Cabasilas in Orthodox Spirituality

St. Nicholas Cabasilas occupies a living place in the spirituality of the Orthodox Church: his vision that the whole Christian life is a “life in Christ” received through the Mysteries speaks directly to contemporary sacramental piety, and his works are read today in spiritual reading and catechesis. This file traces his role as a bridge between the hesychast contemplative tradition and the ordinary sacramental life of the laity, his influence on the recovery of frequent communion and the eucharistic revival, and his standing alongside Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory Palamas as the theologian who located deification in the sacramental life.

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

A Living Voice in the Church

Among the Byzantine theologians, Cabasilas is one of the few whose work has not merely been studied but absorbed into the practical spirituality of the modern Orthodox Church. The Life in Christ and the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy are not read today only as historical documents; they are read as spiritual books, used in catechesis, in personal devotion, and in the formation of clergy and laity alike (Spiteris 1996; deCatanzaro 1974, translator’s introduction). The reason lies in the character of his theology: it describes the life that every Orthodox Christian is actually living — the life of Baptism, Chrismation, and the Eucharist — and it describes it as the locus of union with God (see The Sacramental Life). His teaching is therefore not a specialized doctrine for theologians but an interpretation of the ordinary Christian’s own experience of the Mysteries, which is what has kept it alive.

This contemporary relevance is the fruit of the broader twentieth-century recovery of his work, but it rests finally on the content rather than the circumstances of his theology (on the recovery see The Modern Rediscovery). Cabasilas wrote for the layman in the world, and the modern Orthodox revival — much of it concerned to restore the laity to a full and conscious participation in the sacramental life — found in him a witness from the height of the Byzantine tradition who said exactly what it most needed to hear (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1987; Nellas 1987). His glorification by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1983, with his feast on 20 June, set the seal of the Church on a relevance that scholarship and devotion had already discovered (see The Canonization of 1983).

The Life in Christ as Contemporary Piety

The heart of Cabasilas’s appeal to modern Orthodox piety is his governing thesis: that the whole Christian life is a single reality, the “life in Christ,” begun in this world through the Mysteries and perfected in the world to come (The Life in Christ, Book I; deCatanzaro 1974). The phrase is Pauline — “for to me to live is Christ” (Philippians 1:21), “your life is hid with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3) — and Cabasilas takes it as the name of the reality the sacraments communicate (The Life in Christ, Book I). For a Church concerned in the modern period to recover the depth and seriousness of sacramental life, this vision is directly usable: it tells the believer that what happens in the font and at the chalice is nothing less than the inauguration and nourishment of eternal life in him now.

What makes the vision pastorally powerful is its ordering of grace and effort. Cabasilas insists that the life in Christ is first received and only then exercised: the Mysteries are the cause and the moral life the response, grace the ground and works the fruit (The Life in Christ, Books I, VI; deCatanzaro 1974; Spiteris 1996). This re-ordering speaks to a recurring temptation in Christian piety — the reduction of religion to moral striving — by insisting that sanctity flows from what God has done in the sacraments and not from human achievement (see Grace and the Sacraments). In an age anxious about the relation of grace and works, Cabasilas offers a confident sacramental answer: the Christian is made holy by being united to Christ in the Mysteries, and the virtues are the natural activity of that union (Russell 2004, 304–306).

The vision is also, characteristically, free of polemic and warm in tone. Though Cabasilas wrote during the hesychast controversy and was a partisan of Palamas, The Life in Christ presents the positive content of the Christian life rather than defending it against an adversary (Spiteris 1996; on his Palamism see The Hesychast Synthesis). This irenic, constructive quality is part of why the work reads so well as spiritual reading: it edifies rather than argues, and it offers the believer not a position to defend but a life to live.

A Bridge Between the Cell and the World

Cabasilas’s most distinctive contribution to Orthodox spirituality is the bridge he builds between the contemplative, hesychast tradition and the ordinary sacramental life of the laity. The fourteenth century was the age of the hesychast renewal, with its emphasis on inner prayer, the vision of the divine light, and the conscious experience of grace, defended theologically by Gregory Palamas (on Palamas see the collection on St. Gregory Palamas). Cabasilas stood within this movement and shared its theology of participation in the divine energies, yet he addressed himself not to the monk in the cell but to the Christian in the world, and he located the union the hesychasts sought above all in the Mysteries available to every member of the Church (Spiteris 1996; Russell 2004, 304–306; see The Layman Theologian).

This is the precise service Cabasilas renders to Orthodox spirituality: he takes the high contemplative goal of the monastic tradition — real union with God, deification, the conscious possession of grace — and shows that its ordinary means is the sacramental life that every baptized Christian shares. The layman need not become a monk to attain the life in Christ, because that life is given not by ascetic technique or withdrawal but by Baptism, Chrismation, and the Eucharist (The Life in Christ, Books II–IV; deCatanzaro 1974; on the union see Union with Christ). The deep things of the spiritual tradition are thus opened to the laity without being diluted: Cabasilas democratizes the goal of hesychasm by grounding it in the Mysteries rather than in a method reserved to the few.

For this reason he is, in a real sense, the layman’s theologian, and his accessibility is part of his enduring usefulness. He gives the ordinary Orthodox Christian a theological account of his own sacramental life that is at once profound and within reach, neither requiring the monastic vocation nor settling for anything less than union with the indwelling Christ (Nellas 1987; Spiteris 1996). This bridging function — between contemplation and sacrament, between cell and world — is among the chief reasons his works are used so widely in modern catechesis and spiritual reading.

