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THE THEOLOGY OF
PERSONHOOD
A STUDY OF THE
THOUGHT OF
CHRISTOS YANNARAS
by R.D.
WILLIAMS
(now, archbishop of
canterbury)
published in
“Sobornost” No.6, Winter 1972, pp. 415-430
This article will be devoted chiefly to an examination of
Christos Yannaras’s doctoral thesis presented to the University
of Salonika (“The Ontological Content of the Theological Notion
of Personhood”, Athens, 1970), a remarkable essay in
“theological personalism”. Those of us familiar with the work
of the late Vladimir Lossky, especially his various studies of
the significance for Christian theology of the Chalcedonian
distinction between “nature” and “person”, will recognise
familiar themes in Dr. Yannaras’s book, though here they are
given a philosophical grounding, of great subtlety and
sophistication, which would have been somewhat alien to
Lossky’s general style of doing theology. Indeed, Lossky’s
near-Barthian hostility, during most of his career, to secular
philosophy makes it very hard to assess the extent to which,
consciously or unconsciously, he utilised motifs from his
philosophical contemporaries: there are times when a reader of
Lossky (especially of his work in the early ’50’s)[i] will catch some quite
pronounced echoes of Merleau-Ponty, even of Sartre; but one can
hardly doubt that Lossky would have repudiated indignantly any
suggestion of “influence”. This consideration gives Dr.
Yannaras’s work an added interest for the student of Lossky: a
glance at the bibliography shows us Lossky (represented by the
“Theologie mystique”, and the posthumous collection, “A
l’ Image et a la Ressemblance de Dieu”) side by side with
Heidegger, Husserl and Sartre. What Dr. Yannaras has attempted,
in fact, is a synthesis of what may loosely be called the Greek
patristic tradition (conceived of as including Palamas and other
medieaevals) and modern phenomenological thought. An earlier work
(“The Theology of the Absence and Ignorance of God”, Athens
1967; now available in a French translation)[ii] provided a basis for this in a comparison
between the Byzantine apophatic tradition, and the confrontation
with “Nothing” in the philosophy of Heidegger: this study
also made extensive use of Nietzsche, and attempted to present
the “Death of God” and existential nihilism as a logical and
inevitable growth from the rationalism of the Western theological
tradition. It is a highly provocative work, and one may, I think,
legitimately object to the vast sweep of its generalisations; but
it is undeniably a very significant essay in what does appear to
be genuinely an alternative theological language to that which
has become customary in the Latin tradition and its offshoots. I
hasten to add that the fact that it is an alternative does not
automatically guarantee its superiority: in assessing Dr.
Yannaras’s work, as in assessing that of other Eastern
theologians, it is important not to be hypnotised by sheer
novelty into suspending our critical faculties.
On the whole, the present work seems less determined in its
expression by a desire to present a sharp contrast to
“Western” theology: Aristotle is quoted fairly frequently as
a spokesman for “classical metaphysics”, but Latin
theologians are hardly ever referred to by name. The argument of
the book is positive rather than controversial in character, and
exhibits a remarkable integration of sources and authorities into
the body of the thesis: there are long sections devoid of
footnotes or quotations, but no less rigorous and precise for
that. However, I must register a complaint about the rather
annoying repetition of “Leitmotif” phrases in Heideggerese
“the potentiality for universal ek-static personal
relatedness” (or variants of this wording)[iii] recurs time and time again. Granted that, for
those with some acquaintance with Heidegger, it is the most exact
statement possible of what is involved in the concept of
“relation”, must it be used every time this concept is
under review? Perhaps, however, this is simply the reaction of a
mind acclimatised to the pedestrian phraseology of Anglo-Saxon
philosophy to what appears to be Teutonic mystification.
Certainly, the dialogue with Heidegger is the main them of the
whole work; and it might be of some interest and value to compare
Yannaras’s use of Heidegger with Rahner’s[iv]. On a superficial examination, they would
appear to have a good deal in common; but a detailed study of
this lies outside the scope of the present paper (and the
abilities of the author!).
It may be as well, at this point, to attempt a summary of Dr.
Yannaras’s argument. He begins by noting the relational element
in the Greek ðñüóùðïí (person), the aspect of ðñüò
ùðüò, the existence of person only over-against, in
relation to someone or something; “We know being as presence (ðáñïõóßá),
not essence (ïõóßá)[v], we cannot know “Being-in-itself”
as such. Our acts of knowing, then, are not merely
intellectual, they are an orientation of our personhood in relation,
the outgoing openness to other realities which Heidegger calls
“ek-stasis”. The reality or unreality of entities depends on
their relatedness or not-relatedness to persons; personhood,
then, is the “horizon” (ïñßæùí in Greek means
“that which determines or defines”) upon which all beings
manifest themselves, and so it may be said to have a
“universal” character. Personhood is not a part of human
nature, it defines nature, it is the “ontological
starting-point” for understanding nature. Not that it is (in
Sartre’s sense) the “source” of existence: rather,
existence is to be perceived only in persons. One
consequence of this is that we cannot properly conceive of God as
a “First Cause”, external to His effects: if He is personal,
we must see Him as creative energy relating to creation in the
present, establishing communion between Himself and His
creatures. Another consequence is that any idea of the image of
God as residing in a “part” of man must be abandoned: the
person is a unity, not merely a synthesis (as in the Aristotelean
system), the body is not a component in man, it is his mode (ôñüðïò)
of existence, the manifestation to the outside world of the
“energies” of his nature, that through which personal
presence or absence may be apprehended. The image of God is the
whole man; and it is the whole man who enters into relation with
God. He may know God by way of “absence”, that is, he may
know him through the manifestation of His energies in creation
(as one “knows” the absent artist through his work); or he
may know Him as personal presence, as Christ in the Church.
