Christ-Centred Anthropology

St. Nicholas Cabasilas advances one of the most striking reversals in Byzantine theology: the human being was made for Christ, not Christ adapted to humanity. Human nature was created from the beginning with a capacity and a longing that only Christ fulfils; He is the archetype after which humanity was fashioned, “the new man” for whose sake “human nature was created at the beginning, and for him mind and desire were prepared.” This file expounds that Christocentric anthropology — its rooting in Colossians 1:15–18 and the idea of Christ as the image after which Adam was made, its grounding of the whole vision of the life in Christ, its deep resonance with Maximus the Confessor, and the modern theological interest it has attracted as an early statement of a Christ-centred reading of creation.

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

The Reversal

At the centre of Cabasilas’s understanding of the human person lies a deliberate inversion of the order most readers expect. The natural assumption is that God, in the Incarnation, accommodated Himself to an already-constituted humanity — that human nature came first and Christ came to repair and adapt to it. Cabasilas reverses this. For him the relation runs the other way: humanity was made for Christ, fashioned from the first after Him as after a pattern, so that the Incarnate Lord is not a remedy fitted to a pre-existing human nature but the very archetype according to which that nature was designed (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI; deCatanzaro 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987). The famous formulation comes in the sixth book of The Life in Christ: it was for the sake of the new man — Christ — “that human nature was constituted from the beginning, and for him mind and desire were prepared” (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI; deCatanzaro 1974). Adam, Cabasilas says in the same context, was made after the pattern of Christ, not Christ after the pattern of Adam: the first man was “the image of the second,” the model and exemplar of human nature being not the first Adam but the last (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI; deCatanzaro 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987).

This is not a passing rhetorical flourish but a controlling principle. Because humanity was made for Christ, the entire constitution of the human person — its mind, its capacity for desire and love, its restlessness, its orientation beyond itself — is intelligible only with reference to Christ. The human being is built around a Christ-shaped space, and every faculty was “prepared” with Christ as its true object (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI; deCatanzaro 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987). What looks from below like a generic human openness to the transcendent is, from above, a specific orientation toward the God-man.

The Christ-Shaped Capacity and Its Fulfilment

Cabasilas works this conviction out through a meditation on human desire. The human soul, he observes, has a capacity for love, a power of longing, that exceeds every finite object; nothing in the visible creation can fill it, and even the souls that pour themselves out upon creatures find their thirst unquenched (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ II, VI; deCatanzaro 1974). This is not, for Cabasilas, a defect or a mere generic infinity of appetite; it is a faculty made to a measure, and the measure is Christ. The human power of love was created so vast precisely because it was prepared for an infinite object, and that object is the God who became man: the eye was made for light and the ear for sound, and the soul’s love was made for Christ (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ II; deCatanzaro 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987).

It follows that only Christ can fulfil the human being, and that He fulfils it not as one good among others but as the single thing for which it was constituted. Cabasilas presses the point: the saints in their longing reach out for “one thing only,” and that desire finds rest in Christ alone, in whom the soul at last possesses what it was made for (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ II, VI; deCatanzaro 1974). The whole of the spiritual life, on this reading, is the homecoming of a nature to its archetype — the bringing of human desire, mind, and will to the One after whom they were patterned and for whom they were prepared (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987; Bobrinskoy, in The Life in Christ, 1974). This is why the treatise is called The Life in Christ and not “the life toward Christ”: the goal is not adjacency to Christ but the soul’s coming to live by Him as its proper form.

The Scriptural Root: Colossians and the Image

The scriptural ground of this anthropology is the Pauline doctrine of Christ as the image of God and the firstborn of creation. In Colossians, Christ is “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation,” in whom and through whom and for whom all things were created, who is “before all things,” and in whom “all things hold together,” the head of the body, the Church, who is “the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be pre-eminent” (Colossians 1:15–18). Cabasilas’s reversal is in essence an anthropological reading of this hymn: if all things were created for Christ, then so was the human being, and Christ as the image of God is the image according to which humanity, itself made “in the image” (Genesis 1:26–27), was formed (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI; deCatanzaro 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987).

The move is exegetically pointed. The Genesis text says man was made “in the image of God”; the Christological reading of Colossians identifies that image with Christ, “the image of the invisible God.” Cabasilas draws the conclusion that the image after which Adam was made is the Son who would become incarnate, so that human nature was Christoform from its first creation, made to be filled by the One whose image it already bore (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI; deCatanzaro 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987). The Pauline “in Christ” and “with Christ” language stands behind the whole structure: the believer is one who has died and whose “life is hid with Christ in God,” who will appear with Christ in glory (Colossians 3:3–4), and who can say with Paul, “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). For Cabasilas this indwelling is not a violence done to human nature but its fulfilment — Christ living in the soul is the nature attaining the end for which it was made (Galatians 2:20; Cabasilas, The Life in Christ I, VI; deCatanzaro 1974).

The Resonance with Maximus the Confessor

Cabasilas’s Christocentric anthropology is not an isolated novelty but the late-Byzantine flowering of a theme deep in the Greek patristic tradition, and above all in St. Maximus the Confessor (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996). Maximus had taught that the mystery of Christ — the union of God and humanity in one person — is the very purpose for which the world was made, the “great and hidden mystery” and the goal foreknown before all ages toward which the whole creation is ordered (Maximus, Ad Thalassium 60; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996). For Maximus the Incarnation was not occasioned merely by the Fall as an afterthought but belonged to God’s primordial purpose, the logos of every created thing finding its coherence in the divine Logos who would become flesh (Maximus, Ad Thalassium 60; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996; see St. Maximus the Confessor).

