Nicholas Cabasilas, born in 1322 or 1323, was not a bishop. He took his uncle’s last name, Nilus Cabasilas, who in fact succeeded Gregory Palamas as Archbishop of Thessalonica in 1351. According to Carmino J. DeCatanzaro, the translator of Cabasilas’s The Life in Christ (1974), he, Nicholas, was “a prominent figure” in theological controversies of his time involving the Latinizers (Cabasilas, 1974: 9, 11). He sided with Palamas during the hesychast controversy that ended in the Council of 1351 (See OCA’s Venerable Nicholas Cabasilas).

Starting in 1354 Nicholas devoted himself to philosophy and theology after leaving his post “as an official and friend of the emperor John VI Cantacuzenos,” who was in turn deposed in the same year and retired to monastic life (Cabasilas, 1974: 10). It is now firmly established that Nicholas Cabasilas entered the Manganon monastery near Constantinople and became a priest (Id.). He died there shortly after the tragic fall of his native city Thessalonica to the Ottoman Turks in 1387 (Id.). Some 60 years later, the eternal city Constantine, too, fell to the Ottoman Turks in May 1453. Nicholas was “glorified as a saint on July 19, 1983” (Venerable Nicholas Cabasilas).

As DeCatanzaro notes, Nicholas Cabasilas “was well acquainted with Latin theology” (11). This essay is an attempt to show Anselm’s influence on Nicholas Cabasilas, as it impacts on the latter’s interpretation of the Eucharist and how Cabasilas’ interpretation in turn further influenced the subsequent understanding of the Eucharist in the east (the Orthodox churches). Cabasilas demonstrates the Latin theology’s penetration into Orthodoxy, on one hand; as the influence of Pseudo-Dionysius, once dominant, began to wain in the east, on the other. Ironically, Dionysius’ influence increased in the west in the 13th-century in radically altered forms by both St. Bonaventure and St. Aquias.

Both St Bonaventure and St Aquinas died in 1274 while traveling to attend the Second Council of Lyon. Cabasilas died around 1392.

Arriving about a century after Bonaventure and Aquinas, Cabasilas must have known them both.

While the east is forgetting Pseudo-Dionysius, the west is discovering him in its own way. The critical Greek texts of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite, Corpus Dionysiacum, were first published only in 1990 (vol. 1) and 1991 (vol. 2) respectively by K. Aland and E. Mühlenberg.

Three of the five centers of Christianity fell to Caliphate: Antioch in 637, Jerusalem in 638, and Alexandria in 646. The two remaining Christian centers, Rome and Constantinople, are generally referred to henceforth as the west and the east. The latter took on the name of the New Rome and survived the old capital the Roman Empire for nearly thousand years.

Rome fell in 476 to Visigoths and the Vandals (the Germanic tribes); Constantinople fell in 1453 to Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire.

There was no significant theological exchanges between the eastern churches and the western churches before and shortly after the Great Schism of 1054. Only after the Franks and the Venetian merchants (the 4th Crusaders) broke through the walls of Constantinople and installed Baldwin, the Count of Flanders, as the emperor in 1204 (to begin the Latin rule for the next 57 years), did the exchanges between the two theological regions began in earnest.

Since Pax Constantiana of 313 (Peace of Constantine, or the Edict of Milan), theologies of the east and the west developed in relative independence, largely due to the language difference. Theological exchanges between the two regions earnestly began only in the 13th-century with the discovery of Pseudo-Dionysius in the west, while he was largely forgotten in the east.

Augustine (d. 430) as arguably the father of the western theology and culture dominated the scene in the west. Anselm of Canterbury came on the scene in the late 11th-century and Bonaventure and Aquinas both in Paris came two centuries later. One can argue that Augustine was never eclipsed by these subsequent theologians or by any other later figures in the west.

Despite Augustine’s theological dominance in the west, however, the first of his books to be translated into Greek was De Trinitate (400) in late 13th century (circa 1280) by Maximos Planoudes. His Confessions (401) and City of God (426) were not translated into Greek until the 20th-century by A. Dalezios (The Oxford Guide To the Historical Reception of Augustine, vol. 3, 1480; citing Biedermann, 615).

