The Doctrine of Justification: The Athens Doctorate of 1975

Nellas took his doctorate from the University of Athens in 1975 with a dissertation on the teaching of Nicholas Cabasilas concerning justification, published as Ἡ περὶ δικαιώσεως διδασκαλία Νικολάου τοῦ Καβάσιλα: Συμβολὴ εἰς τὴν ὀρθόδοξον σωτηριολογίαν — “A Contribution to Orthodox Soteriology.” The subtitle states the purpose. The work was written to show that when the Orthodox tradition speaks of a man being made righteous it means something other than a verdict pronounced over him, and that Cabasilas is the witness who shows what.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Work and Its Data

The dissertation was submitted to the theological faculty of the University of Athens and Nellas was made doctor in 1975 (Armos Publications, author page for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας: “in 1975 he was proclaimed doctor of the University of Athens with the subject of the teaching on justification of Nicholas Cabasilas”; Pemptousia, author page, to the same effect). It was published in the same year at Piraeus under the title Ἡ περὶ δικαιώσεως διδασκαλία Νικολάου τοῦ Καβάσιλα: Συμβολὴ εἰς τὴν ὀρθόδοξον σωτηριολογίαν (Greek booksellers’ bibliographic listings, including booksite.gr, philokalia.gr and evripidis.gr; the title with subtitle is uniform across them). It has since been reissued in Greece and is still sold (Greek booksellers’ listings, giving Indiktos as the press of the later edition).

Bishop Kallistos records the dissertation among the labours of a life given largely to Cabasilas (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 9–14). It has never been translated into English, and this collection has not been able to consult it directly; what follows sets out the question the book addresses and the position it defends, on the basis of its title and subtitle, the Cabasilan sources on which it necessarily rests, and the account of justification that Nellas gives in the one book of his that is available in English.

Why “Justification”

Dikaiōsis — justification — is not a native centre of gravity for Orthodox dogmatics. It is a Pauline word (Romans 3–5) which became, in the sixteenth century, the hinge of the Western argument between Rome and the Reformation, and it entered Orthodox theological writing chiefly through the Greek and Russian manuals of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries that had taken their architecture from Western sources (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 78–80, on the manual tradition; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, T&T Clark, 2019, on the “Western captivity” thesis and its qualifications).

The two Western positions, stated as briefly as fairness allows: the Reformation account treats justification as a forensic act — God declares the sinner righteous on account of Christ, the righteousness being imputed rather than infused, with sanctification following as a distinct work; the Tridentine account treats justification as a real making righteous through infused grace, but continues to work within a juridical frame of merit and satisfaction. Both are answers to a question posed in the courtroom.

Nellas’s dissertation was written in a Greek theological world that had, by the 1960s and 70s, become acutely conscious that it had inherited the question along with the answers, and that the Fathers had not asked it in that form. The intense mid-century discussion of justification in Greek theology belongs to the period, as one Greek notice puts it, in which the Orthodox world was freeing itself from a Westernised piety and reconnecting with patristic theology (Greek bibliographic notice for the title, booksite.gr). His subtitle — Συμβολὴ εἰς τὴν ὀρθόδοξον σωτηριολογίαν, “a contribution to Orthodox soteriology” — announces that the point of the study is not antiquarian. He is not asking what a fourteenth-century Byzantine happened to think about a sixteenth-century controversy. He is asking what Orthodox soteriology is, and using Cabasilas to say it.

What Cabasilas Supplies

Cabasilas is the right witness for the question for a specific reason: he uses the vocabulary of righteousness and reconciliation freely and yet has no forensic doctrine at all, because his whole account of salvation is participatory and sacramental.

The Life in Christ describes salvation as an incorporation. Baptism gives being in Christ; chrismation gives the energy proper to that being; the Eucharist gives Christ Himself, so that the Christian is not merely credited with a righteousness but fed with the Righteous One (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ I–IV, trans. deCatanzaro, SVS Press, 1974; see The Sacramental Life and Union with Christ). Cabasilas’s famous image is of the Christian as a living limb into which the Head circulates His own life — a physiology, not a jurisprudence. Where the Western debate asks how a guilty man is accounted righteous, Cabasilas asks how a dead man is made alive; and the answer, for him, is by the Mysteries.

The repository’s account of Cabasilas’s teaching on grace makes the same point and cites Nellas as an interpreter of it (see Grace and the Sacraments). The Orthodox doctrine of grace as the uncreated energies of God, given definitive articulation by St Gregory Palamas in the very century in which Cabasilas wrote, rules out from the start the notion of a created habit conferred on the soul or of a righteousness transferred from one account to another: what is given is God Himself, in His energies, really communicated (see St. Gregory Palamas and The Hesychast Synthesis). Nellas’s Cabasilas is a Palamite in the sense that matters — one for whom salvation is participation in the divine life, not a change in a legal status (see Theosis).

The Continuity with Zōon theoumenon

The dissertation is not a detour from the anthropology; it is its foundation. Two threads run straight from 1975 into the book of 1979.

Salvation is ontological, therefore anthropology is soteriological. If being saved means being really made alive in Christ rather than being accounted innocent, then the question “what is a human being?” cannot be answered apart from the question “what is a human being for?” This is the move that generates Zōon theoumenon: man defined by his destiny in Christ rather than by his present constitution (see A Living Creature Being Deified).

The christological archetype. Cabasilas’s claim that human nature was constituted from the beginning for the New Man, that Adam was made after the pattern of Christ, is stated in The Life in Christ VI — the same book from which Nellas takes the central thesis of his anthropology (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI, deCatanzaro 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987, 34: “Man’s archetype is therefore not simply the Logos but the incarnate Logos”). A scholar who has spent years establishing that Cabasilas’s soteriology is participatory arrives naturally at the anthropology it presupposes (see Image of the Image).

The published English book is thus the visible portion of a submerged mass. Readers who know only Deification in Christ are reading the conclusions of a decade of Cabasilas study whose evidence is in a Greek monograph they cannot get.

A Note on What Is Not Claimed Here

This file has been written with an explicit limit. The dissertation could not be consulted. No English translation exists; no substantial English-language summary of its argument was found in the sources available for this collection; the Greek bibliographic notices give the title, the year, the place and the fact of the doctorate and no more.

Accordingly, this file does not attribute to Nellas any specific thesis, division, chapter, page or formulation from the 1975 book. What it does is set out (a) the verifiable publication facts, (b) the question the title names and why that question was live in Greek theology at that date, and (c) the Cabasilan material on which any study of Cabasilas on justification must rest, cited from Cabasilas and from the standard literature. A reader who needs Nellas’s actual argument must read the Greek. This is the thinnest-sourced topic in the collection, and the collection says so rather than manufacturing detail.

References

Nellas, Panayiotis. Ἡ περὶ δικαιώσεως διδασκαλία Νικολάου τοῦ Καβάσιλα: Συμβολὴ εἰς τὴν ὀρθόδοξον σωτηριολογίαν. Piraeus, 1975. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Athens; not consulted for this file, and not translated.)
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.
Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
Kallistos of Diokleia (Ware), Bishop. Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, 9–14. 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.
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark, 2019.
Armos Publications and Pemptousia, author pages for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας (accessed 2026).
Booksite.gr, Philokalia.gr and Evripidis.gr, bibliographic listings for Ἡ περὶ δικαιώσεως διδασκαλία Νικολάου τοῦ Καβάσιλα (accessed 2026).