Paris, the Arsakeio, and an Early Death

Nellas spent two postgraduate years in France, at Lille and Paris, and six months at Rome, studying under Jean Daniélou and working on the theological foundations of monastic life under the direction of Paul Evdokimov. In 1968 he returned to Athens, took up a post teaching religious studies at the Arsakeio school, and launched the patristic series Epi tas Pigas. He took his Athens doctorate in 1975, founded the journal Synaxi in 1982, and died of heart failure on 6 April 1986, aged fifty.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Years Abroad

After his Athens degree Nellas went west. Bishop Kallistos gives the itinerary: “two years on postgraduate work in France, at Lille and Paris, followed by six months at Rome” (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 9–14). The Greek notices add the funding and the teachers: he studied in Paris on a scholarship from the Roman Catholic Church, and worked in proximity to Jean Daniélou, the Jesuit patrologist and one of the founders of the Sources Chrétiennes series (Armos Publications, author page for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας; Pemptousia, author page for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας).

Two details of these years are load-bearing for everything Nellas afterwards did.

Daniélou and Gregory of Nyssa. Daniélou’s life’s work was the recovery of Gregory of Nyssa — his Platonisme et théologie mystique (1944) is the study that put Nyssen’s doctrine of unending progress into God, epektasis, at the centre of twentieth-century patristics — and the Sources Chrétiennes series he co-founded with Henri de Lubac was the model of what a modern patristic edition could be. Nellas’s two most characteristic debts, the Nyssen anthropology and the conviction that the Church needs its Fathers in reliable editions with translations, both point back to this Paris period (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 89 n. 16, noting explicitly that Epi tas Pigas was founded “on the model of the French Sources chrétiennes”; see St. Gregory of Nyssa).

Evdokimov and monastic theology. Under the direction of Paul Evdokimov, the Russian émigré lay theologian of the Paris school, Nellas wrote a study titled Les fondements théologiques de la vie monastique [“The Theological Foundations of Monastic Life”] (Armos Publications, author page; Pemptousia, author page) [Disputed: the status and publication of this work. The Greek publishers' notices describe it as written under Evdokimov's guidance during the Paris years; whether it was a formal licence or *diplôme* thesis, and whether it was ever published, could not be established from the sources consulted. It is reported here as attested and not as a book in print.] The connection is worth noting for its own sake: Evdokimov was, like Nellas, a layman who did his theology outside the clerical state and who wrote on marriage, the world, and the sanctification of ordinary life. Nellas’s later insistence that the “garments of skin” — marriage, labour, law, economy — are a field of transformation rather than a zone to be escaped stands in a recognisable relation to his director’s concerns (see Paul Evdokimov and Consequence and Provision).

The six months at Rome are attested but otherwise undocumented; no source consulted says what he did there.

The Schoolmaster

In 1968 Nellas returned to Athens and was appointed to the Arsakeio — the historic school of the Philekpaideutiki Etaireia, one of the best-known secondary establishments in Greece (Armos, author page; Pemptousia, author page). Bishop Kallistos’s summary of his working life is the plainest statement available and should be quoted rather than paraphrased: “From 1968 until his death he taught religious studies at a high school in Athens” (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas 1987).

This is the single most important corrective to any inflated account of Nellas. He never held a university chair. Where Zizioulas taught at Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Thessaloniki, and Yannaras held a professorship at the Panteion University in Athens (Russell 2006, 82), Nellas taught schoolchildren for the whole of his eighteen-year working life and did his theology, his editing and his publishing alongside it. Descriptions of him as a professor or as an academic theologian in the institutional sense are inaccurate; he was a doctor of the University of Athens who taught in a gymnasion.

That fact colours the corpus. It explains the size of it — one major book, one monograph, articles, editions — and it explains something of the temper: a body of work made by a man who had no departmental incentive to produce it, and who chose, when he had time to spend, to spend it on a journal and a series that would carry other people’s writing rather than on his own next book.

The Doctorate of 1975

In 1975 Nellas was made a doctor of the University of Athens with a dissertation on the doctrine of justification in Nicholas Cabasilas, published as Ἡ περὶ δικαιώσεως διδασκαλία Νικολάου τοῦ Καβάσιλα: Συμβολὴ εἰς τὴν ὀρθόδοξον σωτηριολογίαν [“The Teaching of Nicholas Cabasilas on Justification: A Contribution to Orthodox Soteriology”] (Piraeus, 1975) (Armos, author page; Pemptousia, author page; Greek booksellers’ bibliographic notices for the title, including booksite.gr and philokalia.gr). The work has been reissued in Greece and remains in print (Indiktos edition, per Greek booksellers’ listings).

