Ethos Against Morality

The argument of The Freedom of Morality turns on a distinction between ēthos — a mode of existence, what a thing is and how it is — and ēthikē, morality understood as a system of rules and an accounting of individual merit. Yannaras holds that Christianity has an ethos and not an ethics, that sin is the failure of relation rather than the breach of a statute, and that a morality of rules is not merely inadequate but is itself the corruption the Gospel came to undo.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Distinction

The Greek word ēthos originally denoted a habitual dwelling-place, and only derivatively a character or custom. Yannaras exploits the older sense. Ethos for him is the way a being exists — its tropos hyparxeōs, mode of existence — and only in that sense a way it behaves. Ēthikē, “ethics” or “morality” in the modern acceptation, is a second-order construction: a set of imperatives addressed to an individual will, with sanctions attached, generating a ledger of merit and demerit.

The whole book is the claim that these are not two ways of saying the same thing but two rival accounts of what a human being is. If a person is an individual — a self-contained unit of nature marked off from other units — then morality is the improvement of that unit, and religion is the technique of the improvement. If a person is constituted by relation, then the “good” is not a property the unit acquires but the actualization of the relation, and its opposite is not a broken rule but a failed communion.

Norman Russell puts Yannaras’s position with unusual economy: “morality does not consist in obedience to rules and precepts. It consists in the realization of life as communion. The ‘personal’ is contrasted with the ‘individual.’ To be an individual is to be locked in one’s cognitive self-sufficiency. To be a person is to affirm freedom as one’s existential truth, a freedom expressed in self-giving and loving communion” (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 83).

Sin as the Failure of Relation

The corollary is Yannaras’s account of sin. Sin (hamartia, in its root sense a missing of the mark) is not primarily a transgression to be forgiven by a competent authority; it is a failure of the person to exist personally — the retreat of the human being into the mode of nature, into self-enclosure, into what Yannaras calls atomicity. Rowan Williams, reading the 1970 thesis on which the mature position rests, summarizes it accordingly: the fall is “a diminution of personal capacity for relation,” not “an ‘essential’ change, an alteration in the underlying structure of human existence,” except in that “nature” thereby “become[s] incapable of expressing itself personally” (Williams, “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras,” Sobornost 6 [Winter 1972]: 415–430, discussing Yannaras, To ontologikon periechomenon, 71–72, 82–83).

Two consequences follow, and Yannaras presses both hard.

First, if sin is a mode of existence and not a set of acts, then salvation cannot be juridical. It cannot consist in a transaction that leaves the sinner’s mode of being untouched while altering his legal standing. Yannaras takes this to be the great deformation of Western soteriology, and it is one of the points at which his ethics and his historical thesis about the West meet (see The Historical Thesis).

Second, if sin is a failure of relation, then a moral code that succeeds — that produces a genuinely well-behaved individual — may leave the failure entirely intact, and may even deepen it, because the accumulation of virtue is one of the more efficient ways of confirming a self in its self-sufficiency. This is the claim behind Yannaras’s most quoted charge, that religious moralism nourishes “an egocentric self-sufficiency” through “the turning of ‘virtues’ and of ‘moral consistency’ into idols” — a formula he first applied not to the West but to the Zoë brotherhood of his own youth (Yannaras, Kataphygion ideōn, 256–57, translated in Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 3–4; see Athens, Zoë, and the Break).

Freedom

The title is exact, and it carries the weight. “The freedom of morality” is not freedom from morality in the antinomian sense; it is the claim that ethos is the exercise of freedom and that a morality of imposed rules is, structurally, unfree — that it addresses the human being at the level of nature and necessity rather than at the level of person and freedom.

Yannaras’s freedom is not the liberal freedom of choice among options. It is the freedom of a being that is not exhausted by its nature — a freedom whose paradigm is God, who is not compelled by his essence to be what he is, and whose image in the human being is the capacity to exist otherwise than as a specimen of a kind. This is where his ethics is most obviously downstream of his ontology and of Lossky’s person/nature distinction (see The Ontology of the Person; Person versus Individual).

It is also where the freedom has its tragic edge. Yannaras is explicit that a freedom real enough to constitute a person is real enough to destroy him: the fall is “the self-destruction of freedom, which is the most tragic way it has of affirming itself,” “the voluntary subjection of the person to the impersonality of the nature” (Yannaras, To prosōpo kai ho erōs, quoted in Petrà, 40). Nothing in his account makes salvation automatic or sin trivial. The charge of libertinism, which Russell reports and rejects, does not survive contact with the texts (Russell, 84).

The Canons

One of the more startling chapters of The Freedom of Morality is on the holy canons — in Elizabeth Briere’s translation, “The Church Canons and the Limits Set to Life.” Yannaras reads the canons not as a legal code administered by an authority but as descriptions of the boundary at which a mode of life ceases to be ecclesial: markers of the limits within which the Church’s life is recognizably itself. On this reading, to convert them into a jurisprudence — to make of them a system of offences, penalties and dispensations administered by a tribunal — is to perform on the Church’s own law exactly the “religionization” he elsewhere ascribes to the medieval West.

This is also where his critique reaches inside Orthodoxy. In Orthodoxy and the West he brings the charge against St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain’s Pēdalion (the Rudder), the annotated canonical collection of 1800, which he holds to have distorted the canons “by introducing Western legalistic notions and even an inept use of critical scholarship” (Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 334, summarizing Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West). Whatever one makes of that judgment — and it is a hard saying about a canonized saint of the Church, and one many Orthodox reject — it shows that his target was never simply “the West.” It was a way of holding the faith, wherever it was found.

The Positive Claim

It is easy to read The Freedom of Morality as a book of demolitions and miss what it is for. The constructive thesis is that the ethos of the Church is already given — in the Eucharist, in the ascetic tradition, in the liturgical arts, in the ordinary life of an Orthodox people — and that theology’s task is not to invent an ethics but to stop obscuring an ethos. That is the subject of the companion file, The Eucharistic Ethos and Asceticism.

Russell’s summary of the whole orientation is the fairest short one available: it is “the turning of the Church into a religion that he passionately objects to, so that what ought to be the dynamic source of life and communion becomes instead a reassuring system safely regulating our thought and conduct” (Russell, 85).

A Note on Standing

Per the standard of this collection: the person/nature distinction and the essence/energies distinction on which Yannaras builds are the teaching of the Church, definitively so in the case of the energies after the Constantinopolitan councils of 1341–1351 (see St. Gregory Palamas). The ethical construction Yannaras erects on them is his own theological work. It has been received with enthusiasm by many Orthodox and rejected by others; it is not a dogmatic position of the Orthodox Church, and this guide does not present it as one. The intra-Orthodox objections are set out in Section 08.

See Also

References

  • Yannaras, Christos. The Freedom of Morality. Trans. Elizabeth Briere. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984.
  • Yannaras, Christos. Kataphygion ideōn: Martyria. Athens: Domos, 1987.
  • Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019.
  • Williams, Rowan (R. D. Williams). “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras.” Sobornost 6 (Winter 1972): 415–430.
  • Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
  • Louth, Andrew. “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–340.