The Second Slander and the Prosecutor’s Reversal

Late in his years at the Holy Trinity convent on Aegina, Nektarios Kephalas was struck by a second major campaign of slander — this time centering on his relationships with the women of the monastic community he had founded and fathered. The account preserved in the Aegina convent tradition and recorded in OrthoChristian.com sources names the accuser as a widow candle-seller called Lazara, whose daughter Maria had entered the monastery’s spiritual orbit; the judge who came to Aegina to investigate treated the saint with open contempt; the gynecological examination of Maria established her chastity and destroyed the charge; and the judge, shortly after, fell gravely ill, came to understand his affliction as a consequence of his treatment of a holy man, and sought to return to Aegina to beg Nektarios’ forgiveness. The episode is the second movement of a theme that had begun in Egypt in 1890: the cross of calumny that the Orthodox tradition regards as one of the defining marks of Nektarios’ path to sanctity.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (canonized 1961)

The Pattern Resumed

The second slander is recognizable as the recurrence of a structural pattern. In 1890, in Egypt, Nektarios had been expelled from the Patriarchate of Alexandria on the basis of whispered accusations — never formally charged, never adjudicated, never substantiated — that had destroyed his career and sent him into decades of institutional obscurity (see The Calumny and Expulsion). He bore that first wave of slander in silence, never publicly defending himself, maintaining a reverence toward the institution that had wronged him that those around him found almost incomprehensible (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/164878.html; Titos Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas, Athens, 1955).

The second slander was directed not at his episcopal ambitions but at his moral conduct — it was recognizably the same cross (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, John Sanidopoulos, johnsanidopoulos.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50001.html). A man who has founded a women’s monastery and lives in close pastoral proximity to young nuns is, in the logic of malice, a standing target; the accusations required only the attachment of a slanderous meaning to the ordinary work of a confessor and abbot.

The Account Preserved by the Convent Tradition

The account of the second slander is attested by the Aegina convent tradition and recorded in OrthoChristian.com sources (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/98838.html; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/164878.html). It proceeds as follows.

A widow who sold candles — identified in the sources by the name Lazara — had a daughter, Maria, who had come under the spiritual guidance of Nektarios and taken refuge in the monastery’s community or its circle (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com). The mother, Lazara, became convinced — or chose to claim — that her daughter’s relationship with the saint was improper. She went to the court in Piraeus and brought an accusation against Nektarios of promiscuity, charging that he was engaged in immoral relations with the young women of the convent (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com; “Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com).

[Disputed: The precise date of this episode is not established in the sources consulted. The OrthoChristian.com accounts place it in the period of Nektarios’ years at the convent — after his permanent move to Aegina in 1908 and before his death in 1920 — but do not assign a specific year. Secondary sources variously suggest the 1910s as the probable period without further precision (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas; Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life). The absence of a dated court record in the hagiographical literature means this episode cannot be pinned to a specific year.]

The Magistrate’s Arrival on Aegina

The court at Piraeus took the accusation seriously enough to dispatch an examining magistrate — or, in some renderings of the account, a judge — to investigate (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com). He arrived at the island accompanied by two police officers. The sources are specific about the manner in which he conducted himself on arrival: he was hostile, contemptuous, and — by any ordinary standard of legal conduct — inappropriate in his treatment of a bishop of the Church.

The convent tradition records that the magistrate did not merely question Nektarios formally; he confronted him with open anger and even with a physical threat — the accounts specify that he threatened to tear out the saint’s beard, the act that, in the culture of that period, would have constituted a deliberate and grievous public humiliation of a clergyman (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com). [Disputed: The precise title of this official — whether examining magistrate, investigative judge, or prosecutor — is rendered differently in different versions of the account. OrthoChristian.com uses language consistent with an examining judge or investigative magistrate. The Greek legal terminology underlying the hagiographical accounts has not been independently verified in a primary legal record.]

Nektarios, as the sources record his response, did not react to the confrontation with anger or protest. He received the magistrate’s hostility with the same silence and composure that had characterized his response to all the persecutions of his life. The convent tradition notes that the sisters who witnessed or were aware of the encounter were distressed; the saint himself appears to have been undisturbed in any outwardly visible way (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas).

Maria: The Examination and Its Outcome

The investigation required that the accused’s conduct be tested. The daughter Maria was summoned as the principal figure in the accusation — the young woman whom her mother Lazara claimed had been the victim of the saint’s immorality (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com). She was subjected to a gynecological examination — a procedure whose purpose was to establish, by physical evidence, whether she was or was not a virgin (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com).

The examination established her chastity — she was found to be a virgin — and thereby demolished the factual basis of her mother’s accusation (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com). The charge of sexual impropriety against Nektarios required, as its necessary condition, that Maria have been the victim of such conduct; the medical finding that she had not been was not a circumstantial rebuttal but a direct disproof.

The humiliation implicit in this episode is not to be minimized. A young woman who had sought a monastery for prayer and formation was subjected, through her own mother’s accusation and a contemptuous magistrate’s authority, to an intimate and degrading examination. The tradition records this without embarrassment because the outcome — her vindication, and through it the saint’s — was what followed. But the cost was real, and it was borne by Maria (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas).

The Magistrate’s Illness and Reversal

What followed the examination is the element of the account that the tradition preserves with particular emphasis, and that carries the episode beyond the register of legal vindication into the register of divine providence.

After his return from Aegina, the magistrate fell gravely ill (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com). The sources do not specify the nature of the illness, but they record its severity and, more importantly, its spiritual interpretation: the magistrate himself came to understand his affliction as a consequence of his treatment of Nektarios — that he had persecuted a holy man, and that his illness was connected to that act (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com).

