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Contemporary Greek Theologians #3
The Freedom of Morality
This major Orthodox contribution to the study of "ethics" takes as its point of departure the concept of "hypostasis" or "person," not only as this is presented in the theology of the Greek Fathers but also as it is experienced in the worship, ascetical life and art of the Orthodox Church. In this perspective, morality is seen not as "an objective measure for evaluating character and behavior, but the dynamic response of personal freedom to the existential truth and authenticity of man." The author states that "freedom carries with it the ultimate possibility of taking precisely this that man should deny his own existential truth and authenticity, and alienate and distort his existence, his being." What we call the morality of man is the way he relates to this adventure of his freedom. Morality reveals what man is in principle, as the image of God, but also what he becomes through the adventure of his a being transformed "in the likeness of God."
272 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1984
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About the author
Christos Yannaras
59 books81 followersChristos Yannaras (Greek: Χρήστος Γιανναράς) was a Greek philosopher, Eastern Orthodox theologian and author of more than 50 books which have been translated into many languages. He was a professor emeritus of philosophy at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens.
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December 18, 2024
Christos Yannaras begins this existentialist treatment of Christian ethics with a stinging but evocative indictment of what passes for the Christian life in a lifeless modern world:
In the life of the Orthodox Church, morality is not a set of behavioral rules imposed by force or convention for the sake of individual or collective “improvement,” nor is it an “objective” apparatus of right conduct derived from abstract reasoning. It is neither “objective”—understood as something purified of personal life and energy—nor is it “subjective”—understood as the province of an individuated will asserting itself over against others. Likewise, it is neither an individual nor a collective enterprise, as these are both impersonal concepts: neither an individual nor a collective is a who, but only a what.
The human ethos is determined by existence rather than essence, and existence is the personal concretization of being as a hypostasis of life. Morality entails the authenticity with which we relate to the free and irreducibly personal mode of existence by which being is constituted. Nothing taken to be wholly objective—that is, defined exclusively in terms of an impersonal nature or essence—could ultimately be real. Nature is real because it is grounded, unified, recapitulated, and endowed with existence in a living, personal, hypostatic center. The person is the substrate of nature, the place where nature realizes its existential possibilities in life—life as true being.
The personal “who” determines the essential “what,” rather than the other way around. The person therefore not only “sums up” nature—is not only the fountainhead through which nature wells up into life, consciousness, and the hypostatic “I AM”—but also transcends the self-enclosure of nature in personal distinctiveness and freedom from essential predeterminations.* To be moral is to embrace one’s calling to hypostatic personhood (as a subject of nature) rather than mere individuality (as an object enclosed within nature), and thereby to share in the true existence of God, “the personal hypostasis of eternal life,” completing the work of creation. The personal ethos is freedom from the limitations of space, time, the passions, principalities, powers, material conditions, and even mortality. It is reified in ecstatic, unobstructed personal communion—in love.
This personal distinctiveness is the image of God in humanity. Christian theology speaks of one God subsisting as three persons or hypostases: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yannaras claims (quite incautiously, in my view) that the West tends to understand the “one God” as the shared essence of the Holy Trinity—thought to be logically “prior” to the hypostases who “emerge” from it—while the East, following the language of scripture and the Nicene Creed, speaks of “one God, the Father Almighty,” whose personal existence constitutes the divine essence and who pre-eternally hypostasizes the Son and Spirit (and Himself, as the Father), sharing with them the fullness of His divinity in the self-offering love which is His very mode of being and which makes both divine and human personal existence possible. Love forms being into hypostases, and is thus “the only possibility for existence.” While persons are distinct, they are never alone, being constituted by their mutual coinherence in loving communion. Individuals, conversely, are alone but never distinct, being entombed within the predeterminations of a falsely “autonomized” nature.
