment in Borrowing). Nicodemus is therefore both the movement’s ancestor and one of its case-studies — the man who did most to recover the patristic phronema, and yet whose own engagement with the West the movement’s heirs would weigh and question. Far from diminishing him, this tension confirms the point: the patristic mind is not a possession to be held without struggle but a criterion that judges even its own greatest servants, and the freedom with which Nicodemus borrowed was itself a wager on the confidence a thoroughly patristic mind may permit itself (Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology; Cavarnos, St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite, 1974).

References

Cavarnos, Constantine. St. Nicodemos the Hagiorite (Modern Orthodox Saints, vol. 3). Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1974. On Nicodemus’s patristic learning as the root of his work and sanctity.
Florovsky, Georges. “St Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers,” and Ways of Russian Theology, for the program of the neo-patristic synthesis and the “return to the Fathers.”
Nicodemus and Makarios, comps. The Philokalia: The Complete Text, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, and Ware. London: Faber, 1979–. The supreme instance of Nicodemus’s patristic method in practice; the translators’ introductions on the patristic recovery.