The Friends of Mount Athos Book Reviews

© 2009

The Synaxarion: The Lives of the Saints of the Orthodox Church: Volume 6: July, August; Volume 7: Appendix, General Index. By Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra; translated from the French by Mother Maria (Rule) and Mother Joanna (Burton). Ormylia, 2008. Volume 6: 690 pages. ISBN 978-960-518-305-9; Volume 7: 245 pages. ISBN 978-960-518-306-6. Available from the Holy Convent of the Annunciation, 63071 Ormylia, Greece.

           These two volumes complete the translation into English of the French Synaxarion originally composed by the learned Fr Makarios, a French monk of the monastery of Simonos Petra on Mount Athos. The work of translation was begun by the late Christopher Hookway and the publishers are fortunate to have found two able successors, Mother Maria and Mother Joanna, both Orthodox nuns and both excellent French scholars.

            Volume Six contains the Synaxarion for the months of July and August, while Volume Seven is a supplementary volume consisting of an appendix giving notices of a number of saints who have been recognized by various Orthodox Churches since the publication of earlier volumes, as well as ones previously omitted, including, ‘for the first time’, saints from the Church of Antioch taken from Arabic sources. The volume ends with a comprehensive alphabetical index to all seven volumes and a table of contents by month of Volume Seven.

            The commemoration of the saints has for centuries been part of the daily offices of both the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. In the Latin rite the names of the saints of the day, often with a brief notice of their lives, were read from the Martyrology at the office of Prime. In the Byzantine rite the names of the saints for each day, again often accompanied by sometimes quite detailed notices, are incorporated the relevant volumes of the Menaia, Triodion, and Pentekostarion, and are read after the Kontakion at Matins. These notices have also been collected in Synaxaria, the equivalent of the Latin martyrologies, of which the best known, in Greek, is that of St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain. His work forms the basis of the massive, fourteen-volume Megas Synaxaristes, published by the Old Calendarist bishop, Matthew Laggis, in 1986. A brief account of this may be found in the introduction to Volume One of The Synaxarion, which also explains the principles on which the French original of The Synaxarion was composed. This introduction points out that the Greek Megas Synaxaristes makes ‘scarcely any reference to the findings of hagiographical research and the additional information that it has brought to light’. This French Synaxarion, on the other hand, by Fr Makarios was prepared on the basis of the work of scholars like the Bollandist, Hippolyte Delehaye, and his edition of the Synaxarion of Constantinople.

           The earlier martyrologies tended to be local rather than universal, and the entries of the Greek Menaia frequently include the name of the church in Constantinople in which the celebration for a particular saint was held. A contemporary Orthodox synaxarion needs to be more pan-Orthodox, and for this reason The Synaxarion includes many saints of non-Greek Orthodox traditions. These saints are listed in two groups, those of the Slav including, slightly misleadingly, Georgian, and those of the Western traditions. One problem here is whom to include. For example, of the fourteen Slav and Western saints included under the month of August in the calendar of the Archdiocese of Thyateira only half are given in The Synaxarion, which shows a slight, if understandable, bias in favour of Gallic and Athonite saints. It is a pity that the late Bishop Christopher's valuable collection, The Saints of the British Isles (In Greek, published in 1995), does not seem to have been consulted. It has also been possible to include a number of saints who suffered in Russia under the Bolsheviks after 1917, and under the Nazis, like St. Maria Skobstova and her companions, as well as saints from earlier times who are not mentioned in the Synaxaria. One of these is St. Cassiane the Melodist. It is a pity that the exchange between the saint and the Emperor Theophilos has been translated in a way that loses the epigrammatic bite of the original. The pithy, Ek gynaikos ta cheiro (‘from a woman what is worse?’), Kai ek gynaikos ta kreitto (‘And from a woman what is better?’), becomes ‘It is from a woman that evil came’, ‘Yes, but it is a woman who has shone forth for us the most greatly’, which is not even normal English. In volume Seven there is a new notice of St Nino, Enlightener of Georgia.

           The Preface to Volume Seven points out that ‘The Synaxarion, being a chronicle of the holiness of the Church, is by definition an incomplete book’, and so it includes, quite rightly, a number of contemporary figures who have not yet received official ‘canonization’, but who are greatly venerated by the Orthodox people. One such is Fr Justin Popovich, who is given a very full, eight-page entry and a photograph. On the other hand, Bishop Nikolai Velimirovich was canonized by the Church of Serbia in 2003.

           Both volumes, like the previous ones, are well produced and are illustrated with reproductions of icons, some in colour, and in the case of more recent saints, photographs.

           All those who have been associated with this work, the original author, Fr Makarios, his translators, the late Christopher Hookway and Mothers Maria and Joanna, together with the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius and the Friends of Mount Athos, are to be congratulated on completing in just ten years this invaluable resource for English-speaking Orthodox Christians.

ARCHIMANDRITE EPHREM

London