Introduction

The Author

The man who wrote this textbook of the moral life had, by the time he composed it, already been schooled by injustice. He was born Anastasios Kephalas on the first of October 1846 at Selymbria in Thrace, then within the Ottoman Empire, into a poor and devout family. As a boy of fourteen he made his way to Constantinople to work and to continue his education, and in 1866 he crossed to the island of Chios as a schoolteacher. There, in his late twenties, the schoolmaster became a monk, receiving the name Nektarios; ordination to the diaconate followed. Recognizing both his piety and his gifts, the Patriarch of Alexandria supported his theological studies at the University of Athens, from which he graduated in 1885. He then returned to Egypt, was ordained priest, and served the Church of Saint Nicholas in Cairo with such distinction that in 1889 the Patriarch of Alexandria, Sophronios, consecrated him Metropolitan of Pentapolis—an ancient see in Cyrenaica, in what is now Libya.

The elevation lasted barely a year. His preaching and popularity stirred the envy of other clergy, and on the strength of slander he was removed from office, formally censured, and sent out of Egypt without a hearing and without any charge he was permitted to answer. He bore the humiliation without protest, and the historical record has since vindicated him: more than a century later, in 1998, the Patriarchate of Alexandria formally lifted the old censure. But at the time he returned to Greece under a cloud, and spent the years from 1891 to 1894 as an itinerant preacher before an appointment restored him to fruitful work.

That appointment was the directorship of the Rizarios Ecclesiastical School in Athens, the seminary that trained candidates for the Greek priesthood. He held the post for some fourteen years, from 1894 until his resignation in December 1908, and it was here—teaching, administering, and writing for his students—that the bulk of his prose theology took shape. The stories preserved from these years turn less on his learning than on his humility: finding a sick janitor unable to work, the metropolitan-director is said to have risen before dawn to do the man’s cleaning himself rather than see him lose his place. In 1904, at the request of a group of pious women, he began to build a convent of the Holy Trinity on the island of Aegina, and when in 1908 he judged that his presence there was needed he withdrew to it, living out his last twelve years as its spiritual father—writing, hearing confessions, tending the garden, and helping raise the buildings with his own hands and means. He died on the evening of the eighth of November 1920, following surgery for prostate cancer.

He was received as a saint by many during his own lifetime, and the wider Church confirmed that reception in due course: the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople glorified him as a saint on the twentieth of April 1961, and he is commemorated on the ninth of November, the day after his repose. He is among the most widely venerated of modern Greek saints, and his tomb on Aegina remains a place of pilgrimage. In the received tradition he is named plainly and without qualification: Saint Nektarios of Aegina, the Wonderworker—the attribution this edition keeps.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The Course in Christian Ethics (in Greek Máthēma Christianikḗs Ēthikḗs) first appeared in Athens in 1897, in the thick of the Rizarios years. It was written for a practical need. Saint Nektarios was responsible for the course in Christian ethics at the seminary, and the Greek-speaking Orthodox world of his day did not yet possess a complete, classroom-ready textbook of moral theology written from within its own tradition. So he made one—a systematic account of the Christian moral life laid out for students who would soon be pastors, and who would in turn have to teach and guide others.

The book therefore carries a double character that runs through everything in it. On one side it is a schoolroom instrument: much of it is cast in the old catechetical form of question and answer, proceeding by definition, division, and classification, so that a student could learn the matter and be examined on it. On the other side it is a work of conviction, animated by a single governing insight that Saint Nektarios pressed on his students again and again—that a person’s faith and love toward God are bound indissolubly to his conduct toward God and toward his neighbor, and that both together decide the destiny of the soul. Ethics, on this understanding, is not an appendix to doctrine but its lived completion.

There was also a polemical edge to the project, though the book wears it lightly. The academic theology imported into nineteenth-century Greece leaned heavily on foreign, largely rationalist textbooks, and Saint Nektarios meant to set against them a moral theology grounded in the Fathers and the councils rather than in the philosophy of the schools alone. He adopted the outward form of the great systematic handbooks then standard in the European faculties—their sweep, their orderly divisions, their apparatus of citation—and poured into that frame the substance of the patristic tradition. After he left the directorship he returned to the book, revising and enlarging it so that it might serve the ordinary literate believer as well as the future clergy. The work thus belongs to the most productive stretch of his authorship, the years in which he also composed studies in Christology, pastoral theology, and the interpretation of Scripture; among these the Christian Ethics is his fullest treatment of the moral life as a whole.

