The Critique of Pietism and Moralism

Before Yannaras had a theory of the West he had a quarrel with Greek pietism. The brotherhoods, the manual dogmatics of Androutsos and Trembelas, and the “secularization of apologetics” were his first and most concrete targets, and the theory of religionization is a generalization of that quarrel. This file sets out the local argument, and asks the honest question about it.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Local Argument

Yannaras’s earliest sustained polemic is not against Rome. It is against the state of Greek religion in the 1950s and 1960s: the brotherhoods, the manuals, and an academic theology that had, in his view, adopted the questions and methods of the Western faculties while believing itself to be simply Orthodox.

The programmatic text is the long essay “Theology in Greece Today,” published with the lecture “Orthodoxy and the West” as a book in 1972 — Orthodoxia kai Dysē: Hē theologia stēn Hellada sēmera (Athens: Athēna, 1972). Andrew Louth’s description of its shape is the clearest available: it “begins with a critical account of two of the more distinguished traditional Greek theologians of the twentieth century, Christos Androutsos, and Panagiotis Trembelas, Yannaras’ one-time professor”; continues “with a highly critical account of the movement Zoë”; and concludes with Yannaras “rehearsing the criticisms of Greek culture by Zissimos Lorentzatos and of traditional (Russian) Orthodox theology by Florovsky and Schmemann” (Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 335).

Two details in that sentence are worth pausing on. Trembelas had been his own professor, and was a leading figure of the Zoë brotherhood to which Yannaras belonged (Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 1). And the textbooks of Androutsos and Trembelas, Louth notes, “continue in use to this day in the theological faculties of Greece” (Louth, 335). This was not an attack on a defeated enemy.

Louth records one further detail with a certain relish: a long footnote, added to the essay at the last minute, summarizes the trenchant criticism of Trembelas made by the then Archimandrite Kallistos Ware, reviewing the French translation of Trembelas’s three-volume dogmatics in the Eastern Churches Review (Louth, 335). The Greek critique and the Anglophone one converged (see Kallistos Ware).

What Was Wrong with the Manuals

Yannaras’s charge against the Greek academic dogmatics was not that it taught false doctrine. It was that it had taken over a form — the systematic manual, organized on the model of German Protestant and Roman Catholic scholastic textbooks, with the Fathers cited as authorities inside a framework not derived from them — and that the form carried a theology of its own.

The consequences, as he saw them: theology becomes a science, subject to “the aims and principles (regulae, axiomata, principia) of rational coherence and historical accuracy”; apologetics becomes the demonstration of Christian propositions by methods borrowed from positivism; and the God so demonstrated is an object of the intellect rather than a Person known in relation (Yannaras, Hē apologētikē sta horia tēs orthodoxou theologias [Apologetics in the Context of Orthodox Theology] [Athens: Grēgorē, 1975], 13, translated in Petrà, 30).

His own alternative he called a distinction of “levels of knowledge”: between “the dynamic-apophatic knowledge of Christian theology” and “the positivistic knowledge of empirical utilitarianism.” If the God of the Church “is not an object of the intellect or the senses that is subject to the verification of scientific observation or rational analysis but is a Person who reveals himself within the context of a personal relationship,” then knowledge of him cannot proceed by the route that leads to knowledge of the objects of science (Yannaras, Hē apologētikē, 13–17, in Petrà, 30–31).

He dated the alienation precisely, and the date is the seed of the whole historical thesis: theology’s transformation into a science began, he wrote, “in the twelfth century” in the West (Yannaras, Hē apologētikē, 13, in Petrà, 30; see The Historical Thesis).

What Was Wrong with the Brotherhoods

The Greek religious brotherhoods — Zōē above all, founded in 1907, and its offshoots — were among the most effective religious organizations of twentieth-century Europe. They restored frequent communion, ran catechetical and Sunday schools, published on a large scale, and produced a generation of devout, disciplined, biblically literate Greek laity. Yannaras belonged to one for about ten years and was one of its most active younger figures (Petrà, 1).

His indictment, made at length in the autobiographical Kataphygion ideōn [Refuge of Ideas] (Athens: Domos, 1987), has four parts, and each maps exactly onto a symptom of religionization:

Moralism. The Christian life presented as moral improvement, with virtues accumulated and sins tallied — “an egocentric self-sufficiency which was nourished by the turning of ‘virtues’ and of ‘moral consistency’ into idols” (Yannaras, Kataphygion ideōn, 256–57, in Petrà, 3–4).
Ideological certainty in place of experience — “the priority of apologetics, or rational ‘proofs,’ the given ‘authorities’ for the reinforcement of truth” (same passage).
Dualism — “the schizophrenic dualism of body and soul, matter and spirit” (same passage).
The fear of love — “the devaluation and depreciation of the sensible, the fear of love” (same passage).

