07 — Hellenic Self-Identity and the Public Voice

Yannaras was not only, or even mainly, an academic. For more than half a century he was one of the most read and most argued-over columnists in Greece, publishing his newspaper pieces in annual volumes into his eighties, and the question that runs through all of it is the same one: what has become of Greek self-understanding, and can a people alienated from its own tradition recover it?

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Public Intellectual

Andrew Louth, writing in 2009, put the point with some surprise: “In Greece, he is very well known, not to say, controversial, as a public intellectual, who, through his regular column in the newspaper Kathimerini, and his appearances on television, seeks to address the issues and problems of modern life in the terms and concepts of today. There are plenty of such public intellectuals in the West, but it is rare to find one who speaks from a Christian perspective” (Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 329–30). The Saint-Serge memorial notice records the same: columnist for the Athenian daily Kathimerini “for several decades” (Institut Saint-Serge, “In memoriam: Christos Yannaras [1935–2024],” 2024).

The scale is visible in his bibliography. Basilio Petrà’s list of his chronographiai — newspaper writings — runs to some forty volumes, from Hē krisē tēs prophēteias (columns of 1963–66) to the annual Epiphyllides volumes of 2009 through 2015 (Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], bibliography, 116–18). The titles alone tell the story of a running quarrel with his country: Finis Greciae, Aphellēnismou parepomena [Consequences of De-Hellenization], Kommatokratia [Partyocracy], Hē Aristera hōs Dexia: Hē Dexia hōs pantomima [The Left as Right, the Right as Pantomime], Hē katastrophē hōs eukairia [Catastrophe as Opportunity], To problēma mas einai politiko, ochi oikonomiko [Our Problem Is Political, Not Economic].

Why This Belongs in a Theological Guide

Because Yannaras said it did. In old age he described the whole of his non-philosophical output as the experimental arm of a single project: after Person and Eros, “a series of studies seeks to test the proposition of a prosopocentric-critical ontology empirically (whether it is verified or falsified) on a variety of levels of shared experience: on that of the practice of jurisprudence, of political economy, of politics and institutions, of post-Newtonian epistemology, of normative ethics, of religion in contrast to the ecclesial event” (Yannaras, Hexi philosophikes zōgraphies, 220–21, in Petrà, 71 n. 107; see Truth as Relation and Communal Verification).

The columns are, on his own account, the ontology being tested in public.

The Two Files

Hellenic Self-Identity treats the cultural thesis: what Yannaras meant by hellēnikotēta, the claim that modern Greece imported its institutions along with its alienation, the ambiguity of the term “Greekness” in a country with a long history of nationalist uses for it, and the criticism this has drawn.

The Columnist and Political Theology treats the political work: the eucharistic community as a social program, his positions on Europe and on the Greek crisis, his writings on human rights, the “neo-Orthodox” phenomenon of the 1980s and his uneasy relation to it, and the question of whether a relational ontology yields a politics at all.

A Caution

This is the section of the guide where a reader most needs to keep two things apart. Yannaras’s theological critique of individualism is continuous with the Fathers. His political and cultural judgments about modern Greece, Europe, the European Union, and the Greek political class are the opinions of a Greek intellectual writing in a particular national argument, sometimes with great force and sometimes with the sweeping quality of the genre. They are reported here; they are not endorsed, and they are not Orthodox teaching.

See Also

References

  • Louth, Andrew. “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–340.
  • Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019. (Bibliography of the chronographiai, 116–18.)
  • Institut de Théologie Orthodoxe Saint-Serge. “In memoriam: Christos Yannaras (1935–2024).” Paris, 2024.