Nicephorus

Saint Nicephorus (Greek: Nikephoros) was born in Constantinople in 758, the son of Theodore, an imperial secretary, and of Eudokia. His family belonged to the official class of the capital and was firmly attached to the veneration of icons. Under the iconoclast emperor Constantine V, Theodore was stripped of office, scourged, and driven into exile for refusing to reject the holy images; he died in banishment. Eudokia likewise endured hardship for the same cause. Nicephorus received a careful education in Scripture, theology, and the classical learning then customary for future civil servants, and he followed his father into the imperial chancery as an asekretis, a senior secretarial official of the court.

While still a layman he took part in the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which condemned iconoclasm and restored the cult of images, attending as one of the representatives of the imperial government. After further service under the empress Irene and Constantine VI he left public life, gave away his property, and established a monastery on the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus, where he lived under monastic discipline. In 806, on the death of Patriarch Tarasius, Emperor Nicephorus I designated him patriarch of Constantinople. Because he was still a layman, he was tonsured and passed through the degrees of ordination in rapid succession before his enthronement. The appointment of a lay official, and his relatively moderate stance in the lingering Moechian controversy over Constantine VI’s irregular second marriage, drew sharp criticism from monastic rigorists led by Theodore the Studite. In time, however, patriarch and Studites stood together against a new assault on the icons.

The early years of his patriarchate, under the emperors Nicephorus I and Michael I Rangabe, were years of official iconophile policy. That settlement collapsed when Leo V the Armenian assumed the throne in 813 and determined to revive iconoclasm, partly in the belief that earlier iconoclast emperors had been more successful in war. Nicephorus refused to give his sanction. He defended the decrees of Nicaea, gathered synods of bishops and abbots, and declined to yield when the emperor pressed him. In 815 he was deposed, confined, and then exiled to the monastery he had founded; the see was given to the iconoclast Theodotus I Cassiteras. From exile Nicephorus wrote the works on which his theological reputation rests: an Apologeticus minor, a longer Apologeticus in defense of the holy images, and three Antirrhetici refuting iconoclast arguments. He also composed a Short History (the Breviarium or Historia syntomos) narrating events from the death of the emperor Maurice in 602 into the later eighth century, and a Chronography of chronological tables. These writings are among the most important surviving sources for Byzantine political history of that period and for the doctrine of icons.

He died in exile on 5 June 828. After the restoration of icon veneration in 843, Empress Theodora and Patriarch Methodius I had his body brought back to Constantinople; on 13 March 846 it was laid in the Church of the Holy Apostles. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 13 March, the day of the translation of his relics. The Eastern Orthodox Church keeps that date as well and also observes 2 June as the commemoration of his falling asleep. He is honored as a confessor and as patriarch of Constantinople, not as pope of Rome. He lived as a monk and bishop and is not recorded to have married or to have had children. His cult grew from contemporary recognition and liturgical use rather than from a later formal process of canonization or beatification, and he is not customarily invoked as patron of particular places, trades, or illnesses in the way some other saints are.