Introduction

The Author

The bishop who wrote this book on the Cross had himself been made to carry one. He was born Anastasios Kephalas on the first of October 1846 at Selymbria in Thrace, then a town of the Ottoman Empire on the Sea of Marmara, into a poor and pious family. As a boy of fourteen he made his way to Constantinople to work and to keep learning, and in 1866 he crossed to the island of Chios to teach school. There, in his late twenties, the schoolmaster became a monk and received the name Nektarios; ordination to the diaconate followed a few years after. His piety and his evident gifts drew the notice of the Patriarch of Alexandria, who supported his theological studies at the University of Athens; he graduated in 1885. Returning then to Egypt, he 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 scarcely a year. His preaching and the affection of the people stirred the envy of other clergy, and on the strength of slander he was removed from office, censured, and sent out of Egypt without a hearing and without a charge he was ever allowed to answer. He bore the injury in silence. The historical record has since vindicated him—more than a century afterward, in 1998, the Patriarchate of Alexandria formally lifted the old censure—but at the time he returned to Greece under a cloud, and passed the years from 1891 to 1894 as a wandering preacher before a fitting appointment restored him to steady work.

That appointment was the directorship of the Rizarios Ecclesiastical School in Athens, the seminary that formed candidates for the Greek priesthood. He held the post for some fourteen years, from 1894 until his resignation in December 1908, and it was in these years—teaching, administering, and writing for his students—that the greater part of his prose theology took shape. The stories preserved from this period turn less on his learning than on his humility; he is remembered, finding a sick janitor unable to do his rounds, for having risen before dawn to do the man’s cleaning himself rather than let 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.

Many received him as a saint already in his 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—and that is the attribution this edition keeps.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

The book here presented in English is titled, in Nektarios’s own Greek, Historical Study Concerning the Precious Cross (Historikḕ melétē perì toû Timíou Stauroû). The title is exact and worth pausing over, because it announces the kind of book this is. It is not a devotional meditation on the Cross, nor a systematic treatise on the doctrine of the atonement, though reverence and doctrine both run all through it. It is a historical study—a marshalling of documentary and patristic evidence, ordered as an argument, in defense of a claim about the past.

The claim is that the Christian veneration of the Cross is as old as the Church herself, an apostolic inheritance and not a later invention. Nektarios states his occasion in his own opening words, “To the Reader.” He undertook the study, he says, at the request of Theokletos, Metropolitan of Athens and President of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece—that is, Theokletos I (Minopoulos), who occupied the see of Athens through the years in which the work was written and published. He wrote it, in his own phrase, to refute “the erroneous opinions and beliefs of those who, having been led astray, possess intellect yet complete ignorance of the historical manifestation of the precious Cross.” The book first appeared in installments in the periodical Hieros Syndesmos (“The Sacred Bond”), the organ of a clerical association of that name; the volume printed at Athens in 1914, from which this translation is made, is its revised and enlarged reissue, offered—again in his words—so that “the historical truth concerning the origin of the manifestation of the precious Cross, its discovery, and its veneration” might reach a wider circle of readers.

It is one of the last works of a long writing life; Nektarios died six years after its publication. And it grows directly out of the concerns of his final decade. The adversaries he names are “certain modern scholars” who “seek to deny every truth handed down to the Church”—the critical historiography of his own century, which had come to question the antiquity of Christian devotion to the Cross and, in particular, the tradition that the Emperor Constantine’s mother, the Empress Helena, discovered the True Cross at Jerusalem. To that skeptical scholarship Nektarios opposes not counter-speculation but testimony: the Fathers, the sacred canons, the Church historians of antiquity, the imperial letters, and the liturgical memory of the Church, laid side by side so that the reader may weigh the weight of the record for himself.

Argument and Structure

The work runs to twenty short chapters, and for all the density of its citation it follows a clear line. After the brief preface (chapter one), the argument opens by establishing the sheer antiquity of the practice, then narrates the great historical episodes that fixed the Cross at the center of Christian life, and closes by turning from history to worship—from what happened to why the Christian should venerate the Cross at all.

The first movement (chapters two through four) argues the apostolic pedigree of the sign of the Cross. Here Nektarios assembles his earliest witnesses. Tertullian, in the De corona militis, describes Christians tracing the Cross over every act of daily life—rising, dressing, bathing, eating, lighting the evening lamp. Ignatius the God-bearer, John Chrysostom in a series of vivid passages, the Council in Trullo’s seventy-third canon on the honor owed the life-giving Cross, the canonists Rhalles and Potles, Photios of Constantinople, Jerome of Jerusalem, and a long, careful extract from John of Damascus’s Exposition of the Orthodox Faith all converge on a single point: that the faithful honored the sign and figure of the Cross “from the very beginning,” tracing its use back, as the most ancient Fathers did, to apostolic tradition. The Damascene extract supplies the theological grammar the rest of the book will assume—that the veneration is offered not to the wood as such but to what the wood signifies, the crucified Christ, and that the Cross was foreshadowed all through the Old Testament in the tree of life, the crossed hands of Jacob blessing Joseph’s sons, the rod of Moses dividing the sea, the brazen serpent lifted on wood. Chapter four gathers the standing liturgical evidence: the Cross sealed in chrism at baptism as “the seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit,” imprinted on the eucharistic gifts, made at every ordination and blessing, and read by interpreters into the sealing of the servants of God in the Book of Revelation.

