Remembering Christos Yannaras (1935–2024)

The Greek philosopher and theologian Christos Yannaras passed away at the age of 89 on 24 August 2024. My journey, and unlikely friendship, with Christos began in the most innocuous of ways. In 2015, a year into a PhD on the political theology of Oliver O’Donovan at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia, a friend and mentor of mine casually mentioned the name Christos Yannaras to me. He assumed that I must of course be familiar with Yannaras and his work as a Greek speaker studying theology. I confess that I had never heard the name. As it happened, I was about to travel to Athens with my Greek wife and then two-year old son to visit her family during the Greek summer. So, I decided to buy a couple of books by this Yannaras in Athens and to make them my holiday reading. I purchased Against Religion and Relational Ontology and promptly devoured them. I recall receiving curious and baffled looks by Greek passengers on the ferry that took us from Athens to the island of Paros, where we spent a week, as I sat there, an Australian of Anglo-decent, reading a book called Οντολογία της Σχέσης (Relational Ontology).

I was immediately taken by Yannaras’ style and approach, which I found novel, refreshing and challenging, particularly as someone formed in a very different theological tradition: a distinctly Australian brand of Anglican Evangelical Christianity. Once back in Australia, I ordered more Yannaras books and soon found myself in the strange situation of writing a PhD on an English, Anglican political and moral theologian while at the same time effectively doing an unofficial shadow PhD on the Eastern Orthodox philosopher-theologian Christos Yannaras. Many thought I was actually doing my PhD on him.

After reading several more of his books, I wrote a letter to Christos expressing my gratitude for his work and telling him about the impact it had had on me. I first reached out to Norman Russell, the person responsible for translating the majority of Christos’s books, and thus the person who more than any other has made his thought accessible to English-speakers, asking if he could put me in touch with Christos, which he kindly did. Before long, I received a moving hand-written letter in return that marked the beginning of a special bond and friendship that defied our geographical, generational, cultural and theological distance.

In March 2017, Christos and I had our first face-to-face encounter at a conference at Cambridge University called “Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras’ Thought.” I gave a paper called “The Problematic of Greek Identity and Christos Yannaras’ Quest for a Politics of Authentic Existence.” Christos and I had already begun a regular correspondence by the time of the conference and he had read and commented on my paper before I gave it. Christos had always craved an engagement of his work outside and beyond the Greek and Orthodox worlds in which he was a significant, yet controversial, figure. He was genuinely moved by my interest in and engagement with his work. It was the kind of engagement he had always desired, yet had rarely received until then.

The highlight of the conference was attending a private dinner at Peterhouse during which Christos, Rowan Williams and John Milbank engaged in a wide-ranging conversation about philosophy and theology. There was a brief heart-stopping moment at the beginning of the dinner in which the three giants of theology flirted with the idea of conducting the conversation in French, only to settle on English for the benefit of the flies on the wall like me (my French is good enough to order a baguette in Paris, but insufficient to follow a discussion on ontology). Christos spoke in Greek via the interpretation of one of the Greek guests attending the dinner.

Christos made a private remark to me after the dinner that has long struck me. In reviewing the papers given at the conference earlier that day, he said of one of them that its author “δεν είχε καμία αίσθηση υπαρξιακού προβληματισμού” (had no sense of existential problematic). This comment epitomised the motivation and intent behind Christos’s intellectual output: he was on a lifelong pursuit to understand the deepest structures and meaning of existence, along with the place, purpose and destiny of the human being in it. He was troubled by existence. He found it difficult and challenging to understand, liable to so much delusion and perversion. He thirsted for the truth of existence—real, authentic existence. He found it in the Trinitarian first cause of existence, known by the signifier “God,” as recounted in the Bible. The biblical testimony attested to an “ecclesial event” characterised by and embodying a new mode of existence inaugurated by the incarnation: a mode in which the created human being could participate in the mode of existence of the uncreated Trinitarian God. That mode consisted in a free, loving communion of persons in relationship. The person was a unique, distinct and unrepeatable otherness that could only come into full existence through relationship—relationship with other persons, the surrounding natural world, and ultimately the God who called human persons into loving communion with him.

I finished my PhD on O’Donovan just a few months after the conference in Cambridge, and I immediately began looking for something to occupy my intellectual time and energy. It was Christos who kindly facilitated my next intellectual adventure, by asking me if I would be prepared to translate one of his books. He put me in touch with Dimitris Panagopoulos, a former student of his living in London who was looking to financially support the translation of Christos’ remaining corpus, and Fr Andreas Andreopoulos at the University of Winchester, who was editing a series in which the translation could be published. So, thanks to Christos, and with the support of Dimitris and Fr Andreas, I set about translating The Effable and the Ineffable: The Linguistic Boundaries of Metaphysical Realism (Winchester University Press, 2021), a work that explored the limitations of theological language to signify the reality of existence. One of the insights I have benefited from most in Christos’s thought is his unique construal of apophaticism. It is centred on the simple, yet profound, observation that signifiers do not exhaust the extent of our knowledge about reality, so much of which we access via experience and verify in shared, convergent experience. It is a caution against conflating signifiers with signifieds, a problem found in the theological tradition in which I was formed. It is a reminder to always remain cognisant that reality transcends our linguistic capacities as human beings. We must learn to live with the ineffable and ultimately accept that there is much about God that not only lies beyond our comprehension, but beyond the conventional signifiers we use to communicate with each other.