The Eucharistic Revival and Frequent Communion

Cabasilas’s influence has been felt with particular force in the modern eucharistic revival and the recovery of frequent communion. For long centuries Orthodox lay practice had drifted toward infrequent reception of the Eucharist, with communion often reduced to a few occasions a year; the twentieth century saw a sustained movement to restore frequent, and ideally regular, communion as the normal participation of the faithful in the sacramental life (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1987; on the rite see The Explanation of the Liturgy). Cabasilas’s theology stands behind this recovery as one of its great patristic-Byzantine authorities, for he treats the Eucharist as the perfection and consummation of the whole life in Christ, the Mystery in which Christ is received whole and entire and the believer is most intimately united to Him (The Life in Christ, Book IV; deCatanzaro 1974; see The Eucharist).

If the Eucharist is, as Cabasilas teaches, the summit toward which Baptism and Chrismation are ordered and the most intimate of all unions with Christ, then its frequent reception is not a special devotion but the very logic of the sacramental life (The Life in Christ, Book IV; Spiteris 1996; Russell 2004, 305–306). His Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, which expounds the rite as the saving work of Christ made present in the assembly, reinforced this eucharistic centrality and shaped the modern recovery of the Liturgy as the heart of the Church’s life (Hussey and McNulty 1960; on the rite as Christ’s work see Liturgy as the Work of Christ; on the Liturgy itself see The Divine Liturgy). The leaders of the eucharistic revival, Alexander Schmemann foremost among them, drew on the patristic and Byzantine witness to the Eucharist as the sacrament of the Kingdom, and Cabasilas is among the most luminous of those witnesses (Schmemann 1987).

It would be an overstatement to credit the frequent-communion movement to Cabasilas alone; it had many sources, ancient and modern, and its proximate impulses were pastoral and liturgical as much as theological (Schmemann 1987; the standard liturgical-revival literature). But Cabasilas supplied much of its theological substance: a vision in which the Eucharist is the goal and crown of the Christian life, so that to commune often is simply to live the life in Christ as he describes it. In this sense the modern recovery of frequent communion is, in part, a return to Cabasilas.

Among the Great Spiritual Masters

Cabasilas’s place in Orthodox spirituality is best fixed by setting him alongside the two figures with whom he is most naturally compared. With St. Symeon the New Theologian he shares the insistence that grace is to be consciously experienced and not merely possessed in theory: Symeon is the great witness of the Byzantine tradition to the conscious, felt reception of the Holy Spirit, and Cabasilas inherits this concern for grace as a living and perceived reality rather than an abstraction (on Symeon see the collection on St. Symeon the New Theologian; Spiteris 1996). With St. Gregory Palamas he shares the theology of participation — the doctrine that the human being is really united to God through the divine energies and truly deified — which Cabasilas presupposes throughout and applies to the sacramental life (on Palamas see the collection on St. Gregory Palamas; Russell 2004, 304–306).

Cabasilas’s own contribution, set against these two, is to locate deification in the Mysteries. Where Symeon emphasizes the conscious experience of grace and Palamas the theology of how participation in God is possible, Cabasilas specifies where and how the ordinary Christian receives this deifying grace: in Baptism, Chrismation, and above all the Eucharist (Russell 2004, 304–306; Nellas 1987; see Deification (Theosis)). He is the theologian who, as it were, grounds the conscious experience of grace and the theology of participation in the concrete sacramental economy of the Church, so that deification ceases to be the privilege of the great mystic or the achievement of the contemplative and becomes the gift offered to every baptized Christian at the chalice. This is his proper place among the spiritual masters: not their rival but their complement, the one who locates the deifying union they describe in the Mysteries the whole Church shares.

It is this synthesis — the conscious life of grace, the theology of participation, and the sacramental life of the laity bound into one — that has given Cabasilas so durable a place in Orthodox spirituality. His vision is at once contemplative and accessible, mystical and ordinary, addressed to the deepest possibilities of the Christian life and yet to every Christian who approaches the font and the altar (Spiteris 1996; Nellas 1987; on his legacy see Legacy and Assessment). The Church that glorified him in 1983 reads him still as the theologian who taught, more clearly than almost any other, that the life in Christ is received through the Mysteries and is meant for all (on the principles governing this account see the methodology).

See Also

References

  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The life in Christ as begun here and perfected hereafter, Book I; the three Mysteries of initiation, Books II–IV; the Eucharist as perfection, Book IV; grace before effort, Books I and VI.)
  • Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. Trans. J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty. London: SPCK, 1960. (The Liturgy expounded as the saving work of Christ; the eucharistic centrality drawn on by the modern revival.)
  • Spiteris, Yannis. Cabasilas: teologo e mistico bizantino. Rome: Lipa, 1996. (Cabasilas’s sacramental mysticism, his lay address, and his relation to the hesychast tradition.)
  • Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Cabasilas’s location of deification in the sacramental life, esp. 304–306; his relation to Palamas and the theology of participation.)
  • 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. (The modern recovery of deification drawing on Cabasilas; the accessibility of the deifying life to the laity.)
  • Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. (The twentieth-century eucharistic revival and the recovery of the Liturgy and frequent communion as the heart of the Church’s life.)