By Metropolitan Chrysostomos III of Mani
The venerable Kollyvades Fathers were not “arteriosclerotic monks,”* as some who were ignorant in spiritual matters called them, but Spirit-bearing teachers and instructors of souls, traditional monks who created a truly reformative climate within the Orthodox Church. Their support was the biblical and patristic teaching and sacred Tradition.
Mainly in the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, this spiritual movement of the Kollyvades Fathers, beginning from Mount Athos and then in other monastic centers on the islands, throughout the whole Aegean Sea, developed and strengthened Orthodox Christian culture. It was indeed a difficult period for all Hellenism, since the French Revolution and the Enlightenment of the West had created a negative influence of alienation from the Orthodox Christian ethos in the Greek lands. Nevertheless, the Kollyvades Fathers struggled, taught, wrote, admonished the people, and preserved the Orthodox faith. Thus there were revealed great figures such as Neophytos Kavsokalyvites (†1784), Makarios Notaras (†1808), Nikodemos the Hagiorite (†1809), Athanasios Parios (†1813), Hierotheos of Hydra (†1814), and others.
As is known, they received the title “Kollyvades” mockingly, because these Fathers insisted that memorial services with kollyva be performed only on Saturday and not on Sunday. At that time, the monks in some monasteries on Mount Athos had been divided into two groups: the traditional Kollyvades and the modernizers, who, for practical reasons of that period, also performed memorials on Sunday. Another important issue was that of frequent Holy Communion, which these Fathers supported and taught, relying on Holy Scripture and the ancient Patristic Tradition. The principal writings of the Kollyvades Fathers were the Philokalia and the Evergetinos, as well as the work On Frequent Communion of the Immaculate Mysteries of Christ.
In the end, after the great disturbance and extent that the whole matter took, the Kollyvades were expelled from Mount Athos, but their dispersion throughout Greece proved beneficial. The Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V, after the long dispute that had arisen over this matter, officially restored the Kollyvades by an encyclical. Indeed, in that encyclical, among other things, he writes: “The pious have the duty at every Sacred Mystagogy both to approach and to partake of the life-giving Body; for this reason they are invited by the priest in the words: ‘With the fear of God, faith, and love, draw near…’”
The principal monasteries which received the Kollyvades Fathers when they departed from Mount Athos were the Monastery of the Annunciation on Skiathos (the monastery especially associated with Alexandros Papadiamantis), the Monastery of Panachrantos on Andros, the Monastery of Saint Nicholas on Andros, the Monastery of Kechrovouni on Tinos, the Monastery of the Life-Receiving Spring of Longovarda on Paros, the Monastery of Hozoviotissa on Amorgos, the Monastery of the Prophet Elias on Hydra, the Nea Moni of Chios, and other monasteries on Patmos, Chios, Samos, Ikaria, and elsewhere.
It is worthwhile to cite some very characteristic views concerning the Kollyvades Fathers.
The learned monk Theoklitos of Dionysiou writes in his introduction to the translation of the Philokalia: “The acquaintance, friendship, and collaboration between Saint Makarios of Corinth and Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite from the island of Naxos, constitutes a blessed milestone for ecclesiastical literature, thanks to the enrichment of the Church with a great number of precious writings that resulted from the cooperation of this sacred pair.”
The professor of Patrology at the University of Thessaloniki, Panagiotis Chrestou, in his study “Spiritual Activity on Mount Athos During the Time of Servitude,” writes: “Among the whole body of scholars of the period, the Kollyvades had, we may say, the richest share. Their friends and defenders, although at first condemned by official decisions of the Church, were later restored; indeed, some of them were recognized as saints and had the greatest influence on the development of the theological and spiritual interests of the Orthodox peoples.”
Another professor, of Liturgics, at the same University, Ioannis Fountoulis, notes: “In the darkness of Turkish rule there shone the purely traditional spiritual ‘movement’ of the Kollyvades. What it offered to the liturgical life of the Church — rejecting the static condition of the time and the simplistic understanding of tradition, and dynamically stirring up the liturgical patristic tradition — is known to all. To it is owed the revival of the forgotten demand for frequent participation in Holy Communion, the highlighting of the meaning of the weekly Pascha, and the related effort to free the resurrectional Sunday from funeral elements…”
The noteworthy writer Kostas Sardelis writes: “Those who preserved the traditions of the Nation, champions of Orthodoxy and of the communal ideal of the once Eastern world of ours, the holy Kollyvades… spread throughout all Greece, preaching the inner rebaptism of the Nation in the untroubled springs of Tradition; they built remarkable coenobitic monasteries, such as that of the Annunciation of Skiathos, which quickly rose into great centers of spiritual radiance.”
We have written this article on the occasion of the memory of our venerable father Nikodemos the Hagiorite, whom our Church celebrates on July 14, wishing to emphasize in the person of the Saint this entire sanctified group of the Kollyvades Fathers, who were figures of sanctified life, of ascetical zeal, personalities marked by love of learning and moral goodness.
Today, when there is sometimes promoted a decadent model of life that darkens the human person, and when a spiritual crisis appears with continual concessions in fundamental moral principles, with compromises and complexes, we consider that the Kollyvades Fathers can stand before us and tell us what it means to live consciously according to God — a life that does not degrade but rather elevates even the modern human being.
Source: Translated by John Sanidopoulos.
Notes:
* The phrase ἀρτηριοσκληρωτικοί καλόγεροι (arteriosclerotic monks) is a mocking/derogatory expression, which implies they were rigid, narrow-minded, backward monks who followed a fossilized tradition.
