The Shape of His Influence

Nellas’s influence runs along four channels of very unequal visibility: a Greek journal that has outlived him by four decades, a patristic series that changed what Greek readers could read, one English book whose central category has become common property, and the modern reception of Nicholas Cabasilas. He founded no school, trained no doctoral students, and left no successor. What he left instead is infrastructure and a vocabulary.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox

Channel One: Synaxi

The largest and least visible channel is a periodical.

Synaxi has appeared quarterly since 1982 and has never stopped (Synaxi, “The Identity of Synaxi,” synaxi.gr). Greek assessments place it among the decisive instruments of theological renewal in the country: Stavros Yangazoglou describes it as the mature fruit and the fertile, critical expression of modern Greek theology (Yangazoglou, “Ἡ ἀνανέωση τῆς νεοελληνικῆς ὀρθόδοξης θεολογίας,” Frear).

A journal’s influence is structural rather than propositional. It does not persuade anyone of anything; it determines what can be said, by whom, and to whom, over decades. Four effects can be traced:

It gave the generation of the 1960s a Greek platform. The men who had broken with the manual tradition and with Zoe needed somewhere to publish that was neither the university’s journals nor the diocesan press.

It kept a non-specialist theological readership in existence. The journal was aimed at “the intelligent non-specialist” (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas, Deification in Christ, SVS Press, 1987, 9–14) — a readership that most theological cultures lose.

It hosted the arguments. The Greek critique of Zizioulas’s personalism was made in Synaxi 13–14 (1985) and 33 (1990), and answered there in 37 (1991) (Panagopoulos, Synaxi 13: 63–79 and 14: 34–47; Agouridis, Synaxi 33: 67–78; Zizioulas, Synaxi 37: 11–36; the exchange summarised in Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18:1 [2006], 86–87, and discussed in Spiteris, La teologia ortodossa neo-greca, Bologna, 1992, 409–411). That the most important intra-Orthodox theological argument of the late twentieth century in Greek was conducted in the pages of a review founded by Nellas is the single most concrete measure of what he built (see The Journal Synaxi).

It survived him by design rather than luck. A journal that depends on its founder dies with him. Synaxi passed to an editorial committee and continued.

Channel Two: Epi tas Pigas

The second channel is a series of books that are not by him.

Founded in 1968 on the Sources Chrétiennes model — original text, modern Greek rendering, introduction, notes — Epi tas Pigas is described by Russell as “one of Nellas’s important contributions to the revival of patristic studies in Greece” (Russell 2006, 89 n. 16), and by Bishop Kallistos as “a Greek equivalent to the French collection Sources chrétiennes” (Kallistos of Diokleia, Foreword to Nellas 1987).

The effect of such a series is measured in what a church can read. Before it, a Greek priest or teacher wanting Cabasilas or Nyssen in a usable form had limited options; after it, he had a shelf. Nellas’s own first volume — Cabasilas’s three Marian homilies, 1968 — is a small instance of a large principle: the least-read part of a major author, put into circulation (see Epi tas Pigas).

This influence is impossible to quantify and easy to overlook, which is the usual fate of editorial work.

Channel Three: One Book, One Category

The third channel is Deification in Christ, and within it, chiefly one chapter.

The book itself has been continuously in print or reprinted in English since 1987, has been stocked by Orthodox booksellers in North America for nearly forty years, and is a standard item on seminary reading lists for theological anthropology (SVS Press and St Tikhon’s Monastery Press catalogue listings for Deification in Christ, ISBN 9780881410303). It has never been a bestseller and has never been out of view.

The category has travelled much further than the book. The “garments of skin,” read as the whole post-lapsarian mode of existence and governed by the two-fold rule — divine provision when referred to God, destructive when treated as autonomous — has become a working term in English-language Orthodox anthropology, pastoral writing, and popular catechesis. It is used by writers on marriage, on the body, on psychology, on culture and technology. Very often it is used without attribution, because the motif is patristic and the user takes it from the tradition rather than from a modern author.

This is the most characteristic form of Nellas’s influence: a category that circulates more widely than his name. It is a good outcome for a theologian who believed his job was to let the Fathers speak, and a poor one for anyone trying to write a reception history (see The Garments of Skin).

Channel Four: The Cabasilas Revival

The fourth channel runs through a fourteenth-century saint.

The twentieth-century recovery of Nicholas Cabasilas involved editors (Salaville, Congourdeau), a translator (deCatanzaro), a first monographer (Lot-Borodine), and theologians who used him (Schmemann, Meyendorff, Bobrinskoy, Clément). Within that company Nellas has a specific place: his was “the most concentrated single development of Cabasilas in modern Orthodox theology,” and his book “did much to make Cabasilas a living source for contemporary Orthodox thought rather than only an object of historical study” (see The Modern Rediscovery).

Anyone who now writes on Cabasilas’s Christ-centred anthropology writes downstream of Nellas, and the repository’s own treatment of that theme cites him as a principal interpreter (see Christ-Centred Anthropology and Grace and the Sacraments).

What He Did Not Leave

The negatives are as instructive as the positives and should be stated without euphemism.

No school. He taught in a secondary school and supervised no research students. There is no second generation of Nellas’s pupils carrying a programme forward.

No successor volume. Part Three of Deification in Christ points toward a theology of creation and a social theology; neither exists.

No debate. He entered none and provoked none. There is no “Nellas controversy,” no defenders and critics, no literature of dispute (see The English-Language Reception).

No English corpus. The 1975 Cabasilas monograph, the articles and the editorial apparatus remain untranslated. English readers have one volume and will, absent a translator’s decision, continue to have one.

No presence in the general histories. He receives a paragraph or two in surveys of modern Orthodox theology where Florovsky, Lossky, Schmemann and Zizioulas receive chapters. The exception is Aidan Nichols’s Light from the East (1995), which gives him a chapter of his own, 170–180 (Russell 2006, 89 n. 15).

The Verdict of Those Who Knew the Field

Two judgements are on record and both are high.

Spiteris, in the fullest assessment written: he sees in Nellas’s work “a personal synthesis that speaks to today’s world,” and concludes that “Western theology can profit greatly from his thought” (Spiteris 1992, 276, quoted in Russell 2006, 82).

Russell, endorsing that verdict by quoting it, and adding his own: with Nellas, “gone now are preconceived theological schemes to which the Fathers added as testimonies” (Russell 2006, 82).

These are the words of the two people who have read Nellas most carefully, and they should be given the weight of expert testimony while being recognised for what they are: sympathetic judgements made without the friction of a counter-literature.

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.
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.
Spiteris, Yannis. La teologia ortodossa neo-greca. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992.
Nichols, Aidan, OP. Light from the East: Authors and Themes in Orthodox Theology. London: Sheed and Ward, 1995, 170–180.
Panagopoulos, J. Synaxi 13 (1985): 63–79; 14 (1985): 34–47. Agouridis, S. Synaxi 33 (1990): 67–78. Zizioulas, John D. Synaxi 37 (1991): 11–36.
Yangazoglou, Stavros. “Ἡ ἀνανέωση τῆς νεοελληνικῆς ὀρθόδοξης θεολογίας.” Frear (mag.frear.gr, accessed 2026).
Synaxi (Σύναξη), “Ἡ ταυτότητα τῆς Σύναξης,” synaxi.gr (accessed 2026).