05 — Against Religion

Yannaras’s most provocative single claim is that Christianity is not a religion — that the Church is an event, a mode of existence, and that “religion” is what happens when the innate human need for security, order and merit takes the Gospel over. He coined a Greek word for the process, thrēskeiopoiēsē, “religionization,” and made it the organizing category of his late work.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Word and the Book

Thrēskeiopoiēsē is a neologism; Norman Russell’s English equivalent is “religionization” (Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 83 n. 1). Petrà traces its first appearance to 1982, in a diary Yannaras kept during a visit to Moscow and Leningrad, published four years later as Hē kokkinē plateia kai ho theios Arthouros [Red Square and Uncle Arthur] (Athens: Domos, 1986), and to the preface of the revised edition of the Heidegger–Areopagite book, signed in the same year (Petrà, 84–86).

The programmatic statement came twenty years later: Enantia stē thrēskeia [Against Religion] (Athens: Ikaros, 2006), translated by Norman Russell as Against Religion: The Alienation of the Ecclesial Event (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2013).

Why the Section Is Placed Here

This is where Yannaras’s biography, his ontology and his historical thesis converge. The critique of religion is the mature, generalized form of the argument he first made against the Zoë brotherhood in the early 1960s (Section 01); it depends on the person/individual distinction of Person and Eros (Section 03); and it supplies the mechanism for the historical claim of Orthodoxy and the West (Section 06). Read on its own it can look like a familiar twentieth-century trope — Barth, Bonhoeffer and Berdyaev all set “religion” against faith. Read in place, it is the load-bearing joint of his whole system.

An Important Qualification

Readers who come to Yannaras expecting a straightforward East-versus-West polemic are frequently surprised here. In the late work, Petrà observes, “the West-East dualism comes to be grafted on to a dualism that is broader and more radical: the dualism between thrēskeiopoiēsē and ecclesial event” — and Yannaras is explicit that there is an Eastern religionization too, which he calls Orthodoxism, “the transformation of Orthodoxy-Church into Orthodoxy-religion” (Petrà, 88, 90). He turned the charge on Orthodox liturgical art, on the canonical tradition, on the Orthodox Churches’ unexamined cosmology — and, most surprisingly, on the modern reception of the Philokalia (Petrà, 88–91). The critique is universal in intention even where the rhetoric is not.

The Two Files

Religionization and the Ecclesial Event sets out the analysis: natural religion as an instinct of the individual, the symptoms by which religionization is recognized, the ecclesial event as the alternative, the striking claim that the religious need must be transformed rather than simply denied, and Yannaras’s application of the whole diagnosis to Orthodoxy itself.

The Critique of Pietism and Moralism follows the concrete target: the Greek religious brotherhoods, the manual theology of Androutsos and Trembelas, the moralism Yannaras had lived, and the question of how far a personal wound can be trusted as a historical instrument.

References

Yannaras, Christos. Against Religion: The Alienation of the Ecclesial Event. Trans. Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2013. (Greek original: Enantia stē thrēskeia, Athens: Ikaros, 2006.)
Yannaras, Christos. Hē kokkinē plateia kai ho theios Arthouros. Athens: Domos, 1986.
Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019. (Ch. V, 83–95.)