Introduction

The Author

The man who compiled this volume spent his working life at the point where the law of the Church meets the law of a state that does not share its faith. Nikodim Milaš—Nikola at his baptism—was born at Šibenik in Dalmatia in 1845, in a province governed from Vienna, where his church was a minority and its position rested on Austrian statute as much as on the canons. That circumstance shaped everything he did. He was a scholar by temperament and a controversialist by necessity, and he was very seldom writing about the past for its own sake.

His formal education took him out of Dalmatia twice. He completed the course of the Serbian Orthodox theological school at Sremski Karlovci in 1866, and then went to the Theological Academy at Kiev, where he took a master’s degree in canon law in 1871 for a study of the Nomocanon of the Patriarch Photius. He returned to teach canon law and pastoral theology at the Orthodox theological institute in Zadar, where he would eventually be rector; he became a monk in 1873, was ordained priest, and was made archimandrite in 1880. A period as rector of the seminary in Belgrade from 1886 interrupted the Zadar years, and he came back to them within two years. He read and worked in a remarkable number of languages—Greek, Latin, Church Slavonic, Russian, German and Italian all pass through his footnotes as a matter of course—and it is that range, more than anything else, that made the present work possible. Very few people in Europe could have compiled it.

In July 1890 he was elected Bishop of Dalmatia and Istria and was consecrated in September of that year. The see was not a comfortable one. His diocese was poor and thinly spread, its parishes were scattered along a coast and a mountainous hinterland, its clergy were few, and its legal standing had to be defended repeatedly before an administration under which the Orthodox were a tolerated minority. He defended it, in learned briefs and in public argument, and made powerful enemies in the process. Alongside his canonical work he wrote the documentary history of his own diocese, publishing a collection of its records in 1899 and his Orthodox Dalmatia in 1901—the labour of a bishop who understood that a community whose history is not written can be told that it has none.

He was forced out of his see at the end of 1911, in the wake of a financial scandal in the diocesan administration for which he bore no personal blame. He retired to Dubrovnik, wrote to the end, and died there on the second of April 1915; his remains were carried home to Šibenik in 1930. His diocese glorified him locally in 2012, and in May 2025 the Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church numbered him among the saints as a confessor. He is commemorated on the fourth of October. Among canonists he has never needed the title: with a bibliography of more than a hundred and eighty items behind him, he is reckoned the founder of the scholarly study of canon law among the Serbs and one of the first Orthodox canonists of his century.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

This is the second and concluding volume of The Rules of the Orthodox Church with Commentary, published at Novi Sad in 1896, a year after the first. Where Volume 1 covered the Apostolic Canons and the seven Ecumenical Councils, this one covers everything else that the Orthodox Church receives as canon law: the canons of ten local or regional councils, and the canonical rulings of sixteen Fathers. Six hundred and twenty-two rules, each printed in full and each explained, together with a closing group of letters that Milaš prints apart from the numbered canons.

If the first volume is the constitutional law of the Church, this one is its case law, and it is by some distance the more revealing of the two. The Ecumenical Councils legislated for the whole Church on great questions. The local synods met to deal with what had actually gone wrong in one province: clergy who had sacrificed under persecution and wanted their places back; deacons who had married; bishops who had wandered from their own cities into other men’s; congregations who kept feasts with the Jews of their town; ascetics whose contempt for marriage had curdled into contempt for the married. And the Fathers’ canons are, in their origin, private letters. A bishop writes to another bishop with a hard case and asks what to do. The answer he receives—set down for one correspondent, in one year, about one situation—was afterwards received by the whole Church as law.

Milaš’s purpose in gathering them was the same as in the first volume and just as practical. His readers were parish priests and diocesan officials who had to give answers, and who could not be expected to hunt through the Greek collections. Everything they were bound by ought to stand in one place, in their own language, with the reason for it explained. But this volume required much more of him as a scholar. The Ecumenical Councils are well documented and their canons come with an established literature. The local synods are often obscure—some of them cannot be dated within a decade—and the Fathers’ canons are fragments of correspondence that have to be set back into the letters they came from before they can be understood at all. A great part of the commentary here is the work of reconstructing the situation that produced a rule, and Milaš does it with evident relish.

Argument & Structure

After a brief Preface of his own, the volume falls into two unequal parts, with a short appendix at the end. The first part gives the ten local councils, in the order and under the ordinal titles that Milaš assigns them: Ancyra, Neocaesarea, Gangra, Antioch, Laodicea, Sardica, the Council of Constantinople of 394, Carthage, the Protodeutera Council of 861, and the Council held in Hagia Sophia in 879. That sequence spans more than five hundred years and takes in almost the whole disciplinary history of the Church. Ancyra and Neocaesarea meet in the immediate aftermath of the last great persecution and must decide what to do with those who broke under it. Gangra confronts an ascetic movement that had begun to despise marriage, property and the ordinary clergy. Antioch and Laodicea, whose sixty canons in this edition make it the most detailed of the group, regulate the everyday life of a province: services, elections, the conduct of the clergy, the behaviour of the laity. Sardica legislates on appeals and on bishops who will not stay in their dioceses. The African series from Carthage, the largest single body of canons in the volume, is the accumulated legislation of a church wrestling with schism and with its own discipline over decades. The two Constantinopolitan councils of the ninth century close the collection with the settlements that ended the iconoclast crisis and the conflict over the patriarch Photius.

