The Kollyvades Movement

The Philokalia was the greatest literary fruit of the Kollyvades movement — an eighteenth-century revival among the monks of Mount Athos that began in a dispute over the day for memorial services, but grew into a broad call for a return to the Fathers, to frequent communion, and to the authentic liturgical and spiritual tradition of the Church against the innovations and the Enlightenment currents of the age.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Athonite)

A Quarrel over Kollyva

The movement takes its name, oddly, from boiled wheat. Kollyva is the dish of boiled wheat grains blessed at Orthodox memorial services for the dead. The controversy that gave the movement its name broke out on Mount Athos around the 1750s at the Skete of St. Anne, where the building of a new church prompted a practical question: on which day should the memorial services for benefactors be held? A group of monks insisted that memorials, being services of mourning, belonged properly to Saturday — the traditional day of the departed — and should not be transferred to Sunday, the day of the Resurrection and of joy, as some had begun to do for convenience (Kollyvades Movement, in the standard accounts; Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” in Bingaman and Nassif, eds., The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, Oxford University Press, 2012). Those who defended the Saturday observance were nicknamed, mockingly, Kollyvades — “the kollyva people” — and the name stuck (on the origin of the name, the standard histories of the movement; cf. the account in Constantine Cavarnos, The Kollyvades Movement, Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies).

What began as a liturgical dispute quickly became something much larger, because the two sides represented two attitudes to tradition itself. The Kollyvades held that even so small a matter of the received order should not be altered on grounds of mere convenience, and that the impulse to innovate — visible in this and in other relaxations of monastic and liturgical practice — was a symptom of a deeper carelessness about the Church’s inheritance (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the movement’s traditionalism). Their opponents saw them as rigid and quarrelsome. The controversy was bitter, involved appeals to the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and led at times to the persecution and expulsion of Kollyvades monks from Athos over the second half of the eighteenth century (the standard histories; Cavarnos, The Kollyvades Movement).

More Than a Dispute: A Return to the Sources

Behind the quarrel over the day of memorials lay a positive program, and it is this that makes the Kollyvades important for the history of Orthodox spirituality. The leading Kollyvades — above all St. Makarios of Corinth (1731–1805), St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1749–1809), and St. Athanasios Parios (c. 1722–1813) — were not merely defenders of an old rubric but reformers in the deepest sense: they sought a renewal of the Church’s life through a return to its patristic and liturgical sources (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the three leaders; on Athanasios Parios, the standard accounts). Two elements of their program stand out.

First, frequent communion. The Kollyvades taught that the faithful should receive the Eucharist often — ideally every Sunday, or even daily — recovering the ancient practice against the custom of their time, in which most Orthodox communed only three or four times a year. St. Nikodemos and St. Makarios put this teaching into print in the treatise Concerning Frequent Communion (1783), which became one of the movement’s manifestos and was itself controversial (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on frequent communion as a Kollyvades cause). Second, the return to the Fathers: a conviction that the theological and spiritual writings of the Greek fathers, and the hesychast tradition of inner prayer in particular, held the living remedy for the Church’s condition, and needed to be recovered, edited, and made available. The Philokalia is the supreme expression of this second impulse (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012).

The Library of the Kollyvades

The Kollyvades were, remarkably, a movement of editors. In a period of only a few years the circle around Nikodemos and Makarios brought to press a whole library of patristic and ascetic texts, most of them out of the Athonite manuscripts, and nearly all serving the same aim of renewal. Besides the Philokalia (1782), they published the Evergetinos (1783), a vast thematic anthology of the ascetic fathers; the treatise Concerning Frequent Communion (1783); and editions of individual fathers, including St. Nikodemos’s edition of the works of St. Symeon the New Theologian and of St. Gregory Palamas, and his labors on the collection of the sacred canons, the Rudder (Pedalion) (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, on the range of Kollyvades publications; the individual editions are treated in St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite). Seen against this background, the Philokalia is not an isolated anthology but the centerpiece of a coordinated recovery of the sources of Orthodox spirituality.

The movement also had a marked interest in St. Gregory Palamas and the fourteenth-century hesychast controversy. Nikodemos’s edition of Palamas’s works and the prominence of the hesychast fathers in the Philokalia are of a piece: the Kollyvades understood themselves as heirs and defenders of the hesychast tradition that Palamas had vindicated, and the Philokalia can be read as, among other things, a Palamite anthology — a gathering of the texts that lead to and support the theology of the uncreated light (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012; see Nepsis, Theosis, and the Vision of Light, and St. Gregory Palamas).

An Enlightenment in Reverse

The Kollyvades revival is sometimes described as a Greek Orthodox counter-Enlightenment, and the description is apt if handled carefully. The later eighteenth century was the age of the “Neohellenic Enlightenment,” when Greek intellectuals under Ottoman rule looked to Western science, philosophy, and political thought for the regeneration of the nation. The Kollyvades offered a different vision of renewal: not the importation of Western modernity but a return to the Church’s own patristic and hesychast depths (Ware, “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia,” 2012, situating the movement against the Neohellenic Enlightenment; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, on the Philokalia as an alternative to the Enlightenment). It would be too simple to call them merely reactionary — Nikodemos himself drew, critically, on Western devotional works — but the movement’s center of gravity was unmistakably a recovery of the East’s own tradition (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). That the Philokalia, born of this backward-looking revival, would become the seed of a forward-looking renaissance of Orthodox theology in the twentieth century is one of the notable ironies of its history (see The Philokalic Renaissance).

See Also

References

  • Ware, Kallistos. “St Nikodimos and the Philokalia.” In The Philokalia: A Classic Text of Orthodox Spirituality, ed. Brock Bingaman and Bradley Nassif, 9–35. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. (The Kollyvades movement; the memorial-services dispute; frequent communion; the three leaders; the movement against the Neohellenic Enlightenment.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The Philokalia and the Kollyvades as an alternative to the Enlightenment; Nikodemos’s critical use of Western sources.)
  • Cavarnos, Constantine. The Kollyvades Movement. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. (Standard English account of the movement, its name, and its history.)
  • Concerning Frequent Communion. Comp. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Makarios of Corinth. 1783. (The Kollyvades manifesto on the Eucharist.)