Grace and the Sacraments

The heart of St. Nicholas Cabasilas’s theological achievement is a synthesis: he fuses the sacramental and the mystical into a single reality. Where one influential way of thinking sets institutional, sacramental religion against inward mystical experience, Cabasilas makes the Mysteries themselves the channels of the very grace by which the soul is deified — so that union with the indwelling Christ is not a bypassing of baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist but the full reception of what they give. This file expounds that synthesis: grace as the uncreated life of God communicated through the Mysteries, deification accomplished through them rather than through ascetic athleticism alone, and how this “sacramental mysticism” both distinguishes Cabasilas and keeps him within the hesychast and Palamite world of his century.

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

The Synthesis Stated

The single most characteristic feature of Cabasilas’s theology is that he refuses the opposition, familiar from much later Western Christian thought, between the sacramental and the mystical — between the objective, churchly, ritual mediation of grace and the inward, personal, immediate experience of God (Bobrinskoy, introduction to The Life in Christ, 1974; Spiteris, Cabasilas, 1996). For Cabasilas these are not two religions, nor even two stages, but one movement: the life of union with Christ is given and grows precisely in and through the Mysteries of the Church. The Life in Christ is built on exactly this conviction, taking as its programme the three great sacraments of initiation — Baptism, Chrismation with the holy myron, and the Eucharist — and showing how through them Christ is begotten in the soul, the soul’s powers are quickened, and the believer is brought into the most intimate union with the Lord (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ I–IV; deCatanzaro 1974; see The Sacramental Life).

The originality of this lies in what it refuses. It is possible — and in the history of Christian spirituality it has been common — to treat the sacraments as the ordinary, exterior support of religion for the many, and mystical union as a higher, more interior path reached by ascetic and contemplative effort beyond them. Cabasilas will not have it. The whole architecture of his masterwork insists that there is no higher grace to be sought past the Mysteries, because the Mysteries already communicate the highest grace there is: the life of Christ Himself (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ I; deCatanzaro 1974; Bobrinskoy 1974). “The life in Christ,” he writes at the opening of the treatise, “originates in this life and arises from it,” and it is “perfected” by the sacraments — for “Christ comes to us through these” (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ I; deCatanzaro 1974). The mystical is sacramental, and the sacramental is mystical, all the way down.

Grace as the Uncreated Life of God

To understand why the Mysteries can bear this weight, one must see what Cabasilas means by the grace they convey. Grace, for him, is not a created gift, a quality or disposition implanted in the soul and distinct from God; it is the uncreated life of God Himself, communicated to the believer (Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004; Bobrinskoy 1974). Here Cabasilas stands squarely within the theology vindicated by the councils of his century: the Palamite teaching that what is given to the deified creature is the uncreated energy of God, truly God and yet distinct from the imparticipable divine essence (Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1974; see The Hesychast Synthesis and Theosis). Cabasilas does not argue this in the technical vocabulary of essence and energies — he is not writing polemic — but his whole account of the sacramental life presupposes it: what the Mysteries give is not merely a benefit from God but God’s own life, the life of the risen and glorified Christ (Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004; Spiteris, Cabasilas, 1996).

This is why he can speak of the sacraments in such startlingly realist language. In Baptism the believer does not merely receive forgiveness and a fresh start; he receives being itself, is brought into existence as a Christian, “born” into the new life — for Baptism “is the cause of a blessed existence… not merely an existence but one that is blessed” (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ II; deCatanzaro 1974; see Baptism and Chrismation). Cabasilas presses the language of generation and birth: through the font Christ is formed in us and we are made members of His body, so that the baptismal water is a womb and the rite a true new birth into the life of God (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ II; deCatanzaro 1974; Bobrinskoy 1974). Because the grace at work is the very life of God, the Mystery does not signify the new life from a distance but actually effects and contains it.

