The Modern Rediscovery

St. Nicholas Cabasilas had always been read in the Orthodox East, but he became newly and broadly prominent only in the twentieth century, when critical editions and translations made his two great works accessible and when the “neo-patristic” and liturgical-theology movements found in him a sacramental and Christ-centred theology they could build upon. Figures from Myrrha Lot-Borodine and Georges Florovsky to Alexander Schmemann, John Meyendorff, Boris Bobrinskoy, Panayiotis Nellas, and Olivier Clément drew on him, and Catholic theologians of the liturgical movement read him as well. This file traces that recovery — its editions and translations, its leading interpreters, and its place in the modern Orthodox sacramental and liturgical revival — of which the canonization of 1983 was the crown.

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

A Long-Read but Newly Prominent Author

Cabasilas was never a forgotten author in the strict sense. His Commentary on the Divine Liturgy and The Life in Christ circulated in manuscript through the late Byzantine and Ottoman centuries and were known to the learned of the Greek-speaking Church; the Commentary in particular had a place in the continuous tradition of Byzantine liturgical mystagogy and was read by those who studied the meaning of the rite (Bornert 1966; Hussey and McNulty 1960; see The Works and Their Transmission). What changed in the twentieth century was not that he was discovered from nothing but that he passed from the relatively narrow readership of specialists and clergy into the centre of a broad theological renewal, becoming one of the most cited and most loved of the late Byzantine theologians (Lot-Borodine 1958; Nellas 1987; Louth 2015).

The shift had two roots. The first was scholarly: the production, in the middle decades of the century, of reliable critical editions and accurate translations that put Cabasilas’s actual text into the hands of theologians who could not read late Byzantine Greek (Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967; Congourdeau, SC 355 and 361, 1989–1990; deCatanzaro 1974). The second was theological: the rise of movements within Orthodoxy — and, in a different key, within Roman Catholicism — that were seeking precisely the kind of sacramental, liturgical, and Christ-centred theology that Cabasilas offered, and that recognised in him a master who had said long before what they wished to recover (Florovsky; Schmemann 1966; Nellas 1987; Louth 2015).

The Critical Editions and the Translations

The recovery rested on editorial work. For the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, the standard modern edition is that of Sévérien Salaville, whose Greek text with facing French translation and notes appeared in the Sources Chrétiennes series and was issued in a revised second edition — prepared with René Bornert, Jean Gouillard, and Pierre Périchon — as Explication de la Divine Liturgie, Sources Chrétiennes 4 bis, in 1967 (Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967). Salaville’s edition gave the Commentary a critically established text and the title by which it is widely known in Western scholarship, and it remains the standard point of reference (Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967; Bornert 1966). For The Life in Christ, the modern critical edition is that of Marie-Hélène Congourdeau, whose Greek text, French translation, and substantial introduction appeared as La Vie en Christ in Sources Chrétiennes 355 and 361 in 1989 and 1990 — the edition that also provided much of the modern scholarly account of Cabasilas’s biography and his relation to the theological controversies of his age (Congourdeau, SC 355 and 361, 1989–1990; see The Historical Cabasilas).

The English translations made the same texts available to a far wider readership. The Commentary appeared in the translation of J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty, with an introduction, as A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, published by SPCK in 1960 — the version through which most English-speaking readers have come to the work (Hussey and McNulty 1960). The Life in Christ was translated by Carmino J. deCatanzaro and published by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press in 1974, putting Cabasilas’s central treatise on the sacramental life into English for the seminary and parish readership that the SVS Press served (deCatanzaro 1974). Together these two translations — the Commentary in 1960 and The Life in Christ in 1974 — made the whole of Cabasilas’s principal achievement accessible in English within a single generation, and they are the versions on which the modern English-language reception largely rests (Hussey and McNulty 1960; deCatanzaro 1974; Louth 2015).

Myrrha Lot-Borodine and the First Recovery

Among the scholars who recovered Cabasilas for the modern reader, a place of honour belongs to Myrrha Lot-Borodine, a Russian-born scholar working in France who was one of the first to bring him to sustained modern attention. Her study Un maître de la spiritualité byzantine au XIVe siècle, Nicolas Cabasilas, published in Paris in 1958, presented him as a master of Byzantine spirituality and helped to establish the modern image of Cabasilas as a theologian of the sacramental and mystical life rather than a mere liturgical commentator (Lot-Borodine, Un maître de la spiritualité byzantine au XIVe siècle, Nicolas Cabasilas, Paris, 1958). Lot-Borodine had already done pioneering work on the doctrine of deification in the Greek Fathers, and she read Cabasilas within that frame, drawing out the theme of the Christian’s union with and transformation in Christ that runs through The Life in Christ (Lot-Borodine 1958; on deification see Theosis). Her monograph stands at the head of the modern literature on Cabasilas and set much of its direction (Lot-Borodine 1958; Nellas 1987; Louth 2015).