Cabasilas stands in this lineage, drawing the Maximian cosmic Christocentrism inward to the anthropological key: where Maximus speaks of the mystery of Christ as the end of the cosmos, Cabasilas speaks of Christ as the archetype of the human person and the fulfilment of human desire (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987; Louth, Maximus the Confessor, 1996). The continuity is one of substance: both hold that creation, and humanity within it, was ordered from the first toward Christ, so that the Incarnation reveals not a divine improvisation but the original meaning of what it is to be human (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987; Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004). The resonance also reaches back, through Maximus, toward the Pauline and Johannine roots and forward into the whole hesychast and Palamite vision of the deified human being, for which the human person is by constitution capable of God (see The Hesychast Synthesis and Theosis).

How It Grounds the Whole Life in Christ

This anthropology is the foundation on which Cabasilas’s entire theology of the sacramental life rests, and seeing it explains why his account of grace takes the form it does. If the human being was made for Christ and finds its fulfilment only in Him, then salvation cannot be a matter of mere moral correction or of escape from the body; it must be the bringing of human nature to its archetype, the forming of Christ within the person until the person lives by Christ’s own life (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ I, VI; deCatanzaro 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987). And since, for Cabasilas, this forming of Christ in the soul is accomplished through the Mysteries, the Christocentric anthropology and the sacramental mysticism are two aspects of a single vision: the Mysteries are the means by which a Christoform nature is brought at last to its Christ (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ II–IV; deCatanzaro 1974; see Grace and the Sacraments).

Deification, in this light, is not the divinisation of something alien to humanity but the completion of humanity, the actualisation of a capacity built into the human person from the beginning (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987; Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004; Theosis). To become “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4) is to become fully human, because human nature was prepared for this partaking from its creation (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI; deCatanzaro 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987). Cabasilas thus closes the gap that a less Christocentric anthropology leaves open between nature and grace: grace does not violate nature or merely supplement it but brings it to the end for which it was constituted, the indwelling of the Christ after whose image it was made (Galatians 2:20; Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI; deCatanzaro 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987).

The Modern Theological Interest

Cabasilas’s Christ-centred anthropology has attracted considerable modern theological attention, in part because it anticipates a Christocentric reading of creation that twentieth-century theologians, Orthodox and Western alike, would develop in their own terms (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987; Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). Within Orthodoxy the decisive figure is Panayiotis Nellas, whose Deification in Christ takes Cabasilas’s teaching that humanity was made for Christ as the cornerstone of a whole theological anthropology: the human person, Nellas argues, is not defined “from below” by its biological or psychological nature but “from above” by its archetype, Christ, so that the truth of what a human being is appears only in the God-man (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987). Nellas reads Cabasilas as supplying exactly the anthropology a contemporary Orthodox theology needs — one that refuses both a naturalism that defines humanity apart from Christ and a dualism that sets grace against nature (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987; see The Modern Rediscovery).

The broader interest lies in the way Cabasilas’s reversal touches the long-debated question whether the Incarnation belongs to God’s primordial purpose for creation or only to the remedy of the Fall (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987; Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004). A theology in which humanity was made for Christ inclines toward the former: Christ is the meaning of creation, not merely its repair. This is the same intuition that, in a different idiom and along independent lines, animated later Western reflection on the primacy of Christ, and modern readers have noted the convergence — though Cabasilas argues it not as a speculative thesis about the motive of the Incarnation but as a description of the actual constitution of the human person, made and longing for the Christ in whom alone it is completed (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ VI; deCatanzaro 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987; Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004).

[Disputed: the precise location and wording of the "human nature created for the new man" teaching are best attributed to *The Life in Christ*, Book VI, in deCatanzaro's translation (SVS, 1974) and the corresponding place in Congourdeau's critical edition (SC 361, 1990); editions and translations divide the Greek by chapter and section differently, so a single universally agreed section number should not be assumed. The substance of the teaching — Adam made after the pattern of Christ, human mind and desire prepared for the new man — is not in dispute and is treated as central to Cabasilas's anthropology across the scholarship (Nellas, *Deification in Christ*, 1987; Russell, *The Doctrine of Deification*, 2004).]

See Also

References

  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro, with introduction by Boris Bobrinskoy. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The primary text; Book VI on human nature created for the new man, Adam made after the pattern of Christ, and the preparation of mind and desire for Christ; Book II on the soul’s capacity for love made for an infinite object.)
  • Congourdeau, Marie-Hélène, ed. and trans. Nicolas Cabasilas, La Vie en Christ. Sources Chrétiennes 355 and 361. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1989–1990. (Critical Greek text and French translation; Book VI in SC 361.)
  • 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. (A theological anthropology built on Cabasilas’s teaching that the human person is defined “from above” by its archetype, Christ; the principal modern development of Cabasilas’s Christocentric anthropology.)
  • Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Deification and Christ-centred anthropology in the Greek Fathers, including Maximus and Cabasilas.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. London: Routledge, 1996. (Maximus on the mystery of Christ as the purpose of creation, Ad Thalassium 60.)
  • Maximus the Confessor. Ad Thalassium (Questions to Thalassius) 60. (The mystery of Christ as the end foreknown before the ages toward which creation is ordered.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The modern Orthodox reception of Cabasilas and of patristic Christocentric anthropology.)