Polis, Ontology, Ecclesial Event: Engaging with Christos Yannaras' Thought

Christos Yannaras (born 1935 in Athens, Greece) has been proclaimed ‘without doubt the most important living Greek Orthodox theologian’ (Andrew Louth), ‘contemporary Greece’s greatest thinker’ (Olivier Clément), ‘one of the most significant Christian philosophers in Europe’ (Rowan Williams).
However, until recently the English-speaking scholar did not have first-hand access to the main bulk of his work: in spite of the relatively early English translation of his The Freedom of Morality (1984), most of his books appeared in English fairly recently – such as Person and Eros (2007), Orthodoxy and the West (2006), Relational Ontology (2011) or The Schism in Philosophy (2015). In this volume, chapters shall examine numerous aspects of Yannaras’ contributions to Orthodox theology, philosophy and political thought, based on his relational ontology of the person, later popularised in the Anglophone sphere by John Zizioulas. From political theology to Heidegger and the philosophy of language, from Yannaras’ critique of religion to the patristic grounding of the theology of the person and from Orthodoxy to the West, this volume comprises a panorama of Christos Yannaras’ transdisciplinary contributions.

Table of Contents

List of Contributors
Preface – John Milbank
Hellenism in Motion
Introduction – Sotiris Mitralexis

Part I
POLIS

Chapter One – Dionysios Skliris
Christos Yannaras’ Political Ontology: An Introductory Sketch
Chapter Two – Jonathan Cole
The Problematic of Greek Identity and Christos Yannaras’ Quest
for a Politics of Authentic Existence
Chapter Three – Angelos Gounopoulos
The Freedom of Relationship as the Ontological Foundation
in Christos Yannaras’ Political Theology
Chapter Four – Paul Tyson
Freedom and Necessity: Yannaras and the Global Struggle for Life

Part II
PHILOSOPHY

Chapter Five – Deborah Casewell
Loving in Relation to Nothing: On Alterity and Relationality
Chapter Six – Sotiris Mitralexis
Relation, Activity and Otherness in Christos Yannaras’ Propositions
for a Critical Ontology
Chapter Seven – Marcello La Matina
As for God, So for Sound: Engaging with Yannaras’ Philosophy
of Language
Chapter Eight – Daniel Isai
Yannaras’ and Marion’s Overcoming Onto-Theology: On the Way
of St Dionysius the Areopagite
Chapter Nine – Nikolaos Koronaios
Education as Freedom: An Attempt to Explore the Role of
Education through Christos Yannaras’ Thought

Part III
ECCLESIA

Chapter Ten – Andreas Andreopoulos
In Conversation with Christos Yannaras: A Critical View
of the Council of Crete
Chapter Eleven – Brandon Gallaher
Orthodoxy and the West: The Problem of Orthodox Self-Criticism
in Christos Yannaras
Chapter Twelve – Rowan Williams
The Theology of Personhood: A Study of the Thought of
Christos Yannaras

Bibliography
Index