The Patristic and Heideggerian Question

The oldest and most persistent objection to Yannaras is that his ontology of the person is modern existentialism dressed in patristic clothing — that “ekstasis,” “otherness,” “freedom from nature” come from Heidegger and Sartre rather than from the Cappadocians and Maximus. A second and related objection, pressed by Nikolaos Loudovikos and Jean-Claude Larchet, is that the priority of person over nature cannot be sustained theologically. Both sides are set out here; neither is adjudicated.

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

What Is Actually in Dispute

Not in dispute: that the Fathers distinguished ousia from hypostasis; that hypostasis was identified with prosōpon; that St Maximus used tropos hyparxeōs in contrast to logos ousias; that the essence/energies distinction is the Church’s teaching; that Dionysius the Areopagite speaks of erōs ekstatikos.

In dispute: whether the Fathers thereby made the person ontologically prior to the nature; whether they distinguished “person” from “individual” in anything like the modern sense; whether freedom rather than necessity is on their account the ground of being; and whether the vocabulary of ekstasis, transcendence and the constitution of the self by relation is being read out of them or into them.

This is the same dispute, in nearly the same terms, that has been conducted about John Zizioulas, and readers should hold the two together (see The Patristic Question).

1. The Existentialism Charge

Norman Russell records the charge in the form it took in Greek Orthodox circles: that Yannaras taught “an Orthodoxy that is just a disguised form of Western existentialism” — one of three accusations, alongside libertinism and agnosticism, that greeted his early books (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 84).

Russell singles it out as the one with weight: “The accusation that Yannaras has imported Western existentialism into Orthodoxy is more weighty” than the other two. But he declines it, on a specific ground: “again it argues from a very narrow idea of Orthodoxy that gives no weight to Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas” (Russell, 84). The defense is that the philosophical language is a preparation: “the role he assigns to the philosophers is a preparatory one. He values Heidegger for having demonstrated the bankruptcy of the Western philosophical tradition and indicating some very suggestive ways of reading the ancient Greeks. By clearing away the assumptions of the more recent philosophical traditions, he has laid bare the questions to which the Fathers give the answers” (Russell, 83–84).

The Greek critics who pressed the charge hardest in print were J. Panagopoulos and S. Agouridis, in the journal Synaxi in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Their principal target was Zizioulas, but Russell notes that both were “already mentioned in connection with Yannaras,” and the charge is the same in both cases: that these theologians attribute to the Fathers ideas in fact imported from philosophical personalism and existentialism (Russell, 86–87; the exchange is surveyed in Yannis Spiteris, La teologia ortodossa neo-greca [Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992]; see The Patristic Question for the full bibliography).

2. Loudovikos: The Heideggerian Starting Point

The most sustained Greek Orthodox critique of Yannaras’s ontology specifically is Nikolaos Loudovikos‘s. In Hē kleistē pneumatikotēta kai to noēma tou Heautou [A Closed Spirituality and the Meaning of the Self] (Athens: Hellēnika Grammata, 1999), 285–91, he devotes an extended treatment to “the Heideggerian point of departure in Yannaras’ Person and Eros and the identification — in his view — of Heidegger’s terminology with that of the Fathers” (Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], 37 n. 14).

Loudovikos’s diagnostic claim, in a later book, is that the borrowing is structural rather than terminological: “For Heidegger (who follows here the notion of the ‘I’ as developed by Husserl in his phenomenology) it is transcendence that constitutes the self. It identifies Being with the mode of existence as ek-stasē, something which, as we shall see, greatly helped the Orthodox personalists to articulate their own views” (Loudovikos, Hoi tromoi tou prosōpou kai ta basana tou erōta: Kritikoi stochasmoi gia mia metaneōterikē theologikē ontologia [The Terrors of the Person and the Torments of Eros] [Athens and Thessaloniki: Harmos, 2009], 19, quoted in Petrà, 37 n. 14).

Loudovikos has also argued more generally against what he sees as the trap of modern Orthodox personalism — the line running from Berdyaev through Yannaras to Zizioulas — in which the person, cut loose from nature, ends in an ecstatic voluntarism that cannot account for asceticism, for the body, or for growth. His constructive alternative appeals to a dialogical reading of nature in St Maximus, in which nature is not the passive substrate of a free person but is itself dialogically constituted.

