The Ontology of the Person

Yannaras begins from the etymology of prosōpon — pros-ōpa, a face turned toward — and builds from it an ontology in which the person is not a part of human nature but the horizon on which beings appear at all. The essence is known only as the content of the person; the energies are the mode by which a nature becomes accessible; and truth is not a correspondence of concepts but the disclosure of a being in relation. This is his central and most contested construction.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

Prosopon

The starting point is a word. Prosōpon, the Greek for “person,” is composed of pros (“toward”) and ōps (“eye,” “face”): it names a face turned toward another. Yannaras takes this not as an etymological ornament but as an ontological datum. To be a person is to be toward — to exist only in relation, over against, in reference.

Rowan Williams’s summary of the 1970 thesis, written when Yannaras was thirty-seven and almost unknown outside Greece, remains the clearest short statement in English:

He begins by noting the relational element in the Greek πρόσωπον (person), the aspect of πρός ωπός, the existence of person only over-against, in relation to someone or something; “We know being as presence (παρουσία), not essence (ουσία)”: we cannot know “Being-in-itself” as such. Our acts of knowing, then, are not merely intellectual, they are an orientation of our personhood in relation, the outgoing openness to other realities which Heidegger calls “ek-stasis.”
— Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras,” Sobornost 6 (Winter 1972): 415–430

The Person as Horizon

From this Yannaras draws the move that makes his ontology distinctive. The person is not one item in an inventory of beings. It is the horizon on which beings manifest themselves — and Yannaras notes that the Greek horizōn means “that which determines or defines.” Williams again: “The reality or unreality of entities depends on their relatedness or not-relatedness to persons; personhood, then, is the ‘horizon’ . . . upon which all beings manifest themselves, and so it may be said to have a ‘universal’ character. Personhood is not a part of human nature, it defines nature, it is the ‘ontological starting-point’ for understanding nature” (Williams, 1972).

Yannaras’s own later formulation is more compressed: the human person is “the presupposition of universal relation, in the context of which beings become true (a-lētheuoun), that is, they are disclosed as that which they are” (Yannaras, To prosōpo kai ho erōs, quoted in Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 41). Truth here is a-lētheia, un-concealment, in the Heideggerian register — but the un-concealing takes place in personal relation rather than in the clearing of Being.

Two consequences follow immediately, and Yannaras draws both.

God cannot be a First Cause. If personhood is the horizon of manifestation, then a God conceived as an external cause standing behind his effects is not personal but a term in an explanatory series. Williams: “we cannot properly conceive of God as a ‘First Cause,’ external to His effects: if He is personal, we must see Him as creative energy relating to creation in the present, establishing communion between Himself and His creatures” (Williams, 1972). This is the point at which the ontology and the critique of onto-theology meet (see Heidegger and the Areopagite).

The image of God is not a faculty. If the person is not a part of nature, then the image cannot reside in a part of the human being — in the rational soul, say, over against the body. “The image of God is the whole man; and it is the whole man who enters into relation with God” (Williams, 1972). The body is not a component of the person but “his mode (tropos) of existence, the manifestation to the outside world of the ‘energies’ of his nature” (Williams, 1972). This is developed in Eros, Ekstasis, and the Body.

Nature, Person, Energies

The technical architecture is patristic, and Yannaras is careful to say so. Three distinctions do the work.

Person and nature. The distinction is Trinitarian in origin — ousia and hypostasis, one essence in three persons — and Yannaras, following Lossky, transposes it to anthropology: the person is irreducible to the nature, and the nature is what a person has in common with others (Petrà, 4–5; see Person versus Individual).

Person as tropos hyparxeōs. Yannaras identifies the person with the mode of existence, one of the Cappadocian characterizations of hypostasis, developed in the seventh century by St Maximus the Confessor in contrast to nature as characterized by its logos ousias, its principle of being. Louth’s gloss is precise: “The way of existence, which is personhood, is not predetermined, like our human nature, as a collection of properties, but is the way our human nature is lived out, or expressed, in a personal way of existence experienced as self-transcendence — an ecstatic moving beyond oneself in loving freedom. This perception is the starting point of Yannaras’ thought” (Andrew Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 336). Louth adds a careful qualification of his own: the contrast between tropos hyparxeōs and logos ousias is a contrast, “though not, I think, in opposition to” nature — a caveat that anticipates one of the standing criticisms of Yannaras and Zizioulas alike (Louth, 336).

