Nicholas Cabasilas

Thessalonica and the name Cabasilas

He was born at Thessalonica, the second city of the empire, about 1320 — the dates 1319, 1322 and 1323 are all proposed — into a family of the civic aristocracy. His father's name was Chamaëtos; he took instead the surname of his mother's family, Cabasilas, because of his uncle Neilos Cabasilas, the theologian and later Archbishop of Thessalonica, who was his teacher and the chief influence of his early life. Neilos was himself a formidable controversialist against the Latin claims, and the nephew grew up inside that argument.

Nicholas studied at Thessalonica and then at Constantinople, where his letters show him working at rhetoric, law, astronomy and the natural sciences as well as theology — the full curriculum of the late Byzantine humanist revival, in a generation that produced Gregoras, Demetrios Kydones and Palamas. His correspondence, some of which survives, is that of a man entirely at home in the classical tradition and entirely unembarrassed by it.

Politics: the Zealots and the emperor

The years of his manhood were the years of the civil war between John VI Kantakouzenos and the regency for John V Palaiologos (1341–1347), and of the Zealot revolution in Thessalonica, when the city was held for years by a popular party against the aristocracy. Cabasilas was a friend and counsellor of Kantakouzenos and was employed by him on delicate business, including an attempt in 1345 to bring the city over. He wrote, against the seizure of church property by the state and by the revolutionary authorities, a Discourse on the unlawful acts of magistrates against sacred things — one of the few Byzantine texts to argue the question of ecclesiastical property on principle — and a Discourse against usurers which attacks the lending trade with a directness that is unusual in his tradition.

In 1347, after the Palamite victory, he was one of three names put forward for the vacant see of Thessalonica; the appointment went to Gregory Palamas. When Kantakouzenos abdicated in 1354 and became the monk Joasaph at the Mangana monastery in Constantinople, Cabasilas went with him and lived there — but the sources do not say that he was tonsured, and the assumption that he became a monk or a priest is an inference, not a datum (see below).

Theology: the Commentary on the Divine Liturgy

The Explanation of the Divine Liturgy (Ἑρμηνεία τῆς θείας λειτουργίας) goes through the rite of St John Chrysostom from the preparation of the gifts to the dismissal. Its originality lies in a decision of method: Cabasilas refuses to let allegory float free of what is actually being done. The older commentaries, from Maximus and Germanus onward, had read each action of the Liturgy as a symbol of a moment in the economy of salvation; Cabasilas keeps that reading but subordinates it, insisting that the Liturgy first does what it signifies — it consecrates, and it sanctifies those who receive — and that the symbolism serves the sanctification rather than the other way about. He treats the epiclesis squarely, defends the Eastern practice against Latin objections without polemical heat, and throughout writes as if the reader will be receiving communion, which by the standards of fourteenth-century practice was itself a position.

Theology: The Life in Christ

On the Life in Christ (Περὶ τῆς ἐν Χριστῷ ζωῆς), in seven books, is his greatest work and the one that has travelled furthest. Its argument is that the life of Christ is communicated to the Christian through the three mysteries — baptism, which gives existence in Christ; chrismation, which gives the energies of the Spirit; and the Eucharist, which gives Christ himself and is therefore the term and perfection of the other two. From this he draws the conclusion that scandalised some later readers and delighted others: that sanctification is not primarily the fruit of ascetic achievement but a gift already given, which the ascetic effort receives and guards.

Two things make the book remarkable in its century. The first is that it is addressed to Christians in the world — the man in the market and the woman in the house can live the life in Christ without leaving either, because the mysteries are given to them as fully as to the monk. The second is its account of the love of God for man: God's love, Cabasilas writes, has the character of eros, a love that goes out of itself, and the Incarnation and the Cross are its proof — a theme he develops with a warmth that is closer to the language of the mystics than to that of the schoolmen. He also composed three homilies on the Mother of God — on her Nativity, the Annunciation and the Dormition — which are among the finest Marian texts in Greek, and an encomium of St Demetrius, the patron of his city, and one of St Theodora of Thessalonica.

Hesychasm

Cabasilas supported the monks of Athos and the theology of Gregory Palamas in the hesychast controversy, whose settlement at the council of 1351 he lived through; he is counted among the Palamite party without having been a controversialist by temperament. His own writing takes the doctrine of deification for granted and spends its energy on the sacramental road to it. This is why he is at once wholly of the hesychast century and readable by people who have no interest in the disputes of that century.

Repose and glorification

He is thought to have died about 1392, possibly a little earlier; letters place him alive in 1391, and he may have lived to see Thessalonica fall to the Ottomans in 1387. The place of his burial is unknown.

His veneration was informal and continuous for six centuries — he was called hagios in manuscripts and in local usage long before any act of the Church — and on 19 July 1983 the Ecumenical Patriarchate entered his name in the calendar of saints, appointing his memory to June 20.