St. Nikolai Velimirovich

St. Nikolai Velimirovich — called “the New Chrysostom” by St. John of San Francisco and “the Thirteenth Apostle” by his disciple St. Justin Popovich — was one of the most brilliant, prolific, and spiritually radiant bishops of the twentieth century. A peasant’s son from the hills of Serbia who mastered seven languages and earned doctorates at Bern and Oxford, he became a fearless preacher whose sermons shook nations, a pastor whose letters healed broken souls, a prisoner of Dachau who wrote prayers beneath German bayonets, and the author of the Prologue from Ohrid, the most beloved devotional treasury in all of Serbian Orthodoxy. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ was the center of his whole life.

A Peasant’s Son with a Scholar’s Mind

Nikolai Velimirovich was born on December 23, 1880, in the tiny Serbian village of Lelić, near Valjevo, to devout peasant parents Dragomir and Katarina. He was one of nine children — and the only sibling who would survive both World Wars. From his earliest years he showed an unusual piety, walking three miles each way to the Monastery of Rakovica with his mother for services. He was an avid reader who hid in the monastery belfry to read undisturbed, and he developed a lifelong love for the working poor and the Serbian peasant soul.

Rejected from military service because of his frail, small stature, he enrolled at St. Sava Seminary in Belgrade, where he struggled with chanting but excelled brilliantly in scholarship. Supported by the Serbian Church, he studied abroad in Switzerland, Germany, and England, becoming fluent in seven languages and reading widely across philosophy, culture, and science. In 1908 he earned a doctorate in Bern with a dissertation entitled Faith in the Resurrection of Christ as the Fundamental Dogma of the Apostolic Church. The following year he completed a second doctorate at Oxford on the philosophy of George Berkeley. Upon returning home gravely ill, he took monastic vows and was ordained in 1909 at Rakovica Monastery — the very place his mother had carried him to as a child.

The Third Army: Preaching that Shook Nations

St. Nikolai’s passionate preaching quickly drew the attention of both Serbian youth and the hostile Austro-Hungarian authorities, who interrogated him and banned him from academic gatherings. When the Great War erupted, he served the poor and wounded, donated his salary to Serbia’s defense fund, and published Above Sin and Death — sermons glorifying those who died defending their homeland.

From 1915 to 1919, the Serbian Church sent him as an emissary to England and America to publicize Serbia’s suffering. He preached across Europe and the United States, raising funds and morale with such extraordinary power that Britain’s Commander-in-Chief declared that Father Nikolai comprised the Third Army. He became the first and only non-Anglican ever to preach at both St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey in London — a testament to the sheer force of his holiness and eloquence that transcended all confessional boundaries.

Bishop of Ohrid and Žiča: The Pastoral Heart

In 1919, Nikolai was elected Bishop of Žiča, and later transferred to Ohrid. As bishop, he rebuilt churches and monasteries devastated by war, founded orphanages — notably the one where St. John of San Francisco later taught — and encouraged the Jesus Prayer, frequent communion, and lay preaching among his flock.

During these years he authored the work that would become his greatest legacy: the Prologue from Ohrid, written between 1926 and 1928 at the request of his spiritual sons, including St. Justin Popovich. This monumental treasury contains daily lives of the saints, hymns of praise, reflections, and short homilies for every day of the year. St. Justin Popovich himself wrote that in all Serbian history, there has never been a book of greater wisdom than the Prologue from Ohrid. Fr. Josiah Trenham calls it the ultimate devotional and the core of a complete theological education — practical, spiritual, and scriptural.

He also wrote Prayers by the Lake in 1922 — one hundred deeply poetic meditations on repentance and the soul’s longing for God, composed at a monastery overlooking Lake Ohrid. These prayers are philosophically and theologically profound, marked by penetrating insight into the mystery of suffering, the complexity of the human heart, and the radical God-centeredness that transforms all of life.

The Missionary Letters: A Surgeon of Souls

Between the world wars, St. Nikolai wrote over three hundred personal letters to people from every station of life — from the House of Lords to Serbian peasants, from grieving fathers to theologians wracked by doubt, from educated girls seeking wisdom to a barkeeper contemplating suicide. No one was beneath his attention, and every letter begins with the cry of a soul and ends with divine consolation.

To a theologian troubled by unbelief, he wrote that the pain of doubt is itself a sign of love for God. To a father mourning his son, he counseled that excess in sorrow is a sin and redirected grief toward prayer and almsgiving. To a woman haunted by an abortion, he exposed the spiritual reality behind her torment and assured her of divine forgiveness with fearless compassion. To the suicidal barkeeper he wrote words that cut with the precision of a surgeon, sharp but never cruel: There are many beggars in the Kingdom of God, but not a single suicide.

His letters teach that despair is the dowry of death received by unbelievers, that communion is worth more to the dying man than all the requiems of the world, that the five wounds of Jesus are five sources of the most pure blood with which mankind has been washed, and that worry is unbelief disguised as responsibility. He urged Christians to reject moral duality — living one integrated Christian life in public and private — teaching that when Americans enter conference with the same thoughts as when they enter church, our nation will be strong.

Mount Athos and the Spirit of Repentance

St. Nikolai visited Mount Athos yearly and befriended St. Silouan the Athonite, from whom he bought many books personally so that the holy monk would touch each one. These pilgrimages marked a profound transformation in his spiritual life. Fr. Josiah Trenham identifies two distinct phases: before Ohrid, Nikolai was intellectual, eloquent, and cultured; after Ohrid, he became humble, repentant, and spiritually aflame.

