The “Relational Ontology” of Christos Yannaras: The Hesychast Influence on

the Understanding of the Person in the Thought of Christos Yannaras

Fr. Daniel P. Payne, Ph.D.

Introduction

It has been stated that Christos Yannaras (b. 1935) is one of the pre-eminent Orthodox thinkers of

our time. Being a part of the 1960s generation of theologians and the prominent leader of what

became known as the Neo-Orthodox Movement in Greece, Yannaras is a prolific writer with over

twenty books published and translated into several languages. His influence is known throughout

Greece and the Orthodox world. He is chiefly known in both the East and the West as an astute

philosopher, theologian, and social commentator with an anti-Western polemic.

Yannaras’s relational theology of the person has been likened to the philosophy of

Levinas.1 The importance of a relational understanding of truth and personhood dominates the

thought of Yannaras. But rather than Levinas having an influence on Yannaras, two other sources

have had a dominant influence on his thought: the Orthodox patristic tradition and Heidegger.

The link that he found with Heidegger was in his understanding of the concept of “being” that he

had recovered from the Pre-Socratic philosopher Herakleitos. Having lost this concept of

“being,” according to Heidegger, the West had drifted away from ontological truth. Yannaras

concurred, for he had identified this concept of “being” with the Orthodox theological and

ascetic tradition that had inherited it from the pre-Socratic philosophers.2

Following Heidegger’s critique of the West, Yannaras argues that the rise of Nietzschean

nihilism is due to the loss of the relational understanding of being. Consequently, he believes that

the source of this problem is the post-Augustinian philosophical tradition which transformed
1
Andrew Louth, “Introduction,” in Christos Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God:
Heidegger and the Areopagite (London: T&T Clark, 2005), 8.
2
Louth, “Introduction,” 3.

1
logos into ratio. The Greek concept of logos implies a relational, experiential understanding of

the truth. Western ratio, however, comes to mean the individual capacity to arrive at a

comprehensive exhaustive understanding of truth. According to Yannaras, this is because of the

analogia entis where the human mind is understood as being a copy of the divine mind at a lesser

level.3 What, this does, then, for the understanding of God is that God becomes an object of the

mind, rather, than a personal reality. God becomes “the product or result of a cognitive self-

sufficiency, guaranteed for the subject by ratio, outside or beyond the experience of reality or

life, where everything is the experience of relationship.” Nietzsche realized what Descartes had

accomplished: “logical proof for the existence of God refutes God as an objective, real

presence.”4 Because the human mind is able to construct the existence of God by logic, there is

no necessity for God’s existence. However, by positing this power on the part of the human

being, he is superior to God, thus he becomes the Superman.

While this critique of the Western philosophical tradition is dependent upon the

philosophy of Heidegger, Yannaras desires not to follow his path for the answer taken from

Nietzsche: existential nihilism. Rather, Yannaras turns to the patristic and ascetic tradition of the

East to answer the existential problem of contemporary “Western” man: ecclesial being. Here the

hesychast and neptic tradition of the Fathers influences the thought of Yannaras.

In this essay I will explore the influence of the hesychast and neptic tradition of the

Orthodox East on the thought of Yannaras, particularly his understanding of the person. I will

first enter into a discussion of the theological achievement of Gregory Palamas, whereby he

articulates the patristic understanding of the distinction in God between the essence and the

energies and how this is understood in a personalist manner. I will then take up Yannaras’s

3
Christos Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God: Heidegger and the Areopagite (London:
T&T Clark, 2005), 23.
4
Ibid., 24.

2
thought in regards to the importance of this distinction for understanding the person. In doing so,

I will also examine Yannaras’s epistemology. Furthermore, I will look at how Yannaras

understands freedom as developed by the patristic tradition.

