Cabasilas & Schmemann: Fleshing Out the Idea of Salvation
Not to set up Schmemann’s work for rejection again, but his language about our salvation is exactly what I was just mentioning as fadish among Orthodox—he is not at all wrong and can say these things with the full weight of the Fathers behind him—salvation is a healing, or in this case, restoration of our nature: “It is Paradise, not sin, that reveals the true nature of man; it is to Paradise and to his true nature, to his primordial vestment of glory, that man returns in Baptism.” And also, “Christ came not to replace ‘natural’ matter with some ‘supernatural’ and sacred matter, but to restore it and to fulfill it as the means of communion with God.”
That is all true, and Orthodoxically beautiful to say, but notice Cabasilas’s language on the same topic, mentioning not only “uniting our nature to Himself”, but also “paid the penalty”, a phrase rarely heard in today’s Orthodox dialect:
“By this He paid the penalty for the sins which we had audaciously committed; then, because of that death, we were made friends of God and righteous. By his death the Saviour not only released us and reconciled us to the Father, but also ‘gave us power to become children of God’, in that He both united our nature to Himself through the flesh which He assumed, and also united each one of us to His own flesh by the power of the Mysteries.”
St. Nicholas Cabasilas has a style I would love to emulate. I cannot see into his mind, but whether purposeful or not, he is stripping his commentary of the emotionally-charged and variously-defined terminology and speaking of salvation in ways that modern American Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox alike could (accidentally, all at the same time) agree with.
“Sin is twofold: it extends into the areas both of action and habit. The action does not linger for a time, nor does it remain at all. It happens once and is no more, like an arrow which is shot and passes by; yet it leaves a wound in those who commit it, the traces of wickedness, the disgrace and the liability to punishment. [note: There was the idea of original or ancestral sin without the baggage of those actual words.] The habit of sin arises from evil actions, like a disease introduced by tainted food. It is permanent and chains souls with unbreakable fetters. ...Accordingly sin has no end, since the habit gives rise to the actions and the accumulation of actions aggravate the habit.”
It may take a few more words to say, but he effectively tied Western and Eastern ideas of sin into one, interwoven understanding of why we need saving. Later returning to his terminology sin, he explains how Baptism purified us of both of those types: “His death, by being a death slays the evil life, by being a penalty it pays the penalty for sins to which each one of us was liable for our evil actions. In this way the baptismal washing renders us pure of every habit and action of sin in that it makes us partakers of Christ’s life-giving health.”
And for me, just when I was wondering how to speak to the Western mentality of salvation while also bringing in a fuller picture, St. Nicholas uses similar imagery to those drawings in evangelistic tracts of a cross bridging the chasm between man and God, the only difference being that St. Nicholas speaks of a barrier of separation instead of a chasm: “Now since the barrier [separating the human race from God] was twofold, consisting on the one hand in diversity of nature, on the other in a will corrupted by evil, the Saviour has removed the one by becoming incarnate, and the other by being crucified.”
That is all true, and Orthodoxically beautiful to say, but notice Cabasilas’s language on the same topic, mentioning not only “uniting our nature to Himself”, but also “paid the penalty”, a phrase rarely heard in today’s Orthodox dialect:
“By this He paid the penalty for the sins which we had audaciously committed; then, because of that death, we were made friends of God and righteous. By his death the Saviour not only released us and reconciled us to the Father, but also ‘gave us power to become children of God’, in that He both united our nature to Himself through the flesh which He assumed, and also united each one of us to His own flesh by the power of the Mysteries.”
St. Nicholas Cabasilas has a style I would love to emulate. I cannot see into his mind, but whether purposeful or not, he is stripping his commentary of the emotionally-charged and variously-defined terminology and speaking of salvation in ways that modern American Protestants and Catholics and Orthodox alike could (accidentally, all at the same time) agree with.
“Sin is twofold: it extends into the areas both of action and habit. The action does not linger for a time, nor does it remain at all. It happens once and is no more, like an arrow which is shot and passes by; yet it leaves a wound in those who commit it, the traces of wickedness, the disgrace and the liability to punishment. [note: There was the idea of original or ancestral sin without the baggage of those actual words.] The habit of sin arises from evil actions, like a disease introduced by tainted food. It is permanent and chains souls with unbreakable fetters. ...Accordingly sin has no end, since the habit gives rise to the actions and the accumulation of actions aggravate the habit.”
It may take a few more words to say, but he effectively tied Western and Eastern ideas of sin into one, interwoven understanding of why we need saving. Later returning to his terminology sin, he explains how Baptism purified us of both of those types: “His death, by being a death slays the evil life, by being a penalty it pays the penalty for sins to which each one of us was liable for our evil actions. In this way the baptismal washing renders us pure of every habit and action of sin in that it makes us partakers of Christ’s life-giving health.”
And for me, just when I was wondering how to speak to the Western mentality of salvation while also bringing in a fuller picture, St. Nicholas uses similar imagery to those drawings in evangelistic tracts of a cross bridging the chasm between man and God, the only difference being that St. Nicholas speaks of a barrier of separation instead of a chasm: “Now since the barrier [separating the human race from God] was twofold, consisting on the one hand in diversity of nature, on the other in a will corrupted by evil, the Saviour has removed the one by becoming incarnate, and the other by being crucified.”
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