Argument and Structure

Saint Nektarios opens, characteristically, at the level of the word itself. He derives the Greek ēthikḗ from ēthos, settled character, which in turn he traces to ethos, habit or custom, and he calls Aristotle and Plutarch as witnesses to the same derivation: moral virtue, in Aristotle’s account, grows in a person out of habituation, and takes its very name from it. The point is not antiquarian. It fixes at the outset the book’s conviction that no one is born good or bad but is formed toward one or the other by upbringing, education, and the repeated exercise of the will—and that ethics as a science exists precisely to teach the virtues in which a person must train until they harden, through habit, into a settled and unshakable disposition. From this etymological doorway the argument passes quickly into the territory that reason alone cannot map, and unfolds across three principal parts.

An extended introduction lays the foundations: the concept and task of ethics, the reasons the discipline arose, a compact history of Christian ethics from the Didache and the apostolic Fathers through Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and the Latin moralists, the relation of ethics to dogmatics and to philosophical ethics, and the necessity of revelation to complete what unaided reason begins. Here Saint Nektarios stakes his central methodological claim—that philosophical ethics, however noble, cannot by itself bear moral fruit, because morality is religious at its root and must be grounded in the religion of revelation if it is to transform and not merely to describe.

Part One, “General Ethics,” builds the doctrinal frame. It begins from the moral concept of God and the proofs of his goodness, moves to the human person made in the divine image and the question of human destiny and freedom, and then to the highest good, which Saint Nektarios identifies with the Kingdom of God—treated both as an eternal reality and as something to be realized, however relatively, on earth. From there he turns to law in its several senses (natural, rational, moral, and the law of revelation), to the authority and content of the moral law, to duty and the conflict of duties, to right and justice and virtue, and finally to a remarkably detailed anatomy of conscience: the broad conscience, the doubtful, the scrupulous, the sensitive, and the hardened or deluded, each distinguished and diagnosed.

Part Two, “Special Ethics,” descends from principle to particulars. After treating moral accountability and the imputation of actions—which deeds count as sins, which lie outside the reach of the moral law, how sins of ignorance or error are to be weighed—it divides into two great sections. The first is on virtue: whether virtue is innate, its moral and religious value, its relation to happiness and to blessedness, and then a systematic treatment of the virtues themselves. The three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are handled first and at length; then the moral virtues, arranged according to the powers of the soul—the virtues of the intellect (prudence, wisdom, knowledge, truth, counsel), the virtues of the spirited part (courage, endurance, magnanimity), and the virtues of the desiring part (chastity, purity, virginity), each paired with the vices that oppose it. The second section treats moral evil, or sin: its essence, the degrees of guilt, what moves a person to sin, the genealogy of the passions, and the terminal condition of hardness of heart.

Part Three, “Moral Deontology,” is the longest, and turns wholly to duties. A section on general duties opens from the fall of man and the necessity of moral regeneration, then takes up the duties that flow from the liturgical and the moral law—including a pointed treatment of oaths and perjury—and the duties of a person toward himself, distinguished into duties toward his bodily nature, the harmonious development of his powers, and his rational, spiritual, and moral life. Duties toward the neighbor follow, grounded throughout in love: its foundation, its marks, and its exercise toward both the bodily and the spiritual good of others. A concluding section on particular duties descends into the concrete relations of civic and family life—duties toward the state, the mutual duties of parents and children, of masters and servants, of the several stations of social existence.

The reach of the citation is as wide as the plan. At every point where the natural moral law and the gospel agree, Saint Nektarios interleaves the pagan witnesses—Plato above all, then Aristotle, Plutarch, and the Stoics such as Seneca and Epictetus—with the Fathers, and the Fathers he draws from both halves of the Christian world: from the Greek East, Chrysostom, Basil, the two Gregories, Athanasius, Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian; from the Latin West, Augustine, Ambrose, and Jerome, with occasional recourse to Boethius and even to the scholastic distinctions of Aquinas. The classical philosophers are not ornament. Their presence enacts the book’s pedagogy: the student is shown exactly how far reason unaided can travel toward the good, and exactly where the gospel carries him beyond reason’s reach.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The lasting interest of the Christian Ethics lies in what Saint Nektarios does with a borrowed form. The nineteenth-century systematic handbook—comprehensive, divided and subdivided, thick with references—was in its origins a Western academic genre, and a lesser writer might have produced with it a merely Orthodox-flavored copy of a Protestant or Latin manual. What Saint Nektarios produced instead is a synthesis. He keeps the architecture, because good architecture serves the student, but he founds the whole on convictions the manuals of pure ethical philosophy could not supply: that the moral life is participation in the goodness of God; that the human person is an image to be restored, not merely a will to be regulated; that virtue is the healing of a nature wounded by the fall; and that the end of ethics is not correct behavior but the perfecting of the soul unto eternal blessedness. Morality, for him, is theonomous through and through—it takes its authority, its content, and its power from God—and this is the axis on which his whole polemic against a self-standing rationalist ethics turns.

