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For this purpose I bow my knees before the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ... 887 The name of St. Nicodemus is inextricably linked with the history of the Holy Mountain and all of Orthodoxy since the last quarter of the 18th century. Breathing patristic zeal, he entered into a dogmatic struggle and became the fear of the slanderous. No one dared to confront this inconspicuous giant with his holy appearance, amazing memory and incredible learning. And one threatening wave of the comrade of his old age, the ascetic staff, was enough to put all kinds of dogs to flight. The Holy Kinot of the Holy Mountain knows the victories over the Protestants won by the Monk Nicodemus, a beggar teacher in worn-out clothes and rough shoes. His writings, reprinted many times, became the measure of church truth and rich spiritual food for monks and the fullness of Christ. Over all these years, they did not fall prey to decay and did not lose the veneration of the faithful. Because the pure spirit that permeates them, their deep observation, subtle analysis, poetry, spiritual sweetness and fragrance, incomparable learning, right-thinking and transparency make the creations of St. Nicodemus impeccable. He never wrote anything without confirmation by the words of the Holy Scriptures, the Fathers and Teachers of the Church, and completely forgot about the author’s “I”. We, the inhabitants of the Holy Mountains, have deep love for Saint Nicodemus: as our God-inspired Teacher and the fragrant flower of the Athos land. And indeed: he is the leader of all spiritual ages of monastic life. Both the beginner and the experienced see Nicodemus as their leader. And the one who is in deep sobriety is guided by Nicodemus and comes to prosperity. And the hesychast is led by him into the darkness of contemplation and into the sanctuary of mystical life. But also many brothers living in the world find support in Saint Nicodemus and consider him an unshakable rule of spiritual life. Nicodemus the Svyatogorets lived by the Orthodox spirit of the Fathers of the Church in all its manifestations and united in himself all their God-wise experience. The monk entered into the immeasurable spaces of life in the All-Holy Spirit, through suffering sharing the wisdom and knowledge of God and always remembering his beloved Apostle Paul: “I have been crucified with Christ. And it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” 888. The life of St. Nicodemus was a most beautiful imitation of Christ, and his love, worthy of the Apostle Paul - within the limits of his monastic life - was filled with sorrows, making up for the lack of the sorrows of Christ in his flesh 889. And, strengthened by the Lord, in the most mediocre era he revealed in the Church a spiritual amalgam made up of various manifestations of his long-suffering and divine life: deepest humility (he considered himself a “dead dog”), rich in tears of tenderness, fiery love for his neighbor, sorrow for the Lord, contemplation of the invisible, mystical theology, love for God, piercing and inconceivable by human beings. being, and finally, writing, diverse, multifaceted and voluminous, adorned by the Lord's grace. Therefore, the Monk Nicodemus, along with the exceptional power of thought that God endowed him with, also accepted spiritual gifts that contributed to the creation of the Church: he was distinguished by the rare talent of a canonist, the art of a commentator, the complete knowledge of a hagiologist, the arcane knowledge of a liturgist, the difficult-to-achieve experience of an ascetic writer - and all these gifts were miraculously united in one person. The monk ascended to the most inaccessible heights of divine contemplation. He fed on them throughout his monastic life and guided the faithful to them, leaving his unsurpassed works to the Church. They are filled with knowledge of the boundless spaces of Orthodox spirituality, they are the fruit of a spirit unfettered by any bonds, eternal and free from space and time, exceeding human understanding and any rationalistic reasoning deprived of freedom. In a word, he left us truly Orthodox creations. Nicodemus the Holy Mountain was a great saint and teacher of the Orthodox Church. Wherever his pen approached, indelible traces of his majestic and luminous personality remained. He was a mentor on the paths of the spiritual world and the “sacraments of Christ.” Deep and pure in heart, with rare intellectual honesty and Christian dispassion in his soul, he, leaving this world in spirit, entered the Holy of Holies of our immaculate faith and dwelt on the most pure table of love. There was no time when he fell into involuntary vanity or insincerity, as happens to many. Every single one of his writings and his glorious life itself testify to continuous living on the heights of the spirit - in Christ Jesus. As a hierophant 890, he constantly wove his works on the loom of pure and all-holy love, which, united forever with his great soul, became its inseparable part from his youth, when his heart was filled with the breath of Divine grace. It is very significant for Orthodox tradition that, before beginning to talk about things divine and human, the monk undertook the feat of purifying himself through asceticism and only then directed the eye of the soul into the boundless distances of the divine. He acquired virtue through his labors and then, in order to subordinate the worse to the better, as the Holy Fathers who lived