The Essence and Energies Distinction in Gregory Palamas

Gregory Palamas, in his debates with Barlaam the Calabrian, argued that a positive knowledge of

God was possible. The experience of God is possible outside of the natural means of knowing,

that is, beyond the senses and the intellect.5 Barlaam believed that all knowledge comes only

through the senses. The revelation of God, consequently, was apprehended through the natural

senses. Thus, he placed an emphasis on philosophical knowledge of creation. However, Gregory

refutes this position by arguing that the experience of God, bringing about the positive

knowledge of God, occurs outside of creation and the natural means of knowing. He states,

Do you now understand that in place of the intellect, the eyes and ears, they [the
hesychasts] acquire the incomprehensible Spirit and by Him hear, see and comprehend?
For if all their intellectual activity has stopped, how could the angels and angelic men see
God except by the power of the Spirit? This is why their vision is not a sensation, since
they do not receive it through the senses; nor is it intellection, since they do not find it
through thought or the knowledge that comes thereby, but after the cessation of all mental
activity. It is not, therefore, the product of either imagination or reason; it is neither an
opinion nor a conclusion reached by syllogistic argument.6

Additionally, this experience of God is not a participation in the divine essence. “However, the

union of God the Cause of all with those worthy transcends that light. God, while remaining

entirely in Himself, dwells entirely in us by His superessential power; and communicates to us

not His nature, but His proper glory and splendour.”7

The Sixth Ecumenical Council established the Christology of St. Maximus the Confessor

that every nature must have a will or energy. This teaching safeguarded the two natures and two

wills of Jesus Christ, human and divine. Without this teaching, salvation was understood to be in
5
John Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas (London: The Faith Press, 1964), 206-07.
6
St. Gregory Palamas, The Triads, ed. John Meyendorff (New York: Paulist Press, 1983), 35.
7
Ibid., 39.

3
jeopardy, for how could the human nature exist without a will or energy? Furthermore, in the

doctrine of the hypostatic union, the human nature is united to the divine hypostasis, that is, it is

a personal union, not an essential union. In this manner, the human nature, according to the

teaching of Leontius of Byzantium, is enhypostasized in the divine hypostasis of the Second

Person of the Trinity. The human nature then participates in the energy of the divine hypostasis

bringing about its deification. Human beings, united to the human nature of Christ participate in

that deifying energy of the divine hypostasis not by an essentialist union with the human nature,

but a hypostatic union in and through the human energy, allowing then for a participation in the

deifying energy of the person of Christ. If an essentialist union is held, whereby the human

nature is united to the divine hypostasis by nature, then the possibility exists for a

polyhypostatization of the divinity.8 Instead of a Trinity of three hypostases, a Poly-Unity would

exist leading to pantheism.9

Gregory’s theology is a continuation of the teachings of the Sixth Ecumenical Council. If

God has a divine nature, then he must also have a divine energy, otherwise God would not exist,

and we would have no experience or knowledge of His existence. The divine energy allows

creation to experience God. However, if creation experiences God in and through the divine

essence, then God’s transcendence would be obliterated, and the result would be pantheism and

the loss of personal existence. But since the basis of Palamas’s thought is the positive experience

of God through the practice of hesychasm, then that real experience of God must be on the basis

of the divine energy. John Meyendorff comments, “It is the real experience of God which is the

best ‘proof’ of his existence, for it touches that existence itself: ‘Contemplation surpassing

8
See Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 183-84. See also, Christos Yannaras, “The Distinction
Between Essence and Energies and Its Importance for Theology,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 19 (summer
1975): 232-45.
9
Daniel P. Payne, The Revival of Political Hesychasm in Contemporary Orthodox Thought: The Political
Hesychasm of John S. Romanides and Christos Yannaras (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 93-94.

