Truth as Relation and Communal Verification

In his later work Yannaras tried to answer the obvious objection to an apophatic ontology: if truth cannot be captured in concepts, how is it distinguished from arbitrary assertion? His answer was a “critical ontology” — relational, non-objective, but open to verification or falsification in shared experience. The programme runs through What Can Be Said and What Cannot Be Said (1999), Relational Ontology (2004), and his rereading of Person and Eros as a work of critical ontology all along.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Objection He Had to Answer

An apophaticism that refuses to let concepts exhaust the truth invites a simple and serious question: what then stops theology from being whatever anyone wants it to be? Norman Russell records the charge as it was actually made against Yannaras in Greek Orthodox circles — “an apophatic theology that ends up in agnosticism” (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 84). Russell’s own reply is dismissive: hostility to Yannaras’s apophaticism “is simply a reaction of the old scholastic mentality to the resurgence of a previously neglected strand of patristic tradition” (Russell, 84). But Yannaras himself did not think the question negligible, and spent the last three decades of his working life on it.

Not Objectivity, and Not Subjectivity Either

The key move is to refuse the dichotomy the question assumes. Yannaras’s claim is that the alternative to objective knowledge is not private feeling:

The opposite to objectivity is not the relativism of subjectivity (as it is also neither impulsive sentimentality or irrational mysticism). The opposite to objective knowledge is the communal verification of knowledge, the denial of the objective support of cognitive correctness — it is the intersubjective coordination of the experiences of relation, the communal validity of knowledge.
— Yannaras, quoted in Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019), 69

Knowledge, on this account, is neither the possession of a solitary knower nor the deliverance of an impersonal method. It is what a community of persons in relation can hold together and test against shared experience. Petrà comments that this “communal way of verification . . . constitutes the foundation of a critical ontology because it allows such an ontology a way of verifying its propositions” — and that the verification “is not given but rather is realised” (Petrà, 69).

The last proposition of Ontologia tēs schesēs [Relational Ontology] states the position as an aphorism:

9. Truth for critical ontology is relation. And relation — consequently truth as well — is never a given. It is an attainment (katorthōma).
— Yannaras, Ontologia tēs schesēs, final proposition, in Petrà’s translation (Petrà, 69)

Katorthōma is an ascetic word before it is a philosophical one: an achievement won by struggle. That Yannaras chose it to close a book of ontology is characteristic. Truth is not something one has; it is something one becomes capable of.

The Ecclesial Community as the Place of Verification

The theological cash value is that the Church — the eucharistic community — is not merely where doctrine is taught but where a claim about the meaning of existence is tested. Yannaras’s word for what happens there is the same word he uses for scientific method, deliberately: communal verification, and equally the possibility of communal falsification.

This is why, on his account, an ecclesiology and an epistemology are the same subject. A community whose life actually manifests the mode of existence the doctrine describes is a verification; a community whose life does not is a falsification, whatever it professes. The severity of his judgments on the historical Church, East and West alike, follows directly (see Religionization and the Ecclesial Event).

It also explains the peculiar place of the ascetic and Philokalic tradition in his work. Asceticism is, in this frame, experimental method: the practical conditions under which the personal mode of existence can be tested in a life (see The Philokalia).

Wittgenstein and the Limits of Language

The instrument Yannaras used to make the argument precise was, in the end, not Heidegger but Ludwig Wittgenstein. To rhēto kai to arrhēto: Ta glōssika oria realismou tēs metaphysikēs [What Can Be Said and What Cannot Be Said: The Linguistic Limits of the Realism of Metaphysics] (Athens: Ikaros, 1999) “engages extensively with Wittgenstein and adopts the format of numbered and sub-numbered paragraphs of the Tractatus” — a formal imitation Yannaras also carried into Relational Ontology (Andrew Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 337).

The choice is telling. The Tractatus ends with the proposition that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence, and with the claim that there is nonetheless a mystical that shows itself. Yannaras reads this as a modern secular restatement of the apophatic position, and the numbered paragraphs as the appropriate form for a discourse that knows its own limits. Petrà’s summary of Yannaras’s achievement puts Wittgenstein and Heidegger on an equal footing: a refiguring “on the one hand, of Heidegger’s refusal to define being in ontic terms and, on the other, of Wittgenstein’s willingness to admit the inexpressible character of the mystical” (Petrà, jacket description, 2019).

