Nikephoros the Hesychast
Our Venerable Father Nikephoros the Hesychast, who struggled on Mount Athos
Venerable · Confessor · d. before 1300, on Mount Athos
Commemorated 4 May — Commemoration of the Athonite hesychast and teacher of watchfulness
Nikephoros the Hesychast (†before 1300) was an Italian by birth and a Latin by upbringing who came to the Byzantine East, embraced Orthodoxy, and became a solitary on Mount Athos. He opposed the union of the Churches imposed at the Council of Lyons (1274) by Michael VIII Palaiologos, and suffered exile for the refusal. His single surviving work, On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart, gathers the sayings of the fathers on inward attention and then sets out, more explicitly than any earlier text, the method of the prayer of the heart — the disciplined return of the mind from its wandering into the "place of the heart," with the breath as its guide. Gregory Palamas cites him as an authority and calls him a teacher of the hesychasts, and the Philokalia preserves his treatise. He is commemorated on May 4.
From the Latin West to Athos
The essential facts of Nikephoros's origin come from Gregory Palamas, who defends him by name in the Triads and who says that he was of Italian stock and had been reared in the Latin confession, but that having come into the territory of the Romans (that is, of the Byzantine empire) he abjured the errors of his fathers and was received into the Orthodox Church. Palamas presents this as a mark in his favour — a man who had reasoned his way out of the Latin position rather than inherited the Greek one.
Having become Orthodox he became a monk, and went to the Holy Mountain, where he took up the life of a hesychast: not the cenobitic discipline of the great houses but the solitary regime of the cell, whose whole business is unceasing prayer. The sources give him no monastery and no abbacy; the epithets attached to his name — the Hesychast, the Solitary, he who struggled on Athos — describe a way of life rather than an office, and this is why the Slavic and English lists have styled him "Nikephoros the Solitary of Mount Athos."
The union of Lyons and the exile
His formation as a Latin did not make him a unionist; it appears to have had the opposite effect. When the emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, for reasons of state, procured the submission of the Byzantine Church to Rome at the Second Council of Lyons (1274) and then enforced it with imprisonments and depositions, the Holy Mountain was among the centres of resistance, and Nikephoros stood with the resisters. For his refusal of communion with the unionists he was arrested and exiled — he afterwards wrote of what he had endured, and the Athonite tradition numbers him among the confessors of that persecution, in the same company as the monks of the Protaton who suffered under the same policy. The classification confessor here rests on that resistance and on the exile.
The teaching on watchfulness
Nikephoros's importance is out of all proportion to what is known of his life, and rests on a short treatise: Λόγος περὶ νήψεως καὶ φυλακῆς καρδίας — On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart. Its first and larger part is an anthology: passages from Antony, Theodosius, Arsenius, Macarius, John Climacus, Isaac the Syrian, Symeon the New Theologian and others, assembled to show that the fathers with one voice make attention (prosochē) and watchfulness (nepsis) the foundation of the spiritual life. Its last part is his own, and it is the part that made his name: an unusually concrete set of instructions for the practice of inner prayer.
His central teaching is that the intellect, which by nature scatters itself among the senses and the objects of thought, must be brought back and enclosed within the heart — "the place of the heart" being for him not a metaphor but the interior centre where the mind is to stand and keep watch over the thoughts that rise. To this he adds the counsel with which his name is permanently associated: that the beginner may use the rhythm of his own breathing as the path along which the mind descends inward, drawing the attention with the breath and holding it there with the invocation of the name of Jesus. He is candid that this is a technique and a support, not the prayer itself; and he insists throughout on obedience to a guide, since the method misused is dangerous.
This is the earliest surviving text to describe the physical component of the Jesus Prayer in plain terms, and it is therefore the text out of which the whole later controversy grew. When Barlaam the Calabrian attacked the Athonite monks in the 1330s as "navel-gazers" (omphalopsychoi), it was Nikephoros's instructions, at second or third hand, that he was caricaturing. Gregory Palamas, answering him, names Nikephoros with honour — "that man lived the hesychast life to the end… a martyr for the truth," and cites him as a father whose authority the Church has received. Later tradition, following Palamas's remark that he had learnt from such men, calls Nikephoros the teacher of St Gregory Palamas; whether this means a personal discipleship or a discipleship through his writings is discussed below.
