The English-Language Reception

Nellas exists in English because two men put him there: Norman Russell, who translated Zōon theoumenon, and Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia, who introduced it. Aidan Nichols gave him a chapter in a Catholic survey of Orthodox theology in 1995; Doru Costache has more recently recruited him for a scientifically engaged Orthodox anthropology. Beyond that the literature is very small, and the wider influence has been diffuse rather than scholarly: the “garments of skin” have entered English Orthodox vocabulary in the sense Nellas gave them, often without his name attached.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

Norman Russell

Russell’s advocacy is the decisive fact in the English reception, and it has taken three forms.

He translated the book. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987) is Russell’s translation, made while Nellas was still alive and published after his death (title-page data; Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 91).

He then wrote the standard monograph on the subject Nellas had been writing about. Russell’s The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) is the reference work on theosis in the Greek Fathers, and it appeared seventeen years after the Nellas translation. The sequence is worth registering: the translator of a modern Greek layman’s book on deification went on to write the Oxford monograph on the patristic doctrine. This gives Russell’s later placement of Nellas an authority it would not otherwise have.

He placed Nellas within his generation for English readers. In “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers” (2006), Russell treats four theologians in detail — Vasileios Gontikakis, Nellas, Yannaras and Zizioulas — and his account of Nellas is the standard English-language placement (Russell 2006, 81–82). The key passages:

On the character of the book: it is “at first sight a conventional scholarly investigation of patristic anthropology. But his declared aim is not simply to submit the texts to critical analysis. It is to approach the Fathers ‘from within the Church and using faith as our basic method’” (Russell 2006, 82, quoting Nellas 1987, 24).
On his manner: “Nellas, as it were, enters into conversation with the Fathers, letting them take him forward where they will. He does not write with the exalted monastic tone of a Gontikakis” (Russell 2006, 82).
On his cultural position, quoting Spiteris: “as a layman he was one of the few Greek theologians … who was able to bring theology into rapport with modern Greek culture” (Russell 2006, 82, citing Spiteris, La teologia ortodossa neo-greca, Bologna, 1992, 256).
On the achievement: “Gone now are preconceived theological schemes to which the Fathers added as testimonies. Nellas lets the Fathers show us that God is not an impersonal eternal ‘principle’ but our ontological origin and consummation” (Russell 2006, 82).
And Spiteris’s verdict, which Russell endorses by quoting it as his closing word on Nellas: Spiteris “sees in Nellas’s work a personal synthesis that speaks to today’s world: ‘Western theology can profit greatly from his thought’” (Russell 2006, 82, quoting Spiteris 1992, 276).

Russell also singles out the Epi tas Pigas series as “one of Nellas’s important contributions to the revival of patristic studies in Greece” (Russell 2006, 89 n. 16; see Epi tas Pigas).

Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia

The foreword to the English edition (Nellas 1987, 9–14) is the other half of the English introduction, and it did two things.

It lent authority. Bishop Kallistos was by 1987 the most widely read English-language Orthodox writer alive, and a foreword by him effectively vouched for an unknown Greek schoolteacher to an Anglophone readership that had no other way of assessing him.

It supplied the biography. Almost everything English readers know about Nellas’s life comes from those six pages: the Athens degree, the two postgraduate years at Lille and Paris, the six months at Rome, the influence of Dimitrios Koutroubis, the teaching post from 1968, the founding of Epi tas Pigas as a Greek Sources Chrétiennes, the running of Synaxi as a 112-page quarterly for the intelligent non-specialist, the Greek editions of 1979 and 1982, the source of the title in Oration 38.11, and the death from heart failure on 6 April 1986. This collection’s Section 01 depends heavily on that foreword and says so.

See Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware).

Aidan Nichols

The Dominican theologian Aidan Nichols gave Nellas a chapter, “Panagiotis Nellas and Anthropology,” in Light from the East: Authors and Themes in Orthodox Theology (London: Sheed and Ward, 1995), 170–180 (Russell 2006, 89 n. 15, citing “Nichols 1995, 170–80”; the chapter title as given in the book’s contents).

