Chapter 4. The Personality of Christos Yannaras
One of the modern theologians who has been engaged in the synthesis of existential philosophy and Orthodox theology is the currently living Christos Yannaras. An authoritative theologian and philosopher, who was born in Athens on April 10, 1935. Captivated by the problem of being since his youth, at the age of 19 he chose theology as his educational path. He studied theology in Athens (1954-1958). In 1961-1964, being a member of the Zoe brotherhood, he was responsible for conducting lectures for students. However, convinced of the impossibility of internal reform of the brotherhood, Yannaras left it together with several young theologians and took part in the publication of Sinoro (Border), which was published from 1964 to 1967 and outlined the paths of theological renewal and revival of church tradition.
Biography and professional path
However, in 1964, at the dawn of the Greek ecclesiastical renewal, following an old Greek custom, Christos Yannaras leaves for the West to complete his education. There he assimilates some of the approaches typical of the French intelligentsia; a clear tendency to question existing forms and rules, as well as their social significance, brings him closer to Jean-Paul Sartre, his teacher in existential philosophy.
In 1964-1967 Yannaras studied philosophy in Bonn. Having discovered M. Heidegger, he experienced his profound influence, guessing in the "death of God" proclaimed by Nietzsche, the God of Western "onto-theology", rejected by Heidegger. From the comparison of the intuitions of the outstanding German philosopher and the apophatic theology of the Greek Fathers of the Church, Yannaras' philosophical and theological essay "On the Absence and Ignorance of God" (Paris, 1971) was born.
In 1968-1970, Yannaras worked in Paris on his doctoral dissertation on the topic "The Metaphysics of the Body in St. John Climacus", which he defended at the Sorbonne. Then, after four years spent in Paris and Geneva as a visiting professor of theology, he taught for three more years at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Crete. Since 1983, Christos Yannaras has been Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Political Science and International Studies in Athens. A member of the International Academy of Religious Studies, he is also a member of the editorial board of the international theological journal Consilium.
Thanks to his active participation – particularly through the press and television – in the public and intellectual life of the country, as well as the original and polemical form that characterized his testimony as a Christian theologian and philosopher, Christos Yannaras managed to attract the attention of the media and the Greek public to his speeches and books. However, his position often met with misunderstanding and negative reactions from strictly “orthodox” or moralistic circles.
Yannaras published his first book in 1961. It was a collection of literary essays under the general title Hunger and Thirst. But the most important thing in his work is the fruit of long, in-depth research into the definition of the features that, according to Yannaras, distinguish the philosophy and church Tradition of the Christian East from the traditions of Western Europe – features not so much of a static, theoretical nature, but of a practical nature – that which determines the way of life, “practice,” and what we call civilization.
In his extensive works, The Person and Eros (1976) and Freedom and Morality (1979), Yannaras analyzes the differences between two civilizations in terms of epistemology, ontology and, in parallel, in terms of ethics. In his subsequent books, Continuous Philosophy (1980), The Right Word and Communal Practice (1984), Premises of Critical Ontology (1985), The Real and the Imaginary in Political Economy (1989), Christos Yannaras attempts to give human existence direction and meaning, based on the experience of the dead ends of the modern, so-called “Western” way of life. Today, Christos Yannaras is one of the most widely read Greek Christian thinkers of our time in the world 40 .
It is easy to read the works of Christos Yannaras, they possess what can be described as "lived knowledge" - knowledge that is not dry and rational, but holistic, experienced, charged with a personal attitude, so it is possible to join and delve into it, to empathize with it. His works are filled with integrative concepts that are helpful for understanding various practical and theoretical theological categories. Perhaps his works are another productive step for the verbal creative rapprochement of the concepts of uncreated reality and created reality, accessible to the perception of humanity of our time.
