Zōon Theoumenon and Its English Life

Nellas’s chief work appeared in Greek as Ζῷον θεούμενον at Athens in 1979, with a second edition in 1982. Norman Russell’s English translation, with a foreword by Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, was in preparation when Nellas died in April 1986 and appeared the following year from St Vladimir’s Seminary Press as Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. That posthumous English edition is, for nearly all readers outside Greece, the whole of Nellas.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Title

The Greek title is two words taken from St Gregory the Theologian: ζῷον θεούμενον, from Oration 38.11, the Nativity oration — literally, in Bishop Kallistos’s rendering, “a living creature that is being deified” (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 12).

The phrase is a definition of the human being, and it is a strange one. Zōon is the ordinary Greek for “animal” or “living creature” — the word in Aristotle’s zōon politikon, the political animal, and zōon logon echon, the animal possessing reason. Gregory takes that classificatory frame and substitutes for the differentia a participle in the present passive: what distinguishes man among the animals is not a faculty he possesses but a process he undergoes. He is the animal being deified.

Nellas’s whole book is an unpacking of that participle. The choice of it as a title is itself the argument in miniature: an anthropology whose defining term is not a property of the subject but an action of God upon him (see A Living Creature Being Deified and St. Gregory the Theologian).

The Greek Editions

Bishop Kallistos gives the publication data plainly: “The Greek text was published by ‘Epopteia’ in Athens in 1979; a second edition followed in 1982” (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas 1987, 12). Epopteia (Ἐποπτεία) was a small Athenian house; the second edition within three years is a modest but real indication that the book found readers.

The Greek edition carries a subtitle indicating perspectives for an Orthodox understanding of the human being (Armos Publications, author page for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας, listing Ζῷον Θεούμενον with the subtitle “προοπτικὲς γιὰ μιὰ ὀρθόδοξη κατανόηση τοῦ ἀνθρώπου”). The book remains in print in Greece.

[Disputed: whether the second Greek edition of 1982 was revised. Bishop Kallistos records the fact of a second edition but not its character, and no source consulted states whether Nellas altered the text. The English translation was made from the Greek but the sources do not specify from which edition.]

The Translation

The English version was made by Norman Russell — the patristic scholar who would later write The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford, 2004), the standard modern monograph on the subject, and the survey article on modern Greek theologians on which much of this collection’s placement of Nellas rests. He translated Nellas before he wrote either.

The foreword is by Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia (Timothy Ware), then the Spalding Lecturer at Oxford and the most widely read English-language Orthodox writer of his generation, and it occupies pages 9–14 (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 89 n. 15, citing “Nellas 1987, 9–14 (by Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia)” as one of the brief treatments of Nellas available). See Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware).

The book appeared as volume 5 of St Vladimir’s Seminary Press’s Contemporary Greek Theologians series, in 1987, at Crestwood, New York, in 254 pages, ISBN 0-88141-030-6 (review notice, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, giving the title-page data; Russell 2006, 91, Works Cited; Internet Archive catalogue record for the volume).

That series matters for the reception. It was the imprint through which the Greek theological generation of the 1960s was introduced to the English-speaking world, and it also carried Vasileios Gontikakis’s Hymn of Entry and Christos Yannaras’s The Freedom of Morality (Russell 2006, 89–90 n. 18: Yannaras’s Freedom of Morality “appeared in the important series on Contemporary Greek Theologians published by St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, which also includes the volumes of Gontikakis and Nellas already mentioned”). English readers therefore met Nellas as one of a group, in a deliberate act of introduction by an American Orthodox press — which is part of why he is read in English at all, and part of why he is read alongside Yannaras rather than on his own terms (see The English-Language Reception).

A Posthumous Book

Nellas died on 6 April 1986 of heart failure, at fifty (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas 1987: “His death from heart failure, at the early age of fifty, was altogether unexpected”). The translation was then in preparation; the volume appeared in 1987.

Three consequences follow, and they shape everything downstream.

The foreword is an obituary. Bishop Kallistos’s introduction to Nellas for English readers was written in the knowledge that its subject was dead and that no further book would come. It is accordingly the fullest short account of Nellas’s life in English — the source, for this collection and for most others, of the Lille and Paris years, the six months at Rome, the schoolmastering from 1968, the founding of Epi tas Pigas, the running of Synaxi, and the date and cause of death.

There was no author to answer for the book. A theologian normally clarifies, extends, corrects and defends his positions over a career. Nellas had eight years between the Greek edition and his death, and none at all after the English one. The book has therefore been received as a finished statement when it was, on any reasonable reading of a fifty-year-old’s bibliography, a first major statement.

The corpus in English is one volume. The 1975 Cabasilas monograph has not been translated; the articles have not been gathered in English; the Epi tas Pigas editions are in Greek by definition. An English-language reader who has read Deification in Christ has read essentially all of Nellas that exists in the language. This is a real limit on the Anglophone assessment of him and is stated here so that it is not forgotten in Sections 08 and 09.

Reissue and Availability

The SVS Press edition has remained the standard one and has been reprinted; it is stocked by Orthodox booksellers in North America, though periodically out of print (St Tikhon’s Monastery Press bookstore listing for Deification in Christ, ISBN 9780881410303; Internet Archive digitised copy of the 1987 edition). The Greek text remains available from Greek publishers.

No second English translation, revised edition, or critical edition exists, and no English collection of Nellas’s shorter writings has been published, so far as this collection could establish.

References

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. 254 pp. ISBN 0-88141-030-6.
Nellas, Panayiotis. Ζῷον θεούμενον: προοπτικὲς γιὰ μιὰ ὀρθόδοξη κατανόηση τοῦ ἀνθρώπου. Athens: Epopteia, 1979; 2nd ed. 1982.
Kallistos of Diokleia (Ware), Bishop. Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, 9–14.
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Gregory of Nazianzus. Oration 38.11 (the Nativity oration; the source of the phrase ζῷον θεούμενον).
Review notice, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, of Deification in Christ, giving title-page data and pagination.
Internet Archive, catalogue record and digitised copy of Deification in Christ (1987).
Armos Publications, author page for Παναγιώτης Νέλλας, armosbooks.gr (accessed 2026).