Introduction

The Author

Nikodim Milaš was born Nikola Milaš at Šibenik, on the Dalmatian coast, in the spring of 1845. Dalmatia was then a crown land of the Austrian Empire: a long, thin, stony province of harbours and hinterland where the Orthodox lived as a scattered minority among a Catholic majority, under a Habsburg administration that governed the affairs of both. A boy of that place who wanted a theological education had to leave it. Milaš went inland to the Serbian Orthodox theological school at Sremski Karlovci, the intellectual capital of Serbian church life in the Habsburg lands, and finished his course there in 1866.

From Karlovci he went east, to the Theological Academy at Kiev, and it was there that the shape of his life’s work was decided. He took his master’s degree in 1871 with a dissertation on the Nomocanon of the Patriarch Photius—the great Byzantine compilation in which the canons of the Church stand side by side with the civil law of the empire, each throwing light on the other. Everything he afterwards wrote grew out of that first subject. The Academy later gave him an honorary doctorate and numbered him among its honorary members.

He came home to teach. The Orthodox theological institute at Zadar was a small seminary training priests for a poor and dispersed flock, and Milaš held its chair of canon law for the greater part of his adult life, in time becoming its rector. He was tonsured a monk in 1873 and took the name Nikodim, was ordained to the priesthood shortly after, and was raised to the dignity of archimandrite in 1880. In 1886 he was called to Belgrade to take charge of the seminary there, which he set about reordering; within two years he was back at Zadar and back at his books. The learning accumulated in those two decades of lecturing to future parish priests is the substance of the present work. It was written by a professor who knew precisely which questions his students would be asked once they had a parish of their own.

On the tenth of July 1890 he was elected Bishop of Dalmatia and Istria, and he was consecrated that September. The diocese belonged to the Metropolitanate of Bukovina and Dalmatia, whose seat lay at Chernivtsi, hundreds of miles away at the far end of the empire, an arrangement that tells its own story about the position of his church. For twenty-one years he governed a diocese whose parishes were poor, whose clergy were few, and whose legal standing depended on Austrian statutes he had to know as well as he knew the canons. He defended that standing energetically and made enemies doing it. At the end of 1911, under pressure from the civil authorities and in the aftermath of a financial scandal in the diocesan administration in which he had no part, he was obliged to resign.

He withdrew to Dubrovnik and gave what remained to him to writing. He died there on the second of April 1915, in the first year of the war that would erase the empire he had spent his life negotiating with. In 1930 his remains were carried to Šibenik, the town of his birth. His bibliography runs to something over a hundred and eighty items, and the settled judgment on him, held by Serbian, Russian and Greek canonists alike, is that he founded the scholarly study of canon law among the Serbs and stood among the first canonists of the Orthodox world in his century. The Eparchy of Dalmatia glorified him locally in 2012, and in May 2025 the Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church entered his name in the diptychs of the saints, ranking him among the confessors. He is commemorated on the fourth of October.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

The two volumes of The Rules of the Orthodox Church with Commentary were published at Novi Sad by Arsa Pajević, the first in 1895, the second in 1896. This is the first volume: the eighty-five canons of the Holy Apostles and the canons of the seven Ecumenical Councils, two hundred and seventy-five rules in all, each printed in full and each followed by Milaš’s own explanation of it.

The occasion was practical and, to Milaš, urgent. The Orthodox clergy he taught and later governed served in a church whose canonical law was ancient, Greek, and largely inaccessible to them. What existed in their own tongue was the Slavonic Krmčija, a venerable nomocanon whose language was by then remote and whose text carried the accumulated additions of centuries. What existed in print elsewhere lay in Greek, in the six volumes of the Athenian Syntagma of Rhalles and Potles or in the Pēdalion, or in Latin in the collections of the Western scholars. A parish priest in Dalmatia, asked whether he might marry a couple related in a particular degree, or what to do with a man who had been baptized by heretics, or whether a cleric might take a case to the civil courts, could not readily find out what the Church had actually laid down.

Milaš set out to give the Serbian clergy in their living language what the Pēdalion gave the Greeks and the Book of Rules the Russians: the whole received body of canon law, accurately rendered, with the historical circumstances of each rule explained and its present force stated. But his readers’ situation made a second demand that no earlier commentary had to meet. Orthodox Serbs of his generation lived under several different states and several different codes—Austria-Hungary in Dalmatia, Bosnia and the Karlovci metropolitanate, the Ottoman Empire in the lands still under it, and the independent kingdoms of Serbia, Greece and Romania—each with its own marriage law, its own courts, and its own rules about what a church might own. A commentary that stopped at the sixth century would have been of no use to any of them. So Milaš writes each canon twice over, as it were: first in its own world, and then in his readers’.

