St. Nicholas
of Myra

A fourth-century bishop of Lycia whose surviving biography is thin and whose veneration became one of the largest in Christian history

Nicholas was bishop of Myra, a port city of Lycia on the southern coast of Asia Minor, in the fourth century. That much is secure. Almost everything told about him in detail arrives much later. No contemporary biography survives, and no letters or sermons of his have come down to us. What survives instead is one of the widest devotions in Christian history, and a grave that has drawn pilgrims for more than sixteen hundred years.

The commonly repeated dates 270 to 343 are later conventions rather than recorded fact. The evidence places him in the age of Constantine. A church at the harbor of Myra was built between roughly 311 and 337, his grave lay outside the city walls in keeping with Roman burial law of the period, and the veneration at that grave is attested early. He died on December 6 of a year no source records. The feast is old and steady; the year is simply not known.

The earliest substantial account of his life was written by Michael the Archimandrite around the year 700, about three and a half centuries after Nicholas died. A sermon of Patriarch Proclus of Constantinople from the fifth century refers to him earlier, but already carries material that belongs to devotional storytelling rather than biography. Historians also work carefully here because a second figure, Nicholas of Sion, a later abbot and bishop in the same region, was drawn into the same body of stories over time. Some of what is told of Nicholas of Myra may belong to him.

The best known of the early stories is the one that shaped everything after it. A father of three daughters had no dowry for them and no honorable future to offer them. Nicholas, according to the tradition Michael the Archimandrite records, threw bags of gold into the house at night, three times, and took care not to be seen. Whatever the underlying event, the story is the reason Nicholas is remembered for generosity practiced in secret, and it stands behind every later custom of gifts left quietly for children.

His patronage of sailors grew out of the same coast. Myra sat above the harbor of Andriake, on the sea lane between the Aegean and the Levant, and a bishop there lived among crews and shipowners. Traditional accounts tell of Nicholas calming a storm and saving sailors who called on him. Whether or not those narratives preserve a particular event, the maritime devotion they express is genuinely early and genuinely widespread, and it carried his name into every port of the Mediterranean.

Whether Nicholas attended the Council of Nicaea in 325 cannot be settled. His name is absent from the older and fuller lists of bishops who attended, and appears in only a few of the surviving medieval copies. A copyist who knew the famous bishop of Myra may have added a name he expected to find. Catholic memory has long associated Nicholas with Nicaea, and that association is worth knowing, but it is later tradition rather than established biography.

The famous scene of Nicholas striking Arius at the council is later still. It appears first around 1370, in Petrus de Natalibus, and there the man struck is only described as an Arian, not Arius himself, who was a priest rather than a bishop and did not sit among the council fathers. Two centuries later the story had hardened into Nicholas against Arius by name, and from there it passed into icons and popular retelling. It is a devotional legend about zeal for the faith, roughly a thousand years younger than the man it describes.

What is remarkable about Nicholas is precisely the gap between how little was written down and how far the devotion traveled. From Myra the devotion spread through the Greek East, then along the shipping routes of the Mediterranean, then into Latin Europe, where by the eleventh century he was among the most invoked saints in the West. Churches, guilds, harbors, and whole cities took his name. When his relics were carried to Bari in 1087, they arrived in a place that already venerated him.

The gift-giving customs of northern Europe kept his feast attached to his name. In the Low Countries Sint Nicolaas became Sinterklaas, and Dutch settlers carried the observance to New Amsterdam. In nineteenth-century New York the figure was reshaped by Washington Irving and then by the 1823 poem now known as The Night Before Christmas, and from there the modern Santa Claus developed. The line back to the bishop of Myra is real, but it runs through several centuries of cultural change. Nicholas is first a bishop, a confessor, and the object of an ancient pilgrimage.

Nicholas is the clearest case in the calendar of a saint whose documentation is thin and whose veneration is enormous. The Church did not remember him because his life was well recorded. It remembered him because generation after generation kept going to his grave.