4
intellectual activities is the only means, the plainest means, the means par excellence to show the

real existence of God and the fact that he transcends beings. For how could the essence of God

not exist, since the glory of that divine nature makes itself seen by men?’” 10 The knowability of

God is firmly rooted in a free divine gift of revelation. This revelation is in and through the

divine energy of God.11

This self-communication of the divine Being is not an essentialist relationship, but rather

a personal communion between humanity and divinity. In this experience of God, God’s personal

Being is communicated to the human person. In understanding this communication, Palamas

conceives his greatest theological understanding: “’The essence,’ he writes, ‘is necessarily being,

but being is not necessarily essence.’” This distinction provides the opening for participation in

God’s Being without participation in his essence. The problem with Barlaam’s theology is that he

maintains an essentialist understanding of the divine Being. Such an understanding logically

prevents a distinction between essence and energy, for it violates the logical principle of the

simplicity of God. Yet, Gregory maintains the doctrine of divine simplicity while making a

distinction between the divine essence and energies. For Palamas the divine simplicity is able to

be defended through a personalist or hypostatic understanding of God.12

In his theology Palamas teaches the personalist nature of the divine energy. He

emphasizes that the divine energy is not a hypostasis; rather it is always enhypostasized in the

divine Persons. This is a very important theological point, for if the divine energy was not

enhypostasized, then the experience of God in and through the divine energy would be through

another hypostasis creating a Tetrarchy in place of a Trinity. Such an understanding would

10
Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 211.
11
Payne, Revival of Political Hesychasm, 94.
12
Ibid.

5
violate divine simplicity and would lead to pantheism, once again. Instead, the enhypostatization

of the divine energy allows for the participation of persons in the divine Son of God.13

Furthermore, Hussey stresses the importance of Palamas’s emphasis on the singularity of

the divine energy that is common to all three Persons in the Trinity. In this Palamas follows

Maximus’s important argument that energy or will follows nature not hypostasis. If energy were

to follow hypostasis, then the unity of the Trinity would be obliterated through the existence of

three divine natures adhering to each of the divine Persons, resulting in tritheism. The divine

energy, then, must be common to all three Persons of the Trinity, allowing for a perichoresis of

personhood in the Trinity.14

Additionally, Palamas argues that the divine simplicity is protected through the “divisible

indivisibility” of the divine energy. He writes,

The divine transcendent being is never named in the plural. But the divine and uncreated
grace and energy of God is divided indivisibly according to the image of the sun’s ray
which gives warmth, light, life and increase, and sends its own radiance to those who are
illuminated and manifests itself to the eyes of those who see. In this way, in the manner
of an obscure image, the divine energy of God is called not only one but also many by the
theologians.15

He continues, “Therefore the powers and energies of the divine Spirit are uncreated and because

theology speaks of them in the plural they are indivisibly distinct from the one and altogether

indivisible substance of the Spirit.”16

Gregory articulates the essence-energies distinction because of his concern to protect the

radical transcendence of God on the one hand, and on the other hand, to allow for a real

participation of the human being in the glory of God that leads to a real deification of the person.

13
Ibid.
14
M. Edmund Hussey, “The Persons-Energy Structure in the Theology of St. Gregory Palamas,” St.
Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 18 (fall 1974): 22-43.
15
St. Gregory Palamas, One Hundred and Fifty Chapters, tr. Robert E. Sinkewicz (Toronto: Pontifical
Institute of Medieval Studies, 1988), 163.
16
Ibid.

6
Thus, Gregory understands the essence-energies distinction to be the means by which God

relates with creation. Meyendorff comments that Gregory is very familiar with the patristic view

“that ‘to beget is the property of nature, and to create that of energy.’” The divine nature of the

Father is the source for the procession of the Spirit and the generation of the Son, not the divine

will or energy. The common divine energy, however, through the divine will creates. This sharing

of the divine energy and will allows through the perichoretic relationship that exists among the

Divine Hypostases, all three Persons to participate in the creative act proper to each hypostasis.

