Christos Yannaras: Philosophy, Theology, Culture

For more than a decade now, I have used Christos Yannaras's The Freedom of Morality in my moral theology courses to good effect. There are parts of the book--like every other of his books, at least among the ones I have read--that drive me to distraction by sometimes indolent polemicizing, but even that is redeemed somewhat in stirring up vigorous classroom discussion. (I rather suspect that may be part of his point, and that he would not be displeased to learn this.)

This summer a paperback edition of a book devoted to Yannaras, which first appeared in 2018, was published: Christos Yannaras: Philosophy, Theology, Culture by Andreas Andreopoulos, Demetrios Harper (Routledge, 2020), 218pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Christos Yannaras is one of the most significant Orthodox theologians of recent times. The work of Yannaras is virtually synonymous with a turn or renaissance of Orthodox philosophy and theology, initially within Greece, but as the present volume confirms, well beyond it. His work engages not only with issues of philosophy and theology, but also takes in wider questions of culture and politics.

With contributions from established and new scholars, the book is divided into three sections, which correspond to the main directions that Christos Yannaras has followed – philosophy, theology, and culture – and reflects on the ways in which Yannaras has engaged and influenced thought across these fields, in addition to themes including ecclesiology, tradition, identity, and ethics.

This volume facilitates the dialogue between the thought of Yannaras, which is expressed locally yet is relevant globally, and Western Christian thinkers. It will be of great interest to scholars of Orthodox and Eastern Christian theology and philosophy, as well as theology more widely.

Two Books by Sotiris Mitralexis

I had the pleasure of meeting the author briefly in Iasi in January at the inaugural conference of the International Orthodox Theological Association. I look forward to seeing him again at a conference in Syros in June. In the meantime, herewith two notices about his newest books:

Sotiris Mitralexis, ed., Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras' Thought (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2018), 277pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Christos Yannaras (born 1935 in Athens, Greece) has been proclaimed ‘without doubt the most important living Greek Orthodox theologian’ (Andrew Louth), ‘contemporary Greece’s greatest thinker’ (Olivier Clément), ‘one of the most significant Christian philosophers in Europe’ (Rowan Williams). However, until recently the English-speaking scholar did not have first-hand access to the main bulk of his work: in spite of the relatively early English translation of his The Freedom of Morality (1984), most of his books appeared in English fairly recently – such as Person and Eros (2007), Orthodoxy and the West (2006), Relational Ontology (2011) or The Schism in Philosophy (2015). In this volume, chapters shall examine numerous aspects of Yannaras’ contributions to Orthodox theology, philosophy and political thought, based on his relational ontology of the person, later popularised in the Anglophone sphere by John Zizioulas. From political theology to Heidegger and the philosophy of language, from Yannaras’ critique of religion to the patristic grounding of the theology of the person and from Orthodoxy to the West, this volume comprises a panorama of Christos Yannaras’ transdisciplinary contributions.

The second work by Mitralexis is his Ever-Moving Repose: A Contemporary Reading of Maximus the Confessor's Theory of Time (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2018), 256 pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

Sotiris Mitralexis offers a contemporary look at Maximus the Confessor's (580-662 CE) understanding of temporality, logoi, and deification, through the perspective of contemporary philosopher and theologian Christos Yannaras, as well as John Zizioulas and Nicholas Loudovikos. Mitralexis argues that Maximus possesses both a unique theological ontology and a unique threefold theory of temporality: time, the Aeon, and the radical transformation of temporality and motion in an ever-moving repose. With these three distinct modes of temporality, a Maximian theory of time can be reconstructed, which can be approached via his teaching on the logoi and deification. In this theory, time is not merely measuring ontological motion, but is more particularly measuring a relationship, the consummation of which effects the transformation of time into a dimensionless present devoid of temporal, spatial, and generally ontological distance--thereby manifesting a perfect communion-in-otherness. In examining Maximian temporality, the book is not focusing on only one aspect of Maximus' comprehensive Weltanschauung, but looks at the Maximian vision as a whole through the lens of temporality and motion.