Essence and energies. The Palamite distinction is the load-bearing element, and for Yannaras it is what makes the whole scheme realist rather than merely poetic. The energies are the mode by which a nature becomes accessible and known in personal otherness: “The ek-stasē is the mode by which the nature becomes accessible and known in the fact of personal otherness. It is the energy of the nature, which is not identified either with its bearer or its result” — quoting a formula that reaches him from St Basil through St Gregory Palamas: “The energy is neither the one operating, nor what is operated” (Yannaras, To prosōpo kai ho erōs §6, and Petrà, 37–38 and 39 n. 16, tracing the citation to PG 150:1220D). On the Church’s teaching here see St. Gregory Palamas.

The key sentence, and the one that makes Yannaras’s position a genuine ontological thesis and not a devotional flourish, is this: “We know the essence (ousia) or nature (physē) only as the content of the person” (Yannaras, quoted in Petrà, 37–38). Essence is never met in itself. It is met as somebody’s.

Person and Individual

Yannaras shares with Zizioulas, and with the older Russian religious philosophy, a sharp opposition between the person and the individual. The individual is what results from division: a specimen marked off from other specimens, whose identity is a function of separation, and whose logical terminus is the isolated self of modernity. The person is what results from relation: constituted in communion, so that personal uniqueness is the opposite of individual self-enclosure rather than its intensification.

Russell’s compressed version: “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” (Norman Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 83).

Whether the Fathers drew this distinction, or whether it is a modern concern read back into them, is the sharpest of the objections to this whole school. It is set out in The Patristic and Heideggerian Question and, for Zizioulas, in The Patristic Question.

Williams’s Early Verdict

Rowan Williams’s 1972 study is the first serious assessment of Yannaras in English and, more than fifty years later, still one of the best. It is worth having both halves of it.

The praise is unstinting: the thesis is “a remarkable essay in ‘theological personalism’,” giving Losskian themes “a philosophical grounding, of great subtlety and sophistication, which would have been somewhat alien to Lossky’s general style of doing theology”; the book “is one of the most important theological studies to come from the Orthodox world in recent years”; “Dr. Yannaras’s case can stand well on its own theological feet; Western theologians have much to lose by neglecting it” (Williams, 1972).

The criticism is equally direct, and Williams makes four points that later critics would repeat, usually less generously. (1) The book is one-sided: “It often exhibits a certain degree of onesidedness in its argument, but is rarely actually polemical; and one might well concede that a measure of onesidedness is perhaps necessary to provoke Western readers to question the presuppositions of their own theology.” (2) The Christology is thin — “he devotes very little space to Christology as such,” and Williams presses hard on a soteriological passage he finds “insufficiently carefully thought out,” asking whether Yannaras’s language does not risk “a sort of Monophysite position, in which human, finite nature as such has no real place.” (3) The pneumatology is underdeveloped: “one misses in the book any real integration of the idea of the Holy Spirit as illuminator, mediator of the knowledge of God (this, interestingly enough, is a far more prominent theme in Lossky’s theology).” (4) The dependence on Heidegger may be excessive: “Could this development and maturation of Lossky’s ideas have been successfully carried through without such heavy dependence on a particular system of secular metaphysics?” — and Williams relays, without endorsing, a French reviewer’s warning of a possible “Hellenic Slavophilism,” which he calls “fair comment as [far as] dependence upon a particular system of secular philosophy is concerned” (Williams, 1972, citing Istina [1971], 130).

That an admirer as early and as attentive as Williams made these criticisms is a useful corrective to the polarized way Yannaras is often discussed. They are not the objections of an unsympathetic reader.

Standing

The person/nature distinction and the essence/energies distinction are the Church’s teaching. The claim that the person is ontologically prior to nature, and that personhood is the horizon of the manifestation of beings, is Yannaras’s own philosophical construction, built from patristic materials in dialogue with Heidegger. It is not a dogma of the Orthodox Church, it is disputed by serious Orthodox theologians, and this guide presents it as what it is: an influential modern theological proposal.

References

Yannaras, Christos. Person and Eros. Trans. Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007.
Yannaras, Christos. To ontologikon periechomenon tēs theologikēs ennoias tou prosōpou. Athens, 1970.
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.
Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019. (Ch. III on Person and Eros, esp. 37–41.)
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.