He learned to disdain praise and to seek only Christ’s glory. When asked about another bishop slandering him, he replied only with silence and a compassionate gaze — clearer than any answer. His entire being was reoriented toward the one thing needful: the inner war against sin that, as he taught, is the only war God truly commands. If man refuses inner war against sin, he must wage war against God and neighbor. Peace in the world begins with repentance in the soul.

Prophetic Voice: The Conscience of Europe

St. Nikolai was not merely a pastor — he was a prophet who read the signs of his age with terrifying clarity. He denounced the 1937 concordat with the Vatican, foreseeing it would enslave Serbia spiritually. He warned that Europe’s apostasy would lead to catastrophe, writing that Christ has withdrawn from Europe, as once from the Gadarenes, and only darkness and stench are left.

In his 1927 book War in the Bible, written as a gift to friends attending a peace gathering in America, he offered twenty-three chapters of biblical interpretation showing that war comes from sin — that the sin of man toward man is always the consequence of sin toward God. He demonstrated from Scripture that righteousness, not numbers, decides the outcome of war; that sexual debauchery among soldiers is a cause of national ruin; that alliances with immoral nations bring disaster; and that godless peace is the creator of war.

His most piercing insight was that the only war God truly commands is war against oneself. If man refuses this inner battle against his own sin, then external war against neighbor and nation becomes inevitable. He saw the interwar peace conferences — which invited diplomats but not God — as merely pouring gasoline on the city, and he predicted with prophetic accuracy that another world war was coming unless repentance intervened.

Dachau: Prayers in the Shadow of Bayonets

When the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, St. Nikolai refused to flee his suffering people. He was arrested in 1941 and imprisoned for three years before being sent to Dachau concentration camp. Even in captivity, he continued to pray daily on his face, writing hidden prayers scribbled inside a Gospel book that is still preserved in Vienna — Three Prayers in the Shadow of German Bayonets.

Freed by the Allies in 1945, he emerged physically broken but spiritually radiant. The experience of war and imprisonment deepened his already fierce conviction that Western civilization, having abandoned Christ, had become what he called the white devil — a culture of baptized nations slaughtering one another in wars that shamed the name of Christianity. Yet even in this darkness, his hope never wavered: war may destroy Christian nations, but not Christianity.

Final Years in America: The Exile Who Became a Father

Unable to return to communist Yugoslavia, St. Nikolai settled in the United States, where he spent his final decade teaching and preaching at St. Sava Monastery in Libertyville, Illinois, St. Vladimir’s Seminary in New York, Jordanville, and St. Tikhon’s Seminary, where he served as rector. He trained seminarians in the art of preaching with exacting standards — requiring written drafts, reviews, and rehearsals before any student could mount the pulpit.

During these American years he wrote his final works: Cassiana, The Lord’s Harvest, and his last unfinished book, The Only Lover of Mankind. He also wrote his Life of St. Sava in English — not Serbian — because he wanted Americans to know the prototype saint and church-builder whose holy nationalism was rooted not in empire but in Christ, and whose model proved that a nation becomes holy through the Church.

St. Nikolai’s love for the people of America was not sentimental. He taught that true ecumenism means deep friendship and cooperation with non-Orthodox Christians without any theological compromise — love so the heterodox can recognize the treasure Orthodoxy carries. He cultivated lifelong friendships with Anglicans and Catholics, collaborated for shared moral goods, and modeled what Fr. Josiah Trenham calls the mature Orthodox way: rebuke heresy without hatred, love the heterodox without flattering their errors, cooperate for truth without surrendering the truth.

The Theologian of Love

Running through all of St. Nikolai’s writings like a golden thread is the theme of love — not as sentiment, but as divine power. In his work The Passion, he composed one hundred sayings on love in the ancient Orthodox literary form of a century, meant not to be studied abstractly but to be prayed through.

He taught that love is sweeter than life and stronger than death, that by losing love people lost all sense of truth, and that everything will be easy for you to do and endure as soon as you acquire holy love. He wrote that the earth quaked twice because of Christ’s love — at His death and at His resurrection — but the third quake, the trembling of human hearts, continues forever.

His theology of suffering was equally penetrating: only the foolish think suffering is evil; the sensible man knows it is the healing of evil. Suffering is God’s mercy, sobering us from the inebriation of sin. And his theology of prayer went to the heart of the matter: prayer is not heavenly merchandise or bargaining with God. God does not seek glory for Himself — He seeks glory for you. The goal of prayer is not getting things but receiving the King into the soul, so the heart becomes flooded with divine life.

Blessed Repose and Glorification

St. Nikolai Velimirovich reposed on March 5, 1956, during Great Lent, at St. Sava Monastery in Libertyville, Illinois. He was buried there, and in 1999 his relics were translated to Serbia, where a monastery now stands over them in his native Lelić.

He was glorified as a saint of the Orthodox Church in 2003. His spiritual son St. Justin Popovich called him the Holy Bishop, the Thirteenth Apostle, the Fifth Evangelist. St. John of San Francisco declared him a universal teacher of the Orthodox Church, the New Chrysostom. Fr. Alexander Schmemann said simply that Bishop Nikolai was the manifestation of Orthodox spirituality for all Orthodox people.

His legacy continues to grow through the Prologue from Ohrid, which is read daily by Orthodox Christians around the world, and through his prayers, letters, sermons, and theological works that speak to every generation with undiminished power. Modern saints show us that holiness is possible now, in America, in our generation — and St. Nikolai, who lived through two world wars, survived a concentration camp, and died in exile still praising God, is the proof.