Outside the Church, only the former way is possible; yet even
here, the absence is personal, the absence of someone, and so it
is painful. Within the Church, this experience is familiar to the
man of prayer —hence the ðÝíèïò (“compunction”,
“lamentation”) associated in the East with the ascetic life.
The emergence of beings into personal relation can thus be seen
as an emergence into order, unity, the formation of a cosmos,
in fact: Anaximander was essentially right in comparing cosmic
order with moral and social order. Contemporary science has
abandoned any crude notion of absoluteness or necessity in
physical “laws”, and has stressed indeterminacy and asymmetry
in things: the concept of a closed and regular system governed by
immutable laws is as untenable as the concept of an “Unmoved
Mover” as the first term of such a system. Both alike are based
on an objectification of reality which scrupulously avoids the
personal. The cosmos much now be seen as “a universal harmony
in an infinity of indeterminate distinctions”,[vi] a manifestation of personal being in a set of
unique, unrepeatable realities.
The awareness of this multiplicity as a harmonious set leads us
to the apprehension of universal objective “beauty”, of
“reason” (ëüãïò) in creation, to the person of
the Logos, in fact, manifested through life-giving energy, the
Spirit.
Our categories of space and time are dependent on the ideas of
personal presence and absence, also. The “personal dimension of
space” appears in awareness of personal absence, where
“distance” has nothing to do with “geometrical”,
objectively measurable space: we are dealing with a
non-objectified, relational space. This experience of
absence, as Sartre makes clear,[vii] is tragic, it is “agony”; yet at the same
time, it presupposes and establishes the possibility of relation
to an authentic reality. Thus Heidegger can speak[viii] of death as a phenomenon of life, a final
personal revolt against the constant failure to achieve authentic
personal relation in “geometric” space: “Death is the
apophatic definition of personhood.[ix] Similarly, time is to be regarded as the
recognition of outgoing (“ek-static”) relation as change,
not as an external computation of movement, but as a dimension of
relation itself, a part of the being of things. In our
experience, however, awareness of continuity is awareness of
“corruption”, of movement towards death; so that again death
appears as, in some way, the vehicle of the possibility of
“total” relationship, because it manifests the finally
limited character of merely individual, “atomistic”
existence. In human life, we are aware of personal energy as
“enduring”, as extending individuality into totality, outside
the limits of temporal succession and death: this is what we
experience through the work of art, a communion with the artist
unconditioned by the circumstances of his or our individual
historical circumstances, an awareness of presence. So the
relation of man to the cosmos which we measure as “time” has
its real end beyond time, limitation, corruption, death, in a
duration of presence. And at this point, we may introduce the
Person of the Logos again, as the person to Whom all
realities are “present”, in this sense, and Who is present in
all realities (as the artist is in his creation). The presence is
made experienced reality in the sacraments of the Church; which
is why we may speak of the establishment of a “liturgical
time” in the Church, the union of past, present, and future in
the presence of the Word —the Kingdom of God, eternal life—
which gives us the ground for a faint apprehension of the
“time” of the Holy Trinity, which is eternity, the measure of
perfect personal communion.
“Logos” is therefore never merely a detached statement, but
is an attitude, an involvement in “what there is”; it is at
the same time a gathering up of diverse elements in a universal
(because personal) unity, and a definition of the distinct modes
in which this unity exists. It is the medium through which things
are manifested to, brought into relation with the person: the
uniqueness of the word is the uniqueness of the relation it
“names” (the uniqueness of the work of art). The word reveals
personhood through the outgoing creative “energies” of
nature, nature’s capacity to show itself as personal. We are
again led to the theological notion of a cosmic personal Word,
establishing the reality of all things in relation to the Person
of God. The “expressive energy”[x] of the human word reveals the cosmic Word,
and reveals Him as a second partner in a “dia-logical”
relation, the encounter of two persons in outgoing reciprocity, êïéíùíßá.