Christos Yannaras

There are certain names, by the force of their prose and the number of their books, which cannot be overlooked today, and Christos Yannaras is certainly in that category. I have used his books in classes for more than a decade now, and read some others. In the former category I have regularly assigned his Freedom of Morality.

That book seems emblematic of Yannaras in some ways--blustery and sprawling, desperately in need of an editor, prone to wild exaggerations and polemical tangents (especially about tiresome Orthodox bugbears such as "scholasticism" and "pietism"), and not a little bit idealistic. Still it contains some crucial insights well worth thinking about in depth.

It is a facile temptation, devoutly to be avoided, to write Yannaras off as one more anti-Western Orthodox crank, of whom there seem to be not a few today. But Yannaras can indulge in those kinds of polemics (perhaps nowhere at greater length than in Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age) and still be worth your time because--unlike almost all other anti-Western Orthodox--he regularly turns the criticism back on Orthodoxy itself in welcome ways, as he does in this book in particular. This capacity for self-criticism, as I noted here, became obvious and welcome in 2011 when he gave a commencement address at Holy Cross in Brookline denouncing Orthodox zealots with their individualism, their idolization, their fundamentalism, and their fanaticism masquerading as Orthodox but in fact deeply modern and deeply Western.

Among his other books which I have read, and in some cases reviewed elsewhere, I'd draw attention to The Enigma of Evil. I'm not entirely convinced by its arguments, but again it raises some good questions (in between the usual shots at the West).

And I am just about to begin reading his Against Religion: the Alienation of the Ecclesial Event. It promises to be of interest in my own current work on Freud and theology, some of it discussed here where Yannaras's ideas on psychoanalysis (especially its Lacanian variant) were also noted and welcomed. In his essay on Lacan, Yannaras is a model of open learning, of "despoiling the Egyptians" that the Fathers so often practiced and recommended--but which few on-line apologists today seem to do.

There are many other books that could be mentioned, but the point of this entry is to draw your attention to a new book, and a forthcoming one later this year.

The new book is Metaphysics as a Personal Adventure, trans. Norman Russell (St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2017), 212pp.

About this book the publisher tells us the following:

Christos Yannaras is a philosopher, theologian, and political thinker widely regarded as one of the most important Orthodox thinkers of the twentieth century. He sees theology along with philosophy not as an academic enterprise, but as a serious approach to reality in all the dimensions vital to life today. A controversial figure, he castigates much of what passes for Christianity in the East as well as in the West, calling it a religionization of faith. In this book he responds to searching questions concerning his work, setting his thinking as a whole in an integrated vision of knowledge, truth, relationship, and salvation.

And then, set for release in August of this year is a forthcoming study: Christos Yannaras: Philosophy, Theology, Culture By Andreas Andreopoulos (Routledge, 2018), 243pp.

About this forthcoming work Routledge tells us the following:

Christos Yannaras is one of the most significant Orthodox theologians of recent times. His work engages not only with issues of philosophy and theology, but also takes in wider questions of culture and politics. With contributions from established and new scholars this collection considers the four main strands of Yannaras’ work - philosophy, theology, ethics and culture - and reflects on the ways in which Yannaras has engaged and influenced thought across these fields. Christos Yannaras provides a foreword.

Why We Secretly Hate Freedom and Health

In having to choose books for next year for a moral theology class, I've had occasion to go back to old works I've used in the past, beginning with the Orthodox thinker Christos Yannaras's The Freedom of Morality, which I have often used over the years, having first read it a dozen or more years ago now. Like many of his books, it contains occasionally wild claims and polemical allegations, and Freedom of Morality in particular is grossly swollen on its own verbosity and badly in need of severe editing. Nevertheless, the core arguments still remain important in refusing the temptation on the part of too many Christians--Catholics especially--to reduce "morality" to some kind of discrete system or, worse, an ideology.

Following Heraclitus' famous aphorism that you cannot step twice into the same river, so I find that picking up books one has read several times over the years necessarily entails reading them differently as the river of one's life continues to move. So this time, in coming back to Yannaras, I read him in light of more recent reading along similar themes, including the social critic and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom.