The controversy over whether one can legitimately say that the “one God” posited by Christian doctrine refers to the Son, the Spirit, the divine essence, or the “collective” hypostatic Trinity constitutes one of those fruitless logical pretzels into which Christian thought has habitually tied itself, as well as seemingly betraying the existentialist mode of theological encounter that Yannaras advocates. But Yannaras is really concerned with avoiding a depersonalization of truth: a phenomenon he holds responsible for the totalitarian regimentation of modern society—beginning, apparently, with baroque Catholicism—by a technocracy that imposes an unbending, “objective,” and supposedly infallible program upon it, obscuring personal existence and crushing personal freedom under its weight. Truth here is no longer the achievement of freedom in a personal mode of being, but an abstract, infallible dogma based on the logic of natural necessity to which the person must submit.
Writing in the 1980s, Yannaras saw both capitalism and Soviet-style communism as totalitarian systems, fundamentally incapable of fostering true society—defined as personal community—because they both tried to organize social life as a series of relationships between objects rather than people. Marx himself intuited this problem by describing the alienation (depersonalization) of labor and the fetishization of the commodity; but once Marxism achieved political power it became little more than state-owned capitalism, subordinating personal expression to the materialistic demands of productive efficiency (managed by a centralized and faceless bureaucracy), and the infallibility of the party line. Only the mystical (rather than institutional) Church, the eucharistic community of personal freedom and solidarity, the Body of Christ, can truly “overcome the world” and change our way of being.**
Like God, humanity is a single common essence concretized in a multiplicity of persons. Each human person recapitulates the entirety of human nature (and created nature as such, but Yannaras doesn’t discuss this), endowing it with existential distinctiveness in his pathway, as an ever-changing created being growing by divine grace from a merely natural individual—limited, isolated, indistinct, mortal, and existentially false—into the full realization of his true existence as a personal manifestation of the personal God. But with the Fall of Adam—who may be thought of as humanity’s “false consciousness” of self as natural individual rather than as person—human nature, following the lead of this corrupted self-determination, is left bereft of its unifying hypostaseity, taking on a false autonomy and fragmenting into so many individual, atomized (Adamized?) wills, governed by the carnivorous ethos of “natural” self-preservation, threatening to shackle the vivifying love in which personal distinctiveness is realized in communion. Now stranded in an isolated fragment of a nature perishing in its existential failure, the human person’s quest for hypostatic freedom is experienced as a polarization against nature, an internal struggle between hypostatic life and individual survival, between the spirit and the flesh.
Having been sealed off in the dominion of the flesh from the true personal existence that is God, a gulf emerged between the divine and human natures which the human being, by virtue of his shrunkenness in individuality, lacked the power to overcome. The redemption of human nature required the incarnation of God’s hypostatic being in the form of Christ, who, as the incarnate Word and Son of God, through his life of radical, defenseless love and solidarity with the human race, taking as his own the fullness of human nature in all its brokenness and alienation even unto a freely-accepted death, “trampled down death by death,” and ascended to his pre-eternal coinherence with the Father, existentially recreating human nature as its abiding hypostatic union with the divine life and opening the way for the entire race of mortals to transform its dying individuality into living personhood through the Way of the Cross.
With Christ enthroned as the unifying human hypostasis, the “life-giving spirit,” human nature exists in communion with God as a new ethos through which all of humanity, in the corporate, communal, ascetical life of the Church, can respond to the ontological fact of its freedom by refusing individual self-sufficiency and embracing personal authenticity, participating in the infinite life of love “that moves the sun and the other stars.”***
I like existentialist Orthodoxy.
* It’s important to note that this is not the liberation of an individuated ego from nature—the quixotic project of transhumanism. It is rather the restoration and salvation of the world (I won’t say tikkun olam—whoops, I just did) through its reconnection to life in hypostatic communion.
** Yannaras speaks as if political-ecclesial tyranny is solely a product of the West or Western ideologies, but this is of course contrary to the historical record. Despite the inadequacies of Western liberalism and the dysfunction of Western polities, Byzantium and Tsarist Russia are hardly models for a more just and humane society. Yannaras could also be forgiven for seeing the institutional Church as a redoubt of freedom and humanity during the Soviet era, but the Russian Orthodox Church's current full-throated endorsement of genocidal warfare abroad and fascist politics at home, even to the point of participating in the persecution of dissident clergy, demonstrates that the Orthodox world is no less susceptible to dehumanizing power structures than any Western institution. This is precisely why Yannaras is right to say that the Church should be thought of in existentialist terms: not as a political program, but as a new life in which all can participate.
