Heidegger and the Areopagite

Yannaras’s first book takes Heidegger’s diagnosis of Western metaphysics as onto-theology — a God who is one being among beings, however exalted — and argues that Nietzsche’s death of God is its correct conclusion. Against it he sets the apophaticism of Dionysius the Areopagite, in which God is beyond being altogether and is known not by analogy but through the uncreated energies in personal communion. The book made his reputation, framed his lifelong thesis about the West, and generated the most persistent charge against him.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

Heidegger’s Question, Taken as an Ally

The move that founds Yannaras’s authorship is unexpected and was, in 1967, startling. He does not argue against Heidegger’s critique of Western metaphysics. He accepts it.

Andrew Louth’s summary of the argument is the most compact available:

Early on he seized on Heidegger’s analysis of the development of philosophy in the West as a kind of stick with which to beat the West. According to Heidegger, the “onto-theology” of Western metaphysics, that made of God a being alongside, even if superior to, other beings, led ineluctably to the nihilism of Nietzsche and Heidegger himself. In his brief work, translated as On the Absence and Unknowability of God, Yannaras found an answer to Western ontotheology in the apophatic theology of the East, notably that of Dionysios the Areopagite, according to which God utterly transcends being, so that none of our concepts can apply to the reality of God himself.
— Andrew Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (2009): 332

The structure of the argument is therefore: Heidegger is right about the West; Heidegger is right that the West ends in nihilism; Heidegger is wrong only in supposing that the theological alternative he has in view is the only one there was. Yannaras’s early study, Rowan Williams notes, “made extensive use of Nietzsche, and attempted to present the ‘Death of God’ and existential nihilism as a logical and inevitable growth from the rationalism of the Western theological tradition” (Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood,” Sobornost 6 [Winter 1972]: 415–430).

The theological nerve is that the “God” Nietzsche declared dead deserved to die. A God who is a being — a First Cause, the supreme entity in a hierarchy of entities, whose existence is demonstrated and whose nature is captured in concepts — is an idol, and its collapse is a purification. Yannaras will say later that this collapse “points out, indirectly but quite clearly, the fundamental ‘heresy’ — the deviation from the original fact of the Church — which constitutes the historical temptation of Western Christianity: the quest to impose itself rationally and socially, finally the Church’s ‘religionisation’” (Yannaras, revised preface to Heidegger kai Areopagitēs, translated in Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 86).

What Apophaticism Is Not

Yannaras’s most important and most easily missed claim is negative: apophaticism is not the theology of negations.

It is evident that the apophatic position can not be identified with the theology of negations. Historically this identification is realised in Western apophaticism. It presupposes natural affirmative knowledge and at the same time its negation, that is to say, the relinquishing of the objective authority of sensible symbols. The apophatic position is not just a further method, even if a more effective one for acquiring natural knowledge of God, but a way that coincides with the affirmation of the human person, that is to say, which defines a universal position towards truth, a gesture of freedom with regard to the sufficiency of rational definitions.
— Yannaras, Hē theologia tēs apousias kai tēs agnōsias tou Theou, 87–88, in Petrà’s translation (Petrà, 19)

The distinction is sharp. A via negativa that consists in saying “God is not X, not Y, not Z” is still operating within the same conceptual economy as the affirmations it negates; it is a technique for refining a concept. Yannaras’s apophaticism is a stance toward truth as such: the refusal to allow any conceptual formulation, affirmative or negative, to close the question — “a renunciation of every conceptual necessity,” “a negation of conceptual idols of God” (Yannaras, Hē theologia tēs apousias, 93, in Petrà, 19).

This is the point at which he is developing Vladimir Lossky and pushing beyond him. Lossky had made apophaticism the mode of all theology rather than a chapter within it; Yannaras makes it a criterion of what counts as knowing anything at all (see Vladimir Lossky).

The Energies as the Ground of the Difference

If God is unknowable, how is he known? Yannaras’s answer is Palamite, and he insists that it is not his invention: the distinction between the essence and the energies of God “has been expressed in the whole of Greek patristic literature (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, Maximus the Confessor, John Damascene, and Gregory Palamas)” and “reveals the specific difference that differentiates Eastern apophaticism from its Western version” (Yannaras, Hē theologia tēs apousias, 99, in Petrà, 19).

The energies are, in his formulation, “the ineffable possibility that the divine essence, which is unknown, imparticipable and incommunicable, has of being offered as a will for personal communion.” They are “the foundation of apophatic ‘knowledge’”: “The abyss of the ‘natural’ distance of beings from God . . . is covered and bridged by the divine energies, thanks to which God becomes accessible under certain conditions, yet at the same time remains perfectly inaccessible” (Yannaras, Hē theologia tēs apousias, in Petrà, 20).

Two corollaries matter for the wider argument.

