Introduction

The Author

Saint Nektarios of Aegina was born Anastasios Kephalas on the first of October, 1846, in the small Thracian town of Selymbria, on the Sea of Marmara not far from Constantinople. His family was poor and pious, and the boy left home young—around the age of fourteen—for Constantinople, where he supported himself by manual work while continuing his schooling and, by his own account, drinking in whatever he could of Scripture and the writings of the Fathers. A teaching post on the island of Chios followed, and there, at the age of thirty, he received the monastic tonsure and the name Nektarios. Ordination to the diaconate came soon after.

His gifts drew the notice of the Patriarchate of Alexandria. Ordained priest and attached to the Church of Saint Nicholas in Cairo, he became a celebrated preacher and a trusted administrator, and in 1889 the aged Patriarch Sophronios consecrated him Metropolitan of Pentapolis—an ancient see of Cyrenaica in what is now Libya, held in Nektarios’s day as a titular dignity while he served the Alexandrian church in Egypt. He was then in the fullness of his powers, learned, eloquent, and much loved.

What followed is among the more painful episodes in modern Church history, and it is best told with restraint. The very affection Nektarios inspired seems to have kindled the envy of others near the patriarchal throne. Within about a year he was removed from his office and sent away—by the sources’ consistent testimony, without trial, without charge, and without explanation. He bore the blow in silence, never publicly defending himself or accusing his accusers, and returned to Greece around 1890–91 with his reputation clouded and his means straitened. The injustice was long in being repaired: only in 1998 did the Church of Alexandria formally lift the censure that had been laid upon him and restore his ecclesiastical standing. That vindication, however, merely confirmed in law what his manner of life had already proved.

Back in Greece, Nektarios served as a preacher in Euboea and elsewhere, and in 1894 was appointed director of the Rizareios Ecclesiastical School in Athens, a seminary for the training of clergy, where he remained for some fifteen years. These were his most fruitful years as an author: he wrote copiously on dogmatics, ethics, Church history, the sacraments, and the spiritual life, and continued to publish throughout. In 1904 he founded a women’s monastery, the Holy Trinity Convent, on the island of Aegina, and after resigning the directorship of the Rizareios School in 1908 he withdrew there for the rest of his life, serving as confessor and spiritual father to the community. He died in November 1920, at the age of seventy-four, after an illness. In 1961 the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople formally numbered him among the saints, and he is commemorated on the ninth of November. Widely known today as “the Wonderworker of Aegina,” he has become one of the most beloved of modern Greek saints, and his written legacy—of which the present treatise is a substantial part—has outlived the controversies of his lifetime.

The Work: Occasion & Purpose

A Sketch Concerning Man (Greek Hypotyposis peri anthropou) was published in Athens in 1893, in the years after Nektarios’s return from Egypt, when he was still finding his footing in Greece and was soon to take up the Rizareios directorship. Its origins were, characteristically for him, pastoral and occasional rather than abstract. In the opening address “To the Readers” he explains that the book grew out of an argument with a group of students. They had maintained—prompted, he tells us, by a newspaper story about a dog that rescued a shipwrecked man during a fire at a monastery—that the human soul differs from the soul of an animal only in degree, and not in kind. Nektarios first answered them with a brief study of some ten pages, “On the Relationship and Difference Between the Human Soul and the Animal Soul.” When that essay proved too slight to overcome their objections, he set himself to a far more thorough treatment. “This resistance,” he writes, “kindled our zeal, and we resolved upon a bolder decision.” The larger book is the fruit of that resolve; its preface is signed at Kyme, in Euboea, on the tenth of September, 1893.

The stated aim is deceptively simple: “to demonstrate who man is, and how great is the distinction that separates man from the animal.” But the question was not idle in 1893. The decades on either side of that date were the high tide of scientific naturalism and of the popular reception of evolutionary theory, and one of its sharper edges was precisely the claim that human beings differ from the beasts only by an accident of complexity—that mind is merely more brain. Nektarios took this challenge seriously enough to meet it on its own ground. He read the naturalists, the physiologists, and the comparative psychologists of his age, and he set out to answer them not by retreating into pious assertion but by argument, marshalling anatomy, the study of the senses, the analysis of language and thought, philology, and the history of nations alongside Scripture and the Fathers. The result is a work of natural theology in the patristic key: an attempt to show, from creation itself as well as from revelation, that man is a rational, God-imaging, immortal being, and that between him and the animal there lies not a gap of degree but a chasm of kind.