*** In psychological terms, Adam might be thought of as the immature ego, and Christ as the individuated person who has accommodated the fullness of the self. Human asceticism is not an individual's conquest of his fallen nature, but the response, within the weakness of this nature, to its salvation in Christ. The ego doesn't "accomplish" union with the self, but only makes itself capable of receiving the grace of this union precisely by accepting its own limitations, refusing to absolutize the finitude of its isolated mode of being.
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. 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 sealed 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 conservatism of established Christianity.
In the life of the Orthodox Church, morality is not a set of behavioral rules imposed by force or convention for the sake of individual or collective “improvement,” nor is it an “objective” apparatus of right conduct derived from abstract reasoning. It is neither “objective”—understood as something purified of personal life and energy—nor is it “subjective”—understood as the province of an individuated will asserting itself over against others. Likewise, it is neither an individual nor a collective enterprise, as these are both impersonal concepts: neither an individual nor a collective is a who, but only a what.
The human ethos is determined by existence rather than essence, and existence is the personal concretization of being as a hypostasis of life. Morality entails the authenticity with which we relate to the free and irreducibly personal mode of existence by which being is constituted. Nothing taken to be wholly objective—that is, defined exclusively in terms of an impersonal nature or essence—could ultimately be real. Nature is real because it is grounded, unified, recapitulated, and endowed with existence in a living, personal, hypostatic center. The person is the substrate of nature, the place where nature realizes its existential possibilities in life—life as true being.
The personal “who” determines the essential “what,” rather than the other way around. The person therefore not only “sums up” nature—is not only the fountainhead through which nature wells up into life, consciousness, and the hypostatic “I AM”—but also transcends the self-enclosure of nature in personal distinctiveness and freedom from essential predeterminations.* To be moral is to embrace one’s calling to hypostatic personhood (as a subject of nature) rather than mere individuality (as an object enclosed within nature), and thereby to share in the true existence of God, “the personal hypostasis of eternal life,” completing the work of creation. The personal ethos is freedom from the limitations of space, time, the passions, principalities, powers, material conditions, and even mortality. It is reified in ecstatic, unobstructed personal communion—in love.
This personal distinctiveness is the image of God in humanity. Christian theology speaks of one God subsisting as three persons or hypostases: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Yannaras claims (quite incautiously, in my view) that the West tends to understand the “one God” as the shared essence of the Holy Trinity—thought to be logically “prior” to the hypostases who “emerge” from it—while the East, following the language of scripture and the Nicene Creed, speaks of “one God, the Father Almighty,” whose personal existence constitutes the divine essence and who pre-eternally hypostasizes the Son and Spirit (and Himself, as the Father), sharing with them the fullness of His divinity in the self-offering love which is His very mode of being and which makes both divine and human personal existence possible. Love forms being into hypostases, and is thus “the only possibility for existence.” While persons are distinct, they are never alone, being constituted by their mutual coinherence in loving communion. Individuals, conversely, are alone but never distinct, being entombed within the predeterminations of a falsely “autonomized” nature.
The controversy over whether one can legitimately say that the “one God” posited by Christian doctrine refers to the Son, the Spirit, the divine essence, or the “collective” hypostatic Trinity constitutes one of those fruitless logical pretzels into which Christian thought has habitually tied itself, as well as seemingly betraying the existentialist mode of theological encounter that Yannaras advocates. But Yannaras is really concerned with avoiding a depersonalization of truth: a phenomenon he holds responsible for the totalitarian regimentation of modern society—beginning, apparently, with baroque Catholicism—by a technocracy that imposes an unbending, “objective,” and supposedly infallible program upon it, obscuring personal existence and crushing personal freedom under its weight. Truth here is no longer the achievement of freedom in a personal mode of being, but an abstract, infallible dogma based on the logic of natural necessity to which the person must submit.