The Neo-Patristic and Liturgical-Theology Movements

Cabasilas’s modern prominence is inseparable from the two great currents of twentieth-century Orthodox theology — the neo-patristic synthesis and the renewal of liturgical theology — both of which found him congenial. Georges Florovsky, who called for a “return to the Fathers” and for a theology drawn from the living mind of the Church rather than from the categories of post-Reformation scholasticism, regarded the late Byzantine theologians, Cabasilas among them, as part of the patristic inheritance to be recovered, and his programme created the climate in which Cabasilas could be read as a Father and not merely as a medieval author (Florovsky; Louth 2015). Within that climate Cabasilas’s combination of sacramental realism, Christ-centredness, and freedom from scholastic abstraction was exactly what the neo-patristic theologians sought (Florovsky; Nellas 1987; Louth 2015).

The renewal of liturgical theology drew on him still more directly. Alexander Schmemann, whose work made the Eucharist and the liturgy the centre of dogmatic reflection, stood squarely in the line of which Cabasilas’s Commentary is a classic, and his account of the liturgy as the Church’s entrance into the Kingdom and as the sacrament of the world’s salvation belongs to the same tradition of seeing the rite as both meaning and reality (Schmemann, Introduction to Liturgical Theology, 1966; Schmemann, The Eucharist; on the rite see The Divine Liturgy). John Meyendorff, the historian of Palamism and of late Byzantine theology, set Cabasilas within the fourteenth-century Palamite world and treated him as an integral part of the hesychast theological synthesis, securing his place in the modern account of Byzantine theology (Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, 1979; see The Hesychast Synthesis). Boris Bobrinskoy, the dogmatic and liturgical theologian, drew on Cabasilas in his work on the Holy Spirit and the Mysteries, reading his sacramental theology as a hesychast spirituality of communion in the Spirit (Bobrinskoy, “Nicolas Cabasilas et la spiritualité hésychaste,” 1992; Bobrinskoy, The Mystery of the Church).

Nellas, Clément, and the Christ-Centred Anthropology

The most concentrated single development of Cabasilas in modern Orthodox theology is the work of Panayiotis Nellas, whose Deification in Christ — published in English by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press in 1987 — built an entire theological anthropology on Cabasilas’s Christ-centred account of the human person (Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS, 1987). Nellas took up Cabasilas’s conviction that the human being is constituted and fulfilled in Christ — that Christ is not added to a humanity already complete but is the very archetype toward whom human nature was made — and developed it into a systematic reflection on the human person as oriented from the first to deification in Christ (Nellas 1987; see Christ-Centred Anthropology and Theosis). His book did much to make Cabasilas a living source for contemporary Orthodox thought rather than only an object of historical study (Nellas 1987; Louth 2015).

Olivier Clément, the French Orthodox theologian and writer, likewise drew on Cabasilas in his presentation of Orthodox spirituality and sacramental life to a wide Western readership, helping to carry Cabasilas’s theology of union with Christ beyond the seminary into the broader culture of spiritual reading (Clément; Louth 2015). Through these and other writers Cabasilas’s Life in Christ — his exposition of how the Christian is incorporated into Christ through baptism, chrismation, and the Eucharist — became one of the texts through which modern readers entered the Orthodox understanding of the sacramental life (deCatanzaro 1974; Nellas 1987; see The Sacramental Life and Union with Christ).

