His Reported Words

Nikephoros left no writings of his own except, in the tradition, his record of St. Anthimos’s miracles; he is remembered less for sayings than for a borne life. This file gathers the words attributed to and associated with him — above all the counsel he received and lived, “the greater the cross, the greater the resurrection” — with careful attention to which are his own and which belong to his masters, and to the thinness of the verbatim record.

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

A Saint of Deeds More Than Words

Unlike the recent elders famed for their spoken teaching — St. Porphyrios, gathered in Wounded by Love, or St. Paisios, whose Spiritual Counsels fill volumes — Nikephoros is not primarily a saint of sayings. His witness was a borne life: blindness, disfigurement, and paralysis carried with joy and prayer. The sources accordingly preserve relatively few verbatim words from him, and the honest treatment is to say so plainly rather than to manufacture a corpus of counsels (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, Athens, 2007, via Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Nikephoros the Leper,” oca.org; METHODOLOGY §2.4 on compiled and orally-transmitted sayings). What the tradition transmits is chiefly a few remembered counsels, the spirit of his speech (consolation, encouragement to patience), and the words of his masters that he made his own.

“The Greater the Cross, the Greater the Resurrection”

The saying most firmly attached to Nikephoros is one he received rather than coined: the counsel of his spiritual father St. Anthimos of Chios — “The greater the cross, the greater the resurrection” (Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, “St. Nikephoros the Leper,” Part 1, orthochristian.com/164755). The tradition attaches it to Nikephoros because he became its living embodiment: the man of the greatest cross, in whom the tradition read the greatest resurrection of joy. It functions in his hagiography much as a personal motto, but its provenance should be stated exactly — it is Anthimos’s word, transmitted through the leprosarium’s memory and applied to the disciple who lived it (see Monastic Life Among the Sick).

Words of Consolation and Encouragement

The witnesses remember the character of Nikephoros’s speech more than its exact content: he consoled the sorrowful and encouraged patience and hope, and it was for this consolation that people gathered at his cell (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, orthochristian.com/164755; on the gift of consolation, attestation-pinned, see The Fragrance of Holiness). Where the sources give the substance of this counsel, it runs along the lines his whole life preached: that affliction accepted in faith is not waste but the very road of salvation, and that God is present and good in the midst of suffering. Per METHODOLOGY §2.4, these are reported as the remembered tenor of his counsel, transmitted by his witnesses, rather than as verbatim quotations with independent documentation.

The Reported Encomium and the Posthumous Words

A distinct category is the words spoken about Nikephoros by his disciple: Eumenios composed a funeral oration / encomium for his elder, and in later years recounted words and appearances he attributed to Nikephoros after death (Metropolitan Neophytos of Morphou, “St. Nikephoros the Leper,” Part 2, orthochristian.com/164914; John Sanidopoulos, “Saint Nikephoros the Leper Resource Page,” johnsanidopoulos.com). These belong to the record of his veneration rather than to his own sayings, and the posthumous accounts are treated under attestation-pinning as Eumenios’s testimony (see The Relics and the Healings). Likewise the liturgical texts now sung to him — the troparion, kontakion, and megalynarion composed after his glorification — are the Church’s words about him, not his own, and are noted as such (Orthodox Church in America, “Saint Nikephoros the Leper — Troparion & Kontakion,” oca.org; on the hymnography, see A Healer-Saint of Our Time).

His One “Writing”: The Record of Anthimos’s Miracles

The nearest thing to a written work from Nikephoros’s own hand that the tradition reports is his record of the miracles of St. Anthimos which he had witnessed — many concerning the deliverance of the demon-possessed (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper, 2007, via oca.org; see Monastic Life Among the Sick). If the tradition is right that Nikephoros set these down, then his one literary act was characteristically self-effacing: not a record of his own experiences but a testimony to his master’s holiness — the leper-monk as witness to another’s sanctity, exactly as he would in turn be witnessed by Eumenios. Per §3.5 the reported miracles of Anthimos are pinned to Nikephoros’s reported record; and the existence of that record is itself attested by the later Life rather than by a surviving manuscript we can here examine.

The Honest Summary

The verbatim record of Nikephoros’s words is thin, and this collection does not inflate it. What can be responsibly transmitted is: one received counsel he embodied (“the greater the cross, the greater the resurrection”); the consoling and hopeful tenor of his speech, as his witnesses remember it; and the report that he recorded his master’s miracles. The saint’s real “text” was his life, and the tradition knows this: it venerates him not as a teacher of words but as the “radiant athlete of patience,” whose eloquence was his endurance (Monk Simon, Nikephoros the Leper: The Radiant Athlete of Patience, Athens, 2007; METHODOLOGY §2.4, §3.5).

See Also

References

  • Monk Simon (Monachos Simon). Nikephoros the Leper: The Radiant Athlete of Patience. Athens, 2007. (The character of his counsel; his record of Anthimos’s miracles; the epithet. Cited via the English digests below.)
  • Orthodox Church in America. “Saint Nikephoros the Leper” and “Saint Nikephoros the Leper — Troparion & Kontakion.” oca.org/saints. (The synaxarion; the liturgical texts.)
  • Metropolitan Neophytos (Masouras) of Morphou. “St. Nikephoros (Tzanakakis) the Leper,” Parts 1–2. orthochristian.com/164755, /164914. (“The greater the cross, the greater the resurrection”; Eumenios’s encomium.)
  • John Sanidopoulos. “Saint Nikephoros the Leper Resource Page.” johnsanidopoulos.com. (Eumenios’s encomium; posthumous accounts; hymnography.)
  • METHODOLOGY.md §2.4, §3.5, this repository. (Compiled sayings and oral tradition; attestation-pinning.)