Nilus (correspondent of Isidore of Pelusium)

Nilus is known as a correspondent of Isidore of Pelusium (d. c. 450) and figures as a recipient of a cluster of his letters in the milieu of Pelusium and the eastern Nile Delta in the early-to-mid 5th century. The letters Isidore addresses to him treat him as an educated inquirer: he writes to ask the meaning of scriptural phrases, and Isidore answers with detailed exegesis of Job 22:12 ("Does not He who dwells on high oversee?") and of the wisdom of Daniel and the three young men, distinguishing true God-given understanding from "the meddlesome learning practiced among the Chaldeans." Other letters to him range across moral and doctrinal themes that he had himself raised, including the condemnation of suicide, the danger of presuming on God's longsuffering, and his own "bold yet true" observation that the corruption of those honored by Christ obscures the redemption Christ accomplished; one consolatory letter, opening with a Latin tag from Virgil's Aeneid, addresses the speechless numbness of overwhelming grief. He is otherwise unattested, and these letters are the only basis for what can be said of him; nothing in them identifies him with any independently famous figure of the same name.