Athens and Egypt (1876–1885)

The decade between Nektarios’s monastic tonsure at the New Monastery of Chios in 1876 and his theology degree from the University of Athens in 1885 was one of radical transitions: from schoolteacher to monk, from monk to deacon, from provincial island life to the great city of Athens, and ultimately to the Patriarchate of Alexandria. Two benefactors made the journey possible — the Chiote merchant John Choremis, who funded the secondary studies in Athens but died before they were complete, and Patriarch Sophronios IV of Alexandria, who took the young deacon under his protection and carried him into Egypt and into the theological mainstream of late nineteenth-century Greek Orthodoxy.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

The New Monastery of Chios and the Monastic Tonsure (7 November 1876)

The Nea Moni — the New Monastery — of Chios is one of the foundational monuments of Byzantine civilization: built in the eleventh century under imperial Macedonian patronage, it had survived the catastrophic Chian massacre of 1822 and continued to function as the island’s principal monastic house throughout the nineteenth century (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com). It was to this monastery that Anastasios Kephalas presented himself after some seven years as a schoolteacher at Lithion, and on 7 November 1876 he received the monastic tonsure there, taking the name Lazaros (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America life, goarch.org).

The choice of the name Lazaros — the friend of Christ whom the Lord raised from the dead at Bethany (John 11:1–44) — carried, in the monastic tradition, the resonance of resurrection: the monk at his tonsure dies to the world and rises to a new life in God. The thirty-year-old former schoolteacher was now Brother Lazaros. He was not, however, to remain at the Nea Moni in prolonged novitiate obscurity; the tonsure was followed in rapid succession by ordination, a name change, and departure — the trajectory of a man whose gifts had been recognized by those around him and who was being propelled, at a pace uncommon in monastic custom, toward active ministry.

Diaconal Ordination and the Name Nektarios

[Disputed: A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios (johnsanidopoulos.com) gives the diaconal ordination as 15 January 1877; Nectarios of Aegina (Wikipedia) records the same year; the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America (goarch.org) does not specify the month but concurs on 1877. No source located for this collection gives 1876 for the diaconate, though the tonsure itself is consistently 7 November 1876. All available sources agree the ordination occurred in early 1877, with January 15 the most specific attestation.]

On his ordination as deacon — most probably on 15 January 1877 — he received a new name: Nektarios (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com). The name Nektarios honors a fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, a near-contemporary of St. John Chrysostom, who presided over the Second Ecumenical Council of 381. The choice carried the weight of that Constantinopolitan and conciliar heritage, though at the moment of ordination none of those present could have foreseen that the newly-named deacon would one day be consecrated bishop and metropolitan himself. The new Deacon Nektarios was assigned to the Monastery of the Holy Fathers on Chios, whose elder, Pachomios, became his spiritual guide during this initial period of ordained life (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, Athens, 1955).

Elder Pachomios and the Chiote Formation

The relationship with Elder Pachomios at the Monastery of the Holy Fathers represents, in the structure of Nektarios’s spiritual formation, the role that Elder Leonid had played for Ambrose at Optina: the practitioner of the tradition who recognized what the new monk was and shaped it accordingly. Pachomios is not a well-documented figure — the surviving sources give us a name, a monastery, and the fact of the relationship, but not the detailed account of formation-through-obedience that the Optina Lives provide for their elders (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, 1955). What we know is that under Pachomios, the newly-tonsured monk and newly-ordained deacon continued and deepened the ascetical practices — fasting, prayer, spiritual reading — that had characterized his years as a schoolteacher. The monastic habit formalized what had already been present; the elder provided the human anchor and discernment that the tradition regards as indispensable for the early monastic life.

The months at the Monastery of the Holy Fathers were not prolonged. Nektarios’s gifts of mind and his evident theological seriousness had come to the attention of persons beyond the cloister. The island of Chios — prosperous, educated, well-connected to the wider Greek Orthodox world — was a place where an able young monk in deacon’s orders did not long pass unnoticed by the laity who supported the church.

John Choremis: The First Benefactor

The figure who stands at the threshold of Nektarios’s formal academic life is John Choremis, a wealthy Chiote layman of the merchant class — the same class that had long sustained Aegean Greek cultural life through its commercial networks (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com). Choremis recognized in the deacon a man who deserved, and urgently needed, the secondary theological education that would give his gifts a scholarly foundation, and he undertook to fund those studies. Under Choremis’s patronage Nektarios was able to travel to Athens and to enroll in the Rizarios Ecclesiastical School (Rizarios Scholē), the principal Greek Orthodox secondary theological institution of the period, which had been founded in 1844 to prepare men for the church (Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America life, goarch.org; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com).

The Rizarios school in Athens placed Nektarios at the center of a world far removed from the Chiote village schoolroom: it was the institution that produced the clergy and ecclesiastical officers of the modern Greek church, staffed by men current with developments in patristic scholarship and canon law. For the thirty-year-old former laborer and schoolteacher, now a deacon in his early thirties, the secondary studies represented an extraordinary opportunity — and they were made possible entirely by Choremis’s generosity.

The tragedy of this patronage is its abrupt termination. John Choremis died during the course of Nektarios’s studies, before their completion (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com). The loss was simultaneously personal — the death of a benefactor who had believed in him — and material: the funding on which the studies depended was cut off. For a man without family wealth or ecclesiastical preferment, this was potentially a catastrophic interruption. That it did not end his academic career was due to the intervention of a second benefactor of far greater institutional power than the first.

