Τὸ Αἴνιγµα τοῦ κακοῦ, by Christos Yannaras. Athens: Ἴκαρος, 2008. Pp. 276. ISBN 960-8399-68-6 This book by Emeritus Professor Christos Yannaras is a discussion of the nature of evil by a prolific author who continues to engage in dialogue with the modern world. Professor Yannaras, with his love for language and linguistic precision, addresses an ‘enigma’, as he calls it, that remains a mystery for the human intellect: the presence of evil in the world. The originality of this present book rests neither on the subject – the Greek bibliography features several interesting theological predecessors on the subject (Romanides, Matsoukas1) – nor on the content, per se, since Yannaras has dealt with the subject in different places in his previous works – most thoroughly in his Ὀντολογία τῆς Σχέσης (Athens: Ἴκαρος, 2004). Even the methodology that Yannaras employs here is a coherent follow-up to the methodology that Yannaras introduced as early as his Ἡ Μεταφυσική τοῦ Σώµατος, and peaked in his Heidegger and the Areopagite and the treatise Τὸ Πρόσωπο καὶ ὁ Ἔρως: Yannaras addresses each subject within the context of a post-modern world, highlighting the challenges that the current scientific worldview pose for theology, showing the inconsistencies that arise through insisting on the theological language of the past, and criticizing the always imminent danger of falling from theology into religiosity, as well as providing some thoughts about the way Orthodoxy could hold the keys for a more accurate understanding of the cosmos. So Yannaras’ originality lies – in each of his books – in the reasons that urge him each time to deal with a specific subject. A book – the communication with his readers – is the author’s answer to whatever troubles his mind, a testimony to what lies in his own soul. That is why as an author and also publicist, Yannaras has engaged, through the years, with a variety of subjects, from theology and political sciences to history and even the production of fairy tales. But each intellectual production bears his own distinct intuitions and insights. As a means of communication, his books provoke the 1 Nikos Matsoukas, Τὸ πρόβλημα τοῦ Kακοῦ: Δοκίμιο Πατερικῆς 3 Θεολογίας (Thessaloniki: Πουρναράς, 1992 ). 1 REVIEWS intellect of his readers, providing directions, without claiming to exhaust their subjects in an authoritative manner. The present book, Τὸ Αἴνιγµα τοῦ Κακοῦ bears out these intentions. In his autobiography, Τὰ 4 Καθ’ Ἑαυτόν (Athens: Ἴκαρος, 2005 ), Yannaras reveals: ‘I always need the charm of the title to deal with a book’. Yet, the charm comes from an inner thirst of the author; each book is an exigency to quench his thirst for understanding, and above all, to communicate and share his intellectual anxieties with his fellowmen. Only, in the matter of Τὸ Αἴνιγµα τοῦ Κακοῦ, it is the author’s wholehearted dedication to his late wife, Tatiana, that provides the ‘charm’ for his latest intellectual production. As the discussion unfolds, Yannaras argues that the enigma of evil is actually the enigma of pain and death. Again, in his autobiography, Yannaras had dedicated to his wife several pages, in a poetic outburst, reminiscent of Elytis’ Monogram, where he consents to his emotions to carry him away. Whereas the reviewer had always suspected the gentle presence of Tatiana hiding behind the images of Yannaras’ masterpiece, Variations on the Song of Songs, perhaps his most complete theological work; she could be the ‘Thou’ of the Song, Yannaras’ own erotic interlocutor. Thus, it is Yannaras’ thirst to face the matter of the death of a beloved person with whom he shared his many adventures, personal and intellectual, that this book expresses. It is death as the ultimate manifestation of evil in the world, that urges him to write a book on the enigmatic presence of evil. For every death and, by extension, every evil, is a personal ‘enigma’ that invites the individual to ponder upon it, not a ‘problem’ to solve by following some abstract logic. Turning to the content of the book, Yannaras’ thought unfolds within seventeen quite brief chapters. The chapters do not exhaust the individual subjects, but highlight the existing gap between current theological discussions on the notion of evil and the post-modern worldview, indicating the difference between genuine Christian theology and obstinate religiosity, and also suggesting an orthodox way of resolving certain theological misunderstandings and inconsistencies that have developed from an intransigent adherence to the theological language of the past. Although the chapters treat of, as it were, independent subjects, their inner coherence may be expressed under the following headlines: (i) the bond between culture and 2 REVIEWS theology in deriving a definition of ‘evil’; (ii) evil as manifest in suffering (pain), natural disasters and death; (iii) the rift from an ontology of evil to the modern ‘naturalistic’ approaches; (iv) the biblical accounts of the fall, their cultural background, and the problem of the corresponding theologies of evil; (v) orthodox theology of personhood and the enigma of evil. One chapter, chapter twelve, needs to be singled out: in this chapter, Yannaras presents briefly and criticizes one by one Fr Georges Florovsky’s positions on the origin of evil. It was asserted earlier that the content of this present book scarcely comes as a surprise; his methodology and certain of his positions have already been introduced in his previous books, though Yannaras gets the chance to dwell on them more thoroughly. Through the years, Yannaras’ theological approach has been crystallized within several premises that have given his thought