Saint Nektarios of Aegina is among the most loved Greek saints of the modern Church. He was Metropolitan of Pentapolis, a teacher of priests in Athens, and, in his last years, a monk on a small island. People ask his prayers especially in illness. His feast is 9 November. The shape of the life is simple to tell, and hard to imitate: a poor boy who was given a high rank, lost it without a hearing, and spent what remained of his years in ordinary work.
A poor boy from Selymbria
He was born Anastasios Kephalas on 1 October 1846, in Selymbria, near Constantinople, the town now called Silivri. His parents, Dimos and Maria, were pious Christians and they were not wealthy. There was no family fortune to carry him into the Church. At fourteen he left home for Constantinople itself, to work and to continue his schooling in the capital of the empire that still ruled his birthplace.
At twenty, in 1866, he took a teaching post on the island of Chios. The classroom did not quiet the older wish. He had wanted the monastic life for a long time. On 7 November 1876, at thirty, he was clothed as a monk at the Monastery of Nea Moni. Three years later he was ordained a deacon and given the name Nektarios, the name by which the Church still calls him.
He did not stay only in the monastery. He studied, and in 1885 he graduated from the University of Athens. From there he went to Alexandria, was ordained a priest, and served at the Church of Saint Nicholas in Cairo. The poor boy from Selymbria had become a learned priest in one of the great cities of the Orthodox world.
Metropolitan, then a man without a see
In 1889 Patriarch Sophronios of Alexandria consecrated him Metropolitan of Pentapolis, an ancient diocese in Cyrenaica, in what is now Libya. He served as a bishop in Cairo, and he served for only a year. The people loved him. That love was read, by some of his fellow clergy, as a threat. They persuaded his superior that Nektarios meant to take the patriarchal throne for himself.
He was suspended. No explanation was offered, and no defense was heard. A bishop who had been raised up by the same patriarchate was sent away from it. In 1891 he returned to Greece, not as a metropolitan with a diocese, but as a priest who would have to begin again. He spent the next few years preaching, from 1891 to 1894, with no palace and no court around him.
What he did not do is as much a part of the biography as what was done to him. He did not publish a case against his accusers. He did not gather a party. He went back to the work he already knew: teaching, preaching, and the care of souls. The accusation had been ambition. The years that followed are the answer to it.
The school, then the island
He was then made director of the Rizarios Ecclesiastical School in Athens, where priests were educated, and he stayed for fifteen years. Young men who would stand at the altar learned under a bishop who no longer had a see. The school became the place where his learning had a daily use. He also wrote. Among the hymns that carry his name is Agni Parthene, “O Pure Virgin,” still sung across the Orthodox world. Later books of his, on repentance and on Christ, would be translated into English, but the hymn traveled first, because people could sing it.
In 1904 a small group of nuns asked him for a monastery. He founded the Holy Trinity Monastery for them on the island of Aegina, in the Saronic Gulf, a short sail from Athens and a long way from the rank he had lost. For four years he remained director of the school and father of the new convent. In December 1908, at sixty-two, he resigned the directorship and withdrew to Aegina for good.
The rest of his life was plain work. He wrote and published. He preached and heard confessions. He tended the gardens, carried stones, and helped raise the monastery buildings, paid for with his own money. Visitors who came looking for the former Metropolitan of Pentapolis found a monk in working clothes. Nothing in that life looks like the ambition he had been accused of. The convent grew because he stayed, not because he ruled it from a distance.
The last illness
The body that had carried stones did not stay strong. He was taken to hospital with prostate cancer and treated for about two months. He died on 8 November 1920, at seventy-four. His body was brought back to the Holy Trinity Convent. His friend Savvas of Kalymnos buried him there, and later painted the first icon of him, so that the face of the monk would not be left only to memory. The funeral drew people from every part of Greece and from Egypt, the land that had both honored him and sent him away.
The Church now keeps 9 November as his feast, and asks his prayers especially for those who are sick: cancer, the heart, the joints, epilepsy, arthritis, the illnesses that do not leave a person quickly. He is called the wonderworker of Aegina because that asking has not been empty. The Church speaks of help given, again and again, to people who had little left to try.
If we live, we live for the Lord; and if we die, we die for the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord. Romans 14:8
That verse sits over the whole of his life, not only the last weeks. The hospital did not cancel it. Neither did the years without a see, nor the grave. He had belonged to the Lord as a poor student in Constantinople, as a bishop in Cairo, and as a monk carrying stones on Aegina.
The Church asked his forgiveness
His relics were taken from the grave on 2 September 1953, more than thirty years after the burial. On 20 April 1961, Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople glorified him in Saint George’s Cathedral in Istanbul, the city he had entered at fourteen with no money and a wish to learn. The boy from Selymbria was named a saint within sight of the sea he had crossed to begin his working life. His feast has been kept ever since, on 9 November.
A later act is almost as moving as the glorification. On 15 September 1998, the Patriarchate of Alexandria, the Church that had expelled him, restored his place. Under Patriarch Petros VII, the Holy Synod said that more than a century had passed since this teacher and father of the Church had been driven out. They spoke of his miracles and of the love the Orthodox people already had for him. Then they said the harder thing: that human weakness and error had caused their holy father, the bishop of Pentapolis, to suffer.
They gave him back the honors due to a saint. They asked him to forgive them, unworthy as they judged themselves, and to forgive those who had sat on the throne of Alexandria before them, for the opposition he had endured. A century after a suspension without explanation, the Church that wronged him asked his prayers. Few biographies end with the institution that injured a man returning to ask his pardon.
A saint you can stand before
An icon of Saint Nektarios usually shows him as a bishop: the sakkos, the omophorion over his shoulder, a Gospel book in his hand, and the monastic hat. The vestments remember Pentapolis. The hat remembers Aegina. Both are true, and the icon refuses to choose one and hide the other. He is a saint of the sick because he was a sick man who did not stop belonging to Christ, and because the Church has found him near to those who suffer as he suffered.
To stand before him is to stand before a particular life, not a general idea of holiness. A child of a poor house. A teacher on Chios. A monk at thirty. A bishop for a single year. A school director for fifteen. A founder of a convent who paid for the walls and then carried the stones. The rank was taken from him. The work was not.
The Saint Nektarios icon is made to be kept where those prayers are said.
