Religionization and the Ecclesial Event

Yannaras holds that the religious instinct is natural and universal — a need of the individual for security, order and merit — and that Christianity is not its satisfaction but its transformation. “Religionization” (thrēskeiopoiēsē) is the name he gives to the capture of the Gospel by that instinct. His most uncomfortable claim is that the process is not Western but human, and that Orthodoxy has succumbed to it too.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Word

Thrēskeiopoiēsē — “religionization” in Norman Russell’s rendering — appears first, so far as Basilio Petrà could establish, in 1982, in a diary Yannaras kept in Moscow and Leningrad and published in 1986 (Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 83 n. 1, 84). The earlier vocabulary had been different: hairesē (heresy), ekkosmikeusē (secularization), thesmopoiēsē (institutionalization) (Petrà, 84).

The first formulation is characteristically absolute. Reflecting on Russian religious music heard in Moscow — music that seemed to him religious but not ecclesial — Yannaras wrote:

I think that the difference between orthodoxy and heresy is not an ideological difference, so even the violation of dogmatic formulations can only have a relative importance. Heresy is the appropriation in actual experience (biomatikē oikeiōsē) of a different concept of life and of truth, another mode of gift of the sense of life. . . . The great heresy of Christianity, the only one that has persisted throughout the centuries, is its thrēskeiopoiēsē in Western Europe.
— Yannaras, Hē kokkinē plateia kai ho theios Arthouros (Athens: Domos, 1986), 90, in Petrà’s translation (Petrà, 84)

The first clause — that the violation of dogmatic formulations “can only have a relative importance” — is a strong statement, and one that Orthodox readers should weigh against the Church’s own practice, in which conciliar definitions are not relative. Yannaras’s point is that heresy is finally a mode of life rather than a proposition; the Church’s councils have consistently held that it is both.

Natural Religion

The mature account, in Against Religion, begins from anthropology rather than from history. Petrà’s summary of the argument:

For the Greek theologian the religious instinct is innate in human beings and is part of the way their natural existence functions. It allows them to overcome fear, to organise the cosmos in which they live in a way that is controllable and comprehensible and it offers dogmatic certainties and a sacred and solid hierarchy. The religious instinct is a need of the individual of the human species and is orientated towards the reinforcement of the individual.
— Petrà, Christos Yannaras, 90, summarizing Enantia stē thrēskeia

Against this stands the Christian claim: “Christianity is born and manifests itself as an existential event which has a different direction, not the empowerment of the individual and the safeguarding of his natural needs but the realisation of the personal truth of human existence in freedom from nature, in sharing and in love. Christianity is a new mode of existence in communion, according to the intimate and radical Trinitarian truth of Man made in the image and likeness of God” (Petrà, 90).

Religion and Church are therefore not two degrees of the same thing. They point in opposite directions: one fortifies the individual, the other dissolves individual self-sufficiency into personal communion. Yannaras’s own compressed formula, in Relational Ontology, defines natural religion as “the system of collective convictions, of rites and moral rules that flow from the need of human beings to protect and safeguard themselves with regard to transcendent forces” (Yannaras, Ontologia tēs schesēs, 151–61 / Relational Ontology, 80–87; cited in Petrà, 88 n. 16).

The Symptoms

Yannaras lists the marks by which religionization can be recognized. Petrà’s inventory of them, drawn from Against Religion, is the most useful summary in English:

faith as ideology; the experience of salvation as a psychological fact; salvation as the result of individual merit; the eucharistic assembly as a sacred rite; art enslaved to impressions; the eclipse of the parish; the idolatry of tradition; the demonisation of sexuality.
— Petrà, Christos Yannaras, 90

Each of these has an obvious ecclesial address, and none of them is confessionally specific. “The idolatry of tradition” and “the eucharistic assembly as a sacred rite” are charges that land, if they land at all, on Orthodox as readily as on anyone.

The Ecclesial Event

The alternative is not irreligion. This is the point most often missed by both Yannaras’s admirers and his critics, and Petrà is careful about it: “for Yannaras natural religion cannot simply be negated; it has to be assumed and transformed” (Petrà, 89).

The model is sacramental. “Just as the sacrament of matrimony assumes and transforms the sexual need because it grafts it on to the ecclesial mode of existence, and just as the Eucharist grafts on to the same mode the need of self-preservation, so the natural religious need of human beings can be assumed and transformed in the very event of the Church” (Petrà, 89). Yannaras’s own statement of what that event is:

This mode is realised and manifested by the synaxis of the “body” of the Church in every particular sacramental act, above all, however, in the supper of the Eucharist, where the realisation and manifestation of the body is accomplished by active participation in eating and drinking of the one bread and the one cup.
— Yannaras, Enantia stē thrēskeia, 313 (Eng. trans., Against Religion, 201), in Petrà, 89

This is orthodox eucharistic ecclesiology, and it is worth saying so plainly: the constructive core of Against Religion is not a departure from the Church’s doctrine but a restatement of it in a polemical key (see Ecclesiology; The Divine Liturgy).

