Gigantius

Gigantius is known only as a recipient of six short letters from Nilus of Ancyra, in the early-5th-century Ancyran milieu of Galatia. The addresses identify him as a deacon and as a church-advocate (ekklesiekdikos, a church's legal defender), and Nilus writes to him in the manner of spiritual direction: urging him not to lose heart over the gift of dispassion (apatheia), reframing demons as the malicious thoughts to be trodden underfoot, pressing him to honor and fear his father and mother, warning against clinging to inherited gold, and twice counseling him to quench an illicit passionate love by refusing to look on the longed-for face and healing the wound through prayer and fasting. These brief admonitions, several drawing on Leviticus, suggest a younger cleric under Nilus's ascetic guidance and struggling with worldly attachment, but beyond this correspondence he is otherwise unattested.