Nellas Among the Greek Generation

Nellas belonged to the Greek theological generation of the 1960s along with Vasileios Gontikakis, Christos Yannaras and John Zizioulas. The standard scholarly reading distinguishes him from the last two by the degree of philosophical mediation: Yannaras and Zizioulas recast patristic thinking in the vocabulary of modern existentialism and personalism, and were criticised for it; Nellas did not, and was not. This makes him attractive to readers wary of personalism — but the comparison must be handled with care, because Nellas never entered the argument and it would be a misrepresentation to enlist him in it.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Generation

Norman Russell’s account is the standard one and is worth stating in his words: “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, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 80–81).

They had much in common. Three of the four — Gontikakis, Nellas and Yannaras — began within the Zoe brotherhood and broke with it in the early 1960s (Russell 2006, 89 n. 11). All were formed, directly or indirectly, by the layman Dimitrios Koutroubis and by the Russian emigration that reached Greece in translation (Russell 2006, 80–81). All were reacting against the same thing: a Greek academic dogmatics that had taken its architecture from Western manuals and used the Fathers as testimonies to it.

They diverged in what they made of the reaction. The repository’s Zizioulas collection states the division from the other side and this collection agrees with it: “where Yannaras worked philosophically and Nellas anthropologically, Zizioulas built an ecclesiology with an ontology attached and made it teachable” (see The Shape of His Influence, drawing on Russell 2006, 80–81). Gontikakis worked monastically, from Athos.

The Distinction Russell Draws

Russell’s transition from Nellas to the other two is the passage that has shaped the comparison, and it is explicit:

Of Nellas: “Another approach, a more familiar one perhaps to Western readers, is represented by Panayiotis Nellas” — as against the “exalted monastic tone of a Gontikakis” (Russell 2006, 81–82).

Then, moving on: “With Yannaras and Zizioulas we enter into more controversial territory. In attempting to speak to today’s world they are not afraid of recasting patristic thinking in contemporary philosophical language” (Russell 2006, 82).

The sentence divides the four into two pairs and puts Nellas on the far side of the controversy. What follows in Russell’s article is an account of Yannaras’s debt to Heidegger and of Zizioulas’s personalist ontology, and then of the criticism both attracted — including the charge, made by J. Panagopoulos and S. Agouridis in the pages of Nellas’s own journal, that Zizioulas “attributes to the Fathers ideas that he has in reality imported from philosophical personalism and existentialism” (Russell 2006, 86–87 and 90 n. 21; see The Journal Synaxi and The Patristic Question).

Nellas attracted no such charge, and the reason is not obscure. His book quotes Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus and Cabasilas, appends forty pages of patristic texts, and includes a glossary of Greek theological terms. It does not deploy a philosophical vocabulary that has to be shown to be patristic, because it does not deploy a philosophical vocabulary at all. Whatever else may be said about the argument of Deification in Christ, the question “is this in the Fathers or has it been read into them?” has a comparatively easy answer.

Why This Makes Him Attractive to Some Readers

Since the 1990s a substantial counter-movement to Orthodox personalism has gathered — Jean-Claude Larchet, Nikolaos Loudovikos, Alexis Torrance, Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos), and a broader return to christology and to the ascetic tradition (see Person, Nature, and Grace and The Shape of His Influence). One recurring criticism in that literature is that modern Orthodox personalism severs anthropology from christology — that it derives a doctrine of the human person from trinitarian theology and existential philosophy without passing through the humanity of Christ (this is, in particular, Alexis Torrance’s line: “Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology,” Heythrop Journal 52:4 [2011]: 700–707; Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology, OUP, 2020).

Nellas offers precisely what such critics ask for. His anthropology is christological from the first sentence: man is the image of the Image; man’s archetype is the incarnate Logos; the definition of the human is taken from the humanity of Christ (Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 24–25 and 34; see Image of the Image). He derives the doctrine of the human being from christology and the sacraments rather than from trinitarian ontology, and he does it in patristic vocabulary.