Within Nektarios’s large and varied corpus, this treatise occupies the place of his fullest statement on Christian anthropology—the doctrine of the human person. Where much of his other writing is dogmatic, historical, or devotional, here he addresses himself to a single great question, the nature and destiny of man, and pursues it with an amplitude he allowed himself nowhere else.

Argument & Structure

Nektarios lays out his plan plainly at the start. The work is divided into four parts, “according to the different perspectives from which we examine the question,” and it is prefaced by the wondering cry of the Psalmist that sets its keynote: “What is man, that you are mindful of him? … You have made him a little lower than the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honor” (Psalm 8). A short, almost lyrical “Preamble” opens the book by reflecting that we habitually underestimate both the world around us and ourselves—that familiarity dulls our sight, so that we walk past the glory of creation, and of the human person, without noticing it. The remedy, Nektarios says, is to become “deep researchers and careful examiners,” to know man “in depth, not on the surface.” The four parts carry out that examination.

Part One studies man in himself, “somatologically and psychologically”—that is, in both body and soul. It follows the arc of a human life through infancy, childhood, manhood, and old age; considers the relation of the spirit to bodily nature and the remarkable harmony of soul and body; and then turns to a sustained comparison of the human being with the animal. Here Nektarios argues, against his students’ thesis, that animals lack a rational soul: he examines their instincts, the proportion of their bodies to their needs, and what he calls “the absolute dissimilarity between the soul of man and the animal.” He then grounds the difference in three human capacities that he takes to be decisive—articulate speech (the “spoken word”), the interior reason behind it (the “innate word”), and the power of forming universal ideas. A long treatment of the bodily senses follows, running through touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight in man and beast alike, before he ascends to the distinctively human faculties of the soul: memory, attention, knowledge, science, and imagination among the cognitive powers; will and desire among the appetitive; and, most tellingly, consciousness and self-consciousness among the affective. It is self-awareness, the mind’s power to take itself as its own object, that for Nektarios seals the case.

Part Two widens the lens from the individual to the species and argues for the unity and nobility of the whole human race. All human beings, he holds, descend from one stock. He takes up the visible varieties among peoples—differences of form, of color, of inherited traits—and explains them as effects of climate, diet, and civilization acting upon a single common nature, rather than as marks of separate origins. He then demonstrates the kinship of all peoples positively, from what they share: common spiritual powers and moral principles, universal religious ideas, and the deep affinities of human language. The argument is at once scientific in its idiom and theological in its point—the biblical teaching that God “made from one blood every nation of men” is defended with the ethnographic and philological learning of the nineteenth century.

Part Three turns directly to the soul—its nature and its origin. Nektarios surveys the ancient philosophers’ many guesses at what the soul is (the Chaldeans thought it fire, others air, or ether, or a compound of the elements; Socrates and Plato held it simple, incorporeal, and therefore immortal; Aristotle called it entelechy), and their equally various theories of its origin—emanation from God, pre-existence, transmigration, inheritance from the parents. Against all of these he sets the teaching of Scripture: that God “breathed into his face the breath of life, and man became a living soul,” so that the soul is neither a fragment of the divine substance nor a product of matter, but a distinct creation, made in the image of God. He then gathers the witness of the Fathers, quoting in turn Athanasius the Great, Gregory the Theologian, John Chrysostom, Basil, Cyril of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, Photius, Gregory Palamas, and Theodoret—and drawing as well on Augustine and Jerome—to show their unanimity: the body is from the earth, the soul from the creating breath of God, and the two together make the composite being that is man. A closing section argues that “spirit” and “soul” name the same reality in the language of the New Testament.

Part Four crowns the whole with the doctrine of the soul’s immortality, argued through a series of eleven distinct proofs. Nektarios reasons from the innate human conviction of immortality; from the desire for a highest good that no earthly thing can satisfy; from the very idea of eternity that the mind is able to form; from the love of the good, the beautiful, and the true; from the testimony of conscience; from God’s inward self-revelation to the soul; from the phenomenon of holy lives; from the universal fact of worship; from the pursuit of knowledge; and from the nature of social life. The last and longest proof reads the destiny of nations as the work of divine providence: surveying the Jewish, Greek, and Roman peoples, Nektarios argues that each was raised up and then withdrawn from the stage of history to serve, knowingly or not, the one purpose of humanity’s regeneration in Christ—a providence so evidently ordered toward man’s perfection that it would be absurd for its object to perish in the grave. The book ends where it began, with the Psalmist’s question now answered: “man is a rational being; he possesses an immortal soul and was formed for immortality.”