This distinction protects the divinity of the Son and Spirit, for if they were products of the divine

will or energy, then they would be creatures and not divine. Meyendorff argues that Gregory’s

(and the patristic) distinction between “begetting” and “creating” manifest in the divine nature

and the divine will respectively, is an attempt to steer between Eunomianism on the one hand and

Sabellianism on the other. Gregory does not want to maintain with Eunomius that creation

participates in the divine essence, which is pantheism, or with Sabellius that the Son and Spirit

are subordinate to the Father, leading to their creaturehood a la Arius. If there is no distinction

between nature and will, essence and energy, then Akindynos and Gregoras are correct, and

creation, then subsists within God, leading to pantheism. Gregory’s theology, then, protects

against pantheism on the one hand, while allowing for a real participation in the Being of God by

creation on the other hand.17

Furthermore, the essence-energies distinction protects the freedom of God. If God creates

by virtue of his divine nature, then creation is a natural act whereby God is determined by his

very nature to create. It is not a free act that God chooses to do; rather, creation becomes more

like a Plotinian emanation from the divine essence, giving it at least a semi-divine existence.

However, if God creates by virtue of his will or energy, then creation is a free act on the part of
17
Meyendorff, A Study of Gregory Palamas, 221-22; Payne, Revival of Political Hesychasm, 95-96.

7
God that does not affect the divine simplicity nor lead to pantheism, but rather a dependence

upon the Creator for its sustenance. Furthermore, the distinction allows for both the existence of

God outside of time while he creates within time.18

Thus, Gregory, by holding to a personalist understanding of the Being of God, escapes

the philosophical problems associated with an essentialist understanding. 19 His interlocutors,

Barlaam, Akindynos, and Gregoras, all held essentialist positions, unable to reconcile their

understanding of God with that which the hesychast monks understood through their religious

experience as well as their reading of the theology of the ascetic tradition. Neoplatonic

understandings of God, either derived from Origen and Pseudo-Dionysius or Augustine, in the

case of Barlaam, were unable to accept the distinction that Gregory made in his understanding of

the Being of God. With their theological positions based on an essentialist understanding of the

divinity, Gregory’s opponents had no ability to articulate a theology of experience, which

Gregory’s theology presupposed.20 This foray into the theology of Gregory Palamas is important

to gain an understanding of how the essence and energies distinction is utilized by Yannaras in

his understanding of the person.

The Essence-Energies Distinction as the Possibility for the Knowledge of God

In an article published in 1975, Yannaras critiques a work by Fr. Juan-Miguel Garrigues

examining the divine energies in the thought of Maximus the Confessor. Yannaras writes in

regards to the importance of this article, “The acceptance or rejection of this distinction [between

the essence and energies] will determine either the abstract or the real character of theological

knowledge, the attribution of theological truths to either rational theology or existential

experience.”21 As we have seen, Yannaras believes that truth is to be understood in a relational

18
Ibid., 222-23.
19
Ibid., 223.
20
Payne, Revival of Political Hesychasm, 96.
21
Yannaras, “The Distinction Between Essence and Energies and Its Importance for Theology,” 232.

8
manner. He argues that the Greek philosophical tradition from the pre-Socratics to the fourteenth

century “remains free from subordination to theories of atomic individualism. It stays rooted in

the social verification of knowledge: the linguistic signifiers are verified when they refer to a

signified experience that is shared in common. That which is shared is true; that which is

possessed privately is false.”22 He continues,

The social criterion for the verification of knowledge links the mode by which we know
with the mode by which we exist, and the topos of this linking is the struggle to attain
relation, or communion. Truth is that knowledge that is assured by the knowledge of each
person (his or her relation with reality) and that is confirmed by a testimony, or a verbal
expression, in which all persons coincide – through which all are brought into a relation
among themselves and with reality.23

Knowledge and existence are linked together through the “social verification of knowledge”,

which “links truth with democracy and ecclesia; it links truth with the common struggle to attain

the relations that enable us to share in life.” 24 Thus, “[r]elation is knowledge as immediate

experiential assurance, the mode by which we recognize reality.”25

What this then leads to is an apophatic approach to the knowledge of truth. According to

Yannaras, apophaticism is

(1) the denial that we exhaust knowledge in its formulation; (2) the refusal to identify the
understanding of the signifiers with the knowledge of what is signified; and (3) the
symbolic character of every epistemic expression: its role in bringing together atomic
experiences and embracing them within a common semantic boundary marker, a process
which allows epistemic experience to be shared and once shared to be verified.26

In regards to the knowledge of God, he states that “theological apophaticism would lead to

agnosticism and the distance between God and the world would remain an enigma, if the

experience of the Church did not insist uncompromisingly on the personal mode of God’s

22
Christos Yannaras, Relational Ontology (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2011), 8.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid., 9.
25
Ibid.
26
Ibid.

