Athens, Zoë, and the Break

Yannaras entered the Zoë brotherhood at eighteen, in 1953, and left it about a decade later, in 1964, after a long inner crisis. What he found on the way out — Berdyaev, the Swiss physician Paul Tournier, and above all the conversation of the Athenian lay theologian Dimitrios Koutroubis — gave him the vocabulary of “person,” “freedom” and “relation” that he never afterwards abandoned. The break is the single event that most shapes his theology.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

Athens, 1935

Christos Yannaras was born in Athens on 10 April 1935 (Wikipedia, “Christos Yannaras,” citing his standard biographical notices; the date is repeated in the 2024 obituaries, e.g. OrthoChristian, “Christos Yannaras, noted professor and theologian, reposes in the Lord,” 26 August 2024). The memorial notice published by the Saint-Serge Institute in Paris adds that he was orphaned at the age of four; the detail is given there and is not, so far as this guide has been able to check, corroborated elsewhere in English, and is reported here on that single authority (Institut Saint-Serge, “In memoriam: Christos Yannaras [1935–2024],” 2024). He was a child during the German occupation and the Greek Civil War — a formative backdrop that Jonathan Cole, one of his translators, singles out in his obituary as part of what made him the kind of writer he became (Cole, “Remembering Christos Yannaras [1935–2024],” Political Theology Network, 2024).

The Zoë Brotherhood

Zōē (“Life”) was a brotherhood of celibate theologians founded in 1907, the most influential of the Greek religious organizations of the twentieth century. It ran catechetical schools, Sunday schools, publishing houses, youth camps and periodicals; at its height it reached a very large part of the Greek Orthodox population, and its senior members included Panayiotis Trembelas, the professor of dogmatics in the theological faculty of the University of Athens whose textbooks were the standard formation of Greek clergy for generations (Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 1). Its ethos was ascetic, moralistic, activist, biblically pietist, and — this is the point Yannaras would later press hardest — organized on models borrowed from Western Protestant and Roman Catholic devotional movements.

Yannaras entered it at eighteen, on completing his secondary education, in 1953, and remained a member “for almost ten years, becoming one of its most dynamic younger members” (Petrà, 1). He was not a marginal or resentful participant. He was the guiding spirit of the brotherhood’s journal for young readers, Skapanē [Mattock], published from January 1961 to December 1963 (Petrà, 1 n. 1).

Berdyaev, Tournier, Koutroubis

Yannaras’s own account of how he came out of that world is given in Kataphygion ideōn [Refuge of Ideas] (Athens: Domos, 1987), the autobiographical book that Petrà calls “perhaps the best known of his books” (Petrà, 2). He describes there a slow passage from an Orthodoxy that was “moralistic, devout and sentimental — ‘pietistic’ as he would later call it — and at the same time rationalistic and intellectually blinkered” to an Orthodoxy “linked with freedom and grounded on the person” (Petrà, 2, summarizing Kataphygion ideōn).

Three books, none of them Greek and none of them theological in the academic sense, began the change: Nicolas Berdyaev, of whom very little had been translated into Greek in the 1950s; the Swiss Christian physician Paul Tournier, Le personnage et la personne, translated into Greek as To prosōpeion kai hē prosōpikotēs [Mask and Personality]; and Igor Caruso’s Psychanalyse und Synthese der Existenz. The last two, with a certain irony, appeared in Zoë’s own psychology series (Petrà, 2 and nn. 4–6, citing Kataphygion ideōn, 257–58).

Yannaras quotes himself on Tournier: what emerged from those pages was “the absolute priority of the human person not in an axiological or ideological sense, but a priority of life in relation to any schematisation of life — laws, values, moral codes — to any schematic mask which like the shirt of Nessus makes our real personhood disappear” (Kataphygion ideōn, 258, quoted in Petrà, 2–3).

Berdyaev did more. Yannaras’s account of reading him is worth having at length, because almost every theme of his later work is already in it:

Here was a Christian author, and indeed an Orthodox one, who in his writings had not the slightest trace of the religiosity which I had known and which I was trying to live as the only authentic Christian life. He subjected moralism to a devastating critique, laid bare the narcissistic character of an individualistic religiosity, derided the turning of faith into a legalistic and ideological structure, had the audacity to respect the tragic adventure of atheism, and defended freedom as the absolute presupposition of a relationship with God.
— Yannaras, Kataphygion ideōn, 256–57, in Petrà’s translation (Petrà, 3)

And immediately after: “I was initiated by Berdyaev into my first sense of the difference between Eastern and Western Christianity. At university I had been taught the differences in dogma or the differences in administration and liturgical practice, but I had never suspected what realities of life were represented by these differences.” What made the discovery explosive was that the corruptions Berdyaev diagnosed in Western Christianity were, Yannaras writes, “the same as those which I saw to be also dominant within the Zōē movement” — “an egocentric self-sufficiency which was nourished by the turning of ‘virtues’ and of ‘moral consistency’ into idols” (Kataphygion ideōn, 256–57, in Petrà, 3–4).