The recognition produced repentance. The magistrate asked to be taken back to Aegina — back to the island and the man he had threatened with physical humiliation — in order to beg Nektarios’ forgiveness (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com). The account as preserved in the convent tradition does not elaborate the details of this return — whether he recovered his health, whether Nektarios explicitly forgave him, what words if any passed between them — but the structural point is clear: the man who came to Aegina the first time with two policemen and a threat returned a second time as a penitent.

This reversal — the judge who becomes the suppliant — is the narrative climax of the episode in the tradition’s telling. It is not presented as a private curiosity but as a legible sign: the holiness of Nektarios, which the court at Piraeus had treated as a subject for investigation, was confirmed by the very event the investigation had set in motion (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas).

The Accuser Lazara: What the Sources Say

The sources name Lazara — the widow candle-seller — as the initiating agent, and the tradition does not soften this (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com). She brought the complaint; the complaint is described as false. Beyond this, the sources do not elaborate on her motivations, her subsequent conduct, or her fate after the accusation collapsed (Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas).

[Disputed: The specific motivation attributed to Lazara in the sources — why she brought the accusation — is not developed in detail. Some versions of the account suggest maternal possessiveness or resentment at her daughter’s embrace of monastic life and attachment to Nektarios as a spiritual father; others offer no psychological explanation. The sources name her and name her action; they do not explain it.]

The Cross of Calumny: Twice Borne

The Orthodox tradition reads the second slander not as an isolated misfortune but as the completion of a pattern that gives the whole arc of Nektarios’ life its characteristic shape. He bore the cross of calumny twice: once in Egypt, where the slander cost him his ecclesiastical career; once on Aegina, where it brought a court to his door and a magistrate to threaten him on the island he had chosen for prayer and poverty (St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com; Saint Nektarios of Aegina, OrthoChristian.com).

The two episodes share their structural logic: the accusation was false; Nektarios did not publicly defend himself; vindication came, but not on the timetables worldly justice would have prescribed. The Egyptian vindication came in 1998, seventy-eight years after his death. The Aegina vindication came through the examination of Maria — the immediate factual refutation — and through the magistrate’s illness and repentance, which the tradition reads as its providential confirmation (A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios, Sanidopoulos; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas).

What the tradition finds most instructive in the second slander is not the vindication but the response — the consistent absence of self-defense. Persecuted once in Egypt, and now again in the place he had built with his own hands, he might reasonably have cried out. He did not. The silence that had characterized his bearing of the first great injustice characterized his bearing of the second (see Bearing It in Silence; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com). The tradition sees in this consistency not passivity but virtue of the most demanding kind: the virtue of a man who had learned, through suffering, that vindication is not his business.

The Convent Tradition as Source

A note on evidential status is required (METHODOLOGY.md §3.5). The episode — the names Lazara and Maria, the magistrate’s arrival with two policemen, the threat against the saint’s beard, the gynecological examination, the illness, and the return — is reported as what the Aegina convent tradition attests, recorded in hagiographical sources (“Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com; St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement, OrthoChristian.com; Matthaiakis, Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). No court record from Piraeus and no contemporaneous newspaper account have been located. The account is reported here because it is well-attested in the primary hagiographical tradition and because named individuals and specific details give it a texture that distinguishes it from later legendary accretion — but it is reported as the tradition’s account, not as a narrative verifiable independently of that tradition.

The Second Slander’s Place in the Hagiography

The episode has held a secure place in Nektarios hagiography since at least Matthaiakis’ biography of 1955, which drew directly on the memories of the Aegina community (Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas). The named figures — Lazara, Maria, the unnamed magistrate — have not been contradicted by any counter-tradition in the literature consulted; the details have remained stable across the sources that carry them (Holy Trinity Monastery of Aegina, agiosnektarios-monastery.gr; “Do you want to see an angel?”, OrthoChristian.com).

What the tradition preserves is a story that reverses the usual logic of accusation and investigation: the investigating authority arrived to discover guilt and departed to seek forgiveness; the accused offered pardon without requiring it to be asked for. This reversal — credible only in the context of a life whose whole logic was the inversion of worldly self-assertion — is why the second slander remains one of the most frequently cited episodes in popular devotion to St. Nektarios (Sanidopoulos, A Brief Life).

References

“Do you want to see an angel?” OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/98838.html. The primary OrthoChristian.com source for the detailed account of the second slander: the names Lazara and Maria, the magistrate’s arrival with two police, the threat, the gynecological examination, the magistrate’s illness, and his return seeking forgiveness.
St. Nektarios Of Aegina, Who Endured Slander and Revilement. OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/164878.html. A focused account of the pattern of slander across Nektarios’ life; used for the characterization of the second episode as the recurrence of the Egyptian pattern, and the saint’s response.
Matthaiakis, Titos (Archimandrite). Ho Hosios Nektarios Kephalas [The Blessed Nektarios Kephalas]. Athens, 1955. The standard modern Greek biography, drawing on Aegina convent tradition and early witnesses; the foundational narrative source for the episode.
Sanidopoulos, John. A Brief Life of Saint Nektarios. johnsanidopoulos.com (Mystagogy Resource Center). Used for the characterization of the second slander in the context of Nektarios’ life.
Saint Nektarios of Aegina. OrthoChristian.com, orthochristian.com/50001.html. Narrative Life; used for contextual material on the convent period and the ongoing pattern of calumny.
Holy Trinity Monastery of Aegina. agiosnektarios-monastery.gr. The convent’s own historical account; the origin point of the tradition from which the episode is drawn.
Nectarios of Aegina. Wikipedia (used to cross-check the convent period chronology; the second slander episode is noted without the specific detail supplied by the OrthoChristian.com accounts).