Nilus of Sinai

Nilus wrote in Greek in the first half of the fifth century. The traditional story of his life is famous, and modern scholarship has taken most of it apart, so both are worth stating plainly.

The traditional account, which circulated in the Byzantine world for centuries, says he was a wealthy man of Constantinople, prefect of the city under the emperor Theodosius, married with two children; that he and his son Theodulus left the world for Mount Sinai while his wife and daughter entered a convent in Egypt; that raiding Saracens attacked the monks of Sinai, carried Theodulus off, and that Nilus recovered him and both were ordained. The story comes from a work called the Narrations, seven tales of the Sinai raid, transmitted under his name.

The modern reading is different. The Narrations look like a romance rather than a memoir, and the historical Nilus appears instead to have been a monk and abbot near Ancyra in Galatia, in Asia Minor, who died about 430. He had been a disciple, or at least a close student, of John Chrysostom, whom he defended in writing after Chrysostom's fall. The Sinai connection seems to have been attached to him later. Nothing about the surviving spiritual writing depends on which version is right.

That writing is the substance. Something over a thousand letters travel under his name, short, blunt, addressed to monks, bishops, officials, soldiers, and ordinary correspondents, along with several treatises. The letters have long been suspected of including material by other hands and of having been cut up by later editors, but their character is consistent: a question comes in, and the answer is a few lines with no flattery in them.

His treatises are the surer ground. On Prayer, a set of one hundred and fifty-three chapters on the discipline of praying, is one of the most important texts in the Eastern tradition, though it is now generally agreed to be the work of Evagrius Ponticus, preserved under Nilus's name precisely because Evagrius had been condemned and Nilus had not. Genuinely his are the Ascetic Discourse, a hard-headed account of what monastic life actually costs; a treatise on voluntary poverty; and works on the eight evil thoughts, on the vices, and against greed.

What runs through all of it is a refusal to let religion become a performance. He tells monks that a fine reputation for holiness is more dangerous than an open sin, that the man who cannot bear an insult has not begun, and that prayer is not a technique for producing feelings.

The Eastern Orthodox church honours him as Saint Nilus the Ascetic and keeps his feast on 12 November.

Sources: Nilus, Ascetic Discourse and Letters (Migne, Patrologia Graeca 79); the Chapters on Prayer (in The Philokalia, volume 1, where the Evagrian authorship is discussed); Daniel Caner, History and Hagiography from the Late Antique Sinai; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.