Union with Christ

For St. Nicholas Cabasilas the goal of human existence is union with the indwelling Christ — not Christ assisting the soul from without, but Christ living within the baptized, as St. Paul confesses: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). This union, begun in Baptism and brought to its summit in the Eucharist, reverses the ordinary direction of nourishment: we do not draw Christ down to ourselves and assimilate Him, but are assimilated to Him, made over into His likeness. Its term is deification, the participation of the human being in the life of God.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (lay theologian; the sacramental life)

The Indwelling Christ as the Goal of Existence

The whole of Cabasilas’s spiritual vision turns on a single conviction: that the human being was made for union with Christ, and that this union is not an external alliance but an indwelling. Christ, in his teaching, does not stand outside the soul to help it as a friend or counsellor helps from a distance; He enters and lives within those who are united to Him through the Mysteries, so that their life becomes His life and His life theirs (The Life in Christ, Book I; deCatanzaro 1974; Spiteris 1996). The governing text is St. Paul’s confession to the Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Cabasilas reads this not as a flight of apostolic rhetoric but as the literal description of what the baptized Christian is — a person in whom Christ has taken up residence and become the principle of life (The Life in Christ, Book I; Russell 2004, 304).

This indwelling is, for Cabasilas, the very purpose for which human nature was created. He stands in the long Greek patristic tradition that reads the human creature as made in the image of God and ordered toward likeness to Him, but he gives this anthropology a sharply Christological focus: the human being is made not merely for God in general but for Christ in particular, fashioned from the beginning with a capacity that only the incarnate Lord can fill (The Life in Christ, Books I, VI; deCatanzaro 1974; Spiteris 1996). The closing books of the treatise develop this into a meditation on the dignity and nobility of human nature, the soul being like a bride fashioned for one Bridegroom (cf. Ephesians 5:25–32; The Life in Christ, Books VI–VII; on this theme see A Christ-Centred Anthropology). Because the human being is so constituted, no created good can satisfy it; only the indwelling of Christ answers to the shape of the soul, and this is why union with Him, and not any lesser attainment, is the goal of human existence (Russell 2004, 304–305).

The Pauline and Johannine Foundation

Cabasilas’s doctrine of union is not an innovation but a reading of the New Testament’s most realistic language about the believer’s incorporation into Christ. He draws on the whole Pauline theology of being “in Christ” — the believer baptized into Christ’s death and raised with Him (Romans 6:3–5), the body whose members are the members of Christ (1 Corinthians 6:15, 12:27), the life now hidden with Christ in God and destined to be revealed in glory (Colossians 3:3–4). For Cabasilas these are not metaphors loosely strung together but descriptions of one ontological fact, the fact that the Christian has become a true member of the body of which Christ is the head, sharing His blood and His life as a limb shares the life of the body (The Life in Christ, Books I, IV; deCatanzaro 1974). St. Paul’s astonishment at the intimacy of the union — that the one joined to the Lord is “one spirit” with Him (1 Corinthians 6:17) — is exactly what Cabasilas means to expound.

He weds this Pauline language to the Johannine teaching on abiding. The Lord’s words in the discourse on the vine — “Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can ye, except ye abide in me” (John 15:4–5) — give Cabasilas the image of a union so organic that the Christian can do nothing apart from it, a branch drawing its very sap from the stock (The Life in Christ, Book I; Spiteris 1996). And the discourse on the bread of life — “Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life… He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him” (John 6:54–56) — supplies the bridge from union as abiding to union as Eucharistic communion, which is where Cabasilas’s most original development lies.

The Eucharist as the Most Intimate Union

If Baptism gives the new being in Christ and Chrismation its energies (see The Sacramental Life), it is the Eucharist that brings the union to its fullness, and here Cabasilas offers the image for which he is most famous. In every other form of nourishment, he observes, the food is changed into the one who eats it: bread and meat are broken down and assimilated to the body, becoming part of the living substance of the eater. But in the Eucharist this natural order is reversed. The living Bread that is received is not changed into us; rather, we are changed into it, assimilated to Christ, made over into His likeness — for here the food is more powerful than those who feed on it, and the stronger transforms the weaker into itself (The Life in Christ, Book IV; deCatanzaro 1974; Russell 2004, 305–306). We do not draw Christ down to ourselves and absorb Him into our life; He assimilates us to Himself and draws our life up into His.

This reversal is the conceptual centre of Cabasilas’s mysticism of communion. Ordinary union leaves the two parties distinct and the weaker spent in feeding the stronger; the Eucharistic union, by contrast, leaves Christ unchanged and transforms the communicant, so that the believer becomes Christlike not by imitation only but by a real participation in the One received (The Life in Christ, Book IV; Spiteris 1996). Cabasilas can therefore call the Eucharist the most intimate of all the Mysteries, the union beyond which there is nothing more intimate in this life, because in it Christ is received whole and the recipient is wholly made over to Him (The Life in Christ, Book IV; deCatanzaro 1974; on the realism this presupposes see The Eucharist). The teaching rests on the Eucharistic realism of the Greek Fathers, for whom the gifts are truly the body and blood of the Lord, and Cabasilas takes that realism to its mystical conclusion: to eat this Bread is to be incorporated into Christ so completely that one’s own life is replaced by His, and Galatians 2:20 becomes the literal truth of the communicant (The Life in Christ, Book IV; Russell 2004, 305).

