From Makrakomi to Athens

Panayiotis Nellas was born in 1936 at Makrakomi, a small town in Phthiotis in the district of Lamia, and read theology at the University of Athens in the 1950s. Like Vasileios Gontikakis and Christos Yannaras he began within the Zoe brotherhood and broke with it in the early 1960s; like them he was drawn into the circle around the layman Dimitrios Koutroubis, out of which came what Greek writers call “the theology of the ’60s.” This file sets out the origins and the formation, with the acknowledgement that the early years are thinly documented.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

Birth and Origins

Nellas was born in 1936 at Makrakomi, a town in the Phthiotis prefecture of central Greece, in the district of Lamia (Armos Publications, author page for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας; Pemptousia, author page for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας). Beyond the place and the year, the family background and the childhood are essentially undocumented in the accessible literature. He would have been four years old at the Italian invasion of October 1940 and a schoolboy through the German occupation and the civil war — the same Greek childhood as his exact contemporaries Gontikakis (b. 1936) and, a year older, Yannaras (b. 1935), and one year younger than Metropolitan John Zizioulas (b. 1931) (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 81). Nothing in the sources allows a fuller picture than that, and this file will not construct one.

Theological Studies at Athens

He took his degree in theology at the University of Athens and specialised in patristics (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 9–14; Armos, author page). The Athens theological faculty of the 1950s was the older and the more conservative of the two Greek schools — the Thessaloniki faculty, founded in 1942, being the more adventurous — and its dominant idiom was still, in the standard scholarly account, a dogmatics organised on Western lines: the manuals of Christos Androutsos and Panayiotis Trembelas, in which patristic texts served as testimonies to a system that had not itself been derived from the Fathers (Russell 2006, 78–80, on the Greek “arid scholasticism” and the Androutsos–Trembelas manual tradition; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, T&T Clark, 2019, on the state of Greek academic theology before the 1960s).

This matters for reading Nellas, because the argument he would eventually make in Zōon theoumenon — that the Fathers are to be approached “from within the Church and using faith as our basic method,” not as ancient documents to be quarried (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987, 24; quoted and glossed in Russell 2006, 82) — is a deliberate refusal of the method under which he had been trained. His generation’s characteristic gesture was to go behind the manual to the source, and Nellas made it the organising principle of a publishing programme as well as of a book (see Epi tas Pigas).

The Zoe Brotherhood and the Break

Nellas began his church life within Zoe (Ζωή), the lay brotherhood of theologians that dominated organised Greek religious life for much of the twentieth century. Norman Russell records the fact plainly: of the four theologians he treats as the leading figures of the new Greek theology, “Gontikakis, Nellas, and Yannaras began as members of Zoe but broke with it in the early 1960s” (Russell 2006, 89 n. 11, citing Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 2006, 217–250 for the history of the movement).

Zoe was a genuine force for piety, catechesis and scriptural literacy, and it had formed a generation. It was also, in the judgement of those who left it, moralising in temper, Western in its devotional models, and organised on a quasi-monastic discipline for laymen that its critics came to regard as an imported and unhealthy form. The breach of the early 1960s was one of the constitutive events of modern Greek theology, and it is the reason the men of that generation write with the particular energy of people who have left something. This collection reports the break as the historical fact it is, without adjudicating the merits of Zoe, which remain contested in Greek writing to this day [Disputed: the assessment of the Zoe movement. Yannaras's *Orthodoxy and the West* (2006), 217–250, gives the sharply critical account of Zoe from within the generation that left it; defenders of the brotherhood regard that account as polemical and stress Zoe's catechetical and scriptural achievement. This collection reports the departure, which is not in dispute, and does not adjudicate the evaluation, which is.]

Dimitrios Koutroubis and the “Theology of the ’60s”

The decisive influence on the formation of the generation was not a professor but a layman without a chair: Dimitrios Koutroubis (1921–1983), whose house outside Athens became, in Russell’s description, “a meeting place for many seekers after spiritual truth” and whose visitors saw him as a “lay staretz” communicating a real experience of the mystical and ascetic tradition of the Greek Fathers (Russell 2006, 80–81, drawing on Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 2006, 291–297). Yannaras, who was one of his disciples, credits Koutroubis with writing “the earliest articles in Greece about the theology of St Gregory Palamas and St Nicolas Kabasilas,” with translating “for the first time the texts of the great theologians of the Russian diaspora,” and — “above all” — with having “gathered around himself a new generation of theologians and trained them by means of the discreet humility of his Socratic method” (Yannaras, quoted in Russell 2006, 80–81) [Corrected: some online summaries transfer these achievements — the first Greek articles on Palamas and Cabasilas, the first translations of the Russian diaspora theologians — to Nellas. In Russell's text they are Yannaras's tribute to Koutroubis, not to Nellas. Nellas was a beneficiary of that work, not its author.]

Bishop Kallistos likewise records that Nellas was deeply influenced by Koutroubis (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas 1987). Two things reached Nellas through that circle and are visible on every page he wrote. The first is Palamas, and with him the fourteenth century as a living theological epoch rather than a decadent afterword to the patristic age (see St. Gregory Palamas). The second is the Russian emigration — Florovsky’s call for a return to the Fathers, Lossky’s mystical theology, and the Paris school’s insistence that dogma is the description of an experience — which reached Greece in the 1960s in translation and reoriented a whole generation (Russell 2006, 79–81; see Georges Florovsky and Vladimir Lossky).

Russell’s placing of Nellas within the resulting group is worth stating exactly, because it is the standard scholarly account: “This new approach to the Greek Fathers bore fruit in the younger generation of Greek theologians, the best known of whom are Vasileios Gontikakis, Panayiotis Nellas, Christos Yannaras, and John Zizioulas. All four studied abroad, coming under the direct influence of the Russian diaspora theologians and the new style of Western patristic scholarship” (Russell 2006, 80–81). Nellas is thus one of four, and within the four he is the one who worked anthropologically — as Zizioulas worked systematically and Yannaras philosophically (see The Shape of His Influence, where the same fourfold placing is given from Zizioulas’s side).

What Cannot Be Said

Three things about the early years are simply not available in the sources this collection could reach, and are therefore left blank rather than filled:

The years of his degree. No source consulted gives the years of matriculation and graduation at Athens. The degree is securely attested; the dates are not.
His teachers at Athens. Whether any member of the Athens faculty shaped him is undocumented; the formative influence recorded in the sources is Koutroubis, who was not a member of any faculty.
The circumstances of his break with Zoe. That he broke, and roughly when, is attested. What precipitated it in his particular case is not.

The reader who wants more will have to go to Spiteris’s Italian monograph, which contains the fullest published assessment (Spiteris, La teologia ortodossa neo-greca, Bologna, 1992, 255–277), and to the Greek memorial literature that gathered around him after 1986.

References

Kallistos of Diokleia (Ware), Bishop. Foreword to Panayiotis Nellas, Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person, 9–14. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987.
Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell, with a foreword by Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia. Contemporary Greek Theologians 5. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987.
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
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. (On Zoe, 217–250; on Koutroubis, 291–297; on Nellas, 297–300.)
Spiteris, Yannis. La teologia ortodossa neo-greca. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992. (Nellas at 255–277.)
Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark, 2019.
Armos Publications (Εκδόσεις Ἁρμός), author page for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας, armosbooks.gr (accessed 2026).
Pemptousia, author page for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας, pemptousia.gr (accessed 2026).