The treatment of conscience and of the virtues repays particular attention. In distinguishing the scrupulous conscience from the hardened, the doubtful from the deluded, Saint Nektarios is doing the work of a pastor as much as a professor: he is equipping future confessors to read the moral condition of real souls, with their evasions and their over-severities alike. And in ordering the virtues to the powers of the soul—intellect, the spirited part, the desiring part—he stands consciously within the ascetic and philosophical psychology the Fathers inherited and baptized, the same tripartite scheme that governs the analysis of the passions in the desert tradition. The book is, in this sense, a bridge: it carries the hard-won moral wisdom of the Fathers and the ascetics into the ordered, teachable form a modern seminary required, without letting the form flatten the wisdom.

Its significance is not confined to one communion. Because Saint Nektarios cites East and West together as a single inheritance—Augustine beside Chrysostom, Ambrose beside Basil—and because the questions he presses are the perennial ones of the Christian moral tradition (the natural law and the gospel, freedom and grace, virtue and the passions, duty toward God and neighbor and self), the work reads as an account of the Christian moral life that Christians of many traditions can recognize as their own. It is a document of the moral theology of the whole Church as one nineteenth-century teacher received and transmitted it, offered from within a life that had itself been tested in the school of injustice and patience.

Reception and Influence

Within the Orthodox world the Christian Ethics has never gone out of use. It circulates as a standard volume of Saint Nektarios’s collected works, and his own late revision—undertaken to open the book beyond the seminary to the ordinary reader—set the pattern for its long afterlife as a work of formation rather than merely examination. That afterlife is inseparable from the extraordinary growth of devotion to its author. Widely held to be a saint even before his death, glorified in 1961, and today one of the most beloved of modern Greek saints, Saint Nektarios lends the book an authority that no ordinary textbook carries: readers come to it for its order and completeness, and because it is the moral teaching of a man the Church venerates as holy. The recovery of his story for a broad modern audience—including in film—has widened that readership further, and this English edition belongs to the ongoing effort to make his moral theology available beyond the Greek-speaking world.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh, standalone English translation of Saint Nektarios’s Course in Christian Ethics, rendered from the original Greek. The base text is the first edition of the Máthēma Christianikḗs Ēthikḗs, published in Athens in 1897, which stands in the public domain; the working copy was a digital facsimile preserved on the Internet Archive. Because the archive’s automatically generated transcription of that scan confused Greek and Latin letterforms throughout, the Greek was re-established from the page images with an optical-character-recognition model trained on polytonic Greek, then cleaned and segmented into its numbered sections and paragraphs—roughly a hundred and seventy-six short sections in all—before translation. The English is made directly from that restored Greek text, not from any earlier English version.

In keeping with the conventions of this series, the translation modernizes the idiom for a present-day reader while preserving the substance and order of the original. Saint Nektarios cited his sources in the manner of nineteenth-century Greek scholarship, by traditional Greek abbreviations and Greek-letter numerals; here those references are converted to their familiar English equivalents and to Arabic numerals, so that a reader without Greek can still follow and check them. Scripture quotations are set in quotation marks, with the chapter-and-verse reference following in parentheses where Saint Nektarios supplies one. The 1897 printing is damaged in a small number of places, and where the underlying Greek could not be confidently recovered the fact is flagged rather than silently smoothed over, so that the reader always knows where the text is secure and where it is not.

Two conventions of attribution should be noted. The author is named as the Church receives him—Saint Nektarios of Aegina—without the qualifications that a purely critical treatment might attach; the veneration and canonization recorded above are stated as the plain historical facts they are. And those who carried the work into English are credited as translators, never as authors: the book remains, from first section to last, the work of Saint Nektarios.

Suggestions for Reading

A reader coming to this book for the first time need not read it straight through as a novel. It was built as a course, and it rewards being used as one. Those who want the heart of Saint Nektarios’s argument should begin with the introductory sections on the necessity of revelation and the grounding of ethics in religion, where his central claim is laid out, and then read the opening of Part One on the image of God and human destiny, which supplies the vision the rest of the book serves. From there the treatment of the virtues in Part Two—especially the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love—and the anatomy of conscience in Part One can be read on their own with great profit. The long catalogue of duties in Part Three is best approached as a reference to return to, section by section, as questions arise. Throughout, it helps to remember what kind of book this is: not a treatise arguing a thesis against opponents, but a teacher’s ordered handing-on of the whole moral inheritance of the Church, meant to be learned slowly and lived out over a lifetime.