A Provisional Assessment

Christos Yannaras died in August 2024, and this is written close enough to his death that any verdict is an interim one. What can be said with confidence is that he changed how theology is done in Greece and gave modern Orthodoxy one of its two great accounts of the person. What remains genuinely open is whether the historical thesis on which he staked so much will survive the scholarship, and whether the untranslated four-fifths of his work will ever be read outside Greece.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Provisionality Is Not a Formality

This repository marks recent judgments as provisional as a matter of method, and in Yannaras’s case there are four specific reasons why the marking is substantive rather than pious.

He died in 2024. Less than two years separate his death from the compilation of this collection. The obituaries have been written; the reassessments have not.

Four-fifths of the corpus is untranslated. The autobiographies, the Wittgenstein book, the Climacus study, and the entire forty-volume run of newspaper writing exist only in Greek. Any non-Greek judgment is a judgment on a selection made by translators (see The Corpus and Its Translation).

The secondary literature is thin and young. One monograph in English (Petrà, 2019), one edited volume (Mitralexis, 2018), a handful of articles. The scholarly conversation about him is roughly where the conversation about Lossky was in 1975.

The central dispute is live. The de Régnon-paradigm literature, the Fordham re-readings of Augustine and the West, Plested on Aquinas — this scholarship is contemporary with him and is still being argued (see The Construction of “the West”).

What Is Securely Established

Four things can be said now and are unlikely to be reversed.

1. He changed Greek theology. Yannaras belonged to — and, on most accounts, was the most conspicuous voice of — the generation that pulled Greek theology out of the German-modeled manual tradition of Androutsos and Trembelas: the generation of Vasileios Gontikakis, Panayiotis Nellas, Nikos Nissiotis, John Romanides and John Zizioulas (Norman Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 [2006]: 80–81). Andrew Louth calls him “without doubt, one of the most important living Orthodox thinkers” (Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 329).

2. He produced one of the two major modern Orthodox ontologies of the person. The other is Zizioulas’s. Together they define the field, and no serious treatment of personhood in contemporary Orthodox theology proceeds without them — including the treatments that reject them (see Person and Eros; John Zizioulas).

3. He wrote at least two books that will last. The Freedom of Morality and Person and Eros are the consensus choices — Russell names them as “the two most important” (Russell, 82); Louth calls Person and Eros “perhaps the most important single work of Yannaras’” and “a quite extraordinary book” (Louth, 335, 337). To these many readers would add Variations on the Song of Songs, which is unlike anything else in modern Orthodox writing.

4. He was a public theologian on a scale no other modern Orthodox has matched. Forty years of weekly columns in a national daily, read by a general public, from an explicitly ecclesial standpoint. Whatever one thinks of the positions, the achievement is unique in modern Orthodoxy.

What Is Genuinely Contested

Equally, four things are open, and this guide does not close them.

1. The historical thesis. Whether “the West” as Yannaras describes it is a historical object or a construct is the subject of a live scholarly dispute in which his own translator concedes ground (Russell, 84–85), a leading Orthodox Byzantinist names him as a builder of false dichotomies (Marcus Plested, Orthodox Readings of Aquinas [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012]), and a leading Greek Orthodox theologian treats the whole strand as needing explanation (Pantelis Kalaitzidis, “The Image of the West in Contemporary Greek Theology,” in Orthodox Constructions of the West [New York: Fordham University Press, 2013], 142–160).

2. The patristic credentials of the personalism. Whether the ontology of the person is a development of the Fathers or an importation into them is disputed by Nikolaos Loudovikos and Jean-Claude Larchet, among others, and was gently queried by Rowan Williams as early as 1972 (see The Patristic and Heideggerian Question).

3. The theological completeness of the system. Williams’s objections of 1972 — the thin Christology, the underdeveloped pneumatology — were never, so far as the English record shows, answered in the terms in which they were put. That is a real hole in a theology of relation: the Person in whom relation is realized is the Holy Spirit, and Yannaras says comparatively little about him (Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood,” Sobornost 6 [Winter 1972]: 415–430; see Pneumatology).

4. The political and cultural legacy. Whether a theology that identifies an authentic tradition and traces its loss to foreign importation can be kept clear of nationalism, in a region where that combination has had a bloody history, is a question his defenders and his critics answer differently.

What a Reader Can Take, and What to Hold Loosely

Hold firmly, because they are the Church’s: the person/nature distinction, the essence/energies distinction, the apophatic mode of theology, the Church as eucharistic event. Yannaras did not invent these and did not claim to.

