The Catecheses

The instructions by which Theodore formed his monks: the Great Catechesis (Megale Katechesis, in three books) and the Small Catechesis (Mikra Katechesis, 134 pieces) — the abbot’s regular word to the brethren on the cenobitic life, obedience, repentance, and the warfare of the soul; their editions (Cozza-Luzi, Papadopoulos-Kerameus, Auvray) and the absence of a complete critical text; and the Testament (Diatheke), dictated near death to his disciple Naukratios (PG 99:1813–1824).

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father / Byzantine)

The Abbot’s Word to the Brethren

The Catecheses are the voice of Theodore as a father of monks. By the custom of the Studite house the abbot addressed the assembled brethren several times a week — the tradition speaks of three weekly instructions — and Theodore’s catecheses are the deposit of that practice: short, direct, practical homilies on the meaning and the daily cost of the common life (Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 130–170; Leroy, Études sur les Grandes Catéchèses, Studi e Testi 456, 2008). They are not systematic theology. They are pastoral instruction — exhortation to obedience, warnings against murmuring and idleness, calls to repentance, consolation in trial — and they are the single richest source for what the Studite reform actually felt like from inside (see Abbot of Stoudios). In them the Basilian and Climacan ideals of obedience and the renunciation of self-will are translated into the texture of a particular community’s days (see The Formation of a Reformer).

The Great Catechesis

The Great Catechesis (Megale Katechesis, Latin Magna Catechesis) is the larger collection, the earliest pieces of which go back to Theodore’s Sakkoudion years (c. 794–796) and which is organized in three books (Cholij, pp. 130–170; Leroy, 2008). Its survival is incomplete and its textual history tangled — there is no complete modern critical edition. The text must be sought across two principal nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century editions:

  • Giuseppe (Joseph) Cozza-Luzi, in Nova Patrum Bibliotheca, vol. 9, part 2 (Rome, 1888) — printing 77 catecheses.
  • A. Papadopoulos-Kerameus (St. Petersburg, 1904) — printing 143 catecheses, some overlapping with Cozza-Luzi.

[Disputed: the precise mapping of the surviving catecheses onto the three books of the Great Catechesis, and the total number originally extant, are not crisply established; the scholarship (Leroy, Études sur les Grandes Catéchèses, 2008) treats the textual tradition as incompletely edited, and no single complete critical edition exists.] Julien Leroy devoted his scholarly career to the Great Catecheses; his studies were published posthumously as Études sur les Grandes Catéchèses de s. Théodore Studite (Studi e Testi 456, Vatican, 2008), but a finished critical edition of the whole did not appear.

The Small Catechesis

The Small Catechesis (Mikra Katechesis, Latin Parva Catechesis) is a collection of 134 shorter instructions, generally assigned to the last years of Theodore’s life (c. 821–826) (Cholij, pp. 130–170). It circulated even more widely than the Great Catechesis, surviving in Georgian and Arabic as well as Greek — a measure of how useful the wider Christian East found these compact monastic exhortations. The standard edition is:

  • Emmanuel Auvray, Sancti patris nostri et confessoris Theodori Studitis praepositi Parva Catechesis (Paris, 1891) — the Greek text with a Latin rendering and the historical annotation of A. Tougard.

A French translation by Anne-Marie Mohr, Petites catéchèses (Les Pères dans la foi 52, Paris, 1993), makes the Small Catechesis accessible to the modern reader. Its short, pointed pieces — on the feasts, on the seasons of the monastic year, on the recurring temptations of the common life — are among the most attractive of Theodore’s monastic writings.

The Theology of the Catecheses

Though pastoral in form, the Catecheses carry a consistent monastic theology. Three notes recur. First, obedience as the heart of the monastic life: the surrender of one’s own will to the abbot and the rule is, for Theodore, the daily martyrdom by which the monk is saved, the Climacan ideal made the axis of the common life (Cholij, pp. 130–170). Second, repentance and penthos — the tears and compunction that the Catecheses press as the constant disposition of the monk. Third, the dignity of the common life itself: against any romance of the solitary or the self-directed monk, Theodore exalts the cenobium as the surer and humbler road, where the will is broken not by one’s own ascetic feats but by the friction of life under obedience with others. The Catecheses are, in this sense, the spiritual charter of the reform whose institutional shape is set out elsewhere (see Abbot of Stoudios and The Studite Typikon).

