medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
The standard scholarly view of this Nilus (also known as Nilus the Ascetic and as Nilus of Sinai) for close to a century now is that he was a disciple of St. John Chrysostom who became hegumen of a monastery at Ancyra (now the Turkish capital city Ankara), who wrote the large collection of letters and some of the many treatises and other texts dealing with the ascetic life that are attributed to him in the _Patrologia Graeca_ (some of these have since been re-attributed to Evagrius of Pontus), and who will have died ca. 430 (this is an inference from his silence concerning the First Council of Ephesus). His early medieval identification with the author of accounts of the martyrs of Sinai commemorated on 14. January (BHG 1301-1307 plus later re-workings) led to the creation of a composite figure who in Byzantine synaxary accounts and in the _Historia Ecclesiastica_ of Nicephorus Callistus (d. ca. 1335) is presented as a high official at Constantinople under Theodosius the Great. In these tellings Nilus gave up his brilliant worldly career and, with her consent, his wife; together with his son St. Theodulus he then became an hermit on Mt. Sinai. The identification upon which this latter view reposes has been rejected repeatedly by philologically informed students of the writings in question but lives on in other venues. These include the English-language Wikipedia article "Nilus of Sinai" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilus_of_Sinai>, whose failure to cite any formal scholarship published after 1896 may be thought disabling.
Some period-pertinent images of Nilus of Ancyra (or of Sinai):
a) as depicted (left margin, upper roundel) in a ninth-century copy of St. John Damascene's _Parallela sacra_ (Paris, BnF, ms. Grec 923, fol. 113v):
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b525013124/f230.item.zoom
b) as depicted in the earlier eleventh-century mosaics (restored between 1953 and 1962) in the katholikon of the monastery of Hosios Loukas near Distomo in Phokis:
http://tinyurl.com/oz74c6z
c) as depicted in the early thirteenth-century frescoes (1208 or 1209; repainted in 1569 in a campaign that seems to have avoided updating the portraits) in the church of the Presentation of the Theotokos in the Studenica monastery near Kraljevo (Raška dist.) in Serbia:
http://tinyurl.com/27wrkf6
d) as depicted in a late thirteenth- or very early fourteenth-century fresco, attributed to Manuel Panselinos, in the Protaton church on Mt. Athos:
http://www.myriobiblos.gr/museum/gallery/panselinos/36.jpg
e) as depicted in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. ca. 1312 and 1321) in the narthex of the monastery church of the Theotokos at Gračanica in, depending on one's view of the matter, Serbia's province of Kosovo and Metohija or the Republic of Kosovo:
http://tinyurl.com/2un22g2
f) as depicted (at right; at left, St. John Climacus) in the late fourteenth-century frescoes (1389; restored in 1971/72) in the monastery church of St. Andrew at Matka in Skopje's municipality of Karpoš:
http://tinyurl.com/ofvdowe
Best,
John Dillon
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