A Provisional Assessment

What Nellas achieved in a working life of eighteen years, in the margins of a schoolteacher’s timetable, is a christological anthropology of unusual clarity, a durable exegetical category, a patristic series and a journal that has outlasted him by four decades. What he lacked was time. This assessment is offered provisionally: it rests on a very thin critical literature, and a judgement made in the absence of counter-argument should be held loosely.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

The Grounds on Which This Assessment Rests

Stated first, so that the reader can discount appropriately.

There is no monograph on Nellas, no biography, and no sustained published critique. The fullest assessment is fifteen pages of an Italian survey from 1992 which this collection knows through Russell’s quotation of it. The English literature is a foreword, a chapter in a Catholic survey, two pages of a journal article, and one recent constructive essay (see The English-Language Reception). Nellas’s own untranslated works were not consulted.

An assessment built on that base is an informed reading, not a settled judgement. It is given as such.

What Is Genuinely Achieved

A christological anthropology stated with unusual clarity. The proposition that man’s archetype is not the Logos simply but the incarnate Logos (Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 34), and the corollary that man is the image of the Image (24–25), give a compact and rigorous foundation for a doctrine of the human person. It is not a novel doctrine — it is Cabasilas’s, and Pauline before that — but the formulation is exact and the consequences are drawn systematically. A reader who wants to know why Orthodox anthropology cannot be conducted apart from christology can be given this book and will understand.

A working category for the fallen condition. The garments-of-skin doctrine, with its two-fold rule, does real work that few other instruments in Christian anthropology do. It permits one to say simultaneously that marriage, law, property, politics, biological life and the body belong to a fallen order and that they are divine gifts within it; and it supplies a criterion — autonomy versus reference to God — for telling their good use from their bad. This is Nellas’s most portable contribution and the one most likely to outlast him (see Consequence and Provision).

A refusal of moralism grounded in ontology rather than in temperament. “The spiritual life is not a life of laws and precepts but a life of participation, affection and love” (Nellas 1987, 116) is a sentence many have written. Nellas earns it: it follows from a participatory soteriology worked out over a decade of study of Cabasilas, and it is therefore an argument rather than a mood (see The Doctrine of Justification).

A demonstration that patristic theology can address modern questions in patristic language. This is the point on which Spiteris and Russell both settle. Nellas was, in Spiteris’s phrase, one of the few Greek theologians who could 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); and he did it without recasting the Fathers in a modern philosophical idiom. Whether or not one thinks that recasting legitimate, it is worth having a demonstration that it is not obligatory.

Two institutions. Synaxi and Epi tas Pigas. On any reckoning that counts the good actually done rather than the pages actually written, these are the larger half of the life (see Section 02).

What Is Missing

The corpus is too small to be a body of thought. Deification in Christ is a first major statement, and it is treated as a summa because there is nothing after it. Its Part Three sketches a cosmology; its Part One chapter III sketches a social theology; neither was developed. A judgement of Nellas as a theologian is therefore a judgement of a book, and books are not theologians.

The construction is not always shown as construction. The garments-of-skin doctrine is a synthesis of two Fathers separated by centuries, extended more explicitly to cultural and political structures than either states; the christological anthropology systematises what Cabasilas argues in passing. These are legitimate theological acts. But they are conducted in a patristic idiom that can make them read as exposition, and Nellas does not always mark the seam. This is a methodological question that no published critic has pressed and that a careful reader will notice (see Nellas Among the Greek Generation).

The engagement with modern anthropologies is thinner than the reputation. Nellas is praised for bringing theology into rapport with modern culture, and the praise is deserved in the sense that he wrote for people who lived in the twentieth century. But Deification in Christ does not contain sustained engagement with any named modern philosopher, psychologist or social theorist. Its critique of modern anthropologies operates at the level of a general diagnosis — that they mistake the fallen condition for the nature — rather than at the level of argument with particular positions.

There is no ecclesiology. For a theologian of the sacramental life this is a striking gap. The Church appears in the book as the setting of the Mysteries and in the “Church–world” chapter as an agent in society, but there is no doctrine of the Church as such. His generation’s great ecclesiological work was done by Zizioulas, and Nellas did not attempt it.

The Cost of the Early Death

It is worth being concrete about what fifty years bought and what it did not.

Nellas published his major book at forty-three and died at fifty. Yannaras published into his eighties; Zizioulas into his nineties; Stăniloae completed the Filocalia at eighty-eight. A theologian’s later decades typically produce the systematisation, the replies to critics, the second and third books that turn a position into a body of work, and the students who carry it on. Nellas had none of these. The corpus we have is a young man’s — brilliant in its central intuition, incompletely worked out, and with no chance of revision.

This is the single most important thing to hold in mind when comparing him to his generation. He is not a lesser thinker than Yannaras or Zizioulas; he is a thinker with a fifth of the time.

What a Reader Should Take from Him

Concretely, for someone deciding whether to read him:

Read him for the anthropology. Deification in Christ, Part One, is the best short statement in English of why the Orthodox doctrine of the human person is christological, and of what the “image of God” means when it is not treated as a faculty.

Read him for the garments of skin. Part One, chapter II is the reason the book is still in print, and the doctrine will change how a reader thinks about mortality, the body, marriage, work and the state.

Read him alongside Cabasilas. The book is unintelligible as an achievement without The Life in Christ, and it is best read with deCatanzaro’s translation to hand (see St. Nicholas Cabasilas).

Do not read him for a system. He does not offer one, and treating the book as a systematic anthropology asks of it what it was not written to do.

Do not read him as the Church’s teaching. The dogma of deification, the fall, and the Incarnation is the Church’s; the anthropology built upon it here is the theological work of a modern layman, offered to the Church and received with respect, and this collection presents it as his (repository METHODOLOGY §4.1).

The Weighing, Offered Provisionally

Nellas is a minor figure with a major idea. That is not a slight. The category of the garments of skin, in the form he gave it, is one of the few genuinely new instruments in twentieth-century Orthodox anthropology, and it is being used by people who have never heard of him — which is the most complete kind of success a theologian can have and the least visible.

Against that, he is not a figure of the stature of Florovsky, Lossky, Stăniloae, Zizioulas or Schmemann, and no one who has written about him claims he is. His achievement is narrower and, within its narrowness, unusually clean: he found one thing that the Fathers had and modernity needed, and he set it out clearly, and then he built a journal so that other people could do the same.

The final judgement of the sources is Spiteris’s, and this collection is content to let it stand: Nellas produced “a personal synthesis that speaks to today’s world,” and “Western theology can profit greatly from his thought” (Spiteris 1992, 276, quoted in Russell 2006, 82).

Provisionally. This assessment is made from a literature of perhaps sixty pages, most of it written by people who admired him. It should be revised by anyone who reads the Greek.

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. (The passages at 24–25, 34, and 116.)
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; quoted at 256 and 276.)
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, 170–180.
Costache, Doru. “Holism, Dynamism, and Integration: The Anthropological Thinking of Panayiotis Nellas.” AIOCS (aiocs.net), 27 April 2018.
Cabasilas, Nicholas. The Life in Christ. Trans. Carmino J. deCatanzaro. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974.