Fromm, in turn, let me to Nikolai Berdyaev's Slavery and Freedom. I don't know if anyone has ever read Fromm and Berdyaev together, let alone written and analyzed their similarities, but they are plainly there in both books for everyone to see. This is not entirely surprising as both men were near-contemporaries in living through both world wars. Both were also shaped by Marxism and existentialism in different ways.

All three--Yannaras, Fromm, and Berdyaev--have been on my mind lately because I have, since reading Adam Phillips, been especially taken with two of his insights: first, that most of us do not really want to be free because we find ourselves too much to bear. It is easier to restrict our freedom through submission to someone or something else--ideology, alcohol, authority figures--than it is to bear our freedom in all its uncontained unpredictability and ill-defined spontaneity.

I think our dis-ease with freedom is what led to D.W. Winnicott's powerful aphorism (quoted in Phillips' short biography of him, but originally found in his book on the child) that "health is much more difficult to deal with than disease." If we are suffering and diseased (spiritually, psychologically, physically) we are bound and unfree. Perhaps perversely, many of us seem to prefer it that way. That is both stranger and yet more widespread than many of us realize.

Why Do Earthquakes and Tornados Exist?

I am finally--nearly a year after the editor sent it to me--getting around to reviewing a recent book by Christos Yannaras, The Enigma of Evil, trans. Norman Russell (Holy Cross Press, 2012), 176pp. I cannot reproduce the contents of the review here but will instead just offer a few thoughts. First, the publisher's blurb:

Nature's logic makes no qualitative judgments: earthquakes, disease, fire, and flood destroy human beings just as they also destroy irrational animals - without distinction. Decay, pain, panic, and death constitute the same conditions of existence for both Aristotle and his dog. Why? How is this irrationality compatible - how does it coexist - with the wonderful rationality (the wisdom and beauty) of nature? Why is the only consciousness in the universe, the creative uniqueness of each human being, a provocatively negligible given in nature's mechanistic functionality? And why do hatred, blind cupidity, sadism, and criminality spring from nature - why do they have roots in humanity's biostructure? Can we perhaps bring some logical order, some principles of understanding, to questions concerning the nature of evil? This book attempts to respond to the challenge.

Those who know and have read Yannaras will find here a characteristic style that is not without its frustrations: he seems to dodge and weave around various "positions" and take almost exuberant delight in sketching out certain lines of thought, only to dash them to bits a little later on. If you have patience to see it through to the end, the book tries on multiple definitions and conceptions of evil, and then just as quickly strips most of them off and rubbishes them. You get some clarity in the end, but you have to work at it. "Mercurial" is the word that recurs when I think of his style.

Still, the value in this book, it seems to me, is that it does not confine itself to classic (if sometimes tiresome) questions of e.g., why does God let the little girl die of brain cancer at 3, or how could He have allowed the Holocaust? Yannaras's focus, rather, is on "natural" evil, as he ponders how it is that "nature" seeks to survive while at the same time "nature" also allows for or brings about floods, fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like.

He Came That We May Have Life

As we get ready to celebrate the nativity of Christ, we are reminded that God did not send an idea into the world or a philosophical system or series of propositions, still less a mere moral code for achieving virtue. He sent, of course, a person, and that person calls other persons not to a "religion" or an "institution" directly, but to a relationship (one that is, of course, ecclesially and sacramentally mediated). For this reason, and long before I had ever begun to read the controversial Greek Orthodox polemicist Christos Yannaras, I have always found myself resistant to describing Christianity as a "religion," a term that I still avoid whenever possible because of its hugely problematic connotations--to say nothing of the fact that sociologists, philosophers, and other scholars find it notoriously difficult to define with any coherence. In many of his earlier works, Yannaras hints at problems with this term, but in his new book he attacks it directly and fully: Against Religion: the Alienation of the Ecclesial Event, trans. Norman Russell (Holy Cross, 2013), 217pp.

About this book (which I'm reviewing for the newly founded Catholic Review of Books) we are told:

What is religion? In this book Christos Yannaras argues that it is a human construct, the product of our instincts of self-preservation and self-perpetuation, which bolsters our sense of securty as individuals, promising us eternal happiness. Against this, Yannaras sets the commitment of faith, defining it as an act of trust, self-offering and self-transcendence. For a Christian, faith is lived within the ecclesial events, that is to say, within a mode of relations of communion embodied in Christ.