However, the capacity for this sort of relatedness is a
possibility, not an automatically realised necessity: we must
reckon with the fact of human fallenness, the empirical
fact that man exists in a state of “atomistic”
self-consciousness, connected to other such consciousnesses
solely in virtue of a shared objective relation to the
“world”, or to “absolute reality”. The idea of Being is
thereby reduced to that which exists, opposed to that which does not
exist—Nothing (ÌçäÝí, Sartre’s “Neant”):
nothingness is, as it were, introduced into the definition of
Being, as a possibility; the possibility of the universality of
Being-as-relation is denied. There are only individual entities
existing in “distance” (áðüóôáóéò) from the
whole: mutual absence is the basic ontological category, Being is
identified with Nothingness. Hence the problem in contemporary
art and philosophy of “one-dimensional man”, existing in
alienation, in the absence of relation: the reality of the person
is wholly obscured, and there is thus nothing to bridge the gulf
between the individual and the whole, the mass. Yet we can only
understand this “fall” as a personal decision, the
result of the ability of freedom to deny itself, to subordinate
itself to “nature”. We are bound to presuppose some degree of
awareness of our impotence, awareness of failure, and thus of the
possibility of something different. Nothingness, then, is not an
empty concept, known only as the opposite of existence, it is a
personal experience of the absence of relation: and the necessity
(“ontological”, not conceptual) of the universal second
person again appears. Man experiences a divine call, an
invitation to enter into relation, and so to become truly
personal: personhood is known as response to the invitation of
the Divine Person, its “truth” is to be found outside the
mere “givenness” of finite facts. In this invitation, this
outgoing of personal energy, the unknowable Divine essence
becomes known as content of person (not known “in itself”):
the mode of God’s being is personal communion.
What we are talking about is the perfect revelation of
personhood; and so we must say that God does not “emerge”
into personhood, He is personal. And since fullness of
personal being-in-communion is beyond singularity and duality, we
are right to think of Him as Trinity: in our relation to God, our
response to His call, we apprehend His energy as triadic, and, at
the same time, as kenotic: each Person “witnesses” to the
others in continual ðåñé÷þñçóéò. This personal
energy is the foundation of finite, created personhood: the
Godhead “comes out of” Its Essence, in free exercise of will,
to establish a new reality possessed of the power of
standing-over against God in personal freedom, the capacity to
affirm or to deny God’s call. To deny it is to be condemned to
“atomic” individuality, the condition in which “Hell is
other people”, when “every ‘other’ is a direct
confirmation of the failure of the person to deny... the
fragmentation of nature into self-sufficient individuals”[xi]. And it is this which
the Church asserts that Christ has overcome, not simply by
“volitional” response to God’s call, but by the union of
the Divine and human natures: the possibility is opened to man of
existing as truly personal nature, being-in-communion. This
change in nature is conveyed to us through the Sacraments, but it
should not be seen as in any way an obliteration of created
freedom: rather is it the attainment of true freedom by ongoing
“conversion” (ìåôÜíïéá). And so the experience
of “Nothing” is revealed finally as a confirmation not only
of human freedom but also of the personal reality of God:
Christ’s descent into Hell is “the transformation of
Nothingness, of the abyss of human failure, into a triumph for
the love and benevolence (öéëáíèñùðßá) of
God.”[xii]
If God is personal êáô’ ïõóßáí, we cannot speak
of Him in ethical terms as they are normally employed, since the
concept of an ethic presupposes a fall. Morality properly
considered is the measure of a person’s “fullness of personal
existence”, existence in communion, and, as we have seen, God
is not becoming personal, as we are, He is the
fullness of personal existence. This means that morality is
intimately related to Being, it is an ontological idea: a failure
to consider it ontologically leads to the idea of some absolute
division between “principles” of good and evil, a dualism in
creation. The identification of Being with the “Idea of the
Good” is really nothing other than a vast absolutisation of
concepts; and talk of good as not being “for” anything or
anyone reduces it to a purely intellectual abstract, unconnected
with the business of life in communion or relation. We must
refuse to give an ontological content to the concepts of
“good” and “evil” (paradoxically, this always leads
eventually to a “socialised” utilitarian idea of good): the
refusal of the Eastern theological tradition to allow ontological
reality to evil implies a complete rejection of the dualism,
distinguishing not good and evil, but Being and Nothing, life and
death, affirming morality as a mode of personal being. ÌåôÜíïéá
is a conversion of man’s whole being from failure to be
what he is (from sin, which is again a mode of being) into
true personhood: the experience of sin is not primarily an
experience of the violation of law, but an experience of Nothing,
as existence-in-isolation, the “outside” (åêôüò)
of communion. We may say, therefore, that morality and ontology
are identical (Heidegger points to the original Greek meanings of
Þèïò äáßìùí, “God”, in Heraclitus, “place
of residence” in Homer and Herodotus —both ideas connected
with “modes of being”), and that an individually orientated
ethic inevitably involves an ontology based on encapsulated
individual entities. “Ontological morality” for the
Christian, however, is an affirmation of personal freedom in the
fullest sense, presupposing an ontology of personal, relational
existence, being-in-communion, the dialogue of God with man.
