03 — Person and Eros

To prosōpo kai ho erōs is the philosophical center of Yannaras’s authorship: a book that began as a hundred-page doctoral thesis in 1970 and grew, through four decades of revision, into a four-hundred-page ontology. Its thesis is that prosōpon — person — is not a part or property of human nature but the horizon on which anything whatever appears, and that the mode of the person is ekstatic: a standing-outside-oneself whose name is eros.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Book and Its Growth

The original form was Yannaras’s Thessaloniki doctoral thesis, To ontologikon periechomenon tēs theologikēs ennoias tou prosōpou [The Ontological Content of the Theological Notion of the Person] (Athens, 1970) — “a short work, of less than 100 pages, written in katharevousa” (Andrew Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 336). A version appeared in the periodical Devkalion in 1974 under the title To prosōpo kai ho erōs: Theologiko dokimio ontologias; another followed in 1976; the text now standard is the “fourth edition” of 1987 (Athens: Domos), running to nearly four hundred pages in demotic Greek (Louth, 336–37).

Norman Russell’s English translation, Person and Eros, appeared from Holy Cross Orthodox Press (Brookline, MA) in 2007. It had long been available in German before it was available in English (Louth, 330).

Louth’s judgment: “Person and Eros is perhaps the most important single work of Yannaras’” and “a quite extraordinary book — at one level rigorously philosophical, but at another level, grounded in a living experience” (Louth, 335, 337).

What Grew and What Did Not

Louth compared the 1970 thesis with the 1987 book directly, and his findings are the best guide to how Yannaras worked. “The fundamental argument and structure of the work is there in the doctoral thesis, but expressed very succinctly.” What the revisions added was: much more philosophy (far more Plato where the thesis leaned on Aristotle; Ferdinand de Saussure on meaning; Wittgenstein); much more of Maximus the Confessor and Dionysius the Areopagite, and many more Fathers cited in passing; a great deal more secondary literature; and, running through the whole, a thoroughly substantiated engagement with scholastic philosophy and theology, drawing especially on Marie-Dominique Chenu (Louth, 337–38).

Louth’s conclusion is worth registering because it bears on the criticism of Yannaras as well as the exposition of him: “Yannaras’ vision was already fully formed in the latter years of the 1960s” — both the personalist ontology and the diagnosis of Greek theology — “but he continued to read, think and reflect” (Louth, 338).

The Two Files

The Ontology of the Person sets out the core: prosōpon as relation, person as the horizon of the manifestation of beings, the person/nature and essence/energies architecture inherited from the Fathers and from Lossky, the identification of person with tropos hyparxeōs, and Rowan Williams’s early and searching assessment.

Eros, Ekstasis, and the Body follows the specific difference of Yannaras’s personalism: eros as the dynamic of ekstasis and not a metaphor for it, the body as mode rather than component, death as “the apophatic definition of personhood,” and the reading of the Song of Songs in which the argument becomes lyric.

See Also

References

  • Yannaras, Christos. Person and Eros. Trans. Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007.
  • Yannaras, Christos. To prosōpo kai ho erōs. Athens: Domos, 1987.
  • Yannaras, Christos. To ontologikon periechomenon tēs theologikēs ennoias tou prosōpou. Athens, 1970.
  • Louth, Andrew. “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–340.