St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite

He was born on the island of Naxos in 1749 and named Nicholas. Gifted with a remarkable memory and a love of learning, he was schooled at Smyrna, and as a young man came to the Holy Mountain of Athos, where he was tonsured a monk with the name Nikodemos and gave himself to the ascetic life and to unceasing study and writing.

He lived in the time of the movement for the renewal of the inner life of prayer, the gathering of the Kollyvades Fathers, who labored to restore frequent communion and the hesychast tradition. With St. Macarius of Corinth he gathered from the libraries of Athos the writings of the Fathers on watchfulness and prayer of the heart, and edited them into the great anthology called the Philokalia, which has since fed the prayer of the whole Orthodox world.

His labors did not cease there. He prepared the Rudder, the great collection of the canons of the Church with their interpretation; he adapted for Orthodox use the books known as the Unseen Warfare and the Spiritual Exercises; he wrote a handbook of confession, a work of Christian morality, commentaries on the Epistles and the canons of the feasts, and the lives and services of many saints. He worked in poverty and simplicity, often borrowing the books he needed, and gave everything to the Church and nothing to himself.

Worn out by his unceasing toil, he reposed on the Holy Mountain on the fourteenth of July, 1809. So great was the esteem in which he was held that it was said the Mountain had lost its teacher.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate numbered him among the saints in 1955, and the Church keeps his memory on the fourteenth of July, honoring Nikodemos the Hagiorite, through whose hands the treasures of the Fathers were given back to the Church.