This is the hinge of the whole authorship. The East/West thesis and the critique of pietism are, for Yannaras, one and the same diagnosis, discovered simultaneously and in each other. Whether that origin is a strength or a weakness of the thesis is precisely what his critics dispute (see The Construction of “the West”).

The living catalyst was Dimitrios Koutroubis (1921–1983), a layman of great personal influence and almost no publications, whom Petrà calls “a Socratic figure” and around whom a circle of young Greek theologians gathered in Athens in the early 1960s (Petrà, 2). Koutroubis’s own biography is remarkable in its own right: a Greek convert to Roman Catholicism, he joined the French Jesuits at their house of studies in Lyons in 1946 — the milieu of Jean Daniélou, Henri de Lubac and the founding of Sources chrétiennes — and returned within a few years to Greece and to Orthodoxy, bringing the excitement of the Western patristic ressourcement with him (Norman Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 80). Yannaras’s own tribute to him is unstinting: “He was the first who spoke the ‘new’ language. It was he who wrote the earliest articles in Greece about the theology of St Gregory Palamas and St Nicolas Kabasilas, he who translated for the first time the texts of the great theologians of the Russian diaspora, and — above all — he who gathered around himself a new generation of theologians” (Yannaras, quoted in Russell, 80).

It is worth recording, against any simple picture of the brotherhood as a closed world, that it was Zoë itself that organized the 1962 Athens symposium “Theologia,” to which Florovsky, Lossky, Schmemann and Meyendorff were invited (Russell, 80, citing Yannis Spiteris, La teologia ortodossa neo-greca [Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992], 213). The movement Yannaras left was also one of the channels by which the Russian émigré theology reached him. Yannaras gave him “pride of place” in his later account of the Greek theological renewal (Louth, “Some Recent Works,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 334, on the final chapter of Orthodoxy and the West). Through Koutroubis and through Olivier Clément’s presentation of him, Yannaras came to Vladimir Lossky, whose Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient appeared in Greek in Thessaloniki in 1964 (Petrà, 4 and n. 10). From Lossky he took the distinction of person from nature and the claim that the person is “rationally indefinable” and “remains always unique, incomparable and ‘dissimilar’” — a formula he was quoting by 1966 (Petrà, 4–5, citing Yannaras’s 1966 exchange with Angelos Terzakis in the journal Epoches).

Synoro and the Break

Yannaras left Zoë in 1964 (Petrà, 1). In the same year the journal Synoro [Frontier] began, and Yannaras was its guiding spirit; it ran from 1964 to 1967, and its last issue, no. 41, was set and ready but never appeared, suppressed by the colonels’ coup d’état of 21 April 1967 (Petrà, 1 n. 1; Andrew Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 331, on Yannaras’s editorship of Synoro “until the accession of the rule of the colonels in 1967”). [Disputed: the exact editorial arrangement. Petrà writes that Yannaras, on leaving Skapanē, "continued with a similar kind of journal, founding Synoro"; Norman Russell reports instead that Koutroubis "collaborated with Elias Mastroiannopoulos, the superior of Zoe, in the editing of a new journal called Synoro" (Russell, "Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers," Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 80, citing Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 294). The accounts are probably compatible — a circle rather than a single founder — but they are not identical.] Synoro was where the “theology of the ‘60s” — the Greek generation that broke with the German-modeled dogmatic manuals — found a voice, and Yannaras’s essays from it were collected as Timioi me tēn Orthodoxia [Honest with Orthodoxy] (Athens: Astēr, 1968).

Two things should be said about the break with dignity and without exaggeration. First, it was painful: Petrà describes the discovery of personalism as “a youthful and enthusiastic discovery pervaded by an emotion intensified by the anguish of leaving Zōē” (Petrà, 5). Second, it was permanent and public. Kataphygion ideōn, published twenty-three years later, remains one of the sharpest indictments of the Greek brotherhoods ever written by someone who had belonged to one, and Yannaras never softened it. His readers have long divided over whether that is prophetic honesty or the settling of a personal account at civilizational scale.

Norman Russell, who translated much of the mature corpus, records without endorsing the range of the reaction: Yannaras “is by no means a liberal in theological matters but his books have provoked fierce hostility in conservative Orthodox circles” — accusations of “a heretical morality that leads to libertinism, an apophatic theology that ends up in agnosticism, and an Orthodoxy that is just a disguised form of Western existentialism” (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 84). Those three charges are examined in Section 08.

See Also

References

  • Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019. (Ch. I, “From Orthodox Pietism to the Discovery of Personalism,” 1–10.)
  • Yannaras, Christos. Kataphygion ideōn: Martyria [Refuge of Ideas: Testimony]. Athens: Domos, 1987.
  • Yannaras, Christos. Timioi me tēn Orthodoxia: Neoellēnika theologika dokimia [Honest with Orthodoxy]. Athens: Astēr, 1968.
  • Louth, Andrew. “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–340.
  • Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
  • Cole, Jonathan. “Remembering Christos Yannaras (1935–2024).” Political Theology Network, 2024.
  • Institut de Théologie Orthodoxe Saint-Serge. “In memoriam: Christos Yannaras (1935–2024).” Paris, 2024.
  • OrthoChristian. “Christos Yannaras, noted professor and theologian, reposes in the Lord.” 26 August 2024.