The Schism, Scholasticism, and Modern Greece

The narrative of Orthodoxy and the West runs from Demetrios Kydones’s translation of Aquinas in 1354 to the Greek theological faculties of the twentieth century, by way of the Tourkokratia, the first Greek dogmatic manual, and — surprisingly — a hard verdict on the Kollyvades. Its last chapters are constructive: Yannaras finds the springs of a renewed theology not in the academy but among lay writers, painters and architects. This is his narrative, reported as his.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

1354: Kydones Translates Aquinas

Yannaras’s account begins at a precise point. In 1354 the Byzantine statesman and scholar Demetrios Kydones completed a Greek translation of Thomas Aquinas, and for Yannaras that translation opens “a new historical period” in which Greeks began to abandon their own tradition for an imported one (Nicolas Prevelakis, “Theologies as Alternative Histories: John Romanides and Chrestos Yannaras,” Classics@ 10, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University).

A bibliographical footnote is worth having, because it is instructive about the book’s revision. The Greek text of Orthodoxy and the West asserted on its very first page that what Kydones translated in 1354 was the Summa Theologiae; the English translation silently corrects this to the Summa contra Gentiles (Andrew Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 333). [Corrected: the 1354 Kydones translation is of the Summa contra Gentiles; the Greek original of Yannaras's book had Summa Theologiae, and the English edition emends it in consultation with the author.]

The date and the text are not disputed by anyone. What is disputed is what the event means. For Yannaras it is the beginning of an alienation. For Marcus Plested the same translation is the beginning of a remarkable Byzantine engagement with Aquinas in which he “was received with astonishing enthusiasm across the Byzantine theological spectrum” (Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]). Plested names Yannaras explicitly among those who have built a false dichotomy between a Thomist West and a Palamite East. The disagreement is treated in The Construction of “the West”.

The Tourkokratia and the Manuals

The second stage of the narrative is the long Ottoman centuries. Higher education for Orthodox Greeks had to be got abroad — in Venice, in Padua, in the Protestant universities — and what came back with the graduates was not only learning but a form.

Norman Russell, summarizing the state of affairs Yannaras describes and citing Yannaras’s own pages for it, sets out the sequence. After the fall of Constantinople “an arid Aristotelianism associated with the name of Theodore Korydalleus took hold of the intellectual life of the Eastern Church” (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 77–78, citing Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 51–58, 63–69). Then Vikentios Damodos (1679–1752), trained in Venice and Padua and imbued with Enlightenment ideas, produced “the first Greek handbook of dogmatic theology” on the model of the Jesuit Denis Pétau’s De theologicis dogmatibus — an innovation in a world where systematic exposition of doctrine on rational principles had not been attempted, and where even the earlier “Confessions of Faith” had been written on Western models under Western pressure (Russell, 78, citing Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 101). Yannaras’s verdict on one such Confession is characteristically flat: “a non-Orthodox treatise compiled from Orthodox materials” (Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 210, quoted in Russell, 89 n. 2).

The line runs from Damodos through Eugenios Voulgaris “right up to the authoritative manuals of Christos Androutsos (1907) and Panayiotis Trembelas (1959–1963)” (Russell, 78). The manuals were still in use in the Greek theological faculties when Yannaras wrote, and remained so afterwards (Louth, 335).

The institutional half of the story is the same. The school of theology at Athens was founded in 1837, on the German model, shortly after the modern Greek state; it was the only one in Greece until a second faculty was founded at Thessalonica in 1925; it was “entirely academic” and not integrated into the Church’s life; and until comparatively recently its teachers did almost all their postgraduate work in Germany (Russell, 79, citing Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 194). For Yannaras this is not a series of unfortunate accidents. It is a state importing a mode of religious existence along with its constitution, its architecture and its army.

The Kollyvades and the Pēdalion

The most startling move in the book — and the one most likely to trouble Orthodox readers — is that Yannaras does not exempt the great eighteenth-century movement of Orthodox renewal.

The Kollyvades were the Athonite movement of liturgical and Philokalic revival whose best-known figure is St Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain, compiler with St Makarios of Corinth of the Philokalia. Yannaras’s charge, as Louth reports it, is twofold. Nikodimos’s Pēdalion — the Rudder, the annotated collection of the holy canons — “distorted them by introducing Western legalistic notions and even an inept use of critical scholarship.” And “Nikodimos’ openness to the pietism of Western devotional works ran the risk of tainting the enterprise of the Philokalia with a moralistic puritanism,” a phenomenon for which Louth recalls Fr Lev Gillet’s phrase “spiritual piracy” (Louth, 334, summarizing Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West).