Existential Philosophy and Theology in the Works of H. Yannaras
It is important to note what specifically valuable things the works of Christos Yannaras give us. For example, his work “Faith of the Church” briefly outlines Orthodox theology, developing Christian philosophy in an apophatic and personalistic key, in opposition to modern Western thought, but creatively using its achievements. H. Yannaras mainly uses Heidegger and other modern trends of thought. The strategy of “Faith of the Church” (the reception of modern philosophy, thinking addressed to the unbelieving world) is the strategy of the Holy Fathers. The ancient Fathers formulated the Christian message in the language of Stoicism and Neoplatonism, according to the commandment of Apostle Paul “to be all things with all.” Russian religious philosophy performed this task in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century. Now it is the responsibility of contemporaries. “Faith of the Church” is a truly worthy introduction to Orthodox theology, especially for those who want to thoughtfully understand Orthodoxy within the framework of modern thinking. The book is written very simply, but does not lose its depth because of this. Yannaras characterizes the idea of his book as follows: “The author’s task in the book offered to the reader’s attention is not to convince him of his own rightness or to force potential opponents to change their point of view. This is not an “apology” for the Christian faith, which sets itself the goal of attracting as many supporters as possible to its side. The author strove for something else: to clearly distinguish between what the Christian faith is and what it is not; to eliminate, as far as possible, the misunderstandings associated with today’s understanding of church truth; to cleanse it of extraneous chaff, which is often taken for the truth itself. Our task was to tell about this in a simple and understandable language, accessible, as they say, to “ordinary people” and, in particular, to ordinary “intellectuals”. It is the modern intellectual who, as a rule, is the culprit and the victim of the resulting confusion. Cut off from the living roots of faith, sometimes even psychologically suppressed by formal family religiosity, haunted by memories - alas, too often negative - of the tasteless school catechism, he discards what he takes to be the Christian faith, without ever knowing the faith itself. But if one day a person nevertheless wants to find out what exactly he is discarding, then a book like this, like a dictionary or an elementary textbook, can be useful, presenting the material with the help of terms and concepts familiar to our consciousness 41 .
Examples of the use of existential conceptual apparatus
Here are some examples of Christos Yannaras's unique, mind-expanding, existential expressions about the experience of the Church. The quotes are taken from his most famous book, The Faith of the Church.
• “The Church experience and the Holy Scripture affirmed the real distinction of the Divine Persons, the existential independence of each of Them. Thus, They are capable of communicating with each other, referring to each other, while clearly acting as different “hypostases”, non-identical “selves” . The theory of “masks” (Latin: persona) proposed by [Sabellius] denied both the direct meaning of the Gospel sayings of Christ, and the living experience of the Church, testifying to the personality of the Father, the personality of the Son and the personality of the Holy Spirit.”
• We derive the concept of a single essence from a certain set of properties and distinctive features inherent to one degree or another in all people. Thus, every human being has reason, will, judgment, imagination, memory, etc. All people exist through the above-mentioned properties common to the entire human race. Consequently, all people have a single nature, or essence. However, each specific realization (hypostasis) of the general nature, that is, each person taken separately, embodies the essential properties in a special and unique way. Each of us speaks, thinks, judges, fantasizes in his own way, differing in this from all other people; and therefore each specific person represents an absolutely unique existence . Thus, the essence, or nature, in question - both in relation to man and to God - does not exist outside of individual personalities, but only thanks to them. Personalities hypostasize the essence, give it hypostasis, that is, real and concrete existence. Nature has no being except in persons; persons are the mode of existence of nature. (I would even add that this is a special gnomic mode in accordance with the doctrine of the two wills of Maximus the Confessor)
• However, essence is not just an abstract concept (be it “divinity” or “humanity”), formed in our consciousness as a kind of summary of general qualities and properties. Yes, we say that nature does not exist outside of its specific incarnations in individual hypostases. Nevertheless, each of us, people, quite really feels the difference between our personality and our nature, or essence. We often realize in ourselves the simultaneous presence of two desires, two volitional impulses, two needs, each of which requires satisfaction. One of these manifestations expresses our free choice, our personal preference, while the other represents a natural, innate attraction. We study it using the example of man and see that here nature acts as an existential opposition to personal freedom . Personal existence is distinguished from all other forms of existence by two moments: self-consciousness and otherness .
• Personality is not an arithmetic unit, not one of the elements of a whole, not a singularity-in-itself , it is being-in-communication and exists only as a person’s consciousness of his otherness . Consequently, only personality presupposes a conscious face-to-face meeting with the Other, also a different being, and entering into a relationship with it.
