Alexander (correspondent of Nilus of Ancyra)

Alexander is known only as a monastic correspondent of Nilus of Ancyra (d. c. 430), to whom Nilus addressed six surviving letters of spiritual direction in the early-5th-century Galatian milieu around Ancyra (modern Ankara). The address lines trace his progress: he is greeted variously as "a Monk Formerly a Grammarian," as "the Monk," and ultimately as "the Archimandrite" (head of a monastery), suggesting a man who renounced secular learning for the ascetic life and rose to lead a community. Nilus writes to him on characteristic themes of his own monastic theology, urging him to abandon the "hollow" worldly wisdom of his former profession, to pursue stillness (hesychia) and dispassion (apatheia), and once rebuking him sharply for extorting offerings from people "in the midst of insults and anger" rather than trusting prayer to provide. Beyond these letters Alexander is otherwise unattested as an independent historical figure.