08 — The Critique

Yannaras has been criticized from every direction: by conservative Greek Orthodox for libertinism and agnosticism, by Orthodox patristic scholars for importing Heidegger into the Fathers, by historians for a schematic account of the West, and by Orthodox theologians of a different temper for making anti-Westernism the organizing principle of Orthodox self-understanding. This section names the positions and their proponents and adjudicates nothing.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox academic (both-sides scholarly debate, per METHODOLOGY §4.2)

The Both-Sides Question, Precisely Stated

The discipline here has to be exact, and it is the same discipline the repository applies in God, History, and Dialectic (see METHODOLOGY.md, §4.1–4.2).

What is not a both-sides question. The Orthodox Church confesses that the Filioque is an error, that the papal claims of supremacy and infallibility have not been received, and that the distinction between the divine essence and the uncreated energies is her teaching. This collection confesses these things (see Filioque; Orthodox vs. Catholic; St. Gregory Palamas). Nothing in this section is a concession on those points.

What is a both-sides question. Four things, all of them genuinely open, on which serious and faithful Orthodox divide and on which the Church has adjudicated nothing:

1. Whether Yannaras’s “West” is a historical object or a construct — whether, that is, the grand narrative running from Augustine through the schoolmen to nihilism describes what happened.
2. Whether his ontology of the person is a legitimate development of the Fathers or an importation of Heideggerian and existentialist categories into them.
3. Whether the priority he gives to person over nature can be sustained theologically — the person and nature question, on which Jean-Claude Larchet and Nikolaos Loudovikos have written at length against both Yannaras and Zizioulas.
4. Whether anti-Westernism as a mode of Orthodox self-definition has been theologically fruitful or theologically costly.

The Shape of the Field

It is worth stating at the outset that Yannaras’s critics are not, in the main, hostile outsiders. They include his own translator (Norman Russell, who concedes the Augustine point while defending the rest), his most sympathetic English reviewer (Andrew Louth, who calls the analysis “too simplistic” in the same paragraph in which he defends it), and his earliest serious English reader (Rowan Williams, who in 1972 raised nearly every objection later critics would raise, while calling the work “one of the most important theological studies to come from the Orthodox world in recent years”).

That pattern — admiration and objection from the same pens — is the most reliable single fact about his reception, and readers should hold on to it.

The Two Files

The Construction of “the West” takes the historical thesis: the de Régnon-paradigm critique (Barnes, Ayres) as it bears on Yannaras specifically, Marcus Plested’s Orthodox Readings of Aquinas as a direct counter-case in which Yannaras is named, the Fordham Orthodox Readings of Augustine and Orthodox Constructions of the West volumes, Pantelis Kalaitzidis and Alfons Brüning on the anti-Western strand and human rights, Brandon Gallaher on the problem of Orthodox self-criticism, and the defenses — Yannaras’s own, Louth’s, Russell’s.

The Patristic and Heideggerian Question takes the philosophical thesis: the charge that the personalism is existentialism in patristic dress, Loudovikos’s and Larchet’s arguments, the earlier Greek critique of Panagopoulos and Agouridis, Rowan Williams’s four objections of 1972, the relation to the parallel dispute about Zizioulas, and the replies.

See Also

• Orthodoxy and the West — the thesis under examination
• Person and Eros — the ontology under examination
• The Patristic Question — the same dispute, conducted about Zizioulas
• The De Régnon Paradigm Critique — the historiographical background
• Legacy and Assessment — where this leaves a reader

References

• Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
• Louth, Andrew. “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–340.
• Williams, Rowan (R. D. Williams). “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras.” Sobornost 6 (Winter 1972): 415–430.
• Mitralexis, Sotiris, ed. Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras’ Thought. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2018.