• Thus, only in direct connection, meeting, contact do we acquire some experienced (lived) knowledge of someone's personality. No external information is able to express the unique originality of another person, to give us knowledge of his "otherness". No matter how much detail we try to describe him, no matter how hard we try to convey the subtlest nuances of his appearance, temperament, character and other distinctive features and properties, in any case our description will correspond to a huge number of individuals. The fact is that by means of the "objective" formulations of our everyday language it is in principle impossible to exhaust the depth of human uniqueness. Hence the enormous significance of the name in mutual communication and knowledge of people becomes obvious. Only one name in our language is capable, beyond all concepts and definitions, of expressing the uniqueness of a person. We would formulate the Orthodox Church understanding of the "image of God" in man as follows: God endowed man with the ability to be a person, that is, to realize his life according to the mode of Divine being.
• Thus, the human “I”, its hypostasis, is not identified with either the body or the soul, but acts, reveals and expresses itself in bodily and mental functions. That is why no physical impairment, no mental inferiority or damage to the mind can deprive a person of his inner “I”, make a person non-human, destroy him as an existential fact.
Limiting this work to a few examples, it is necessary to note that great credit for the detailed critical analysis of the anthropological formulations and ideas about personality in Christos Yannaras belongs to Hieromonk Methodius (Zinkovsky).
Anthropology. Personality as “being-in-communication”
Christos Yannaras develops the theme of personality in anthropology and deeply analyzes such properties of personality as freedom, communication, dynamism, irreducibility to nature, irrationality, integrity, consciousness, uniqueness, literature 42 . His personal philosophy of eros is also of great importance and, interestingly, among other things, the Russian sources of thinking: he owes the main provisions of his teaching to Pavel Evdokimov, who drew inspiration from V. Solovyov, and the intermediary link here was N. Berdyaev, who developed, among other things, the “metaphysics of sex” 43 . The ontology of M. Heidegger is used as the basis for philosophizing, the return to patristic thought as a reliable foundation, personality is revealed as that in which being “is”, and eros as a way of existence of personality.
It should be noted that dogmatic theology is of great importance in Orthodox anthropology – a church discipline that systematically reveals the meaning of the dogmas of the Christian church. The most important of these dogmas for anthropology is the dogma of the two natures of Jesus Christ, which was developed at the IV (Chalcedonian) and V Ecumenical Councils in the fight against the Monophysites and Monophylites. The dogmatic definitions of these councils contain many extremely important and fundamental principles for Orthodox anthropology. Without Christology, there is no anthropology. This is the difference between Orthodox anthropology and scientific psychology. We judge a person not only based on what he is today, but also based on what he should be and has actually become in Christ and the saints. In other words, the divinity of Christ and the holiness of the saints are for us an image of what a person should become, can become and actually becomes.
For us, a real person seems to be a beautiful, but in spiritual reality, disfigured creature. He is disfigured by original and his own sin. What people have preserved in themselves of the Divine is beautiful in them. But what is in people from self-will and sin, which does not contain the Divine, is terrible. Therefore, Orthodox anthropology proceeds not only from the reality that we can see in reality and study, but also from what a person should or could be.
Therefore, in the case of anthropology, dogmatics is a discipline that forms the basic theological categories and fundamental positions, setting the boundaries of Orthodox knowledge, which we cannot cross... dogmatics is also a school of methodology, the theological methodology of anthropology.
All this and much more makes the problem of the development of Orthodox anthropology very acute, sometimes painful. Especially when anthropology enters into dialogue with secular sciences and heterodox teachings 44 .
The subject of the study is man from the point of view of Orthodox anthropology, and the task is the development of a holistic Orthodox teaching about man. The range of problems of our discipline includes the origin, purpose, meaning of life, death, salvation of man, as well as the teaching about the body, about the flesh, about the mind, about the heart, partly about those forms of social life and human activity that interest us from the Orthodox point of view, including the Church.
But most importantly, Orthodox anthropology is a theological discipline.
Orthodox anthropology does not deal with physiology, medicine, or other sciences that are not included in its specific themes. Connections with other disciplines are limited to common interests. Our discipline should draw on knowledge obtained by related fields, but should not itself study physiology or, for example, anatomy.
Orthodox anthropology occupies a special place. It itself defines the guidelines by which alone it is possible to understand man. It is not a metaphilosophy of scientific anthropology, but the latter cannot do without religious knowledge; science is destined for a miserable fate without Christianity. Christian (Orthodox) anthropology cannot become an integral scientific discipline, but without it, scientific anthropology has no future.
The greatness of the Orthodox view of man is his ontological connection with God. Therefore, no human nature, no level of human existence can ever be said to be extra-divine. The image is revealed in the whole man, and not only in one of his parts.