I hope I may be pardoned for having set out Dr. Yannaras’s
argument at some length, but I think a briefer summary would do
it less than justice. An adequately detailed examination of it is
really beyond the scope of this article, but I propose to select
a few points of significance for discussion, in an attempt to
relate the book to the wider background of Eastern theology in
general, and, to a lesser extent, to certain aspects of Western
theology. I have already remarked on the points of contact
between Yannaras and Lossky, and I think it is worth commenting a
little further on this. Students of Lossky will be aware of two
parallel models for a “personalist ontology” in his work, the
Chalcedonian nature-person schema, and the essence-energies
distinction of Gregory Palamas: both are intended to guard
against a static essentialism, a cosmos of enclosed substances
incapable of acting upon one another. However, there seems at
times to be something of a gulf between the two models in
Lossky’s writings: the Palamite scheme clearly poses some
difficulties in a Trinitarian context, since the temptation is to
contrast an impersonal essence with personal energies,
and thus to put the Persons of the Trinity on the same plane as
the energies (as I think Pseudo-Denys does). Now indeed Palamism
is not so simple as that, and the Palamite certainly can
state his distinction intelligibly in a Trinitarian scheme; but I
am not sure that Lossky always succeeds in doing so, and I
suspect that, finally, it is the nature-person distinction which
is of more central importance to his theology.[xiii] What Dr. Yannaras has brilliantly succeeded
in doing is to integrate these two models in a synthesis which
clearly distinguishes “nature”, “person”, and
“operation”, but which demonstrates the close interrelation
of the three. As a model for Trinitarian theology (including a
theology of the operationes, Trinitatis ad extra) it is,
in many ways, admirable; but, later on, I should like to question
its usefulness for Christology.
Dr. Yannaras very frequently refers to “ek-static”
relationship as something essentially “pre-conscious” (ðñïóõíåéäçóéáêÞ);
and his examination of the implications of this marks something
of an advance from Lossky’s very definite emphasis upon the
importance of “consciousness” in personal relation. Although
Lossky grants that person is by no means identical with
consciousness and that “la conscience n’est plus limitee
comme sujet connaissant et agissant”,[xiv] he is equally emphatic that inter-personal
union” “ne peut etre non plus inconsciente.”[xv] Consequently, he
asserts that the characteristically “Western” (so he
considers it) experience of the “Night of the Spirit”, and
the idea of “passive purgation” in St. John of the Cross are
wholly alien to the spirituality of the Christian East, because
they deny the free personal co-operation of man in the
work of salvation, leaving him in darkness and ignorance while
God proceeds to purify man’s nature. Now it is not difficult to
show that Lossky’s account of Western, especially Carmelite,
spirituality is in very many respects seriously misleading,
reflecting a fundamental misunderstanding of the terminology and
presuppositions especially of St.John of the Cross; but the point
I wish to make is that Dr. Yannaras recognises –as Lossky does
not- that the “experience of the absence of God” is by no
means the same thing as the “absence of the experience of
God”. Dr. Yannaras’s exposition of the experience of personal
absence as establishing the possibility of total authentic
communion by a sort of via negativa is, I would suggest, very
close to the Carmelite tradition; and his connexion of this with
the Eastern ascetical tradition, with the idea of ðÝíèïò
in the Fathers, provides a most valuable bridge between the two
“schools” (can one really call them that?) of spirituality.
Of course, a very great deal depends upon what meaning one gives
to “consciousness”: Lossky probably has a considerably less
“intellectual” (or even perhaps “conceptual”) idea of it
than Yannaras, and it is hard to see why he should reject the
idea of a consciousness of personal absence.[xvi] It is words like “consciousness”, one
often feels, which bedevil the study of theology, because there
is nothing easier (and nothing more fatal) than to assume that
all theologians using such a word mean roughly the same thing by
it; but that is another story.
To leave Lossky aside for the moment, and to move into the very
different sphere of British philosophy of religion: a recent
issue of “Theology”[xvii]
contained a paper by Professor John Macquarrie entitled “God
and the World: One Reality of Two?”, and a comment on this
paper by Mr. Brian Hebblethwaite of Queen’s College, Cambridge.
Dr. Macquarrie suggests that without dispensing with the idea of
transcendence, it is time that we began to think of the God-world
relation as “in some respects” symmetrical or reciprocal:
this position, sometimes described as “pantheism”,
particularly characterises “those theologians who have been
influenced by such philosophers as Alexander, Whitehead, Bergson,
Heidegger.”[xviii] He
goes on to suggest some possible models for the expression of
such a relation. Mr. Hebblethwaite’s comments are extremely
interesting in the light of Dr. Yannaras’s book: Professor
Macquarrie, he says, “is constantly inclined to identify
God’s immanence with some structural aspect of the created
world… The reason seems to be that, for Macquarrie, traditional
theism has posited a purely external relation between God
and the world, which fails to do justice to the intimacy and
involvement which biblical religion attributes to the living God
in his dealings with the world”… But at least one might think
that a doctrine of creation is better expressed in terms
of an external relation between God and the world, without
prejudice to God’s further involvement in his creation. The old
theology distinguished between the inter-trinitarian processions
and the operationes Trinitatis ad extra; and it is hard to
see how one can abandon some such distinction and yet retain the
concept of creation.”[xix] What
Mr. Hebblethwaite is objecting to is any attempt to solve the
problem of the God-world relation, the problem of the action of
the infinite in and upon the finite, by making the relation
internal to God (or internal to the “world”, depending upon
one’s point of view), “And you’ll agree, as I expect, that
he was right to so object.” Yet, as he admits,
“externality” is a notion which has acquired “pejorative
connotations when predicated of the relation between God and the
world”;[xx] one
cannot help feeling that Professor Macquarrie’s plea for a
recognition of genuine reciprocity is justified (I do not think
that the term “symmetry” is really very helpful here). And it
seems to me that at this point Dr. Yannaras’s synthesis of
Heidegger and Palamas provides a possible solution. The most
cursory reading of the book will impress upon the reader that one
of Yannaras’s central concerns is to establish that the
relation between God and man is personal and reciprocal, a
relation of communion, a “real” (as opposed to a
logical) relation: thus far, he is as much Heidegger’s pupil as
is Macquarrie. However, precisely by underlining that it is a
communion of persons, and therefore a confluence of
personal energies, he succeeds in avoiding any notion of the
“involvement” (in Macquarrie’s sense) of the Divine Essence
in the finite world: the energies of God, manifesting the Person
of the Word, create and preserve the world, and are fully
involved in it, there is no “external” relation in question,
nor any identification of the Divine Essence with a causal
abstraction. But it is only in this personal “mode” that we
can apprehend the Essence of God at all: we do not and cannot
know It in Itself, but only as content of the Persons of the
Trinity, it is not and cannot be “involved” in creation
except through the outgoing of personal energy, in Itself It
remains beyond all finite being. The personal energies freely
“come out of” the unapproachable, transcendent Essence, so
that the relations ad extra established by the energies are not
internal (in the sense of “natural” or “necessary”) to
the Essence. So (as Lossky would no doubt have delighted to point
out) the Eastern theological tradition, here as elsewhere,
proposes a satisfactory via media whereby Western theology may
escape from a choice between two ultimately unacceptable
alternatives.
