The problematic of Greek identity and Christos Yannaras’ quest for a politics of authentic existence By Jonathan Cole Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras’ Thought conference 27-28 March 2017, University of Cambridge  Christos Yannaras has a reputation in the English-speaking world as an unreconstructed and unbalanced critic of Western theology and civilisation. It is beyond the scope of this paper to examine in detail Yannaras’ complex conception of the “West.” Petrà has observed that “in Yannaras’ vast oeuvre the theme of the West comes up in many different contexts and plays a variety of roles.” Basilio Petrà, “Christos Yannaras and the Idea of “Dysis,”” in Orthodox Constructions of the West, eds. George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 161. Yannaras actually uses a number of different terms to describe different aspects and historical phases of the West. For example, in Ἕξι φιλοσοφικές ζωγραφιὲς he uses terms such as “the Post-Roman West,” “the barbarian West,” “the Hellenised Roman East” and “Latin orthodoxy.” In Ἕξι φιλοσοφικές ζωγραφιὲς, Yannaras says that “civilisation is constituted by a single central axiom that ascribes meaning to reality and life – not, of course, perceptible to all, but in practice accepted by all.”Christos Yannaras, Ἕξι φιλοσοφικές ζωγραφιὲς: Σύνοψη εἰσαγωγικὴ καὶ πάντως αὐτεξεταστική (Athens: Ikaros, 2011)… At least, that is the impression one obtains reading some Orthodox accounts of Yannaras in English. Norman Russell, for example, has speculated that Yannaras’ “reputation for rebarbative anti-Westernism has probably put off scholars from engaging with him.” Norman Russell, “The Enduring Significance of Christos Yannaras: some further works in translation,” International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 16:1, 59. Marcus Plested, who finds “much of value in Yannaras’ work” and describes him as a “brilliant thinker,” nevertheless finds Yannaras “unduly dialectical and unwontedly oppositional,” containing too many “sweeping historical judgments and impossibly simple dichotomies”. Marcus Plested, ““Light from the West”: Byzantine Readings of Aquinas,” in Orthodox Constructions of the West, eds. George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 63. Pantelis Kalaitzidis has described Yannaras’ “systematic and structural anti-Westernism” as “a contrived new version of Church history and theology” and “a mocking caricature of the real West.” Pantelis Kalaitzidis, “The Image of the West in Contemporary Greek Theology,” in Orthodox Constructions of the West, eds. George Demacopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 153, 155. Kalaitzidis’ substantive criticism is that Yannaras too naively draws “a direct connection between texts and social reality.” Pantelis Kalaitzidis, Orthodoxy and Political Theology, trans. Fr. Gregory Edwards (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publication, 2012), 41. If Catholic and Protestant opinion of Yannaras mirrors Orthodox anxieties about his “anti-Westernism,” there is little evidence to show for it. Admittedly, the overwhelming response of Catholic and Protestant theologians has been one of silence, making categorical judgments about their reaction to Yannaras’ critique of the West difficult to make. It is noteworthy, however, that those Catholic and Protestant scholars who have engaged Yannaras work in English have given little heed to his supposed anti-Westernism. Catholic priest and scholar Basilio Petrà, in his essay “Christos Yannaras and the Idea of “Dysis,”” went no further than acknowledging an “East-West dualism” in Yannaras’ thought and the concession that Orthodoxy and the West contains “many provocative aspects.” Petrà, “Christos Yannaras and the Idea of “Dysis,” 176-177. Rowan Williams, in his essay “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras,” admittedly published long before the major works that have cemented Yannaras’ anti-Western reputation, nevertheless observed that, although Yannaras exhibited a certain “onesidedness” in his arguments, this was “perhaps necessary to provoke Western readers to question the presuppositions of their own theology.” Anglican Rowan Williams, “The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of Christos Yannaras,” Sobornost 6 (1972), 423. It is therefore possible that Orthodox reactions to Yannaras’ work have done more to cement his anti-Western reputation in English-language scholarship than either Protestant or Catholic responses. This paper concedes