Anthropology by Destiny

If the human being is defined by his end rather than his present state, then every anthropology that describes only the present state is describing a fragment. This is Nellas’s standing critique of modern accounts of man — the naturalistic, the idealist, the humanist — and it is also the ground on which he can accept the findings of the natural sciences, including evolutionary biology, without alarm. What the sciences describe is real; it is simply not the whole, and it is not the criterion.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Structure of the Argument

Nellas’s engagement with modern anthropologies follows from the definition rather than being an added apologetic. The steps are these.

1. A definition of man must state what man is for. If the differentia of the species is a process not yet complete — zōon theoumenon, the animal being deified — then any description of the human being that stops at his observable present condition has described the material of the definition and omitted its form (see A Living Creature Being Deified).

2. The present condition is not the natural condition. This is where the “garments of skin” do their work. What is empirically given about human beings — mortality, biological reproduction, the passions, the economy of scarcity, the necessity of law and coercion — belongs, on Nellas’s reading of Genesis 3:21 with St Gregory of Nyssa and St Maximus, to the post-lapsarian mode of existence, not to human nature as such (see The Garments of Skin). An anthropology built on observation of the present human being is therefore building on the fall and calling it nature.

3. The criterion is Christ. The one human being in whom human nature is realised is the incarnate Logos, and He is the archetype according to whom the rest were made: “Man’s archetype is therefore not simply the Logos but the incarnate Logos” (Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 34; see Image of the Image).

The result is a specific and unusual polemical position. Nellas is not arguing that the modern accounts of man are false in what they report. He is arguing that they are incomplete in a way that makes them misleading as definitions — that they mistake a description of the fallen condition for a description of human nature, and that they therefore have no way of accounting for the dissatisfaction of the creature with the condition described.

Against the Reductions

Doru Costache, in the fullest available account of Nellas’s anthropological method, identifies as its first pillar a complexity that refuses two opposite errors: “naturalistic reductionism” on one side and “outdated dualism” on the other, in favour of an “iconic ontology” in which the human being is configured as the image of God’s Image (Costache, “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas,” AIOCS, 27 April 2018).

Both refusals matter.

Against naturalistic reductionism: the claim that a human being is exhaustively describable as an organism, a set of drives, an economic agent or a neural system. Nellas’s objection is not that these descriptions are wrong but that they are descriptions of the garment, not of the wearer — of the mode of existence assumed after the fall, taken for the thing itself. The empirical human being really is mortal, really does reproduce biologically, really is driven by appetite; all of this is true and none of it is what he is.

Against dualism: the equal and opposite error of locating the “real” human being in a spiritual component housed in a body, so that salvation becomes escape from the biological. Nellas’s Fathers do not permit this. The garments of skin are to be transformed, not shed; the body is not the prison of the person; the material creation is drawn into the deification of man rather than left behind (Nellas 1987, Part Two, “The cosmic body of Christ,” 157–162; Part Three, 163–198). Gregory’s word was zōon, and the animal is not subtracted.

Costache’s second pillar, holistic dynamism — human nature as “work in progress,” a continuous metamorphosis from earthly origins toward divine participation — is the positive form of the same point (Costache 2018).

Secular Humanism

Nellas’s argument bears in a specific way on the humanisms, religious and secular, that make man the measure.

The Orthodox objection to a humanism that ends in man is not that it esteems the human being too highly but that it esteems him too little. Nellas’s formulation of humanity’s greatness is that it lies in a vocation “to become a god,” and that authentic human existence consists in being “raised up towards God and united with Him” rather than in existing autonomously (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987, as summarised in the book’s own presentation of its core anthropological thesis). A humanism that closes the horizon at the human has, on that account, not exalted man; it has confined him to the fragment.

This is a familiar line in twentieth-century Orthodox writing — it is one of the recurring themes of the Russian emigration and of the Greek generation alike — and Nellas is not original in taking it. What is his own is the anthropological rather than moral form he gives it: the objection is not that secular humanism produces bad conduct but that it is descriptively inadequate, since it must treat the creature’s restlessness as a psychological accident rather than as the sign of what he is (see Theological Anthropology).

Nellas was, as Spiteris observes and Russell repeats, “one of the few Greek theologians … who was able to bring theology into rapport with modern Greek culture” (Spiteris, La teologia ortodossa neo-greca, Bologna, 1992, 256; quoted in Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 82). The engagement with modern anthropologies is a large part of what that means. He was writing for Greeks who had read Marx and Freud and Sartre and were not going to be argued out of the twentieth century.

Evolution and the Sciences

Part Three of Deification in Christ takes up the anthropological and cosmological context of union with God, and it is here that Nellas engages the natural sciences most directly.

His position, in Costache’s summary, is that evolutionary theory cannot damage Orthodox anthropology, because the two discourses are addressing different aspects of the same subject: the sciences analyse the external morphology and the process by which the human phenomenon appeared; theology grasps the interior trajectory of that phenomenon toward deification. Rather than defending a border, Nellas reinterprets the scientific data within a holistic, theocentric and christological framework, so that the two perspectives harmonise (Costache, “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration,” AIOCS, 2018, describing Nellas’s “integration of theology and science” as the third pillar of his thought and calling the incorporation “remarkable”).

The move is coherent with everything else in his anthropology. If the human being is defined by an end rather than by an origin, then the question of how the organism arose is not the question of what the human being is, and an answer to the first does not compete with an answer to the second. A creature whose definition is ζῷον θεούμενον can have any natural history whatever; what he cannot have is a definition supplied by that history.

Two cautions, stated plainly.

First, this is Nellas’s theological proposal, not the dogma of the Orthodox Church. The Church has issued no conciliar definition on evolutionary biology, and Orthodox opinion on the question ranges from positions like Nellas’s to strict creationism. This collection reports his position as his and does not present it as the Church’s, nor adjudicate among the Orthodox positions (repository METHODOLOGY §4.1–4.2).

Second, the assessment of the proposal rests on a thin literature. Costache is an enthusiastic advocate — his article is written precisely to recruit Nellas for a contemporary scientifically engaged Orthodox theology — and this collection could locate no published Orthodox criticism of Nellas’s treatment of evolution. The absence of criticism is not evidence of consent; it is more probably evidence that few people have engaged the argument. It is reported as an absence (see The Critical Literature).

Church and World

The last chapter of Part One (Nellas 1987, 93–108) draws the consequences for the Church’s relation to the world, and it is the point at which the anthropology becomes a social theology.

The logic is the two-fold character of the garments of skin (see Consequence and Provision). If law, marriage, family, property, labour and political order belong to the fallen condition and are given within it as divine provision, then the Church’s stance toward the structures of secular life can take neither of the two easy forms. It cannot simply bless them, as though the present order were the natural order. It cannot simply flee them, as though the provision were merely a punishment. What is left is the harder position: these things are to be used with God as their end and transformed, and they become destructive precisely when they are treated as autonomous — as ends in themselves rather than as garments (Nellas, Deification in Christ, 1987, II.3 “The two-fold character of the garments of skin,” 60–63, and III, 93–108).

This is a genuinely useful framework and it is Nellas’s most portable contribution outside the seminary. It is also the least developed part of his corpus, because he died before writing the social theology that Part One, chapter III gestures toward (see Social Ethics).

References

Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. Norman Russell. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. (Part One ch. III at 93–108; Part Two at 109–162; Part Three at 163–198; the archetype at 34.)
Costache, Doru. “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas.” Australian Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies (aiocs.net), 27 April 2018.
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
Spiteris, Yannis. La teologia ortodossa neo-greca. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992. (Nellas at 255–277; the judgement quoted at 256 and 276.)