03 — Cabasilas Scholarship
Nicholas Cabasilas was the labour of Nellas’s working life. He edited Cabasilas’s Marian homilies as the first volume of Epi tas Pigas in 1968, took his Athens doctorate in 1975 with a study of Cabasilas’s teaching on justification, and built the anthropology of Zōon theoumenon on Cabasilas’s christological account of the human person. He is one of the principal figures in the twentieth-century recovery of Cabasilas, and among the most theologically consequential.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Doctrine of Justification | The 1975 Athens dissertation, Ἡ περὶ δικαιώσεως διδασκαλία Νικολάου τοῦ Καβάσιλα; why justification was the chosen question; the Orthodox soteriology it was written to serve |
| Editing and Translating Cabasilas | The 1968 edition of the three Marian homilies; Nellas’s place in the modern rediscovery of Cabasilas alongside Lot-Borodine, Salaville and Congourdeau; what he added that the editors did not |
Why Cabasilas
The choice was not arbitrary, and it is the key to Nellas’s whole project.
Cabasilas was a layman. He was, so far as the evidence goes, never ordained, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate glorified him as a lay saint in 1983 (see The Layman Theologian and The Canonization of 1983). For a lay theologian who taught schoolchildren and who belonged to a generation of Greek laymen recovering their own theological vocation, the precedent mattered.
Cabasilas’s anthropology is christological in the strong sense. The burden of Book VI of The Life in Christ is that human nature was constituted from the beginning for the sake of the New Man; that Adam was made after the pattern of Christ and not Christ after the pattern of Adam; that the first man was “the image of the second” (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI, trans. deCatanzaro, SVS Press, 1974; see Christ-Centred Anthropology). This is precisely the thesis Nellas would develop into a systematic anthropology (see Image of the Image).
Cabasilas’s soteriology is sacramental, not forensic. The Life in Christ describes salvation as incorporation into Christ through baptism, chrismation and the Eucharist — a real participation rather than an imputed verdict. A Greek theologian of the 1960s and 70s working to free Orthodox dogmatics from imported Western categories could find no better source, and “justification” was exactly the term at which the two accounts collide.
The Shape of the Contribution
The repository’s own account of the twentieth-century Cabasilas revival names Nellas as its most concentrated theological development: “The most concentrated single development of Cabasilas in modern Orthodox theology is the work of Panayiotis Nellas, whose Deification in Christ … built an entire theological anthropology on Cabasilas’s Christ-centred account of the human person” (see The Modern Rediscovery). This collection agrees with that judgement and sets out its basis.
The distinction to hold is between the editors and the theologian. Sévérien Salaville produced the critical text of the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy (Sources Chrétiennes 4 bis, 1967); Marie-Hélène Congourdeau produced the critical text of The Life in Christ and the modern biography (Sources Chrétiennes 355 and 361, 1989–1990); Myrrha Lot-Borodine wrote the first modern monograph (1958); Carmino deCatanzaro made the English translation (1974). Nellas edited a small but important part of the corpus and, more importantly, thought with Cabasilas — took a fourteenth-century argument and made it the spine of a twentieth-century anthropology.
See Also
- Deification in Christ — the book in which the Cabasilas material becomes an anthropology
- Christ the Archetype of the Human — the central Cabasilan thesis in Nellas’s hands
- St. Nicholas Cabasilas — the full collection on his subject
- The Life in Christ — the treatise at the centre of the reading
- Soteriology — the Church’s account of salvation, within which “justification” is located
References
- Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
- Nellas, Panayiotis. Ἡ περὶ δικαιώσεως διδασκαλία Νικολάου τοῦ Καβάσιλα: Συμβολὴ εἰς τὴν ὀρθόδοξον σωτηριολογίαν. Piraeus, 1975.
- Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987.
- Congourdeau, Marie-Hélène, ed. and trans. Nicolas Cabasilas, La Vie en Christ. Sources Chrétiennes 355 and 361. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1989–1990.
- Salaville, Sévérien, ed. and trans. Explication de la Divine Liturgie. 2nd ed. Sources Chrétiennes 4 bis. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1967.
- Lot-Borodine, Myrrha. Un maître de la spiritualité byzantine au XIVe siècle, Nicolas Cabasilas. Paris: Éditions de l’Orante, 1958.