02 — The Freedom of Morality

Hē eleutheria tou ēthous (1970; second revised edition 1979; third 2002) is the book by which Yannaras is best known in English, and the one that first made him controversial in Greece. Its thesis is that Christian ethics is not a code but an ontology: what the Church calls ethos is a mode of existence, and morality in the conventional sense — rules obeyed, virtues accumulated, an individual improved — is precisely what the Gospel dissolves.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Book

Hē eleutheria tou ēthous: Dokimes gia mia orthodoxē theōrēsē tēs ēthikēs [The Freedom of Morality: Attempts at an Orthodox Vision of Ethics] was first published in Athens by Athēna in 1970. A second, revised edition appeared from Grēgorē in 1979, and a third revised edition in 2002 (Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], bibliography, 115–16). The English translation, by Elizabeth Briere, is of the 1979 second edition and appeared as The Freedom of Morality (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), in that press’s “Contemporary Greek Theologians” series (Petrà, bibliography, 120; on the series, Andrew Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 332). [Corrected: the frequently seen shorthand “1970; SVS 1984” is not wrong but is imprecise — the translated text is the revised 1979 book, not the 1970 first edition.]

Norman Russell, who knows the whole corpus as well as anyone, calls it one of the two most important of Yannaras’s many books, the other being Person and Eros: “Person and Eros (on ontology) and The Freedom of Morality (on ethics)” (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 82). The two are a pair, and the ethics is unintelligible without the ontology (see Section 03).

Why It Was Controversial

Louth records that the book was, “when first published in Greece, very controversial” (Louth, 332). The reason is not hard to find. A theology which says that morality is not obedience to precepts is easily heard — and was heard — as a theology which says that precepts do not matter. Russell reports the charge in its sharpest form: that Yannaras taught “a heretical morality that leads to libertinism” (Russell, 84). He rejects the charge as “based on a complete misreading of Yannaras’s discussion of eros and ecstasy,” terms which “derive from Dionysius the Areopagite and signify a going out of the self and seeking fulfilment in communion with God” (Russell, 84). But the charge was made, by Orthodox, and it is part of the record.

The Two Files

Ethos Against Morality sets out the central argument: the distinction between ēthos and ēthikē, the definition of sin as the failure of relation rather than the transgression of a rule, the critique of “religious” ethics as the individual’s project of self-justification, and Yannaras’s reading of the canons as measures of life rather than a legal code.

The Eucharistic Ethos and Asceticism follows the positive half: the Eucharist as the place where the new mode of existence is realized, asceticism as the practice of freedom from self-enclosure rather than a technique of self-improvement, and the extension of the ethos into art, the parish, and the shape of a culture.

See Also

  • Person and Eros — the ontology on which the ethics rests
  • Against Religion — the later and more polemical form of the same critique
  • Theosis — the Church’s teaching on deification, which Yannaras presupposes
  • Social Ethics — the wider Orthodox frame

References

  • Yannaras, Christos. The Freedom of Morality. Trans. Elizabeth Briere. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
  • Yannaras, Christos. Hē eleutheria tou ēthous. Athens: Athēna, 1970; 2nd rev. edn Athens: Grēgorē, 1979; 3rd rev. edn Athens, 2002.
  • 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.
  • Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.