It is, as I have said, a possible solution; not
necessarily an adequate one, though, because its validity depends
upon the validity of the whole essence-energies schema. Plainly
this is far too large a question to embark upon in detail here,
but it may be worthwhile to raise one or two issues which seem to
be of some importance. In the first place, I am never quite
certain what Dr. Yannaras (and his predecessors in the East) are
saying about the incomprehensibility of the Divine Essence. There
are times when Orthodox theologians seem to be asserting this
simply because all essences (considered as Aristotelean
individual essences) are incommunicable and imparticipable,[xxi] and therefore (since
knowledge involves some sort of participation of knower in known)
unknowable. Whereas at other times, the Divine Essence is held to
be unknowable because it is Divine, and therefore beyond the
capacity of the finite mind. These two approaches –need I add?-
are not incompatible, but I think it is helpful to recognise that
they are different. The trouble with the first approach is that
inevitably it tends to make God a member of a class of essences, closed
essences: and the theological problem then is to think of
something in God which is “not-essence” and therefore not
incommunicable and enclosed. The result is the classical
statement of Palamism, which encounters severe difficulties in
reconciling this distinction with the doctrine of the absolute
simplicity of God. The latter approach, however, leaves the door
open to a more open-minded notion of essence: Aquinas, who is
just as ready as any Easterner to assert the incomprehensibility
of God, succeeds in avoiding a system of closed essences by revising
the Aristotelean notion of essence,[xxii] so that ens or esse, the
“essence-in-its-act-of-existing” is seen as primary. On this
basis, it is possible to assert a real communication with the
Divine Essence in actu, while still denying that, even in
the Beatific Vision, a finite intellect can comprehend the
Essence, can know It as It knows Itself.[xxiii] Thus, we continue to affirm that essences are
not “interchangeable”: “participate in this context
never means to have part in another entity”.[xxiv] This would be absurd, as it would necessarily
presuppose an abstraction of the entity (essentia) from
its act of existing (ens), which is metaphysically
impossible if we are speaking of actual essences. Yet we can also
maintain real, “existential” communication, mutual
accessibility, between essences as they in actu: we are
not making any awkward division between “essence” and
“not-essence” in a thing, rather are we defining the mode in
which essences exist.
It
should by now be clear that this is not an irrelevant digression:
the position we have arrived at is very close to that proposed by
Dr. Yannaras, it seems, and once again he appears to have given
us an invaluable link between East and West. Professor E. L.
Mascall has suggested more than once that the essence-energies
distinction is —at least in intention— parallel to the
essence-existence distinction in St. Thomas;[xxv] and not only do we find Dr. Yannaras coming
to conclusions fundamentally very close to those of Professor
Mascall, we even find a fairly clear identification of the
“energies” with “existence” throughout (they are “the
mode in which entities exist”, åßíáé a frequently
repeated formula, and God is “revealed as personal
existence”,[xxvi] õðáñêôéêüôçò,
in the relation established by the energies). Dr. Yannaras
quotes Palamas’s dictum that God did not say to Moses “I am
Essence”, but “I am that I am”, “I am He Who Is”, åãþ
åéìß ï þí[xxvii]; and
it is precisely this “existentialist” point which Aquinas
makes in his comment on the text from Exodus.[xxviii] It is curious that Orthodox theologians
(including Dr. Yannaras at some points in his book) persist in
regarding Thomist thought as basically essentialist: there is a
tendency either to assimilate the Angelic Doctor to Augustine and
Anselm (Paul Evdokimov is inclined to do this), or to view him
through the medium of late scholastic thought, or, worse,
Cartesianism (Lossky is often guilty of this) in apparent
oblivion of the copious expositions of Thomist existentialism
provided by Gilson, Maritain, Mascall and others. And in this
connexion, one may ask whether Dr. Yannaras’s strictures[xxix] on the use of analogy
in Western theology are really justified: if Professor Mascall is
right in affirming the existential character of analogy in
Aquinas,[xxx] I
think one might be able to state a doctrine of analogy giving a
satisfactory degree of priority to the reality of God over the
reality of man. Mascall’s suggestion[xxxi] that the “energies” of Palamism are
parallel not simply to Aquinas’s esse but to analogia
as well seems to merit further examination (which I cannot
give it in the present article, unfortunately).
