The Canonization of 1983

Although St. Nicholas Cabasilas had been treated as a holy father and read as a master of the spiritual life for centuries, his formal inscription among the saints came only in 1983, when the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople recognized him by synodal act and fixed his feast on 20 June. This file examines that notably late canonization, its significance as the recognition of a layman as a saint and theologian, and the way the twentieth-century rediscovery of his works — critical editions, translations, and the revival of liturgical and sacramental theology — prepared the ground for it.

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

A Canonization Long Deferred

The most striking fact about the cult of St. Nicholas Cabasilas is how long the Church waited to give it formal expression. Cabasilas died around 1392, and from a relatively early date he was treated within Orthodox tradition as a holy father — copied, cited, and read for edification, his works transmitted alongside those of figures whose sanctity was not in doubt (Congourdeau, in the introduction to La Vie en Christ, SC 355, 1989; Spiteris 1996). Yet his official inscription in the calendar of saints, by a synodal act of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, did not come until 1983, with his feast fixed on 20 June — more than five hundred and ninety years after his death (Congourdeau 1989; the date as given in the standard reference works and the Greek Synaxaria). This makes him one of the notably late canonizations of the Orthodox Church: a figure venerated informally across centuries who was only at the close of the twentieth century entered formally among the saints.

The long delay is not, in Orthodox terms, an anomaly to be explained away but a characteristic feature of how the Church recognizes holiness. Glorification (the Orthodox term preferred to the Latin “canonization”) does not create a saint; it acknowledges a sanctity already present and already, in many cases, the object of popular veneration (on the wider pattern see Feast and Cult). In Cabasilas’s case the veneration ran ahead of the formal act by centuries, so that the 1983 inscription ratified rather than initiated his standing as a saint. What is unusual is less the existence of the cult than the lateness and the deliberateness of its official confirmation, which fell in a period when his theological importance had been freshly recovered by modern scholarship.

The Synodal Act and the Feast of 20 June

The agent of the recognition was the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople, the mother church within whose historic territory Cabasilas had lived and served and to which the formal glorification of saints of the Byzantine tradition properly belongs (Congourdeau 1989; Spiteris 1996). The recognition took the form of a synodal act inscribing him in the calendar with an appointed day of commemoration, 20 June, on which his memory is now kept (the 1983 date and the 20 June feast as attested by the standard biographical references and the Greek Synaxaria; Congourdeau, SC 355, 1989). The feast joins him to the rhythm of the liturgical year, so that the layman who wrote so profoundly on the Mysteries is himself now commemorated within the Church’s worship.

Precision is owed here, because the canonization is recent and the documentary trail, as it reaches the standard reference literature, is thinner than one would wish. The year 1983 and the feast of 20 June are firmly and consistently attested across the biographical and liturgical references and are not in serious doubt (Congourdeau 1989; Spiteris 1996; the Greek Synaxaria). The finer details of the synodal act itself, however, are less uniformly reported. [Disputed: the standard reference works and biographical notices agree that the Ecumenical Patriarchate formally recognized Cabasilas as a saint in 1983 with his feast on 20 June (Congourdeau, SC 355, 1989; Spiteris 1996; Greek Synaxaria); a precise primary citation of the synodal tomos — its exact session, formula, and signatories — is not consistently given in the accessible scholarly literature, and this file therefore attributes the 1983 date and the 20 June feast to the standard reference works rather than to a directly consulted text of the act.] This caution is in keeping with the repository’s standard, which prefers an honest gap to an invented citation (see the methodology).

It is worth distinguishing the question of the year from the question of the day. The 20 June feast is a calendrical assignment proper to the act of glorification; it is the day on which the Church chose to remember him, not a date drawn from the events of his life, whose chronology — including the very year of his death — is itself imperfectly fixed (on the biographical problems see The Historical Cabasilas). The two data therefore rest on different footings: the death-date is a matter of historical reconstruction, while the feast-day is a matter of ecclesiastical appointment, established with the 1983 recognition.

The Significance of Canonizing a Layman

What gives the 1983 act its peculiar weight is that the man it glorified was a layman. Cabasilas was, so far as the evidence allows us to say, never ordained; he wrote, taught, and served the Church and the imperial administration as a lay Christian, and it is as a layman that his greatest works address the spiritual life (on his lay status see The Layman Theologian; Spiteris 1996; Congourdeau 1989). The Orthodox calendar is filled with monastic saints, hierarchs, and martyrs; lay theologians honoured as saints precisely for their theological achievement are comparatively few. Cabasilas’s glorification therefore stands as an affirmation, made formally and at the highest level, that the office of theologian and the path to holiness are not confined to the ordained or the monastic, but are open to the baptized Christian in the world.

This is more than a biographical curiosity, for it answers exactly to the content of his teaching. The burden of The Life in Christ is that the whole Christian life — the life of union with Christ, the life that issues in deification — is received through the Mysteries by every member of the Church, and not by ascetic feats reserved to the few (see The Sacramental Life; on deification see Deification (Theosis)). A layman who taught that sanctity is available to laymen, and who was himself glorified as a layman saint, embodies his own doctrine: the recognition is a kind of confirmation in the calendar of what he had argued in the treatise. The Church, in entering him among the saints, set its seal on the proposition that the life he described was a life he had lived.