Repose and legacy
He reposed on the Holy Mountain, and the date is not recorded; the calendars and the handbooks give "before 1300," which is an inference from the chronology of the Lyons resistance and from Palamas's manner of speaking of him as belonging to the generation before his own. His treatise entered the standard hesychast reading-lists at once, and Nikodemos the Hagiorite and Macarius of Corinth printed it in the Philokalia (Venice, 1782), where it stands among the central texts of the collection; it appears in the fourth volume of the English translation of the Philokalia.
Feast and commemoration
May 4 (church date; New Calendar civil May 4, Old Calendar civil May 17). The commemoration is carried by the Greek synaxaria (Ὅσιος Νικηφόρος ὁ ἐν Ἄθῳ ἀσκήσας), by the OCA day-page ("Venerable Nikēphóros of Mount Athos"), and by the English lists; it is not in the printed Slavic Menaion for the day. He is also kept collectively with the Holy Fathers who shone forth on Mount Athos, whose synaxis is observed on the Second Sunday after Pentecost, and among the confessors of the Athonite resistance to the union of Lyons. No proper service is transmitted; the common of a venerable father is sung.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 8 (from the common of a venerable father)
Thou didst forsake the errors of thy fathers and the land of thy birth, and taking up the yoke of stillness on the Holy Mountain, thou didst gather the mind into the heart and keep watch there with the Name of Jesus; wherefore, having taught the way of unceasing prayer to the sons of light, O our father Nikephoros, intercede with Christ God that our souls may be saved.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Nikephoros is painted as an Athonite ascetic: a lean elder in the rason with the analavos and koukoulion of the great schema, sometimes bare-headed, the beard long and grey, standing or seated in a cave or before the rocks of the Mountain. Two features recur in the modern icons of him, which are the only ones there are. The first is the scroll, on which is written a phrase from his treatise — most often the summons to return the mind into the heart. The second is the posture of inward prayer: the head slightly bowed and inclined toward the breast, and the right hand laid over the heart — a deliberate visual allusion to the method he taught, and the same gesture given to the other hesychast fathers. Where he appears in the composite icon of the Fathers of Mount Athos he stands in the row of the hesychasts near Gregory Palamas, and is identified by inscription only.
No pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this collection; his cultus as an individual saint with a calendar day is largely a development of the modern Athonite revival, and any candidate inscribed simply "Ο ΟΣΙΟΣ ΝΙΚΗΦΟΡΟΣ" must be checked against Nicephorus of Medikion and the patriarch Nicephorus.
Disputed questions
- Whether he taught Palamas in person. The OCA life and many popular accounts state flatly that Nikephoros was the teacher of St Gregory Palamas. The chronology makes a personal discipleship difficult: Palamas was born about 1296 and came to Athos about 1316, by which time Nikephoros — placed by the same sources before 1300 — was dead. Palamas's own language in the Triads is that of a man defending a revered predecessor whose writings and whose reputation he had received on the Mountain, not that of a pupil recalling his elder. The likeliest truth is that he was Palamas's teacher through his treatise and through the living Athonite tradition he had shaped, which is how the older Greek notices put it, and that the popular formulation has hardened a spiritual filiation into a biographical fact.
- His date. No year is transmitted. "Before 1300" is the conventional formula; some handbooks say simply "second half of the thirteenth century," and a few extend him into the early fourteenth to make room for the Palamas discipleship, which is reasoning backwards from the disputed point above.
- Whether he is Nikephoros the Monk. Wikidata and some catalogues file him as "Nikephoros the Monk," which is the manuscript attribution of the treatise; it is the same person, the manuscripts having no need of the epithets the calendar later supplied.
- Not the other Nikephoroi of this day. The same calendar day, May 4, carries Nicephorus of Medikion (†813), the Bithynian founder-abbot — a genuinely inconvenient coincidence which has produced conflated single entries ("St Nicephorus, abbot, 813, of Mount Athos") in careless day-lists. The two are separated by four and a half centuries, by Bithynia and Athos, and by the whole hesychast question. Distinguish also Nicephorus of Constantinople the patriarch (†828), and the Nikephoros who is one of the five Alfanov brothers of Novgorod, likewise commemorated on May 4.