The
question of analogy brings us to a (brief) consideration of Dr.
Yannaras’s methodology. I suppose this book would be classified
by most Western readers as an essay in “natural theology”,
though it is a natural theology with a Trinitarian sting in the
tail: it is an attempt to show how personhood as we know it is
grounded in Being, and so in God, and because we begin from a
particular notion of personhood (existence-in-communion) we are
obliged to postulate “internal” personal communion in God.
And this, like any attempt to explicate the relation of finite to
infinite, is inevitably an essay in analogy; which does
not necessarily mean that we take finite existence as a
starting-point which is “more real” or “more certain”
than infinite existence. At one level, we are not “starting
from” either the finite or the infinite pole, we are
presupposing both; while at another level —as it is
almost trivial to point out— of course we are beginning from
finite existence, simply because we are finite existents. It is
important not to confuse ontological priority with
epistemological priority: when the late Austin Farrer said,[xxxii] “This problem of
analogy is in principle prior to every particular relation,” he
was (as a reading of “Finite and Infinite” shows) very far
from claiming any real priority for a knowledge obtained
outside revelation; rather was he insisting, I believe rightly,
that any talk about the content of a revelation necessarily
requires some underlying theory of what it is that enables us to
talk about a revelation as the revelation of God. It is
only fair to add that there is a world of difference between Dr.
Farrer’s brilliant essay in “voluntarist metaphysics” and
Dr. Yannaras’s book: Farrer, in fact, represents precisely that
intellectualist strand in Western theology which Yannaras
condemns so frequently and strongly. What Dr. Yannaras —like
some of the theologians of the Reformation— has done is to set
the doctrine of analogy in the context of the totality of
God’s action upon the world, so that we are not obliged to make
a distinction in kind between our knowledge of God in creation
and our knowledge in revelation: one is áðïõóßá,
the other ðáñïõóßá, but in both it is the same
sort of relation with the Person of the Word that we apprehend.
If one may so express it, Dr. Yannaras has “theologised” the
concept of analogy very thoroughly. Though perhaps, in one way,
not thoroughly enough: one misses in the book any real
integration of the idea of the Holy Spirit as illuminator,
mediator of the knowledge of God (this, interestingly enough, is
a far more prominent theme in Lossky’s theology[xxxiii]) the Person through
Whom “analogical” participation in God, participation in the
Divine energies, becomes a reality here and now. (On this
subject, much of the work of Professor T. F. Torrance is highly
suggestive; I would refer particularly to his essay on “The
Epistemological Relevance of the Spirit.”[xxxiv]) In the light of all this, I feel that Dr.
Yannaras is wrong to use the terms like “analogy”, as he
does, in a consistently negative and derogatory way, as if
analogy necessarily involved a methodological doubt of non-finite
reality. After some sixty pages mainly devoted to an essentially
philosophical analysis of the structure of human personhood, the
reader may well raise his eyebrows at a statement like this:
“In the theology of the Christian East, we approach the reality
of human personhood on the basis of the revealed Truth of the
Person of God, in contrast to the theology of the West, which
seeks the Truth about God analogically and anagogically,
concentrating basically on the reality of man.”[xxxv] And as to the use made
of Heidegger’s system and terminology throughout, one may be
forgiven for wondering whether it is perhaps a little uncritical:
it is reminiscent of the use made of Hegel by Russian theologians
at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th
century; a writer in “Istina”, introducing an article by Dr.
Yannaras,[xxxvi]
remarked on the possible danger of an “Hellenic
Slavophilism”, and this seems to me fair comment as dependence
upon a particular system of secular philosophy is concerned.
It
should be clear by now that Dr. Yannaras is far less of a
“revelationist” than Lossky, and it is significant that he
devotes very little space to Christology as such (as opposed to
what might be called “Logology”, the theology of the cosmic
Word). As I have already indicated, I find his remarks on
Christology[xxxvii]
cryptic and rather unsatisfactory. The fall, we are told,[xxxviii] is a diminution of
personal capacity for relation, it is not an “essential”
change, an alteration in the underlying structure of human
existence, except insofar as it means that “nature” has
become incapable of expressing itself personally.[xxxix] We should expect to be
told that Christ restores this power of “personal expression”
to nature; but what does Dr. Yannaras mean by saying that the
capacity for ek-stasis has, in Christ, become proper not merely
to the person, but to the nature of man? If nature is, in any
case, only capable of ek-stasis through the person, does this
statement have any content? It is not difficult to see why Dr.
Yannaras should feel obliged to make it: the great betes
noires of Orthodox theology seem to be, on the one hand, any
doctrine of man’s total depravity (i.e. a radical obliteration
of God’s image in man by the Fall), and, on the other, any
“moralistic” approach to soteriology, which neglects the
ontological side of salvation, the restoration of man’s nature.[xl] Obviously Yannaras is
trying to state the Eastern position as fully as possible over
against these distortions: but the soteriological passage on pp.
