The Columnist and Political Theology

From the mid-1970s Yannaras argued that the eucharistic community is not a private consolation but a social proposal — a mode of common life that judges both capitalist individualism and collectivist statism. He worked the argument out over forty years of newspaper columns, collected in some forty volumes, and it is the least studied and most contested part of his authorship.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Genre

Yannaras published his newspaper writing in book form, year by year, from the 1960s to 2016. Basilio Petrà’s bibliography lists them under chronographiai, and the run is remarkable: Hē krisē tēs prophēteias (columns of 1963–66), To pronomio tēs apelpisias (1971–73), Kephalaia politikēs theologias (1974–75), Hē neoellēnikē tautotēta (1976–77), then a steady annual sequence through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, ending with the Epiphyllides volumes of 2009 to 2015 (Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], bibliography, 116–18).

Andrew Louth described the effect from outside: a public intellectual “very well known, not to say, controversial,” who through his Kathimerini column and his television appearances addressed “the issues and problems of modern life in the terms and concepts of today,” and who was in this rare — “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).

Chapters on Political Theology

The founding text is Kephalaia Politikēs Theologias [Chapters on Political Theology], collecting columns of 1974–75 and published in Athens by Papazēsē in 1976, with a second edition from Grēgorē in 1983 (Petrà, bibliography, 116). A short programmatic piece was translated into English as “A Note on Political Theology,” trans. Steven Peter Tsichlis, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1983): 53–56, and reprinted in The Meaning of Reality: Essays on Existence and Communion, Eros and History, ed. Gregory Edwards and Herman A. Middleton (Los Angeles: Sebastian Press and Indiktos, 2011), 149–52 (Petrà, bibliography, 120).

The timing matters. 1974–75 is the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Greek junta — a moment when everything about how Greeks were to live together was open, and when the dominant idioms on offer were Marxist and liberal. Yannaras’s intervention was to argue that the Church had a third proposal, and that it was not a set of moral prescriptions for politicians but a form of common life.

The Eucharistic Community as a Social Proposal

The argument, stated as briefly as it can be:

  • If the human being is a person constituted by relation, then any social order built on the individual — the rights-bearing unit, the consumer, the voter as an isolated preference — is built on a false anthropology and will produce loneliness, however efficiently it distributes goods.
  • If the alternative is not collectivism (which dissolves the person into the mass, an equal and opposite falsification), then it must be a form of communion in which persons are more themselves for being together.
  • The Church already possesses such a form. The eucharistic assembly, and around it the parish as a real community with a shared material life, is not a metaphor for society but a working instance of what society could be.

Yannaras’s proposal for the “reconstruction of the parish” in The Freedom of Morality is the ecclesiological version of the same claim (see The Eucharistic Ethos and Asceticism). In the columns it becomes a critique of the Greek state, the party system, and the economy — his term kommatokratia, “partyocracy,” giving its title to a book subtitled When Citizens Vote in Favour of the Plundering of Their Life (Athens: Patakē, 2002) (Petrà, bibliography, 118).

Left and Right

Yannaras was not placeable on the Greek political spectrum, and made a point of it. One of his volumes is titled Hē Aristera hōs Dexia: Hē Dexia hōs pantomima: Stoicheia kritikēs analysēs tou neoellēnikou mēdenismou [The Left as Right, the Right as Pantomime: Elements of a Critical Analysis of Modern Greek Nihilism] (Athens: Patakē, 2001) (Petrà, bibliography, 118). The thesis of the title is that the Greek left and right are variants of a single nihilism, differing in vocabulary rather than in the mode of existence they presuppose.

Nicolas Prevelakis notes the consequence for his reception: the framing “enable[ed] appeal across ideological divides — left-wing anti-capitalists, nationalists, church reformers” (Prevelakis, “Theologies as Alternative Histories: John Romanides and Chrestos Yannaras,” Classics@ 10, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University). A theologian whose critique of consumer capitalism could be quoted by the left and whose critique of Western importation could be quoted by the right was going to be claimed by both and owned by neither. He appears to have preferred it that way.

Human Rights

The one place where the political theology meets a live ecumenical debate is human rights. Yannaras contributed “Human Rights and the Orthodox Church” to Emmanuel Clapsis, ed., The Orthodox Churches in a Pluralistic World: An Ecumenical Conversation (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2004), 83–89, reprinted in The Meaning of Reality, 45–50 (Petrà, bibliography, 120).

