Bishop Nicholas

Nicholas was bishop of Myra in Lycia, a coastal region of southwestern Asia Minor in the Roman Empire, corresponding to part of modern Turkey. He is one of the most widely venerated saints in both Eastern and Western Christianity, yet contemporary documentation of his life is extremely limited. Historians generally accept that a bishop of this name occupied the see of Myra in the fourth century, on the basis of an early local cult, a church at Myra associated with him by the sixth century, and a continuous later tradition. Greek lives composed from about the ninth century, notably that attributed to Michael the Archimandrite, supply the familiar outline: birth at the Lycian city of Patara to Christian parents, distribution of his inheritance to the poor after their death, and elevation to the bishopric of Myra as a young man. Exact years of birth and death are not established by reliable historical evidence; later writers commonly assign his death to 6 December in the mid-fourth century. Some modern scholars have also noted possible later contamination of his legend with material from the sixth-century Life of Nicholas of Sion, which makes caution about biographical detail especially necessary.

Later tradition linked him with the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and with opposition to Arianism, including a legendary incident in which he struck Arius. His name is absent from the most trustworthy early lists of Nicene fathers, and modern scholarship treats attendance at the council as unproven. What can be said of his episcopate is largely the portrait preserved in hagiography: a pastor who defended the poor, intervened for those under unjust sentence, and was remembered as a wonder-worker. Among the best-known stories are his secret gifts of gold to three destitute daughters so that they might marry rather than fall into prostitution; the calming of a storm at sea and the resulting patronage of sailors; the provision of grain during famine at Myra; and the deliverance of three condemned innocents, or of imperial officers, from execution. These tales, whatever historical events may underlie some of them, fixed his character in Christian memory as a hidden benefactor and protector of the vulnerable.

He died at Myra and was entombed in his cathedral. In 1087, Italian sailors from Bari seized the principal relics from Myra, then under unstable conditions in Asia Minor after the Seljuk advance, and brought them to Bari in Apulia, where the Basilica of Saint Nicholas was erected over the shrine. A further portion of relics was taken to Venice in the twelfth century. The translation of 1087 made Bari a major pilgrimage destination and spread the cult still more widely in the Latin West. The feast of 6 December became one of the great popular celebrations of the medieval year. In the Christian East, Nicholas ranks among the most frequently depicted holy hierarchs. Dutch and other European customs of gifts on the eve of his feast, embodied in the figure of Sinterklaas, later contributed, especially in North America, to the secular Christmas figure of Santa Claus, a development far removed from the fourth-century bishop but historically descended from his cult.

Nicholas was a diocesan bishop, not a member of a religious order, and he was neither pope nor patriarch. Tradition presents him as unmarried and without children. He was never the subject of a formal papal canonization of the later medieval type; his sainthood rests on ancient liturgical and popular veneration in East and West. He is invoked as patron of children, sailors and mariners, merchants, pawnbrokers, students, fishermen, the falsely accused, unmarried women, travelers, the poor, prisoners, and numerous trades, and as patron of Russia, Greece, Sicily, Lorraine, Amsterdam, Moscow, Bari, and many other places. The historical figure remains a poorly documented Lycian bishop of the fourth century; the saint of devotion is among the most familiar in the Christian world.