Translating The Effable and the Ineffable was like beginning a mountaineering career at Mount Everest. But it allowed me to acquaint myself with Christos’s thought with the kind of intimacy that only the process of translation can afford, and for that I am most grateful. It also had the wonderful by-product of providing me with an opportunity to spend some more time with Christos, this time in Athens. I visited him at his apartment in Nea Smyrni over several days, working through a long list of translation problems that could only be unlocked by the author. He was a patient and gracious host, picking me up from the nearby metro station in his car at the spritely age of 84, cooking me lunch and hosting me for hours of conversation and work. I found him to be a warm, kind and generous soul.

This, it turned out, would be the last time I would see Christos in person. We remained in contact via email, and I was fortunate enough to translate a second book of his in 2020, again with the support of Dimitris Panagopoulos. Christos once again patiently and graciously responded to my many requests for clarification and assistance in understanding the text in its original Greek. On the “Meaning” of Politics was published earlier this year in the Routledge series Transforming Political Theologies. As things transpired, the book, originally published in Greek in 2019, would prove to be one of his last.

I wrote an introduction to On the “Meaning” of Politics that recounted some of the seminal events in Christos’s life, from living through the Nazi occupation of Athens as a child, followed by the ensuing civil war upon liberation, to his fractious relationship with the theological establishment in Greece throughout much of his career. His first attempt at a PhD, at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, met effectively with rejection (wholesale changes were demanded). Christos told me that the thesis was charged with “atheism.” Christos refused to comply with the demanded changes on principle and went on to study in Bonn and then in Paris where he received a PhD in philosophy. He later obtained a second PhD, this time in theology, from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. But Yannaras failed to secure a position in any theological school in a Greek university. He was already a well-known and controversial author by this time. He eventually found a home at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, albeit not without yet another scandal involving concerted efforts by students and lecturers to thwart the appointment of a “theologian,” ironically unwelcome in the theological fraternity of Greece. He would go on to serve as a Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at Panteion, where he had a fruitful career as a lecturer and writer. He remained an Emeritus Professor there until his death. The School of Theology in the National Kapodistrian University of Athens awarded Christos an honorary doctorate in 2017.

Christos was a prolific writer, penning a weekly column in major Greek newspapers well into his eighties. These articles, along with his books, many of which sold well in Greece, as well as television appearances, cemented his reputation as one of Greece’s highest profile public intellectuals, a feat unmatched, or at least unsurpassed, by a public theologian anywhere in the post-Christian West today. He was an uncompromising and withering critic of the Orthodox Church in Greece, charging it with the sin of “religionization,” the Western pathology that can be traced back to the collapse of the Roman Empire and the emergence of a “barbarian” form of Christianity in its place. Christianity was not a religion, in Christos’s view, but rather an event to be experienced and participated in, the calling together of the faithful to partake in the eucharist as a community of persons in loving communion. Christianity was ultimately a mode of existence to be lived and experienced, not a set of facts and propositions to be understood intellectually. The religion of Christianity transformed the “ecclesial event” into an ideology obsessed with the rectitude of belief, with disastrous consequence exhibited in the brutal punishment of heretics, and those striving for, and failing, to consistently live out the individual moral strictures upon which salvation was said to depend.

It is this critique, elaborated over many books and articles, that has caused such controversy in Greek theology, and Eastern Orthodox theology more broadly. Reformers in the Orthodox churches have worried that Yannaras’ desire to purify the Orthodox faith from its “Western” pathologies will keep it mired in bigoted ethno-nationalism. Reformers think the Eastern Orthodox churches can, and should, learn from some of the liberal ideas of contemporary Western Christianity, particularly in relation to issues like pluralism. However, many critics have failed to appreciate that Christos’s critique of Western Christianity and civilisation has always been immanent. He self-consciously and explicitly wrote as a man educated and formed in Western traditions of thought and “religion,” albeit as a man living in a land that had retained, to some extent, a non-Western inheritance in the form of Byzantine Christianity and pagan Greek philosophy. He struggled to reconcile these traditions and experiences, describing Greece as suffering from a debilitating type of cultural schizophrenia. He believed Greece could find the resources to solve its “Western” problems in the patrimony of its Eastern spirituality and classical intellectual tradition.

Increasing numbers of Western theologians and thinkers are now discovering in Christos’s writings not just a powerful critique of Western Christianity and secular culture that now resonates with many sons and daughters of the West, but also a vision of society, life, community and faith that transcends the tired, and unfulfilling, materialistic individualism that underpins them. In On the “Meaning” of Politics, Christos argues that truth, conceived as “disclosure,” can only be attained in community, by living together as persons in relationship, thus giving the polis a vital corporate epistemological function in the human being’s quest to know and live according to true existence. This is an example of the new horizons and vistas Christos’s thought opens for those willing to take the time to read and contemplate his work. Opening these new horizons and vistas on reality are Christos’s distinct contribution to theology and philosophy.

One suspects that Christos Yannaras’ stature is destined to grow in the coming years and decades as more people search for fresh ideas and perspectives on a Western civilisation that virtually everyone now agrees is in crisis. It is a shame that the engagement Christos yearned for throughout his life only really began to appear in its final chapters. He lived to see just the first fruits of his work. However, the engagement that exists now, and which one can only hope will continue to grow, will serve as a fitting testament to a life devoted to contending with the problem of existence.