St. Nicholas Cabasilas

Nicholas Cabasilas was born about the year 1322 in Thessalonica, into a distinguished family; his uncle Nilus Cabasilas was archbishop of that city. He received the finest education of his age in rhetoric, philosophy, and theology, and took a part in the public affairs of the late Byzantine state, standing close to the emperor without ever, so far as is known, receiving ordination or the monastic tonsure.

He lived in the years of the great hesychast controversy, when St. Gregory Palamas defended the monks who taught that man may truly share in the uncreated light and energies of God. Cabasilas stood with Palamas and the Fathers of the councils of his century, and his own writings breathe the same teaching, that grace is a real participation in the divine life and not a created gift held at a distance.

His two great works are without rival in their kind. The Commentary on the Divine Liturgy leads the reader step by step through the service, showing how the whole economy of salvation is set forth in it. The seven books of The Life in Christ unfold how that life is given and grown: in baptism we are born, in chrismation we are moved, in the Eucharist we are fed, until Christ is formed in us and we live no longer our own life but His.

He withdrew in his later years to a life of prayer and study, and is thought to have reposed about the year 1392. His holiness and the soundness of his teaching were never forgotten, and the Church of Greece numbered him formally among the saints in the twentieth century.

The Church keeps his memory on the twentieth of June, honoring Nicholas Cabasilas as a teacher of the Mysteries and a witness that the deepest theology of the Church may be uttered by a layman who lives in Christ.