Hellenic Self-Identity

The subtitle of Yannaras’s best-known historical book — Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age — names his lifelong subject. His claim is that modern Greece built itself on imported Western models and thereby became a stranger to its own tradition, and that the recovery of that tradition is not nostalgia but the condition of any real cultural life. The claim is powerful, contested, and politically double-edged.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

What He Meant by “Greekness”

Hellēnikotēta — Greekness — is a fraught word in modern Greek. It has served romantic nationalism, state ideology, and dictatorship; the colonels who seized power in 1967 and shut down Yannaras’s journal had a good deal to say about Hellenic-Christian civilization. Yannaras used it anyway, and meant by it something quite specific and not nationalist.

For him, Greekness names not an ethnicity but an ontological culture — a way of understanding what it is to be, transmitted through a language and a mode of life, whose classical form is the Greek philosophical vocabulary as the Fathers transfigured it, and whose social form is the ecclesial and communal life of Greek villages, monasteries and parishes. Petrà notes a telling shift in his usage: in the earlier years Yannaras used “Byzantium” and “the Byzantines” freely; later he preferred to speak of “the continuity of Greek ontological culture” (Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 37 n. 13). The change of vocabulary is the thesis in miniature: not an empire, not a race, but a continuity of understanding.

Nicolas Prevelakis’s summary of the intellectual move is exact: Yannaras positions “relational thinking as ancient Greece’s authentic legacy preserved in Orthodoxy” — which, Prevelakis notes, is precisely what allowed his appeal to cross ideological lines that in Greece are rarely crossed (Prevelakis, “Theologies as Alternative Histories: John Romanides and Chrestos Yannaras,” Classics@ 10, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University).

The Alienation

The negative half of the thesis is that modern Greece, from its foundation, imported its forms from the West and thereby lost access to its own.

The list of imports, as Yannaras tells it, is long and institutional. The Bavarian monarchy and the administrative apparatus of the new state after 1830. The theological faculty at Athens, founded in 1837 on the German model, unintegrated into the Church’s life, with its teachers doing their postgraduate work in Germany (Norman Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 79, citing Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 194). The dogmatic manuals of Damodos, Voulgaris, Androutsos and Trembelas, built on Western scholastic and Enlightenment models (Russell, 78, citing Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 101). The nineteenth-century purist language, katharevousa, itself an artificial construction. The religious brotherhoods of the twentieth century, organized on Western pietist lines (Andrew Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 331). And, in his later columns, the political party system, the consumer economy, and the terms of Greek participation in European integration.

Louth’s phrase for the whole is memorable: Yannaras contrasts what was “preserved by ordinary devout Orthodox Christians through the long years of the Tourkokratia” with “the even more destructive years of Western-style ‘Independence’” (Louth, 334). It is a provocation, and it was meant to be. The judgment that Greek independence was more culturally destructive than four centuries of Ottoman rule is Yannaras’s, is deliberately polemical, and is rejected by most historians of modern Greece.

The Positive Program

Yannaras’s answer to the alienation is not political restoration but attention. The sources of a renewed Greek culture, he argued, are the writers and artists who kept faith with the living texture of Greek life: Papadiamandis above all, then Kontoglou, Pentzikis, Pikionis, Theotokas, Tatakis, Georgoulis, and the critic Zissimos Lorentzatos, to whom he acknowledged a large debt (Louth, 334; see The Schism, Scholasticism, and Modern Greece).

This is a genuinely unusual position for a theologian: the claim that a short-story writer of village life did more to preserve the Church’s mode of existence than the professors of dogmatics. It is also the reason the “romanticism” charge has stuck to him.

The Romanticism Charge, and His Answer

The objection was put crisply by one critic: that Yannaras does not confront the problems of the Church today “but prefers to mourn a lost reality,” yearning “for the immediacy of life reflected in agrarian society” (M. Tataryn, quoted in Russell, 85).

Yannaras’s answer, in the preface to the English Orthodoxy and the West: “My aim is not to lament the past in a sentimental fashion, nor is it to resurrect the Greek experiential version of the Church in pursuit of a lost culture” (Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, trans. Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell [Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006], viii, quoted in Russell, 85). Russell endorses the disclaimer: “It is true that Yannaras has a deep respect for popular Orthodox culture. But he is no romantic” (Russell, 85).

