01 — Life and Formation

Christos Yannaras was born in Athens on 10 April 1935 and died on 24 August 2024. Between those dates he was, in order: a devout teenage member of a pietist brotherhood, a runaway from it, a student in Bonn and Paris, the holder of two doctorates, a professor of philosophy at a school of social and political sciences, and for half a century one of the most argued-over columnists in the Greek press. This section covers the first three of those.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

Why the Biography Matters Here

With most theologians the life can be summarized in a paragraph and the thought studied on its own. With Yannaras it cannot. His central polemical term — the “religionization” (thrēskeiopoiēsē) of the Church into a system of moral demands, doctrinal certainties, and institutional authority — was first of all a description of the movement in which he spent his late adolescence and his twenties, and which he left in 1964 after what his biographer calls “a long inner struggle” (Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 1). He said so himself, at length, in an autobiographical book, Kataphygion ideōn [Refuge of Ideas] (Athens: Domos, 1987), and again in Ta kath’ eauton [Personal Memories] (Athens: Ikaros, 1995).

Andrew Louth makes the same point from outside: “In his youth he was a member of the renewal movement in the Greek Orthodox Church called Zoë, which was organized on Western lines. It was in rebellion against this movement, and through his encounter with the West in the 1960s, that his own distinctive theological vision was formed” (Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 331). Read without that, his anti-Westernism looks like simple confessional hostility. Read with it, it is at least in part an autobiography written as a history of Europe — which is one reason it has been both so powerful and so criticized (see Section 08).

The Two Files

Athens, Zoë, and the Break covers the years to 1964: the Athens childhood, entry into the Zoë brotherhood at eighteen, the editorship of two journals, the discovery of personalism through Berdyaev, Paul Tournier and the Athenian lay theologian Dimitrios Koutroubis, and the departure.

Bonn, Paris, and the Two Doctorates covers the years abroad and the academic career: Bonn, Paris in 1967–1970, the Thessaloniki thesis of 1970 that became Person and Eros, the Sorbonne thesis on John Climacus, the rejected Athens doctorate, the long exclusion from the Greek theological faculties, and the chair of philosophy at Panteion. It closes with his death in August 2024.

See Also

  • Against Religion — the mature form of the critique that began with Zoë
  • Orthodoxy and the West — the historical thesis, with a chapter of its own on the Greek religious movements
  • Vladimir Lossky — read in Paris and decisive for the young Yannaras
  • John Zizioulas — the exact contemporary, whose formation ran a parallel course

References

  • Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019.
  • Louth, Andrew. “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–340.
  • Yannaras, Christos. Kataphygion ideōn: Martyria [Refuge of Ideas: Testimony]. Athens: Domos, 1987.
  • Yannaras, Christos. Ta kath’ eauton [Personal Memories]. Athens: Ikaros, 1995.