Deification Through the Mysteries

The goal of this communicated life is theosis, deification: the believer made, by grace and participation, what God is by nature — sharing in the divine life, conformed to Christ, and united to Him (Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987; Theosis). Cabasilas’s distinctive contribution to this ancient Greek patristic theme is the route by which deification is reached. For a long tradition associated above all with the monastic and ascetic literature, deification is the summit of a long labour: purification of the passions, unceasing prayer, watchfulness, the praxis and theoria of the contemplative life, crowned at last by the vision of the divine light (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 1964; Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004). Cabasilas does not deny the place of this ascetic labour, but he refuses to make it the means of deification. The means are the Mysteries; the labour is the response (Bobrinskoy 1974; Spiteris, Cabasilas, 1996).

This is the inversion that gives his theology its character. He begins not with what the soul must do but with what Christ has done and continues to do through the sacraments. The order of The Life in Christ is itself the argument: the sacraments first, the moral and ascetic life afterward as their fruit, because “it is not we who possess these things but they that possess us” — the grace comes first and works in us, and our striving is the working-out of a life already received (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ I–II, VI; deCatanzaro 1974; Bobrinskoy 1974). For a layman of fourteenth-century Thessaloniki this was a theology of liberating breadth: the highest reaches of the spiritual life, deifying union with Christ, are not reserved for the monk on Athos perfecting his technique of prayer but are given in the Mysteries to every baptized member of the Church (Spiteris, Cabasilas, 1996; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). The life in Christ is offered to all who have been baptized, chrismated, and admitted to the Holy Table, and its perfection is a matter of receiving more fully what is already given, not of climbing past it.

The Eucharist as the Summit

Among the Mysteries the Eucharist holds the highest place in Cabasilas’s account, because it gives most completely what all the sacraments give: Christ Himself (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ IV; deCatanzaro 1974; see Eucharist). Baptism gives being and chrismation gives the energy of the new life, but the Eucharist is the consummation, for in it the believer does not merely receive a gift from Christ but receives Christ entire, and is united to Him as food is united to the one who eats — except that here, Cabasilas insists, the union runs the other way (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ IV; deCatanzaro 1974; Bobrinskoy 1974). In ordinary nourishment the food becomes the substance of the eater; in this nourishment the eater is assimilated to the food, transformed into Christ rather than transforming Him, “for it is not we who change it into ourselves but it is changed into us” (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ IV; deCatanzaro 1974). The image is among the most quoted in all his writing, and it states his sacramental mysticism in a single figure: the most intimate mystical union of which the soul is capable is given in the most concrete sacramental act there is, the eating of the consecrated gifts.

It is no accident that Cabasilas devoted a whole separate work to the rite of this Mystery, the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, in which the celebration of the Eucharist is read throughout as the action of Christ Himself accomplishing the salvation of those present (Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy; Hussey & McNulty 1960; see The Explanation of the Liturgy and Liturgy as the Work of Christ). For Cabasilas the Liturgy is not a human commemoration into which God may or may not enter but the very channel through which sanctifying and deifying grace is poured out, and its whole purpose is the consecration of the faithful through communion in the Body and Blood of Christ (Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy 1; Hussey & McNulty 1960; Bornert, Les commentaires byzantins de la Divine Liturgie, 1966; see The Divine Liturgy). The mystical theology of The Life in Christ and the liturgical theology of the Commentary are thus two faces of one doctrine of grace.

A Sacramental Mystic Within the Palamite World

It is this configuration that justifies describing Cabasilas as a sacramental mystic — a phrase modern scholars have found apt for him precisely because it holds together two things often separated (Spiteris, Cabasilas, 1996; Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). He is a mystic: his subject is the soul’s transforming union with the indwelling Christ, the most interior and personal of all themes. He is sacramental: he locates that union wholly within the objective, churchly, given order of the Mysteries. The two are not in tension for him because the grace that deifies and the grace that the sacraments convey are one and the same uncreated life of God (Bobrinskoy 1974; Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004).