Pseudo-Dionysius’ influence on the Latin theology, however, is well known. In the early 12th-century Hugh of St Victor (d. 1141) first wrote a commentary on Dionysius’ Celestial Hierarchy. In the early 13th-century St Bonaventure wrote The Soul’s Journey into God (1259), adopting and spiritualizing Dionysius’ celestial hierarchy as the hierarchy of the soul’s journal toward God in the final chapter of the Soul’s Journey. Within the same decay, in the same city (Paris) and in the same university, Thomas Aquinas also wrote his own commentary on Dionysius’s Divine Names: An Exposition of the Divine Names (1268).

Both Bonaventure and Aquinas were Masters of Theology at the University of Paris and died in the same year 1274, while traveling to Council of Lyon.

In the early 14th-century Dante Alighieri (d. 1321) reproduced the exact celestial hierarchy of Dionysius’ celestial hierarchy, when he described Paradise in his Divine Comedy (1320). See Rorem, 1993: 74.

The famous hesychast debate between Palamas and Barlaam took place in June 1341 in Constantinople. This was perhaps the first ever formal theological confrontation between the east and the west.

Palamas was born in Constantinople in 1296 and became Archbishop of Thessolonica in 1347. Barlaam was born in a Greek community in Calabria, Southern Italy in 1290 and became the (Roman Catholic) Bishop of Gerace in 1342. Palamas was canonized in the east, as Barlaam was also in the west.

As already mentioned, Cabasilas, who sided with Palamas during the hesychast controversy, was well acquainted with Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (1098) and, as I will argue, was heavily influenced by Anselm. Cabasilas in turn substantially influenced the subsequent Orthodox’s interpretation of the sacraments (baptism, the Eucharist, and unction), shifting the focus on them toward the historical events of Christ with emphasis on the incarnational realism. This resulted in turn in viewing the sacraments largely in their representative roles, symbolizing (as sign) the historical events of Christ, as in Protestantism. The real, ontological presence of Christ in the sacraments is acknowledged; but the meaning thereof became largely representational and memorial; and their function and goal largely pietistic. In short, the ontological theology, symbolic and participatory, became subjective and individualistic—paralleling the shift in philosophy from the objective, realistic Platonic forms to the subjective, “clear and distinct” ideas as in Descartes.

Anselm’s Influence on Cabasilas

Anselm’s language and concepts are transported and directly implanted in Nicholas Cabasilas’ The Life in Christ, as he writes:

When a man has fallen it is not possible for him to be raised by human power, nor can human evil be destroyed by human righteousness. … There is need of virtue greater than is found in man to be able to cancel the indictment.

Cabasilas continues:

For the lowest it is particularly easy to commit an injury against Him who is greatest. Yet it is impossible for him to compensate for this insolence to Him who he has injured, and He who is injured is so far superior that the distance between them cannot even be measured. He, then, who seeks to cancel the indictment against himself must restore the honor to Him who has been insulted and repay more than he owes, partly by way of restitution, partly by adding a compensation for the wrong which he has done. Yet how can he who is unable even to attain to the measure of his debts succeed in surpassing it?

It was therefore impossible for any man to reconcile himself to God by introducing his own righteousness. Accordingly neither could the old law overcome the enmity, nor would the unaided efforts of those who live under the new be capable of achieving this peace, since both the former and the latter are works of men’s own power and of human righteousness.

He continues:

[Christ] destroys the enmity in His flesh and reconciles us to God… This He accomplishes not merely by sharing our nature, nor was it only when He died for us, but at all times and for every man. He was crucified then; now He hospitably entertains us whenever we in penitence ask forgiveness.

He alone, then, was able to render all the honor that is due to the Father and make satisfaction for that which had been taken away. The former He achieved by His life, the latter by His death. The death which He die upon the cross to the Father’s glory He brought in to outweigh the injury which we had committed; in addition, He most abundantly made amends for the debt of honor which we owed for our sins. By His life He paid all honor, both that which it befitted Him to pay and also that by which the Father ought to be honored. Even with the many great works by which He gave the greatest honor to the Father He also offered His life which was pure from every sin. He did this by fulfilling His own laws most exactly and perfectly, not only those which He Himself observed… but also those which He prescribed for the lives of men…

Cabasilas, 1974: 117-118.