Patriarch Sophronios IV of Alexandria

Sophronios IV, Patriarch of Alexandria from 1870 to 1899, was among the most energetic occupants of that ancient throne in the modern era: an ecclesiastical statesman who worked to strengthen the Alexandrian patriarchate’s institutions and to cultivate educated Greek clergy for a flock spread across Egypt and North Africa (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com). Whether the patriarch first encountered the deacon in Athens or whether their connection was established through Chiote networks is not specified in the surviving sources; what is clear is that Sophronios IV took Nektarios under his protection, assumed the financial responsibility for his continuing studies, and eventually brought him to Egypt to serve the Alexandrian patriarchate (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, 1955).

The patriarchal patronage was not merely financial. Sophronios represented the institutional church at one of its most ancient and prestigious sees — the see of St. Mark the Evangelist, continuous from apostolic times — and his adoption of the young deacon from Chios gave Nektarios access to that world: to the Alexandrian tradition of Orthodox scholarship and to the practical life of a patriarchate that was ministering to Greek communities across the Ottoman and British-controlled territories of Egypt (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America life, goarch.org). The relationship shaped Nektarios’s sense of episcopal ministry — and also, as subsequent events would show, his vulnerability, since the patriarch who raised him would eventually be unable or unwilling to protect him from the calumnies that destroyed his Egyptian career.

The University of Athens: Theological Studies (c. 1881–1885)

Under the patronage of Sophronios IV, Nektarios was able to complete his secondary studies and proceed to the University of Athens, at which he enrolled in the theological faculty — the premier institution for Orthodox theological education in the Greek-speaking world (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America life, goarch.org). He graduated with his degree in theology in 1885 (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com). The decade between tonsure and degree — 1876 to 1885 — had taken him from a Chiote village classroom to the faculty of the national university, and the theological formation he received there would undergird all of the writing that occupied him for the rest of his life.

The University of Athens theological faculty of the 1880s was a place of genuine scholarly activity, engaged with the critical methods being developed in German Protestant and French Catholic biblical and patristic scholarship, and the Greek professors of the period were actively reading and responding to those developments. Nektarios’s subsequent theological output — which runs to studies of the Mother of God, the nature of the Church, Christian ethics, philosophical apologetics, and monastic spirituality — reflects the breadth of training one could receive there (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, 1955; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com). The man who graduated in 1885 was not a self-taught ascetic but a properly credentialed theologian, and the combination of that credential with the interior formation of the preceding thirty years produced something unusual in late nineteenth-century Orthodoxy: a bishop who was simultaneously a published scholar and a practitioner of unaffected holiness.

Departure for Egypt

His studies complete and his patron Sophronios IV awaiting him, Nektarios now turned toward Egypt — toward Alexandria, toward the Patriarchate, and toward the decade of ministry and suffering that is covered in the companion files of this collection (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com). The journey from a Thracian village to the Alexandrian patriarchate had taken almost forty years; it had passed through a tobacconist’s shop in Constantinople, a schoolroom on Chios, a monastic cell at the Nea Moni, secondary studies in Athens funded by a merchant who died, and university studies in Athens funded by a patriarch who awaited him on the other side of the Mediterranean. What awaited him in Egypt — rapid promotion to the episcopate, the calumnies of rivals, humiliation and expulsion — lay ahead. What he carried there was the formation described in this file and its predecessor: an ascetical life built in poverty and deepened in monasticism, and a theological education that matched it.

The combination of Choremis and Sophronios — the local merchant who saw potential in a deacon and the patriarch who recognized it as something larger — represents a pattern common in Orthodox ecclesiastical history: the gifted man from a poor family who reaches his vocation only through a chain of patrons, each of whom sees something the previous one could not fully provide. That Choremis’s death threatened to break the chain, and that Sophronios appeared to restore it, the tradition reads not as a fortunate coincidence but as Providence — the same Providence that had addressed a letter sent to Christ by a boy who could not afford a stamp (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, 1955; A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com).

References

A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios (1846–1920). John Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com. (Tonsure at Nea Moni 7 November 1876, name Lazaros; diaconal ordination 15 January 1877, name Nektarios; Elder Pachomios; John Choremis and his death during the studies; Patriarch Sophronios IV; University of Athens degree 1885.)
Saint Nektarios of Aegina. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/50001.html). (Nea Moni tonsure and ordination; the Rizarios school; patronage of Sophronios IV; Athens degree; departure for Egypt.)
Matthaiakis, Titos. Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas [The Holy Nektarios Kephalas]. Athens, 1955. The primary scholarly Greek-language biography; reference for the structure of the patronage relationships and the academic chronology.
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. Life of Saint Nektarios of Aegina. goarch.org. (Rizarios Ecclesiastical School; the role of the Alexandrian patriarchate in his formation.)
Nectarios of Aegina. Wikipedia. (Used to cross-check dates; tonsure and ordination chronology verified against OrthoChristian.com and johnsanidopoulos.com.)
Holy Trinity Monastery of Aegina. agiosnektarios-monastery.gr. (Site of the community he founded; supplementary hagiographical tradition on the early monastic and student years.)