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.