Writing in the 1980s, Yannaras saw both capitalism and Soviet-style communism as totalitarian systems, fundamentally incapable of fostering true society—defined as personal community—because they both tried to organize social life as a series of relationships between objects rather than people. Marx himself intuited this problem by describing the alienation (depersonalization) of labor and the fetishization of the commodity; but once Marxism achieved political power it became little more than state-owned capitalism, subordinating personal expression to the materialistic demands of productive efficiency (managed by a centralized and faceless bureaucracy), and the infallibility of the party line. Only the mystical (rather than institutional) Church, the eucharistic community of personal freedom and solidarity, the Body of Christ, can truly “overcome the world” and change our way of being.**
Like God, humanity is a single common essence concretized in a multiplicity of persons. Each human person recapitulates the entirety of human nature (and created nature as such, but Yannaras doesn’t discuss this), endowing it with existential distinctiveness in his pathway, as an ever-changing created being growing by divine grace from a merely natural individual—limited, isolated, indistinct, mortal, and existentially false—into the full realization of his true existence as a personal manifestation of the personal God. But with the Fall of Adam—who may be thought of as humanity’s “false consciousness” of self as natural individual rather than as person—human nature, following the lead of this corrupted self-determination, is left bereft of its unifying hypostaseity, taking on a false autonomy and fragmenting into so many individual, atomized (Adamized?) wills, governed by the carnivorous ethos of “natural” self-preservation, threatening to shackle the vivifying love in which personal distinctiveness is realized in communion. Now stranded in an isolated fragment of a nature perishing in its existential failure, the human person’s quest for hypostatic freedom is experienced as a polarization against nature, an internal struggle between hypostatic life and individual survival, between the spirit and the flesh.
So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? (Romans 7:21-24)
Having been sealed off in the dominion of the flesh from the true personal existence that is God, a gulf emerged between the divine and human natures which the human being, by virtue of his shrunkenness in individuality, lacked the power to overcome. The redemption of human nature required the incarnation of God’s hypostatic being in the form of Christ, who, as the incarnate Word and Son of God, through his life of radical, defenseless love and solidarity with the human race, taking as his own the fullness of human nature in all its brokenness and alienation even unto a freely-accepted death, “trampled down death by death,” and ascended to his pre-eternal coinherence with the Father, existentially recreating human nature as its abiding hypostatic union with the divine life and opening the way for the entire race of mortals to transform its dying individuality into living personhood through the Way of the Cross.
With Christ enthroned as the unifying human hypostasis, the “life-giving spirit,” human nature exists in communion with God as a new ethos through which all of humanity, in the corporate, communal, ascetical life of the Church, can respond to the ontological fact of its freedom by refusing individual self-sufficiency and embracing personal authenticity, participating in the infinite life of love “that moves the sun and the other stars.”***
I like existentialist Orthodoxy.
* It’s important to note that this is not the liberation of an individuated ego from nature—the quixotic project of transhumanism. It is rather the restoration and salvation of the world (I won’t say tikkun olam—whoops, I just did) through its reconnection to life in hypostatic communion.
** Yannaras speaks as if political-ecclesial tyranny is solely a product of the West or Western ideologies, but this is of course contrary to the historical record. Despite the inadequacies of Western liberalism and the dysfunction of Western polities, Byzantium and Tsarist Russia are hardly models for a more just and humane society. Yannaras could also be forgiven for seeing the institutional Church as a redoubt of freedom and humanity during the Soviet era, but the Russian Orthodox Church's current full-throated endorsement of genocidal warfare abroad and fascist politics at home, even to the point of participating in the persecution of dissident clergy, demonstrates that the Orthodox world is no less susceptible to dehumanizing power structures than any Western institution. This is precisely why Yannaras is right to say that the Church should be thought of in existentialist terms: not as a political program, but as a new life in which all can participate.
*** In psychological terms, Adam might be thought of as the immature ego, and Christ as the individuated person who has accommodated the fullness of the self. Human asceticism is not an individual's conquest of his fallen nature, but the response, within the weakness of this nature, to its salvation in Christ. The ego doesn't "accomplish" union with the self, but only makes itself capable of receiving the grace of this union precisely by accepting its own limitations, refusing to absolutize the finitude of its isolated mode of being.
