Director of the Rizareios Ecclesiastical School (1894–1908)

In 1894 Nektarios Kephalas was appointed Director of the Rizareios Ecclesiastical School in Athens, the premier seminary of the Church of Greece, a post he would hold for fourteen years until his retirement on 24 March 1908. This file traces his pedagogy, his personal humility — above all the celebrated account of the absent janitor — the love of his students, and the way in which the Rizareios years produced most of his major theological writings and formed a generation of Greek Orthodox clergy.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

The Rizareios Ecclesiastical School

The Rizareios Ecclesiastical School (Rizareios Ekklēsiastikē Scholē) had been founded in 1844 through the bequest of the Zosimas brothers and the patronage of the Rizaris family, and by the time Nektarios arrived in 1894 it was the foremost institution in Greece for the formation of clergy and theologians (Sanidopoulos, John, A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50001.html). It occupied a prominent position in central Athens, admitted students intending the priesthood, and combined general secondary education with theological formation. To lead it was to shape, year by year, the men who would serve as parish priests, deacons, and eventually hierarchs across the Church of Greece.

The appointment was not the restoration of his episcopal see — Nektarios remained Metropolitan of Pentapolis in title, a dignity without territorial substance — but it was a post of real influence, and it removed him at last from the isolation of the provincial preaching years (see Return to Greece). He was forty-eight years old. He had been carrying the calumny from Alexandria for four years. He would spend the next fourteen years at the Rizareios, and those fourteen years would prove to be the most intellectually productive and, in their quiet way, the most influential of his life (Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life; Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia).

His Pedagogy: Piety and Learning Together

The principle that unified Nektarios’s approach to theological education was the refusal to separate intellectual formation from the formation of the heart. He regarded a seminary that produced learned but coldly professional clergy as a failure, and a piety that was warm but ignorant as a danger of a different kind (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com; Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, Saint Nektarios of Aegina, goarch.org). At the Rizareios he worked to hold both together: the rigorous study of theology, Scripture, patristics, and Church history alongside the practices of daily prayer, regular confession, and the cultivation of inner attention.

He taught several of the courses himself. His published theological writings — and the Rizareios years were the period during which he produced the great bulk of them — show the same combination: they are technically capable works, engaging with the problems of their day, yet they read at every point as the work of a man who has prayed what he writes (Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life; Matthaiakis, Titos, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, Athens, 1955). The corpus produced in these years includes his study of Orthodox worship, his theological investigations of the theotokia and the veneration of the Mother of God, his pastoral handbook, and texts that would circulate as devotional reading far beyond the walls of the seminary (see The Theological Corpus).

He also made the chapel the center of the school’s life rather than its ceremonial appendage. Daily services were not optional extras scheduled around the serious work of the curriculum; they were the curriculum’s foundation (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). Students later recalled that to watch the director serve the Liturgy or lead Vespers was itself a theological education: not a lesson about worship but an encounter with it.

The Love of His Students

The accounts of the Rizareios years from former students, collected and cited in the hagiographical literature, have a consistent texture. They speak of a man who knew them individually — their families, their struggles, their temptations — and who treated each one not as a prospective clergyman to be processed but as a person to be accompanied (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com; Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life). He was available to them in ways that the formal role of director did not require: outside classroom hours, in the evenings, in the chapel before and after the services.

His manner with them was gentle rather than imposing. He did not govern the school by authority of rank, though the rank was there; he governed it by the authority of a man who was plainly more serious about what he taught than any expedient reason — career, reputation, obligation — could fully account for (goarch.org; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). Students who arrived at the Rizareios as clever boys in search of an education sometimes found, in their contact with him, something they had not expected: a living example of the theology they were studying. The hagiographical tradition records that a number of them entered the priesthood with a seriousness of vocation that they traced directly to his influence, and that some pursued monastic life, which the normal trajectory of a Rizareios graduate did not demand (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com).

He was also, the sources record, without any trace of the director’s habitual distance. He used no honorifics unnecessarily, deflected personal praise, and was quicker to praise a student’s work than to correct it — saving the correction for the private conversation rather than the public occasion (Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas).

The Janitor: The Most Famous Account of His Humility

The episode that has become the most celebrated illustration of Nektarios’s personal humility at the Rizareios belongs to the category of attested hagiographical tradition: it is first recorded in the Lives closest to the events and is reported consistently across the sources, though it is not a bureaucratic fact of the kind that leaves an administrative trace (A Brief Life, Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; per METHODOLOGY §3.5, hagiographical accounts are pinned to their earliest written attestation rather than verified as historical events).

The account runs as follows. On a particular occasion, one of the school’s janitors or cleaners was ill and absent from his duties. Rather than allow the work to go undone, or assign it to a student, or instruct another member of staff to cover it, Nektarios quietly took up the man’s broom and cleaning implements himself and went about doing the work — scrubbing floors, cleaning the corridors, performing the menial tasks that the school’s director would, under any normal social calculus, have been the last person to touch. When students or staff encountered him at this work and recognized who it was, they were struck dumb. The detail that appears consistently in the tradition is that Nektarios did this not as a performed gesture — not in front of a gathered audience — but as a practical response to a practical situation, and that his motive, as he is reported to have said or indicated, was that he did not want the absent man to lose his day’s wages.

