05 — Theology
St. Nicholas Cabasilas (c. 1322 – c. 1392) is remembered not for a system but for two great theological intuitions worked out across The Life in Christ and the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy: that the Mysteries of the Church are themselves the channels of the deifying grace by which the soul is made one with Christ, and that the human person was created from the beginning for Christ, fashioned after Him as after an archetype. This section draws those two threads out of the works examined elsewhere in the collection and sets them side by side — a sacramental account of grace and deification, and a Christ-centred account of what a human being is.
Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (lay theologian; the sacramental life)
Cabasilas wrote no dogmatic treatise and entered none of the technical polemics of his age; his theology is embedded in works of liturgical commentary and spiritual instruction rather than stated as a set of theses (Bobrinskoy, in The Life in Christ, 1974; Spiteris, Cabasilas, 1996). Yet beneath the liturgical and devotional surface there is a coherent and original theological vision, and modern scholarship has increasingly read him as one of the most significant theologians of the late Byzantine world (Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987). Two convictions in particular reward separate treatment. The first is his fusion of the sacramental and the mystical: where other strands of Christian thought have set institutional, sacramental religion against inward mystical experience, Cabasilas makes the Mysteries the very means of mystical union, so that deification comes through baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist rather than around them. The second is his Christocentric anthropology: his startling claim that human nature was prepared at the creation for the “new man,” Christ, who is therefore not adapted to humanity but is the pattern after which humanity was made. Both stand within the Palamite and hesychast world examined in Cabasilas and Palamism, and both have shaped Orthodox theology long after his death.
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Grace and the Sacraments | Cabasilas’s synthesis of the sacramental and the mystical: grace as the uncreated life of God communicated through the Mysteries; deification (theosis) received through baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist rather than through ascetic effort alone; and how this “sacramental mysticism” distinguishes Cabasilas while keeping him within the hesychast–Palamite tradition. |
| Christ-Centred Anthropology | Cabasilas’s reversal of the relation between Christ and humanity: the human being made for Christ, fashioned after Him as archetype (Colossians 1:15–18); the rooting of this vision in the Life in Christ and in Maximus the Confessor; and its modern development, above all in Panayiotis Nellas. |
See Also
- Union with Christ — the goal toward which Cabasilas’s theology of grace is ordered
- The Sacramental Life — the treatise from which this section’s account of grace is drawn
- The Hesychast Synthesis — the Palamite background of his theology of deifying energy
- The Modern Rediscovery — the twentieth-century recovery of Cabasilas as a theologian
- Theosis — the doctrine of deification that both files presuppose
References
- Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro, with introduction by Boris Bobrinskoy. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.
- Congourdeau, Marie-Hélène, ed. and trans. Nicolas Cabasilas, La Vie en Christ. Sources Chrétiennes 355 and 361. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1989–1990.
- Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
- 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.
- Spiteris, Yannis. Cabasilas: teologo e mistico bizantino. Rome: Lipa, 1996.