The Construction of “the West”

Yannaras’s account of Western Christendom rests on a contrast — a person-first East against an essence-first, rationalist West — that a generation of scholarship has argued is a nineteenth-century construction rather than a patristic datum. Marcus Plested names him directly as a builder of false dichotomies; Pantelis Kalaitzidis treats the anti-Western strand of modern Greek theology as a phenomenon needing explanation; Norman Russell, his own translator, concedes the point about Augustine. This file names the positions and adjudicates nothing.

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

What Is at Issue

Not the Filioque, not the papal claims, not the essence/energies distinction — on those the Orthodox Church has spoken and this collection confesses her teaching. What is at issue is a historical-interpretive thesis: that Eastern and Western Christendom stand in a systematic, civilization-defining opposition of ontologies, traceable to Augustine, consolidated by the schoolmen, and issuing in modern nihilism and consumerism. That is the claim of The Historical Thesis, and it is what the scholarship gathered here contests.

1. The De Régnon Paradigm

The scaffolding of the whole East/West contrast is the formula of the nineteenth-century French Jesuit Théodore de Régnon (1831–1893), in his Études de théologie positive sur la Sainte Trinité (4 vols., Paris: Retaux, 1892–1898): that the Greeks begin from the three persons and proceed to the one essence, while the Latins begin from the one essence and proceed to the three persons.

Michel René Barnes, in “De Régnon Reconsidered,” Augustinian Studies 26 (1995): 51–79, argued that this contrast had been detached from its original careful context and hardened into a paradigm the patristic sources do not support. Lewis Ayres, in Nicaea and Its Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) and Augustine and the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), developed the point into a full re-reading in which the pro-Nicene theologians East and West share a common grammar, and Augustine is far closer to the Greek pro-Nicenes than the paradigm allows. The repository sets this out at length in The De Régnon Paradigm Critique.

The application to Yannaras is made explicitly, and by his own translator. Norman Russell: “Where he is most vulnerable to criticism is his tracing back of all that is wrong in the ‘West’ to St Augustine. Here he has taken his cue from Vladimir Lossky, John Romanides and John Meyendorff, who present polemical assessments of Augustine that (at least in the case of Lossky and Meyendorff) owe more than a little to the work of the French Jesuit, Théodore de Regnon. A first-hand study of Augustine by Orthodox scholars would do much to dispel the caricature that often informs their writings” (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 84–85).

The force of the objection, stated plainly: if the sharp East/West contrast is itself a modern scholarly artifact, then a theology built on it is standing on ground that has shifted since it was built. Russell is unusually candid about how far Yannaras builds on it — in Yannaras’s writings “Tertullian, Ambrose and Augustine are seen to provide the basis of the secularized ‘religionization’ of the Christian life which Yannaras regards as the source of all Western ills” (Russell, 83).

2. Marcus Plested: Aquinas Read in Byzantium

The most direct counter-case is Marcus Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and it is directed at Yannaras by name. Plested identifies Yannaras — together with Stelios Ramfos — as among the chief modern builders of a narrow dichotomy between a Thomist West and a Palamite East (Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas, 2012).

Plested’s historical case cuts at exactly the point where Yannaras’s narrative begins. Demetrios Kydones’s 1354 translation of the Summa contra Gentiles, which for Yannaras opens the era of Greek self-alienation, is for Plested the beginning of a reception in which Aquinas “was received with astonishing enthusiasm across the Byzantine theological spectrum” — read, translated, cited and in part appropriated, including in the Palamite century. Byzantine theologians who criticized particular Thomistic positions — Plested instances St Mark of Ephesus and Neilos Kabasilas — did not oppose Thomas’s method to that of the Greek Fathers; St Mark, he notes, “was as fond of syllogistic reasoning as any Thomist.” Plested’s conclusion is that the wall between “two theologies” is far more porous than the grand narrative allows, and that scholarship should reject the dichotomy in favor of a properly catholic construal of Orthodoxy (Plested, 2012; see St. Mark of Ephesus).