9
existence.”27 We do not know what God is, yet we have a personal experience of who God is.

This mode in which he exists “is revealed in the personal energies of God.”28

Returning to Yannaras’s response to Fr. Garrigues in regards to the essence and energies

distinction, he states, “In Orthodox theology…the problem of the energies is put exclusively in

terms of existential experience. The experience of the Church is the knowledge of God as an

event of personal relationship, and the question raised is one of witness to and defense of that

event, the question of ‘how we come to know God, who is neither intelligible nor sensible, nor at

all a being among the other beings.’”29 He continues, “The knowledge of God as an event of

personal relationship reveals the priority of the truth of the person in the realm of theological

knowledge.”30

This personal knowledge of God is made possible in and through the energies of the

person. It is not possible to know God “by objective definitions, analogical correlations or

conceptual assessments.”31 Yannaras writes, “God is known and participated through his

uncreated energies, which are beyond the reach of the intellect, while in his essence he remains

unknown and unparticipated. That is to say, God is known only as personal disclosure, as a

triadic communion of persons, as an ecstatic self-offering of erotic goodness.”32 Every person is a

unique unrepeatable existential reality. What makes a person distinctive “cannot be defined but

can only be experienced as fact, that is, as unique, dissimilar and unrepeatable relation.”33 He
27
Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God, 78.
28
Ibid.
29
Yannaras, “The Distinction Between Essence and Energies and Its Importance for Theology,” 234-35.
30
Ibid., 235.
31
Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God, 78. Yannaras writes, “Thus beings, as results of the
divine will that is active outside the divine ‘essence’, do not have any absolute reference to the divine ‘essence’
itself, and for that reason knowledge of God is impossible on the basis of the ‘analogy of being’ (analogia entis).”
(79). David Bentley Hart has argued for an Eastern Christian appropriation, expressly using the theology of Gregory
of Nyssa, for the analogy of being in place of the onto-theology of Heidegger in his work The Beauty of the Infinite:
The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003). Yannaras develops
his critique of the analogia entis in Person and Eros (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007), 201-16.
32
Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros, 64.
33
Ibid., 17.

10
states, “Our existential otherness becomes known and participated in only in the immediacy of

relationship. Not only the Person of God, but also any kind of human person, is known only as

we realize a relationship with it. And we realize a relationship through the energies of the

person.”34

Again, Yannaras asserts that the starting point for the knowledge of God is the essence-

energies distinction of the patristic tradition. We cannot know the essence of God; yet, we can

know the mode of existence, and thus, come to the knowledge of who God is in and through

participation in the energies of the divine nature. These energies of God allow for a real

participation in the personal mode of existence of God. “For in Him we live, and move and have

our being” (Acts 17:28). He writes, “Our participation and communion in the energies of God

acquaints us with the otherness of the three personal Hypostases.” 35 Through the divine energies,

God discloses himself personally, uniting himself to us. “The divine energies reveal to us the

personal existence and otherness of the living God – they make the Person of God accessible to

human experience, without abolishing the inconceivable abyss of the essential distance that

