Bearing It in Silence

Expelled from Egypt in 1890 under fabricated charges he never answered, Nektarios Kephalas spent the remainder of his life in a silence about the injustice done to him that his contemporaries found almost incomprehensible — never speaking against Patriarch Sophronios IV, never seeking retaliatory recourse, continuing to reverence the institution that had expelled him, and teaching from that same wound a doctrine of patience under slander that drew on Christ’s own silence before His accusers. This is the saint’s defining virtue, more characteristic of him than his miracles.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

The Choice Made in Egypt

The silence began in Egypt, in the weeks between the first notification of 3 May 1890 and his departure from the country in the summer of that year. At every point in those weeks, Nektarios possessed means of response that a bishop of his standing could reasonably have employed. He could have written formally to the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. He could have circulated a written defense to the Greek community — which, as the farewell letter of 29 July 1890 would demonstrate, was already almost entirely on his side. He could have demanded from Sophronios IV a specification of the charges, compelling the accusers to put their whispers into documentary form where they could be examined and refuted (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, John Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/164878.html).

He did none of these things. The choice not to defend himself was not a product of helplessness or shock; it was, the tradition records, a considered spiritual response — the deliberate adoption of silence as a form of witness (Titos Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, Athens, 1955; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50001.html). It was the first expression, in the great crisis of his life, of a conviction about slander that he would hold and teach for the thirty years remaining to him: that the man unjustly accused who answers with patience rather than retaliation is not passive but active, not defeated but engaged in a spiritual warfare that runs deeper than any institutional controversy.

The Silence That Followed Him to Athens

When he arrived in Athens in 1890, Nektarios was a Metropolitan without a position. The Patriarch’s ambiguous letter — the “wolf ticket” that managed to neither condemn nor recommend — and the rumors of improper conduct that had reportedly circulated before him meant that no bishop of the Church of Greece was prepared to receive him or offer him a post (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, Sanidopoulos; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). He spent his first years in Athens in real poverty: a metropolitan who could not always pay his lodgings, who moved between borrowed rooms, who in at least one period could not afford adequate food (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com).

[Disputed: The severity and specific circumstances of his poverty in Athens are described with varying degrees of detail across the sources. Matthaiakis (Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas) and the OrthoChristian.com accounts attest to genuine material hardship and institutional rejection; some later hagiographical accounts add specific details (exact amounts unpaid, particular benefactors) that are not uniformly attested across the major sources. The central fact — that he was in poverty and without a position because of the vague letter from Alexandria — is consistently reported. Individual anecdotes about specific incidents of destitution should be received as hagiographical tradition attested by the Aegina community sources rather than independently documented historical record.]

Throughout this period, across years in which the justice of his situation was self-evident to him and to the people who encountered him, he did not speak against Sophronios IV. He did not seek redress through the ecclesiastical courts. He did not write a memoir of his expulsion or circulate an account of the injustice. Those who knew him in Athens during these years and later — many of whom wrote down what they remembered — noted the complete absence from his conversation and his letters of any bitterness toward the Patriarch or the accusers, any complaint about the injustice done to him (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). The wound was kept in silence not because he had forgotten it or could not feel it, but because he had made a theological decision about it.

The Reversal That Never Happened in His Lifetime

Nektarios died in a hospital in Piraeus on 8 November 1920, thirty years after his expulsion from Egypt, without ever having received a formal acknowledgment from the Patriarchate of Alexandria that he had been wronged (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia). Sophronios IV had died without retracting the expulsion. No written apology had reached him. The institution whose servant he had been, and whose dignity he had continued to reverence throughout three decades of its neglect of him, had still not said — in any recoverable documentary form — that it knew what had been done to him was wrong.

The formal admission came in 1998 (Decision of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria, Patriarch Petros VII, 15 September 1998, orthodoxphotos.com/readings/nektarios/decision.shtml) — seventy-eight years after his death and thirty-seven years after his glorification. He bore the injustice unreversed to the end, and that is precisely the form in which the tradition has received and transmitted it: not as a wound eventually healed in his lifetime, but as a cross carried to the end without the relief of earthly vindication.

His Teaching on Slander and Patience

The spiritual substance of Nektarios’ silence was not mere temperamental composure. He taught explicitly on slander, on patience, and on the proper disposition of the soul toward those who wrong it — and his teaching, drawn from the patristic tradition he knew and from the experience through which he lived it, is preserved in his letters and pastoral writings (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com).