The fourth is the one that drives Person and Eros and the Variations on the Song of Songs, and it explains why a philosopher’s ontology should have made room for a lyric on the Song of Songs (see Eros, Ekstasis, and the Body).

Yannaras’s structural claim about the brotherhoods was that they were, in form, Western: organized “on Western lines,” on the model of the pietist fraternities of Protestant Europe and of Roman Catholic devotional societies, and therefore importing a mode of religious life that was not Orthodox however Orthodox its content (Louth, 331). This is why the critique of pietism and the critique of the West are, in his work, a single argument.

The Honest Question

There is an obvious objection to all of this, and readers should have it plainly. It is possible to reason from a genuine and painful experience to a thesis far larger than the experience will bear. Yannaras left a movement that had wounded him and then wrote a history of Europe in which the movement’s faults are the faults of a civilization. The question is whether the diagnosis is confirmed by the history or projected onto it.

Yannaras was aware of the objection and answered it in the preface to the English edition of Orthodoxy and the West: “The critique of Western theology and tradition which I offer in this book does not contrast ‘Western’ with something ‘right’ which as an Orthodox I use to oppose something ‘wrong’ outside myself. I am not attacking an external Western adversary. As a modern Greek, I myself embody both the thirst for what is ‘right’ and the reality of what is ‘wrong’ . . . My critical stance towards the West is self-criticism; it refers to my own wholly Western mode of life. I am a Western person searching for answers to the problems tormenting Western people today” (Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, trans. Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell [Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006], viii–ix, quoted in Louth, 332–33, and in Norman Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 84–85).

Louth’s response is measured: “even if the analysis is too simplistic, what it is seeking to analyse is a set of problems that is undeniable” — and he quotes Yannaras’s own list of them: “the threat to the environment, the assimilation of politics to business models, the yawning gulf between society and the state, the pursuit of ever-greater consumption, the loneliness and weakness of social relations, the prevailing loveless sexuality” (Louth, 333, quoting Orthodoxy and the West).

Pantelis Kalaitzidis has argued the opposite conclusion at length. His doctoral dissertation, “Hellēnikotēta kai Antidytikismos stē ’Theologia tou ‘60’” [Greekness and Anti-Westernism in the “Theology of the ’60s”] (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2008), treats the anti-Western strand of the Greek theological generation — Yannaras above all — as a phenomenon requiring explanation rather than a discovery requiring assent, and he has restated the case in English in “The Image of the West in Contemporary Greek Theology” (in George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Constructions of the West [New York: Fordham University Press, 2013], 142–160). His argument is treated in The Construction of “the West”.

What Survives the Question

Whatever one concludes about the historical thesis, two things about the local critique are not seriously disputed.

First, the Greek theological generation of the 1960s did change Greek theology, and Yannaras was central to it. Norman Russell’s survey names the group — Vasileios Gontikakis, Panayiotis Nellas, Yannaras, Zizioulas — as the generation that pulled Greek theology out of the German-modeled manual tradition (Russell, 80–81; see John Zizioulas, Panayiotis Nellas). Russell also records the detail that makes the point sharper: of these, “Gontikakis, Nellas, and Yannaras began as members of Zoe but broke with it in the early 1960s” (Russell, 90 n. 11, citing Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 217–50 for the history of the movement). The renewal came out of the movement it criticized.

Second, the diagnosis of moralism as a spiritual danger is not a modern innovation. That the accumulation of virtues can become an idol, that religious observance can serve self-justification, that fear of the body can pass for chastity — these are commonplaces of the ascetic Fathers, and Yannaras took them from there. His originality lay in turning them into a category of historical and cultural analysis. Whether that turn was legitimate is the question of Section 08.

References

Yannaras, Christos. Orthodoxia kai Dysē: Hē theologia stēn Hellada sēmera. Athens: Athēna, 1972.
Yannaras, Christos. Hē apologētikē sta horia tēs orthodoxou theologias. Athens: Grēgorē, 1975.
Yannaras, Christos. Kataphygion ideōn: Martyria. Athens: Domos, 1987.
Yannaras, Christos. Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age. Trans. Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006. (Preface, viii–ix.)
Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019. (On the apologetics essay, 30–31.)
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.
Kalaitzidis, Pantelis. “Hellēnikotēta kai Antidytikismos stē ’Theologia tou ‘60’.” Doctoral dissertation, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2008.
Kalaitzidis, Pantelis. “The Image of the West in Contemporary Greek Theology.” In George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Constructions of the West, 142–160. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.