His position follows from the ontology and is genuinely awkward. Rights language presupposes the individual as the bearer of claims against others; a relational ontology holds that the individual so conceived is precisely the problem. Yannaras therefore could not simply endorse the human rights framework, and did not.

This is the point at which Pantelis Kalaitzidis presses hardest. Kalaitzidis has argued that the anti-Western discourse of modern Greek and Orthodox theology has functioned to block the reception of political liberalism, democracy and human rights in Orthodox majority countries, and has called for critical self-reflection by Orthodox theologians about why that reception has been so difficult (Kalaitzidis, “The Image of the West in Contemporary Greek Theology,” in George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Constructions of the West [New York: Fordham University Press, 2013], 142–160; and Orthodoxy and Political Theology, Geneva: WCC Publications, 2012). The counter-position — that Orthodoxy has resources for a genuinely democratic politics that do not require the individualist anthropology — is argued by Aristotle Papanikolaou in The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). Neither position is adjudicated here.

The Church after Communism

A further English-language piece, “The Church in the Postcommunist World,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 3, no. 1 (2003): 29–46 — also issued as a booklet, The Church in Post-Communist Europe (Berkeley, CA: Interorthodox Press, 2003), and reprinted in The Meaning of Reality, 123–43 — applies the diagnosis to the Orthodox world after 1989 (Petrà, bibliography, 119–20). The characteristic move is to refuse the obvious consolation: the fall of an atheist regime does not, on his account, restore the Church, because the mode of existence that had colonized the Church before the persecution is still in place and is now free to flourish.

How Serious Is the Political Theology?

Two honest observations, without adjudication.

In its favor: Yannaras did what very few twentieth-century theologians attempted — he sustained a weekly public argument, in a national newspaper, for four decades, from an explicitly ecclesial standpoint, and was read by people who had no interest in theology. The corpus of columns is the largest experiment in public theology in modern Orthodoxy, and it is almost entirely untranslated. Jonathan Cole, who translated some of it, thinks the political theology “destined to grow” in influence as Western civilization faces crisis (Cole, “Remembering Christos Yannaras [1935–2024],” Political Theology Network, 2024).

Against: a body of newspaper columns is not a political theory, and Yannaras never produced the systematic political work that his ontology arguably required. What the eucharistic community as a social proposal would mean institutionally — what it implies about property, law, coercion, pluralism, or the state — he tended to answer by negation rather than by construction. Louth’s judgment on Postmodern Metaphysics, that Yannaras’s confidence sometimes outran the univocity of the evidence, applies here too (Louth, 333).

Standing

None of this is Orthodox teaching. The Church has a social witness and a body of conciliar and patristic teaching on wealth, poverty, power and the state; Yannaras’s political theology is one modern Orthodox layman’s proposal, developed in a journalistic form, in a particular national argument. It is reported here because it was a large part of his life and of his influence.

See Also

References

  • Yannaras, Christos. Kephalaia Politikēs Theologias (1974–1975). Athens: Papazēsē, 1976; 2nd edn Athens: Grēgorē, 1983.
  • Yannaras, Christos. “A Note on Political Theology.” Trans. Steven Peter Tsichlis. St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1983): 53–56.
  • Yannaras, Christos. “Human Rights and the Orthodox Church.” In Emmanuel Clapsis, ed., The Orthodox Churches in a Pluralistic World: An Ecumenical Conversation, 83–89. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2004.
  • Yannaras, Christos. “The Church in the Postcommunist World.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 3, no. 1 (2003): 29–46.
  • Yannaras, Christos. The Meaning of Reality: Essays on Existence and Communion, Eros and History. Ed. Gregory Edwards and Herman A. Middleton. Los Angeles: Sebastian Press and Indiktos, 2011.
  • Yannaras, Christos. Kommatokratia. Athens: Patakē, 2002; Hē Aristera hōs Dexia: Hē Dexia hōs pantomima. Athens: Patakē, 2001.
  • Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019. (Bibliography, 116–20.)
  • Louth, Andrew. “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–340.
  • Kalaitzidis, Pantelis. Orthodoxy and Political Theology. Geneva: WCC Publications, 2012.
  • 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.
  • Papanikolaou, Aristotle. The Mystical as Political: Democracy and Non-Radical Orthodoxy. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012.
  • Prevelakis, Nicolas. “Theologies as Alternative Histories: John Romanides and Chrestos Yannaras.” Classics@ 10. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University.
  • Cole, Jonathan. “Remembering Christos Yannaras (1935–2024).” Political Theology Network, 2024.