that Yannaras’ portrayal of Western theology and civilisation is open to charges of being too generic, simplistic and lacking in subtlety. It is interesting to note that in Ἕξι φιλοσοφικές ζωγραφιὲς Yannaras concedes that “an evaluation and comparison of civilisations is not feasible” because it is difficult to identity “commonly accepted criteria”. But this does not prohibit him from making numerous categorical judgments about the “West” and contrasting it with the “East.” For example, he argues several sentences later that “the civilization of the Post-Roman West…did not recognise the need to move from the community of use to the community of truth [original italics]. Yannaras, Ἕξι φιλοσοφικές ζωγραφιὲς… One could very well level the reverse charge at much Western scholarship and its portrayal of the Byzantine East. See, for example, Dimiter G. Angelov, “Byzantinism: The Imaginary and Real Heritage of Byzantium in Southeastern Europe,” in New Approaches to Balkan Studies, ed. D. Keridis et. al. (Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2003). But it contends that Yannaras’ critique of the West has been misconstrued in some quarters as a form of ideological “anti-Westernism” rather than the ontological critique it in fact represents. Petrà, “Christos Yannaras and the Idea of “Dysis,”” 176. Petrà understands Yannaras’ critique of the West is “an ontological critique.” Yannaras in fact offers a cosmopolitan political ontology that seeks to address tangible and pressing existential political problems in the Greek context. Although Yannaras’ critique of the West is in many respects highly context-dependent, I argue that his political ontology actually represents a transcontextual and transcultural reconception of politics as the common human relational struggle for truth and authentic existence that has application well beyond the borders of Greece and the confines of Orthodox theology. An impediment to a proper evaluation of Yannaras’ critique of the West is the fact that his substantial body of work on politics has not been translated. See, for example, Christos Yannaras, Ὀρθὸς λόγος καὶ κοινωνικὴ πρακτική [Rationalism and Social Practice] (Athens: Domos, 1984), Chapter 6; Christos Yannaras, Ἡ ἀπανθρωπία τοῦ δικαιώματος [The Inhumanity of Right] (Athens: Domos, 1998). The works that are available in English are all in the fields of philosophy and theology, leading to the common characterisation of Yannaras as a philosopher-theologian, when in fact he is more accurately described as a philosopher, theologian and political theorist and political commentator. The ontological basis of Yannaras’ critique of the West is arguably clearer in his political work than in either his philosophical or theological work. Moreover, his critique of Western liberal political order reveals that his critique of the West has an objective basis and validity in the contemporary Greek context that has not been appreciated by all English-speaking readers, and more surprisingly, by some Greek critics. This objective basis is the problematic of Greek identity and the problematic of Greek political order, both of which provide impetus for Yannaras’ critique of Western liberal political order, and by extension the West more broadly. The problematic of Greek identity and Greek political order find their origin in the creation of what Yannaras refers to as the “alien” Greek state in 1828. For a recent discussion of the problematic of Greek identity, see Georgios Steiris, Sotiris Mitralexis and Georgios Arabatzis, eds. The Problem of Modern Greek Identity: From the Ecumene to the Nation-State (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016). This event marked a complete innovation and turning point in the long and variegated history of Hellenic civilisation, and, according to Yannaras, marked the beginning of the Western corruption of Greek political life. The corruption of Greek thought began much earlier, according to Yannaras, with Demetrios Kydones’ translation of Aquinas’ Summa contra Gentiles into Greek in 1354. Christos Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age, trans. Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006), 3. In a 2014 column in Kathimerini, Yannaras wrote that “in form, mode, and institutional shape the ‘nation-state’ was something foreign to Greeks, unrelated to their experience, untested: it hadn’t emerged from their needs, their historical norms, their priorities or aspirations.” Christos Yannaras, “Συνεπάγεται αχρείωση ο αφελληνισμός,” Kathimerini, 10 August 2014, http://www.kathimerini.gr/779516/opinion/epikairothta/politikh/synepagetai-axreiwsh-o-afellhnismos. In the same column Yannaras identified three constitutive elements of Western liberal political order that were foreign to Greek thought and political praxis: “freedom,” construed as “the freedom of unbridled individual choice,” “equality,” construed as “individual rights,” which elsewhere Yannaras argues are little more than the security of private interests, Yannaras, Ἡ ἀπανθρωπία τοῦ δικαιώματος, 15. and “brotherhood,” construed as a conventional form of cohesion through a social contract. Christos Yannaras, “Συνεπάγεται αχρείωση ο αφελληνισμός,” The emergence of the Greek state forced Greek-speaking Christians of the Ottoman Empire to contend with two difficult syntheses simultaneously. The late Greek historian Nikos Svoronos articulated the first synthesis in the following terms: In order for Hellenism to…synthesise the elements of its national consciousness and to present itself as an autonomous historical entity, it had to try to reconcile and harmonise its multifarious, and often contradictory, traditions. Nikos G. Svoronos, Το Ελληινικό Έθνος: Γένεση και Διαμόρφωση του Νέου Ελληνισμού [The Greek Nation: The Genesis and Development of Neo-Hellenism] (Athens: Polis, 2004), 107. Svoronos identified four such traditions: “Ancient Greek civilisation,” “Orthodox Christianity,” “Byzantine Empire” and “popular tradition.” Ibid. Svoronos described the second synthesis as “the incorporation of [Greece] into the united current of European civilisation.” Ibid., 108. In reality, the nascent Greek state was incorporated into European civilisation in the best traditions of European colonialism. Following the assassination of Ioannis Kapodistrias in 1832, and with him the short-lived Greek politeia, the Kingdom of Greece was established with the seventeen year old Catholic Bavarian prince Otto Friedrich Ludwig installed on the newly minted throne. King Otto and his Bavarian officials ran Greece as an effective Bavarian protectorate. One of the most infamous Western institutions created during Otto’s reign was a national church, the Church of Greece, unilaterally carved out of territory that had belonged to the Patriarchate in Constantinople for centuries. The philosopher and diplomat Ion Dragoumis evocatively captured the difficult integration of neo-Hellenic identity to the current of European civilisation in the following observations he made in 1904: “Before 1821 the Greeks had a life, with an ideal. It was an Eastern life, with the goal of being liberated from the Turks and reclaiming Constantinople… everything then was certain, put in its place, remnants of Byzantium, a life settled, the product of older civilisations and times. Then, suddenly, with 1821, a Greek state was born, and everyone realised that everything could change. They noticed the Europeans, they brought new clothes from Europe, new systems of governance…and a greater revolution occurred than the revolution against the Sultan. After everything had been turned upside down, nothing remained in its place and so we find ourselves now unable to find our new form, our resting point...” Ion Dragoumis, Ὁ Ἑλληνισμός μου καὶ οἱ Ἕλληνες [My Hellenism and the Greeks] (Pelekanos). Svoronos and Dragoumis remind us that the problematic of Greek identity caused by the creation of the Greek state has a widely-attested synchronic and diachronic basis. It is not a contrived problematic of 1960s neo-Orthodox zealots or nostalgic Greek intellectuals living in the shadow of Ancient Greek and Byzantine glory. Yannaras has clarified that his critique of the West is not that of a superior non-Western Orthodox other. In the preface to the English translation of Orthodoxy and the West, for example, Yannaras wrote that “My critical stance towards the West is self-criticism; it refers to my own wholly Western mode of life.” Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, ix. What hasn’t been sufficiently taken into consideration in the critical evaluation of Yannaras’ anti-Westernism is just how dysfunctional that Western mode of life has been for Yannaras living in the Greek state, and the way that this experience has shaped his perception of the “West.” It would not be an act of hyperbole to describe Greek political order as “disorder.” When Yannaras describes Greek political order as “…endemic divisions, civil war, gross government incompetence, economic dysfunction, a top-heavy and ineffective civil service, a feeble system of education, shortsighted diplomacy, an uncritical pedalling of ideologies, a jejeune nationalism and a provincial internationalism,” he is describing a lived personal experience and pressing existential political problems that demand resolution. Ibid., 251. As he wryly noted in his autobiography Τὰ καθ᾽ἑαυτὸν, during the military junta of the late 1960s and early 1970s Greek intellectuals began decrying “the dismantling of freedoms, the Greek polity and the principles of democracy, as if modern Greece had ever known democracy and a political order that wasn’t rotten.” Christos Yannaras, Τὰ καθ᾽ἑαυτὸν [Personal Matters] 4th ed (Athens: Ikaros, 2005), 67. The problematic of Greek political (dis)order has profoundly shaped the sense of alienation at the heart of Yannaras’ critique of the West. In Orthodoxy and the West, he argued that, “…although content to be de-Hellenised through accepting the Western model, the Greeks did not achieve a real assimilation but remained in a disorganised state of alienation.” Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West, 252. Yannaras’ personal sense of alienation, however, runs deeper than the widely-felt alienating effects of Greece’s political dysfunction. It is also a consequence of the problematic of Greek identity; not for the reasons Svoronos identified – the “contradictions” of Greece’s multifarious cultural legacy – but for precisely the opposite reason – Yannaras’ strong sense of continuity and coherence in Helleno-Christian ontology, theology and political thought, a continuity and coherence that was broken with the creation of the Greek state. Yannaras contends that Greek politics, in its Helleno-Christian conceptual form, and in its praxis from Athens to Constantinople and even to the self-governing communities of the Ottoman period, was characterised by the common communal struggle for truth and authentic existence. Yannaras, “Συνεπάγεται αχρείωση ο αφελληνισμός.” He says in the book Six Philosophical Pictures that “We speak of a meeting of Hellenism and Christianity, of the Greek polis and the Christian ecclesia (of the ecclesia of the demos and the ecclesia of the faithful), a meeting at the level of the pursuit of truth as a mode of existence…” Christos Yannaras, Ἕξι φιλοσοφικές ζωγραφιὲς Greek Politics, Yannaras contends, was about ontology. Western politics is about ideology. Christos Yannaras, “Το σήμερα έρχεται από το χθες,” [Today Comes from Yesterday] Kathimerini, 12 February 2017, http://www.kathimerini.gr/896065/opinion/epikairothta/politikh/to-shmera-erxetai-apo-to-x8es; Yannaras, “Συνεπάγεται αχρείωση ο αφελληνισμός.” Yannaras defines “ideology” as the “substitution of the experiential participation in knowledge with a mental conviction bolstered by psychological self-imposition.” Yannaras, Ἕξι φιλοσοφικές ζωγραφιὲς,… Accordingly, Yannaras’ response to the problematic of Greek identity, of Greek political disorder and the alienation wrought by the Western political model is a reconception of politics from the Western paradigm of ideology to the Greek paradigm of ontology. Yannaras’ Helleno-Christian inspired political ontology envisions a politics that is personal, relational, communo-centric and participatory. It is also ultimately a theological political ontology, one might even say a “theotic” political theology, because the free, loving community of persons that constitutes the Trinity is both the source and telos of existence, and ergo of political life. Sotiris Mitralexis, “An Ontology of the historico-social: Christos Yannaras’ reading of European history,” in Mustard Seeds in the Public Square: Between and Beyond Theology, Philosophy, and Society, Sotiris Mitralexis, ed. (Wilmington, Del.: Vernon Press, 2017), 97. Mitralexis has observed that “…Yannaras’ attempt at a comprehensive narrative on European history, leading to a political theology, can be categorised as an ontology of the historico-social [original emphasis].” This is why the Trinity functions as a foundational political concept in Yannaras’ political thought. Conversely, the Western political paradigm of ideology, rights, utility, nationalism and totalitarianism not only alienates the person from community, the citizen from authority, and the person from real existence, but crucially also the person and community from God. Some Greek scholars have interpreted Yannaras’ political ontology as a form of Greek cultural imperialism. Kalaitzidis, for example, has charged Yannaras with propagating a notion of “Greek