Nicodemus of Vatopedi
Our Venerable Father Nicodemus the Hesychast of Vatopedi, elder of Saint Gregory Palamas
Venerable · d. c. 1319–1322, on Mount Athos
Commemorated 11 July — Repose on the Holy Mountain
Nicodemus of Vatopedi (†c. 1319–1322) was an ascetic of the Holy Mountain, remembered chiefly because it was he who received the young Gregory Palamas on Athos, tonsured him, and formed him for three years in fasting, vigil and unceasing prayer. Born Nikephoros and first a monk on Mount Auxentius near Chalcedon, he was driven from Bithynia by the Turkish raids and settled in a cell near the monastery of Vatopedi. Philotheos Kokkinos, who wrote the life of his disciple, calls him a man wonderful alike in practice and in contemplation. He died a few years after Gregory came to him, and is commemorated on July 11.
From Mount Auxentius to the Holy Mountain
The saint's name in the world was Nikephoros. He took up the monastic life not on Athos but on Mount Auxentius, the wooded height above Chalcedon on the Asian shore opposite Constantinople, which had been a centre of Bithynian monasticism since the fifth century and was still populous in the thirteenth. The Turkish advance across Bithynia in the closing years of that century and the opening of the next emptied those mountains one after another; Nikephoros, with many others, abandoned his monastery and made his way to the Holy Mountain, where he settled in a hermit's cell in the neighbourhood of the great coenobium of Vatopedi. There he was tonsured to the great habit with the name Nicodemus, and there he lived as a hesychast — the word is used of him in its proper sense, of a solitary whose whole discipline is the guarding of the mind and the prayer of the heart.
Of his ascesis the sources say only what a disciple would say: that he was, in the phrase of the Patriarch Philotheos Kokkinos, "admirable in praxis and in theoria" — that is, that he had both halves of the monastic life, the active purification of the passions and the contemplative vision that is its fruit. He was known through the Mountain for his virtue.
The tonsure and formation of Gregory Palamas
About the year 1316 three brothers of a noble Constantinopolitan house — Gregory, afterwards archbishop of Thessalonica, with Makarios and Theodosios — left the capital, and the court in which their father had served the emperor, and came to Athos to be monks. Enquiring for a guide, Gregory was directed to Nicodemus, and, the life says, was so struck by his virtue that he attached himself to him and would have no other elder. Nicodemus tonsured him and kept him in his cell three years, and Philotheos describes the regime in four words that are the whole of Athonite tradition: fasting, vigil, sobriety, and prayer without ceasing. It was in these years, and under this obedience, that the young Palamas received the hesychast method he afterwards had to defend before the Church and the empire against Barlaam of Calabria — so that the theology of the uncreated light, in the form the councils of 1341 and 1351 received it, reaches back through Gregory to this obscure refugee from Bithynia.
To the same period belongs the vision Philotheos records: that as Gregory kept vigil in the elder's cell, the Evangelist John the Theologian appeared to him and promised the protection of the Mother of God, whose intercession Gregory had been imploring with the prayer "Enlighten my darkness."
Repose
At the end of the three years Nicodemus died — the accounts give the year variously as 1319 or 1322, depending on whether Gregory's arrival on the Mountain is set in 1316 or in 1319. Gregory buried his elder, took what he had of his relics, and went down to the Great Lavra, where he served for three years more before withdrawing to the skete of Glossia and thence, when the Turkish raiders reached the Mountain, to Thessalonica.
Feast and commemoration
July 11 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 24). The commemoration is Athonite and Greek; the Slavonic calendars and the OCA do not carry it, and the printed Menaion has no proper service for him — the Athonite books supply the common of a venerable father with his name. He is also honoured within the Synaxis of All Saints of Vatopedi and within the general commemoration of All the Saints of the Holy Mountain, kept on the second Sunday after Pentecost in Athonite usage.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 8 (common of a venerable father)
In thee, O father, was the divine image preserved with exactness; for taking up the cross thou didst follow Christ, and by thy deeds thou didst teach us to overlook the flesh, for it passeth away, but to care for the soul, which is a thing immortal. Wherefore, O venerable Nicodemus, thy spirit rejoiceth with the angels.
Iconography
Nicodemus is painted in the ordinary type of the Athonite hesychast: an elder in the black mandyas and the great schema, with a long white beard, the right hand raised in blessing or held before the breast, an unrolled scroll in the left. Where he is shown at all he is most often shown in company — beside Gregory Palamas, either as the elder tonsuring the young monk or standing with him among the fathers of Vatopedi — since his whole memory in the tradition is bound to that discipleship; the scenes belong to the modern wall-paintings of Vatopedi and to the Athonite synaxis compositions of All Saints of the Holy Mountain rather than to any older panel. No pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this repository, and a search of Wikimedia Commons for an icon of Nikodemos of Vatopedi returns nothing; the Menologion of Basil II, the usual first resort for a minor saint of the fixed year, covers only September to February and in any case predates him by three centuries.
Disputed questions
- The dates. The three years with Nicodemus are firm in Philotheos; the absolute chronology is not. Gregory Palamas is placed on Athos from c. 1316, which would put the elder's repose about 1319; other reckonings put the arrival at 1319 and the repose at 1322. Both are given in the modern Athonite literature and this entry asserts neither.
- Not to be confused with three other Athonite Nicodemuses: the new-martyr Nicodemus the Albanian, a monk of Vatopedi who suffered at Berat in 1722 and who shares this very day — the two are constantly conflated because both are called "of Vatopedi"; Nicodemus the Hagiorite (†1809, July 14), the compiler of the Philokalia; and Nicodemus of Serbia (†1325), archbishop of the Serbs.