Two things are worth noting about this. First, Light from the East is a Roman Catholic survey written with the express purpose of identifying dogmatic issues raised by Eastern Orthodox theologians that are of equal importance for Catholic theology. That a book of that kind should give Nellas a chapter alongside the major names of modern Orthodoxy is a considered judgement of his significance from outside. Second, the chapter title indicates how he was already being classified within eight years of the translation: Nellas is “and Anthropology” — the theologian one goes to for the doctrine of man, as one goes to Zizioulas for ecclesiology and Lossky for apophaticism.

This collection has not been able to consult the Nichols chapter directly and therefore attributes no specific argument or assessment to it.

Doru Costache and the Recent Appropriation

The most substantial recent English engagement is by Doru Costache, in “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas” (Australian Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies, 27 April 2018), and it is constructive rather than critical.

Costache identifies three pillars in Nellas’s anthropology: complexity (an “iconic ontology” refusing both naturalistic reductionism and outdated dualism), holistic dynamism (human nature as “work in progress”), and the integration of theology and science — the last being what Costache is chiefly after. He argues that Nellas incorporates evolutionary theory without damage to theological anthropology, on the ground that the sciences describe external morphology while theology grasps the interior trajectory toward deification. Costache pairs Nellas with Fr Dumitru Stăniloae as neo-patristic thinkers for whom the patristic mind is “continuous, living, and meaningful” (Costache 2018; see Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae and Anthropology by Destiny).

This is a use of Nellas rather than a study of him, and it is characteristic of what has happened to his work: he functions as a resource for other people’s projects rather than as an object of scholarship in his own right.

The Diffusion of the “Garments of Skin”

The largest effect Nellas has had in English is untraceable by citation counts.

The garments-of-skin motif — Genesis 3:21 read as the whole post-lapsarian mode of existence, with mortality drawing after it biology, the passions, and the structures of law, family, economy and politics, all of them at once consequence of the fall and merciful provision — has become a standing category in English-language Orthodox anthropology, pastoral writing and spiritual direction. Writers on marriage, on the body, on psychology, on the Christian relation to culture reach for it. It appears in blogs, catechetical material, seminary lectures and popular books.

It is Gregory of Nyssa’s motif and Maximus’s, and Nellas did not invent it. What he did was give it the systematic form in which it now circulates: a doctrine with divisions, extended explicitly to culture and politics, and governed by the two-fold rule that the garments save when referred to God and destroy when treated as autonomous (see Consequence and Provision). English writers who use the motif in that shape are, in most cases, using Nellas whether or not they know it.

The State of the Literature, Stated Plainly

For the sake of a reader trying to judge how much weight the assessments in this collection can bear:

There is no monograph on Nellas in English.
There is no biography in any language known to this collection.
There is no collected edition of his shorter writings in English, and no second translated volume.
There is no sustained published critique of his theology that this collection could locate — no article, chapter or review-essay taking issue with his exegesis of Genesis 3:21, his christological anthropology, or his treatment of evolution.
The fullest assessment in any language is fifteen pages of an Italian survey published in 1992 (Spiteris 1992, 255–277), which this collection has not consulted directly and knows through Russell’s summary and quotation of it.

The absence of criticism should not be read as consensus. It is much more probably a measure of how few people have engaged the work closely enough to disagree with it — which is itself the natural fate of a small corpus by a schoolteacher who died at fifty and wrote in a language most theologians do not read.

References

Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92. (Nellas at 81–82; nn. 15–16 at 89.)
Russell, Norman. The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
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. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987.
Kallistos of Diokleia (Ware), Bishop. Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, 9–14.
Nichols, Aidan, OP. Light from the East: Authors and Themes in Orthodox Theology. London: Sheed and Ward, 1995. (Ch. “Panagiotis Nellas and Anthropology,” 170–180; not consulted directly.)
Spiteris, Yannis. La teologia ortodossa neo-greca. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992. (Nellas at 255–277; quoted at 256 and 276 via Russell.)
Costache, Doru. “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas.” AIOCS (aiocs.net), 27 April 2018.