Nicetas of Remesiana
Our Father among the Saints Nicetas, Bishop of Remesiana, Apostle of the Bessi
Bishop · b. c. 335 — d. c. 414
Commemorated 22 June
Nicetas, bishop of Remesiana in Dacia Mediterranea — the modern Bela Palanka in south-eastern Serbia, on the road from Naissus to Serdica — was the apostle of the Bessi, a Thracian mountain people whom he brought to Christ and taught to sing the psalms in their own tongue, "turning wolves into sheep" in the phrase of his friend Paulinus of Nola. He was a catechetical writer of real weight: his surviving Instruction for Candidates for Baptism is the earliest text known to use the phrase "the communion of saints," and a long tradition, now contested, ascribed to him the Te Deum. He is commemorated on June 22, on which day the calendars also carry a Martyr Nicetas the Dacian who is very probably himself.
Remesiana and the Dardanian
Remesiana was a garrison town on the great military road that ran from Constantinople to the West, in the province of Dacia Mediterranea, a Latin-speaking district on the Greek–Latin frontier of the Balkan peninsula. Nicetas, born about 335, was its bishop from about 366 to his death. He identified himself, in a phrase preserved from his own writing, as a Dardanian — of the paleo-Balkan people of the region — and he wrote in Latin, though his see lay within a few days' travel of the Greek world and he moved easily in both.
The apostle of the Bessi
The Bessi were a Thracian tribe of the mountains, with a reputation among Roman writers for banditry and for a stubborn attachment to their own gods. Nicetas went to them; and the fact is attested not by a hagiographer but by the two poems his friend Paulinus of Nola wrote about him after his visits to Italy in 398 and 402. Paulinus describes a people who had been wolves becoming sheep, brigands of the crags who now sing Christ with a Roman heart, and who keep vigil singing psalms in the cold of their own mountains. The picture is of a mission that worked by liturgy and by song rather than by argument, and it is the earliest firm evidence for organised Christianity among the inland Thracians.
Nicetas's own writings bear this out. Of the six books of his Instruction for Candidates for Baptism (Instructio ad competentes) enough survives to show a careful, unpolemical Trinitarian catechesis addressed to converts with no philosophical training; and a separate short work, On the Benefit of Psalmody (De psalmodiae bono), argues the case for congregational singing — precisely the instrument of his mission. The Instruction's exposition of the Creed contains the first known occurrence of the phrase communio sanctorum, "the communion of saints," which entered the Latin creed and has been said in the West ever since.
The Te Deum
From the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth, a substantial body of scholarship — chiefly that of A. E. Burn — assigned the composition of the Te Deum laudamus to Nicetas, on the strength of a group of Irish and continental manuscripts that head the hymn hymnus quem Niceta composuit. The attribution is now regarded as unproven: the older ascription to Ambrose and Augustine is itself legendary, and the hymn's origins remain open. What is not in doubt is that a bishop who wrote a treatise urging the faithful to sing, and whose converts were remembered precisely for their singing, is a plausible enough candidate to have kept the question alive for a century.
Repose and cult
Nicetas died about 414. His cult is old in the Balkans and was recovered in the West largely through the rediscovery of his writings; the Serbian Church honours him as one of the earliest saints of its own soil, and the Roman martyrology and the Orthodox calendars alike keep him on June 22.
Feast and commemoration
June 22 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 5). He is kept on this day in the Orthodox calendars — the OCA's and those dependent on it — and in the Roman martyrology, and is honoured particularly in Serbia, where Bela Palanka stands on the site of his see, and among the Orthodox of the Balkans as the evangeliser of the Thracian interior. He has no proper office in the Greek or Slavonic Menaia and is commemorated with the day's other saints.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
The truth of things hath revealed thee to thy flock as a rule of faith, an icon of meekness and a teacher of abstinence; therefore thou hast achieved the heights by humility, riches by poverty. O Father and Hierarch Nicetas, intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Iconography
Nicetas is painted as a hierarch: a bishop of middle age in phelonion and omophorion, blessing and holding the Gospel-book, the beard short and rounded in the Balkan manner rather than the long pointed beard of the Syrian hierarchs. Modern Serbian icons of him, written since the recovery of his memory in the twentieth century, sometimes place behind him the mountains of the Bessi or give him an open scroll with a line of psalmody, in allusion to his mission and to his treatise on singing; these are all recent works and none is free-licensed. No pre-1900 image of him has been located for this collection — the surviving material on Wikimedia Commons under his name is architectural photography of churches and a 1998 Albanian postage stamp, neither storable nor iconographic.
Disputed questions
- Nicetas of Remesiana and "Nicetas the Dacian." The calendars of June 22 — the Orthodox Church in America's among them — list two Nicetases on this one day: a Hieromartyr Nicetas of Remesiana and a Martyr Nicetas the Dacian, in both cases with the note that no life is available. Almost certainly these are one man entered twice, once under his see and once under his province, the doubling having arisen when two source-lists using different by-names were merged. This entry treats them as one, records the doubling, and does not mint a second slug; if a genuinely distinct Dacian martyr Nicetas should be attested, the two can be separated then.
- Martyr, hieromartyr, or neither? The calendars style him hieromartyr or martyr. Nothing in the record supports a violent death: Paulinus of Nola, who knew him personally and wrote about him twice, gives no hint of one, and his repose about 414 falls in a period of no persecution in the Balkan provinces. The title is most likely a by-product of the same list-merging that produced the doubled entry, perhaps assisted by confusion with the Gothic martyr below. The types field here therefore carries bishop only, and the divergence from the calendars' styling is deliberate and recorded.
- Not to be confused with Nicetas the Goth (September 15), the Gothic martyr burned about 372 on the lower Danube in the persecution of Athanaric — a genuinely different man of a different century, but of the same name and the same Danubian region, and the most likely single source of the "martyr" title attaching itself to the bishop of Remesiana. Nor with Nicetas of Chalcedon, Nicetas of Medikion or the other Byzantine Nicetases of the calendar.