NILUS THE YOUNGER, Saint. - Also called of Rossano, where he was born ca. 910. Of illustrious birth, N. received a very careful education; he soon entered as a simple cleric in the service of the Cathedral. By a girl of very modest condition, whom he married, he had a little daughter.
Wishing to withdraw from the world, he passed into the region of the Mercurion, where he led for many years a solitary and penitent life in the cave of St. Michael. Because of the continuous Saracen incursions he betook himself first to the mountains north of Rossano, organizing around the oratory of St. Adrian a first community of his, which he then led to Valleluce near Montecassino, then to Serperi, near Gaeta. He made frequent pilgrimages to the tombs of the Apostles with the aim also of procuring parchments and bringing books there. In 998 he went there to intercede in favor of the unhappy antipope Philagathus (John XVI), his fellow countryman. In 1004 he left Serperi and, by divine impulse, reached the Tusculanum, where he received in donation from Count Gregory the territory of Grottaferrata for his last and most enduring foundation, but in that same year, on the evening of Sept. 25, he ceased to live.
Besides being the most representative figure of Italo-Greek cenobitic monasticism in the 10th century, St. N., who was also knowledgeable in Latin, was an expert calligrapher and the author of that particular tachygraphic system called Italo-Greek, of which his manuscripts, which together with those of his immediate disciples constituted the first nucleus of the Library of Grottaferrata, provide a fine example. He was also a hymnographer, and there have been preserved a Greek office in honor of St. Benedict, sung during one of his visits to Montecassino, and a hymn for St. Nilus Sinaita. The biographer makes express mention of some of his letters: to the judges of Bisignano, to the notary of the emir of Palermo, to Leo abbot of St. Alexis on the Aventine, to the antipope Philagathus. His feast in the Roman Martyrology and in the Italo-Greek Synaxaria is established on Sept. 26.
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Teodoro Minisci