Eros, Ekstasis, and the Body

The specific difference of Yannaras’s personalism is that ekstasis — the standing-outside-oneself in which a person exists — is identified with eros, and eros is taken in the full and undivided sense that includes the body. Space, time and death are then read as functions of personal presence and absence. This is the part of his work that provoked accusations of libertinism, and the part he defended most stubbornly.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

Eros Is Not a Metaphor

The title Person and Eros is not decorative. Yannaras states the identification flatly, and did so again years later when answering critics: “In Person and Eros the fact of ek-stasē, following the Areopagitical writings, is identified with the existential possibility of eros (and indeed with erōs ek-statikos)” (Yannaras, replying to criticism in Hexi philosophikes zōgraphies, quoted in Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 40).

The authority is Dionysius the Areopagite, whom Yannaras quotes: “divine eros is also ek-statikos, so that lovers belong not to themselves but to the beloved” (Yannaras, To prosōpo kai ho erōs, quoted in Petrà, 40; the source is On the Divine Names IV). Eros, in this patristic usage, is not the erotic as opposed to the spiritual; it is the loving power and movement of exodus from an atomically individualized mode of existence toward relation. “Eros is the dynamics of ek-stasē, which finds its consummation as personal reference to supreme Otherness” (Yannaras, quoted in Petrà, 40).

The point of choosing this word rather than agapē is precisely that erōs refuses the division. A love that is safely disembodied would leave the body outside the personal mode of existence — which for Yannaras is exactly the dualism he is trying to undo (see St. Dionysius the Areopagite).

The Body as Mode, Not Component

In an Aristotelian frame, a human being is a composite: body and soul, matter and form. Yannaras rejects the composite. Rowan Williams, reading the 1970 thesis: “the person is a unity, not merely a synthesis (as in the Aristotelean system), the body is not a component in man, it is his mode (τρόπος) of existence, the manifestation to the outside world of the ‘energies’ of his nature, that through which personal presence or absence may be apprehended” (Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras,” Sobornost 6 [Winter 1972]: 415–430).

This is a genuine and considerable claim, and it has a genuine and considerable source. Yannaras’s Sorbonne doctorate was on exactly this: La métaphysique du corps chez saint Jean Climaque, published in Greek as Hē metaphysikē tou sōmatos: Spoudē ston Iōannē tēs Klimakos (Athens: Dōdōnē, 1971). The Ladder of Divine Ascent is not a text in which the body is despised; it is a text in which the body is the arena of the whole struggle, and Yannaras read it as such (see Bonn, Paris, and the Two Doctorates; The Philokalia).

The theological consequence is that the body is not a barrier between persons but the very medium of their disclosure to one another — which is why iconography, gesture, liturgy and even architecture belong to Yannaras’s ontology and not merely to his aesthetics (see The Eucharistic Ethos and Asceticism).

Space, Time, and Death

If personhood is the horizon on which beings appear, then the categories in which beings appear must themselves be personal. Yannaras follows this through.

Space. Beside geometrical, measurable space stands what Williams calls “the personal dimension of space,” which “appears in awareness of personal absence, where ‘distance’ has nothing to do with ‘geometrical,’ objectively measurable space: we are dealing with a non-objectified, relational space” (Williams, 1972). The absent beloved is not far away in metres.

Time. Time likewise is read from the movement of personal relation rather than from the succession of instants.

Death. Here Yannaras is at his most severe and most Heideggerian. Drawing on Sein und Zeit, he treats death as a phenomenon of life — “a final personal revolt against the constant failure to achieve authentic personal relation in ‘geometric’ space” — and lands on the formula Williams quotes: “Death is the apophatic definition of personhood” (Yannaras, To ontologikon periechomenon, 44, citing Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 245–46; quoted in Williams, 1972). Death defines the person the way apophatic negation defines God: by marking the point at which no concept reaches, and at which relation is either everything or nothing.

The long analysis of nothingness in Person and Eros — “inspired by, but quite different from, Heidegger’s discussion in Sein und Zeit” — belongs here (Andrew Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 336).

Freedom That Can Destroy Itself

Yannaras’s freedom is not a benign capacity. Because the person is not determined by nature, the person can renounce the personal mode; and that renunciation is the fall:

[Freedom is] a potential for the self-realisation of the person, a potential that destroys itself. The self-destruction of freedom, which is the most tragic way it has of affirming itself, signifies the voluntary subjection of the person to the impersonality of the nature. It is what we call the Fall, a deterioration or reversal of the primordial relation between person and nature, an existential alienation of their ontological difference.
— Yannaras, To prosōpo kai ho erōs, in Petrà’s translation (Petrà, 40)

This passage should be set beside the accusation of libertinism. A theology in which the fall is the collapse of eros into self-gratification is not a theology with a permissive account of the passions.

