Christos Yannaras

Philosophy, Theology, Culture

Andreas Andreopoulos, Demetrios Harper, Andreas Andreopoulos, Demetrios Harper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781472472083
• eBook ISBN: 9780429809965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Christos Yannaras is one of the most significant Orthodox theologians of recent times. The work of Yannaras is virtually synonymous with a turn or renaissance of Orthodox philosophy and theology, initially within Greece, but as the present volume confirms, well beyond it. His work engages not only with issues of philosophy and theology, but also takes in wider questions of culture and politics.

With contributions from established and new scholars, the book is divided into three sections, which correspond to the main directions that Christos Yannaras has followed – philosophy, theology, and culture – and reflects on the ways in which Yannaras has engaged and influenced thought across these fields, in addition to themes including ecclesiology, tradition, identity, and ethics.

This volume facilitates the dialogue between the thought of Yannaras, which is expressed locally yet is relevant globally, and Western Christian thinkers. It will be of great interest to scholars of Orthodox and Eastern Christian theology and philosophy, as well as theology more widely.

Part I
Philosophy

1 The apophatic in modern Orthodox theology – and modern philosophy

Andrew Louth

One of the characteristics of Orthodox theology in the last century has been an insistence on the apophatic, on negative theology, or a theology of denial or negation. This is the perception of many Orthodox, and of many Western Christians interested in the Orthodox tradition; as an example of the latter, I take the remark by Joseph Famerée early on in his contribution to the symposium, Receptive Ecumenism and the Call to Catholic Learning, which dealt with what Catholicism might learn from Orthodoxy on the notion of collegiality: ‘Eastern theology is, as such, negative or apophatic’.¹ Closely associated with such stress on the apophatic is the distinction, often called Neo-Palamite, between God’s essence and his energies (the usual expression in English, though it seems to me that a more accurate translation of the Greek ἐνέργεια would be ‘activity’): this is a distinction within God, corresponding to the conviction that in his essence God is unknowable, but through his uncreated energies, God himself, and not merely some divine effect, is known and experienced. Though this distinction between God’s essence and energies goes back to the hesychast controversy of the fourteenth century, when it was championed by St Gregory Palamas (and indeed can be traced, though in a more rudimentary form, much further back in the Patristic tradition, for instance to St Basil the Great), it is only in the last century that it became a regular feature of Orthodox theology. As Metropolitan Kallistos remarked in his foreword to the first volume of the English translation of Fr Dumitru Stăniloae’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology:

The central place that [Fr Dumitru] assigns to this distinction [between God’s essence and his uncreated energies] is a new and significant development, so far as works of modern Orthodox dogmatic theology are concerned. The Palamite teaching is ignored in the Dogmatics of Androutsos, and allowed no more that a passing mention in that of Trembelas. There is no reference to it in the main text of Fr Michael Pomazansky’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, although a few lines are devoted to St Gregory Palamas in an appendix.²

It is by no means universal in modern Orthodox theology: Metropolitan John Zizioulas makes no use of the distinction between essence and energies, and is unhappy about Vladimir Lossky and ‘his emphasis on the notion of apophaticism in a manner unknown to the clarity of the Greek Patristic tradition’.³ Fr Sophrony of Essex was also unhappy about a notion of the apophatic that would hide from us God ‘as he is’ (though that is clearly not the purpose of the essence/energies distinction, which Fr Sophrony uses freely).⁴ Nevertheless, many theologians of the last century, not least those whose voices have been heard in the West, have endorsed the notion of apophatic theology and the essence/energies distinction. It is not simply a matter of the influence of Vladimir Lossky, though the apophatic is very prominent in his theology; Bulgakov and Florovsky, Stăniloae, Myrrha Lot-Borodine, Olivier Clément, John Romanides, Metropolitan Kallistos, and last, but by no means least, Christos Yannaras – all these are theologians for whom the apophatic and the Neo-Palamite essence/energies distinction are important. However, for all the near-universality of the apophatic in modern Orthodox theology, it seems to me that what is meant by the apophatic often has rather different nuances in the different thinkers I have mentioned. What I want to do in this brief paper is bring out some of these differences, and then, taking my cue from the place of the apophatic in Yannaras’s thought, point to one problem of modern philosophy where the Orthodox understanding of the apophatic might have something to contribute.

Let me start with Fr Sergii Bulgakov, who might seem an unlikely apophatic theologian, as he could be thought to have altogether too much to say about God. Nevertheless, in his first major theological work, Unfading Light, the first section is called ‘Divine Nothing’, and the largest part of that on ‘Negative (Apophatic) Theology’ (Thomas Allen’s translation, which seems a faithful rendering of Otritsatelnoe Bogoslovie), a massive survey of negative theology from Plato to Kant. He also makes reference to the essence/energies distinction not infrequently in his great trilogy, mostly by way of arguing that sophiology is tackling the same problem that Palamas solved by use of the essence/energies distinction, a claim which has some plausibility. Fr Georges Florovsky has little to say about Palamas and rarely uses the essence/energies distinction; however, in his brief ‘St Gregory Palamas and the Tradition of the Fathers’, although mainly concerned with the nature of tradition, he ably summarizes the background and meaning of the Palamite distinction, relating it to the notion of theosis, and in his paper on ‘St Athanasius’ Concept of Creation’, given here in Oxford in 1959, he makes use of the very similar distinction between essence and powers (οὐσία and δυνάμεις) to account for the presence of the transcendent Word in the created order. Neither with Bulgakov nor with Florovsky, however, is the thrust of the essence/energies distinction epistemological; it is concerned with the presence of God in the cosmos, rather than with apophatic theology.