its distinct character: namely, (i) Christian ontology as an answer to post-modern nihilistic existentialism; (ii) the unyielding patristic ontological distinction between created and uncreated, and the ostensible distinction between ousia and energies at the beginnings of Christian anthropology; (iii) Christian apophaticism and the theology of personhood as a response to (Western) individualism, conceptualism and legalism; (iv) divine and human freedom, expressed in love, as the cornerstone of a genuine Christian theology; and (v) the distinction between communion and intellectual knowledge, translated into a constant distinction between religiosity (θρησκεία) and authentic ecclesiastical experience (ἐκκλησιαστικὸ γεγονός). On the other hand, Yannaras continues to rely heavily upon his ancient sources, Denys the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, and John Damascene, while remaining critical towards – though dependent upon – modern figures, such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Lacan. Furthermore, he can never resist one more chance to demonstrate the historical intellectual rift between East and West (a constant feature in his works) – in terms of ontology versus rationalism – and reiterate his distaste for Augustine, who is constantly singled out as the person responsible for the theological decline of the West. Nonetheless, this reviewer believes that, in their personal adventures and attitudes towards the established theology of their times, Yannaras and Augustine share more than the former 3 REVIEWS would care to admit, not least, an involuntary liability to being misunderstood – alas – by their readers owing to their daring assertions. This is not to deny the importance of his present book, Τὸ Αἴνιγµα τοῦ Κακοῦ. In his Ὀντολογία τῆς Σχέσης, Yannaras had argued that evil has its origin in the being (εἶναι) of man in terms of communion. In the present book, Yannaras argues more concisely the ontological consequences of such a position: maintaining the Aristotelian definition of evil as a negation or deprivation, Yannaras indicates that the evil is a negation of being in communion with God. But most importantly, Yannaras asks his reader, for the first time, to ponder on the true meaning of the word evil; what do we call evil? Thus, the importance of the book, with its enticing and alluring use of language – for Yannaras is primarily a poet, only secondarily a theologian – lies with the author’s invitation to his reader to strip his intellect of any concepts and images believed to reveal, as such, the true nature of evil. The author could not deny the predominance of pain and death in the world. In fact, his discussion on the proneness of humanity to discover new and more intelligent means of imposing pain, and also the impersonal ways of nature, reminiscent of Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground, reveal an author who is not trying to hide or play down the ‘factness’ of evil under the veil of elaborate sophisms for the sake of a pious theological answer: quite the contrary. For, as a regular columnist, Yannaras betrays a poignant feeling in his Sunday articles of a man who painfully acknowledges the decadence of our human civilization, including theology. In witnessing to the twisting of the human intellect, and seeking to awaken his fellowmen from their intellectual slumber, he gives rise to accusations that he himself is only a disguised nihilist; yet Yannaras is merely stating what is apparent: something evil is happening to us and our world. But, where does this evil, this human decadence, come from? Yannaras has sought his answer in the distinction, which he draws from St Maximus the Confessor, between logos and tropos. Evil is a prerogative of the ‘mode’ of being (τρόπος τοῦ εἶναι), it is not itself a being (τὸ ὄν): evil is the tropos, not the logos of the created 4 REVIEWS beings. Thus, evil is not an ethical quality, nor a being, per se, but an ontological mode of being (τρόπος τοῦ εἶναι) distinct from the logos or principle of being that originates in the uncreated Creator. His thought sounds provoking; in several places it leads to an apparent identification of humanity and ‘evil’, since ‘evil’ is the tropos or mode of the creatures, whose logos was created by God. This leaves a sense that the presence of matter in the creation is reminiscent of the Plotinian ‘matter’ that could not have been a bearer of ‘good’ qualities. Yet, at the beginning of the book, Yannaras has iterated a profound premise: this book constitutes an invitation to its reader to undergo a painstaking purification, stripping himself of any conceptions, not least ethical ones, that he previously held about the evil. The Maximian distinction that qualifies evil as relative, introduced by Yannaras at an early stage, initiates the reader into this truth: that humanity has been called into being (εἶναι) to surpass its created mode. Thus, human freedom – the most celebrated divine gift that humanity has been endowed with according to the Greek Fathers – gives rise to ethical ‘evil’ in so far as human beings remain inert within their created mode, defined in terms of proneness to self-love, self-centredness and self-absorbed existence. Yannaras’ insistence on human inertia is not far from Balthasar’s own call for theological action, as part of his theo-dramatic theology. His questioning the historical authenticity of the ‘fall’, and demons and angels in the Bible, play the role of a warning towards his reader that we are dealing primarily with ancient images, not definitions, that were created within a certain cultural environment and sought to transmit a certain message: the proneness of humanity to ‘ethical’ decay is more than a matter of mere ethics; it is an ontological riddle. What human collective experience designates as evil is not the result of a ‘fall’ from a blissful state; it is the ontological consequence of man’s failure to overcome his ‘created’ mode of being and remain trapped within a world of self-love. Yannaras turns to modern science for a witness that decay is a universal law, where nothing in the tangible cosmos indicates that there was a sudden and abrupt ‘fall’ from a state of balance. We could add that, whereas everything indicates that the cosmos itself is an outcome of a yet unexplainable singularity in time and space, decay is the irreversible 5 REVIEWS fate of everything that moves within the vastness of the universe: life is a cosmic mystery, death is a universal fate. By employing such scientific witness, Yannaras argues against the hypothesis that death is a punishment or an event that was introduced only lately in human history. Life and death, blossoming and decay seem to be bound tight together within human history. Hence, Yannaras seeks the meaning of evil, pain and death in his celebrated theology of personhood. Compared to similar contemporary systems, his is quite unique, since it is a theology of redemption, not of abstract anthropology. Yannaras does not seek to deal with the meaning of what a human being primarily is; is he a person or a nature? The theology of personhood is his answer to our cultural and historical nihilism. Instead of seeking an answer to an intellectual problem, Yannaras acknowledges the manifest ethical decay, the presence of pain and also the universal fate of death as enigmas that call human beings to live in communion with God and their fellow men. The author has distanced himself from a ‘Neo-platonic’ understanding of human history as a fall from an original spiritual personhood to an undifferentiated nature (identifiable with evil) and a return to the original personhood: a circular notion of material time. He argues within a linear temporal frame, where humanity is always called to surpass its nature, not unlike Gregory of Nyssa’s notion of epektasis. Yannaras’ approach claims to be driven by ecclesial experience, as opposed to rational abstractions; yet the lack of a clear Christological approach is an essential consequence of his failure to achieve a ‘Christo-logical’ theology, such as we find in modern Russian theology (Bulgakov–Archimandrite Sophrony) and even in modern Catholic theology (de Lubac–von Balthasar). Whereas they take the Incarnation as the starting point of their discussion, the Greek theology on which Yannaras draws starts from the premise of an inexorable distinction between created and uncreated. Even Yannaras, notwithstanding his criticism of adherence to the formulations of the past, has failed to realize that the above distinction, valid as it may be, could acquire a different meaning, another Christological dynamism, when viewed from a ‘God-man’ perspective. Our author writes little about the divine image, which seems to have declined to the condition 6 REVIEWS of a mere potentiality or been narrowly identified with freedom; whereas it has found a solid and concrete Christological content in the above theologians, who argue against the idea that humanity experiences only the mode of being of the created. For instance, when dealing with the question whether God knows evil or not, Yannaras focuses on the notion of divine freedom and the fact that God exists beyond the mode of the created (and even the uncreated), excluding an answer that would have the Incarnation and the sacrifice of Christ as its point of departure. The modern emphasis on human freedom could never be enough to shed light on the origin of evil or the way of overcoming ‘the mode of the created’; every human being, since birth, is born within a lack of freedom (cf. the classical remarks by Tristram Shandy), whereas modern science would agree with Augustine that human willingness is not all it takes to change our course of action. Several problems remain unaddressed: for instance, the origin of angels and demons. Where do they come from and why are they so different from men in their proneness or remoteness from sin? Origen was the first to attempt an answer, but this problem remains an intriguing issue, even after the refutation of the latter’s cosmological system. Moreover, the connection between evil, Incarnation and redemption remains obscure and problematic. Yannaras seems to have misread Florovky’s intention in dealing with the above issue: why did the Incarnation not deal with the presence of evil, once and for all? If the Incarnation was not meant to set human freedom aright, what will happen at the eschaton? Will evil be eradicated? Why so? Florovsky introduced the above issues, though, it is true, he did not provide a sufficient answer himself. In calling his book, The Enigma of Evil, Yannaras shows that, at the end of the day, evil is a mystery since it is part of the divine œconomia. As it is with every mystery, the human intellect could never suffice to grasp it. In the final chapters, Yannaras puts forward the notion of faith (πίστις), indicating that faith signifies a personal trust (ἐµπιστοσύνη) in God. But this can only be achieved with a life of love and self-denial. It is only in his personal encounter with God that man will find the meaning of an enigma that is there, not to baffle the intellect, but to direct us to a God who has experienced the 7 REVIEWS consequences of evil Himself and conquered over it, through the suffering, death and resurrection of His Only-begotten Son. EVAGGELOS BARTZIS 8