separates us from God.”36

34
Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God, 78.
35
Ibid., 84.
36
Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God, 85. Metropolitan John Zizioulas argues that the
chasm between creation and God has been overcome through the hypostasis of the Son rather than the divine
energies. He states, “[The idea that the energies are the means by which God enters into relationship with creation]
can be accepted, however, only if it means that it is ultimately personhood, the hypostasis of the Logos, and not
divine energies, that bridges the gulf between God and the world. Therefore, ‘maximizing’ the role of divine
energies may obscure the decisive significance of personhood for the God-world relationship – and this is, in fact,
the case with many modern Orthodox theologians. It is extremely important not to forget or overlook the fact that
the God-world relationship is primarily hypostatic, that is, in and through one person of the Trinity, and not through
an aspect of God’s being that belongs to all three of the Trinitarian Persons, such as the divine energies.” John D.
Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 30. Aristotle Papanikolaou provides an
interesting discussion on Zizioulas’s critique of the divine energies and Palamite theology, particularly as maintained
by Vladimir Lossky, in his work Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 106-27. Papanikolaou argues that for Zizioulas, the distinction
between the essence and energies of God is simply superfluous. He states that Zizioulas is revolutionizing Orthodox
Trinitarian thought by divorcing itself from the essence-energies distinction. David Bentley Hart, too, argues that
the distinction is unnecessary and, polemically, “pious nonsense,” maintaining that it violates the simplicity of God.
See “The Hidden and the Manifest: Metaphysics after Nicaea,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, ed. Aristotle
Papanikolaou and George E. Demacopoulos (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2008), 191-226. David

11
Love and the Freedom of the Person

The personal mode of existence in which God expresses the divine energy is erotic love. 37 This

erotic love is expressed in the inner working of the perichoretic relationship between the Persons

of the Trinity as well as the ecstatic relationship that God has with the world. But erotic love is

not just an attribute of God, it is his mode of being. 38 The Evangelist John writes, “God is love”

(I Jn 4:16). Yannaras states, “God exists in love, and because he loves; existence and love, love

and freedom are identical in the case of divine Persons. And this ecstatic, existential self-offering

is the ‘name of God’, eros, unifying the existence and the life of the Trinitarian God.”39

As God is love, he manifests this self-offering within the divine life of the Trinity. The

Father begets the Son and the Holy Spirit proceeds out of love. “Consequently, being stems not

from the essence, which would make it an ontological necessity, but from the person and the

freedom of its love which ‘hypostasizes’ being into a personal and trinitarian communion. God

the Father’s mode of being constitutes existence and life as a fact of love and personal

communion.”40 Love, then, is the ontological content and mode of existence of who God is.41

Since we are created in the “image and likeness of God,” human beings express this

image through “erotic self-transcendence in the personal mode of existence,” which is love.42

“The reason for this,” Yannaras writes, “is that human existence derives its ontological substance

from the fact of divine love, the only love which gives substance to being.” Human beings are

created out of love, not out of divine necessity. 43 As God is love and manifests himself as

Bradshaw responds to Hart defending the distinction in the thought of Maximus and the other fathers in “Augustine
the Metaphysician,” in Orthodox Readings of Augustine, 227-51.
37
Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God, 100.
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid., 101.
40
Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), 18.
41
Ibid.
42
Yannaras, On the Absence and Unknowability of God, 101.
43
Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality, 19.

12
personal distinctiveness and freedom, so do human beings created in the image of God.44 “Man

constitutes,” he states, “an image of God as an ontological hypostasis free from space, time and

natural necessity.”45

This “existential fact of freedom,” however, “presupposes the ontological reality of the

simultaneous natural identity and existential otherness of the person – of the personal otherness

and common-natural properties of each single individual existence.” 46 The natural properties of

the human nature do not determine the mode of existence of the person, but are “preconditions”

for its disclosure. Consequently, when human beings do not actualize their individuality through

self-offering to the other in love, the natural properties do become the determinants of the mode

of existence. Hereby the person becomes enslaved to the natural properties of the human nature.

“The objective properties of nature are proved then to be ‘passions’ of existential individuality,

‘unnatural’ energies of individual nature.”47

Yannaras contrasts the person to the individual. Human beings are not atomic individuals

as understood in Western Enlightenment thought following Descartes. “’Hypostasis’ [or person]

signifies the dynamic reality and wholeness of personal existence in its ecstatic mutual

perichoresis and total communion, the antithesis of the distantiality of atomic self-

containedness.”48 Therefore, as Yannaras states, “Man is an existential fact of relationship and

communion. He is a person, [prosopon], which signifies, both etymologically and in practice,

that he has his face [ops] towards [pros] someone or something: that he is opposite (in relation to

or in connection with) someone or something.” 49 Each human being, then, exists in relationship,

but not as an individual, rather as a person, who sums up the entirety of human nature in himself
44
Ibid.
45
Ibid.
46
Yannaras, Person and Eros, 236.
47
Ibid.
48
Ibid., 255.
49
Yannaras, Freedom of Morality, 20.