Western and Ecumenical Interest

The recovery of Cabasilas was not confined to Orthodoxy. The twentieth-century Roman Catholic liturgical movement, which sought to restore the liturgy to the centre of the Church’s life and the faithful’s piety, found in the Byzantine mystagogical tradition — and in Cabasilas as its classic exponent — a witness to the very vision it was recovering, and Catholic theologians and liturgists of that movement read him with interest (Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967; Taft 1992). That Salaville, a Catholic Assumptionist scholar, produced the standard modern edition of the Commentary in the Sources Chrétiennes series — itself a project of the ressourcement that fed the Catholic renewal — is itself a sign of the cross-confessional attention Cabasilas drew (Salaville, SC 4 bis, 1967). His irenic treatment of the epiclesis question made him a natural reference point in the modern Catholic–Orthodox liturgical and theological dialogue, where his account of the eucharistic prayer has been repeatedly cited (Taft 1992; Bobrinskoy; see The Eucharist and the Latins). Cabasilas thus belongs to the small number of late Byzantine theologians read seriously across the confessional divide in the twentieth century (Taft 1992; Louth 2015).

The Canonization of 1983 as the Crown of the Recovery

The modern rediscovery of Cabasilas culminated in his formal glorification. In 1983 the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople recognised the long-standing veneration of Cabasilas and numbered him among the saints, an act that set the seal of the Church on the scholarly and theological recovery of the preceding decades (Louth 2015; Congourdeau, SC 355, 1989). The canonization gave ecclesial confirmation to what the editions, translations, and theologians had been saying in their own register — that this fourteenth-century layman was a teacher of the Church and a saint of the sacramental life — and it remains the formal crown of his twentieth-century return to prominence (Louth 2015; Nellas 1987). The full account of the glorification, its background, and its significance belongs to the treatment of his veneration (see The Canonization of 1983 and Cabasilas in Orthodox Spirituality).

Taken together, the editions and translations, the labours of Lot-Borodine and Congourdeau, the use made of Cabasilas by Florovsky, Schmemann, Meyendorff, Bobrinskoy, Nellas, and Clément, the attention of the Catholic liturgical movement, and the glorification of 1983 constitute one of the clearest cases in modern Orthodox theology of a patristic-era author recovered and made fruitful for the present (Lot-Borodine 1958; Nellas 1987; Louth 2015). Cabasilas’s theology of the liturgy as the work of Christ and of the Christian life as life in Christ proved to be exactly what the modern liturgical and sacramental revival needed, and his return to prominence is itself a chapter in that revival (Schmemann 1966; Nellas 1987; Louth 2015; see Liturgy as the Work of Christ and Legacy and Assessment).

References

Lot-Borodine, Myrrha. Un maître de la spiritualité byzantine au XIVe siècle, Nicolas Cabasilas. Paris: Éditions de l’Orante, 1958. (One of the first modern recoveries of Cabasilas, presenting him as a master of Byzantine spirituality and reading him within the doctrine of deification.)
Salaville, Sévérien, ed. and trans. Explication de la Divine Liturgie. 2nd ed., revised by René Bornert, Jean Gouillard, and Pierre Périchon. Sources Chrétiennes 4 bis. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1967. (The standard modern critical edition of the Commentary; a product of Catholic ressourcement scholarship.)
Congourdeau, Marie-Hélène, ed. and trans. Nicolas Cabasilas, La Vie en Christ. Sources Chrétiennes 355 and 361. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1989–1990. (The modern critical edition of The Life in Christ, with the introduction that underlies much of the modern biography.)
Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. Trans. J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty. London: SPCK, 1960. (The standard English translation of the Commentary.)
Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The standard English translation of The Life in Christ.)
Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. (A theological anthropology built on Cabasilas’s Christ-centred account of the human person.)
Schmemann, Alexander. Introduction to Liturgical Theology. Trans. Asheleigh E. Moorhouse. London: Faith Press, 1966; and The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. (The renewal of liturgical theology in the line to which Cabasilas’s Commentary belongs.)
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes. 2nd ed. New York: Fordham University Press, 1979. (Cabasilas within the Palamite and late Byzantine theological world.)
Bobrinskoy, Boris. “Nicolas Cabasilas et la spiritualité hésychaste.” In La communion du Saint-Esprit. Bégrolles-en-Mauges: Abbaye de Bellefontaine, 1992; and The Mystery of the Church: A Course in Orthodox Dogmatic Theology. (Cabasilas’s sacramental theology as a spirituality of communion in the Spirit.)
Florovsky, Georges. Collected Works and related essays on the neo-patristic synthesis. (The “return to the Fathers” that created the climate for Cabasilas’s recovery.)
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (On the twentieth-century Orthodox theological renewal and the place of Cabasilas within it.)
Taft, Robert F. The Byzantine Rite: A Short History. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. (On the liturgical movement’s interest in the Byzantine mystagogical tradition and the modern discussion of the epiclesis.)