The Testament

Theodore’s last word to his community was the Testament (Diatheke, Latin Testamentum), dictated as he lay dying in 826 to his disciple Naukratios, who would succeed him in the leadership of the Studite party (Cholij, pp. 170–185; the text at PG 99:1813–1824). The Testament is part confession of faith and part final charge: it professes the Orthodox faith, anathematizes the heresies (iconoclasm above all), commits the brethren to the rule and to one another, and binds them never to surrender the veneration of the icons nor the freedom of the Church (Thomas & Hero, eds., Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents, 2000, doc. 3, trans. Miller). It is the seal of his life — the reformer and the Confessor speaking with one voice at the end — and it became, with the Hypotyposis, one of the founding documents transmitted by the Studite tradition (see The Studite Typikon). In it, characteristically, Theodore enjoins his successors to hold to economy nowhere that it would touch the faith, and to guard the common life undiminished: the two causes of his whole career, committed to the brethren as his dying bequest.

The Genre and Delivery of Monastic Catechesis

The Catecheses belong to a recognizable genre of cenobitic literature whose ancestor is the spoken instruction of the desert and the great rule-givers, and whose particular Studite form is a function of the reformed house’s weekly rhythm. The catechetical word was not a sermon in the public liturgical sense but the abbot’s domestic address to his own monks, delivered in chapter or after an office, and Theodore’s collections preserve the deposit of an instruction repeated, by the tradition, some three times a week across the years of his abbacy (Cholij, Theodore the Stoudite, 2002, pp. 130–170; Leroy, Études sur les Grandes Catéchèses, 2008). The form accordingly shows its origins in oral delivery: the pieces are short, open with an address to the brethren, turn quickly to a single practical theme, and close with a doxology. Many are tied to the moment of their delivery — to a feast just kept, to a season of the monastic year, to a death in the community, to a journey the abbot was about to make — so that the collections, read in sequence, trace the lived calendar of the Stoudios as much as they expound a doctrine. This occasional, calendrical character is most marked in the Small Catechesis, whose pieces frequently begin from the feast or the fast at hand (Auvray, ed., Parva Catechesis, 1891).

The manuscript transmission reflects both the usefulness and the editorial untidiness of the corpus. The Small Catechesis travelled remarkably far: beyond its Greek witnesses it survives in Georgian and Arabic versions, evidence that these compact exhortations were prized as practical reading across the monastic world of the Christian East, from the Caucasus to the Melkite communities under Islam (Cholij, pp. 130–170). The Great Catechesis, by contrast, survives in a more fragmentary and dispersed state, its pieces scattered through manuscripts that do not agree on order or contents, which is why the printed witnesses — Cozza-Luzi’s seventy-seven catecheses (Nova Patrum Bibliotheca 9.2, 1888) and Papadopoulos-Kerameus’s hundred and forty-three (1904) — overlap without coinciding and neither presents the whole. The decisive modern judgment is that no complete critical edition of the Great Catechesis exists: Julien Leroy, who gave his scholarly life to the problem, established the lines along which such an edition would have to proceed and clarified the relation of the witnesses to the three-book structure, but the finished critical text did not appear in his lifetime and his work was published posthumously as a set of Études rather than as an edition (Leroy, Études sur les Grandes Catéchèses, Studi e Testi 456, 2008). The student of the Catecheses therefore still works, for the larger collection, with an incompletely edited tradition — a caution that should temper any confident statement about the exact number, order, or wording of the pieces (see Poems, Canons, and the Scriptorium for the parallel state of the verse).