13
through his personal distinctiveness and freedom.50 Personal distinctiveness and freedom are

expressed thusly in relationship, in the context of erotic love. 51 “Personal freedom,” he states, “is

a fact of love, and love is the existential ground of freedom.”52

But if, as we have stated, the human being decides out of freedom to become enslaved to

the natural energies or passions, he has recourse to the freedom offered to him through the

ecclesial and ascetic tradition of the Church. Releasing the individual from the enslavement to

the passions allows for the person to be manifested in freedom in “its existential integrity.”

Yannaras writes, “The existential integrity of the person signifies the fullness of a personal erotic

relationship with creation and God.”53 Freedom, then, means the salvation of the person, which

“means to ‘make whole’ (sôon), to restore humankind to its existential integrity, to the fullness of

life.”54 Through asceticism and the sacramental life of the church, the individual is set free from

the passions that bind him. “The Church, then, does not simply represent a sociological or moral

fact or a ‘religious’ manifestation of fallen humanity. The Church is an ontological reality, the

existential fact of a ‘new’ human nature, which communes wholly with the Godhead, or which

realizes an existential ‘impulse’ opposite to that of the Fall. It realizes existence as love and eros,

not as survival as an atomic individual.” 55 The Church creates the existential change in human

being from atomic individualism and enslavement to the passions to personhood and freedom

manifest in self-offering and relationship.56 He continues, “The whole meaning of the Christian

ascetic practice and mystical life is summed up in the dynamics of this existential change.” 57 We

become ecclesial beings in relationship with God and creation.

50
Ibid., 21.
51
Ibid., 23.
52
Yannaras, Person and Eros, 239.
53
Ibid., 237.
54
Ibid.
55
Ibid., 270.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.

14
 Not only do we become ecclesial beings, but also political beings in the fullest sense of

the word. In a short explanatory article written in 1983, Yannaras articulates what an Orthodox

understanding of politics might be: “I mean by this a political theory and action that is not

limited merely to social utility or to the conventional rules of human relations – even if these are

more efficient – but has as its goal the truth of man and the authenticity of his existence.”58

Politics and theology are inseparable, for both pertain to the meaning of human being and how

he or she relates to corporate society. Indeed, “Politics can be considered a chapter of theology –

a true ‘political theology’ – when it takes upon itself serving man according to his nature and his

truth; and consequently serving the political nature of humanity – i.e., the power of love, which

is at the heart of existence and which is the condition of the true communion of persons, the true

city, the true [polis].”59 For Yannaras, the true city or polis is the ecclesia. Political theology is

simply a description of ecclesial being. It is in and through the Church that the personal

distinctiveness of the human being is recognized.60

In and through the Church the personal mode of existence is manifested as love. He

states, “For the Church is not a religion, it is not a school of spirituality, but a place where we are

invited to transform our existence into being as relationship. We are invited to a meal, to a

banquet – and a banquet is a way of practicing life as communion.” 61 In the eucharistic meal, the

gathered people of God are transformed into the reality of the Body of Christ through the action

of the Holy Spirit. “The eating and drinking of Christ’s flesh and blood changes individuals into

members of a unified body, and individual survival into communion of life and unity of life -

that unity which exists among the members of the body, and between them and the head. The
58
Christos Yannaras, “A Note on Political Theology,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 27 (spring
1983): 54, emphasis added.
59
Ibid.
60
Payne, Revival of Political Hesychasm, 240-41.
61
Christos Yannaras, “The Church: A Mode of Being That Can Conquer Death,” Sourozh 49 (August
1992): 24.