82-83 gives the impression (all the stronger for being so rare in
the book) of being insufficiently carefully thought out. If Dr.
Yannaras means that Christ, and man-in-Christ, are removed from
the condition of “becoming” personal to a state of simply being
personal, the state enjoyed by the Persons of the Trinity, have
we not arrived at a sort of Monophysite position, in which human,
finite nature as such has no real place? Clearly this is not at
all what Dr. Yannaras means: but we do need a sharper distinction
between the Union of the Trinity, the Hypostatic Union, and the
Union of Grace. Here, I think, we have much to learn from Lossky,[xli] with his carefully
worked-out theory of redemption as consisting in the restoration
of nature in Christ and the personal realisation of this
in the Holy Spirit, in Whom, by Whose indwelling, men become
truly persons, truly human. This is a system which, I believe,
does justice to both the primacy of God’s action in salvation
and the distinctness of human response. Now this is more or less
implicit in what Yannaras says, but, again, I believe that a more
positive pneumatology would have clarified matters.
The
clue to Yannaras’s Christological remarks may lie in his
assertion[xlii] that
the union of humanity and divinity in Christ is “not only
volitional”; that is, we are to regard it as “natural” as
opposed to volitional, and presumably should regard the
communion of man with God in Christ as equally “natural” (a
union of öýóåéò) rather than volitional. This looks
back to the venerable Byzantine doctrine of the absence of the
“gnomic” or “dispositional” will in Christ: in the system
of Maximus the Confessor, man has two wills, “natural”, and
“dispositional”, of which the latter is solely a consequence
of the contingencies of human action after the Fall. Ideally, man
exercises only a “natural” will, he wills to do only that
which is an accord with his nature (as God’s image); but after
the Fall, he can will this only at the result of moral decision
between two alternatives which are, at one level, equally
attractive. Only by good “habit” (ãíþìé) does he
choose the good. For Maximus, Christ has no gnomic will, but
exercises natural will alone; so that one might conclude that the
end of the redemptive process is for the saved man to exercise
only such a will (one still needs a satisfactory doctrine of the
indwelling of the Spirit to account for this). This, I think, is
what lies behind Yannaras’s statements; to rephrase Maximus in
Yannaras’s more usual terminology we may perhaps say that,
“since the Fall,” man has been capable of ek-stasis, of
genuine personal communion, only by conscious exercise of his
will to escape “atomicity”. In Christ, the possibility of
existence-in-communion which is not merely dependent on
our continuing struggle against atomicity is established. There
is still an ongoing ìåôÜíïéá;[xliii] but what we are given is authentic personal
freedom, freedom to be persons, freedom from the threat of
existence-in-isolation. This seems to be what Yannaras means: but
I, for one, should be grateful for an exposition, at some future
date, of how this is to be related in detail to the Chalcedonian
definition, and, indeed, to the general Byzantine tradition in
Christology. The main points of contact are clear enough, and a
fuller integration into the Eastern tradition certainly seems
possible.
This has brought us into the sphere of Dr. Yannaras’s ethics
and the identification of ethics with ontology. It occurs to me
that it would be most interesting to compare this with
Wittgenstein’s insistence that ethics should only be spoken of
—indeed, are only intelligible— within the context of a total
world-view: ethical belief and ethical practice are “forms of
life” (modes of being?), we can begin to consider them only as
they are seen to be a facet of a whole approach to living. Moral
debate is debate about world-views.[xliv] There is more to it than that, of course, and
perhaps the differences are more significant than the parallels;
but it is worth noting. Again, is Dr. Yannaras really fair to the
“Platonic” tradition? The kind of Platonism proposed by, say,
Miss Iris Murdoch in “The Sovereignty of Good” seems to me to
have a certain amount in common with Yannaras’s outline, and
not to deserve his sharper strictures on Platonism.[xlv] However, an examination
of all this would probably double the length of an already
overlong essay, and I must leave it aside for now.[xlvi]
In summary, it seems that Dr. Yannaras’s book is one of the
most important theological studies to come from the Orthodox
world in recent years. It often exhibits a certain degree of
onesidedness in its argument, but is rarely actually polemical;
and one might well concede that a measure of onesidedness is
perhaps necessary to provoke Western readers to question the
presuppositions of their own theology. It is a profoundly
“traditional” theology, obviously rooted in the Fathers and
in Byzantine theology; yet this very fact prompts me to ask how
necessary to Dr. Yannaras’s case the explicitly Heideggerian
framework is. Could this development and maturation of Lossky’s
ideas have been successfully carried through without such heavy
dependence on a particular system of secular metaphysics? I
should be the first to grant that Christian faith has ontological
corollaries, that in this sense it is “in search of a
metaphysic”; but this is rather different from claiming one
metaphysic as against all others as “the” Christian
metaphysic. I doubt whether Yannaras would seriously claim this;
and I hope it is not presumptuous to suppose that in future works
from his pen we shall see a gradual diminution of dependence on
Heidegger. Dr. Yannaras’s case can stand well on its own
theological feet; Western theologians have much to lose by
neglecting it.
[i] See
especially the articles on “Redemption et Deification,” “La
notion theologique de la personne humaine” and “La theologie
de l’image” in the collection A l’ image et a la
ressemblance de Dieu (Paris, 1967).