The episode crystallizes something the Rizareios years confirmed from many angles: that Nektarios’s humility was not a posture cultivated for public effect, but a disposition so thoroughly settled that it expressed itself in whatever the immediate moment required (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com; Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life). A Metropolitan doing the work of a janitor so that a poor man would not go without his pay is the emblem, in the hagiographical reading, of everything the Rizareios years were about.

His Personal Ascesis During the School Years

While directing the Rizareios, Nektarios maintained a personal rule of life that those close to him recognized as austere, though he took care not to impose it on others or make it visible (Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). He slept little, rose early for prayer, kept the fasts strictly, and ate simply. His cell — he lived at the school rather than in separate lodgings — was noted for its poverty of furnishings (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com). He had no interest in accumulating money; what came to him he gave away with consistency that those around him had learned to expect.

His practice of the Jesus Prayer — the hesychast tradition of unceasing interior prayer — was a stable feature of his life during these years, as it had been since his formation in Egypt and continued to his death (goarch.org; Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life). There is in the student accounts a repeated note that one of the differences between him and other figures of authority they had known was that he seemed to be doing something inwardly, something quiet and continuous, that the ordinary business of the school — meetings, lessons, administrative decisions — ran alongside without interrupting. They had, most of them, no name for what they were observing; some of them found the name later, when they understood what hesychast prayer was.

The Writings Produced at the Rizareios

The fourteen years from 1894 to 1908 were the period of Nektarios’s most sustained theological production (Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). The access to the school library, the intellectual community of teachers and advanced students, and the comparative stability — difficult as the underlying situation remained, with the calumny still unresolved — created the conditions for sustained writing in a way the preaching years in Euboea and the provinces had not.

Among the works produced or completed during this period were his major study of the Mother of God and the theological basis for her veneration (Theotokos), his examination of Orthodox ecclesiology and the primacy question, his treatise on the immortality of the soul, a substantial treatment of the Psalms, and the pastoral and devotional texts that would circulate most widely during his lifetime and after his glorification (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com; Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). He also composed hymnographical texts — troparia, canons, akathist hymns — that entered liturgical use in the Greek Church, a contribution that places him not only in the tradition of the theologian but of the hymnographer (Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life). The full account of these works belongs to the next section (see The Theological Corpus).

Retirement: 24 March 1908

Nektarios left the Rizareios on 24 March 1908 [Disputed: Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life, gives this specific date; Nectarios of Aegina, Wikipedia, gives 1908 without specifying the day; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, gives 1908 consistently but does not fix the day]. He was sixty-two years old. The circumstances of his retirement are not entirely transparent in the sources: what is clear is that it was not a voluntary withdrawal at a time of his own choosing, but rather that pressure from within the institutional Church of Greece — whether from the Holy Synod, from individuals who had never been comfortable with his presence in the capital, or from some combination — played a role in ending his tenure (Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). The calumny, never formally cleared, had never entirely lost its power to obstruct.

His departure from the Rizareios was therefore a fresh iteration of the pattern that had run through his life since 1890: the institutional Church moving him aside, and Nektarios receiving the removal in silence. He departed, as he had arrived, without a public complaint. What followed — the founding of the convent on Aegina, the final ascetic years, the miracles, and the death in 1920 — is the last and in many ways the most luminous chapter of his life (see Founding Holy Trinity; The Hidden Ascetic).

The Rizareios students whom he had formed did not forget him. The testimony that gathered after his glorification in 1961 drew on memories from men who had been his students decades earlier, and those memories had not faded: the director who cleaned floors, who prayed as if his life depended on it, who knew each student’s name and situation, and who had — they said, in retrospect — the look of a man already somewhere else (Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life; Saint Nektarios, OrthoChristian.com).

References

Sanidopoulos, John. A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios. johnsanidopoulos.com (Mystagogy Resource Center). (Appointment to the Rizareios 1894; fourteen years of service; the janitor account; writings produced; retirement 1908; student recollections.)
Saint Nektarios of Aegina. OrthoChristian.com (orthochristian.com/50001.html). (The Rizareios as premier Greek seminary; Nektarios’s pedagogy combining piety and learning; chapel as center of school life; the janitor account; personal poverty and ascesis; the departing in silence in 1908.)
Nectarios of Aegina. Wikipedia. (Rizareios appointment 1894; retirement 1908; overview of writings; cross-checked against Sanidopoulos and OrthoChristian for dates and titles.)
Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America. Saint Nektarios of Aegina. goarch.org. (The authority of personal example over formal rank; the Jesus Prayer during the school years; the climate of the Rizareios under his direction.)
Matthaiakis, Titos. Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas [The Venerable Nektarios Kephalas]. Athens, 1955. (Greek-language monograph; closest chronological account; the janitor story in its fullest form; the writings of the Rizareios period; the circumstances of the 1908 retirement.)