Yannaras replied directly, in Hexi philosophikes zōgraphies [Six Philosophical Pictures] (Athens: Ikaros, 2011), 124–34 (Petrà, 37 n. 14). His line of reply, insofar as Petrà reports it, is that his ekstasis is Dionysian before it is Heideggerian: “In Person and Eros the fact of ek-stasē, following the Areopagitical writings, is identified with the existential possibility of eros (and indeed with erōs ek-statikos)” — and that the realism of the argument is secured not by phenomenology but by “the distinctions between nature and person, nature and energies,” which are patristic (Yannaras, Hexi philosophikes zōgraphies, quoted in Petrà, 40 and 71 n. 107).

3. Larchet: Person and Nature

The fullest book-length Orthodox refutation of the personalist school is Jean-Claude Larchet, Personne et nature: La Trinité – Le Christ – L’homme. Contributions aux dialogues interorthodoxe et interchrétien contemporains (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2011). Larchet is a French Orthodox patristic scholar of substantial standing, best known for his work on St Maximus and on the theology of illness and healing; the book’s three parts follow its subtitle — the Trinity, Christ, and the human being — and its final and most polemical section is directed at the personalist theologies of Christos Yannaras and John Zizioulas (Larchet, Personne et nature, Paris: Cerf, 2011; review notice, Nouvelle Revue Théologique, describing the final section as strongly critical of the personalist theories of Yannaras and Zizioulas).

Larchet’s general contention is that the patristic tradition does not subordinate nature to person; that the Fathers’ ousia/hypostasis distinction was framed to state the trinitarian faith against Arians and Sabellians rather than to found an ontology of freedom; and that a theology which makes nature the realm of necessity and the person the realm of freedom will run into difficulties in Christology, since the Christ of Chalcedon has a complete human nature and a natural human will.

Rowan Williams had felt exactly this pressure point in 1972, from a wholly sympathetic standpoint. Reading Yannaras’s soteriological passage, he asked whether the language did not risk “a sort of Monophysite position, in which human, finite nature as such has no real place,” and concluded — carefully — “Clearly this is not at all what Dr. Yannaras means: but we do need a sharper distinction between the Union of the Trinity, the Hypostatic Union, and the Union of Grace” (Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras,” Sobornost 6 [Winter 1972]: 415–430).

4. Williams’s Four Objections, 1972

Because they were made first, and by an admirer, Williams’s objections deserve to stand as a set. From “The Theology of Personhood”:

  1. Style and dependence. A complaint about “the rather annoying repetition of ‘Leitmotif’ phrases in Heideggerese” — “the potentiality for universal ek-static personal relatedness” and its variants — and the broader question “whether it is perhaps a little uncritical,” with the Istina reviewer’s warning about a possible “Hellenic Slavophilism” quoted as “fair comment” (Williams, 1972, citing Istina [1971], 130).
  2. Christology. “He devotes very little space to Christology as such,” and the key soteriological passage “gives the impression . . . of being insufficiently carefully thought out” (Williams, 1972).
  3. Pneumatology. “One misses in the book any real integration of the idea of the Holy Spirit as illuminator, mediator of the knowledge of God (this, interestingly enough, is a far more prominent theme in Lossky’s theology)” (Williams, 1972). This is a substantial charge: a theology of relation without a developed doctrine of the Spirit is a theology missing the Person in whom relation is realized (see Pneumatology).
  4. Fairness to the tradition criticized. That Yannaras uses “analogy” “in a consistently negative and derogatory way”; that he is perhaps not “really fair to the ‘Platonic’ tradition”; and that the sharp East/West sentences sit oddly after sixty pages of philosophical analysis conducted with no confessional markers at all (Williams, 1972).

And the counterweight, from the same essay: the book “is one of the most important theological studies to come from the Orthodox world in recent years”; “It is a profoundly ‘traditional’ theology, obviously rooted in the Fathers and in Byzantine theology”; “Dr. Yannaras’s case can stand well on its own theological feet; Western theologians have much to lose by neglecting it” (Williams, 1972).

Williams’s later verdict, quoted in the publicity for the English translations, was that Yannaras is “perhaps one of the most significant Christian philosophers in Europe” [Disputed: this phrase is widely circulated in publishers' material for the Holy Cross and James Clarke volumes; this guide has not located it in a signed article or review, and it should be treated as a jacket endorsement rather than a documented scholarly judgment.]

