Editing and Translating Cabasilas

Nellas’s editorial work on Cabasilas began in 1968 with the three Marian homilies, the first volume of his Epi tas Pigas series, and continued through the doctoral study of 1975 and into the anthropology of 1979. He belongs to the twentieth-century rediscovery of Cabasilas alongside Lot-Borodine, Salaville, Congourdeau and deCatanzaro — but his distinctive contribution was not textual. It was to think with Cabasilas and make him a source for a living theology rather than an object of historical study.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The 1968 Edition

The first fruit was Nicholas Cabasilas, Ἡ Θεομήτωρ: τρεῖς θεομητορικὲς ὁμιλίες [“The Mother of God: Three Marian Homilies”], with the Greek text, an introduction, a modern Greek rendering and commentary by Nellas. It was published at Athens by the Panhellenic Sacred Foundation of the Evangelistria of Tinos in 1968, in 228 pages, as volume 1 of the series Ἐπὶ τὰς πηγάς: Ἐκλεκτὰ πατερικὰ κείμενα (Google Books record for Ἡ Θεομήτωρ; catalogue record, Koventareios Municipal Library of Kozani, which specifies “κείμενο, εἰσαγωγή, νεοελληνικὴ ἀπόδοση, σχόλια Παναγιώτου Νέλλα”).

Cabasilas’s three Marian homilies — on the Nativity of the Theotokos, on the Annunciation, and on the Dormition — are the least-read part of a corpus dominated by The Life in Christ and the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. They are also the place where his anthropology is most concentrated, because the Mother of God is for Cabasilas the human being in whom human nature actually did what it was made to do: she is not an exception to humanity but its realisation (see The Marian Homilies and The Theotokos). A theologian who would go on to argue that man is defined by his destiny rather than his present condition had an obvious motive for beginning here.

[Disputed: the extent of Nellas's later editorial work on Cabasilas. The 1968 volume is securely attested with full bibliographic data. Whether Nellas edited further Cabasilan texts within *Epi tas Pigas*, and if so which, could not be established from the sources consulted; the online booksellers and publishers' pages that carry most accessible information about him list only his two authored books. This file therefore attests one edition and does not extrapolate a programme of editions from it.]

Where He Stands in the Rediscovery

The modern recovery of Cabasilas has a well-defined shape, set out in full at The Modern Rediscovery. Its principal moments:

Myrrha Lot-Borodine, Un maître de la spiritualité byzantine au XIVe siècle, Nicolas Cabasilas (Paris: Éditions de l’Orante, 1958) — the first modern monograph, which established Cabasilas as a master of the spiritual and sacramental life rather than a liturgical commentator, and read him through the doctrine of deification.
Sévérien Salaville, ed. and trans., Explication de la Divine Liturgie, 2nd ed. rev. by René Bornert, Jean Gouillard and Pierre Périchon, Sources Chrétiennes 4 bis (Paris: Cerf, 1967) — the critical text of the Commentary, produced by a Catholic Assumptionist within the ressourcement.
Carmino J. deCatanzaro, trans., The Life in Christ (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1974) — the English translation that carried Cabasilas to the Anglophone seminary and parish.
Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, ed. and trans., Nicolas Cabasilas, La Vie en Christ, Sources Chrétiennes 355 and 361 (Paris: Cerf, 1989–1990) — the critical text of The Life in Christ and the introduction that underlies the modern biography.
The glorification of 1983 by the Ecumenical Patriarchate, which set the Church’s seal on the recovery (see The Canonization of 1983).

Nellas’s place in that list is distinct, and it should be described accurately rather than inflated. He was not the critical editor of Cabasilas’s major works. Salaville and Congourdeau were. He was not the English translator; deCatanzaro was. He did not write the first modern monograph; Lot-Borodine did. What he did was three things:

He edited a neglected part of the corpus into modern Greek — the Marian homilies, in a form a Greek reader could use.
He wrote the study of Cabasilas’s soteriology that treated the fourteenth-century theologian as a witness in a live dogmatic question rather than as a historical subject (see The Doctrine of Justification).
He built a systematic anthropology on Cabasilas’s christological thesis — which is the act by which Cabasilas passed from being a rediscovered author to being a source (see Section 07).

The repository’s own summary of this is exact and this collection stands by it: Deification in Christ “did much to make Cabasilas a living source for contemporary Orthodox thought rather than only an object of historical study” (see The Modern Rediscovery).

Chronological Coincidence Worth Noting

Two dates sit close together and are worth setting beside one another without over-reading the connection.

Nellas died on 6 April 1986. The Ecumenical Patriarchate had glorified Cabasilas in 1983 (see The Canonization of 1983). Nellas therefore lived to see his subject entered among the saints — a fact worth registering for a scholar who had spent close to twenty years on him, and who had begun by editing the homilies that Cabasilas wrote in honour of the Mother of God.

No source consulted records any statement by Nellas about the canonization, and this collection does not invent one. The proximity is noted; nothing is built on it.

The Character of the Reading

One feature of Nellas’s use of Cabasilas deserves comment because it distinguishes him from the editors.

Nellas read Cabasilas as a Father, not as a late-medieval author. His declared method is to approach the Fathers “from within the Church and using faith as our basic method” (Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 24; quoted in Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 82), and Russell glosses the practice precisely: “The Fathers are to be studied not like any ancient text but from within the community of faith. Nellas, as it were, enters into conversation with the Fathers, letting them take him forward where they will. … Gone now are preconceived theological schemes to which the Fathers added as testimonies” (Russell 2006, 82).

This is both the strength and, for a certain kind of reader, the vulnerability of his Cabasilas. The strength is that it produces theology rather than Forschungsgeschichte: Cabasilas’s fourteenth-century sentences are made to bear on twentieth-century questions about the human person because Nellas assumes they can. The vulnerability is that the historian will want the fourteenth-century context supplied before the sentences are transposed — the Palamite controversies, the Zealot revolt in Thessaloniki, the particular polemical setting of The Life in Christ — and Nellas is not writing that kind of book. The repository’s historical treatment of Cabasilas supplies that context independently (see The Historical Cabasilas and Thessaloniki in the Fourteenth Century).

Whether reading a Father “from within the Church” is a superior method or a way of foreclosing historical questions is one of the standing arguments about the whole neo-patristic project, and it is not settled (see Nellas Among the Greek Generation). What can be said without controversy is that Nellas knew what he was doing and said so on page 24 of his book.

References

Cabasilas, Nicholas. Ἡ Θεομήτωρ: τρεῖς θεομητορικὲς ὁμιλίες. Text, introduction, modern Greek rendering and commentary by Panayiotis Nellas. Ἐπὶ τὰς Πηγάς: Ἐκλεκτὰ Πατερικὰ Κείμενα 1. Athens: Πανελλήνιον Ἱερὸν Ἵδρυμα Εὐαγγελιστρίας Τήνου, 1968. 228 pp.
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.
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
Lot-Borodine, Myrrha. Un maître de la spiritualité byzantine au XIVe siècle, Nicolas Cabasilas. Paris: Éditions de l’Orante, 1958.
Salaville, Sévérien, ed. and trans. Explication de la Divine Liturgie. 2nd ed., rev. René Bornert, Jean Gouillard and Pierre Périchon. Sources Chrétiennes 4 bis. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1967.
Congourdeau, Marie-Hélène, ed. and trans. Nicolas Cabasilas, La Vie en Christ. Sources Chrétiennes 355 and 361. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1989–1990.
Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
Google Books and Koventareios Municipal Library of Kozani, catalogue records for Ἡ Θεομήτωρ (accessed 2026).