The Marian Homilies

Among the works of St. Nicholas Cabasilas are three homilies on the Mother of God — on her Nativity, on the Annunciation, and on her Dormition — which rank among the richest Marian preaching of the Byzantine age. They present the Theotokos as the summit of created holiness: the all-pure Virgin who, of her own free will, gave her assent to God at the Annunciation and so cooperated freely in the salvation of the world. This file sets out the content and importance of these homilies and addresses, soberly and non-polemically, why their high doctrine of the Virgin’s purity must not be read as the Latin dogma of the Immaculate Conception.

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

The Three Homilies

Besides his two great prose works, Cabasilas left a small body of festal homilies, of which the three Marian sermons are the most celebrated: a homily on the Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos (8 September), a homily on the Annunciation (25 March), and a homily on the Dormition (15 August) (Martin Jugie, ed., Homélies mariales byzantines, Patrologia Orientalis 19, fasc. 3, Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1926; Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, introduction to Nicolas Cabasilas, La Vie en Christ, Sources Chrétiennes 355, Paris: Cerf, 1989, on the corpus and chronology). They were edited with a Latin translation by the Assumptionist scholar Martin Jugie in the Patrologia Orientalis in 1926, the edition on which subsequent study has rested, and they were rendered into English in Mary, the Mother of God: Sermons by Saint Nicholas Cabasilas (Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2005).

These sermons belong to a long and luxuriant tradition of Byzantine Marian preaching that runs from St. Andrew of Crete and St. John of Damascus in the eighth century down to the last centuries of the empire (on which see St. John of Damascus). Within that tradition Cabasilas’s homilies are reckoned among the finest of the late period — dense, theologically ambitious, and animated throughout by the same Christ-centred vision that governs his sacramental writing (Congourdeau, La Vie en Christ, SC 355, introduction; Andrew Louth, Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681–1071, Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007, on the Byzantine Marian homiletic tradition). They are festal oratory, but oratory in the service of theology: each feast becomes the occasion for an extended meditation on what the Virgin is and on what God accomplished in and through her.

The governing theme of the homilies, and the one for which they are best known, is the free consent of the Theotokos. Cabasilas dwells on the scene of the Annunciation (Luke 1:26–38), and especially on the Virgin’s words to the angel — “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; let it be unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38) — as a true and unconstrained act of the human will. God, in Cabasilas’s reading, did not simply override the Virgin or use her as a passive instrument; He sought her free assent, and the Incarnation waited upon her “yes” (Homily on the Annunciation, in Jugie, Homélies mariales byzantines, PO 19; trans. in Mary, the Mother of God, 2005). The salvation of the world, in this presentation, hung upon the free cooperation of a human being.

This is one of the most striking statements of human freedom and synergy in Byzantine theology. Cabasilas insists that the Virgin’s consent was genuinely her own, the fruit of her own purity and love, and that in giving it she acted on behalf of the whole human race — offering to God, from the side of humanity, the free welcome that the Incarnation required (Homily on the Annunciation, PO 19; Mary, the Mother of God, 2005; Boris Bobrinskoy and other modern commentators on Cabasilas’s Mariology). The Annunciation thus becomes a moment of cooperation between Creator and creature, in which God’s initiative and the Virgin’s free response meet (on synergy and the human will, see Christ-Centred Anthropology). The accent on freedom is wholly characteristic of Cabasilas, whose entire theology turns on the believer’s free and personal appropriation of the grace given in Christ (see Union with Christ).

The All-Holiness of the Theotokos

If the Annunciation homily centres on the Virgin’s freedom, the homilies as a whole develop a sustained account of her holiness. Cabasilas presents the Theotokos as all-holy (panagia) and all-pure — the one human being in whom the original purpose of God for humanity was perfectly realized, the summit and crown of created holiness (Homily on the Nativity of the Theotokos and Homily on the Dormition, in Jugie, PO 19; trans. Mary, the Mother of God, 2005). She is the new Eve, in whom the human race at last produced a fruit worthy of God; she is the one in whom the long preparation of the ages came to its term (Jugie, PO 19, introduction; Mary, the Mother of God, 2005). The homilies pile up the imagery of light, of the temple, of the bridal chamber, to express a holiness that surpasses that of every other creature, angelic or human.

The Nativity homily reflects on the birth of the Virgin as the dawn of salvation, the appearance of the one for whom the whole of sacred history had been waiting; the Dormition homily contemplates her passage from this life and her glorification, the fitting end of a life of unequalled sanctity (Jugie, PO 19; Mary, the Mother of God, 2005; see Theotokos). Throughout, Cabasilas’s praise is exalted to the limit of what created holiness can bear — and it is precisely the height of his language that has drawn modern attention and made these homilies a focus of theological discussion.

The Modern Discussion and a Necessary Distinction

In the modern period the Marian homilies have been read with particular interest in connection with Mariological debate, above all the question of the Virgin’s freedom from sin. Some Roman Catholic scholars — Jugie himself among them, and others after him — have read Cabasilas’s exalted account of the Virgin’s all-holiness as approaching, or even anticipating, the doctrine defined as Roman Catholic dogma in 1854, the Immaculate Conception (the teaching that the Virgin Mary was preserved free from original sin from the first instant of her conception). The interest is natural, given that Cabasilas’s praise of the Virgin’s purity is about as high as patristic language goes.