The point should not be overstated into a novelty. Cabasilas is not the only lay saint, and Orthodoxy has never restricted holiness to clergy; the deeper claim of his theology is that the distinction between the sacramental life of the layman and that of the monk is one of circumstance and not of access to grace (Russell 2004, 304–306; Nellas 1987). But among theologians honoured by name for their writings, the lay theologian-saint is a rarer figure, and Cabasilas’s 1983 glorification gave that figure a conspicuous twentieth-century representative.

The Twentieth-Century Rediscovery

The timing of the canonization is no accident, for it followed and was prepared by a remarkable modern recovery of Cabasilas’s work. For long stretches his treatises had been read but not critically studied; in the twentieth century they became the object of scholarly editions, translations into the major Western languages, and a sustained theological reappraisal that placed him among the most significant voices of the Byzantine spiritual tradition (Spiteris 1996; Congourdeau 1989; on the wider recovery see The Modern Rediscovery). By the time the Ecumenical Patriarchate acted in 1983, Cabasilas was no longer a half-remembered name but a theologian freshly understood and widely read.

Several strands of this recovery converged. The critical editions — above all Marie-Hélène Congourdeau’s edition of The Life in Christ in the Sources Chrétiennes series, which established the Greek text and its manuscript tradition — gave scholars a secure foundation, even though the definitive edition appeared only at the very end of the decade, after the canonization itself (Congourdeau, La Vie en Christ, SC 355 & 361, 1989–1990). The translations made him accessible far beyond the readers of Byzantine Greek: the English version of The Life in Christ by Carmino J. deCatanzaro and the English Commentary on the Divine Liturgy by J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty brought his two masterworks into wide circulation in the decades before 1983 (deCatanzaro 1974; Hussey and McNulty 1960). Through these versions Cabasilas entered the bloodstream of the modern Orthodox revival and of Western interest in Eastern Christian spirituality alike.

Equally important was the broader theological climate. The twentieth century witnessed a powerful revival of liturgical and sacramental theology within Orthodoxy, in which the Eucharist and the Mysteries were restored to the centre of theological reflection (Schmemann, The Eucharist, 1987; on the liturgical recovery see Liturgy as the Work of Christ). Cabasilas, whose entire vision located the Christian life in the sacramental economy, was the natural patristic-Byzantine authority for such a revival, and the renewed study of deification — exemplified by Panayiotis Nellas’s Deification in Christ and Norman Russell’s work on the patristic doctrine — drew on him directly (Nellas 1987; Russell 2004, 304–306). The rediscovery thus had a doctrinal as well as a philological dimension: scholars were not merely editing Cabasilas but recognizing in him a theologian whose preoccupations matched the deepest concerns of their own century.

It is reasonable to see in this convergence the immediate background of the 1983 act. A figure long venerated but little studied had become, within a couple of generations, one of the most read and most admired of Byzantine theologians; the formal recognition followed the rediscovery rather than preceding it (Spiteris 1996; Congourdeau 1989). The canonization, in this light, was the Church’s response to a renewed perception of who Cabasilas was — the ecclesial counterpart to the scholarly and devotional recovery of his work.

A Saint for the Sacramental Revival

The 1983 glorification therefore stands at the meeting-point of two movements: the centuries-old informal veneration of Cabasilas as a holy father, and the twentieth-century rediscovery of his theology by scholarship and by the liturgical revival. The synodal act of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, fixing his feast on 20 June, gave formal and calendrical expression to both — confirming an ancient cult and crowning a modern recovery (Congourdeau 1989; Spiteris 1996). That it came so late, and that it honoured a layman as a saint and theologian, makes it one of the more theologically eloquent canonizations of the modern period.

For the Church that keeps his memory, the lateness is finally less important than the fact. Cabasilas now stands in the calendar as the lay theologian of the sacramental life, his feast a yearly occasion to read again the works in which he taught that the whole life in Christ is received through the Mysteries (see Cabasilas in Orthodox Spirituality; on the assessment of his legacy see Legacy and Assessment). The recognition of 1983 did not make him a saint; it acknowledged, at last and formally, the holiness the Church had long perceived in him, and it did so at the very moment his voice was being heard most clearly again.

References

Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The English version through which Cabasilas reached a wide modern readership before his 1983 canonization.)
Cabasilas, Nicholas. A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy. Trans. J. M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty. London: SPCK, 1960. (The English Commentary, part of the twentieth-century recovery of his work.)
Cabasilas, Nicholas. La Vie en Christ. Ed. and trans. Marie-Hélène Congourdeau. Sources Chrétiennes 355 & 361. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1989–1990. (Critical Greek text and introduction; the long informal veneration and the modern critical recovery; the standard scholarly edition.)
Spiteris, Yannis. Cabasilas: teologo e mistico bizantino. Rome: Lipa, 1996. (Cabasilas’s lay status, his transmission and reputation, and his place in modern Byzantine theological scholarship.)
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 theological recovery of deification, drawing directly on Cabasilas.)
Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. (Cabasilas’s sacramental doctrine of deification, esp. 304–306.)
Schmemann, Alexander. The Eucharist: Sacrament of the Kingdom. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. (The twentieth-century eucharistic and liturgical revival within which Cabasilas was rediscovered.)