Religionization Is Not Only Western

The most important development in Yannaras’s late work is the loosening of the term from its geography. Petrà states it directly: “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” (Petrà, 88). Western religionization, in its twinned Catholic and Protestant forms, becomes “only one of the forms”; there is also an Eastern form, which Yannaras calls Orthodoxism — partly caused by Western influence after the schism (scholastic and confessional theology, Westernized art), partly inherited directly from the imperial Church (he names certain canons, and the role assigned to the canons generally), and partly homegrown (Petrà, 88).

He goes further. “The ultimate stage of thrēskeiopoiēsē even of the so-called Orthodox Churches” lies, he says, not in these things but in the fact that the Churches continue to underwrite a cosmology and an anthropology incompatible with modern science without treating the incompatibility as a problem — with the result that the Orthodox Churches risk becoming “a place of psychological refuge in a mythical world that corresponds to humanity’s desires and instinctual needs and is almost a projection of them” (Yannaras, Enantia stē thrēskeia, 271 / Against Religion, 173, in Petrà, 88).

This is a hard saying, and it is Yannaras’s own position, not the Church’s. It is reported here because the alternative — presenting his critique as directed only outward — would misrepresent him.

The temptation, on his mature account, is coeval with the Gospel itself: “like the wheat and the tares, so thrēskeiopoiēsē and the Gospel message grow together until the moment of harvest” (Yannaras, To ainigma tou kakou, 123 / The Enigma of Evil, 61, in Petrà, 89). And the West therefore becomes, in Petrà’s precise formulation, “a negative category of a moral type that serves to designate the permanent temptation of the naturally religious human being to appropriate salvation by making it his own achievement” (Petrà, 91).

The Philokalia Case

The sharpest illustration Yannaras gives of his own thesis is one that will startle most Orthodox readers. He points to the enormous modern Western success of the Philokalia — and reads it not as a triumph of Orthodox spirituality but as evidence that religionization is native to the human heart:

We Orthodox like to accuse the West of institutional rigidity and of imposing religionisation on the ecclesial event, of submitting it to intellectualism, moralism and legalism. But the case of the Philokalia proves rather that the West is “within us” — its historical outgrowths dwell in an obscure way in the “inward” instinctive need of every human being for individualistic self-protection and assurance. The ego likes to be self-sufficient. The urge for autonomy is built into our nature (is an existential presupposition). We want the provenance of faith, of knowledge and of salvation to come from within us, to be our own achievement.
— Yannaras, quoted in Petrà, 90–91

Petrà notes bluntly that “Yannaras, as we shall see, is strongly critical of Philokalian hesychasm” (Petrà, 88). [Disputed: how far this criticism extends. Yannaras drew constantly and admiringly on Maximus, Palamas, Isaac the Syrian and John Climacus — the *Philokalia*'s own authors — and Norman Russell lists precisely these as his guides (Russell, "Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers," *Philosophy & Theology* 18, no. 1 [2006]: 83). The criticism appears to be of a particular modern *reception* of the collection as an individualist spiritual technique rather than of the hesychast tradition as such; but Petrà's phrasing is stronger than that, and this guide does not resolve the question.]

Readers should set this beside the repository’s own collections on The Philokalia and The Jesus Prayer, which present the hesychast tradition as the Church has received it. Yannaras’s worry — that a practice of prayer can be turned into a private project of self-improvement — is one the hesychast Fathers themselves raise constantly. His inference, that the collection’s Western popularity is diagnostic of a defect, is his own and is contestable.

The Question of Reform

Against Religion ends where its logic requires: in a call for the reform of the Churches — “a Eucharistic recreation of their mode of becoming in history,” in Petrà’s summary (Petrà, 83). This is the impulse behind Yannaras’s anonymously published proposals for new Greek texts of the marriage, funeral and baptismal rites (see Eros, Ekstasis, and the Body).

Whether such a call is prophetic or presumptuous when made by a layman about the rites of his Church is exactly the sort of question this guide does not answer. What can be said is that Yannaras made it publicly, under his own name for the argument and anonymously for the texts, and that no Orthodox Church adopted the proposals.

References

Yannaras, Christos. Against Religion: The Alienation of the Ecclesial Event. Trans. Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2013. (Greek: Enantia stē thrēskeia, Athens: Ikaros, 2006; passages cited at Gk. 271 = Eng. 173, Gk. 313 = Eng. 201.)
Yannaras, Christos. The Enigma of Evil. Trans. Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012. (Greek: To ainigma tou kakou, Athens: Ikaros, 2008; passages cited at Gk. 123 = Eng. 61, Gk. 157 = Eng. 79.)
Yannaras, Christos. Relational Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2011.
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.)
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.