Athanasius Parios

Paros, Smyrna, and the Holy Mountain

He was born about 1721 or 1722 in the mountain village of Kostos on Paros, and given at baptism the name Athanasios; his father, Apostolos Toulios, was a Sifniot settled on the island, his mother a Parian. Of the family nothing further is transmitted. He had his first letters on Paros, and then — as ambitious island boys did in that century — crossed to Smyrna, to the Evangelical School founded there in 1717, where he studied for six years and acquired the classical grounding that his enemies never denied him.

In 1752 he went to Mount Athos and enrolled in the Athonias, the academy on the slope above Vatopedi then at the height of its short brilliance, studying under Neophytos Kausokalyvites and the great Eugenios Voulgaris. He completed his formation at Corfu under Nikephoros Theotokis. Between them these three teachers gave him the two things that would define his career and set them against each other: a thoroughly modern philosophical training in the European manner, and an unbending attachment to the patristic tradition, which he would spend the rest of his life defending against the very learning that had formed him.

He was ordained to the priesthood on the Holy Mountain by Macarius, formerly archbishop of Corinth — the first leader of the Kollyvades and the compiler of the Philokalia — and remained a hieromonk, never seeking a see or an abbacy.

The Kollyvades dispute

The controversy that gave the movement its name began about 1754 in the skete of St Anne over a question that looks trivial and was not: whether the kollyva — the boiled wheat of the memorial service for the departed — might be offered on Sunday. A party of Athonite monks, obliged to be in the port of Karyes on Saturdays for the market, had shifted their memorials to the Lord's Day. Neophytos Kausokalyvites objected that Sunday is the day of the Resurrection and belongs to the living, that Saturday is the Church's day for the dead, and that a convenience should not be allowed to displace an order received from the Fathers. The objection was made in the name of akriveia, exactness; the answer was made in the name of oikonomia; and within a few years the two words had become two parties on the Mountain.

What was really at issue emerged as the dispute widened. The Kollyvades were not antiquarians. Their programme was a return to the Fathers at every point where custom had drifted: the restoration of frequent Holy Communion against the prevailing practice of communicating three or four times a year; the recovery of the Jesus Prayer and the hesychast tradition of the heart, which their circle would put into print in the Philokalia of 1782; the correct celebration of the services; and a spirituality of exactness over accommodation. Athanasius became, after Neophytos, the second leader of the party, and its most formidable pen. His circle is a roll of the century's saints: Macarius of Corinth, who ordained him; Nicephorus of Chios, whom he taught and with whom he worked for twenty years on Chios; Nikodemos the Hagiorite, whom he encouraged to prepare an edition of the works of Gregory Palamas (the manuscript of which was lost before it could be printed, one of the real losses of the period); and Arsenios of Paros, of the following generation and of his own island.

Opposition on the Mountain turned personal and then official. Athanasius was driven from Athos; he was slandered for his teaching on frequent communion and for his refusal of Sunday memorials; and in 1776 the Patriarch Sophronios II of Constantinople, acting on the complaints of the anti-Kollyvades party, condemned him as a heretic, deposed him from the priesthood and excommunicated him. He was suspended from all priestly function for five years. In 1781 he laid his case before Sophronios's successor, Gabriel IV; the charges were examined, found "absurd and unfounded," and the sentence was lifted and his rank restored. A synod of 1819 would eventually settle the underlying question in the Kollyvades' favour — memorials to Saturday, communion at the communicant's readiness — but by then he was six years dead.

The episode is worth stating plainly, because it is the sort of thing the synaxaria usually smooth away: a saint of the Church was formally anathematised by the Church's own chief see for the very teaching for which the Church now honours him, and the sentence was reversed by the same see within five years. Athanasius neither appealed to a rival authority nor left communion; he waited, and answered in writing.

The schoolmaster of Chios

He taught first at the Athonias, of which he became director, and then at Thessalonica (about 1767–1770). In 1788 he came to Chios, and there he stayed. For twenty-five years he taught in the gymnasium of the island and served as director of its schools, lecturing on logic, rhetoric, metaphysics and theology, and by common consent reviving the study of eloquence in the Aegean. The school of Chios under Athanasius was one of the two or three serious centres of Greek learning in the last generation before the Revolution, and the honorific he carries in the Greek books — didaskalos tou Genous, teacher of the Nation — is the technical title of that office in the Ottoman Greek world, not a piety.

His writings are numerous and were mostly printed abroad, at Leipzig and Vienna. The best known are:

• the Rhetorical Pragmatics (1787), a rhetoric worked out on the orations of Demosthenes, which was his most influential textbook;
• a Metaphysics (1787), from his philosophical teaching;
• the Christian Apology (1798) and other apologetic works;
• the Epitome (Leipzig, 1806) — a compendium of the dogmas of the Orthodox faith drawn from the Fathers, his most important theological book, prepared in the circle of Macarius of Corinth;
• the Antipapas (1785), against the Latin claims;
• an Answer to the Unreasonable Zeal of the Philosophers Coming from Europe (1802);
• treatises on the Great Blessing of the Waters, on the kneeling prayers of Pentecost, on the holy icons, on memorial services, and on the new martyrs;
• and a great quantity of hagiography and hymnography: lives and liturgical services of saints, among them the life of Mark the New (June 5) and the life of Macarius of Corinth, and the preface to the Neon Leimonarion (the New Spiritual Meadow), the collection of lives and services begun by Macarius and completed with Nicephorus of Chios and himself.

The last of these matters more than its bulk suggests. The eighteenth century was the great age of the new martyrs — Greeks executed under Ottoman law for apostasy from Islam or for refusing it — and the Kollyvades circle deliberately collected, wrote and set to music their lives, so that a persecuted nation should have contemporary saints in its service books and not only ancient ones. Athanasius wrote for that project and defended it in print against those who thought it imprudent.

He was also, and unapologetically, an enemy of the Enlightenment. Against Voltaire and the philosophes, against the naturalising theology coming out of Europe, and against the Greek intellectuals who wished to carry it home, he wrote with a bluntness that made him enemies among his own countrymen and has kept his reputation contested among modern historians of the Greek Enlightenment. He held that a nation which exchanged its faith for the new learning would lose both.

Repose

He retired from the direction of the schools in 1812, at ninety, and went to join Nicephorus of Chios at the hermitage of St George at Resta on Chios, the little house where Nicephorus had gathered the papers of the new martyrs. There he died on 24 June 1813, on the feast of the Nativity of the Forerunner.

He was recognised as a saint of the Orthodox Church by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1995, and a proper service was composed for him. He is honoured principally on Paros, where a church stands at his native Kostos, and on Chios; the Greek islands also keep him in their local synaxes — with the saints of Paros, and (in the Cycladic usage that pairs the two islands) with the saints of Naxos, on a Sunday of September.