This places Cabasilas in a particular and somewhat distinctive position within the hesychast and Palamite tradition of his century. He shares its theology of grace entirely — the uncreated energies, deification as real participation in God, the rejection of a merely created or moral grace (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1974; Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004). What he does not share is the centre of gravity of much hesychast literature in the technique of contemplative prayer and the discipline of hēsychia. The classic hesychast writers expound the path to the vision of the uncreated light through stillness, the Jesus Prayer, and bodily method; Cabasilas expounds the reception of the same uncreated life through the Mysteries of the Church (Spiteris, Cabasilas, 1996; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; see The Hesychast Synthesis). The difference is one of emphasis and idiom rather than of doctrine: Cabasilas presupposes the Palamite settlement and embodies it in a sacramental key, giving the late Byzantine theology of deification its most ecclesial and liturgical expression (Bobrinskoy 1974; Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004).

[Disputed: scholars differ over how far Cabasilas should be read as a self-conscious Palamite at all. Some, following Meyendorff (*A Study of Gregory Palamas*, 1964) and the Sources Chrétiennes presentation (Congourdeau, SC 355, 1989), situate him firmly within the Palamite camp by his associations and by the deifying-grace theology that underlies his work; others, noting that he nowhere argues the essence–energies distinction and that his idiom is sacramental rather than polemical, caution against reading the *Triads* into *The Life in Christ* and prefer to call his Palamism implicit or presupposed rather than asserted (Spiteris, *Cabasilas*, 1996). The texts themselves carry the deifying-energy theology without the controversial vocabulary, which is why both readings can be sustained.]

Why the Synthesis Matters

The significance of Cabasilas’s synthesis is easiest to see by contrast. A recurrent temptation in Christian thought has been to drive a wedge between the outward and the inward — to suppose that the sacraments belong to a lower, churchly, almost mechanical order of religion, while true closeness to God is a matter of inward experience reached past or apart from them. Cabasilas’s whole theology is a refusal of that wedge (Bobrinskoy 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987). The most inward thing that can happen to a human being — to be made one with God, deified, indwelt by Christ — happens through the most outward and given things the Church has, the water of the font, the oil of chrism, the bread and wine of the altar (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ II–IV; deCatanzaro 1974). Grace is not less personal for being mediated; it is personal because of what is mediated, namely the person of Christ Himself (Bobrinskoy 1974; Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004).

This is why the twentieth-century recovery of Cabasilas mattered so much to Orthodox theologians seeking to articulate a sacramental and ecclesial mysticism over against both a rationalised sacramentalism and an experience-centred spirituality detached from the Church (Bobrinskoy 1974; Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; see The Modern Rediscovery). In Cabasilas the Mysteries are not the husk around a mystical kernel; they are the body of the mystical life, and the life in Christ has no existence apart from them. The grace of the sacraments and the grace of deification are, in the end, the same grace — the uncreated life of the risen Christ, given to His members through the Mysteries of His Church (Cabasilas, The Life in Christ I, IV; deCatanzaro 1974; Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 2004).

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; the programmatic opening of Book I; Baptism as new birth and the cause of blessed existence in Book II; Chrismation in Book III; the Eucharist as the consummation of the sacramental life and the assimilation of the believer to Christ in Book IV; the priority of grace over effort in Book VI.)
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, French translation, and introduction; the principal scholarly edition.)
Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. Trans. J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty. London: SPCK, 1960. (The Liturgy as the action of Christ sanctifying the faithful through communion.)
Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Deification in the Greek Fathers; Cabasilas’s sacramental account of theosis and its place in the Palamite settlement.)
Bornert, René. Les commentaires byzantins de la Divine Liturgie du VIIe au XVe siècle. Paris: Institut Français d’Études Byzantines, 1966. (The tradition of Byzantine liturgical commentary within which the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy stands.)
Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964. (The hesychast tradition and the theology of the uncreated energies.)
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974. (The Palamite settlement as the established theology of the later Byzantine Church.)
Spiteris, Yannis. Cabasilas: teologo e mistico bizantino. Rome: Lipa, 1996. (Cabasilas as sacramental mystic; the relation of his thought to the hesychast controversy.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (The Philokalic and Palamite inheritance and the modern reception of Cabasilas.)
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. (An Orthodox theology of the person built on Cabasilas’s sacramental and Christ-centred vision.)