The tone throughout is that of a man answering a question that has actually been put to him. He does not moralize, he does not preach, and he very rarely raises his voice. He explains what a rule says, why it was made, what it has come to mean, and what a conscientious priest or bishop is to do about it now.

Argument & Structure

Milaš opens the volume with his dedication, a short Preface on the commentators who went before him, and a long essay, On the Canons of the Orthodox Church, that surveys the sources of the whole collection. The canons then follow the order of the received corpus, beginning with the eighty-five Apostolic Canons, the oldest stratum of the collection and the one to which every later council refers back. There follow the canons of the Ecumenical Councils in sequence: the twenty of the First Council at Nicaea in 325, the seven of the Second at Constantinople in 381, the nine that Milaš’s edition assigns to the Third at Ephesus in 431, the thirty of the Fourth at Chalcedon in 451, the hundred and two of the Council in Trullo of 691–92—which issued no dogmatic definition of its own but supplied the disciplinary canons of the Sixth Council, and is reckoned with it—and the twenty-two of the Seventh at Nicaea in 787. There is no section for the Fifth Ecumenical Council, and its absence is not an omission: the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 promulgated no canons.

Each canon is set out in three parts, and learning to read the three is the whole art of using the book.

First comes the text of the canon itself, translated from the Greek. Milaš renders it plainly, without smoothing away the difficulties of the original; where the ancient wording is genuinely obscure he says so in the commentary rather than quietly improving it.

Second comes a short line of parallel references, set in parentheses: a list of the other canons that bear on the same matter—Apostolic canons, canons of other councils, canons of the Fathers. This modest-looking line is one of the most valuable things in the book. It is the canonical tradition citing itself. Read across the whole volume, these references form a dense web in which almost every rule is tied to a dozen others, and following them is the quickest way to discover what the Church’s mind on a given question actually is, as distinct from what one canon happens to say about it. A reader who consults a canon and stops there has taken only a third of what Milaš is offering.

Third comes the commentary, opening with a dash. This is where Milaš the scholar appears. He typically gives the historical occasion of the canon—the abuse it was made to check, the controversy it settled—then works through its terms, then reports how it was understood by the great Byzantine commentators, John Zonaras, Theodore Balsamon and Alexius Aristenus, whose glosses he read in the Athenian Syntagma and whom he cites constantly, sometimes to follow and sometimes to differ. He draws as freely on Western scholarship: Beveregius’s Synodicon, the conciliar histories of Hefele, Van Espen on the canons, Zhishman on marriage law, the collections of Pitra and Migne. And he closes, where the matter calls for it, with the state of the question in his own day: what the practice now is in Constantinople, in Russia, in Greece, in Serbia, in the Austro-Hungarian dioceses, and how far the civil law of those states allows the canon its force.

The commentaries vary greatly in length. Some run to a line or two; the great ones—on the ordination of bishops, on the primacy of sees, on remarriage, on the reception of converts, on usury and on the property of the church—run to many pages and amount to short monographs. Where several consecutive canons treat one subject, Milaš sometimes gathers them and comments on the group together, as he does with the four Apostolic canons on self-mutilation.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

It is easy to mistake a book of canons for a book of regulations, and a commentary on them for a work of jurisprudence and nothing more. Milaš’s volume is the standing refutation of that mistake. What emerges from it, canon by canon, is a portrait of the Church describing itself—how it believes it is constituted, what it thinks a bishop is, how it understands the relation of the clergy to the people and of one local church to another, what it holds about marriage, about repentance, about property, about the body. The canons are the Church’s practical theology, worked out under pressure, in response to real failures and real disputes, over seven centuries.

Two convictions run through the commentary and give it its character. The first is that the canons are medicinal rather than penal. Again and again Milaš stops to point out that a period of exclusion from communion is a course of treatment prescribed for the penitent’s healing, that its length may be shortened for a penitent who is genuinely healed and lengthened for one who is not, and that the bishop who applies it is acting as a physician of souls. For him the ancient distinction between strictness and condescension, between holding the rule to its letter and relaxing it for the sake of the person in front of you, is a principle written into the law itself.

The second is the conciliar character of authority. His treatment of the very first Apostolic Canon, which requires that a bishop be ordained by two or three bishops, is characteristic: he takes a rule that looks like a procedural minimum and shows that it rests on the equality of the apostles and therefore of their successors, so that no bishop can confer alone what only an assembly can give. From that root he traces the whole structure of synods, metropolitans, patriarchs and councils that the rest of the corpus builds up.

The book also engages, quietly and without polemic, the questions that separate the Christian confessions—the primacy of the Roman see, the validity of sacraments performed outside the visible boundaries of one’s own communion, the terms on which converts are received. Milaš writes as an Orthodox bishop and states the Orthodox reading of the canons without apology, but he argues from the texts, reports the Western scholarship on them fairly, and does not descend to abuse. A reader of another tradition will find here a serious statement of a position, set out with the evidence attached, which is a more useful thing than agreement.

