The Works and Their Transmission

The corpus of St. Nicholas Cabasilas is small, secure, and unevenly studied. Its two pillars are The Life in Christ, a treatise in seven books on the sacramental life, and A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy (the Explanation of the Divine Liturgy) in some fifty-three chapters; around them stand a cycle of Marian homilies, a body of correspondence, and a set of minor treatises and orations on theological, social, and political questions. This file surveys that corpus, the modern critical editions that have at last given much of it a reliable Greek text — above all the Sources Chrétiennes volumes of Salaville and Congourdeau and Jugie’s Marian edition in Patrologia Orientalis — the manuscript transmission and the place of the works in Migne’s Patrologia Graeca, and the English translations through which Cabasilas reached the modern Orthodox world.

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

A Small and Secure Corpus

The literary remains of Nicholas Cabasilas are modest in extent but of the first theological importance. Unlike the vast output of a Palamas or a Photius, his name is attached to a compact body of writing whose authenticity is, in its central works, beyond serious dispute, even where the biography of their author remains obscure (Congourdeau, La Vie en Christ, SC 355, introduction, 1989; Spiteris 1996). The corpus divides naturally into several groups: the two great prose works — the treatise The Life in Christ and the liturgical Commentary — on which his fame rests; a cycle of homilies on the Mother of God; a body of letters; and a scatter of shorter treatises and orations addressing the theological controversy of his day and the social and political questions of fourteenth-century Byzantium (Spiteris 1996; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Kabasilas, Nicholas”). It is a measure of how the modern rediscovery of Cabasilas has proceeded that the two masterworks were edited, translated, and absorbed into Orthodox spiritual reading well before the minor works and the biography received critical attention (see The Modern Rediscovery).

The two pillars of the corpus belong together and were almost certainly conceived as complementary. The Life in Christ expounds the life of grace as it is received through the Mysteries of initiation; the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy expounds the rite in which those Mysteries are consecrated and offered. The one is interior and mystagogical, the other liturgical and exegetical, and a reader of both finds a single sacramental vision worked out from two directions (Bobrinskoy, in his studies of Cabasilas’s sacramental theology; Spiteris 1996; see The Sacramental Life and The Explanation of the Liturgy).

The Two Great Works

The Life in Christ

The Life in Christ (Greek Peri tes en Christoi zoes, Latin De vita in Christo) is Cabasilas’s masterwork: a treatise in seven books tracing the whole of the spiritual life as a life grounded in the sacramental economy of the Church (deCatanzaro 1974, translator’s introduction; Congourdeau, SC 355, 1989). Its argument moves from the inauguration of the life in Christ through Baptism, Chrismation, and the Eucharist (Books I–IV), through the consecration of the altar (Book V), to the life of virtue and the dignity of human nature (Books VI–VII), so that the moral life appears throughout as the fruit of the sacramental life rather than its precondition (deCatanzaro 1974; see The Sacramental Life and Union with Christ). The work is the most complete Byzantine treatise on the spiritual life understood sacramentally, and it is on this treatise above all that the modern estimate of Cabasilas as a theologian of the first rank has been built (Spiteris 1996; Bobrinskoy).

A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy

The companion work is the Explanation of the Divine Liturgy (Greek Hermeneia tes theias leitourgias; commonly titled in English A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy), a mystagogical exposition of the Byzantine eucharistic rite in some fifty-three chapters (Salaville, Explication de la Divine Liturgie, SC 4 bis, 1967; Hussey and McNulty 1960). Cabasilas takes the worshipper through the Liturgy in sequence — the prothesis and the entrances, the readings, the great entrance, the anaphora and consecration, the commemorations, and the communion — and at each stage unfolds both the symbolic meaning of the action and its theological substance, insisting throughout that the rite effects what it signifies because the whole Liturgy is the work of Christ Himself (Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967; see Liturgy as the Work of Christ). The Commentary is among the most influential of all Orthodox writings on the Eucharist and stands beside the earlier mystagogies of Maximus the Confessor and Germanus of Constantinople in the Byzantine liturgical tradition (Hussey and McNulty 1960, introduction; see also The Divine Liturgy).

