Translator’s Introduction

The Course in Christian Ethics (Greek Μάθημα Χριστιανικῆς Ἠθικῆς) is a one-hundred-and-eighty-four-section pedagogical treatise on Orthodox moral theology published in Athens in 1897 by Saint Nektarios of Aegina, then Metropolitan of Pentapolis and director of the Rizareios Ecclesiastical School. It belongs to the most prolific period of his writing career — the fifteen years between 1894 and 1908 during which, while training the next generation of Greek priests, he produced classroom-ready handbooks of pastoral theology, Christian ethics, dogmatic Christology, and Sacred Scripture in harmony. He died at the Holy Trinity Convent he founded on the island of Aegina twenty-three years after this work first appeared, in November 1920.[1][2]

The work was composed for the seminarians of the Rizareios school as a complete classroom course — a textbook the Greek-speaking Orthodox world did not yet have. Saint Nektarios’s preface to the reader, on the work’s first page after the table of contents, identifies the sources he drew upon: the printed lectures of his Western colleagues Wuttke and Martensen, the manuscripts of his own ethics lectures, and the unpublished Christian-ethics lectures delivered at the University of Athens by Zikos Rhōssēs, his elder contemporary at the theological faculty. The result is encyclopaedic in coverage, pedagogical in structure, and eclectic in source — Eastern and Western Fathers cited side by side, Greek philosophical witnesses interleaved with patristic ones, scholastic distinctions and Orthodox synthesis brought into one flowing exposition.[3]

The book opens at the level of vocabulary, deriving the Greek ἠθική from ἦθος (character) and ἔθος (custom) and citing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics on the same etymology, then quickly moves into the territory only revelation can illuminate: the natural moral law written on the heart, the Mosaic law, the new commandment of Christ, the conscience as inward judge, the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, the genealogy of the passions and their healing, the duties of the human person to God, to self, to neighbour, to family, to society, and to the state. The argument moves through three principal divisions: an introductory section on the foundations of moral theology (sections 1–9), a long treatment of the moral law and moral life (sections 10–32), and an even longer treatment of duties (sections 33 onward) that occupies the bulk of the work. Within each major section, Saint Nektarios proceeds by definition, classification, distinction, and Scriptural-and-patristic citation, in the manner of the great nineteenth-century pedagogical handbooks of his Western contemporaries.

The patristic dossier is broad. Saint John Chrysostom is cited most often, followed by Saint Basil the Great, Saint Gregory Nazianzen, Saint John of Damascus, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Saint Athanasius, the desert fathers (Antony, Macarius, Evagrius, Nilus), Saint Maximus the Confessor, Saint Symeon the New Theologian, and the canonical commentators. From the Latin tradition Saint Nektarios cites Saint Augustine repeatedly, along with Saint Ambrose, Saint Jerome, Saint Gregory the Great, and Boethius; he also draws (with care) on Aquinas and on later scholastic distinctions. Greek philosophical witnesses — Aristotle, Plato, Plutarch, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, the Stoics — are interleaved at every point where the natural moral law and the gospel agree. The presence of so much classical philosophy in a textbook of Christian ethics is not eclecticism for its own sake; it is Saint Nektarios’s pedagogical conviction that the seminarian must see exactly where reason alone can reach, and exactly where the gospel goes beyond what reason alone can reach.

In the manner of nineteenth-century Greek scholarly editions, Saint Nektarios cites his sources by traditional abbreviations: τόμ. for volume, σελ. for page, κεφ. for chapter, and Greek-letter ordinals for verse and chapter numbers. Latin titles for the Western works appear in the running text rather than in parenthetical references. In the translation these citations are rendered into English equivalents — vol., pp., ch. — and Greek-letter ordinals are converted to Arabic numerals, so that the references remain usable by readers without Greek. Direct Scripture quotations appear in double quotation marks; the chapter-and-verse reference, when Saint Nektarios gives one, follows the quotation in parentheses. A small number of footnotes labelled “Translator’s note” flag passages where the 1897 printing is damaged and the Greek could not be confidently reconstructed.