The idea that man is hopeless to save himself is a biblical idea that both Anselm and Cabasilas accept as the starting premise, the same idea that John Calvin, one of the Protestant Reformers, will later pick up with his own emphasis. See “The Reformers” in Anselm and the Byzantine Synthesis.

Although Anselm does not use the word “indictment” (to my knowledge), as Cabasilas does (as seen in the above quote), it is a word that fits well in the legal system that Anselm sets up to explain the reason for the necessity of Christ’s atoning work (the work of substitution) on the cross. Christ’s perfect obedience in life and death undergone for us cancels the divine indictment (filed) against us (in the heavenly court of reason).

The other key words or concepts Casabilas employs crucially are directly transplanted from the pages of Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo (Why God-Man?), such as God’s honor, men causing injury to God Himself and His honor, the need to pay compensation, restitution, otherwise to pay back debts owed to God as requirement for reconciliation, etc. The identical metaphors of accounting and of the legal language are hard to avoid in both Anselm and Cabasilas.

For example, the ideas that humans owe God a collective debt which cannot be reconcilable by human work and that only a God-Man can make the sufficient repayment to satisfy the condition in which “recompense ought to be proportional to the magnitude of the sin” (Cur Deus Homo, Bk 1. 20; Anselm, 1998: 302) were entirely new in the theological vocabulary until Anselm introduced them in the 11th-century. Cabasilas in the 14th-century accepts these ideas readily without a qualm. 

Moreover, both Anselm and Cabasilas share the idea that the whole schema of redemption can be explained in terms of debts incurred and debts reconciled by repayment. Both argues that the compensation for the injury inflicted on God can only be made by Christ’s perfect life lived on earth and by his obedient death suffered on the cross. By His perfect life and his atoning death, we are reconciled with God. But only Christ’s nature as being fully God and fully Man can substitute for us adequately and appropriately. No other human being is large enough to receive the punishment adequate enough to the magnitude of sins; and no other being but God Himself can be adequate to encompass the whole of humanity under condemnation. God’s infinite love and justice are both satisfied in Christ’s single act of atonement on the cross. Since only God-Man can adequately sacrifice for the sins of humanity, only Christ’s atone sacrifice at Golgotha suffices. No other sacrifices can accomplish sufficient result. Thus, as the Protestants argue—with René Girard, knowingly or not—Christ’s sacrifice ends all sacrifices thereafter. His sacrifice puts an end to it all. The Eucharist performed in the Liturgy only reminds us of that fact. We ourselves should no longer perform sacrifices. There is no need, because Christ has done it all “once and for all.”

If Christ had sacrificed sufficiently once and for all, do we need to participate in it? Is theōsis necessary? The legal and the accounting language of Anselm does not fit the language of theōsis. Participation by imitation is fundamentally at adds with justification by faith. Sin becomes in Protestant theology the fundamental problem to be solved; whereas in patristic theologies, returning back to God in divinization is.

In Cabasilas, the union with Christ is physically and sacramentally accomplished in the sacraments, while imitation and becoming Christ recede into the background. Cabasilas does not seem to appreciate the tension that Anselm broaches into patristic theologies, as he adopts and employs Anselm’s vocabulary without a qualm.

Cabasilas’ Theology of “Life In Christ”

Adopting as central Paul’s famous statement: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2.20); Cabasilas understands Christian life to be a life lived “in Christ.” What does it mean to live “the life in Christ”? If for Pseudo-Dionysius it means a life lived in imitation of Christ, for Cabasilas it means life lived physically or sacramentally “in Christ.” The expression he uses, “in Christ,” should be taken literally and sacramentally. By “in Christ” he means literally: taking in the Body and the Blood of Christ and ingesting them:

Union with Christ, then, belongs to those who have undergone all that the Saviour has undergone, and have experienced and become all that He has.