And with this, I shall sign off until after the feast. See you at the end of the month. Znamy boh! 

Christos Yannaras's Relational Ontology

I have previously drawn attention to the important thought of Christos Yannaras for both contemporary philosophy and theology. A new translation has recently been published of Relational Ontology, trans. Norman Russell (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2011), 156pp.

About this book, the publisher tells us:

How is the person constituted? Is there a transcendent cause of existence? Starting from these questions, Christos Yannaras explores what we know about ourselves as willing, thinking, sexual beings, and suggests how we can overcome the predeterminations of nature to enter into a different mode of existence, a mode that enables us ultimately to share in the personal otherness of divine being. This book builds on the notion of the human person that Yannaras has already established in his previous works and develops it further in exciting new ways.

This book carries endorsements from two important non-Orthodox voices, an Anglican and a Roman Catholic:

"Christos Yannaras has been for several decades one of the most prolific, original, and contemporary Orthodox writers in Greece. He is perhaps one of the most significant Christian philosophers in Europe, and it is wonderful to be able to welcome this sustained enterprise in making him accessible to English-speaking audiences." - Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

"In this recent work Christos Yannaras confronts the reductionist claims advanced by some neuroscientists, and in dialogue with Jacques Lac an reflects on the relevance of relation with the Other to the constitution of the human person. Everything in us manifests itself as a form of the desire for life-as-relation. It is this relational dynamic that shapes our mode of being, going beyond the determinism of nature and opening us up to the experience of freedom, sacrifice, love, and beauty. In the light of the originally relational constitution of human existence, Yannaras presents a suggestive rereading of the Christian faith - particularly of the doctrine of original sin - and offers a fascinating new approach to the problems of evil and death. This stimulating book is a most welcome addition to Holy Cross Orthodox Press's Yannaras series." - Basilio Petra, Professor of Moral Theology at the Faculty of Theology of Central Italy (Florence)

This will be expertly reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2012.

Christos Yannaras, Orthodoxy, and the West

In my adamantine conviction that no one can consider oneself educated in theology unless one know both Eastern and Western traditions, I have my graduate students in moral theology read several texts, including Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality 
which, in my judgment, is a felicitous counterpart to one of the others we read, viz., Servais Pinckaers' The Sources of Christian Ethics.

Yannaras is one of the most interesting theologians of our time. He has written, inter alia, books on anthropology (Person and Eros), on metaphysics (Postmodern Metaphysics and, one of his first, On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite), a scriptural commentary (Variations on the Song of Songs), and an introductory text (Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology).

To my mind, two of his most important works remain The Freedom of Morality, originally written and published in Greek in the 1970s and first introduced to anglophone audiences in a 1984 translation from St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, and recently reprinted by them. It is not the easiest text in some ways, and were I the editor of it I think I would have re-arranged several chapters differently and cut out some of the breezier parts; but nonetheless it remains a deeply challenging and important book, especially for Western Christians still struggling--as Pinckaers, one of the most important Catholic moralists of our time, and, many believe, a ghost writer for Veritatis Splendor, convincingly argued--with the legacy of scholasticism and the manualist tradition of casuistry and looking for a way forward to genuine renewal of moral theology as called for by the Second Vatican Council.

More recently, Yannaras has authored Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age, a book we had reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies by Brandon Gallaher of Oxford.

For those accustomed to hectoring Athonites and their often jejune disciples in North American Orthodoxy bleating about ecumenism as a "pan-heresy" and "the West" as the source of all errors, this book must be at least somewhat disconcerting. Yes, Yannaras is critical, as he was in The Freedom of Morality, of many things he sees in the West--and rightly so--but he also realizes that such criticism can only be reflexive: "the West" is everybody today. (A member of the international Orthodox-Anglican dialogue, some years ago, came back from one of their meetings and told me that, according to the other great Greek theologian of our time, John Zizioulas, "There's no such thing as 'the West' today: we're all Western.")

