Epilogue from "Criticism of the Accusations Against Saint Nektarios by the Nun Magdalene"

1. The “nun” Magdalene, in her attempt to defend the Orthodox faith, considered that it retains its authentic form only in Old Calendarism. Thus, in her struggle—lacking discernment—for the defense of Orthodoxy, and wanting to prove that the New Calendarists have fallen into heresy and therefore are deprived of the grace of the Holy Spirit, she proceeds to accuse the one who had been numbered among the choirs of the Saints by the “Mason New Calendarist” Patriarch Athenagoras—Saint Nektarios, Metropolitan of Pentapolis.

The accusations, therefore, for which she indicts the Holy Father can be classified into the following three groups:

A. Nektarios Kefalas is an Iconoclast, because:

a) he presents Iconoclasm as a reformation of society,
b) he justifies the reformist Iconoclasts,
c) he defends [Emperor Constantine V] Copronymos,
d) he praises the Council of Hieria, characterizing its members as true fathers, and
e) he blasphemes the feasts of the Lord and of the Theotokos as responsible for the moral and material decline of society.

B. Saint Nektarios is an Ecumenist – Papist sympathizer, because:

a) according to him, the cause of the Schism was the jealousy of the Easterners over the development of the Pope’s primacy by the Westerners,
b) he accuses Patriarch Michael Cerularius of being harsh, meddlesome, power-loving, ambitious, and that because of his character he did not prevent the Schism with the Westerners,
c) he is revealed as a great enemy of the Athonites, because he exposes them as liars and their martyrologies and accounts of massacres on Athos by the Latins as false,
d) those who condemned [Patriarch John XI] Bekkos were not followers of the moral principles of Christianity, and
e) he defends Bekkos.

C. Nektarios is an opponent of monasticism, because:

a) according to him, the Monks were the main instigators of the reactions against Iconoclasm, since through the abolition of the holy Icons they were deprived of their most profitable handiwork,

b) he accuses Saints Theodore the Studite, Plato, and Joseph, Archbishop of Thessaloniki, as troublemakers, opportunists, Jesuits, etc., and Saints Methodios and Ignatios as tools of the monastic order for the imposition of Iconodulism.

 

2. Magdalene draws her arguments from the following works of Saint Nektarios: The Ecumenical Councils and On the Holy Icons and from On the Causes of the Schism, on its Perpetuation, and on the Possibility or Impossibility of the Union of the Two Churches, Eastern and Western, Vols. I and II.

From the first work, and especially from the chapter referring to the period of Iconoclasm, she takes the positions to support the accusations that Saint Nektarios is an Iconoclast and an opponent of monasticism. Also, based on the Holy Father’s book concerning the schism, she formulates the accusation that Saint Nektarios is a Papist sympathizer – Ecumenist. Magdalene considers that by presenting as the primary cause of the schism—the one from which the other causes also stem—the theory of papal primacy of authority, Saint Nektarios aligns himself with the Western theologians and defends the actions of the Latin-minded of the East.

3. Saint Nektarios, as a man with ecclesiastical conscience and possessing awareness of the sinfulness of human nature, did not claim any kind of infallibility for himself. Nor does the Church of Christ consider that the Saints are infallible. Thus, the Holy Father in his studies expressed some positions that were excessive and even liable to misunderstanding, such as when he characterized the Iconoclastic movement as a reformation. The Saint is excessive when he extols the iconoclast emperors and hierarchs, or when he considers the Iconoclasts as more intelligent, and the Iconodules as an inferior class consisting of the mob, women, and monks. The same could be said regarding the issue that the veneration of holy icons was one of the causes of the material, moral, and intellectual decline of society. Another misstep of the Saint is his attempt to dispel the designation “Copronymos,” which has been attributed to Emperor Constantine V, even going so far as to characterize the rumors that the emperor defecated in the font during baptism as shameless, immoral, and baseless. Another error of the Saint is the designation of the headless Council of Hieria (754) as Ecumenical, and this because he did not place the term in quotation marks in order to show that he was using the designation as a terminus technicus and not because he was attributing to the council the status and authority of an Ecumenical Council.

4. These missteps of Saint Nektarios are mainly due to his insufficient bibliographical information concerning the period of Iconoclasm. The aid the Saint used regarding the events of that period was the work of the historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos, History of the Greek Nation. It should be taken into account that Western historians despised Byzantium. The Byzantine Empire was considered by them as the worst period of the medieval world, as a place where intrigue, crime, superstitions, and religious passions prevailed. Paparrigopoulos was the first to undertake the colossal task of restoring to the consciousness of scholars the unjustly despised Byzantium. In his classical work History of the Greek Nation, Byzantine history is presented as the natural continuation of ancient Greek history and is examined in various ways. However, his work does not fully restore the reputation of the Church of that period.

