Christos Yannaras > Quotes

“To share out your soul freely, that is what metanoia (a change of mind, or repentance)really refers to: a mental product of love. A change of mind, or love for the undemonstrable. And you throw off every conceptual cloak of self-defense, you give up the fleshly resistance of your ego. Repentance has nothing to do with self-regarding sorrow for legal transgressions. It is an ecstatic erotic self-emptying. A change of mind about the mode of thinking and being.”
― Christos Yannaras, Variations on the Song of Songs

“In humans (and humans alone), sexuality is embodied in desire--in the primordial desire for life-as-relation. That the sex drive serves the vital desire for relation--that on the level of the primordial process, the desire for life-in-itself clothes itself in the sex drive--belongs to the particularity of being human.”
― Christos Yannaras, Relational Ontology

“Every specific human being, however, thinks, judges, imagines, wills and expresses himself or herself in a unique, dissimilar, and unrepeatable mode--a mode of unpredictable difference, or otherness, which objectively defies description or delimitation.”
― Christos Yannaras, Relational Ontology

“The word 'God' defines a personal relation, not an objective concept. Like the name of the beloved in every love. It does not imply separation and distance. Hearing the beloved name is an immediate awareness, a dimensionless proximity of presence. It is our life wholly transformed into relation.”
― Christos Yannaras, Variations on the Song of Songs

“Increasingly, Christian life seems to be nothing more than a particular way of behaving, a code of good conduct. Christianity is increasingly alienated, becoming a social attribute adapted to meet the least worthy of human demands - conformity, sterile conservatism, pusillanimity and timidity; it is adapted to the trivial moralizing which seeks to adorn cowardice and individual security with the funerary decoration of social decorum.”
― Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality

“We know God by cultivating a relationship, not by understanding a concept.

The relation constitutes the very subjectivity of of our existence. We participate in existence consciously and rationally, with subjective self-knowledge and identity, because the erotic drive of our nature is transformed into a personal relation when there arises in the space of the Other the first signifier of desire: the maternal presence. The subject is born with love's first leap of joy.”
― Christos Yannaras, Variations on the Song of Songs

“Today, in this atmosphere, the very word and idea of asceticism is probably incomprehensible to a very large number of Christian people. Anyone talking about fasting and chastity and voluntary restriction of our individual desires is sure to meet with condescension or mockery. This does not, of course, prevent people from having their “metaphysical convictions” and believing in a “supreme being” or in the “sweet Jesus” who had a wonderful ethical teaching. The question is, however, what is the use of “metaphysical convictions” when they do not go any way towards providing a real answer — as opposed to one that is idealistic and abstract — to the problem of death, the scandal of the dissolution of the body in the earth. This real answer is to be found only in the knowledge granted by asceticism, in the effort to resist death in our own bodies, and by the dynamic triumph over the deadening of man. And not just in any kind of asceticism, but in that which consists in conformity to the example of Christ, who willingly accepted death so as to destroy death — “trampling down death by death.”

Every voluntary mortification of the egocentricity which is “contrary to nature” is a dynamic destruction of death and a triumph for the life of the person.”
― Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality

“Once the Church denies her ontological identity-- what she really, essentially is as an existential event whereby individual survival is changed into a personal life of love and communion-- then from that very moment she is reduced to a conventional form under which individuals are grouped together into an institution; she becomes an expression of man's fall, albeit a religious one. She begins to serve the "religious needs" of the people, the individualistic emotional and psychological needs of fallen man.”
― Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality

“The people who really thirst for life, who stand daily on the brink of every kind of death, who struggle desperately to distinguish some light in the seated mystery of human existence— these are the people to whom the Gospel of salvation is primarily and most especially addressed, and inevitably they all remain far removed from the rationalistically organized social conventionalism of established Christianity.”
― Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality

“In the Church, bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road to
theological knowledge. It is not possible for man to come to know the truth of life, the truth of God and the truth of his own existence purely through intellectual categories...”
― Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality

“Păcatul eşec existenţial.”
― Christos Yannaras

“In the Church, bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road to
theological knowledge. It is not possible for man to come to know the truth of life, the truth of Godand the truth of his own existence purely through intellectual categories...”
― Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality

“The Church has its hierarchical arrangement and structure. It is an arrangement and structure which serves the realization and manifestation of the Church, that is the celebration of the Eucharist. But there is no administrative or organizational intentionality, at least, preceding the truth of the Church, its identity; for where such an intentionality does precede, it brings confusion and falsification of that truth and identity. The administrative arrangement and organizational structure and hierarchy of officers in the Church results from the celebration of the Eucharist and is concerned with this alone. Secondarily, they serve the dynamic extension of the Eucharist, the eucharistic transformation of the life of the faithful, the declaration and testimony of their faith to the world outside.”
― Christos Yannaras, Faith as an Ecclesial Experience