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While Although some modern scholars critics have criticized his writings for alleged influence from [[Roman Catholic Church|Roman Catholic]] spirituality, canon law, and theology, his life work clearly focused on reviving traditional Orthodox texts and ascetic practices, while making use of limited materials at hand amid the Turkish occupation of the Greek world, which involved sometimes adapting Catholic materials. He translated and revised "The Spiritual Combat" (1589) by Lorenzo Scupoli, a Catholic priest of Venice, renaming it "Unseen Warfare," as well as the "Spiritual Exercises" of J.P. Pinamonti (sometimes wrongly thought to have been Ignatius Loyola's work), probably via a Greek translation by Emmanuel Rominantes. Accusations of Catholic and Pietistic influences on his work, a topic of controversy going back to debate divisions over the Kollyvades ascetic reform movement with which St. Nicodemus was associated in the Greek Church in his day, have been disputed (for a recent detailed discussion, see the introductory materials to "Christian Morality," a 2012 English translation of "Chrestoethia of Christians," (which originally appeared in 1803). A current commentator in that translation remarks on how that handbook on moral behavior by St. Nicodemus' text reflects in part Orthodox Athonite "the monastic propriety of his age," and responding at times to "conventions upheld by the civil authorities" for exemplary behavior by the general populace," rather than Catholic or Pietist influence per se, as earlier writers alleged. Archimandrite Chrysostom Maidones, Chancellor of the Metropolis of Hierissos in Greece, in a recent English translaiton of St Nicodemus' confession guidebook, also commented on how a neglect in modern academic theology of study of the "Fathers of the Philokalic movement," including St. Nicodemus, has contributed to some scholarly confusion in the past about how to contextualize the Saint's work.

Yet recent Recent renewed attention in the West to the Saint's works in their primary Orthodox context of the saint's work reflects the expanded availability of English translations of his major worksbooks, as well as greater awareness of the cosmopolitan contexts of Christian sources in the early modern period--through, for example, through scholarship on the sequences of translation and adaptation of Roman Catholic texts in the East, and better understanding of the influence of the Orthodox ascetic texts of the Macarian homilies on Pietism, for example. In this light, the main context of St. Nicodemus' works can be appreciated as firmly in the tradition of Orthodox asceticism--exemplified by the sources and influence of his compilation of "The Philokalia"--applicable in varying ways to monastics, clergy, and laity alike. The legacy of St. Nicodemus' voluminous scholarship thus can also be understood from a larger perspective in part partly as an Orthodox response alternative, from Mount Athos, to a variety of eighteenth-century cultural movements in Europe, including not only the Enlightenment, but also the aftermath of the Counter-Reformation, Pietism, and the beginning of Romanticism.

*English translations of his work in recent years, often with prefaces by Orthodox scholars, include, in In addition to older twentieth-century English editions of "The Philokalia," "Unseen Warfare," and "The Rudder," new twenty-first century English translations of St. Nicodemus' works (some of them collaborations with St. Makarius of Corinth), often with new prefaces by Orthodox scholars, include the Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies' "Christian Morality" or "Chrestoethia of Christians," the Uncut Mountain Press editions of "Exomologetarion--A Manual of Confession," "Concerning Frequent Communion," and "Confession of Faith," and the English translation of "The Synaxarion" adapted by Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra."*The account of St. Nicodemus in the above-mentioned translation of "The Synaxarion," compiled by Hieromonk Makarios of Simonos Petra (also and an adaptation of St. Nicodemus' work), "July 14," pp. 146-153, including includes helpful footnotes by the current editor's footnotes. Trans. Mother Maria Rule and Mother Joanna Burton. Holy Convent of the Annunciation of Our Lady Ormylia (Chalkidike), 2008. Vol. 6.*[http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/saintn63.htm Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain] ([[Roman Catholic]])