This is a strong claim and it is contested in its turn; what is not in doubt is that it is made by a competent Orthodox Byzantinist on the basis of the manuscript evidence, and that it is aimed at Yannaras.

3. The Fordham Volumes

Two edited volumes from the Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham gather the Orthodox re-reading:

George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Readings of Augustine (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), in which Orthodox scholars, drawing on Barnes and Ayres, argue that the polemical Orthodox picture of Augustine rests substantially on caricature and on the retrojection of later polemics (see St. Augustine of Hippo).
George E. Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Constructions of the West (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), whose very title states the thesis: that “the West” in modern Orthodox discourse is substantially a construction serving Orthodox self-definition.

Yannaras is a principal subject of the second volume, in Kalaitzidis’s essay.

4. Kalaitzidis: Greekness and Anti-Westernism

Pantelis Kalaitzidis, director of the Volos Academy for Theological Studies, wrote his Thessaloniki doctoral dissertation on precisely this subject: “Hellēnikotēta kai Antidytikismos stē ’Theologia tou ‘60’” [Greekness and Anti-Westernism in the “Theology of the ’60s”] (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2008). The English statement of his case is “The Image of the West in Contemporary Greek Theology,” in Demacopoulos and Papanikolaou, eds., Orthodox Constructions of the West, 142–160.

His argument has three parts. Descriptively, the “West” of the Greek theological generation of the 1960s is an image constructed for the purposes of Greek theological self-definition rather than a historical object arrived at by study. Genealogically, the construction has roots in nineteenth-century Russian Slavophilism and in the Greek search for identity after independence, not only in patristic sources. Practically, the anti-Western and anti-colonial discourse in Greece and other Orthodox countries has functioned as an obstacle to the theological reception of political liberalism, democracy and human rights, and Kalaitzidis calls for critical Orthodox self-reflection on why that reception has proved so difficult (Kalaitzidis, “The Image of the West,” 2013; and Orthodoxy and Political Theology [Geneva: WCC Publications, 2012]).

A related argument on the human-rights front is made by Alfons Brüning, “‘Freedom’ vs. ‘Morality’ — On Orthodox Anti-Westernism and Human Rights,” in A. Brüning and E. van der Zweerde, eds., Orthodox Christianity and Human Rights (Leuven, Paris and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2012), 125–152.

For the wider mapping of modern Orthodox theology within which this strand sits, see Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New (London: T&T Clark, 2019), which surveys the neo-patristic movement and the Greek theological generation of the 1960s within it.

5. Gallaher: The Problem of Orthodox Self-Criticism

Brandon Gallaher‘s chapter “Orthodoxy and the West — The Problem of Orthodox Self-Criticism in Christos Yannaras,” in Sotiris Mitralexis, ed., Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras’ Thought (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2018), 206–225, takes up the very disclaimer on which Yannaras’s defenders rely — his insistence that “my critical stance towards the West is self-criticism” — and makes it the problem rather than the solution. This guide has been unable to obtain the full text of Gallaher’s chapter and reports its title, placement and subject rather than summarizing an argument it has not read. Readers pursuing the question should go to the chapter itself; it is the single most focused treatment of the self-criticism question in English.

That the volume containing it is a sympathetic volume — edited by a scholar of Yannaras, containing Rowan Williams’s 1972 essay and contributions by Andreas Andreopoulos, Isidoros Katsos, Pui Him Ip and Dionysios Skliris — is itself worth noting. The criticism comes from inside the conversation.