St Nikodimos is a canonized saint of the Orthodox Church, glorified in 1955. Yannaras’s criticism of two of his books is a scholarly and theological judgment about texts, not a judgment about his sanctity, and it is emphatically Yannaras’s own; many Orthodox reject it. That Nikodimos adapted Western devotional works — Lorenzo Scupoli’s Combattimento spirituale as Unseen Warfare, and the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises — is not in dispute as a fact; whether the adaptation was a contamination or a legitimate Orthodox transfiguration of the material is precisely what is disputed. See The Philokalia.

This passage is the clearest evidence that Yannaras’s target was a form of religious life rather than a confession. He was willing to find it inside the most revered movement of modern Orthodox renewal.

The Springs of Renewal: The Laity

The constructive half of the book is what Louth thinks most important about it: “What is most important about this book, however, is not so much the documentation of distortion, as its account of the springs from which a renewed theology has emerged” (Louth, 334).

Those springs, for Yannaras, are not in the theological faculties. They are among lay writers and artists who kept faith with the living rhythms of Greek life:

Alexandros Papadiamandis (1851–1911), the short-story writer, whom Yannaras places at the head — a whole section is titled “Alexandros Papadiamandis and his School”;
Photis Kontoglou, the painter, central to the modern rediscovery of traditional iconography, and Nikos Gabriel Pentzikis;
Dimitris Pikionis, the architect;
the philosophers Basil Tatakis and Konstantinos Georgoulis;
the novelist George Theotokas;
the literary critic Zissimos Lorentzatos, whom Yannaras presents “as a profound influence on his own theological vision” (Louth, 334).

Louth notes that Lorentzatos is available in English — The Lost Center and Other Essays in Greek Poetry, trans. Kay Cicellis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), and The Drama of Quality: Selected Essays, trans. Liadain Sherrard (Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey, 2000) — and gently faults the English edition’s bibliography for not noticing (Louth, 334).

The methodological claim underneath is the one that makes Yannaras Yannaras: “the springs of authentic Orthodox theology are found, not in the academy, but in those writers and artists who paid attention to the living traditions and rhythms of Greek life, preserved by ordinary devout Orthodox Christians through the long years of the Tourkokratia and the even more destructive years of Western-style ‘Independence’” (Louth, 334).

One consequence: an Englishman belongs on the list. Philip Sherrard, poet, translator and Philokalia co-translator, was among the first outside Greece to welcome Yannaras’s voice in the 1970s (Louth, 334).

The 1960s

The final chapter is titled “The 1960s,” and it presents what that decade meant in Greece as the opposite of what it meant in Western theology: not the dissolution of tradition but its recovery. Yannaras gives “a lively, and not uncritical, account of the recovery of a genuine Orthodox theology among theologians, such as John Romanides, Nikos Nissiotis, John Zizioulas, Panayiotis Nellas, George Mantzarides, and Archimandrite Vasileios” — and among these he gives “pride of place to Demetrios Koutroubis” (Louth, 334–35).

Yannaras’s tribute to Koutroubis is the affectionate center of the book: “He was the first who spoke the ‘new’ language. It was he who wrote the earliest articles in Greece about the theology of St Gregory Palamas and St Nicolas Kabasilas, he who translated for the first time the texts of the great theologians of the Russian diaspora, and — above all — he who gathered around himself a new generation of theologians and trained them by means of the discreet humility of his Socratic [method]” (Yannaras, quoted in Russell, 80, citing Orthodoxy and the West, 279 and 294; Russell, 89 n. 5, glosses the reference to “a new style of theological writing in Greece”).

That the book ends here is important for reading it fairly. Whatever the merits of the historical thesis, its purpose is not to establish that the Greeks were wronged. It is to argue that a recovery has begun and to say where it came from.

The English Edition’s Bibliography

A practical note for readers. The translators compiled a bibliography from the notes of the original — a genuine service — but Louth judges that “this, however, could have been done better,” faulting the repetition of articles and collected works “without any apparent awareness that the collected works include the articles,” and the failure to notice the available English translations of Lorentzatos (Louth, 334). Anyone working from the English edition’s apparatus should check it.

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. (Korydalleus and the post-Byzantine intellectual world, 51–58, 63–69; Damodos, 101; the theological faculties, 194; the Confession as “a non-Orthodox treatise,” 210; Koutroubis and Synoro, 279, 294.)
Louth, Andrew. “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–340. (On Orthodoxy and the West, 333–35.)
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Prevelakis, Nicolas. “Theologies as Alternative Histories: John Romanides and Chrestos Yannaras.” Classics@ 10. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University.
Lorentzatos, Zissimos. The Lost Center and Other Essays in Greek Poetry. Trans. Kay Cicellis. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.
Lorentzatos, Zissimos. The Drama of Quality: Selected Essays. Trans. Liadain Sherrard. Limni, Evia: Denise Harvey, 2000.