Maximus, the Tradition, and the Logic of Union

Cabasilas did not arrive at this teaching alone. His doctrine of union belongs to and gathers up a long tradition, and his most important patristic debt is to St. Maximus the Confessor. From Maximus he inherits the vision of the incarnate Christ as the one in whom human and divine are united without confusion, and of the deifying union of God and the creature as the goal of the whole economy — a union in which the human being, while remaining fully human, is filled and penetrated by God as iron is filled with fire (on Maximus see the collection on St. Maximus; Russell 2004, on the Maximian background to later Byzantine deification). Cabasilas applies this Maximian logic to the individual life in Christ: the union with the incarnate Lord that Maximus describes cosmically and Christologically is realized personally and sacramentally in each member of the body through the Mysteries (The Life in Christ, Books I, IV; Spiteris 1996).

The tradition also supplies the safeguard that keeps Cabasilas’s language of union from collapsing into a pantheistic merger. The union is real and intimate, but it does not abolish the distinction between Christ and the believer or dissolve the human person into the divine; it is union by participation and indwelling, in which the creature remains creature even as it is filled with the life of God (Russell 2004, 304–306; Bobrinskoy 2012). This is the same balance that the hesychast theology of Cabasilas’s own day, articulated by St. Gregory Palamas, secured through the distinction between the unknowable divine essence and the deifying divine energies in which the saints participate (on this synthesis see The Hesychast Synthesis; on Palamas see the collection on St. Gregory Palamas). Cabasilas’s mysticism of union is thus the warm, sacramental, lay-facing expression of the same theology that Palamas defended in controversy.

Union as Deification

The term toward which the whole movement tends is deification — theosis, the participation of the human being in the life and glory of God. For Cabasilas the union with the indwelling Christ is not an end in itself but the means by which the creature is made god by grace, sharing through Christ in what belongs to God by nature (The Life in Christ, Books I, IV; deCatanzaro 1974; Russell 2004, 304–306). This is the patristic principle, classically stated by St. Athanasius and St. Maximus, that God became man so that man might become god; Cabasilas restates it in sacramental terms, locating the place of deification not in a rare contemplative ascent but in the Mysteries available to every Christian (Russell 2004, 1–3, 304–306; on the doctrine as a whole see Theosis: Deification in Orthodox Theology). The Christian is deified because Christ lives in him; the human being shares in the divine life because he has been made a member of the body of the incarnate God and is nourished on His flesh and blood (The Life in Christ, Book IV; 2 Peter 1:4, the promise that we become “partakers of the divine nature”).

Cabasilas’s account of deification is therefore inseparable from his sacramental mysticism. Because the union with Christ is given through Baptism, Chrismation, and the Eucharist, deification is not the prize of an elite asceticism but the proper destiny of the baptized, begun now and to be consummated in the age to come when, as St. Paul says, “Christ, who is our life, shall appear” and we shall appear with Him in glory (Colossians 3:4; The Life in Christ, Book I; Russell 2004, 304). The dignity of human nature, the theme of his final books, is precisely this capacity for deification: the human creature is noble above all the visible creation because it alone is made to be filled with God and united to Christ (The Life in Christ, Books VI–VII; see A Christ-Centred Anthropology). In this way Cabasilas’s theology of union gathers the whole of his work into a single arc — from the indwelling begun at the font, through the most intimate communion at the Holy Table, to the deification that is the end for which humanity was made. The dogmatic grounding of this teaching in grace and the Mysteries is pursued further in the theology section (see Grace and the Sacraments; on the principles governing this account see the methodology).

See Also

References

  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The indwelling Christ and the goal of existence, Book I; the Eucharist as the most intimate union and the reversal of assimilation, Book IV; the dignity of human nature, Books VI–VII.)
  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. La Vie en Christ. Ed. and trans. Marie-Hélène Congourdeau. Sources Chrétiennes 355 & 361. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1989–1990. (Critical Greek text and French translation; the standard scholarly edition.)
  • Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Cabasilas’s doctrine of union and deification, esp. 304–306; the Maximian background and the patristic principle of deification, 1–3.)
  • Spiteris, Yannis. Cabasilas: teologo e mistico bizantino. Rome: Lipa, 1996. (The mysticism of union with Christ and the Eucharistic theology of assimilation.)
  • Bobrinskoy, Boris. The Mystery of the Church: A Course in Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2012. (Union with Christ and deification by grace in Orthodox dogmatic theology.)