before him did, and then he took up the work of the Evangelist and teacher, so that, preaching to others, he himself would not remain unworthy 891. He harmoniously combined in himself a reverend, philosopher, polemicist, teacher, apologist, writer, confessor and martyr for the truth, a husband devoted to his nation, a hardworking worker who anticipated the resurrection of an enslaved people. After all, the Monk Nicodemus, exposed to danger, proclaimed the truth during the time of Turkish slavery. He interpreted the rules of moral and monastic life, which were covered in the darkness of ignorance. He armed the people's liberation movement spiritually, morally and religiously, translating the scriptures into a language understandable to the people. He represented one of the greatest figures in the history of the Greek people and the Church during their most difficult times. Undoubtedly, Orthodoxy in the person of the Monk Nicodemus found its unique apologist, an outstanding and rare intercessor who quenched the fiery anxiety of the Hieromartyr Cosmas of Aetolia. The Church found in him its wonderful decorator, its mellifluous singer. For he was also a poet, a poet, and a hymn-writer, endowed with a rare sensitivity to words. His service to the truth was not accidental. He loved her beauty, like Solomon, and “asked the Lord” for her. And wisdom was generously given to him so that he would shine its rays “near and far.” Thanks to the Monk Nicodemus the Holy Mountain, the stone of theology, over which chosen minds stumbled - and still stumble - became a solid foundation on which his feet firmly stood. He saw God face to face and heard, like Paul, unspeakable words. Otherwise, how can one explain that the boundless knowledge that the saint possessed was devoid of the slightest deviation from the Orthodox spirit, and was not involved in any taint of “slander,” when he advocated a return to forgotten traditions and abandoned statutes, being a true interpreter of Orthodox teaching and life? The Orthodox Church knows few saints who at the same time left behind numerous writings. Monastic life is mainly active, and its contemplative side is aimed at the inner life of the soul. From here the following often happens: either the writer displaces the monk, or the monk triumphs over the writer. However, Nicodemus the Svyatogorets remained within the ascetic path. And it is surprising that his intellectual efforts and amazing diligence did not prevent him from acquiring ascetic good deeds. St. Nicodemus did not simply quote or interpret the Fathers. What he considered necessary and useful, he supported by the authority of the Fathers and Holy Scripture. He had his own spiritual scales. A great theologian who left a huge work, original, unique, he never said that he himself was a theologian, but he constantly repeated: “theologians say,” meaning the Fathers. Initiated into the ineffable and incomprehensible mysteries of theology, he turned out to be a remarkable apologist. There was no such difficulty, among those found in the lofty thought of the patristic works, to which the Monk Nicodemus would not give a correct interpretation or solution - thanks to the fact that he lived a patristic life. Thanks to his ascetic life, the name of Nicodemus the Holy Mountain was surrounded by unfading glory. His asceticism, his deep humility, his love for his brothers and for God constitute the most sincere and living pages of the books he wrote. Nicodemus the Svyatogorets wrote not out of a feeling of satisfaction about the trust with which the truths he set forth were met, but out of love, which guided his writing. The monk loved reverently, and that is why he wrote skillfully. He left no dry lines. His pious hands prepared medicines for the salvation of his fellow men, and his great and pure heart burned in the furnace of prayer that these medicines would be beneficial. The Monk Nicodemus lived and labored legally, achieved enlightenment, loved God - and wrote his incorruptible creations. Like a hardworking farmer in the spiritual field of the Lord, he first ate the fruits of grace himself, and, changed by divine action, passed them on to his brothers, because the main thing for the saint was love - love for Christ and his neighbor. Nicodemus, as a servant of the truth, was bound to be hated. And many of his contemporaries hated him, just as many loved him. Nothing surprising. “Where truth arises, delusion fights.” His sisters were poverty and humility. He, who fed hundreds and hundreds of thousands of hungry souls with his immortal writings, had no place to lay his head 892. Others gave him shelter and food. And he, “tormented by poverty and like a giant towering over our insignificant generation,” as Cosmas Vlahos writes, reaped the grace of benefiting his brothers, and for the sake of the glory of the Church he was like a lamp, burning and shining 893 . It is generally accepted that our Holy Church from the time of Gregory Palamas until the end of the 18th century. there were almost no Orthodox lamps of this scale. That is why the Lord bowed to the prayers of the Church and gave us Nicodemus, the bearer of all the diverse Orthodox spirituality. Even during the painful period of the enslavement of the people, he awakened the sleepy conscience of the Orthodox, and in subsequent years of national freedom he removed the veil of ignorance, endowing the wealth of Eastern Orthodox theology to our distressed Church, overcome on all sides by Western false teachings. That is why our