It is therefore entirely intelligible that readers wary of personalism should find Nellas congenial, and this is a real feature of his contemporary appeal.

Four Cautions

Everything in the preceding section requires qualification, and the qualifications matter more than the comparison.

1. Nellas never entered the dispute. This collection has found no text in which Nellas criticises Yannaras or Zizioulas or personalism, and Deification in Christ does not argue with contemporaries at all. The Panagopoulos articles appeared in Synaxi 13–14 in 1985, while Nellas was alive and editing; whether he solicited them is unrecorded, and no source attributes to him any position on their argument. The main body of the controversy — Agouridis in 1990, Zizioulas’s reply in 1991 — is posthumous. To present Nellas as an opponent of personalism would be to invent a position he did not take.

2. The contrast is drawn by others, not by him. The philosophical/patristic distinction is Russell’s classification of four writers, made twenty years after Nellas’s death. It is a useful and well-grounded classification; it is not a controversy between the parties.

3. There was no rivalry. Nothing in the sources suggests personal or professional antagonism among the members of this generation. They were formed together in the same circle, published in the same series (Gontikakis, Nellas and Yannaras all appeared in St Vladimir’s Contemporary Greek Theologians: Russell 2006, 89–90 n. 18), and were understood by contemporaries as a common movement. Yannaras writes about Nellas at some length and, so far as can be judged from Russell’s citation of it, sympathetically (Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 2006, 297–300).

4. “Less philosophical” is not automatically “more faithful.” The judgement that Nellas is more directly patristic is a description of method, not a verdict on truth. Zizioulas’s standing reply to his critics is that fidelity to the Fathers’ mind is not the reproduction of their sentences, that the Fathers themselves did not merely repeat their predecessors, and that theology’s task is to draw out what patristic moves imply (see The Patristic Question). Russell’s own measured verdict on Zizioulas is that modern philosophy “influenced his thinking but not determined it” (Russell 2006, 87). A reader who prefers Nellas on the ground that he stays closer to the texts is making a methodological choice that Zizioulas would contest, and the Church has not adjudicated between them.

Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, this collection sets out the comparison, names who draws it, and adjudicates nothing.

The Symmetrical Question

For fairness, the objection that could be raised against Nellas’s method should be stated as clearly as the objection raised against Zizioulas’s — with the reminder that this collection has found no one who has raised it in print.

If Zizioulas is vulnerable to the charge of importing philosophy, Nellas is in principle vulnerable to the opposite one: that a theology conducted entirely in the vocabulary of the Fathers may be systematising them without acknowledging that it is doing so. Nellas’s garments-of-skin doctrine is a construction from two Fathers separated by two and a half centuries, extended to cultural and political structures more explicitly than either states; his christological anthropology is a systematisation of what Cabasilas argues in passing. These are real acts of theological construction, and the patristic idiom in which they are conducted can make them look like reportage (see The Motif in Nyssa and Maximus).

Nellas would presumably answer as he does on page 24 of his book: that the Fathers are approached “from within the Church and using faith as our basic method,” that this is a conversation rather than a transcription, and that letting the Fathers “take him forward where they will” is the point (Nellas 1987, 24; Russell 2006, 82). Whether that answer is sufficient is exactly the standing question about the whole neo-patristic project, and it is unresolved.

This is flagged as an open methodological question, not attributed to any critic.

References

Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92. (The generation at 80–81; Nellas at 81–82; the transition to Yannaras and Zizioulas at 82; the personalism charge at 86–87 and 90 n. 21.)
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.
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. (Zoe at 217–250; Koutroubis at 291–297; Nellas at 297–300.)
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.
Torrance, Alexis. “Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology.” Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 700–707; and Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Spiteris, Yannis. La teologia ortodossa neo-greca. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992. (Nellas at 255–277; the Zizioulas dispute at 409–411.)