Cabasilas, 1974: 65.

Just as Christ “was united to [our] blood and flesh pure from all sin,” we too must be united to His divine Blood and Flesh by partaking the sacraments. This is possible, because by becoming human He “deified” human nature. By dying “for the sake of the flesh, and [by rising] again,” He also deified us. Repeating the mantra first spoken by St Irenaeus of Lyon and then by St Athanasius of Alexander, Cabasilas says: “He descended in order that we might ascend” (66). We can have a free ride in Christ because He as God has descended to us; we can have a free ride to God because Christ as Man has risen to God. Even though neither Anselm nor Cabasilas employed the metaphor of transportation, the idea is there in their thoughts:

He who seeks to be united with Him must therefore share with Him in His flesh, partake of deification, and share in His death and resurrection. So we are baptized in order that we may die that death and rise again in that resurrection. We are chrismated in order that we may become partakers of the royal anointing of His deification.

Cabasilas, 1974: 65-66.

Absent the Neo-Platonic idea that the image participates in the archetype by imitation and assimilation (ὁμοίωσις), Cabasila is left with the idea of participation by means of symbolic and representational union in the materiality of the sacraments that functions as a token or sign. Our becoming like Christ by assimilation has no place in either Anselm or Cabasilas.

Instead, deification or divinization (θέωσις) is to happen in the symbolic and representational re-enactment produced in the sacrament, in which we participate by partaking in the rite, i.e., in the act of ingesting of the bread and wine or submerging in the water and arising therefrom. Cabasila’s way to deification is through representational participation in the materiality of the sacraments:

By feeding on the most sacred bread and drinking the most divine cup we share in the very Flesh and Blood which the Saviour assumed.

Cabasilas, 1974: 66.

Participation by feeding on and sharing “in the very Flesh and Blood”—this is how we join in Christ’s death and resurrection symbolically and representationally. There is no more mystagogy (μυσταγωγία) in which one enters and becomes initiated into the divine Mysteries/Symbols (razé) through the rite (τελετή).

But how can a representational participation be a real, ontological participation? How can we become like Christ ontologically, not merely symbolically (that is, representationally)? How can feeding or submerging become theōsis unless the rite is understood as an initiation into the Mystery itself? One does not symbolically participate; rather, one enters into the divine presence, whereby one is transformed and made divine, like a wig catching a fire by touching the fire lit on another candle.

If as in Dionysius becoming Christ means becoming like Him ontologically by imitation and assimilation (ὁμοίωσις), living “in Christ” as in Cabasilas means in contrast “to be counted worthy of the graces that befit [God’s friends]” (1974: 66)—whether or not one is in fact worthy in him- or herself. To be “in Christ” is to cloak oneself in His righteousness so as to be counted as righteousness, not necessarily to become righteousness by grace. Instead of actually becoming divine ourselves, like Christ, we bear a token of Christ’s divinity, i.e., we participate in His divinity symbolically and representationally. We enjoy a free ride “in Christ,” in His atoning work, as Christ’s righteousness is imputed upon us freely, as we are deemed righteousness thereby. Since Christ’s sacrifice is sufficient for all of us, we need not sacrifice ourselves as Christ did. We do not participate in His sacrifice but reap the benefits thereof.

We can now see how one of the Reformation mantras, sola fide, becomes important as a foundation of applying Christ’s work upon us. Absent the ontological and ritualistic initiation into the mysteries, a way to Christ’s atoning work and to reaping the benefits thereof is through faith alone. For we are justified by faith “in Christ,” by our belief in Him, as Paul says: “The one who is righteous will live by faith” (Rom 1.17). Martin Luther was deeply moved by this verse. But, then, James 2.24 says: “… a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.”

But does faith subjectively held as a firm belief have the power to transform us to become divine like Christ? Is a strongly held subjective belief powerful enough to effectuate the initiation into the Mysteries? Where does the transforming power lie? In faith or in the Symbols/Mysteries (razé) themselves? Can a token participation “in Christ” be a real participation in the sacrifice we offer ourselves with Him, like Him in imitation?

Cabasilas on the Eucharist