If one has not read his books, especially Orthodoxy and the West as well as the Freedom of Morality, one will not perhaps fully understand Yannaras' recent commencement address in Brookline at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology/Hellenic College. I really encourage the entire reading of it, but here are some key passages which clearly and strongly echo concerns--first raised nearly forty years now in Freedom of Morality--with not turning Orthodoxy into a "system":

The "Zealots" of Orthodoxy, as our own fundamentalists are called, are as a rule fanatically anti-Western: they regard the Christian churches and confessions of the West as opponents of the Orthodox camp, as a real threat. They proclaim that the West is steeped in error and at the same time has evil designs on Orthodoxy. Thus for the Zealots any attempt at Orthodox "dialogue" with Western Christians, any participation in the "ecumenical movement" signifies a betrayal of Orthodoxy, a surrender to error, an abandoning of the conviction that the Church is One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic.

But this Zealotry certainty does not constitute a defence of the decisions of the Councils; it does not derive from a conciliar expression of catholic ecclesial experience. It is an individual choice and conviction, based usually on the opinion of some geron, or elder, also chosen individually, who is lent "objective" authority by his hagiorite, or other, monastic affiliation. The defense of Orthodoxy by the "conservatives" is conducted on the basis of their individual choices and judgements, not on the basis of the Church's conciliar expression. It is therefore a defense that manifestly undermines the coherence of the ecclesial body. It invalidates the conciliar system; it denies the episcopal ministry.

Thus the individualistic character of Zealotry-Fundamentalism and the accompanying idolization of formalism - of "dogmas" and "canons" rendered independent of ecclesial experience - assimilate the "Orthodoxy" of conservative Christians to every other ideological "orthodoxy": to that of conservative Marxists, conservative Freudians, etc. All these "orthodoxies" have the same characteristics in common:

As he goes on next to note, one of those characteristics is precisely an obsession with "sources." This is, of course, not a new or original criticism: Georges Florovsky made it in "St. Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers," first published in the Greek Orthodox Theological Review in 1959-60; and it was also made later by Alexander Schmemann in his essay “Liturgical Theology, Theology of Liturgy, and Liturgical Reform,” in Liturgy and Tradition: Theological Reflections of Alexander Schmemann (originally published in St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly in 1969). Even earlier, the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar made a strikingly similar argument in a 1939 essay published in German and translated into English in 1997 as "The Fathers, the Scholastics, and Ourselves." All three note that fetishizing "sources" like the Fathers is a failed method that overlooks their phronema and fails, moreover, to take account of the fact that we cannot "return" to the past (a past which, in any event, was not nearly so golden, as Robert Taft has shown).

Yannaras continues by noting that this mindset of the zealots is not a theological, traditional, or spiritual one: it is, rather, "the specific product of the post-Roman West that we call 'ideology,'" an ideology that is "individualist'' in nature.

The answer to this and other problems is twofold, and here we see Yannaras and Zizioulas both working on common themes, as anyone who has read either will immediately recognize:

The ontology of the person and eucharistic ecclesiology implement criticism of the West as Christian self-criticism, because they were both born from a consistent grappling with the impasse to which the West (and now also the East) has been led by intellectualism and legalism - the rendering of Christian "religiosity" independent of the ecclesial event.

In any event, as I say, the whole thing very much merits close reading, as do his books.

Political Hesychasm

Hesychasm is coming in for renewed scholarly attention, as I have noted previously. A new book from Lexington Books (an imprint of Rowman and Littlefield) continues the exploration: Daniel Payne, The Revival of Political Hesychasm in Contemporary Orthodox Thought: The Political Hesychasm of John Romanides and Christos Yannaras (Lexington Books, 2011), 336pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The Revival of Political Hesychasm in Contemporary Orthodox Thought focuses on the retrieval of the spiritual theology of the Orthodox Church and how it is being used in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to develop a political ideology that allows for the creation of a unique Eastern Orthodox identity, which is against western globalization. Paramount in the creation of this identity is the thought of John S. Romanides and Christos Yannaras.

This sounds like a very interesting, almost paradoxical combination: hesychasm, on the one hand, usually associated with the quiet contemplative in a monastery, and the bustle of politics-in-the-world on the other; and a second paradox: Christos Yannaras, a serious thinker, paired with John Romanides, whom some Orthodox (inter alia) regard as a crank.