Here the greatest care is required, and it must be exercised without polemic (METHODOLOGY §4). The Orthodox tradition has never received the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and there are deep reasons why Cabasilas’s homilies cannot simply be annexed to it. The Latin dogma is framed within an Augustinian theology of original sin — inherited guilt transmitted at conception — from which the Virgin is said to have been uniquely preserved; the Orthodox tradition, including Cabasilas, does not work with that Augustinian framework and so does not pose the question in the terms the Latin dogma answers (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, New York: Fordham University Press, 1979, on the Eastern understanding of ancestral sin; Louth, Greek East and Latin West, on the divergence of the two traditions). What Cabasilas affirms is the surpassing personal holiness and purity of the Virgin, achieved within and on behalf of fallen humanity — not her exemption from a juridically conceived inheritance of guilt. The two doctrines arise from different theologies of sin, and the resemblance of the praise can mislead if the difference of the underlying frameworks is forgotten.

[Disputed: the bearing of Cabasilas's Marian homilies on the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception is contested. Martin Jugie (*Homélies mariales byzantines*, PO 19, and his wider Mariological work) and some later Roman Catholic scholars read Cabasilas's account of the Virgin's all-holiness as anticipating or supporting the 1854 dogma; Orthodox theologians and historians (e.g. the line of interpretation associated with John Meyendorff and with the recovery of an Eastern, non-Augustinian theology of ancestral sin) hold that his praise of the Virgin's purity is articulated within a framework that neither poses nor answers the Latin question, and so cannot be claimed for the Immaculate Conception. The homilies' high doctrine of the Virgin's holiness is not in dispute; what is disputed is whether that doctrine is materially the same as the Roman dogma. This file affirms the holiness Cabasilas teaches and leaves the cross-confessional question to the named scholarship.]

The sound conclusion is the one the homilies themselves support: Cabasilas teaches an extraordinarily high doctrine of the Virgin’s holiness and purity, and that doctrine is distinctly and authentically Orthodox. It is to be received as praise of the panagia who freely cooperated with God and stands as the summit of created sanctity — not as a covert form of a later Western dogma, and not as a foil for inter-confessional polemic (see Theotokos). Read in their own terms, the homilies are a witness to the Orthodox veneration of the Mother of God at its most theologically rich.

The Place of the Homilies in Cabasilas’s Thought

The Marian homilies are not a digression from Cabasilas’s central concerns but an extension of them. His whole theology is an account of how the human being is united to God and made a partaker of the divine life through free cooperation with grace (see The Sacramental Life and Grace and the Sacraments). In the Theotokos he finds the perfect instance of that cooperation: the one human being whose free assent and unequalled purity made her the place where God became man (Mary, the Mother of God, 2005; Congourdeau, La Vie en Christ, SC 355, introduction). The Virgin is, for Cabasilas, the model of the life in Christ — the human response to God realized to perfection — and his Mariology is therefore of a piece with his sacramental anthropology (see Christ-Centred Anthropology).

This integration is what gives the homilies their depth. They are not occasional pieces of festal flattery but a meditation on the human side of the Incarnation, on freedom and grace meeting in a single person. For this reason the homilies have figured prominently in the modern rediscovery of Cabasilas as a theologian of the first rank, and they are among the works that have carried his name beyond the bounds of specialist Byzantine studies (see The Modern Rediscovery and Cabasilas in Orthodox Spirituality). Together with The Life in Christ and the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy (see The Explanation of the Liturgy), they constitute the slender but extraordinarily concentrated body of work on which his reputation rests (see The Works and Their Transmission).

See Also

References

  • Jugie, Martin, ed. Homélies mariales byzantines. Patrologia Orientalis 19, fasc. 3. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1926. (Critical edition with Latin translation of Cabasilas’s homilies on the Nativity of the Theotokos, the Annunciation, and the Dormition; the editor’s reading of the Virgin’s all-holiness in relation to the Immaculate Conception.)
  • Mary, the Mother of God: Sermons by Saint Nicholas Cabasilas. Brookline: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2005. (English translation of the three Marian homilies; the free consent of the Virgin at the Annunciation; her all-holiness and purity.)
  • Cabasilas, Nicolas. La Vie en Christ. Ed. and trans. Marie-Hélène Congourdeau. Sources Chrétiennes 355 and 361. Paris: Cerf, 1989–1990. (Introduction on Cabasilas’s corpus, including the homilies, and on his chronology and theology.)
  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The wider theology of freedom, grace, and union into which the Mariology fits.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. 2nd ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979. (The Eastern understanding of ancestral sin and its difference from the Augustinian framework of the Immaculate Conception.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Greek East and Latin West: The Church AD 681–1071. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2007. (The Byzantine tradition of Marian homiletics and the divergence of Eastern and Western theology.)