spirit, the spirit of the Holy Mountain residents, rejoices. After all, St. Nicodemus the Holy Mountain, proclaimed a saint by the Church, again and again shares the Orthodox Tradition with us - with us living in these last times - in an era when we are suffering from the invasion of dangerous and alien theological teachings. There is nothing more revered than our immaculate faith, than our adamantine Orthodoxy. It is contained not only in dogmas (the content of which is inexhaustible), but also in the spiritual path of the Holy Fathers, and is manifested through the way of thinking, spirituality, freedom and our life in Christ, which is directed to righteousness by the Comforter. This unique feature of Orthodoxy - the combination of dogma and life - has always been a natural and life-giving atmosphere for us, monks... More than in any other period in the history of the Church, today we need examples of true servants of Orthodoxy, living not only in fidelity to its dogmatic teachings, but also in the “inner” Orthodox spirit, acquired with such difficulty. After all, Western theology, imprisoned in the cage of fallen human thought, serving Roman Catholicism or the many-sided Protestantism, has recently been intertwined in a very dangerous and hidden way with the immaculate patristic spirituality, so that the heights of our “sacramental” theology, which is approached without revelation, inspiration and enlightenment, risk perishing in the face of withered, rational, “early” people, non-theological theologians. And while the Western world turns to the life-giving sources of eastern waters, translates the Greek Fathers and tries to understand the main reasons for its spiritual problems, we, unfortunately, present a sad spectacle: the theologians of Byzantium, which was bowing to its decline, having lost the treasure of Tradition, are seduced by humanistic movements and betray our Holy Fathers, gradually preparing the arrival of Protestantism - the logical continuation of Thomism and Aristotelianism of the Catholic Church. That is why the glorification of our holy father Nicodemus, who became the embodiment of all Christian virtues and the image of Orthodox spirituality, was greeted with greetings as a genuine victory of patristic Orthodoxy, returning the Church to apostolic times, embracing in unity and harmony all the holy Fathers, from the Apostle Paul, Hieromartyr Ignatius the God-Bearer and St. Basil the Great to St. Maximus the Confessor and Saint Photius, Saint Simeon the New Theologian and Saint Gregory Palamas. The Monk Nicodemus, who simultaneously performed “smart prayer” and wrote his creations, fingering his rosary in his left hand and holding a pen in his right, left us an image and example of true Orthodox life: he imitated the Fathers, continued the Tradition and at the same time taught his brothers the secrets of holiness and wisdom about the Lord. The Monk Nicodemus was a true man and a true Christian. And we believe him, for he entered with the deepest reverence into the “inner” veil of Orthodoxy, where its highest truths dwell, and it is there that his spiritual impulse takes us. We believe Nicodemus the Holy Mountain not because he “glorified the Orthodox Church for the first time in many centuries,” as the Catholic V. Grumel writes, but first of all because in his life he sacrificed himself as a burnt offering, imitating the Fathers, and served the Church of Christ until his last breath, as a true Ecumenical Teacher. Having immersed the roots of his humility in the 14th century, marked by the special radiance of hesychasm, the Monk Nicodemus became the tallest, most fruitful and spreading tree of the Athos land for a thousand years, and under his shade all those who resort to him will always find food and peace. If we were a little less “insignificant generation” and more loved the Church, which gathers its greatest children, on the island of Skiropoula the church of St. Nicodemus and a monument with the image of the “Admonitory Manual”, which the monk wrote without books, should have been erected... History has rarely witnessed such a miracle and, as Bishop Porfiry (Uspensky) says, “it is impossible to measure it, but it must be imitated” 894. And indeed, we need to imitate St. Nicodemus in order to become continuers of the Orthodox Tradition of our Church. And Orthodox Tradition means inner life, holiness of the soul and love of the heart... Concluding the epilogue, we exalt glory and praise to the Church Bridegroom, who gave us St. Nicodemus as a “heavenly intercessor.” We marvel at the deepest humility of the monk, which forced him to look at himself as a “monster”, “a dead dog”, “unwise”, “unlearned”, “worthless”, “nothing”, “non-monk”. But for the sake of this “worthlessness”, for the sake of the poor monk - Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, it would be fitting for the Holy Kinot of the Holy Mountain to inscribe in golden letters in the great hall of its palace the canonical act of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, in order to proclaim for all centuries that our Holy Church is not “the shadow of its shadow,” as Catholics pejoratively call it, but the One Church of Christ, led by the Holy Spirit, and that The Holy Mountain knows how to honor its saint, who now has no equal. To God who does all things be praise and glory Hierophant - priest in Ancient Greece. Here the literal meaning of the word is played on: “sacred weaver”. Porfiry (Uspensky), bishop. History of Athos. Part 3/2. P. 520. – Note. ed.