His consistent counsel was that slander should be received as a gift rather than an injury: not because the injury is unreal, but because the soul that learns to receive unjust suffering without retaliation is being shaped toward the likeness of Christ in a way that no comfortable ease can accomplish. He taught that the man who trusts his vindication to God rather than to his own defense is not passive but has entrusted himself to the only court whose verdict is final and irreversible. In his letters to correspondents facing similar situations — clergy unjustly spoken against, laypeople slandered by enemies — he returned repeatedly to the injunction to pray for the slanderer and to seek no redress except from God (paraphrase of the pastoral teaching as attested in Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, and reported in St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com; the letter texts themselves are cited as “the letters of St. Nektarios” in these sources without exhaustive enumeration of recipients).

The counsel was not abstract. Every person to whom he gave it knew, or later came to know, that he was giving it from inside the experience — that the metropolitan who told them to be patient under slander had himself been slandered out of his office and his country and had chosen, for thirty years, exactly the patience he recommended to them.

Continued Reverence for the Patriarch and the Institution

Perhaps the most striking specific element of Nektarios’ bearing of the injustice is that his reverence for Patriarch Sophronios IV and for the Patriarchate of Alexandria as an institution appears to have remained intact (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, Sanidopoulos; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). The sources do not preserve records of him speaking ill of Sophronios, of blaming him by name in any recovered letter or conversation, or of using the Patriarch’s failure as evidence against the authority of the Church or the legitimacy of the Alexandrian Patriarchate.

This is theologically significant. The Orthodox tradition distinguishes sharply between the office and the person — between the Church as the Body of Christ, whose authority is not negated by the failures of any particular bishop, and the specific man who at a given moment holds episcopal authority and may misuse it. Nektarios held this distinction in practice, not merely in theory: he could bow before the institution that had expelled him because what he bowed before was not Sophronios IV but the episcopate itself, the apostolic succession, the sacramental authority that no individual bishop’s sin could extinguish (see Orthodoxy: Spiritual Direction on the Orthodox understanding of obedience to ecclesiastical authority; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas).

Those around him in Athens and later in Aegina testified that when the subject of his expulsion arose — brought up by others, never by him — he deflected it, neither confirming nor elaborating the story of the injustice, and turning the conversation to other subjects (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). The silence was active and maintained; it was not the silence of someone who had forgotten or put the matter behind him, but the silence of someone who had made a permanent decision about it.

The Christological Pattern

The tradition has consistently read Nektarios’ silence in the light of the silence of Christ before Pilate and the chief priests — the refusal of self-defense that Isaiah had prophesied (“He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter”, Is. 53:7, LXX) and that the Gospels record (Mt. 27:12–14; Mk. 14:60–61; Lk. 23:9; Jn. 19:9–10). This is not a devotional embellishment imposed on the story from outside; it is the interpretive framework the tradition explicitly applies to the pattern of Nektarios’ bearing of the expulsion (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com).

The parallel holds at a structural level, not merely an inspirational one. Christ was accused before the highest religious authority of his people by informers whose charges were, in the event, not legally demonstrable (the need for two witnesses, the contradiction of the witnesses against each other at the Sanhedrin trial: Mk. 14:56–59). Nektarios was accused before the highest authority of his ecclesiastical jurisdiction by clergy whose charges were, in the event, never put into recoverable documentary form. Christ did not produce a defense. Nektarios did not produce a defense. In both cases the silence is not weakness but the expression of a trust in divine vindication that overrides the logic of institutional self-preservation.

The tradition is careful not to collapse the analogy — Nektarios was a sinner seeking sanctification, not the incarnate Word — but it maintains the typological relationship: in bearing unjust suffering with silence and without retaliation, the saint participates in a pattern that is ultimately Christ’s own, and his virtue is not merely admirable human patience but a form of union with the Lord who “when they hurled their insults at him, he did not retaliate; when he suffered, he made no threats” (1 Pet. 2:23, cited in St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com).

