The Author: Saint Nikodim Milaš

Saint Nikodim Milaš (1845-1915) was the foremost Orthodox canonist of his generation and, for the Serbian Church, the founder of canon-law scholarship in the modern era. He was born Nikola Milaš on 16 April 1845 in Šibenik, in Dalmatia, then under Habsburg rule. He studied at the Serbian Orthodox seminary in Sremski Karlovci, then continued his theological and canonical formation in Vienna and in Kiev, where he came into close contact with the Russian school of canon law that would shape his own life’s work.

Ordained to the priesthood and tonsured a monk under the name Nikodim, he taught canon law and theology at the seminary in Zadar before his consecration as Bishop of Dalmatia and Istria in 1890, a see he held from Zadar until 1912. As a bishop he combined the pastoral government of a diocese under Habsburg administration with a scholarly output that made him, within his own lifetime, the standard authority on Orthodox ecclesiastical law throughout the Slavic Orthodox world.

His two principal works, both presented in English translation for the first time here, remain foundational. The Rules of the Orthodox Church with Commentary (Pravila Pravoslavne Crkve sa tumačenjima, Novi Sad, 1895-96) gathers and comments on the entire body of canons received by the Orthodox Church—the Apostolic Canons, the Ecumenical and local councils, and the canonical Fathers. Orthodox Church Law (Pravoslavno crkveno pravo, Mostar, 1890; 2nd ed. 1902) builds from that material a systematic account of how the Church is governed as a juridical body. Both works were translated into Russian, German, Bulgarian, Romanian, and Greek within Milaš’s own lifetime or shortly after, and remained the working reference of Orthodox canon law across the Slavic Churches for a century—yet neither had ever appeared in English until now.

Saint Nikodim reposed on 2 April 1915 in Dubrovnik. On 17 May 2025 he was numbered among the saints by the Serbian Orthodox Church, in recognition of a life spent in the pastoral and scholarly service of the Church’s own self-understanding as a body ordered by law under Christ.