15
unity of life in the context of personal communion is the Church.” 62 In this transformative event

of the heavenly banquet that the Church is invited to partake, the realization of the image of God

in man takes place. As Yannaras states, “The eucharist unifies the life of persons in the

community of Christ’s theanthropic nature, and thus restores the image of God’s ‘ethos,’ of the

fullness of trinitarian personal communion, to man’s being or mode of existence – it manifests

the existential and at the same time theological character of ethical perfection in man.” 63

Together, those who are united into the Body of Christ become the Kingdom of God, the New

Israel, here on earth.64 In this communal mode of existence, the person is able to live in loving

communion with God and the Church. It is here that the person experiences ontological

freedom.65

Consequently, political society should not be about the moral “improvement” of society

or man, but rather it should be about the securing of human freedom through the recognition of

the uniqueness and distinctiveness of each person.66 Attempts to produce more just societies or

more virtuous citizens fail to take account of the fullness of personal distinctiveness and human

failure. What is at stake is the personal truth of who the human being is. Yannaras concludes,

We live in a world where planned living is increasingly replacing the immediacy of life,
where freedom is sought among the objective premises of corporate existence; a world
where the individual intellect is the strongest weapon for survival, and individual
preference the only criterion for happiness. In such a world, the witness of the ecclesial
ethos looks like a kind of ‘anarchist theory’ to overthrow established customs in the way
it concentrates the universality of life once again in the sphere of personal freedom, and
personal freedom in asceticism of bodily self-denial. Yet this ‘anarchic’ transference of
the axis of life to the sphere of the truth of the person, is the only humane, reassuring
response to our insatiable thirst for the immediacy of life and freedom, although it
certainly does overthrow ‘efficient’ and rigid structures, and also programs for ‘general
happiness.’67
62
Yannaras, Freedom of Morality, 81.
63
Ibid., 82.
64
Ibid., 82-83.
65
Payne, Revival of Political Hesychasm, 244-45.
66
Yannaras, Freedom of Morality, 217.
67
Ibid., 269-70.

16
Conclusion

What, then, does Yannaras propose as an alternative to modern democratic society which

he understands to falsely promote true human existence? He argues for the retrieval of the

Byzantine autonomous communities that developed toward the end of the Ottoman Empire. The

life of these communities was centered around the life of the Church or monastery found in its

midst. These communities, he comments, continued the ancient patristic ethos of apophatic

knowledge and the accompanying cultural and social institutions that allowed for the experience

of communal truth. Furthermore, the Byzantine tradition affirmed the identity of the person as

person, that is, not as an individual, but within the context of community and relationship.68

The ecclesial life becomes the basis for human society. Particularly, the monastic

hesychast life provides the model for human society. He states,

Monasticism will be revealed as a dynamic and real witness and reminder of the
separation of Church from the world, of the ‘exodus’ of the Church from the ‘imposition’
of the world. The ecclesiastical consciousness will recognize in the monastic life the lost
truth of the charismatic union and the real confession of faith: The distinction of the
Church from the ‘world’ will transpose progressively in the separation of the monks from
the ‘worldly’ Christians. Finally, the entire clergy, without denying its obedience to the
worldly-political hierarchy, will be clothed in the dress of the monks, enlarging the chasm
and its objective difference from the ‘popular’ or ‘worldly’ Christians.69

For Yannaras, apophaticism as a way of knowledge allows for the full expression of the

person since the person is not construed as an object of knowledge that can be comprehended,

but as a subject that can be known through ecstasy and love. Only through a return to the

ecclesial community, the true polis, as a way of life according to truth, can authentic human

existence be achieved. For Yannaras that community is none other than the Orthodox Church.70

68
Payne, Revival of Political Hesychasm, 252.
69
Christos Yannaras, The NeoHellenic Identity, 3rd ed. (Athens: Gregory, 1989), 204.
70
Payne, Revival of Political Hesychasm, 253.

17