The second and largest movement (chapters five through sixteen) is frankly narrative, and it is the heart of the historical case. Nektarios recounts the vision of the Cross of light granted to Constantine before his battle with Maxentius, with the words “By this conquer,” quoting Eusebius’s Life of Constantine at length and corroborating it from Socrates Scholasticus, Sozomen, Philostorgius, and the later Byzantine chroniclers Cedrenus, Zonaras, and Nikephoros Kallistos. He describes the cross-bearing statue Constantine raised in Rome and its inscription. He records a second appearance of a luminous Cross over Jerusalem, stretching from Golgotha to the Mount of Olives, in the reign of Constantine’s son Constantius and the episcopate of Cyril of Jerusalem—the wonder the Church still commemorates on the seventh of May. Then comes the pivot of the whole book. Chapter eight meets head-on the modern doubt about Helena’s discovery of the Cross, which the critics rested on the supposed silence of Eusebius. Nektarios answers first by argument—the silence of one historian who set out to write only the life of Constantine, and who compressed Helena’s stay in Jerusalem into a few lines, cannot outweigh the concurrent testimony of the whole tradition—and then by evidence: the letters of Constantine to Macarius of Jerusalem and to the prefect Dracilianus, preserved by Theodoret; the account of the three crosses and the healing that identified the Lord’s; the division and distribution of the wood. Chapters nine and ten give the imperial correspondence and Helena’s building of the church over the holy places in full. The remaining chapters of this movement turn to the continuing life of the relic and its feast: the miracle wrought at Apamea through a fragment of the wood, as told by Evagrius; a chapter on the divine power indwelling the wood; the inscribed cross of Shirin, consort of the Persian king Chosroes; the feast of the Finding and the Exaltation; the Procession of the Cross; and a chapter on the dimensions of the Cross, the sacred nails, and the crosses of the two thieves.

The third movement (chapters seventeen through twenty) leaves the archive and turns to the Cross’s abiding power and the duty of veneration. Chapter seventeen gathers the great testimonies to that power: Gregory the Theologian’s account, in his First Invective Against Julian, of the young apostate signing himself against the demons that terrified him in a pagan crypt; Theodoret’s version of the same episode; Chrysostom on the Cross as trophy and sword; and Athanasius’s report, from the Life of Antony, of the desert father who cleansed the demon-possessed by the sign of the Cross before the astonished philosophers, insisting that “it is Christ who does such things through those who believe in Him.” Chapters eighteen and nineteen answer, in two parts, the plain question why the Cross is to be honored: first because upon it Christ shed his blood and saved the world—here Nektarios draws on Gregory of Nyssa and on Saint Paul’s image of the height and depth and breadth and length by which all creation is held together—and second because it has been given as a weapon against the devil, with Cyril of Jerusalem’s counsel to seal oneself at every act, Chrysostom’s and Isidore of Pelusium’s testimonies, and a practical instruction on how the sign of the Cross is to be made and what each motion of the hand confesses. The book closes, fittingly, with an extended passage from the homilies of Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Thessalonica, on the Cross as the sum of the whole economy of salvation—the trophy that gathers into itself the mystery of Christ’s coming and reconciles heaven and earth—a homiletic crown set upon the historical argument.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The distinctive thing about this book is its method. Faced with a devotional question—should the Christian venerate the Cross, and is that veneration authentic? — Nektarios answers as a historian and a reader of the sources rather than as a preacher pressing a point. Almost the whole of the book is dossier: he prefers to let Tertullian and Chrysostom and Eusebius and the Damascene speak, and to arrange their testimonies so that the cumulative witness makes the argument. In this he is very much a man of the learned nineteenth century, and the work belongs recognizably to the same scholarly world as his other writings of the Rizarios and Aegina years, in which he sought to ground Orthodox teaching in the Fathers and the councils rather than in the philosophical handbooks then imported into Greek theology. The Historical Study is his contribution to a long tradition of Christian apologetic that meets the critic on the critic’s own ground, the ground of evidence.