Alongside Wittgenstein, the mature Person and Eros draws heavily on Ferdinand de Saussure for the account of meaning and of the person as one who signifies, and on Jacques Lacan in the later work on the relation between subjectivity and relation (Louth, 337, on Saussure; Petrà, 69, on Lacan and Le Séminaire, Livre XI). A whole new chapter of the mature book, “The ‘Semantics’ of Personal Disclosure,” grew out of a single section of the 1970 thesis (Louth, 337).

Rereading Himself

One of the more revealing facts about Yannaras is that in old age he reread his own principal work as a work of critical ontology, and said so. Petrà records this “rereading” and quotes it:

The above passage from To prosōpo kai ho erōs summarises the proposition of prosopocentric ontology as a “critical” ontology: a proposition interpreting the existential event that is subject to critical control, that is to say, that is open to the possibility of communal verification (or falsification) thanks to the realism of the distinctions between nature and person, nature and energies.
— Yannaras, Hexi philosophikes zōgraphies, 220–21, in Petrà’s translation (Petrà, 71 n. 107)

And he gives the research programme that followed: “After To prosōpo kai ho erōs, a series of studies seeks to test the proposition of a prosopocentric-critical ontology empirically (whether it is verified or falsified) on a variety of levels of shared experience: on that of the practice of jurisprudence, of political economy, of politics and institutions, of post-Newtonian epistemology, of normative ethics, of religion in contrast to the ecclesial event” (Yannaras, Hexi philosophikes zōgraphies, 220–21, in Petrà, 71 n. 107).

That sentence is the key to the shape of his bibliography. The books on law, on political economy, on Greek politics, on the failure of the party system, on postmodern physics — the ones that look, from a theological distance, like a public intellectual’s miscellany — are on his own account the experimental arm of a single philosophical project.

Postmodern Metaphysics

The most ambitious of those experiments is Meta-neōterikē meta-physikē [Postmodern Metaphysics] (Athens: Domos, 1993), translated by Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press) [Disputed: Petrà's bibliography gives the English edition as 2004; Louth's 2009 review article gives 2005.] Its argument is that the advances of twentieth-century physics have dismantled the rationalist structures of classical Western metaphysics — determinism, closed systems, immutable law — and so have cleared the ground for a personalist metaphysics.

Louth thought it the least successful of the recent translations: “In very general terms, the argument looks not unattractive, but the metaphysical implications of modern scientific approaches are hardly as univocal as Yannaras seems to suggest, and to call them ‘postmodern’ seems odd. The term ‘postmodern’ is generally associated with an attitude that denies any ultimate truth, not a position Yannaras himself seeks to embrace, nor one at all supported by modern science” (Louth, 333). It is a fair warning about the whole verification programme: an ontology that claims to be testable in every field runs the risk of resting on a reading of each field that its specialists would not recognize.

Rowan Williams had made a related observation about the young Yannaras’s use of physics as early as 1972, noting how heavily the 1970 thesis leaned on the abandonment of “any crude notion of absoluteness or necessity in physical ‘laws’” to underwrite an ontological conclusion (Williams, “The Theology of Personhood,” Sobornost 6 [Winter 1972]: 415–430).

Standing

The apophatic tradition and the essence/energies distinction are the Church’s. The “critical ontology” — the claim that a relational ontology can be given a criterion of communal verification and falsification — is Yannaras’s own philosophical proposal. It is a modern construction, and one that some readers find the most original thing he did and others find an over-extension of a theological insight into fields where it cannot be tested. The judgment is not made here.

See Also

References

  • Yannaras, Christos. Relational Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2011. (Greek original: Ontologia tēs schesēs, Athens: Ikaros, 2004.)
  • Yannaras, Christos. To rhēto kai to arrhēto: Ta glōssika oria realismou tēs metaphysikēs. Athens: Ikaros, 1999.
  • Yannaras, Christos. Postmodern Metaphysics. Trans. Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2004/2005. (Greek original: Meta-neōterikē meta-physikē, Athens: Domos, 1993.)
  • 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. IV, esp. 68–71.)
  • Louth, Andrew. “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–340. (On Postmodern Metaphysics, 333; on Wittgenstein and Saussure, 337.)
  • Williams, Rowan (R. D. Williams). “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras.” Sobornost 6 (Winter 1972): 415–430.
  • Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.