The Historical Thesis

Yannaras’s claim is that the difference between Eastern and Western Christendom is not a set of doctrinal disagreements but a difference of ontology, and that an ontology is a mode of life — so that the divergence works itself out in law, politics, art, economics and the shape of a civilization. This is Yannaras’s thesis. It is not the teaching of the Orthodox Church, and this collection does not adopt it. It is stated here in his own terms; the criticism is in Section 08.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Claim in One Sentence

Yannaras’s own formulation of his scholarly focus was that the distinctions between the Greek and Western European philosophical traditions “are not limited solely at the level of theory, but also define a mode . . . of life” (Yannaras, biographical statement, as reproduced on OrthodoxWiki, “Christos Yannaras”). Everything else follows from that. If theology is not a body of propositions but the articulation of a mode of existence, then a different theology is a different civilization, and a theological error is a civilizational pathology.

The Two Ontologies

The contrast, as Yannaras draws it, runs like this.

In the East, God is beyond being; he is known not through the analogy of created being but through the uncreated energies, in personal communion; truth is relational and is verified in the ecclesial community; the person is ontologically primary; and knowledge is an event of relation rather than a matching of concepts to objects (see Heidegger and the Areopagite).

In the West, on his account, God became a being — the supreme being, the First Cause, an object of demonstration; the analogia entis made creaturely being the route to knowledge of God; theology became a science with regulae, axiomata, principia; truth became propositional correctness administered by an authority; and the human being became an individual, a self-sufficient unit whose relation to God is juridical (Yannaras, Hē apologētikē sta horia tēs orthodoxou theologias [Athens: Grēgorē, 1975], 13, in Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 30).

Andrew Louth’s summary of the consequences Yannaras draws is the fairest short statement in English:

According to this analysis, the West, tied to ontotheology, had abandoned this understanding of the Gospel and the Church, and settled into a rationalist and legalistic understanding of human existence, subject to law and custom, that was bound, sooner or later, to turn to the ashes of nihilism, while at the same time reducing value to price and ushering in the consumerism that is so marked in modern Western society (and one of its most successful, and baleful, exports).
— Andrew Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (2009): 332

Louth’s own immediate comment is worth keeping in view: “The Western reader is likely to feel that this analysis is too simplistic, and indeed Yannaras himself is conscious of this” (Louth, 332).

The Causal Chain

Yannaras proposes a genealogy, and it is genuinely a genealogy — one thing causing the next — rather than a series of parallels. Nicolas Prevelakis’s summary identifies the pivots: the translation of Aquinas into Greek by Demetrios Kydones in 1354, which for Yannaras inaugurates “a new historical period” in which Greeks begin to abandon their own tradition; the destruction of Byzantium by the Fourth Crusade; and the modern Greek state’s wholesale adoption of Western institutions (Prevelakis, “Theologies as Alternative Histories: John Romanides and Chrestos Yannaras,” Classics@ 10, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University).

Behind the fourteenth century lies, for Yannaras, an earlier and deeper divergence. Norman Russell states the theological end of it without softening: in Yannaras’s writings, “Tertullian, Ambrose and Augustine are seen to provide the basis of the secularized ‘religionization’ of the Christian life which Yannaras regards as the source of all Western ills. Augustine in particular is presented as the prime source of the rationalism and intellectualism that has dominated Western culture and imprisoned humanity in an egocentric individualism” (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 83).

Late in life Yannaras made the civilizational claim explicit in a title: Hē Eurōpē gennēthēke apo to ‘Schisma’ [Europe Was Born from the “Schism”] (Athens: Ikaros, 2015). Europe, on that reading, is not a place that suffered a schism; it is a thing the schism made.