Its theological substance is the theology of the Cross the Fathers held in common. The governing distinction, taken over from John of Damascus and repeated by canonist and homilist alike, is that between the honor paid to an image and the honor paid to what it represents: the veneration terminates not on the material—gold, wood, or stone, which once the figure is dissolved is only material again—but on the crucified Lord whom the figure signifies. This is the same principle by which the Church, East and West, had long distinguished the veneration of holy things from the worship due to God alone, and Nektarios’s dossier is in effect a demonstration that the principle is ancient and unbroken. Around it he lets his sources develop the fuller doctrine: the Cross as the instrument of a cosmic reconciliation, its four arms figuring the height and depth and length and breadth in which all things are held together; the Cross prefigured throughout the Law and the Prophets; the Cross as the tree of life answering the tree of the fall; the Cross as the seal that marks the faithful and the trophy before which the powers of evil give way.

There is a polemical charge in the book, and honesty requires noting it, but its temper is worth stating precisely. Nektarios writes against two positions. The first is the historical skepticism of certain modern scholars who dated the cult of the Cross no earlier than Constantine and doubted the finding of the True Cross; against them he argues, in the ordinary way of historians, from the antiquity and convergence of the evidence—and the questions he engages (the reliability of the vita Constantini, the meaning of Eusebius’s silence, the origins of the Jerusalem tradition) remain genuine questions on which careful readers still differ, so that the book is best read as one learned and reverent voice in a continuing conversation rather than as its last word. The second position, surfacing especially in the closing homily of Palamas, is the objection that the Cross, as the instrument of a shameful death, is unworthy of honor—an objection Christians of various ages have raised against venerating the image of the Cross. To it the answer given is theological: that the very death endured upon the Cross is the source of life, so that the tree of the execution has become the tree of salvation, and to despise it would be to despise the death into which the baptized are baptized. Nektarios does not turn this into a quarrel among the churches; he presents it as the perennial Christian answer to a perennial objection, drawn from Fathers honored across the traditions.

For the modern reader the book’s value is twofold. It is, first, a compact anthology of what the ancient Church actually said and did about the Cross—a single place in which the relevant texts of Tertullian, Ignatius, Chrysostom, Cyril of Jerusalem, the Damascene, the historians, the canons, and Palamas are gathered and translated. And it is, second, a window into the mind of a modern saint at work: patient, evidential, unpolemical in tone even when the matter is contested, more concerned to set the record before the reader than to overwhelm him. The devotion that made Nektarios one of the best-loved saints of the modern Greek world is present here not as sentiment but as scholarship placed in the service of prayer.

The Text and This Edition

This is a fresh, standalone English translation of Saint Nektarios’s Historical Study Concerning the Precious Cross, rendered directly from the original Greek. The base text is the first book edition, printed at Athens in 1914 by the press of Paraskevas Leonis under the author’s own name—“Nektarios Kephalas, Metropolitan of Pentapolis”—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 chapters and numbered paragraphs—twenty chapters in all—before translation. The English is made from that restored Greek text, not from any earlier English version.

A few conventions of this edition follow the practice of the series. The author is named as the Church receives him, Saint Nektarios of Aegina; those who prepared the translation are credited as translators and never as authors. Nektarios cited his sources in the manner of a nineteenth-century Greek scholar—by Migne’s Patrologia volume and column, by the volume and page of the Athens and older European reprints, and by the traditional book-and-chapter abbreviations of the ancient historians—and these parenthetical citations are preserved as he gave them, so that a reader who wishes to follow him back to the sources may do so. Scripture quotations are set off as he set them off. Where the argument turns on a division or a number, references are given in the plain modern style. A small number of editorial notes, marked as translator’s notes, clarify a difficult phrase or flag the handful of places where the 1914 printing is too damaged for confident recovery of the text; these are the translator’s, not the author’s. Chapter headings are rendered as Nektarios wrote them, and his chapters are presented in the order he arranged them, so that the shape of his argument—from the antiquity of the sign, through the history of the relic and its feasts, to the power of the Cross and the duty of its veneration—stands before the English reader as it stood before the Greek.

Suggestions for Reading

A reader coming to this book for the first time will find it least puzzling if he keeps its genre in view. It is a work of evidence, and much of it consists of quotation; the connective argument is Nektarios’s, but the bulk of the words are the Fathers’ and the historians’. It rewards being read as one would read a well-made brief—noticing how each testimony is placed, and how the witnesses accumulate. Those who want the argument in brief may begin with the preface and chapter two, where the thesis of apostolic antiquity is stated, and then turn to chapter eight, where the decisive case over Helena’s discovery is joined. Those who care most for the theology of the Cross will find it concentrated in the long extract from John of Damascus in chapter three, in the twin chapters (eighteen and nineteen) on why the Cross is to be honored, and in the closing homily of Gregory Palamas, which lifts the whole study from history into worship. However it is read, the book is best received in the spirit in which it was written: as the offering of a learned and humble bishop who believed that the truth of the Church’s oldest devotion could be shown, patiently and from the record, to anyone willing to weigh it.