The Cult East and West

St. Nicholas is among the most universally venerated saints in the whole history of Christianity — honored in the Greek and Slavic East and the Latin West alike, the patron of nations, cities, and peoples, the dedicatee of thousands of churches, and after the Theotokos perhaps the most popular non-biblical saint of the medieval Christian world. This file traces the astonishing reach of his cult: its early establishment in the East, its explosion in the West after the translation to Bari, the patronages that attached to him, and Bari as a shared pilgrimage of a divided Christendom.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Wonderworker; Great Hierarch)

The Universality of the Cult

The single most remarkable fact about the veneration of St. Nicholas is its sheer universality. Few saints are honored across so many peoples, churches, and centuries; among non-biblical saints he is rivaled in popularity, in the undivided Church and after, perhaps only by a handful of the very greatest (Jones 1978; English 2012). He is venerated by the Greek, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Georgian, and other Orthodox Churches; by the Latin Catholic Church; and his memory persists even in Protestant lands where the cult of saints was otherwise suppressed, surviving in folk custom and ultimately in the secular Santa Claus (see The Making of Santa Claus). The number of churches dedicated to him runs to the thousands across Europe and beyond, and his image is among the most frequently encountered in all of Christian art. This breadth is itself, as the methodology insists, the firmest historical fact about him: the cult is older, larger, and better attested than any episode of the life (see Reading the Nicholas Tradition).

The Early Eastern Cult

The cult began, naturally, in the East and in Lycia. The shrine at Myra was a place of pilgrimage from early times, and the existence of a church of Saint Nicholas at Constantinople under Justinian (r. 527–565) shows the veneration already established at the imperial capital by the sixth century (Procopius, Buildings 1.6.5; see The Historical Core). Through the Byzantine centuries the cult grew steadily: Nicholas became one of the most beloved of the hierarch-saints, his Life standardized by the Metaphrast and read across the empire (see The Vita Tradition), his image fixed in the iconographic canon, his feast a major day of the calendar. The maritime peoples of the Mediterranean — Greeks above all — made him their patron at sea, and his protection was invoked from one end of the Byzantine world to the other.

When the faith spread to the Slavs, Nicholas went with it and took deep root. In Russia especially his veneration grew to extraordinary proportions — so great that he came to be regarded almost as a national patron, “the Russian God” in a popular saying, his icon present in countless homes and churches, his name among the most commonly given (Jones 1978; see Feast, Iconography, and Patronage). The depth of the Russian devotion to Nicholas is one of the striking features of Slavic Orthodox piety and a major channel of his cult into the modern world.

In Russian popular usage the saint is known with an affectionate familiarity by the form “Nikola,” and the place he occupies in the devotional landscape is unusual even by the standards of a much-venerated saint. He stands, in the common piety, almost beside the Theotokos as a protector close at hand — invoked in the ordinary troubles of life, his icon set in the corner of the home, his feast among the warmest of the year. The saying that made him “the Russian God” should not be read as a literal theology but as a measure of devotional intimacy: of all the saints he was felt to be the people’s own, the merciful helper nearest to the peasant and the traveler (Jones 1978). The two feasts of December and May, marked in the agricultural calendar as the winter and spring Nicholas, wove his name into the very rhythm of the year (see Feast, Iconography, and Patronage).

The Western Explosion After Bari

In the West a cult of Nicholas existed before 1087 — carried by trade, by pilgrims, and by the general traffic of relics and stories between East and West — but it was the translation of the relics to Bari in 1087 that transformed it (see The Translation to Bari (1087)). With the saint’s body now resting in southern Italy and a great pilgrimage basilica rising over it, the Western veneration exploded. Bari became one of the major pilgrimage destinations of Latin Christendom; the feast and the translation entered the Western calendar; and from Italy the cult radiated north and west across Europe (Jones 1978; English 2012).

The medieval West elaborated the legend in its own literature — the Nicholas stories entered the great compilations, above all the thirteenth-century Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, which carried the dowry, the generals, the sea-rescues, and a vivid Western tale of three murdered schoolboys restored to life, to a wide readership (Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend; Jones 1978). Nicholas became a patron of schoolchildren and scholars in the West, of merchants and pawnbrokers (the three bags of gold becoming the pawnbroker’s emblem), of sailors and many trades, and the dedicatee of cathedrals and parish churches without number.