Paparrigopoulos could not understand Byzantine theology as well as he understood political history. In those points where the Church had come into conflict with the emperors, Paparrigopoulos generally sides with the emperors. He places the interest of the Nation above all else, and considers doctrinal differences as insignificant matters, which existed only to dissolve the unity of the state. Unfortunately, most of the Greek scholars of Saint Nektarios’s time, who had been raised with the ideas of Paparrigopoulos, viewed the struggles of the Byzantine theologians against heretics with disfavour or even contempt, and criticized their insistence on preserving doctrinal details. The image they had of the Church of the Empire differed little from the image held by Protestants, who, rejecting Holy Tradition, saw the entire course of Byzantine theology as a continuous departure from the teaching of Holy Scripture. Similarly, Byzantine painting, as well as architecture, was not held in esteem or was considered inferior to that of Europe.
Within this atmosphere, Saint Nektarios felt obliged to revise the prevailing ideas concerning the Ecumenical Councils of the Church. In this effort, the Saint used Paparrigopoulos uncritically, for two reasons:

a) because he had no other aid with which to compare the events, and

b) because he was not interested in producing history or in critically analyzing the events of the period, but simply in presenting them in order to arrive at the account of the Seventh Ecumenical Council.

5. Magdalene, in her desire to accuse Saint Nektarios, attempts to find accusations in order to convince that the Metropolitan of Pentapolis is not a Saint; she invents various pretexts, mainly concerning her anxiety to prove that the Saint is a Papist sympathizer and an opponent of Monasticism.

Many of these pretexts are due to her half-knowledge and to the fact that she misunderstands and misinterprets what she reads. For example, when she states that Saint Nektarios characterizes the iconoclast clergy as “true clergy,” Magdalene reproaches him and labels him an enemy of the Holy Fathers. However, when the Saint says “true clergy,” as we noted in the corresponding paragraph, he is referring to those saints who, during the early centuries of Christianity, opposed the veneration of holy icons. Elsewhere, according to Magdalene, Saint Nektarios becomes an enemy of the Holy Fathers and even an insulter of the 367 God-bearing Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, because he considers the rumors regarding how Emperor Constantine V acquired the nickname Copronymos to be shameless and immoral. This is because Magdalene believes that the Fathers of the Second Council of Nicaea were the ones who gave Copronymos that epithet. We have developed the relevant rebuttal in the corresponding paragraph. We simply emphasize here as well the misinterpretation of what Magdalene reads. Just as when he refers to the members of the Council of Hieria as Fathers and clergy worthy of speech, he does so regardless of their positive or negative stance toward Iconoclasm.

6. Magdalene, as we have already said, up until the early 1970s respected and honored Saint Nektarios, even dedicating one of her books to the Holy Father. From 1972–1973, however, she began to speak out against the Saint, even publishing her first related work, in which she develops her positions that Saint Nektarios was an Iconoclast, an Ecumenist – Papist sympathizer, and an opponent of Monasticism. This change in Magdalene’s stance toward the Saint should be sought in her overall disposition to present herself as a protector and teacher of Orthodoxy, to the point of believing that only she and the sisterhood under her live out “Orthodoxy,” that only she walks according to the Holy Canons, and that only she is the continuator of the Patristic Tradition, since all others have gone astray.

Thus, by proving that a modern Saint, who lived and acted in our time and is moreover very popular, was a heretic, it follows that the Synod which proclaimed him is also in error; therefore, those who wish to live Orthodox lives must separate from that Church and place themselves under the guidance of the fallen nun, who alone preserves the canonical and hagiopaternal Tradition.

7. Holiness, as Orthodox Theology teaches, is a gift of God to those who strive within the Church to live out the commandments of God, and in certain cases, to seal their struggle with martyrdom, as the highest expression of their love for God.

The Saints, like all people, are also subject to the condition of the fall and incline toward sin, striving with the grace of God to transform their passions into virtues. Living, therefore, in this state of fallen human nature, they do not claim any kind of infallibility, but they recognize their faults and correct them. A Saint does not mean one who is infallible or sinless, but one who has the courage to acknowledge his fault, to confess his errors, and to repent for them. Thus also Saint Nektarios, as a human being, may have fallen into some missteps, but he never departed from Orthodox teaching. He approached all matters with discernment, consistent with Tradition, both in his Gospel-aligned teaching and in his conduct, and thus was revealed as an Orthodox theologian and teacher. He did not create his own construct, nor did he apply foreign elements, but followed the experience of the Church.

The divine Father, through his vast learning and his personal conduct, conveyed and taught in our times all that the God-bearing Fathers have handed down to us through their Theology throughout the ages. And this makes his contribution all the more precious. The Saint, even if he erred in some point, is certainly not deprived of the sanctifying grace of God, as his entire path until the end of his earthly life and conduct—a path of humility and obedience to the will of God and submission to the Church—confirms, leaving us an example to imitate.

 

Source: Κριτική στό κατηγορητήριο τῆς μοναχῆς Μαγδαληνῆς κατά τοῦ Ἁγίου Νεκταρίου [Criticism of the accusations against Saint Nektarios by the nun Magdalene], by Archimandrite Symeon (Spyridon) Kalopanagiotis, Athens, 2018, pp. 99-103. Translated from the original Greek source online:

https://pergamos.lib.uoa.gr/uoa/dl/object/2866362/file.pdf