[ii] The article “An
Orthodox Comment on ‘The Death of God’” by Dr. Yannaras
(Sobornost, Winter 1966, and in Orthodoxy and the Death of
God, ed.: A. M. Allehin, pp 40-49) gives what amounts to a
summary of the conclusions of this book.
[iii] E.g. ìïíáäéêÞ äõíáôüôçò åßíáé Ýíáíôé ôùí üíôùí (p. 17), ç äéÜóôáóéò ôçò êáèïëéêüôçôïò, ç åêóôáôéêÞ öïñÜ ôïõ ðñïóþðïõ (p.21), äõíáôüôçò ðñïóùðéêÞò áíáöïñÜò, ðñïóùðéêÞò ó÷Ýóåùò (p.23), and so on.
[iv] It is interesting
to note that Meyendorff (Christ in Eastern Christian Thought, pp.
165-6) suggests some points of contact between Rahner and the
Greek Patristic tradition.
[v] Op. cit., p. 13:
the responsibility for translation of quotations from the Greek
is the present writer’s.
[vi] Ib., p. 37.
[vii] L’Etre et le Neant, pp. 44
f.
[viii] Sein und Zeit, pp. 245-246; quoted,
Yannaras, op. Cit. P. 44.
[ix] Yannaras, op. cit., p. 45.
[x] Ib., p. 63.
[xi] Ib., p. 81.
[xii] Ib., p. 85.
[xiii]
See especially the articles quoted above, and the articles on
Dogmatic Theology published posthumously in the Messager de
l’Exarchat du Patriarche Russe en Europe Occidentale, Nos.
46-47, 48, 49 and 50 (1964-65).
[xiv]
From an unpublished lecture (in a course on Dogmatic and
Comparative Theology) given on March 8th, 1956.
[xv] Ib.
[xvi]
C.f. P. Miquel (“La conscience de la grace selon Symeon le
Nouveau Theologien”, in Irenikon, XLII, 1969, pp.
314-342): “La secheresse l’absence et la nuit sont aussi des
experiences : ce’st pressentir qu’il y a... une Presence qui
ne se peut encore reveler, un Jour qui ne finira pas et dont on
attend l’aurore” (p.342).
[xvii] Vol. LXXV, No. 626; August, 1972.
[xviii] Op. cit., p. 395.
[xix] Ib., p. 404.
[xx] Ib., p. 405.
[xxi]
C.f., in this context, Sherrard’s assertion (The Greek East
and the Latin West, p. 38): “We can conceive neither of the
relationships of God to creation, nor of how all things
participate in His divinity, except by distinguishing His
entirely simple, immutable, and incommunicable Essence
from His multiple and communicable powers and energies” (my
italics). Surely, in a conservative Aristotelean system, the
properties here enumerated would not be peculiar to the Divine
Essence as such.
[xxii] See E. L. Mascall, The Openness of
Being, Appendix III, Grace and Nature in East and West.
[xxiii]
Summa Theologica, I, xii, 7.
[xxiv] P. E. Persson, “Sacra Doctrina”: Reason
and Revelation in Aquinas, p. 130.
[xxv] See e.g., The Openness of Being, p.
222.
[xxvi] Yannaras, op. cit., p. 77.
[xxvii]
Palamas, On the Hesychasts, in vol. A of P. Christou’s
edition of Palamas’s work, p. 66; quoted Yannaras, p. 79.
[xxviii] Summa Theol. I,
xiii, 11; See E. L. Mascall, Existence and Analogy, pp.
10-12.
[xxix] E.g. Yannaras, op. Cit., p. 74.
[xxx] E. L. Mascall, Existence and Analogy, passim.
esp. ch. 5.
[xxxi] Op. cit., p. 154.
[xxxii] Finite and
Infinite, p. 2.
[xxxiii]
See, e.g., The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, ch.
9; also “La Tradition et les traditions”, in A l’image
et a la ressemblance de Dieu, pp. 139-166.
[xxxiv] In God and
Rationality, pp. 165-192.
[xxxv] Yannaras, op. cit., p. 74.
[xxxvi] Istina, 1971,
p. 130: the article (pp. 131-150) is on “La theologie en Grece
aujourd’hui”.
[xxxvii] See especially
Yannaras, op. cit., p.82.
[xxxviii] Ib.; pp. 71-72.
[xxxix]
For a parallel insistence that the Fall does not produce an
alteration in man’s nature, v. P. Evdokimov, L’Orthodoxie,
pp. 88-92.
[xl] See, for instance, Evdokimov, op. cit.,
pp. 93 ff.
[xli]
See especially, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, chs.
8 and 9, and the articles in A l’image... already
referred to.
[xlii] Op. cit., p. 82.
[xliii] Ib., p. 83.
[xliv] See, for example, D. Z. Phillips & H.
O. Mounce, Moral Practices, especially ch. 9.
[xlv]
We should note also that, in some significant aspects, Miss
Murdoch appears to have been influenced by Heidegger.
[xlvi]
Dr. Yannaras has more recently produced an extended exposition of
his ethical theory, H Åëåõèåñßá ôïõ ¹èïõò (Athens,
1971).
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