The Themes and Their Patristic Roots

Read for their content rather than their form, the Catecheses return again and again to a small cluster of themes, each of which Theodore receives from the tradition and sharpens for the common life of his house. The first is penthos — the gift of tears, the abiding compunction that the Catecheses press as the monk’s normal disposition rather than an occasional grace. Here Theodore stands in direct line from John Climacus, whose Ladder of Divine Ascent gives mourning (charmolype, “joy-making sorrow”) its classic monastic treatment; the Studite catechetical insistence on daily repentance is the Climacan teaching made the steady weather of a cenobium (Cholij, pp. 130–170; see The Formation of a Reformer). The second is stability — hypomone, endurance, and the rootedness of the monk in his place and his obedience. Against the restless monk who seeks a better cell, a stricter rule, or a more congenial father, Theodore exalts the patient remaining-in-place where the will is ground down by ordinary friction; the theme answers to the Basilian preference for the common life over the wandering of the unattached ascetic (Basil, Asketikon; Cholij, pp. 130–170).

The third and governing theme is the danger of self-will (idiorrhythmia of the heart, the thelema idion that the Fathers name the root of the monk’s undoing). For Theodore the surrender of one’s own will to the abbot and the rule is not a discipline among others but the very substance of the monastic conversion: it is the daily, bloodless martyrdom by which the monk dies to himself and is saved, and the Catecheses return to it as to the axis of the whole life (Cholij, pp. 130–170). This is the point at which Basil and Climacus converge in Theodore: from Basil he takes the conviction that obedience is rightly rendered within the structured common life and to a lawful superior, not to a self-chosen guide; from Climacus he takes the radical valuation of obedience as the shortest road to dispassion, the cutting-off of the will (ekkope tou thelematos) that the Ladder praises above bodily austerity (see The Formation of a Reformer). The Catecheses translate this inheritance into the idiom of a particular community — its officers and its offices, its kitchen and its scriptorium (see Poems, Canons, and the Scriptorium) — and in doing so they give the reform its interior voice, the spiritual counterpart to the institutional ordering set out in the Hypotyposis and the Testament (see The Studite Typikon). It is characteristic of Theodore that he refuses to let the cenobium be merely a frame for private askesis: the common life is itself the ascetic instrument, and the brethren are, for one another, the means of salvation.

See Also

References

  • Cholij, Roman. Theodore the Stoudite: The Ordering of Holiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. (On the Catecheses, the Testament, and the monastic theology.)
  • Leroy, Julien. Études sur les Grandes Catéchèses de s. Théodore Studite. Studi e Testi 456. Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 2008. (Posthumous; the standard study of the Great Catechesis and its incompletely edited tradition.)
  • Auvray, Emmanuel, ed. Sancti patris nostri et confessoris Theodori Studitis praepositi Parva Catechesis. Paris, 1891. (The edition of the Small Catechesis.)
  • Cozza-Luzi, Giuseppe, ed. Nova Patrum Bibliotheca, vol. 9, pt. 2. Rome, 1888. (77 catecheses of the Great Catechesis.)
  • Papadopoulos-Kerameus, A., ed. (St. Petersburg, 1904). (143 catecheses of the Great Catechesis.)
  • Theodore the Studite. Testamentum (Diatheke), PG 99:1813–1824 (Migne, 1860); trans. Timothy Miller, in Thomas & Hero, eds., Byzantine Monastic Foundation Documents (Dumbarton Oaks, 2000), doc. 3.
  • Mohr, Anne-Marie, trans. Petites catéchèses. Les Pères dans la foi 52. Paris: Migne, 1993.
  • John Climacus. The Ladder of Divine Ascent. (On penthos/compunction and the cutting-off of self-will; the Climacan source of the Studite catechetical themes.)
  • Basil of Caesarea. Asketikon (the Longer and Shorter Rules). (The Basilian preference for the common life and lawful obedience underlying Theodore’s teaching on stability.)
  • The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. Alexander Kazhdan et al. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (s.vv. “Theodore of Stoudios,” “Catechesis.”)