He was thirty-nine. The doctorate came seven years after his appointment to the Arsakeio and seven years after he had already begun editing Cabasilas’s texts for Epi tas Pigas; it is the formalisation of a labour long under way rather than the start of one (see The Doctrine of Justification).

The Two Foundations

The public work of Nellas’s life consists in two institutions, treated at length in Section 02:

Epi tas Pigas (Ἐπὶ τὰς πηγάς, “To the Sources”), launched in 1968, a series of patristic texts in the original with modern Greek translation and scholarly apparatus, expressly modelled on Sources Chrétiennes (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas 1987: “In 1968 Panayiotis launched the series Epi tas Pigas, ‘To the Sources,’ a Greek equivalent to the French collection Sources chrétiennes”; Russell 2006, 89 n. 16).
Synaxi (Σύναξη), founded in 1982, a quarterly journal subtitled “a study in Orthodoxy,” of which he was founder and editor and which has appeared without interruption ever since (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas 1987, noting that it “appeared quarterly, with some 112 pages in each number”; Synaxi, “The Identity of Synaxi,” synaxi.gr).

Death, 6 April 1986

Nellas died on 6 April 1986, of heart failure, at the age of fifty. Bishop Kallistos, writing within a year of the event, records that “his death from heart failure, at the early age of fifty, was altogether unexpected” (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas 1987). The English translation of Zōon theoumenon was then in preparation; it appeared in 1987 as Deification in Christ, and its foreword accordingly reads as an obituary as well as an introduction (see Zōon Theoumenon and Its English Life).

He was survived by the two institutions. Synaxi was four years old and had published thirteen or fourteen numbers; it passed to other editors and continues (see The Journal Synaxi). Within a decade of his death the journal he had founded would become the venue in which the Greek critical debate over Zizioulas’s personalism was conducted — Panagopoulos in Synaxi 13–14 (1985), Agouridis in Synaxi 33 (1990), Zizioulas’s own reply in Synaxi 37 (1991) — an outcome he did not live to see but for which he had built the room (Panagopoulos, Synaxi 13 [1985]: 63–79 and 14: 34–47; Agouridis, Synaxi 33 [1990]: 67–78; Zizioulas, Synaxi 37 [1991]: 11–36; the exchange summarised in Russell 2006, 86–87; see The Patristic Question).

What the Sources Do Not Give

No source consulted for this collection records whether Nellas married or had children, where he is buried, or what the immediate circumstances of his death were beyond the cause and the date. There is no published biography. These are ordinary facts about an ordinary modern life that happen not to have been written down in any accessible place, and this file leaves them unstated rather than guessing at them.

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. Ἡ περὶ δικαιώσεως διδασκαλία Νικολάου τοῦ Καβάσιλα: Συμβολὴ εἰς τὴν ὀρθόδοξον σωτηριολογίαν. Piraeus, 1975. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Athens; reissued in Greece and still in print.)
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
Synaxi (Σύναξη). “Ἡ ταυτότητα τῆς Σύναξης” [“The Identity of Synaxi”], synaxi.gr (accessed 2026).
Panagopoulos, J. “Ὀντολογία ἢ θεολογία τοῦ προσώπου;” Synaxi 13 (1985): 63–79; 14 (1985): 34–47.
Agouridis, S. “Μποροῦν τὰ πρόσωπα τῆς Τριάδας νὰ δώσουν τὴ βάση γιὰ περσοναλιστικὲς ἀπόψεις περὶ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου;” Synaxi 33 (1990): 67–78.
Zizioulas, John D. “Τὸ εἶναι τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ τὸ εἶναι τοῦ ἀνθρώπου.” Synaxi 37 (1991): 11–36.
Armos Publications (Εκδόσεις Ἁρμός), author page for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας, armosbooks.gr (accessed 2026).
Pemptousia, author page for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας, pemptousia.gr (accessed 2026).
Booksite.gr and Philokalia.gr, bibliographic listings for Ἡ περὶ δικαιώσεως διδασκαλία Νικολάου τοῦ Καβάσιλα (accessed 2026).