The life of St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain
Two years into that new life, Makarios Notaras, Metropolitan of Corinth, brought with him a manuscript he had come across at Vatopedi in 1777, a wide collection of spiritual writing gathered from authors across eleven centuries, and asked the young monk to see it into print. What the two men produced together, the Philokalia, appeared in Greek in 1782, and the work of preparing it opened onto a lifetime of further writing for Nikodemos, who moved on afterward to the Skete of the Pantokrator to study Scripture and the Fathers under Elder Arsenios of the Peloponnese.
His pen rarely rested after that. He gave the wider Church an edition of Lorenzo Scupoli's Unseen Warfare, later carried into Russian, English, and other tongues, and, with the hieromonk Agapios, compiled the Pedalion, a full commentary on the Church's canon law printed in 1800 with the endorsement of Patriarch Neophytos VII himself, who insisted it appear in everyday Greek so that ordinary believers, and not clergy alone, could read it.
He reposed in 1809, remembered as one of the most prolific spiritual writers Mount Athos has ever produced.