Readers can weigh that for themselves. What can be said is that the target of the mature critique is not modernity as such but individualism as a mode of existence — which is why he could write with equal severity about a Greek village that had become a suburb and about a monastery that had become a religious institution.

The Political Ambiguity

There is an honest difficulty here, and this guide states it rather than smoothing it.

A theology that identifies an authentic national tradition and traces its corruption to foreign importation is, structurally, available to nationalism, whatever its author’s intentions. Prevelakis observes that Yannaras’s framing “enabl[ed] appeal across ideological divides (left-wing anti-capitalists, nationalists, church reformers)” (Prevelakis, Classics@ 10). In 1980s Greece a loosely defined “neo-Orthodox” current drew on Yannaras and on John Romanides for exactly such a mixture of anti-Western, anti-capitalist and identitarian arguments.

Yannaras himself resisted the nationalist reading. His “Greekness” is a mode of existence open in principle to anyone — he several times insisted that his critique of the West was self-criticism by “a Western person” (Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, viii–ix). And his columns were as scathing about Greek nationalism, Greek clientelism and the Greek political class as about anything foreign; the volume titles Kommatokratia [Partyocracy] and Hē hellēnikotēta hōs poiotēta kai hōs ntropē [Greekness as a Quality and as a Cause for Shame] make the point on their own (Petrà, bibliography, 117–18).

But the ambiguity is real, and it is the substance of Pantelis Kalaitzidis‘s criticism. Kalaitzidis’s Thessaloniki doctoral dissertation was on precisely this conjunction — “Greekness and Anti-Westernism in the ’Theology of the ‘60s’” (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2008) — and his English essay “The Image of the West in Contemporary Greek Theology” argues that the anti-Western construct of the Greek theological generation has functioned as an obstacle to Orthodox engagement with political liberalism, democracy and human rights (Kalaitzidis, in George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Constructions of the West [New York: Fordham University Press, 2013], 142–160). See The Construction of “the West”.

Greece and Europe

Yannaras’s relation to Europe was not simple rejection. He wrote a book in 2000 on Hellēnikē hetoimotēta gia tēn eurōpaikēn henopoiēsē [Greek Readiness for European Unification], and another in 2015 titled Hē Eurōpē gennēthēke apo to “Schisma” [Europe Was Born from the “Schism”] (Petrà, bibliography, 116–17). The second title is the thesis: Europe as a civilization is, for him, the historical product of the theological rupture, which makes it neither a neutral partner nor a simple enemy but something closer to an estranged sibling — and makes the Greek question of how to belong to it genuinely difficult rather than merely practical.

During the Greek financial crisis his columns carried titles such as Hē katastrophē hōs eukairia [Catastrophe as Opportunity] (2012) and To problēma mas einai politiko, ochi oikonomiko [Our Problem Is Political, Not Economic] (2013) (Petrà, bibliography, 118). The consistent line — that the crisis was a crisis of culture and of the mode of common life rather than of macroeconomics — is a direct application of his ontology, and it is characteristic that he thought so.

Standing

The Orthodox Church does not teach a doctrine of Hellenic self-identity, and has in fact condemned the subordination of the Church to national identity — phyletism, condemned by the Council of Constantinople in 1872. Yannaras’s account of Greekness is his own cultural thesis, offered by a Greek layman inside a Greek argument. It is reported here because it is a large part of what he did and of why he mattered in his own country; it is not presented as Orthodox teaching, and the criticism of it is not minimized.

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. Hellēnikē hetoimotēta gia tēn eurōpaikēn henopoiēsē. Athens: Libanē, 2000.
Yannaras, Christos. Hē Eurōpē gennēthēke apo to ‘Schisma’. Athens: Ikaros, 2015.
Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019.
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.
Prevelakis, Nicolas. “Theologies as Alternative Histories: John Romanides and Chrestos Yannaras.” Classics@ 10. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University.
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.
Kalaitzidis, Pantelis. “Hellēnikotēta kai Antidytikismos stē ’Theologia tou ‘60’.” Doctoral dissertation, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2008.