04 — Apophaticism and the Critique of Onto-theology

Yannaras’s first book set Heidegger’s account of the death of God beside the apophaticism of Dionysius the Areopagite, and argued that Western nihilism is the correct conclusion of a Western theology that had made God a being among beings. From this came his lifelong claim that apophaticism is not a method of negation but a refusal to exhaust truth in concepts — and, later, an attempt to give that refusal the form of a critical ontology, one whose propositions are verified in shared experience.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Founding Book

Hē theologia tēs apousias kai tēs agnōsias tou Theou [The Theology of the Absence and Unknowability of God] was published in Athens in 1967 — before either doctorate, and while Yannaras was still in his early thirties. It was translated into French by Jacques Touraille, with a preface by Olivier Clément, as De l’absence et de l’inconnaissance de Dieu d’après les écrits aréopagitiques et Martin Heidegger (Paris: Cerf) [Disputed: catalogue records and French review notices indexed on Persée give the Cerf edition variously as 1970 and 1971; this guide has not resolved which is the year of issue.] A second revised edition appeared in Greek from Domos under the title Heidegger kai Areopagitēs in the late 1980s [Disputed: Petrà's own bibliography gives 1988 in his list of English translations and 1987 in his list of Italian ones; the preface to the revised edition is dated 1986.] The English translation, by Haralambos Ventis, edited and introduced by Andrew Louth, is On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite (London: T&T Clark, 2005).

Rowan Williams, writing in 1972 when it was almost the only Yannaras available outside Greek, called it “a highly provocative work” and added a caution he would repeat about the whole authorship: “one may, I think, legitimately object to the vast sweep of its generalisations; but it is undeniably a very significant essay in what does appear to be genuinely an alternative theological language to that which has become customary in the Latin tradition” — with the immediate qualification that “the fact that it is an alternative does not automatically guarantee its superiority” (Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras,” Sobornost 6 [Winter 1972]: 415–430).

The Two Files

Heidegger and the Areopagite sets out the argument of the 1967 book: onto-theology and its nihilistic terminus, the distinction between Eastern apophaticism and what Yannaras calls its Western version, the essence/energies distinction as the ground of the difference, and the question of how much Yannaras owes to Heidegger.

Truth as Relation and Communal Verification follows the later development: apophaticism as a refusal of conceptual idolatry rather than a technique of negation, truth as attainment rather than datum, the programme of a “critical ontology” open to communal verification or falsification, and the engagement with Wittgenstein and Saussure that produced What Can Be Said and What Cannot Be Said (1999) and Relational Ontology (2004).

A Note on What Is Confessed and What Is Argued

The essence/energies distinction is the teaching of the Orthodox Church, confessed by the Constantinopolitan councils of the fourteenth century (see St. Gregory Palamas). Apophatic theology is the common patrimony of the Fathers. What is Yannaras’s own is (a) the claim that the Western reception of the Filioque and of a certain account of analogy produced a systematically different — and finally nihilistic — theological grammar, and (b) the constructive proposal that the ontology so recovered can be given a criterion of verification. Both are treated here as his theses, and the criticism of them is in Section 08.

See Also

References

  • Yannaras, Christos. On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite. Trans. Haralambos Ventis, ed. with an introduction by Andrew Louth. London: T&T Clark, 2005.
  • Yannaras, Christos. De l’absence et de l’inconnaissance de Dieu d’après les écrits aréopagitiques et Martin Heidegger. Trans. Jacques Touraille, preface by Olivier Clément. Paris: Cerf, 1970/1971.
  • Williams, Rowan (R. D. Williams). “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras.” Sobornost 6 (Winter 1972): 415–430.
  • Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019.