Cabasilas, Nicholas

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CABASILAS, NICHOLAS

CABASILAS, NICHOLAS (c. 1322–1395), born Nicolaos Chamaetos Cabasilas; Greek Orthodox theologian and saint. A native of Thessalonica, Cabasilas studied there and in Constantinople. One of his teachers was his uncle Nilos Cabasilas, an adherent and successor of Gregory Palamas in the see of Thessalonica. Cabasilas served for ten years as counselor to the emperor John VI Cantacuzenos (1341–1354). In 1353 his name was put forward as a candidate for the patriarchal chair, although he was a layman. During the second half of his life, he resided in Constantinople, mostly in the monastery of Mangana, as a layman or as a monk, devoting himself to theological studies.

Gennadios Scholarios, the first patriarch after the fall of Constantinople, characterized Cabasilas's writings as "an ornament to the church of Christ." With an imposing style, apophthegmatic, prophetic, and poetical, he expresses genuine religious feeling and deep faith.

One of Cabasilas's most important works is Interpretation of the Holy Liturgy, a spiritual explanation of what is said and done during the Divine Liturgy, which he considers a real image of divine worship in heaven as well as of the earthly life of the incarnated God. In his thought the participation of the church in the sacraments (mustēria ) is not symbolic, but real, as is the participation of the members of the body in the heart. By participating in the mysteries (i.e., the Body and Blood of Christ), the faithful do not incorporate these elements into the human body as they do other food; rather, the faithful themselves are incorporated into these elements. Human's union with Christ, soul with soul and body with body, brings complete peace, which makes the many one; disturbance makes the one many.

Cabasilas's second great work, On the Life in Christ, presents an anatomy of the spiritual life in the framework of the incarnation, repeated and continued in the sacraments of the church. Cabasilas's thought revolves around the fact of salvation through union with God. The destination of humankind from the moment of its creation to the end of its history is this: union with God.

For Cabasilas, the distinguishing property of God is goodness. God is good in an excelling way, and the nature of good is to pour itself out and be distributed. Thus humankind is created good from the beginning, both Godlike and Christ-like, with the purpose of being united with God in the future. The incarnate Word of God encounters a Godlike kernel in each human being and from this encounter a new life springs, which leads to perfection in life in Christ. Perfection is the supreme and complete gift of God. All things have been made for perfection.

The present world is in the process of giving birth to the inner person, who is molded and formed in the present life, but who is born only in the future world. The moment of transition is the most delightful of visions. "Christ descends from heaven to earth brilliantly, the earth raises up other suns toward the sun of justice. All is full of light" (Life in Christ 6.16).

In 1983 Cabasilas was canonized a saint of the Greek Orthodox church and his feast fixed on June 20. His writings are widely read in many languages.

Bibliography

Works by Cabasilas

An unsatisfactory edition of the main texts, by Fronto Ducaeus, is reprinted in Patrologia Graeca, edited by J.-P. Migne, vol. 150 (Paris, 1865). All modern translations of Cabasilas's two great treatises, based on this text, are necessarily unsatisfactory too. Explication de la divine liturgie, edited and translated by Sévérien Salaville, in Sources Chrétiennes, vol. 4 (Paris, 1967), follows the same text collated with one Parisian manuscript. An English translation by Joan M. Hussey and P. A. McNulty is also available as Interpretation of the Divine Liturgy (London, 1960). While working on my own translation into modern Greek, I prepared another, more correct original text, based on four manuscripts; see Nikolaos Cabasilas, no. 22 in the series "Philokalia" (Thessaloniki, 1979–).

Works about Cabasilas

Die Mystik des Nikolaus Cabasilas vom Leben in Christo, edited by Wilhelm Gass (1849; 2nd ed., Leiden, 1899), was excellent in its time. The work of Myrna Lot-Borodine, Un maïtre de la spiritualité byzantine au quatorzième siècle, Nicolas Cabasilas (Paris, 1958), in spite of its oratorical style, is very interesting. Special aspects of Cabasilas's thought are treated in Ermanno M. Toniolo's La mariologia di Nicola Cabasila (Vicenze, 1955); Ihor Ševčenko's "Nicolas Cabasilas' 'Anti-zealot' Discourse: A Reinterpretation," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 11 (1957): 79–171; and Jean Vafiadis's L'humanisme chrétien de Nicolas Cabasilas: L'épanouissement de la personne humaine dans le Christ (Strasbourg, 1963). For readers of modern Greek, two important works are Athanasios Angelopoulos's Nikolaos Kabasilas Chamaetos, Hē zōe kai to ergon autou (Thessaloniki, 1970) and Panagiotes Nellas's Hē peri dikaiōseōs didaskalia Nikolaou tou Kabasila (Piraeus, 1975).