The Corpus and Its Translation

Yannaras published more than fifty books, almost all of them in Greek. About a dozen exist in English, nearly all translated by Norman Russell, and they are not a representative dozen: the philosophy and the theology travelled, the four decades of political and cultural writing did not. This file is a practical guide to what exists, in what order, and where the gaps are.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Shape of the Corpus

Basilio Petrà’s bibliography — the fullest available in English — divides Yannaras’s Greek output into five categories, and the division tells you a great deal about him (Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell [Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019], bibliography, 113–21):

Philosophical works — To prosōpo kai ho erōs, To rhēto kai to arrhēto, Ontologia tēs schesēs, To ainigma tou kakou, Hexi philosophikes zōgraphies.
“Artefacts” (technēmata) — the lyrical and autobiographical books: Peina kai dipsa [Hunger and Thirst], Hē kokkinē plateia kai ho theios Arthouros, Kataphygion ideōn, Scholio sto Asma Asmatōn, Ta kath’ eauton, Aoristē Hellada.
Theological works — Timioi me tēn Orthodoxia, Hē eleutheria tou ēthous, Hē metaphysikē tou sōmatos, Hē apologētikē sta horia tēs orthodoxou theologias, Alētheia kai henotēta tēs Ekklēsias, Alphabētari tēs pistēs, Orthodoxia kai Dysē stē neōterē Hellada, Enantia stē thrēskeia, Hē Eurōpē gennēthēke apo to ‘Schisma’.
Newspaper writings (chronographiai) — some forty annual or biennial volumes from 1963 to 2016.
Liturgical texts — the anonymously published proposals for new rites of marriage (1997), burial (2008) and baptism (2012), and for a contemporary rendering of the eucharistic anaphora (2012).

Andrew Louth, writing in 2009, put the count at “about thirty books” then in print; the total across a career of some fifty-five years is usually given as more than fifty (Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 [2009]: 330; the “more than fifty books” figure is the one used in the 2024 obituaries).

The Development, in Order

The sequence of the major works, with the first Greek edition and the English translation where one exists:

Greek original	English
Hē theologia tēs apousias kai tēs agnōsias tou Theou (Athens, 1967); 2nd rev. edn as Heidegger kai Areopagitēs (Athens: Domos, late 1980s)	On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite, trans. Haralambos Ventis, ed. Andrew Louth (London: T&T Clark, 2005)
To ontologikon periechomenon tēs theologikēs ennoias tou prosōpou (Athens, 1970) — the doctoral thesis	—
Hē eleutheria tou ēthous (Athens: Athēna, 1970; 2nd rev. edn Grēgorē, 1979; 3rd rev. edn 2002)	The Freedom of Morality, trans. Elizabeth Briere (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), from the 1979 edition
Hē metaphysikē tou sōmatos: Spoudē ston Iōannē tēs Klimakos (Athens: Dōdōnē, 1971)	—
Orthodoxia kai Dysē: Hē theologia stēn Hellada sēmera (Athens: Athēna, 1972)	partly: “Orthodoxy and the West,” trans. Theodore Stylianopoulos, Eastern Churches Review 3, no. 3 (1971): 286–300; “Theology in Present-Day Greece,” trans. Angeline Bouchard, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 16 (1972): 195–214
Alētheia kai henotēta tēs Ekklēsias (Athens: Grēgorē, 1977)	—
Alphabētari tēs pistēs (Athens: Domos, 1983)	Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology, trans. Keith Schram (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991)
To prosōpo kai ho erōs (Athens: Domos, 1987)	Person and Eros, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007)
Kataphygion ideōn (Athens: Domos, 1987)	—
Scholio sto Asma Asmatōn (Athens: Domos, 1990)	Variations on the Song of Songs, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2005)
Orthodoxia kai Dysē stē neōterē Hellada (Athens: Domos, 1992)	Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age, trans. Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006)
Meta-neōterikē meta-physikē (Athens: Domos, 1993)	Postmodern Metaphysics, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press) `[Disputed: 2004 per Petrà's bibliography; 2005 per Louth's review article]`
Ta kath’ eauton (Athens: Ikaros, 1995)	—
To rhēto kai to arrhēto (Athens: Ikaros, 1999)	—
Ontologia tēs schesēs (Athens: Ikaros, 2004)	Relational Ontology, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2011)
Enantia stē thrēskeia (Athens: Ikaros, 2006)	Against Religion: The Alienation of the Ecclesial Event, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2013)
To ainigma tou kakou (Athens: Ikaros, 2008)	The Enigma of Evil, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2012)
Hexi philosophikes zōgraphies (Athens: Ikaros, 2011)	—
Hē Eurōpē gennēthēke apo to ‘Schisma’ (Athens: Ikaros, 2015)	—

(Bibliographical data throughout from Petrà, 113–21, checked against the publishers’ listings.)

Two further English volumes stand outside the sequence:

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) — a collection of shorter pieces, including “A Note on Political Theology,” “Human Rights and the Orthodox Church,” “The Church in the Postcommunist World,” and Andrew Louth’s translation of the proposed marriage rite.
Metaphysics as a Personal Adventure: Christos Yannaras in Conversation with Norman Russell, Orthodox Christian Profiles 9 (Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017) — an extended interview, and the best single point of entry to the man.

