Selymbria, Thrace (modern Turkey)·1846 – 1920
Αγιος Νεκτάριος
St. Nektarios of Aegina
The Wonder-Worker of Aegina
He was wronged by men and vindicated by God.
“Happiness is found within ourselves, and blessed is the man who has understood this. Happiness is a pure heart, for such a heart becomes the throne of God.”
Life
Born Anastasios Kephalas on 1 October 1846 in Selymbria, Thrace, to a pious but poor family, the future saint moved to Constantinople at fourteen to work and study. At twenty, he secured a teaching post on the island of Chios, where his inner life deepened. On 7 November 1876, at age thirty, he took monastic vows at the Monastery of Nea Moni, receiving the name Nektarios — “make sweet.” He pursued theological studies at the University of Athens, graduating with distinction in 1885, and came to the attention of Patriarch Sophronios IV of Alexandria, who ordained him priest and deacon, then consecrated him Metropolitan of Pentapolis in 1889.
His tenure as bishop was brilliant and brief. His pastoral zeal, brilliance as a preacher, and closeness to the people aroused the jealousy of rivals who poisoned the Patriarch’s ear with fabricated accusations. In 1890, without explanation, without trial, and without a single opportunity to defend himself, he was dismissed and expelled from Egypt. He returned to Greece bearing a wound that would have destroyed a lesser soul. Instead, he met every insult with silence. He never complained, never defended himself publicly, never spoke a word against his accusers — a silence so absolute that it became its own witness to his character.
From 1894, he served for fifteen years as Director of the Rizarios Ecclesiastical School in Athens, forming a generation of priests while composing more than sixty books on theology, philosophy, ethics, prayer, and the spiritual life. In 1904, responding to a group of nuns, he founded the Holy Trinity Convent on the island of Aegina, eventually retiring there in 1908 to live as a simple monk. There, in his final years, he tended the garden, carried stones for the construction, washed the nuns’ habits, and prayed without ceasing. Pilgrims arrived from across Greece seeking healing; the miracles multiplied. He died on 8 November 1920 from prostate cancer in an Athens hospital. The nurses noticed that when his shirt was accidentally placed on the bed of a paralyzed patient beside him, the man was instantly healed — the first of what would become thousands of posthumous miracles. He was canonized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on 20 April 1961. His feast is kept on 9 November.
St. Nektarios left behind a life that reads as a prolonged commentary on the Beatitudes: blessed are the meek, blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness. His great secret was a thoroughgoing humility that did not wait for vindication from men because it sought nothing from men. The Church of Alexandria, which had anathematized him, formally lifted that anathema in 1998, acknowledging what the people of God had known for decades: that Nektarios was a saint.
One Heart
“The Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Seek it in the depths of your heart.”
Teachings
The Pure Heart as the Throne of God
St. Nektarios taught that happiness is not found in circumstances but in the state of the heart. A pure heart — cleansed of passion, pride, and self-will — becomes the dwelling place of God. This is not pious language but a description of inner reality: when the heart is emptied of the ego’s noise, what remains is divine presence. He wrote: “There is nothing greater than a pure heart, because such a heart becomes the throne of God. Is anything more glorious than the throne of God?”
Humility as the Foundation of All Virtue
Nektarios modeled a humility that was not self-deprecation but the simple acknowledgment that the self has no existence apart from God. His silence in the face of unjust slander was not weakness but the ultimate spiritual strength: he had nothing to defend because he had surrendered the ego entirely. He taught that true humility empties the soul of pride and self-will, creating the space into which God’s grace can descend. “Grace descends as a gift upon those cleansed of passions,” he wrote. “It comes quietly and at an unexpected hour.”
Prayer as Ascent and Communion
Drawing on the Hesychast tradition, Nektarios practiced and taught the prayer of the heart — the continuous, inward repetition of the Jesus Prayer as a means of establishing unbroken communion with God. He described prayer as “forgetting earthly things, an ascent to heaven” and as “an inexhaustible treasure, an unruffled harbor, the foundation of serenity, the root and mother of myriads of blessings.” For him, prayer was not a technique but a relationship — a living conversation with the Ground of all being.
Works & Publications
On Repentance and Confession
One of his most widely read pastoral works, offering a penetrating examination of conscience and the soul’s return to God through the sacrament of confession.
Study of the Days of Holy Week
A devotional and theological commentary on the final week of Christ’s earthly life, uniting Scripture, patristic tradition, and personal prayer.
Homilies During Great Lent
Ten sermons covering free will, repentance, confession, and the Holy Eucharist — rooted in Scripture and the Fathers, accessible to ordinary believers.
An Inspiration
St. Nektarios’s teaching that the pure heart becomes the throne of God resonates deeply with the Advaitic understanding of the Self as pure Awareness — when the obscuring movements of ego, passion, and self-will subside, what remains is not emptiness but the fullness of divine presence. His bhakti, expressed in absolute surrender and uncomplaining humility, mirrors the path of devotion taught in these satsangs: not striving upward toward a distant God, but clearing away what obscures the God who is already here. His life demonstrates that mystical experience is not the privilege of any single tradition — the same grace that flows through the Ganga flows through the Aegean.