The Marian Homilies

Beyond the two prose masterworks, Cabasilas left a cycle of homilies on the Mother of God which have come to be regarded as among the finest examples of late Byzantine Mariology. The cycle comprises three principal homilies on the great Marian feasts — on the Nativity of the Theotokos, on the Annunciation, and on the Dormition of the Theotokos — in which Cabasilas develops a high doctrine of the Virgin’s holiness and her free, conscious cooperation in the Incarnation (Jugie, Homélies mariales byzantines, Patrologia Orientalis 19, 1926; Spiteris 1996; see The Marian Homilies). These homilies were edited by Martin Jugie in the nineteenth volume of the Patrologia Orientalis, and it is through that edition that they entered modern scholarship; their theology of the Theotokos’s sanctity and human freedom is one of the distinctive contributions of Cabasilas to the Orthodox tradition (Jugie, PO 19, 1926; on the dogmatic frame see The Theotokos).

The Letters

Cabasilas also left a body of correspondence — letters addressed to friends, kinsmen, and figures of the ecclesiastical and political world of his day. The letters are a principal source for what little can be reconstructed of his biography and his social and intellectual circle, and they have been studied closely by the scholars who have attempted to fix the chronology and milieu of his life (Congourdeau, in her work on the biography and chronology; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Kabasilas, Nicholas”). Because so much of the secure outline of Cabasilas’s career depends on internal evidence drawn from these letters and from the minor orations, the correspondence carries an evidential weight out of proportion to its modest literary scale (Congourdeau; see The Historical Cabasilas).

The Minor Treatises and Orations

The remainder of the corpus consists of shorter treatises and orations on theological, social, and political subjects, which together show Cabasilas engaged with the public questions of his age as well as with the interior life. Three groups deserve particular notice.

First, there is the discourse against usury — a treatise directed against usurers and the taking of interest, in which Cabasilas brings the patristic and canonical condemnation of lending at interest to bear on the economic life of his own city (Spiteris 1996; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Kabasilas, Nicholas”). The piece belongs to the long Christian tradition of writing against usury that runs back to Basil and Gregory of Nyssa, and it shows Cabasilas as a layman addressing the moral economy of Byzantine society directly (Spiteris 1996).

Second, there is the oration on illegal acts of the magistrates against sacred things — the treatise sometimes called the “anti-Zealot” or property oration, in which Cabasilas protests against the unlawful seizure or confiscation of ecclesiastical and sacred property by civil authorities. The work is frequently read in connection with the upheavals of the Zealot movement that controlled Thessaloniki in the 1340s, when church property was threatened by social-revolutionary seizure, and it has been used as evidence for Cabasilas’s political sympathies in the civil conflicts of the period (Nicol 1993, on the Zealot episode and the politics of the 1340s; Spiteris 1996). The exact occasion and target of the oration are debated, but its general subject — the defence of sacred property against unlawful magisterial confiscation — is clear (Nicol 1993; Congourdeau).

Third, there are the theological works connected with the Palamite controversy. Cabasilas stood within the circle that defended the hesychast theology of Gregory Palamas, vindicated at the councils of Constantinople in 1341, 1347, and 1351, and his minor theological writings reflect his place in that controversy, even though his own great works are remarkably free of polemic (Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas; Spiteris 1996; see The Hesychast Synthesis). His association with the Palamite cause, and with the emperor John VI Cantacuzene who championed it, is one of the few firm anchors of his public biography (Nicol 1993; Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology).

The Critical Editions

For most of its history the corpus of Cabasilas was read in the inadequate and partial texts available before the twentieth century; the modern critical recovery of his works is a story of three editorial achievements.

The Marian homilies were edited first, by the great Catholic Byzantinist Martin Jugie, who published the Greek text in the nineteenth volume of the Patrologia Orientalis in 1926 — the edition by which the homilies are still cited (Jugie, PO 19, 1926). For the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, the standard critical edition is that of Sévérien Salaville, whose Explication de la Divine Liturgie appeared in the Sources Chrétiennes series as volume 4 bis, the revised and enlarged edition of 1967 superseding his earlier work and providing the Greek text with a French translation and apparatus (Salaville, Explication de la Divine Liturgie de Nicolas Cabasilas, SC 4 bis, 1967). For The Life in Christ, the definitive modern edition is that of Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, whose La Vie en Christ established the Greek text and its manuscript tradition and was published in the Sources Chrétiennes series as volumes 355 and 361 across 1989 and 1990 (Congourdeau, La Vie en Christ, SC 355 & 361, 1989–1990). Congourdeau’s edition, with its long critical introduction, is also the foundation of the modern reassessment of Cabasilas’s biography, chronology, and identity, and it is to her work that questions of the historical Cabasilas are now referred (Congourdeau, SC 355, introduction, 1989; see The Historical Cabasilas).

