Saint Nicetas of Remesiana

For centuries Nicetas was hard to see. The 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia says that his writings were wrongly given to others, to a later bishop Nicetas of Aquileia and to Nicetius of Trier, and that only the research of Dom Germain Morin, A. E. Burn and others brought him back into focus. ¹

The key was putting two witnesses together. Gennadius of Marseilles, in his catalogue of Christian writers, lists "Niceas, bishop of the city of Romatia," who wrote six books of instruction for those about to be baptized. ² Paulinus of Nola, in his poems, writes of a friend Nicetas, "Bishop of the Dacians." ¹ The encyclopedia argues that they are one man: no other writer and bishop called Niceas is known, the dates agree, and in Dacia there was a city called Romatiana, now Bela Palanka, on the great Roman road from Belgrade to Constantinople. ¹

He was born, by the encyclopedia's estimate, about 335, and died about 414. ¹ "This is all that is known concerning the life of Nicetas," it says, after giving what Paulinus and Jerome add. ¹

In 398 Nicetas traveled to Nola, near Naples, to visit the grave of Saint Felix, and stayed with Paulinus. ¹ When he left for home, Paulinus wrote him a poem for the journey. ¹ In it, the encyclopedia says, Paulinus pictures his friend greeted with joy wherever he passes, because in the cold lands of the north he has melted icy hearts with the warmth of the Gospel and laid the yoke of Christ on peoples who never bowed their necks in battle. ¹ He wishes him a safe journey by land and by sea. ¹

The Roman Martyrology, as the Italian bishops print it, takes its entry for him from that poem. Translated here, it commemorates Saint Nicetas, bishop of Remesiana in Dacia, in present-day Serbia, whom Saint Paulinus of Nola celebrates in a poem for teaching the Gospel to the barbarians and making them like sheep led into a fold of peace, so that those who had once been an untaught people given to robbery had learned to make Christ resound in a Roman heart. ³

The encyclopedia adds that Jerome also speaks of his apostolic labors, and points to a letter in which Jerome writes that "the fierce Bessians and the throng of skinclad savages who used to offer human sacrifices in honour of the dead have broken out of their harsh discord into the sweet music of the cross." ¹⁵ Jerome does not name Nicetas in that passage; the encyclopedia reads it as his work. ¹⁵

Gennadius says Nicetas wrote six books of instruction for those seeking baptism, "in simple and clear language." ² The first told candidates how to conduct themselves; the second dealt with pagan errors, and told of a father of a family named Melodius and a peasant named Garadius whom the heathen, not long before his own time, had placed among the gods for their generosity and their bravery. ² The third was on faith in one God, the fourth against the casting of nativities, the fifth on the Creed and the sixth on the sacrifice of the paschal lamb. ¹²

Much of the work survives, the encyclopedia says, though not all of it. ¹ There are fragments of the first and second books; the third is probably the two treatises On the Nature of Faith and On the Power of the Holy Spirit, usually printed apart; and the fifth is most probably the Explanation of the Creed for candidates, which manuscripts had given to Origen or to Nicetas of Aquileia. ¹ Of the fourth and sixth nothing is known. ¹

Gennadius also mentions a little book to a virgin who had fallen, which he says would spur to amendment anyone who had fallen. ² The encyclopedia thinks a letter to a fallen virgin that Morin published in 1897 has the better claim to be it. ¹

Paulinus praised his friend as a writer of hymns, and the encyclopedia takes that as a sign that Gennadius did not list everything Nicetas wrote. ¹ Morin gave strong reasons, it says, for assigning him two treatises long credited to Nicetius of Trier, On the Vigils of the Servants of God and On the Good of Psalmody. ¹

The confusion went back a long way. Cassiodorus, in the sixth century, already knew Nicetas's book on faith bound into Saint Ambrose's treatise On Faith, which shows, the encyclopedia says, that some were crediting the great bishop of Milan with the Dacian bishop's work very early. ¹

The Te Deum, the Church's great hymn of thanksgiving, was long called the hymn of Saints Ambrose and Augustine, from a story that the two composed it together on the night of Augustine's baptism. ⁴ The encyclopedia's article on the hymn says that story can be traced only to the end of the eighth century and is now generally rejected. ⁴ Some manuscripts give the hymn to Nicetus, Nicetius, Nicetes or Neceta, names thought to stand for Nicetas of Remesiana. ⁴

In 1894 Morin proposed him as the author. ¹⁴ The case, as the encyclopedia lays it out, rests on ten manuscripts, the earliest of the tenth century and mostly Irish, that name Nicetas; on dates that fit; on Paulinus's praise of his hymns; and on the plain, direct style that Gennadius and Cassiodorus noticed in his prose. ⁴ The treatises on vigils and psalmody, it adds, show a man who felt the need of such a hymn. ⁴ Scholars in Germany, England and France accepted the suggestion. ⁴

Others did not, and the encyclopedia names them too. ⁴ Some argued that the first part of the hymn is far older, pointing to a close likeness between its lines on the apostles, prophets and martyrs and a passage of Saint Cyprian written in 252, and to its rhythm and melody. ⁴ The encyclopedia's article on Nicetas calls Morin's proof "particularly interesting"; the question has not been settled, and this page does not settle it. ¹⁴

No source used for this page names a patronage for Saint Nicetas of Remesiana, and none is claimed here. The Martyrology remembers him for teaching the Gospel to the peoples of the frontier. ³

Saint Nicetas of Remesiana's feast day is June 22, the day the Roman Martyrology commemorates him. ³ No source used gives the day he died; the encyclopedia dates his death only to about 414. ¹

What he wrote that is surely his was written for beginners: six books for people about to be baptized, in what Gennadius called simple and clear language. ² A bishop on the edge of the empire spent his pen on catechumens. ¹²

His friend remembered him for a harder work, among peoples who had been raiders and were now singing Christ. ¹³ Paulinus put it as melting ice; the Martyrology keeps his image of sheep brought into a fold of peace. ¹³

Whether or not he wrote the Te Deum, the treatises that are probably his are about keeping vigil and singing psalms, and A. E. Burn, who edited his works, thought he "lived in the same sphere of religious thought" as the hymn. ¹⁴ For most of the Church's history, nobody knew his name at all. ¹