The Poverty as Spiritual Formation

The destitution of the early Athens years, severe as it was, operated in this theological framework as a continuation of the same cross rather than a merely incidental hardship. A bishop in good standing, with a functioning recommendation letter, would have received a position, an income, a community — and with them, comfort, dignity, and the ordinary satisfactions of useful work. What Nektarios received instead was the stripping away of all of these: rank without function, orders without a see, episcopal dignity without any of the social support normally attached to it (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, Sanidopoulos; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com).

The tradition reads this stripping as the preparation for what came next: not the reversal of the injustice but the deepening of the saint. The years of poverty in Athens — eventually relieved by the appointment as a preacher and then as director of the Rizareios Ecclesiastical School — were the years in which Nektarios, with no institutional position to protect, wrote prolifically, taught faithfully, and formed the pastoral and theological manner that would eventually draw the Aegina nuns to him and through them build the convent that became his final home (Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; see Return to Greece).

“He Did Not Retaliate”

The biographical tradition is precise on one particular: that no word against his enemies was ever heard from Nektarios, not in private correspondence, not in conversation with the Aegina nuns who were closest to him in his final years, not in any public sermon or teaching (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life). This precision matters because silence in a public figure — a preacher, a school director, an author, a spiritual father to a community of nuns — is a form of public act. To spend thirty years in institutional life and never in that time speak against the men who destroyed your career and poisoned your reputation requires a discipline of the tongue and the heart that the tradition rightly calls heroic.

Those who have written about him have struggled to characterize this precisely because it falls outside the ordinary registers of human behavior in such situations. It is not forgetting, not indifference, not the peace of someone who never felt the injury. It is the bearing, daily renewed, of a wound that did not close — in a silence chosen not because there was nothing to say but because everything had been entrusted, instead of being said, to the God of the wronged.

The Vindication He Did Not See

The 1998 decision of the Patriarchate of Alexandria (Patriarch Petros VII, Decision of the Holy Synod, 15 September 1998, orthodoxphotos.com/readings/nektarios/decision.shtml) is the institutional close of the case that was never formally opened in 1890. It is the Patriarchate asking forgiveness from a canonized saint — which is to say, it is an institution speaking to the One who judges it, acknowledging that His servant was unjustly used.

The silence of Nektarios before his earthly judges has given way, in the logic of the tradition, to an intercession before the heavenly court that is more powerful than any defense he could have mounted in Cairo or Athens or before any synod in his lifetime. The man who did not defend himself was vindicated in 1961 by the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s act of glorification, and in 1998 by the act of repentance of the Patriarchate that expelled him. His silence was not defeat; it was the beginning of a victory he was not alive to witness but which those who loved him, and the institution that had wronged him, eventually had to acknowledge.

This is the shape of the bearing of the cross in the Orthodox tradition: not resolution in this life, not institutional justice in the accuser’s lifetime, not the satisfactions of public vindication — but the long patience that trusts God with what belongs to God, and is rewarded, in the end, with what no earthly court could have given.

References

Matthaiakis, Titos (Archimandrite). Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas [The Blessed Nektarios Kephalas]. Athens, 1955. The standard modern Greek biography; the primary narrative source for the character of the silence, the poverty in Athens, the absence of bitterness in his speech, and the testimony of those who knew him.
Sanidopoulos, John. A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios. johnsanidopoulos.com (Mystagogy Resource Center). Used for the characterization of the silence and the institutional marginality on his return to Greece.
Saint Nektarios of Aegina. OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50001.html. Used for the poverty of the Athens years, the eventual appointments, and the framing of the silence as a sustained spiritual posture.
St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement. OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/164878.html. The principal source for the characterization of the non-retaliation, the continued reverence toward Sophronios IV, the Christological interpretation of the silence, and the testimony of those around him who never heard a word of complaint against his accusers.
Decision of the Holy Synod of the Patriarchate of Alexandria [on the restoration of the ecclesiastical order of St. Nektarios]. Issued 15 September 1998 under Patriarch Petros VII. Text at orthodoxphotos.com/readings/nektarios/decision.shtml. The documentary close of the 1890 injustice and the formal request for forgiveness.
Nectarios of Aegina. Wikipedia (used to locate and cross-check dates; chronology verified against the above sources).
Isaiah 53:7 (LXX); Matthew 27:12–14; Mark 14:56–61; Luke 23:9; John 19:9–10; 1 Peter 2:23 — the Scriptural framework within which the tradition reads the silence.