Manuscript Transmission and the Place in Migne

The works of Cabasilas survive in a substantial Greek manuscript tradition, and it is the collation of those manuscripts that underlies the modern critical editions of Salaville and Congourdeau, each of whom reconstructed the text and its history from the surviving witnesses (Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967; Congourdeau, SC 355, 1989). Before these critical editions, the works of Cabasilas were most accessible in the Patrologia Graeca of J.-P. Migne, where his writings — the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, The Life in Christ, and associated pieces — appear in volume 150, the volume that gathers a range of fourteenth-century Palamite and post-Palamite authors (PG 150; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, s.v. “Kabasilas, Nicholas”). The Migne text is a reprint of earlier and often unsatisfactory editions and has been superseded for the major works by the Sources Chrétiennes volumes; it remains, however, the place where a reader will most readily find the corpus gathered in one volume, and references to Cabasilas in older scholarship are regularly to PG 150 (Spiteris 1996; Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967).

The English Translations

The diffusion of Cabasilas in the English-speaking Orthodox world rests on two translations of the two great works. The Life in Christ was translated by Carmino J. deCatanzaro and published by St Vladimir’s Seminary Press in 1974, with an introduction by Boris Bobrinskoy; this is the version by which the treatise is most often cited in English and through which it entered the spiritual reading of English-speaking Orthodox (deCatanzaro 1974). The Commentary on the Divine Liturgy was translated by J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty and published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) in 1960, with an introduction by R. M. French; this remains the standard English version of the liturgical commentary (Hussey and McNulty 1960). Together these two translations carried Cabasilas into twentieth-century Anglophone theology and made him, well before his formal canonization in 1983, one of the most widely read of all Byzantine spiritual writers in the West (see The Modern Rediscovery and The Canonization of 1983).

See Also

References

  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro, intro. Boris Bobrinskoy. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (Standard English translation of the seven books; cited throughout as the English version of The Life in Christ.)
  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. Trans. J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty, intro. R. M. French. London: SPCK, 1960. (Standard English translation of the Explanation of the Divine Liturgy in fifty-three chapters.)
  • Cabasilas, Nicolas. La Vie en Christ. Ed. and trans. Marie-Hélène Congourdeau. Sources Chrétiennes 355 & 361. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1989–1990. (Critical edition of the Greek text with French translation, apparatus, and a long introduction foundational for the biography and chronology.)
  • Cabasilas, Nicolas. Explication de la Divine Liturgie. Ed. and trans. Sévérien Salaville. 2nd ed., revised. Sources Chrétiennes 4 bis. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1967. (Critical edition of the Greek text of the liturgical commentary with French translation.)
  • Jugie, Martin, ed. Homélies mariales byzantines. Patrologia Orientalis 19. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1926. (Greek text of the Marian homilies of Cabasilas — on the Nativity, the Annunciation, and the Dormition of the Theotokos.)
  • Migne, J.-P., ed. Patrologia Graeca, vol. 150. Paris, 1865. (The collected works of Cabasilas appear in this volume; superseded for the major works by the critical editions but still the most convenient gathering of the corpus.)
  • Spiteris, Yannis. Cabasilas: teologo e mistico bizantino. Rome: Lipa, 1996. (Monograph on the theology and mysticism of Cabasilas, surveying the corpus and the minor works.)
  • Meyendorff, John. A Study of Gregory Palamas. Trans. George Lawrence. London: Faith Press, 1964. (The Palamite controversy and Cabasilas’s place within it.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. New York: Fordham University Press, 1974. (The post-Palamite theological context.)
  • Nicol, Donald M. The Last Centuries of Byzantium, 1261–1453. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. (The Zealot episode at Thessaloniki and the politics of the 1340s–50s relevant to the property oration.)
  • Kazhdan, Alexander, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. (Entry “Kabasilas, Nicholas” for the secure outline of the corpus and its place in PG 150.)