The Story of the Reception in English

Louth tells the story of the Anglophone reception with some rue, and it is worth having, because it explains why a thinker of this scale was for so long unknown outside Greece.

Phase one: the reviewers. Yannaras’s early Greek works were noticed in England, but only in a small circle — the short-lived Eastern Churches Review and, to a lesser extent, Sobornost, whose reviewers “belonged to the small circle in England who knew modern Greek.” “The attitude to Yannaras found in these reviews was welcoming, but cautious about his dependence on the existentialism of Heidegger, and (sometimes, not by any means always!) critical of what was seen as his strident anti-Westernism.” The Eastern Churches Review folded in 1978 (Louth, 331–32).

Phase two: Contemporary Greek Theologians. In the mid-1980s St Vladimir’s Seminary Press launched a series presenting Greek theologians in English — Nellas, Mantzaridis, Yannaras (The Freedom of Morality), Zizioulas, and Archimandrite Vasileios. “Apart from Zizioulas’ Being as Communion, these works were little noticed outside Orthodox and philorthodox circles and after a few years the series ceased” (Louth, 332).

Phase three: Holy Cross and Norman Russell. Between 2004 and 2013 Holy Cross Orthodox Press published seven volumes in Russell’s translations, transforming the situation: as Louth wrote in 2009, they “make Yannaras more accessible in English than in any other language, save his original Greek” (Louth, 330). Louth’s own verdict on the translator: “Norman Russell has put the English-speaking world deeply in debt with his translation of these four important works by Yannaras” (Louth, 339).

Louth’s diagnosis of the earlier neglect deserves quoting, because it is unusually frank about both sides: these works “manifested a confidence in the continuing power of patristic and Orthodox theology that sometimes expressed itself in an almost casual contempt (not, I think, too strong a word) for Western theology. Feeling such a lack of understanding of their own position, perhaps Western theologians responded in kind” (Louth, 332).

The Gap

The gap in the English Yannaras is not random. What is translated is the philosophy and the theology. What is not translated is nearly everything else: the two autobiographies (Kataphygion ideōn, Ta kath’ eauton), the study of John Climacus, Truth and Unity of the Church, the Wittgenstein book, and the entire forty-volume run of newspaper writing on Greek politics, culture, education and economics.

This matters for the assessment of him in two ways. It means that the English-language debate about Yannaras has been conducted largely on the basis of the works most likely to provoke it — Orthodoxy and the West above all — while the material that would most complicate the caricature, the autobiographies and the columns, remains inaccessible. And it means that the largest single body of modern Orthodox public theology is effectively invisible to non-Greek readers (see The Columnist and Political Theology).

He was better served in French and Italian for a long time; his most important work, Person and Eros, was available in German long before it was available in English; and single works exist in Finnish and Russian (Louth, 330). Basilio Petrà, his Italian interpreter, has translated several of the major works into Italian himself.

The Secondary Literature

Short and manageable, which is itself a sign of how recent the serious study of him is:

Basilio Petrà, Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology, trans. Norman Russell (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019) — the only survey of the development of his thought as a whole. Aristotle Papanikolaou’s endorsement calls it “a remarkably clear analysis both of the chronological development and of the coherence of Yannaras’s wide-ranging thought.”
Sotiris Mitralexis, ed., Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras’ Thought (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2018), xviii + 259 pp. — the principal collection of essays, including Rowan Williams’s 1972 study and Brandon Gallaher’s critical chapter.
Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras,” Sobornost 6 (Winter 1972): 415–430 — still, after more than fifty years, one of the best introductions.
Andrew Louth, “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation,” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (2009): 329–340; and “The enduring significance of Christos Yannaras: some further works in translation,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 16, no. 1 (2016).
Norman Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92 — situates him beside Zizioulas and the whole Greek generation.
Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present (London: SPCK, 2015) — the chapter on Greek lay theologians treats Yannaras alongside Philip Sherrard, Dimitris Koutroubis and Stelios Ramfos.
Evaggelia Grigoropoulou, “The Early Development of the Thought of Christos Yannaras” (PhD thesis, University of Durham, 2008) — the standard study of the formative years, on which Louth’s 2009 account leans (Louth, 339 n. 5).
For the critical literature, see Section 08.

References

Petrà, Basilio. Christos Yannaras: The Apophatic Horizon of Ontology. Trans. Norman Russell. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2019. (Bibliography, 113–21.)
Louth, Andrew. “Some Recent Works by Christos Yannaras in English Translation.” Modern Theology 25, no. 2 (April 2009): 329–340.
Louth, Andrew. “The enduring significance of Christos Yannaras: some further works in translation.” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 16, no. 1 (2016).
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015.
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.
Mitralexis, Sotiris, ed. Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras’ Thought. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2018.
Grigoropoulou, Evaggelia. “The Early Development of the Thought of Christos Yannaras.” PhD thesis, University of Durham, 2008.
Yannaras, Christos, and Norman Russell. Metaphysics as a Personal Adventure: Christos Yannaras in Conversation with Norman Russell. Orthodox Christian Profiles 9. Yonkers, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2017.