Cabasilas and the Sacramental Life

The archetype of man is a Person, and a Person is received, not contemplated. Part Two of Deification in Christ is Nellas’s account of how the christological anthropology of Part One is actually realised: through baptism, chrismation and the Eucharist, in the ascetic labour that follows from them, and in a spiritual life that is “not a life of laws and precepts but a life of participation, affection and love.” The material is Cabasilas’s, gathered from twenty years of work on him.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Structure of Part Two

Part Two, “The Spiritual Life in Christ,” runs from page 109 to page 162 in five divisions: the presuppositions of the spiritual life (109), its nature (115), the living of it (121), its fruits (141), and the cosmic body of Christ (157) (contents of Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987).

The title is Cabasilas’s — The Life in Christ is the treatise on which the whole part draws — and so is the shape of the argument. Cabasilas’s book opens with the proposition that the life in Christ is engendered in this world and begins here; that it is received through the three Mysteries of initiation; and that what the Christian does afterwards is the exercise of a life already given rather than the earning of one (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ I, trans. deCatanzaro, SVS Press, 1974; see The Sacramental Life and Union with Christ).

The Three Mysteries

Cabasilas’s structure, which Nellas takes over, treats the sacraments of initiation as three moments of a single incorporation.

Baptism is birth: it confers being in Christ. Cabasilas’s language is deliberately ontological rather than juridical — baptism does not chiefly remit a debt, it constitutes a new existence. The Christian comes out of the font not acquitted but alive.

Chrismation is the imparting of the energy proper to that new being. What baptism gives as existence, chrismation activates as operation: the powers of the new life are set in motion.

The Eucharist is the term and the summit. Here what is given is not a grace, a gift or an effect but Christ Himself. Cabasilas’s characteristic image is that in the other Mysteries we receive something from Christ, but in this one we receive Christ; and unlike ordinary food, which is assimilated by the eater, this food assimilates the eater to itself (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ IV; deCatanzaro 1974; see The Divine Liturgy and The Holy Mysteries).

For an anthropology whose thesis is that man’s archetype is the incarnate Logos, this is exactly the required mechanism. If humanity was made after the pattern of Christ, then becoming human means being conformed to Christ; and if the conforming were a matter of imitation, it would be a project of the will operating on a distant model. Cabasilas’s sacramentology makes it instead a matter of incorporation: the archetype is not held before the creature as an example but planted in him as a life.

Not a Life of Laws

The keynote sentence of Part Two is the one Russell singles out and that has become the most-quoted line of Nellas’s book: “the spiritual life is not a life of laws and precepts but a life of participation, affection and love, a life of mingling and mixing with God” (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987, 116; quoted in Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 82).

Three refusals are packed into it.

Against moralism. The reduction of the Christian life to conduct — to the keeping of rules and the avoidance of transgressions — was the standing charge of Nellas’s generation against the Greek religious formation they had received, and it is the charge that lies behind the break with the Zoe brotherhood in the early 1960s (Russell 2006, 89 n. 11; see From Makrakomi to Athens). Nellas is not denying that Christians must obey the commandments; he is denying that obedience is what the Christian life is.

Against forensic soteriology. If salvation were a verdict, the spiritual life would be conduct undertaken with a verdict in view. Because salvation is participation, the spiritual life is the exercise of a communion already given. This is the direct continuation of the doctoral work of 1975 (see The Doctrine of Justification and Soteriology).

Against the reduction of grace to a created effect. “Mingling and mixing with God” is strong language, and it is deliberate. What is communicated in the Mysteries is God’s own life in His uncreated energies, not a created gift standing between God and the soul. This is the Palamite doctrine that Cabasilas inherited in his own century (see Grace and the Sacraments, St. Gregory Palamas and Theosis).

The positive form of Nellas’s account, in Russell’s summary: he “lets the Fathers show us that God is not an impersonal eternal ‘principle’ but our ontological origin and consummation. When we live theandrically — in imitation of Christ — we realize ourselves by reaching out into infinity” (Russell 2006, 82).

The Christian as Layman

There is a point in Cabasilas that Nellas had particular reason to press, and it deserves separate statement.

Cabasilas’s argument in The Life in Christ is that the whole life of union with Christ, issuing in deification, is received through the Mysteries by every member of the Church — not by ascetic feats reserved to the few. The distinction between the sacramental life of the layman and that of the monk is one of circumstance and not of access to grace. Cabasilas was himself a layman, and the Ecumenical Patriarchate glorified him as one in 1983 (see The Canonization of 1983 and The Layman Theologian).

Nellas was a layman who taught schoolchildren in Athens, in a generation of Greek lay theologians recovering a vocation their church had largely reserved in practice to clergy and monks. That the great sacramental theologian of the Byzantine tradition should have been a layman arguing that laymen have full access to the deified life was not an incidental attraction. It is one plausible reason — this collection puts it no higher, because no source states it — why he spent his life on Cabasilas rather than on some other Father.

The Cosmic Body of Christ

Part Two closes with a division on “the cosmic body of Christ” (Nellas 1987, 157–162), and this is the bridge into Part Three’s cosmology.

The logic: if the Eucharist assimilates the communicant to Christ, and if what is offered in the Eucharist is bread and wine — the material creation worked by human hands — then the deification of man is not a private transaction between a soul and God. Man is the creature in whom the world is offered and through whom the world is sanctified. The material creation is drawn into the process by which the zōon theoumenon is deified.

This is the point at which Nellas’s anthropology becomes a cosmology, and it is why the book can proceed from a chapter on the garments of skin to an engagement with the natural sciences without a change of subject (see Anthropology by Destiny).

What Nellas Added to Cabasilas

The material of Part Two is largely Cabasilas’s; the question is what Nellas did with it. Three things.

He put it inside an anthropology. In Cabasilas, the sacramental theology is the whole subject. In Nellas it is Part Two of a book whose Part One has established what a human being is. The Mysteries are thereby presented not as the practices of a religion but as the means by which a creature becomes what he is.

He connected it to the fallen condition. The garments of skin are transformed in the sacramental life. Nellas’s Part One and Part Two are joined by that claim: the mortal, biological, culture-making creature described in chapter II is the creature who is baptised, chrismated and fed.

He made it usable in the twentieth century. Cabasilas wrote in the Greek of fourteenth-century Thessaloniki for readers who had never heard of forensic justification, secular humanism or evolutionary biology. Nellas is a modern writer addressing modern readers, and — in Spiteris’s judgement, quoted by Russell — one of the few Greek theologians able to bring theology into rapport with modern Greek culture (Spiteris, La teologia ortodossa neo-greca, Bologna, 1992, 256; Russell 2006, 82).

See Also

• Image of the Image — the christological thesis that this sacramental theology realises
• The Doctrine of Justification — the participatory soteriology behind the refusal of moralism
• Consequence and Provision — the garments that the sacramental life transforms
• The Sacramental Life — Cabasilas’s own account
• The Holy Mysteries — the sacraments of the Church
• The Divine Liturgy — the rite in which the Eucharist is celebrated
• Theosis — the end of the whole process

References

• 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. (Part Two, 109–162; the quoted sentence at 116.)
• Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
• Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
• Spiteris, Yannis. La teologia ortodossa neo-greca. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992.
• Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.