cultural superiority over the West” and Sotiris Gounelas of “cultural totalitarianism”. Kalaitzidis, “The Image of the West in Contemporary Greek Theology,” 158. Gounelas quoted in Kalaitzidis, p.153. But these criticisms misunderstand the way that Yannaras’ political ontology relativises culture, at least in the modern ethno-linguistic sense of the term. Even more surprisingly, they fail to recognise the objective problematic of Greek identity and Greek political (dis)order that Yannaras’ political ontology seeks to address. A Greek conception of politics, according to Yannaras, has little to do with race, blood, land, borders or sovereignty, even if these are unavoidably necessities in a global order of nation-states. In a recent column in Kathimerini Yannaras put the following indicative rhetorical questions to his Greek readership: “Are we the continuity of the Greco-Roman “oikoumene”? A cosmopolitan civilisation, a mode of life – language, art, communo-centric politics, prioritising relationship over utility? Do we seek the truth, not as a code of rationality, but as an experience of participation, in unbroken organic continuity from Heraclitus to Gregory Palamas? Or are we the racial potpourri of schismatic Greeks (Γραικών), as the West would have us be…? Yannaras, “Το σήμερα έρχεται από το χθες.” Thus while Yannaras’ political ontology finds its impetus in the problematic of Greek identity and Greek political (dis)order, and finds is resolution in Helleno-Christian ontology, it is not, contra Greek critics, either a form of Greek cultural imperialism, or a Greek Orthodox nationalist ideology. As a political ontology that has truth and authentic existence as its telos, with personhood, relationship and community as its means, it is a vision of transcultural and transcontextual scope and application, as indeed any ontological proposal ought to be by its nature. Clarifying the ontological basis of Yannaras’ critique of Western liberal political order allows his putative anti-Westernism to be placed into new perspective. Yannaras’ critique of Western liberal political order, a key component of his wider critique of the West, finds an objective basis in the problematic of Greek identity and the lived experience of Greek political disorder. If there is an error on Yannaras’ part, it is arguably to misapply and overextend the valid critique of Western liberal political order in the Greek context to contexts where Western liberal political order is more functional and less alienating. However, it is important to recognise that the validity or otherwise of Yannaras’ critique of Western liberal political order as manifest in the contemporary Greek context, is not dependent on the validity of his wider, generic reading of Western history, civilisation and culture, nor even of the validity of his reading of Greek history and thought. The plausibility of Yannaras’ critique of Western liberal political order in the Greek context and its possible misunderstanding in the English-speaking context raise interesting questions for political theology. It indicates, for instance, that much English-language political theology works with far too thin a conception of “Western liberal political order.” English-peaking Protestant political theology is a particular culprit in this regard, often restricting its interest to the status and function of just a handful of stable, prosperous and functional Anglo-Saxon states to the divine economy. Yannaras’ uniquely Greek experience of and perspective on Western liberal political order can provide important counterbalance to a Western Christian view of liberal political order that can be in some cases too naïve and optimistic. Moreover, once Yannaras’ anti-Westernism is understood as a proposal to reconceive and reorient Western political thought and praxis away from the current paradigm of individualism, utilitarianism, freedom of choice and private interests disguised as rights to a new ontologically-grounded paradigm of personhood, community, relationship and communion with God, its true transcultural, transnational and ecumenical potential emerges. It is a proposal that in conception and intention is designed to transcend the very things that divide humans, such as nationalism, ideology and individualism, and seeks to put in their place a cosmopolitan politics grounded in the common human struggle for truth and authentic existence. This makes it a proposal that “Western” theologians and political thinkers can and ought to take seriously. PAGE 1