5. The Defenses, Stated Strongly

Four lines of reply run through the literature, and they should be put as strongly as the objections.

The Fathers did not repeat their predecessors either. Fidelity to the patristic mind is not the reproduction of patristic sentences. Russell makes this point on Yannaras’s behalf and on Zizioulas’s: theology’s task is to relate dogma to contemporary concerns, as the Fathers did in their own day (Russell, 87).

The question is what the Fathers’ move implies. Yannaras does not claim that St Basil wrote a treatise on relational ontology. He claims that the identification of hypostasis with prosōpon, and the distinction of essence from energies, commit one to an ontology whether or not the Fathers drew the inference.

Nature is not abolished. The standing misreading is that Yannaras denies or devalues nature. He does not: the energies are the energies of the nature, and it is precisely their reality that makes the person’s ekstasis a real disclosure rather than an assertion (Yannaras, To prosōpo kai ho erōs §6, in Petrà, 37–38). Whether the architecture succeeds is another question.

Louth’s reading of the sources. Andrew Louth, who edited the English On the Absence and Unknowability of God, judged after comparing the 1970 thesis with the 1987 book that in Person and Eros “the influence of Heidegger is not, in fact, much greater than in the earlier work. Yannaras explores much of the same territory as did Heidegger . . . but with different guides — the Greek Fathers, not least St Gregory of Nyssa and St Maximos the Confessor.” And what makes Yannaras distinctive “among adherents of what could seem a fashionable ‘personalist existentialism’ is the care and thoroughness with which he explores this notion from a philosophical perspective” (Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 335–36).

6. Yannaras and Zizioulas

A word on the relation between the two, since it is constantly misdescribed.

They belonged to the same generation and were allies on most questions of personhood; Zizioulas has acknowledged Yannaras’s influence, and Yannaras returned the compliment in the most quoted verdict ever passed on Zizioulas, in Orthodoxy and the West, 289 — a judgment Norman Russell endorsed as made “with justification” (Russell, 87; see The Shape of His Influence, where the passage is quoted in full).

Their emphases nonetheless differ, and the differences are real. Russell’s contrast is the standard one: “where Yannaras worked philosophically and Nellas anthropologically, Zizioulas built an ecclesiology with an ontology attached and made it teachable” (Russell, 80–81, 87). Zizioulas grounds personhood in the monarchy of the Father and works it out ecclesially and eschatologically; Yannaras grounds it in apophaticism and the energies and works it out philosophically and culturally. Critics of the school — Loudovikos, Larchet — treat them together, which is fair as far as the person/nature question goes and less fair on nearly everything else.

Where This Leaves a Reader

  1. The historical-patristic challenge is serious and unsettled. It cannot be answered by reasserting the Greek/Latin difference, since that difference is itself under scrutiny (see The Construction of “the West”).
  2. It is narrower than it looks. It concerns the priority of person over nature and the person/individual distinction. It does not touch the essence/energies distinction, which is dogma, nor the ascetic and eucharistic material Yannaras draws from the Fathers.
  3. The most searching objections came from friends. Williams in 1972, Louth in 2009, Russell in 2006 — each states the case against and then declines to convict. That is the actual condition of the question.
  4. A theological thesis is not refuted by a genealogy. Even if Yannaras reached his ontology by way of Heidegger, the question whether it is true, and whether it is consonant with the faith, remains open.

See Also

References

  • Loudovikos, Nikolaos. Hē kleistē pneumatikotēta kai to noēma tou Heautou: Ho mystikismos tēs ischyos kai hē alētheia physeōs kai prosōpou. Athens: Hellēnika Grammata, 1999. (285–91 on Yannaras.)
  • Loudovikos, Nikolaos. Hoi tromoi tou prosōpou kai ta basana tou erōta: Kritikoi stochasmoi gia mia metaneōterikē theologikē ontologia. Athens and Thessaloniki: Harmos, 2009.
  • Larchet, Jean-Claude. Personne et nature: La Trinité – Le Christ – L’homme. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2011.
  • Williams, Rowan (R. D. Williams). “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras.” Sobornost 6 (Winter 1972): 415–430.
  • Yannaras, Christos. Hexi philosophikes zōgraphies. Athens: Ikaros, 2011. (Reply to Loudovikos, 124–34.)
  • Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019.
  • 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.
  • Spiteris, Yannis. La teologia ortodossa neo-greca. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992.