Take seriously as his contribution: the identification of ethos with mode of existence and the consequent refusal of a merely rule-governed morality; the insistence that sin is a failure of relation; the argument that apophaticism is a stance toward truth rather than a technique of negation; the diagnosis of “religionization” as a temptation coeval with the Gospel and no respecter of confessional borders; the reading of eros and the body as the medium and not the obstacle of the personal.

Hold loosely: the causal chain from Augustine to consumerism; the periodization of Western decline; the account of Greek self-identity; the verdicts on the Pēdalion and on the Philokalia’s reception; the political judgments of the columns. These are the opinions of a brilliant and combative man in a particular argument, and they are contested by scholars at least as competent.

The Honest Shape of His Reception

The most reliable single fact about Yannaras’s reception is that his best readers admired and objected in the same breath.

Rowan Williams, 1972: “one of the most important theological studies to come from the Orthodox world in recent years” — and, in the same essay, “it is important not to be hypnotised by sheer novelty into suspending our critical faculties” (Williams, 1972).

Andrew Louth, 2009: the analysis is “too simplistic” — and “what it is seeking to analyse is a set of problems that is undeniable”; and, closing his review: one hopes his name will become known “not only in the English-speaking Orthodox world, where his insights may do something to dispel the dreary puritanism too often found there, but also among English-speaking theologians in general, who have been deprived too long of the inspirational Orthodoxy of Christos Yannaras” (Louth, 333, 339).

Norman Russell, 2006: “Where he is most vulnerable to criticism is his tracing back of all that is wrong in the ‘West’ to St Augustine” — and, of the charge of existentialism, that it “argues from a very narrow idea of Orthodoxy that gives no weight to Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas” (Russell, 84–85).

A theologian who provokes that pattern in three such readers is neither a crank nor a master to be received uncritically. He is a serious and one-sided thinker, and the one-sidedness is not separable from the seriousness. Williams saw this in 1972 and put it better than anyone since: “one might well concede that a measure of onesidedness is perhaps necessary to provoke Western readers to question the presuppositions of their own theology” (Williams, 1972).

The Voices at His Death

The obituaries were warm and, on the whole, unspecific — as obituaries are. Jonathan Cole, one of his translators, judged his influence “destined to grow” as Western civilization faces crisis, and named as his distinct contribution the “opening [of] new horizons on reality” (Cole, “Remembering Christos Yannaras [1935–2024],” Political Theology Network, 2024). The World Council of Churches mourned “a renowned Orthodox theologian” (WCC notice, 2024). The Ecumenical Patriarchate had already honored him, in 2019, with the lay office of Archon Grand Rhetor (OrthoChristian, 26 August 2024).

This guide records these as what they are — tributes, offered at a death, by people and institutions well disposed to him. They are not scholarly assessments, and Cole’s prediction is a prediction.

What the Coming Decades Will Decide

Three things, none of which can be anticipated here.

Whether the historical thesis is separable from the theology. If the causal narrative about Augustine and the schoolmen does not survive, does the ontology of the person survive with it? Yannaras built them together; his readers may have to take them apart.

Whether the Greek corpus travels. If the autobiographies and the columns are translated, the picture of him will change — probably in his favor, since the untranslated material is where his self-criticism and his humor live.

Whether Orthodoxy needs him. The deepest question is not scholarly. It is whether the Church, in a century of individualism, finds in Yannaras’s account of the person a genuine resource or a philosophical detour. That is not a question a reference guide can answer, and it is not one the present moment is far enough from him to answer either.

The Substance Affirmed

With all the qualifications registered, the substance stands and should be said plainly. A layman with no place in the theological faculties of his country, who left a pietist brotherhood in his twenties and never stopped arguing with it, gave modern Greek theology a new language; wrote an ontology of the person that has been the subject of doctoral theses on three continents; recovered for a wide readership the patristic insight that ethics is a mode of existence and not a code; and carried on, for forty years and in public, an argument about how human beings should live together, conducted from within the Church and addressed to everyone. He was one-sided, polemical, and frequently unfair to those he criticized. He was also, by the testimony of readers as different as Rowan Williams and Andrew Louth, among the most serious Christian philosophers Europe produced in his century. Both things are true, and an honest assessment holds them together.

May his memory be eternal.

See Also

References

  • 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.
  • Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
  • Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019.
  • Mitralexis, Sotiris, ed. Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras’ Thought. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2018.
  • Plested, Marcus. Orthodox Readings of Aquinas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 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.
  • Cole, Jonathan. “Remembering Christos Yannaras (1935–2024).” Political Theology Network, 2024.
  • OrthoChristian. “Christos Yannaras, noted professor and theologian, reposes in the Lord.” 26 August 2024.
  • World Council of Churches. “WCC mourns loss, celebrates life of renowned Orthodox theologian Prof. Christos Yannaras.” 2024.