Legacy and Assessment

The collection’s final weighing. St. Nicholas presents, more sharply than almost any other saint, the paradox of an immense and universal veneration resting on a very thin documentary record. This file draws the threads together and states, soberly and without either skepticism or sentimentality, what can be concluded — about Nicholas of Myra as a figure of history, about the legend that overgrew him, about the modern figure that replaced him, and above all about the saint as the living object of the Church’s devotion.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Wonderworker; Great Hierarch)

The Paradox Restated

Every section of this collection has circled one paradox, and it is time to name it plainly. St. Nicholas of Myra is one of the most universally venerated saints in the history of Christianity — honored across the entire Christian world for sixteen centuries, the dedicatee of thousands of churches, the patron of nations and trades, the root of the most famous secular figure of the modern calendar. And he is, at the same time, one of the least documented of all the great saints: no contemporary source names him, no writing of his survives, his earliest connected biography stands five centuries after his death, that biography is partly borrowed from another man’s life, and his single most famous deed — the slap of Arius — is a late legend his earliest Lives do not contain. The cult is vast; the record is nearly empty. Holding both of these truths at once, without collapsing either into the other, is the whole discipline of this collection, and the final assessment is the place to state what follows from it.

As History

As a matter of history, the sober conclusion is the one reached in the foundations and never since overturned (see The Historical Core). There was, with reasonable probability, a fourth-century bishop of Myra named Nicholas; a cult venerating him was established early, with a shrine at Myra and a church at Constantinople by the sixth century; and on the balance of the evidence he was a real person, not an invention. Beyond this, almost nothing can be affirmed as documented fact. His dates are reconstructions; his deeds are traditions pinned to late and sometimes borrowed sources; his presence at Nicaea is unestablished and the slap of Arius is legendary. The forensic study of the Bari relics yields a figure consistent with the tradition — an elderly man of roughly the right antiquity — and silent on everything beyond (see What the Relics Tell Us). This is a thin historical harvest, and the collection has reported it as thin, without padding it out with anecdotes treated as facts.

To say this is not skepticism for its own sake; it is the honesty the methodology requires, and it is the necessary ground for everything else. A veneration built on a frank acknowledgment of what is and is not known is sturdier than one built on legend mistaken for history.

The physical evidence deserves its place in this sober accounting, neither inflated nor dismissed. The relics at Bari, examined with the best science available, yield a figure consistent with the tradition and silent past it: an elderly man of roughly the right antiquity, whose face can be reconstructed and whose identity, deeds, and holiness lie wholly outside what anatomy and radiocarbon can reach (see What the Relics Tell Us). It is tempting to treat the bones as the hard fact that rescues the saint from the thinness of his archive, but they do no such thing; they carry the frame and not the content, confirming that an old fourth-century bishop is consistent with the venerated remains while leaving the name, the charity, and the sanctity to the cult alone. The relic, like the record, must be reported for exactly what it establishes and no more — which is the same discipline applied in a second medium (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

As Legend

As a body of legend, the Nicholas tradition is a remarkable and instructive thing — one of the richest hagiographic deposits in Christendom, grown over the better part of a millennium from a single early miracle-story into a full life and a vast cult. Read critically, as this collection has read it, the legend is not an embarrassment but a witness: it shows how the Church remembered and elaborated a saint, what virtues it found indispensable to his portrait (mercy and zeal, hidden charity and bold confession), and how a stable persona can persist across every layer even where no single anecdote can be verified (see Reading the Nicholas Tradition). The dowry, the generals, the storm, even the slap — each, properly dated and weighed, tells us something true about how Nicholas was loved and understood, if not about what he did on a given day. The legend is the cult’s memory, and the cult’s memory is itself a historical fact of the first importance.

There is a further lesson in the shape of the growth, beyond the content of any single story. The Nicholas dossier is a near-textbook case of how a hagiographic tradition accretes: a stable core persona — the merciful, bold bishop — persisting unchanged while around it new episodes gather, each answering a need of the venerating community, some migrating in from the life of another man, some generated freshly in the medieval West, some, like the slap of Arius, arising late and then becoming, by the force of devotion, among the most famous deeds of all (see Reading the Nicholas Tradition). To watch this process in Nicholas is to learn how to read it elsewhere, for the same dynamics operate, more or less visibly, in the dossiers of many saints. The very thinness of the documented core, which might seem a defect, is what makes the case so legible: with so little hard fact to anchor the tradition, the work of devotional memory stands out with unusual clarity, and the collection has tried to let it be seen for what it is rather than mistaken for a chronicle.

As the Object of Devotion

As the living object of the Church’s devotion — which is, in the end, what matters most — Nicholas stands secure, and the thinness of his record does not touch him. The repository’s flagship method, applied to Nicholas throughout, makes the point: when the Church glorifies and venerates a saint, it ratifies a cult — the testimony of the faithful that grace has worked through this person — and not a biography (see Reading the Nicholas Tradition; and the model in Blessed Xenia of Petersburg). By that measure Nicholas is among the most securely attested of all saints, for no veneration is older, broader, or more constant than his. The sixteen centuries of devotion, the shared shrine at Bari where Orthodox and Catholic venerate together, the icon in every Russian home, the sailor’s prayer in the storm and the prisoner’s prayer in the cell — these are the evidence the Church weighs, and they are overwhelming. The saint the Church venerates is the merciful, steadfast, wonderworking bishop of Myra (see The Saint the Church Venerates), and his holiness is ratified not by an archive but by the unbroken testimony of the faithful.

The Modern Afterlife

A final word on the figure that has, in much of the world, replaced him. Santa Claus is the great-grandchild of St. Nicholas — really descended from him, recognizably related, and yet a different being, emptied of the faith, the sacrifice, and the God that gave the saint’s charity its meaning (see The Making of Santa Claus). The Orthodox assessment of this afterlife is neither denunciation nor endorsement but discernment: the custom of generosity preserves a faint echo of a real charity, and an echo is better than silence; but the echo is not the saint, and for the Christian the saint is the thing. The task this collection has set itself — to recover the actual Nicholas from beneath both the late legend and the commercial figure — is in the end an act of devotion as much as of scholarship: to see the real saint clearly is to be able to venerate him truly.

The Final Assessment

It is worth naming, finally, what Nicholas contributes to the wider work of this repository, for his case is not merely one saint’s but a methodological touchstone. He is the demonstration, at the largest possible scale, of a principle the repository’s flagship treatment of Xenia states for a small and local cult: that the strength of a veneration and the thickness of a documentary record are independent variables, and that the first does not depend on the second (see Blessed Xenia of Petersburg). Xenia proves the principle at the margin, with a saint barely documented and locally venerated; Nicholas proves it at the center, with a saint barely documented and venerated by the whole Christian world. If the method can hold both — reporting the thin record honestly while recognizing the overwhelming cult as the true ground of veneration — then it can hold any case the repository will meet. Nicholas, precisely because his cult is so vast and his record so thin, is where the discipline is most needed and most fully vindicated.

What, then, is the conclusion? That St. Nicholas of Myra is a saint whose history is thin, whose legend is vast and instructive, whose modern afterlife is a distant and distorted echo, and whose veneration is among the most secure and universal in all of Christendom. The historian and the believer need not quarrel over him: the historian reports a near-certain bishop and an immense cult resting on a nearly empty record, and the believer venerates a wonderworker of God ratified by sixteen centuries of the Church’s love — and both are telling the truth. Nicholas is, in this, a model case for the whole repository: the saint who shows that the thinness of a record and the certainty of a cult are not in tension, and that to read a holy life honestly is not to diminish it but to recover it. The Church commemorates him on 6 December not as a bringer of gifts but as a great hierarch and wonderworker, a rule of faith and an image of meekness — and it is that Nicholas, recovered and clearly seen, whom this collection has sought to set before the reader.

References

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 balanced assessment of the historical core, the legend, and the modern figure.)
Jones, Charles W. Saint Nicholas of Myra, Bari, and Manhattan: Biography of a Legend. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. (The legend’s growth and afterlife; the thin record beneath the vast cult.)
Anrich, Gustav. Hagios Nikolaos: Der heilige Nikolaos in der griechischen Kirche. 2 vols. Leipzig and Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1913–1917. (The source-critical foundation of the whole assessment.)
METHODOLOGY.md §3 and §3.5, this repository.