The Rudder

The Rudder or Pedalion is a work by St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain. It is a Canonicon or collection of canons of the Church, especially the Ecumenical Councils, and interpretations thereof.

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Controversy in World Orthodoxy

The Rudder is commonly hidden from ordinary believers by their ecumenist hierarchs—no doubt to prevent them from learning the truth of the heresy they are in. In fact, the Rudder is not some secret book of advanced dogma for clergy and higher, spiritual people as is claimed, but was translated into the common Greek of the time and is explicitly intended to be used by both the learned and the common laity.

“For this reason we too, following the example of this apostolical teaching, have desired by means of the present Handbook to benefit both the erudite and learned and the simple and unlearned as well. The former, with the Greek text of the divine and sacred Canons, apostolical, conilliar, and individual. The latter, on the other hand, with a simpler interpretation and explanation of the same Canons.”

Again in the footnote to the above:

“This shows how frigid, how vain, how illogical the argument of some men to the effect that the divine Canons oought not to be explained in everyday speech. Man alive whoever you be that are saying these things, do you mean to tell us that it is all right for the divine and sacred Canons to be translated into arabic, into Syriac, into Ethiopic, and to be explained in Latin, Italian, Slavonic, English, and, in fact, right for nearly every race of so-called Christians to have these sacred Canons translated into their language, but, on the other hand, right only for the race of the Orthodox Eastern Greeks, within whose borders the Councils were held and the Fathers of the Canons produced their blossoms and the exegetes of these first made their appearance, to lack and not be allowed to have the divine Canons translated into their mother tongue? And if our own race formerly had these Canons couched in Greek because they knew Greek, how is it that the same race ought not to have the Canons now explained in their ordinary language, since, with few exceptions, they know only the simple idiom?”