September 17, 2022
4.5 stars. I needed to read this book - it felt like it was written for me. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, it seemed to me that many Orthodox Christians, under the pretense of Church doctrine, instead used social and political justifications for their position in opposition to government restrictions. I found this to be disturbing (and as someone with my own political opinions, a pitfall I am not exempt from). The author spends the first half of the book identifying moralism, "socio-political" concerns and the "heresy of pietism" as false starting points of Christian morality. Rather, the morality or ethos of the Church is that of ontology, which is hypostatic and personal. Human beings derive their personhood from the Trinity, which exist in a communion of freely given love. Thus, as I understand it, a "morality" that impedes the life of the Church, whatever that moral cause may be, is outside of the moral ethos of the Church. This is undoubtedly an oversimplification.
I've read criticisms of Yannaras for his tendency to oppose nature and person, which inevitably results in a diminishing of nature as that which must be overcome in the journey to “personal distinctiveness” within the context of human freedom. This is in contrast to the theology of St Maximus, which understands the human person as being of “consubstantial” essence and thus with the potential to be divinized by grace. For what it is worth, Yannaras does not seem to see the same tension in his views as do his critics. The last chapter of the book, which acts as an application of his theological/philosophical views, discusses Byzantine architecture/iconography and the role of the artist as being a co-creator that works with, rather than against, creation in order to manifest the divine.
I've read criticisms of Yannaras for his tendency to oppose nature and person, which inevitably results in a diminishing of nature as that which must be overcome in the journey to “personal distinctiveness” within the context of human freedom. This is in contrast to the theology of St Maximus, which understands the human person as being of “consubstantial” essence and thus with the potential to be divinized by grace. For what it is worth, Yannaras does not seem to see the same tension in his views as do his critics. The last chapter of the book, which acts as an application of his theological/philosophical views, discusses Byzantine architecture/iconography and the role of the artist as being a co-creator that works with, rather than against, creation in order to manifest the divine.
February 18, 2012
Σπουδαίο βιβλίο· δικαίως θεωρείται το έργο αυτό κεντρικό, όσον αφορά στην προσφορά του Χ. Γιανναρά στην Ελληνική θεολογία αλλά και, προπάντων, στην εθνική μας αυτογνωσία. Ποιος είναι ο πολιτισμός της Ελληνικής Ορθοδοξίας, όχι μέσα από την στρεβλή εικόνα που έχουμε, επηρεασμένοι από την Δύση (βλ. του ιδίου, "Ορθοδοξία και Δύση"), αλλά με βάση την δική μας πατερική και εκκλησιαστική παράδοση, την ζωή, το ήθος και τον πολιτισμό του λαού μας;
Με οξυδέρκεια και βαθιά γνώση ο συγγραφεύς, καταδεικνύει, ανατρέποντας κατεστημένες αντιλήψεις, πώς αυτός ο τρόπος ζωής, η φιλοσοφία, ο πολιτισμός εκφράζονται σε όλες τις εκδηλώσεις της Ελληνικής παραδόσεως και πολιτισμού (Τέχνη (αρχιτεκτονική, ζωγραφική και αγιογραφία κ.ά. - πόσοι συνειδητοποιούμε, για παράδειγμα, τι πολιτισμό εκφράζουν, ποια φιλοσοφία καθρεφτίζουν και πώς, η βυζαντινή Ελληνική αρχιτεκτονική, η αρχαία Ελληνική, η γοτθική της Δύδεως;), κοινωνική ζωή, οικογένεια και σχέσεις των δύο φύλων, σχέση ανθρώπου και φύσεως, εργασία, κοινωνικά προβλήματα κ.λπ.), πώς το Ορθόδοξο ήθος, διαχρονικό ήθος του Ελληνισμού, αποτελεί απάντηση στα προβλήματα της σύγχρονης κοικωνίας και, πολύ περαιτέρω, τρόπο υπάρξεως που ελευθερώνει τον άνθρωπο από την δουλεία και την μοίρα θανάτου του ατόμου.