The Charge of Libertinism

Nonetheless the charge was made, publicly and repeatedly, in conservative Greek Orthodox circles. Norman Russell records it among three: that Yannaras taught “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).

Russell’s answer to the first is unequivocal: it “is based on a complete misreading of Yannaras’s discussion of eros and ecstasy. These terms are not antinomian and Gnostic in origin but derive from Dionysius the Areopagite and signify a going out of the self and seeking fulfilment in communion with God” (Russell, 84). Note that Russell is Yannaras’s translator and a partisan; the reader should weigh that. But the philological point stands on its own: erōs ekstatikos is Dionysian vocabulary, not existentialist vocabulary.

Yannaras did not let the matter rest. In 1989 he published Erōtikōn amphilogia ē peri libellopragmonos monachou [Controversy on Erotic Matters, or Concerning a Libellous Monk] (Athens: Domos) — a direct polemical reply to a monastic critic (Petrà, bibliography, 116). The title tells you the temperature of the Greek argument about him.

Marriage and the Liturgical Proposals

One unusual expression of this theology deserves recording, because it shows how far Yannaras was willing to take a conviction. Between 1997 and 2012 he composed and published — anonymously, each time “by an anonymous married person,” “by an anonymous person among those left behind,” “by an anonymous baptized person” — proposed new Greek texts for the rites of marriage (1997), the funeral service (2008), and baptism (2012), together with a proposal for a contemporary rendering of the eucharistic anaphora (2012) (Petrà, bibliography, 118, “Leitourgika”). Andrew Louth translated two of them into English for Sobornost: “A revised Orthodox ceremony of marriage?”, Sobornost 29, no. 2 (2007): 51–74, and “A New Funeral Service for the Orthodox?”, Sobornost 35, nos. 1–2 (2013): 123–35 (Petrà, bibliography, 120–21).

The marriage proposal is the theologically pointed one. If eros is the dynamic of the personal mode of existence, then a marriage rite whose language is juridical and procreative rather than erotic and eschatological is, on Yannaras’s terms, a religionized rite. These were private proposals offered to the Church by a layman, not authorized liturgical texts; no Orthodox Church has adopted them, and this guide reports them as what they were — a theological argument conducted in liturgical form.

Variations on the Song of Songs

The lyrical counterpart to Person and Eros is Scholio sto Asma Asmatōn (Athens: Domos, 1990), translated by Norman Russell as Variations on the Song of Songs (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2005). Louth calls it “a work that is nonpareil” — chapters headed with musical terms, each prefaced by a verse of the Song, the language deliberately poetic, quotations woven in unattributed because attribution “would be too ‘academic’ for such a lyrical text” (Louth, 338–39).

Its first sentence sets the tone and the realism: “We come to know love only in the context of failure” (Yannaras, Variations on the Song of Songs, quoted in Louth, 339). Louth’s comment is exact: the sentence “both marks a contrast with conceptual theology (argument works by succeeding) and presages the realism of Yannaras’ analysis of love.”

A longer passage, which Louth quotes, shows what the ontology sounds like when it stops being an ontology:

We fall in love not only with the person of the Other, but with everything that is his . . . with the music that he loves, the streets he walks, the landscapes we have looked at together. If you happen to fall in love with God himself, even for a fraction of a second, the quivering of yearning remains in every cool drop of spring rain, . . . in the smell of autumn. Every aspect of beauty, every skilful artefact is a gift of erotic joy granted to you . . . We call a fool in love with every work of God a “saint.”
— Yannaras, Variations on the Song of Songs, 67, quoted in Louth, “Some Recent Works,” 339

Yannaras goes on from there to St Isaac the Syrian, and to Isaac’s prayer even for the demons (Louth, 339). Whatever else is disputed about him, this is the register in which he most convinced his readers.

References

Yannaras, Christos. Person and Eros. Trans. Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007.
Yannaras, Christos. Variations on the Song of Songs. Trans. Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2005.
Yannaras, Christos. Hē metaphysikē tou sōmatos: Spoudē ston Iōannē tēs Klimakos. Athens: Dōdōnē, 1971.
Yannaras, Christos. Erōtikōn amphilogia ē peri libellopragmonos monachou. Athens: Domos, 1989.
Yannaras, Christos. “A revised Orthodox ceremony of marriage?” Trans. Andrew Louth. Sobornost 29, no. 2 (2007): 51–74; “A New Funeral Service for the Orthodox?” Trans. Andrew Louth. Sobornost 35, nos. 1–2 (2013): 123–35.
Williams, Rowan (R. D. Williams). “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras.” Sobornost 6 (Winter 1972): 415–430.
Louth, Andrew. “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–340. (On Variations, 338–39.)
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.