Reception & Influence

The Rules made Milaš’s reputation beyond the Serbian lands almost at once. The work was carried into Russian and published at Saint Petersburg in 1911–12, and Milaš’s writings generally passed into Russian, German, Bulgarian, Romanian, Greek and Italian during his lifetime and shortly after—his systematic treatise on church law appearing in an authorized German version from his own publisher in 1905. For more than a century his commentary has been the standard first recourse in Serbian, and a constant point of reference in Russian and Greek canonical scholarship: the book a canonist opens to find out what a canon says and what has been thought about it. Its later editions and reprints, including the photographic reissue of the original volumes by his own diocese, have kept it continuously in use.

Its reach has been wider than the guild. Because Milaš wrote for parish clergy rather than for professors, the book has served for generations as the practical handbook of Orthodox church order, consulted by bishops on questions of ordination and discipline, by priests on marriage and penance, and by anyone who has had to answer, in a concrete case, the question of what the Church has actually determined.

The Text & This Edition

His works travelled widely in his own lifetime and after it, into Russian, German, Bulgarian, Romanian, Greek and Italian. The present edition is made from the Serbian original—the first edition, Правила Православне Цркве са тумачењима, Novi Sad, A. Pajević, 1895, consulted in the photographic facsimile issued by the Eparchy of Dalmatia—with the Russian edition of 1911–12 used throughout as a collating witness where the printed page was in doubt.

The edition is English only and complete in itself; it is not laid out as a parallel or bilingual text. The three-part shape of Milaš’s own page is preserved exactly: canon, parallel references, commentary. His footnotes, which are dense with citations of the Greek and Latin collections and of the nineteenth-century literature, are carried over rather than discarded; they are a substantial part of what makes the book worth having. Following the conventions of this series, the author is named as the Church receives him, with his title of sanctity recorded in its own place rather than folded into his name, and those who have carried his words into English are credited as translators and never as authors. Citations of canons and of Scripture are given in Arabic numerals, where his print used Roman and Slavonic forms, and Greek passages are reproduced as he set them.

A word about the state of the text, which a reader of a scholarly edition is entitled to have plainly. The printed text has damage of its own. In one place it reaches the text itself: the heading of Apostolic Canon 22 is lost, and the canon has been restored from the body of its neighbour, where its text had been carried along without a heading of its own. The restoration rests on the canons themselves: Canon 21 refers the reader forward to 22, Canon 22’s own line of parallel references survives and points to 21, 23 and 24, and the recovered text is the canon on self-mutilation that those references require it to be. It remains a restoration, and it is recorded as one here. Elsewhere the losses are smaller and confined to the apparatus. A number of the parallel-reference lines break off where the printed page is damaged, and these have been left visibly incomplete instead of being filled out from other editions; a number of the bibliographic citations in the footnotes are damaged past confident recovery, and these too are left as they stand, with the damage marked. That policy is deliberate. An invented citation reads as authoritative and cannot be checked by the reader who trusts it, which makes it worse than an obvious defect.

Two features of the volume are Milaš’s own editorial decisions and not errors to be corrected. His Ephesus carries nine canons where most collections print eight, and his numbering follows the Athenian Syntagma, which parts company at several points with the Slavonic Krmčija and with the Pēdalion. Where his count differs from the one a reader may expect, the count printed here is his.

Suggestions for Reading

This is not a book to be read from front to back, and no one, including its author, has ever supposed otherwise. It is a book to be consulted, and then to be read around the place one has consulted.

A reader coming to the canons for the first time might begin with the opening group of Apostolic Canons on the making and the qualifications of bishops and clergy, where Milaš lays down the principles he will rely on for the rest of the volume, and then turn to Nicaea, whose twenty canons are short, famous, and show the Church legislating for the first time as a body free to meet in the open. From there the Trullan canons repay browsing more than any other section: they are the most numerous, the most various, and the most revealing about the ordinary life of Christians in the seventh century—what they ate, whom they married, what festivals they kept, what they were forbidden to do at the theatre.

Whatever the entry point, use the reference lines. They are the connective tissue of the entire corpus, and the book only becomes what it is when they are followed. Look up a canon on some question—remarriage, say, or the reception of converts, or the property of a bishop—read Milaš’s commentary on it, then follow his references to the three or four other canons that bear on it and read those commentaries too. What emerges is a mind: the settled judgment of the Church, arrived at over centuries, on a question that is very often still a live one. And it is worth remembering, throughout, who is writing. The commentary on how a bishop is chosen, on what a synod may do, on what a state may demand of a church within its borders, comes from a man who was himself a diocesan bishop under a government that was not of his communion, and who was eventually removed from his see by it.