Unceasing Prayer in Affliction

When leprosy had taken Nikephoros’s sight, his hands, and finally his mobility, one thing remained wholly within his power: prayer. His witnesses remember him as a man of unceasing prayer — the Jesus Prayer on his lips and in his heart through long vigils — and it is to this prayer that they attribute the radiant patience and joy that made him, in the tradition’s phrase, “the radiant athlete of patience.”

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

Prayer as the Last and Whole Ascesis

The distinctive shape of Nikephoros’s ascetic life is that it was progressively stripped down to prayer alone. The ordinary works of the monk — labour, reading, the physical disciplines, even the sight of the icons and the service-books — were taken from him one by one as the disease advanced: first the strength and integrity of his hands, then his sight, and at last nearly all mobility (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, Athens, 2007, via Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Nikephoros the Leper,” oca.org; on the medical course, see Blindness and Total Affliction). What could not be taken was interior prayer. In the theology of the ascetic tradition this is precisely the prayer that remains possible to the utterly incapacitated: the Jesus Prayer — “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me” — needs neither eyes, nor hands, nor movement, only the heart and the breath (see Orthodoxy: The Jesus Prayer).

Nikephoros’s biography is therefore, in its interior aspect, a near-laboratory case of the hesychast ideal of unceasing prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17; cf. the Philokalic tradition): a man reduced by affliction to the single practice that the whole tradition regards as the summit of the monastic life. His witnesses remember him not as a broken invalid passively enduring, but as an active man of prayer whose waking hours were filled with the invocation of the Name (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, “St. Nikephoros the Leper,” Part 1, orthochristian.com/164755).

The Vigils and the Prostrations

From the Chios years the accounts record long night vigils of prayer, with “countless prostrations” — a striking detail given the state of his body, since prostration is itself a strenuous physical act, and its performance by a man whose hands and feet were being consumed by leprosy is remembered as a measure of the intensity of his prayer (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via John Sanidopoulos, “Saint Nikephoros the Leper Is Canonized,” johnsanidopoulos.com; on the ascetic profile, see Monastic Life Among the Sick). As the disease progressed and the prostrations became impossible, the vigils continued as vigils of the heart — the outward form falling away while the inward prayer remained.

His chanting belongs here too. Even blind, he chanted the services from memory, so that the liturgical prayer of the Church and the private prayer of the heart were woven together in him: the man who could no longer see the icon of Christ went on singing His praises and calling on His name (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; on the chanting, see The Lovokomeio of Chios).

Radiant Patience: “The Athlete of Patience”

The fruit of this prayer, in the uniform testimony of those who knew him, was patience transfigured into joy. The title the modern Life gives him — the radiant athlete of patience — is not a rhetorical flourish but a compressed theological claim: that his patience (hypomonē, the endurance the New Testament names as a chief Christian virtue, e.g. Romans 5:3–4, James 1:3–4) was not a grim teeth-gritting but a positive radiance, visible to others, that they could explain only by the presence of grace (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper: The Radiant Athlete of Patience, Athens, 2007, title and text, via oca.org; Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, orthochristian.com/164755).

His disciple Eumenios and the other witnesses connect this joy directly to the prayer: it was the man of unceasing prayer who was also the man of unaccountable joy, and the tradition does not separate the two (Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, orthochristian.com/164755; on the reported gifts that flowed from this, attestation-pinned, see The Fragrance of Holiness). Per the repository methodology (§3.5), the interior states — the joy, the peace, the unceasing prayer — are reported here as the consistent testimony of his witnesses, pinned to them by name, and not asserted as independently verified psychological fact; what is being transmitted is what those who watched him prayed beside and reported (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

The Counsel of the Cross

Undergirding the whole was the word Nikephoros had received from St. Anthimos and made his own: “The greater the cross, the greater the resurrection” (Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, orthochristian.com/164755). The prayer in affliction was not, in his tradition’s reading, an escape from the cross but its acceptance: the invocation of the Name in the midst of total loss, offered not that the cross might be removed but that it might be borne unto resurrection. This is why the tradition presents him not as a patient to be pitied but as an “athlete” — one who contended and prevailed — and why the name given him at his tonsure, Nikephoros, “bearer of victory,” was read by his witnesses as providential (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; on the name, see The Lovokomeio of Chios).

See Also

References

  • Monk Simon (Monachos Simon). Nikephoros the Leper: The Radiant Athlete of Patience. Athens, 2007. (The unceasing prayer; the vigils and prostrations; the radiant patience; the title “athlete of patience”; the name Nikephoros. Cited via the English digests below.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Nikephoros the Leper.” oca.org/saints/lives. (The prayer; the chanting from memory; the ascetic profile.)
  • John Sanidopoulos. “Saint Nikephoros the Leper Is Canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate.” johnsanidopoulos.com, 2012. (Night vigils and countless prostrations.)
  • Metropolitan Neophytos (Masouras) of Morphou. “St. Nikephoros (Tzanakakis) the Leper,” Part 1. orthochristian.com/164755. (The joy in affliction; “the greater the cross, the greater the resurrection.”)
  • Scripture: 1 Thessalonians 5:17 (pray without ceasing); Romans 5:3–4 and James 1:3–4 (patience/endurance); on the Jesus Prayer, the Philokalic tradition.