Against the analogy of being. In Dionysius, Yannaras argues, “beings have no reference to the divine essence. It is for this reason that knowledge of God is impossible on the basis of the analogy of being”; creatures are the result “not of the essence but of the will of God” (Yannaras, in Petrà, 20). A theology that derives knowledge of God from the being of creatures has, on this account, made the world “a defective reflection of the divine essence, as Platonism would have it.” Yannaras therefore reads the scholastic transformation of Dionysian analogia and hierarchia — from creaturely participation in the divine energies into “a kind of logical calculus concerned with matching our concepts with the reality of God” — as a decisive falsification, and devotes a whole new section of the mature Person and Eros (“On Analogy and Hierarchy”) to it (Louth, 338, calling that section “a powerful and informed indictment”).

Rowan Williams, sympathetic but not convinced, thought this went too far: “I feel that Dr. Yannaras is wrong to use the terms like ‘analogy,’ as he does, in a consistently negative and derogatory way, as if analogy necessarily involved a methodological doubt of non-finite reality” (Williams, 1972).

Knowledge as communion. Because the energies are personal — a will for communion, not an emanation of essence — apophatic knowledge is “the result of personal communion between Man and God” (Yannaras, in Petrà, 20). Louth: “It is only through the relationship that God has established with humankind, through the Incarnation and in the Church, that we can come to knowledge of God, a knowledge that is ineffable and inexhaustible” (Louth, 332). The epistemology and the ontology of the person are one thing.

Absence and Presence

The 1967 title puts absence first, and Yannaras means it. God’s unknowability is experienced not as a blank but as a someone’s absence — and therefore as pain. Williams’s summary catches this exactly: a man “may know God by way of ‘absence,’ that is, he may know him through the manifestation of His energies in creation (as one ‘knows’ the absent artist through his work); or he may know Him as personal presence, as Christ in the Church. Outside the Church, only the former way is possible; yet even here, the absence is personal, the absence of someone, and so it is painful. Within the Church, this experience is familiar to the man of prayer — hence the πένθος (‘compunction,’ ‘lamentation’) associated in the East with the ascetic life” (Williams, 1972).

This is where Yannaras joins the ascetic tradition to the philosophy. Penthos, the mourning of the hesychast Fathers, is not a mood; it is the epistemic form of a relation with an unobjectifiable Other (see The Jesus Prayer).

How Much Heidegger?

The question was asked from the first review onward and has never gone away. Williams put it with characteristic fairness: “as to the use made of Heidegger’s system and terminology throughout, one may be forgiven for wondering whether it is perhaps a little uncritical: it is reminiscent of the use made of Hegel by Russian theologians at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century” — and he relayed a French reviewer’s warning of a possible “Hellenic Slavophilism” as “fair comment as [far as] dependence upon a particular system of secular philosophy is concerned” (Williams, 1972, citing Istina [1971], 130). His closing hope was that “in future works from his pen we shall see a gradual diminution of dependence on Heidegger.”

Louth, thirty-seven years later, judged that the dependence had in fact never been as great as it looked: in Person and Eros “the influence of Heidegger is not, in fact, much greater than in the earlier work. Yannaras explores much of the same territory as did Heidegger . . . but with different guides — the Greek Fathers, not least St Gregory of Nyssa and St Maximos the Confessor” (Louth, 335–36).

Norman Russell’s defence is the most explicit: “the role he assigns to the philosophers is a preparatory one. He values Heidegger for having demonstrated the bankruptcy of the Western philosophical tradition and indicating some very suggestive ways of reading the ancient Greeks. By clearing away the assumptions of the more recent philosophical traditions, he has laid bare the questions to which the Fathers give the answers” (Norman Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 83–84).

And against all three stands Nikolaos Loudovikos, who has devoted many pages to arguing that Yannaras’s starting point in Person and Eros is Heideggerian and that he identifies Heidegger’s terminology with that of the Fathers — noting that for Heidegger, following Husserl, “it is transcendence that constitutes the self,” an identification of Being with existence as ek-stasis “which, as we shall see, greatly helped the Orthodox personalists to articulate their own views” (Loudovikos, Hoi tromoi tou prosōpou kai ta basana tou erōta [Athens and Thessaloniki: Harmos, 2009], 19; and Hē kleistē pneumatikotēta kai to noēma tou Heautou [Athens: Hellēnika Grammata, 1999], 285–91; cited in Petrà, 37 n. 14). Yannaras replied at length (Yannaras, Hexi philosophikes zōgraphies [Athens: Ikaros, 2011], 124–34).

The dispute is set out in full in The Patristic and Heideggerian Question. It is not adjudicated here.

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. Hexi philosophikes zōgraphies. Athens: Ikaros, 2011.
  • Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019. (Ch. II, esp. 19–20, 37, 86.)
  • 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.
  • Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
  • Loudovikos, Nikolaos. Hē kleistē pneumatikotēta kai to noēma tou Heautou. Athens: Hellēnika Grammata, 1999. (285–91.)
  • Loudovikos, Nikolaos. Hoi tromoi tou prosōpou kai ta basana tou erōta. Athens and Thessaloniki: Harmos, 2009.