The Friends of Mount Athos Book Reviews

© 2003

The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church: Volume 4: March, April. By Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra; translated from the French by Mother Maria (Rule) and Mother Joanna (Burton). Ormylia, 2003. 575 pages. ISBN 960-87487-2-0. Price h/b £25.00, 37.20 euros, or US $ 41.50.

Available from the Holy Convent of the Annunciation, 630 71 Ormylia, Greece. Prices in sterling and euros include packing and shipping within Europe, prices in dollars include packing and shipping beyond Europe.

The English translation of the Synaxarion prepared by Fr Makarios of Simonos Petra that was begun by Christopher Hookway, who completed three volumes (September to February) before his untimely and much-lamented death, has passed into the capable hands of Mother Maria and Mother Joanna: volume four constitutes the first volume of their translation. The Synaxarion is a collection of the lives of the saints, arranged according to the dates of their liturgical commemoration. What Fr Makarios has done is to take the standard Synaxarion of the Greek Orthodox Church, itself based on the tenth-century Synaxarion of Constantinople, as revised by several later figures such as St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain, which for the first millennium includes saints from the whole Church (though more comprehensively for the Byzantine Empire), and thereafter is largely Greek, including the New Martyrs, and supplemented this with saints venerated in the Slav and Romanian Churches; he has also provided a further supplement of Western saints from the first millennium, including several Celtic and Anglo-Saxon saints (this volume, for instance, includes notices on St Chad, St Patrick, St Cuthbert and St Wilfrid). The best way of reading it will be to read the lives for the saints of each day on the day—thereby getting to know them all, one by one—though it will also be useful as a work of reference: at the end of the volume there is a table of contents, enabling one to locate particular saints quite quickly, and it is to be hoped that the final volume will include an alphabetical index of all the saints included.

In compiling his Synaxarion, Fr Makarios has made judicious use of scholarship, and occasionally written the entry himself, indicating his sources. Sometimes he is unduly modest: the entry for St Benedict (14 March) is said to be a summary of book 2 of St Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, but it contains a skilful epitome of St Benedict’s Rule, about which Gregory is strangely silent (it is curious how slowly the two traditions about Benedict—the account in the Dialogues and the man of the Rule—came to inform each other). Sometimes, however, the scholarship is somewhat dated: under St Sophronios of Jerusalem we are told that his friend, John Moschos, died in 619; a reference to the ‘eighth indiction’, on which this date is based, is now generally taken to mean 634, and is the date when Sophronios arrived in the Holy Land with the relics of his friend, to encounter a hostile Arab presence. There are also occasional indications of further information about the saints mentioned, often editions of their works, though the translators have only half-heartedly given English equivalents of the information provided by Fr Makarios; there are, for instance, two good English translations of Melito of Sardis’ On Pascha, that could have been mentioned, instead of the French edition; Symeon the New Theologian (12 March) does better, though there was no need to list the translation of his Discourses twice. The translation is generally excellent, though there are too many typos; on occasions, however, there are howlers, as when we are referred to a work of Symeon the New Theologian’s called The Second Action of Grace, instead of Second Thanksgiving (the Greek is eucharistia), and I think ‘Black Sea’ would be more readily comprehensible to English readers, rather than ‘Pontus Euxinus’.

Although this volume covers a period that usually coincides with Lent, when the celebration of saints is somewhat muted, it is a fat volume. There are several saints recorded here of especial interest to Friends of Mount Athos: from the Holy Mountain itself, notably St Gregory of Sinai, monastic saints such as Mark the Ascetic, Christodoulos of Patmos, several saints from the Stoudios monastery, including St Theodore’s uncle, Plato, and his close friend and successor, Naukratios. A particular blessing is the inclusion of Slav and Romanian saints: several saints from the Caves Monastery in Kiev, St Nil Sorsky, and later figures such as St Innocent Veniaminov, St Ignaty Brianchaninov, and Patriarch Tikhon, and from among the Romanians, St Callinicus of Cernica. There are also many new martyrs recorded, most notably Patriarch Gregory V.

One of the greatest blessings of being a historian of Orthodox Christianity is that in reading a book like this one constantly comes across saints who have become, as it were, friends, through having traced their lives and their hopes and longings through their letters and other writings. And this, it seems to me, is the purpose of this wonderful book: to help us to get to know the saints, so that they become our friends, whose examples can inspire us, but, more important, whose prayers we can seek. As well as the words, there are many black-and-white illustrations and eight colour plates, to help us in this. A sense of the communion of saints is one of the most precious possessions of Orthodox Christianity, and this beautifully produced Synaxarion will contribute to making this a reality.

ANDREW LOUTH

Durham