The Western tale of the three murdered schoolboys deserves particular notice, for it is a purely Western growth with no warrant in the Greek dossier and yet became one of the most popular Nicholas stories of the medieval West. In the version that circulated through the Golden Legend and the liturgical drama, three boys (or young scholars) lodging at an inn are killed and dismembered by a wicked innkeeper, their bodies hidden in a salting-tub; Nicholas, passing by, discovers the crime and by his prayer restores the children whole to life (Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend; Jones 1978). This legend, unknown to the earliest tradition, fastened the saint to the patronage of children and schoolboys in the West and fed directly into the later association of Nicholas with gifts for the young — the channel that would, by a long route, reach Santa Claus (see The Making of Santa Claus). It is a clear instance of how the medieval West did not merely receive the cult but added to it, generating new stories and patronages on the stock of the inherited saint. The custom of giving gifts to children on his feast — the seed of the modern Christmas gift-giving — took hold in this medieval Western cult and would later, in the Low Countries and then America, undergo its famous transformation (see The Making of Santa Claus).

The Patronages

Out of the deeds gathered in earlier sections grew a remarkable breadth of patronage, and listing it conveys the reach of the cult:

Sailors and all who travel by water, from the sea-miracles — among his oldest and most universal patronages, East and West (see Rescuer of the Condemned and Sailors).
The wrongly accused, prisoners, and the condemned, from the Praxis de stratelatis.
Children, from the gift-giving and from the Western tale of the restored schoolboys.
The poor, brides, and the unmarried, from the dowry of the three daughters (see The Three Daughters).
Merchants, pawnbrokers, and bankers, from the three bags of gold.
Whole nations and cities — Russia above all, and Greece, Serbia, and others; the cities of Bari and Myra; and many more.

This profusion is the cult’s reach made concrete: a saint invoked by sailors in storms, by prisoners awaiting judgment, by parents for their children, by the poor and the marrying, by merchants and travelers, across the whole Christian world.

The breadth of patronage is not a random accumulation but a direct outgrowth of the stock of deeds gathered in the tradition, each story generating its constituency. The reason the list is so long is that the Nicholas tradition is itself unusually rich in incident — the dowry, the generals, the sea-rescues, the schoolboys — and each narrated mercy attached to itself a class of the needy who claimed the saint as their own. A cult of this kind grows by a kind of devotional logic: where a saint is remembered for rescuing the condemned, the condemned will pray to him; where he is remembered for dowering the poor, the poor and the marrying will claim him; and the more numerous and vivid his remembered deeds, the wider the net of his patronage. Nicholas’s extraordinary range is thus the patronal expression of his hagiographic richness, and it explains why a single fourth-century bishop came to be invoked in so vast a variety of human straits (Jones 1978; English 2012).

Bari as a Shared Shrine

A final and poignant feature of the cult is that, almost uniquely, it spans the great division of Christendom. Nicholas was venerated universally in the undivided Church, and his cult continued, undiminished, in both East and West after the schism of 1054 (see The Pre-Schism Church). His relics rest in a Latin basilica, yet Orthodox pilgrims come to Bari in great numbers, and the shrine has become a meeting place of the two traditions; an Orthodox chapel and regular Orthodox worship have a place in the basilica, and the saint is honored there by Catholic and Orthodox together. In an age of division, Nicholas remains a saint held in common — a shared inheritance of a Christendom that agrees on little but agrees on him. That a forcible eleventh-century seizure should have produced, nine centuries on, a place of shared Orthodox-Catholic veneration is one of the quieter ironies of his history, and not the least of his wonders.

References

Jones, Charles W. Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. (The universality of the cult; the Western explosion after Bari; Russia; the patronages; the Golden Legend.)
English, Adam C. The Saint Who Would Be Santa Claus: The True Life and Trials of Nicholas of Myra. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2012. (The reach of the cult East and West; Bari as a shared shrine.)
Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend (Legenda Aurea). Trans. William Granger Ryan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. (The medieval Western Nicholas stories, including the three schoolboys.)
Procopius of Caesarea. Buildings 1.6. Trans. H. B. Dewing, Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940. (The early church of Saint Nicholas at Constantinople.)