Yannaras’s Own Qualification

Yannaras anticipated the objection that he was writing confessional polemic, and answered it in the preface to the English edition. The passage is the single most important qualification he ever put on his own thesis, and it deserves to be quoted at length:

Let me therefore make one thing absolutely clear. 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”: a contradictory and alienated survival of ecclesiastical Orthodoxy in a society radically and unhappily Westernized. 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

He continues by naming the problems he means: “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” (Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, quoted in Louth, 332–33).

Two responses to that qualification are on record, and both are worth having.

Louth accepts it as sincere and as changing what the book is doing: “even if the analysis is too simplistic, what it is seeking to analyse is a set of problems that is undeniable. . . . There is no question that we need answers to these issues, nor that, for whatever reason, it is this that Western civilization has created for itself and spawns throughout the world” (Louth, 333).

Russell reads it as a genuine subtlety that critics have missed, but concedes the point on which Yannaras is most exposed: “Where he is most vulnerable to criticism is his tracing back of all that is wrong in the ‘West’ to St Augustine. Here he has taken his cue from Vladimir Lossky, John Romanides and John Meyendorff, who present polemical assessments of Augustine that (at least in the case of Lossky and Meyendorff) owe more than a little to the work of the French Jesuit, Théodore de Regnon. A first-hand study of Augustine by Orthodox scholars would do much to dispel the caricature that often informs their writings” (Russell, 84–85).

That last sentence is, in effect, the program of the Fordham Orthodox Readings of Augustine volume (2008), and it is the hinge on which the criticism of Yannaras turns (see The Construction of “the West”; St. Augustine of Hippo).

The Florovsky Parallel

Yannaras himself drew the comparison that best locates his book. Orthodoxy and the West, Louth writes, “recalls Fr Georges Florovsky’s Ways of Russian Theology and its indictment of what he called the ‘Babylonian Captivity of the [Russian] Church’; Yannaras is, indeed, fully conscious of the parallel” (Louth, 333).

The parallel is exact and illuminating. Florovsky argued that Russian theology had been captured by Western scholastic and pietist forms and had to be freed by a return to the Fathers; Yannaras argues the same about Greek theology. In both cases the genre is a theological history of one’s own tradition’s alienation from itself, written by an insider, in the service of renewal. And in both cases the same objection has been made: that the historical scheme is too neat, and that “the West” functions as an explanatory principle rather than as an object of study (see Georges Florovsky; The Patristic Revival).

What This Is Not

Three clarifications, because Yannaras is easy to caricature in either direction.

It is not a claim that individual Western Christians are lost. Yannaras’s argument is about the structure of a tradition, not the standing of persons, and he does not make the second claim.

It is not confessional triumphalism. He was at least as hard on Orthodoxy — on “Orthodoxism,” on the Greek theological faculties, on the canonical tradition’s legalization, on the modern reception of the Philokalia — as he was on Rome (see Religionization and the Ecclesial Event).

It is not a settled scholarly result. It is a large historical-interpretive thesis of a kind that the field has spent the last thirty years contesting. Naming it as such is not a criticism of Yannaras; it is a description of where the question stands.

Standing

The Orthodox Church confesses that the Filioque is an error, that papal supremacy and infallibility have not been received, and that the distinction of essence and energies is her teaching (see Filioque; Orthodox vs. Catholic). The claim that these differences constitute two ontologies which have generated two civilizations, and that the trajectory from Augustine through Aquinas to nihilism and consumerism is a single causal chain, is Christos Yannaras’s own historical thesis. Serious Orthodox scholars hold it, and serious Orthodox scholars reject it. This guide names both and adjudicates neither.

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. (Preface, viii–ix.)
Yannaras, Christos. Hē Eurōpē gennēthēke apo to ‘Schisma’. Athens: Ikaros, 2015.
Yannaras, Christos. Hē apologētikē sta horia tēs orthodoxou theologias. Athens: Grēgorē, 1975.
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.
Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019.
Prevelakis, Nicolas. “Theologies as Alternative Histories: John Romanides and Chrestos Yannaras.” Classics@ 10. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University.
Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Readings of Augustine. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008.