The Eucharistic Ethos and Asceticism

Having dissolved morality into ontology, Yannaras has to say where the new mode of existence is actually to be found. His answer is: in the Eucharist, in the ascetic practice of the Church, and in the material culture — architecture, icon, chant, the shape of a parish — that a eucharistic ethos generates. Asceticism, on this account, is not a technique of self-improvement but the dismantling of self-sufficiency; and liturgical art is not decoration but the ethos made visible.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Eucharist as the Place of the Ethos

For Yannaras the Church is not an institution that administers means of grace to individuals; it is an event, and the event is the Eucharist. The Church’s whole structure — its orders, its canons, its geography of parish and diocese — exists, on his account, for the realization and manifestation of the Church in the eucharistic assembly, and has no independent rationale of its own.

The claim places him squarely in the eucharistic-ecclesiological current of twentieth-century Orthodox theology, whose Russian origins lie with Nicholas Afanasiev and whose most systematic Greek exponent was his contemporary John Zizioulas (see John Zizioulas; The Divine Liturgy). Their emphases differ. Zizioulas built an ecclesiology with an ontology attached and made it teachable, where “Yannaras worked philosophically” — the contrast is Norman Russell’s, and it is the standard one (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 80–81, 87). Yannaras is less interested than Zizioulas in the bishop, the synod, and the canonical shape of communion, and far more interested in what a eucharistic mode of existence does to a culture.

The move is characteristic: where a conventional moral theology would ask what the Eucharist obliges the communicant to do, Yannaras asks what mode of existence the Eucharist is. Bread and wine — the fruits of nature and of labor — are offered, and returned as communion; the relation of the human being to the world ceases to be use and consumption and becomes gift and thanksgiving. Ethics is thereby relocated: not a list of permitted and forbidden uses of the world, but a change in what using the world is.

Asceticism

The chapter of The Freedom of Morality on “The Asceticism of the Church and Individual Virtue” (in Elizabeth Briere’s translation, at pp. 109–117) makes the corresponding move for ascetic practice. The distinction in the title is the argument. Individual virtue is an achievement that belongs to the achiever and confirms him; the asceticism of the Church is the voluntary undoing of the achiever’s self-sufficiency.

Yannaras grounds it christologically rather than psychologically. Asceticism is conformity to the example of Christ, who freely accepted death in order to destroy death; every voluntary mortification of egocentricity is therefore a real, if small, destruction of death and a victory for the life of the person. Fasting is not calorie-counting for the soul; it is the practical refusal of the claim that the human being is the sum of his needs.

This is why Yannaras is not, as his rhetoric sometimes suggests, an enemy of the ascetic tradition he found in the brotherhoods. He is an enemy of ascetic practice detached from ontology — of fasting, prayer rules and confession functioning as the machinery of individual moral accountancy. The positive account is drawn straight from the Philokalic and neptic Fathers. Russell’s list of the authorities Yannaras actually relies on is instructive: the Cappadocians, Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas — “the chief representatives of the tradition of apophatic theology and Philokalian spirituality” — and, for the ascetic life specifically, “three great teachers”: Isaac the Syrian, Macarius the Great, and John Climacus (Russell, 83). Yannaras had written a doctoral thesis on Climacus (see Bonn, Paris, and the Two Doctorates).

It is worth noting what is absent from that list. “The Latin Fathers are conspicuous for their absence — except when they are attacked,” Russell observes, and Augustine in particular is treated as “the prime source of the rationalism and intellectualism that has dominated Western culture” (Russell, 83). That absence is not accidental, and it is one of the standing criticisms of his work (see The Construction of “the West”; St. Augustine of Hippo).

The Ethos Made Visible: Liturgical Art

The longest constructive stretch of The Freedom of Morality is its final part, “The Ethos of Liturgical Art” (in the English translation, pp. 231–264), with sections on worship, on art and technology, and on the asceticism of art. Here the book turns from ethics to culture, and the reader discovers what Yannaras thinks an ethos looks like.

His claim is that a mode of existence is legible in what a people makes. The Byzantine icon, the Byzantine church building, the chant, the pattern of a village and the manners of hospitality are not illustrations of a doctrine held elsewhere; they are the doctrine, in the only form in which most people ever have it. Iconography that renounces illusionistic depth and individual expression is an ascetic art — the artist’s own self-assertion is what is being fasted from — and it therefore embodies the same ethos as the fast and the Eucharist.

By the same logic, a change of art is a change of theology. In Elements of Faith Yannaras dates the ecclesial-to-religious transition in art to “the twelfth century’s transition to gothic and the post-Byzantine Italian art of the thirteenth century” (Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 86 n. 8, citing Alphabētari tēs pistēs, 234, and the English Elements of Faith, 157). Later, describing Russian religious music heard in Moscow in 1982, he writes that such art “is directed towards the individual; it wants to delight the senses of the individual to suggest and stimulate the feelings of the individual . . . it is a function of power,” offering the religious individual “protection and safety” so that “he does not have to take any risk in order to arrive at participation in the knowledge of truth” (Yannaras, Hē kokkinē plateia kai ho theios Arthouros [Athens: Domos, 1986], 91, translated in Petrà, 85).

That passage is doubly revealing. It shows how completely aesthetics and ontology are one thing for him — and it shows that his charge of “religionization” fell on Orthodox Russia as readily as on the Latin West, since he took both to have drifted from what he calls the Greco-early-Christian prototype (Petrà, 85–86, citing Hē kokkinē plateia, 93). Readers who assume that his target is confessional will keep being surprised by this.

The Parish

The Freedom of Morality also contains a discussion of “the communal ethos of the eucharist and its cultural expression,” including a proposal for the reconstruction of the parish. Yannaras’s parish is not a service-provision unit for religious consumers but a local community whose common life — economic, social, material — is generated by the eucharistic assembly at its center. This is the seed of the political theology he developed in his newspaper columns from the mid-1970s, where the eucharistic community is presented as a social program rather than a private consolation (see The Columnist and Political Theology; Yannaras, Kephalaia politikēs theologias [Chapters on Political Theology], Athens: Papazēsē, 1976).

Yannaras was well aware of the objection this invites — that he is mourning a lost agrarian world. One critic put it exactly so: that he does not confront the problems of the Church today “but prefers to mourn a lost reality,” yearning “for the immediacy of life reflected in agrarian society” (M. Tataryn, quoted in Russell, 85). Yannaras answered in the preface to the English Orthodoxy and the West: “My aim is not to lament the past in a sentimental fashion, nor is it to resurrect the Greek experiential version of the Church in pursuit of a lost culture” (Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, trans. Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell [Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006], viii, quoted in Russell, 85). Russell judges the disclaimer sincere: “he is no romantic” (Russell, 85). Not every reader has agreed, and the question is a live one.

References

Yannaras, Christos. The Freedom of Morality. Trans. Elizabeth Briere. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984. (Asceticism and individual virtue, 109–117; the ethos of liturgical art, 231–264.)
Yannaras, Christos. Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age. Trans. Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006. (Preface, viii–ix.)
Yannaras, Christos. Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology. Trans. Keith Schram. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991.
Yannaras, Christos. Hē kokkinē plateia kai ho theios Arthouros [Red Square and Uncle Arthur]. Athens: Domos, 1986.
Yannaras, Christos. Kephalaia politikēs theologias (1974–1975). Athens: Papazēsē, 1976.
Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019.
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92. (Yannaras’s patristic sources, 83; the “lost reality” objection and his answer, 85.)