The Gospel of Christ is a revelation about man, his nature, destiny and path to salvation, so the theme of man, it would seem, should inevitably be central to Christian doctrine. However, the historically formed appearance of the doctrine was not like this: in its extensive composition, the doctrine of man became just one of the secondary sections, rather poor in content. The reason was that the Good News is characterized, in the words of Fr. John Meyendorff, by an “open view of man”, which does not limit man to the plane of empirical existence, and the main thing in the Gospel was not empirical information about man, but the message about the very way of his existence, his existential calling. As a result, only a small part of the anthropological content of Christianity was clothed in the direct form of speech about empirical man, while the most essential part was expressed in other forms, implicitly. The main of these “crypto-anthropological” forms were dogmatics and asceticism. In dogmatic discourse, the ontological aspects of anthropology are conveyed, first of all, revealing the existential essence of the phenomenon and situation of man, and in Trinitarian theology the Christian concept of being is affirmed (as the being of the Holy Trinity and “personal being-communication”), and in Christological theology the relations and connection of man with being are established. In practical forms of asceticism, the anthropological content of Christology is directly continued and concretized: here it is revealed how man realizes this relation and connection.
As a result, the perception of Christian anthropology in its entirety required a sophisticated church consciousness that would be able to grasp and read the anthropology hidden under the forms of dogma and asceticism 45 .
Further, for example, "hesychastic anthropology is a limit anthropology, or the anthropology of limit experience: the process leading to a change in the mode of human existence is not simply an anthropological but a meta-anthropological process, and in it a person enters a region where the defining, constitutive properties, the predicates of human existence, begin to change. It is natural to call this region an anthropological boundary, and the experience that corresponds to being in it is a limit, or limit experience. And finally, it is worth emphasizing the experiential nature of this anthropology: it is built not on abstract postulates, but on the data of practice, and although it maintains a connection with Christian doctrine and dogmatics," their concepts are also absorbed into experience here, they acquire rootedness in experience 46 .
Chapter 5. Conclusions. The importance of the works of H. Yannaras
For the development of a modern, well-thought-out conceptual apparatus, with a decent form of words and no less valuable and understandable content, the works of Christos Yannaras can be extremely useful. Now the fractional development of individual practical specialties, including especially helpful professions (doctors, psychologists, sociologists, teachers, philosophers, priests, etc.) leads to the fact that the education of specialists lasts throughout their professional life and increasingly has the character of a personal search for the synthesis of knowledge, their personal creative processing of theories for practical use. The emerging personality-oriented and phenomenological approaches in many areas of life inevitably sooner or later turn people with their questions to anthropology, as a deep foundation, with a search for common and accessible for understanding and use essential words, an essential language for explaining diverse and multi-level personal processes.
Perhaps the language of "existentialism", including the language of the books of Christos Yannaras, could become more fully revealing in today's linear period of time, both apologetic and systematic theological tasks. Inviting to reveal and make accessible to modern man the accumulated invaluable historical church experience, and also explaining what the essential theological categories in Christianity are, i.e. what Christianity itself is and what it is not.
In addition to general theological categories and, if one can put it this way, descriptions of objective knowledge, the “existential” language allows one to approach a subjective description of a person’s personal, intimate kairological experience of time. A person’s experience (including religious experience) is personal, “lonely” – because it is acquired, nurtured and lived out in the human soul, isolated by the mode of its earthly existence” 47 . And since “man is a spiritual-mental-physical otherness to man” 48 , there is always the Other, and the Other is always different, distinct, and there is a variety of ways of relating to the Other and with the Other, and sometimes even the discovery of oneself within oneself as the Other – this is a miracle that is possible only in communication and openness. Therefore, then, in a sincere dialogue, in love and mutual respect, separateness (as isolation and limitation) can be overcome by metapersonal experience. And this depth can be described by speech. This time of dialogue, the time of a person's inner speech, a person's speech with the Other, depends largely on the attitude to the problem of speech, time and eternity in general. The experiential experience of the fullness of time (past, present, future) and eternity, the awareness of living one's existence in the world, filling one's experience with ultimate meanings, the ability to reflect, the depth of contact and dialogue, prayer experience, church experience, the attitude to the experience of the Kingdom of God in the context of the ongoing eschatology and personal correlation with this mystery, including many other aspects that a person is able to comprehend and accommodate, influence this multifaceted and multilayered theme.
