06 — Orthodoxy and the West

Orthodoxia kai Dysē stē neōterē Hellada (1992), translated as Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age (2006), is Yannaras’s account of how Greek theology and Greek self-understanding were, on his reading, progressively distorted by imported Western categories from the fourteenth century to the twentieth. This is his thesis, not the teaching of the Orthodox Church, and this collection does not adopt it. It is set out here in his own terms and as fully as the sources allow; the case against it is in Section 08.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Standard Applied Here

Per METHODOLOGY §4.1, this repository is academic from within the Orthodox Church: where the Church has a dogmatic position — the Filioque is an error, papal supremacy has not been received, the essence/energies distinction is the Church’s teaching — that position is presented as the Church’s. What §4.1 does not license is the adoption of any particular modern author’s historical-causal narrative about how Western Christendom came to be as it is. Yannaras offers exactly such a narrative, and a very ambitious one. It is reported here accurately and sympathetically, attributed to him throughout, and stated as a contested thesis in a live scholarly field.

The parallel case in this repository is God, History, and Dialectic, which stages the same debate at length and maps the field from the maximal grand narrative through David Bradshaw’s measured divergence-thesis to the paradigm-critics. Yannaras belongs squarely within the tradition that collection stages, and the reader is referred there for the wider frame (see especially The De Régnon Paradigm Critique).

The Book

Orthodoxia kai Dysē stē neōterē Hellada [Orthodoxy and the West in Modern Greece] was published in Athens by Domos in 1992. It grew from much earlier material: a lecture, “Orthodoxy and the West,” delivered at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology in Boston in September 1970 and published in English translation in 1971, and a longer companion essay, “Theology in Greece Today”; the two appeared together as a Greek book in 1972 (Andrew Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 335; the 1971 translation is Yannaras, “Orthodoxy and the West,” trans. Theodore Stylianopoulos, Eastern Churches Review 3, no. 3 [1971]: 286–300).

The English edition — Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age, trans. Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006), xii + 379 pp. — is not a plain translation, and this matters. As the translators explain in an introductory note (p. xi), “the ‘luxuriant prose of the Greek original’ has been pruned, the notes have been updated ‘with an emphasis on material available in English’, and the polemical tone has been modified,” with some factual corrections; all in consultation with the author (Louth, 333). Louth adds a wry qualification: the consultation “makes one wonder why Yannaras makes no secret of the fact that he thinks he has been censored in the English translation” (Louth, 333). Readers working seriously on Yannaras’s historical thesis should be aware that the English text is milder than the Greek.

The Two Files

The Historical Thesis states the argument as Yannaras makes it: the claim that the difference between East and West is a difference of ontology and therefore of mode of life; the causal chain he proposes; the parallel he himself drew with Florovsky’s Ways of Russian Theology; and his own explicit qualification that the critique is self-criticism.

The Schism, Scholasticism, and Modern Greece follows the historical narrative in detail: Demetrios Kydones’s translation of Aquinas in 1354, the Tourkokratia, Damodos and the first Greek dogmatic manual, the Kollyvades and Yannaras’s hard verdict on the Pēdalion, the German-modeled theological faculties of the new Greek state, and the constructive final chapters on “Papadiamandis and his school” and on the 1960s.

See Also

References

  • 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.
  • Yannaras, Christos. Orthodoxia kai Dysē stē neōterē Hellada. Athens: Domos, 1992.
  • Yannaras, Christos. “Orthodoxy and the West.” Trans. Theodore Stylianopoulos. Eastern Churches Review 3, no. 3 (1971): 286–300.
  • Louth, Andrew. “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–340.