Theological & Spiritual Significance

The lasting interest of A Sketch Concerning Man lies in its method as much as its conclusions. Nektarios writes as a bishop and a Father of the Church, yet he chooses to meet the confident naturalism of his century on the terrain the century itself prized—observation, physiology, comparative psychology, the study of language and of history. He does not fear the sciences; he presses them into the service of a Christian account of the person, treating the natural world as a book that, rightly read, testifies to its Author and to the dignity of the creature made to know Him. This is natural theology in an ancient and generous sense, the same impulse that moved Basil in the Hexaemeron or the Psalmist gazing at the heavens, here turned to the specific questions of Nektarios’s own day.

At the heart of the book is a strong doctrine of the image of God. Man is not the highest animal but a being of another order—rational, self-conscious, morally free, capable of contemplating his Creator and destined for union with Him. The soul is a fresh creation, not an emanation and not a mechanism, and its likeness to God is at once its glory and its calling: Nektarios ends the great section on the origin of the soul by noting that God endowed man “with divine attributes, the intellectual and freedom of choice,” breathing into him the grace of the Spirit “so that through virtue he might achieve assimilation to the divine.” The purpose of human life is thus moral and spiritual ascent—the growing likeness to God that the tradition calls deification—and the passions and inattentions that dull our self-knowledge are, precisely, failures to become what we are.

The treatise also displays a quietly ecumenical breadth. In arguing his case Nektarios draws freely on Fathers of both East and West and on the classical philosophers of Greece and Rome, presenting the Christian doctrine of man not as the property of one school but as the truth toward which right reason and revelation together point. His concern is never sectarian; it is to show that the human person, in body and soul, is more than the sum of his physiology—a conviction as pertinent now, when the reduction of mind to mechanism is pressed in new forms, as it was in 1893.

Reception & Influence

Nektarios’s stature has grown steadily since his death. The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s formal recognition of his sanctity in 1961 confirmed a veneration already widespread, and he is today among the most popular of Orthodox saints, honored well beyond the Greek-speaking world and invoked especially by the sick. His written corpus—dogmatic, ethical, historical, and devotional—has been continually reprinted and increasingly translated. A Sketch Concerning Man stands within that corpus as his most developed engagement with Christian anthropology, and it rewards attention both as a document of how a learned churchman answered the intellectual challenges of the late nineteenth century and as a still-living statement of the Christian understanding of the human person.

The Text & This Edition

The present volume offers a fresh, modern English translation of A Sketch Concerning Man, rendered from Nektarios’s own Greek. The basis is the first edition of 1893 — Hypotyposis peri anthropou, published at Athens—whose text survives in a public-domain facsimile preserved on the Internet Archive; that scanned Greek text was transcribed with optical character recognition, corrected by hand against the page images, and translated from the resulting edition. Nektarios wrote in the formal katharevousa Greek of his day, and the translation aims to carry his argument into clear, readable contemporary English while keeping the dignity and momentum of the original.

A few editorial conventions should be noted. The book follows the house practice of traditional attribution: the author is named as the Church receives him, Saint Nektarios, Metropolitan of Pentapolis, with his sainthood recorded as the plain fact it is. Those who prepared and rendered the text are credited as translators and editors, never as authors. Where Nektarios quotes Scripture, it is given in the register in which he himself quotes it, rather than conformed to a standard English version, so that the reader hears the text as he used it. Where he cites the naturalists and philosophers of his century, their names appear as he transliterated them into Greek. Citations of Scripture and of the work’s own internal divisions are given in the modern Arabic style. Nothing has been added to Nektarios’s argument and nothing abridged; the four-part structure of the original, with its prefatory address and preamble, is preserved intact.

Suggestions for Reading

The reader new to Nektarios need not begin at the beginning. Those drawn to the book’s central question may wish to read the address “To the Readers” and the “Preamble” first, for the flavor of the man and the shape of his purpose, and then turn to Part Three, on the nature and origin of the soul, and Part Four, on immortality, where his argument reaches its goal. The long comparisons of man and animal in Part One, and the ethnographic and philological chapters of Part Two, are the scaffolding by which he builds his case; they reward patience, and they show a churchman unafraid of the science of his age, but they can be sampled rather than read straight through on a first encounter. Throughout, it helps to remember the occasion: this is a bishop answering, at length and in earnest, a handful of clever students who doubted that the human soul was anything more than a finer animal instinct—and answering them, finally, with the Psalmist’s wonder that man should be made “a little lower than the angels” and “crowned with glory and honor.”