The second part gives the canons of the Fathers: Dionysius, Gregory the Wonderworker, Peter of Alexandria, Athanasius the Great, Basil the Great, Timothy of Alexandria, Gregory the Theologian, Amphilochius of Iconium, Gregory of Nyssa, Theophilus, and Cyril of Alexandria, followed by a supplementary group of later authorities—John the Faster, Nicephorus the Confessor, and Nicholas of Constantinople. Basil’s ninety-two canons, drawn almost entirely from his three canonical letters to Amphilochius, are the heart of it and the fullest single treatment of penance and marriage anywhere in the corpus. Some of these texts are formal rulings; others keep the shape of the correspondence they came from, and Timothy of Alexandria’s are simply a list of questions with their answers, on subjects as intimate as the reception of communion by a woman during her illness or by a man troubled in the night.

Four pieces stand at the end, outside the numbered sequence, because they are letters rather than canons and Milaš prints them apart on that account. Two are encyclicals of patriarchs of Constantinople against simony—that of Gennadius, issued by a synod of his church, and that of Tarasius, which assembles the scriptural and patristic testimony against the buying of ordination and is among the most forceful documents in either volume. The third is a letter of Theodore the Studite to the monk Methodius, answering a set of practical questions put to him; Milaš prints it separately and says why, noting that the Athenian Syntagma attributes it wrongly to Nicephorus. The fourth is a small compilation of miscellaneous canonical prescripts, gathered from letters and homilies of Basil the Great, John Chrysostom and Anastasius of Antioch, most of them turning on how often and in what state of soul a Christian ought to receive communion—including Basil’s well-known account of communing four times a week and of self-communion where no priest can be had. Each carries Milaš’s own note identifying its source.

Each canon, as in the first volume, is presented in three parts, and the reader who understands the arrangement gets three times as much from the book.

The canon itself comes first, translated from the Greek and left with its difficulties intact. Then a line of parallel references in parentheses, listing the other canons that bear on the same matter—a cross-reference apparatus that binds this volume tightly to the first and to itself, and which repays following far more than its unassuming appearance suggests; it is the tradition showing where each rule sits in the whole. Then the commentary, opening with a dash: the historical occasion, the sense of the terms, the readings of the Byzantine commentators Zonaras, Balsamon and Aristenus, the judgments of the Western scholars—Hefele, Van Espen, Beveregius, Zhishman—and, where it matters, the state of the practice in Milaš’s own day across the Orthodox world.

Before each council Milaš places a historical note setting out what is known of when and why it met, and these introductions are among the most useful pages in the book. For several of the obscurer synods they amount to the only compact account a reader is likely to find.

Theological & Spiritual Significance

The lasting value of this volume lies in what the material itself is. These canons were made under pressure, for particular people, about failures that had actually happened, and they preserve the pastoral mind of the early Church at close range in a way that no treatise does. A synod meeting in Asia Minor in the years after Diocletian had to decide what should become of a priest who had offered sacrifice and then repented—and the answer it gave, that he might keep the honour of his seat but never again perform the priestly ministry, is a piece of exact moral reasoning about what repentance can and cannot restore. Basil, writing to a fellow bishop about the periods of penance appropriate to particular sins, is not drawing up a tariff; he says repeatedly that the measure is the penitent’s healing, that time served is not the point, and that a bishop who sees real conversion may shorten the term.

That principle, that the canons are given for the cure of souls and are administered as a physician administers a remedy, runs through the whole volume, and Milaš returns to it constantly. It is the key to reading a collection that can otherwise look forbidding. So is the distinction, everywhere assumed here, between the strictness that holds a rule to its letter and the condescension that relaxes it for a particular person in a particular case, a distinction that belongs to the law’s own understanding of itself. The closing appendix states the principle outright, in a passage taken from Chrysostom’s instruction to confessors: in imposing a penance one must look less at the size of the sin than at the disposition of the sinner, lest in trying to mend the tear one make it worse.

There is a second thing this volume shows better than any other book of its kind: how the Church actually made law. No legislature sat. A council of one province ruled on a local problem; another province found the ruling useful; an Ecumenical Council afterwards confirmed a list of such canons wholesale, and what had been the answer of one bishop to one correspondent became binding on the whole Church. The canons of the Fathers gathered here were never issued as legislation at all. They were received as such. For a reader interested in how tradition works—how the judgment of the Church is formed over time out of particular acts and particular texts, rather than promulgated at a stroke—this collection is the primary evidence, and Milaš’s commentary is a running demonstration of how to read it.