Η ελευθερία του τρόπου υπάρξεως του προσώπου έναντι της νοησιαρχικής θρησκευτικότητος και δικανικής ηθικής του ατόμου. Η ελευθερία της Ελληνικής Ορθοδοξίας (την οποία δυστυχώς αγνοούμε συχνά) έναντι του παπικού νομικισμού και ευσεβισμού και του προτεσταντικού πουριτανισμού (τα οποία θεωρούμε ως "χριστιανισμό" ενώ είναι οι μέγιστες διαστρεβλώσεις και αναιρέσεις του χριστιανικού ήθους).
Με οξυδέρκεια και βαθιά γνώση ο συγγραφεύς, καταδεικνύει, ανατρέποντας κατεστημένες αντιλήψεις, πώς αυτός ο τρόπος ζωής, η φιλοσοφία, ο πολιτισμός εκφράζονται σε όλες τις εκδηλώσεις της Ελληνικής παραδόσεως και πολιτισμού (Τέχνη (αρχιτεκτονική, ζωγραφική και αγιογραφία κ.ά. - πόσοι συνειδητοποιούμε, για παράδειγμα, τι πολιτισμό εκφράζουν, ποια φιλοσοφία καθρεφτίζουν και πώς, η βυζαντινή Ελληνική αρχιτεκτονική, η αρχαία Ελληνική, η γοτθική της Δύδεως;), κοινωνική ζωή, οικογένεια και σχέσεις των δύο φύλων, σχέση ανθρώπου και φύσεως, εργασία, κοινωνικά προβλήματα κ.λπ.), πώς το Ορθόδοξο ήθος, διαχρονικό ήθος του Ελληνισμού, αποτελεί απάντηση στα προβλήματα της σύγχρονης κοικωνίας και, πολύ περαιτέρω, τρόπο υπάρξεως που ελευθερώνει τον άνθρωπο από την δουλεία και την μοίρα θανάτου του ατόμου.
Η ελευθερία του τρόπου υπάρξεως του προσώπου έναντι της νοησιαρχικής θρησκευτικότητος και δικανικής ηθικής του ατόμου. Η ελευθερία της Ελληνικής Ορθοδοξίας (την οποία δυστυχώς αγνοούμε συχνά) έναντι του παπικού νομικισμού και ευσεβισμού και του προτεσταντικού πουριτανισμού (τα οποία θεωρούμε ως "χριστιανισμό" ενώ είναι οι μέγιστες διαστρεβλώσεις και αναιρέσεις του χριστιανικού ήθους).
February 4, 2024
“It is better for a man to purify himself for God than to speak of God as a theologian.
It is better for you to be slow of tongue, yet full of knowledge and experienced, rather than to pour forth a flood of teaching because you are sharp of mind.”
-St. Isaac the Syrian
Very good book! :D
It is better for you to be slow of tongue, yet full of knowledge and experienced, rather than to pour forth a flood of teaching because you are sharp of mind.”
-St. Isaac the Syrian
Very good book! :D
January 5, 2021
One of the only modern works I've read that successfully pulls off contributing to the disciplines of philosophy and theology.
May 6, 2025
For me the book is too deeply philosophical. At times I had the feeling that his position is that the whole world is spiritually bankrupt except for Byzantium and the Greeks. Ethics are that which restore a proper relationship with God (mostly ontologically) and are not meant to produce a better or more moral world. He acknowledges that Western theology and morality have made huge and significant progress in improving the human condition but that has done nothing for restoring humanity's relationship to God. His solution to me seems to be a throwback to some earlier time in Church history when these things were better understood and practiced. He seems to suggest all we can to resist the Western worldview is to form small communities and try to live out the values of an earlier Christian age.
July 20, 2020
Was great, technical read, It is somewhat controversial theology - it leans heavily towards Greek tradition. Chapter 8 on pietism made it worth while.
April 19, 2012
Heavy and not for the faint of heart or philosophically illiterate. I was challenged to rethink my faith by this book.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews