Monastic Life Among the Sick

The Chios leprosarium under Father Anthimos (Vagianos) — the future St. Anthimos of Chios — was a genuine ascetic community, and Nikephoros lived within it as a monk under obedience. This file treats the verified relationship between Nikephoros and his confessor Anthimos, the daily ascesis of obedience, fasting, and prayer among the sick, and Nikephoros’s own role as a recorder of the miracles of his spiritual father.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (20th-c. Cretan monk; glorified 2012)

St. Anthimos of Chios as Confessor and Spiritual Father

The single most important relationship of Nikephoros’s monastic formation — and one that the sources attest clearly, so that it can be affirmed rather than merely surmised — is his discipleship under St. Anthimos of Chios. In the world Argyrios K. Vagianos (Ἀργύριος Βαγιάνος), born on Chios in 1869 and reposed there on 15 February 1960, Anthimos was ordained and, after a pilgrimage to Mount Athos around 1911, became chaplain of the Chios leprosarium, which he transformed from a place of disorder into a spiritual centre; he later founded the convent of the Panagia Voithia (“Our Lady the Helper”) on Chios in 1930 (Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Anthimus of Chios,” oca.org; OrthodoxWiki, “Anthimus of Chios”). Anthimos was canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 13 August 1992 and is commemorated on 15 February (OCA, “Saint Anthimus of Chios,” oca.org).

It was this Anthimos who tonsured Nikephoros and served as his spiritual father and confessor throughout the Chios years. The sources describe a “special spiritual relationship” between the elder and the monk, who “always remained close to him,” and who lived, the Life says, “with unquestioning, genuine obedience to his Spiritual Father” (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, Athens, 2007, via Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Nikephoros the Leper,” oca.org; on the tonsure, see The Lovokomeio of Chios). Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, transmitting the memory of the leprosarium, preserves a saying of Anthimos to the young leper that became a watchword of Nikephoros’s whole life: “The greater the cross, the greater the resurrection” (Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, “St. Nikephoros the Leper,” Part 1, orthochristian.com/164755). Because both men are now glorified saints, the tradition reads their bond as a chain of holiness — the “father of lepers” Anthimos forming the leper-monk Nikephoros, who would in turn form the leper-priest Eumenios (see The Disciple Eumenios Saridakis).

The Ascesis of Obedience, Fasting, and Labour

Under Anthimos, Nikephoros’s life took the shape of a rigorous monasticism practised inside a hospital. The Life records three constant elements. First, obedience: “unquestioning, genuine obedience to his Spiritual Father,” the surrender of his own will that the ascetic tradition places at the foundation of the monastic life (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; cf. Orthodoxy: Monasticism). Second, austere fasting, maintained despite the demands a wasting disease makes on the body (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org). Third, manual labour: he “worked in the gardens” of the leprosarium for as long as his hands and eyes allowed, joining the ordinary Athonite pattern of ascesis-through-work to the involuntary labour of simply surviving his illness (ibid.).

To these the accounts add long night vigils of prayer, with “countless prostrations” — the physical exertion of prostration being, for a body already broken by leprosy, itself a form of ascesis and a marker of the intensity of his prayer (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via Sanidopoulos, “Saint Nikephoros the Leper Is Canonized,” johnsanidopoulos.com; on his prayer, see Unceasing Prayer in Affliction). The disease itself supplied the raw material of a life the tradition reads as one long, deliberate self-offering: what was inflicted on him he took up, under obedience, and made into ascesis.

The Community of the Lepers

The reason the Chios years matter theologically is that they show a monastic brotherhood formed out of the segregated sick. The lepers of Chios were not, in the tradition’s memory, a mass of the hopeless but a praying community: they had their chapel, their services, their chanter (Nikephoros himself), their confessor (Anthimos), and their common life of prayer and labour (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org). The leprosarium became, in effect, a monastery whose walls were the walls of quarantine, and whose tonsure into it was a disease rather than a vow. This is the distinctive note the modern Greek Church hears in the Chios story: that in the most abandoned and physically horrifying of places, under a holy chaplain, an authentic ascetic community flourished — and produced saints.

Nikephoros as Recorder of Anthimos’s Miracles

A concrete and historically valuable detail: Nikephoros did not only receive from Anthimos but served as a witness and recorder of his spiritual father’s works. The Life reports that Nikephoros wrote down the miracles of St. Anthimos which he had himself seen — many of them, the accounts say, involving the deliverance of the demon-possessed who were brought to the chaplain (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org). Per the repository methodology, these miracle reports are pinned to their attestation — they are what Nikephoros is remembered to have recorded of Anthimos, transmitted through the later Life, and are here reported as such rather than certified as adjudicated events (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The detail is nonetheless significant for source-criticism: it shows Nikephoros as a literate observer and recorder within the leprosarium, and it establishes one of the channels — a disciple’s written testimony — through which the sanctity of the Chios community reached the later biographers (see The Sources for His Life).

The Absence of Effective Treatment

Throughout these Chios decades there was, for most of the time, no cure. Effective chemotherapy for Hansen’s disease — the sulfone drugs, above all dapsone — became available only from the later 1940s; the Life notes that a drug “was found in 1947,” by which time Nikephoros had already lived more than thirty years with the untreated disease and suffered “many large lesions” (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; on the medical course, see Blindness and Total Affliction). The ascesis of obedience, fasting, prayer, and labour was thus carried on within a body being progressively destroyed, with no medical hope of reversal for most of his life — the condition against which the tradition sets his remembered joy.

See Also

References

  • Monk Simon (Monachos Simon). Nikephoros the Leper: The Radiant Athlete of Patience. Athens, 2007. (Obedience to Anthimos; austere fasting; labour in the gardens; night vigils and prostrations; recording of Anthimos’s miracles; the 1947 drug. Cited via the English digests below.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Nikephoros the Leper.” oca.org/saints/lives. (The relationship with Anthimos; obedience, fasting, gardens; recording of Anthimos’s miracles.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Anthimus of Chios.” oca.org/saints/lives. (Anthimos: Argyrios Vagianos, 1869–1960; chaplain of the Chios leprosarium; Panagia Voithia convent 1930; commemoration 15 February.)
  • OrthodoxWiki. “Anthimus of Chios.” orthodoxwiki.org. (Dates; canonization by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, 13 August 1992.)
  • John Sanidopoulos. “Saint Nikephoros the Leper Is Canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate.” johnsanidopoulos.com, 2012. (Night vigils and prostrations; the ascetic profile.)
  • Metropolitan Neophytos (Masouras) of Morphou. “St. Nikephoros (Tzanakakis) the Leper,” Part 1. orthochristian.com/164755. (“The greater the cross, the greater the resurrection”; the bond with Anthimos.)