Vladimir Lossky is best known for the lectures he published in 1944, called Essai sur la théologie mystique de l’Église d’Orient. The mystical, for Lossky, is bound up with the apophatic. For Lossky, apophatic theology is not a negative corrective to affirmative, or cataphatic, theology; it is the way through which we engage with God, strip ourselves of any intellectual pretensions before God.

Lossky comments:

Indeed, not only does he [the theologian, the one who seeks God] go forth from his own self … but he belongs wholly to the Unknowable, being deified in this union with the uncreated. Here union means deification. At the same time, while intimately united with God he knows Him only as Unknowable, in other words as infinitely set apart by His nature, remaining even in union, inaccessible in that which He is in His essential being.⁵

Lossky raises the question as to whether in speaking of union thus we are envisaging an ecstatic experience, and responds:

Apophaticism is not necessarily a theology of ecstasy. It is, above all, an attitude of mind which refuses to form concepts about God. Such an attitude utterly excludes all abstract and purely intellectual theology which would adapt the mysteries of the wisdom of God to human ways of thought. It is an existential attitude which involves the whole man: there is no theology apart from experience; it is necessary to change, to become a new man. To know God one must draw near to Him. No one who does not follow the path of union with God can be a theologian … Apophaticism is, therefore, a criterion: the sure sign of an attitude of mind conformed to truth. In this sense all true theology is fundamentally apophatic.⁶

This apophatic approach has manifold implications for the pursuit of theology. An apophatic theology is tentative: ‘[a]ny theological doctrine which pretends to be a perfect explanation of the revealed mystery will inevitably appear to be false: by the very fact of pretending to the fulness of knowledge it will set itself in opposition to the fulness in which the Truth is known in part’.⁷ This does not at all mean that Lossky sits light to dogma: dogmas are important, but not as the building blocks of some comprehensive account of the divine mysteries, but rather as a series of decisions, arrived at by the Church, to prevent ways of thinking that might obscure or bypass the mystery of God before whom we stand in awe. One might say that it is impossible to understand God and his ways; nevertheless, it is very easy to misunderstand God and his ways, and dogmas are there to help prevent such misunderstanding. As Olivier Clément put it, summarizing the lectures he heard Lossky give in the 1950s:

The whole purpose of the Church, in defining [dogma], is to preserve the possibility, for each Christian, of participating with all his being in the whole of revelation, that is to say, of sharing in the very life of Him who reveals himself. That is why, said Vladimir Lossky, Orthodoxy refuses to multiply dogmatic definitions. The definition, when it can no longer be avoided, is there to correspond to a precise, practical necessity, is there as evidence to bar the route to erroneous interpretations.⁸

In interpreting and exploring the meaning of dogma, this sense of reserve remains. Lossky cites a remark of St Ignatios of Antioch: ‘He who possesses the word of Jesus can even hear his silence’.⁹ Lossky comments: ‘The words of Revelation have then a margin of silence which cannot be picked up by the ears of those who are outside’.¹⁰ There is a margin of silence that surrounds any manifestation of mystery. If we are to understand what is revealed, we need to be attuned to the margin of silence that surrounds it. That margin of silence is discerned only in prayer. The kind of dogmatic attitude, if we can call it that, which is necessary if we are to engage with the mysteries of the Church, the mystery of God, is, in many ways, a quite ‘undogmatic’ attitude, using the word in its commonly accepted sense. It reminds me very much of what the English poet Keats called ‘negative capability’: ‘that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.¹¹

The notion of the apophatic permeates the whole of Lossky’s theology. In particular, it is central to his analysis of the personal. The very notion of the personal, he suggests, arises only from reflection on the mystery of the Trinity: apart from the Trinity the mystery of personal being is closed to us. A personal apophaticism is revealed to us only by the doctrine of the Trinity. For personhood itself is beyond conceptualization:

Personality can only be grasped in this life by a direct intuition; it can only be expressed in a work of art. When we say ‘this is by Mozart’, or ‘this is by Rembrandt’, we are in both cases dealing with a personal world which has no equivalent anywhere.¹²

The apophatic and the personal reflect each other, as it were, but not in a merely conceptual way: it is only the person that can make the apophatic approach to the divine mystery, for the apophatic is concerned with a personal, or existential, attitude. We have no time to pursue this further now, but before we leave Lossky, we must underline this point by quoting from the last chapter of his book, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. There we read, in his recapitulation:

We have had again and again, in the course of our study of the mystical theology of the Eastern Church, to refer to the apophatic attitude which is characteristic of its religious thought. As we have seen, the negations which draw attention to the divine incomprehensibility are not prohibitions upon knowledge: apophaticism, so far from being a limitation, enables us to transcend all concepts, every sphere of philosophical speculation. It is a tendency towards an ever-greater plenitude, in which knowledge is transformed into ignorance, the theology of concepts into contemplation, dogmas into experience of ineffable mysteries. It is, moreover, an existential theology involving man’s entire being, which sets him upon the way of union, which obliges him to be changed, to transform his nature that he may attain the true gnosis which is the contemplation of the Holy Trinity. Now, this ‘change of heart’, this μετάνοια, means repentance. The apophatic way of Eastern theology is the repentance of the human person before the face of the living God.¹³

I’ve dwelt long on Lossky, because it seems to me that the notion of the apophatic is the key to his theology, and that he relates several other themes – reserve, the notion of the personal – to it.

Perforce, I must deal more briefly with Fr Dumitru Stănilaoe. Fr Stăniloae, like most modern Orthodox theologians, gives an important place to apophatic theology in our knowledge of God, that is, to the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Christos Yannaras: brief CV and list of works
• List of works
• A brief address by His Beatitude Anastasios (Giannoulatos), Archbishop of Albania
• Introduction
• Part I Philosophy
• Part II Theology
• Part III Culture
• Index