The canons here have also been read, throughout Christian history, on questions where the traditions differ from one another: the terms on which a cleric may appeal beyond his own province, the standing of the great sees, the validity of sacraments administered outside one’s own communion. Milaš states the Orthodox reading of these texts without hedging and without polemic, gives the Western scholarship on them a fair hearing, and argues from the documents. The reader is left in a position to judge.

Reception & Influence

Together with its companion volume, this book became the standard Serbian canonical reference within a generation of its publication and has remained so. It was carried into Russian and published at Saint Petersburg in 1911–12, and Milaš’s writings passed more broadly into Russian, German, Bulgarian, Romanian, Greek and Italian; his systematic treatise on church law appeared in an authorized German version in 1905. Later editions and the photographic reissue of the original volumes by his own diocese have kept the work continuously available and continuously cited. Its usefulness has outlived the empire it was written in and the questions of the moment it sometimes answers.

The Text & This Edition

Milaš was read in six languages in his own lifetime and after it; this edition brings the whole of his canonical commentary—the two volumes of which this is the second—into English. The translation is made from the Serbian original, Правила Православне Цркве са тумачењима, Књига II, Novi Sad, 1896, consulted in the photographic facsimile issued by the Eparchy of Dalmatia, with the Russian edition of 1911–12 used as a collating witness at doubtful points. The Russian edition is not a complete control: it lacks material that the Serbian carries, including the single canon of the Council of Constantinople of 394 and a considerable part of the later Fathers.

The edition is English only and stands on its own; it is not laid out as a parallel or bilingual text. Milaš’s three-part arrangement of each canon is preserved, as are his historical notes before each council and his footnotes, which are dense with references to the Greek and Latin collections and to the nineteenth-century literature and are too valuable to drop. In keeping with the conventions of this series, the author is named as the Church receives him, with his title of sanctity kept in its own field rather than worked into his name, and those who have brought his words into English are credited as translators, never as authors. Canon and Scripture citations appear in Arabic numerals where his print used Roman and Slavonic forms.

Several editorial facts belong to Milaš’s own edition and should not be read as slips. He orders the local councils as they stand here, placing the Council of Constantinople of 394 seventh and Carthage eighth, and he titles them by ordinal rather than by name. His Constantinople of 394 prints its single canon without a number, running straight on from the council’s heading. His Laodicea carries sixty canons where most collections print fifty-nine. For Carthage he follows the numbering of the Athenian Syntagma, which diverges at several points from the Slavonic Krmčija, from the Russian Book of Rules, and from the Pēdalion; where his number differs from the one a reader expects, the number given here is his, and he states his practice in his own footnote. Basil’s canon 92 has no heading of its own in his print, because he tells us there that the commentary on canon 91 serves for both; it accordingly stands here where he put it, at the end of 91. The separate placing of Theodore the Studite’s letter is likewise his decision, taken for the reason he gives.

The state of the text should also be stated plainly. The printed text has limits of its own, and they are recorded rather than smoothed over. A number of the parallel-reference lines break off mid-list where the printed page is damaged, and they are left visibly incomplete. Where the print cannot be read, the gap is marked and nothing is supplied. A number of bibliographic citations in the footnotes are damaged past confident recovery, and the damage is marked, on the principle that an invented reference reads as authoritative and cannot be checked by the reader who trusts it, which makes it worse than a visible defect.

Suggestions for Reading

A reader who wants to know what this book is should not start at the beginning. Start with Basil. His ninety-two canons, read continuously with Milaš’s commentary, are the best single introduction to the mind of the early Church on sin, penance, marriage and the treatment of persons—and they are the passages later canonists cite most often. From Basil, turn to the historical note and opening canons of Ancyra, where the Church is deciding, within living memory of the persecution, how to receive back those who failed; the questions there are as concrete as questions get.

After that, browse. Gangra rewards it, for the picture it gives of an ascetic enthusiasm that had gone wrong in ways that are still recognizable. Laodicea rewards it for the sheer detail of ordinary church life it preserves. Timothy of Alexandria’s questions and answers can be read in ten minutes and will change most readers’ picture of what fourth-century pastoral practice was like. And the short pieces at the very end are worth the detour: the encyclical of Tarasius for the sustained heat of its argument against buying an ordination, and the miscellaneous prescripts for what they show of how the Fathers actually counselled ordinary Christians about approaching the chalice.

Above all, follow the reference lines. Every canon carries a short parenthesis listing the others that speak to the same matter, and that apparatus is what turns a collection of rules into a body of law. Take a question—the reception of converts, second marriage, what a bishop may do with the property of his church, who may not testify in an ecclesiastical court—find one canon on it, read the commentary, then follow the parenthesis to the four or five other canons Milaš points to, across both volumes, and read those. What surfaces is the settled judgment of the Church on the question, assembled out of the particular decisions of many centuries. That is the way this book was built to be used, and it is the way its author, who was answering such questions from a bishop’s desk while he wrote it, used it himself.