6. The Defenses

Yannaras’s own. The preface to the English Orthodoxy and the West is his answer, and it is a serious one: “I am not attacking an external Western adversary. As a modern Greek, I myself embody both the thirst for what is ‘right’ and the reality of what is ‘wrong’ . . . My critical stance towards the West is self-criticism; it refers to my own wholly Western mode of life. I am a Western person searching for answers to the problems tormenting Western people today” (Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, trans. Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell [Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006], viii–ix). And his late work generalizes the critique so far beyond geography that “the West” becomes, in Basilio Petrà’s summary, “a negative category of a moral type that serves to designate the permanent temptation of the naturally religious human being” — a temptation to which Orthodoxy has succumbed too, in the form he calls “Orthodoxism” (Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 88, 90–91; see Religionization and the Ecclesial Event).

Louth. Andrew Louth grants the charge and declines the conclusion: “even if the analysis is too simplistic, what it is seeking to analyse is a set of problems that is undeniable” — the environmental crisis, the assimilation of politics to business models, the gulf between society and state, consumption, loneliness, “the prevailing loveless sexuality.” “There is no question that we need answers to these issues, nor that, for whatever reason, it is this that Western civilization has created for itself and spawns throughout the world” (Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 332–33). Louth also insists, against a purely negative reading of the book, that “what is most important about this book . . . is not so much the documentation of distortion, as its account of the springs from which a renewed theology has emerged” (Louth, 334).

Russell. Norman Russell concedes Augustine and defends the rest: the complaint “that Yannaras presents too schematic an opposition between ‘Western’ rationalism and ‘Eastern’ personalism” has “some truth in this but it fails to do justice to the subtlety of his position,” and “Yannaras is fully aware that he cannot escape his intellectual environment” (Russell, 84).

The measured middle. Not everyone who resists the de Régnon paradigm denies that there is a real East/West divergence. David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), argues for a genuine and consequential divergence located carefully in the differing receptions of the Aristotelian energeia — a disciplined version of the same intuition, conducted on falsifiable ground. Reading Bradshaw beside Yannaras shows what the thesis looks like when it is narrowed to what the evidence will carry (see The De Régnon Paradigm Critique).

Where This Leaves a Reader

Four things can be said without adjudicating.

The historical challenge is serious and unresolved. No competent scholar now writes as though the person-first-East / essence-first-West contrast were simply the state of the question.
The challenge is narrower than it looks. It bears on Yannaras’s history. It does not by itself touch his account of ethos and morality, his apophaticism, or his critique of religionization, each of which rests on different evidence.
The methodological point cuts both ways. If Yannaras is convicted of reading a modern schema into the past, the same de Régnon literature reaches Lossky, Romanides and much of the tradition of critique itself; and Kalaitzidis’s own genealogy of “Greekness” is a thesis about a thesis, and is contestable in its turn.
A theological insight is not refuted by a historical finding. Even if the causal chain from Augustine to consumerism cannot be sustained, the question whether individualism is a false anthropology, and whether the Church’s mode of existence is its remedy, remains open on its own merits.

References

de Régnon, Théodore. Études de théologie positive sur la Sainte Trinité. 4 vols. Paris: Retaux, 1892–1898.
Barnes, Michel René. “De Régnon Reconsidered.” Augustinian Studies 26 (1995): 51–79.
Ayres, Lewis. Nicaea and Its Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004; Augustine and the Trinity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Readings of Augustine. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008.
Demacopoulos, George E., and Aristotle Papanikolaou, eds. Orthodox Constructions of the West. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.
Kalaitzidis, Pantelis. “The Image of the West in Contemporary Greek Theology.” In 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.
Kalaitzidis, Pantelis. Orthodoxy and Political Theology. Geneva: WCC Publications, 2012.
Brüning, Alfons. “‘Freedom’ vs. ‘Morality’ — On Orthodox Anti-Westernism and Human Rights.” In A. Brüning and E. van der Zweerde, eds., Orthodox Christianity and Human Rights, 125–152. Leuven, Paris and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2012.
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark, 2019.
Gallaher, Brandon. “Orthodoxy and the West — The Problem of Orthodox Self-Criticism in Christos Yannaras.” In Sotiris Mitralexis, ed., Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras’ Thought, 206–225. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2018.
Bradshaw, David. Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
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.
Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019.
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.