BOOK REVIEW: Person and Eros, Christos Yannaras. Translated by Norman Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press 2007. http://store.holycrossbookstore.com/peanderchya.html. ISBN: 978-1-885652-88-1. Pp. xix + 395.

Reviewed by Dr.Edward Moore, St. Elias School of Orthodox Theology

Originally published in Greek under the ponderous title The Ontological Content of the Theological Concept of the Person in 1970, this work was re-titled Person and Eros for its second edition in 1974. The present English translation, by Norman Russell, is based on the expanded fourth edition of 1987. Yannaras’s [hereafter Y] somewhat difficult but profound book has become something of a classic in the fields of Orthodox theology and existentialist religious philosophy. Heavily indebted, but not slavishly so, to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Y seeks to escape the bonds of theological and metaphysical rationalism (“ontic-noetic definitions”) through an approach to the question of “essence or Being” by way of “personal relation,” in which Being is properly comprehended as the “content of the person” (34-35). Access to Being is to be had not by any reduction of the question of Being to definitions or logical structures(s), but rather by witnessing to the revelation of Being in the dynamic self-expression (“ek-stasis” or “ecstasy”) of personal relation.

In order to access Being, we must avoid conceptualizing Being as the supra-essential ground or source of beings, for to do so is to make of Being yet another object for intellectual contemplation. Western scholasticism, on Y’s interpretation, by identifying Aristotle’s prime mover as a rational, thinking cause, came to view God as an object of rational inquiry. This led to a depersonalization of God, a reduction of the divinity to “an existentially inaccessible motive cause” (56). God as a person, as a willing, loving, expressive – “ek-static” – Being, was lost, and so was the proper orientation of the human being toward God and His self-revelation in nature. For God, properly understood, is not a disinterested source; He is a self-giving Person whose actualized will is the Being of nature, and the possibility of human personhood. God’s act of “stepping outside” (ek-stasisenergeiai) in and as nature is the call to humans to recapitulate this gracious act of love through ‘erotic’ self-giving. This is the pathway to the truth of Being, and to true personal freedom. Knowledge is not the act of comprehending a static, self-contained entity, but the free participation in the uniqueness and dissimilarity of the other and nature, culminating in dynamic relation to the “supreme Otherness” of God, which is true eros (20). “The knowledge of God, as a fact of personal relation, discloses the priority of the truth of the person in the field of theological epistemology. … We know the essence or nature only as the content of the person, and this unique power of knowing the nature signifies its ecstatic recapitulation in the fact of personal reference, the nature’s power of ‘standing-outside-itself,’ and becoming accessible and participable not as a concept, but as personal uniqueness and dissimilarity” (57).

Our nature as human beings is not the same as the self-contained units of creation that we contemplate as “things” (pragmata; rather, we are poised, as it were, between the essential presence (par-ousia) of God’s self-disclosure, and the absence (ap-ousia) that is not nothing, but the receding of personal being into discrete ontic units. The personal Being or essence of God, revealed through natural energies, and the personal being of others, revealed through creative acts of self-expression or “ecstasy,” both recede when I define my self as an “atomic individual,” i.e., when I distinguish my self according to the “impersonal attributes of the common nature” (234). By choosing an illusory freedom based upon the options given to me through the ontic-noetic fragmenting of nature into discrete, rationalizable units, my ability to give expression to Being by way of creative acts is neutralized. Y refers to this as “distantiality”: the separation of “atomic individualities” into “existential units within the limits of the common nature, breaking the nature up into fragments” (243). In other words, by limiting my selfhood to the modes of expression provided by abstract nature, I “fall” into an “irrational loneliness” that is devoid of the personal, ek-static communion with others and with God that allows the energetic modes of Being to be revealed in existence.

The revelation of Being comes forth through the logos of material nature, which is a direct representation or “substantiation” of the will of God as “personal energy” (86). “Irrational” (a-logon or blindly ‘self-sufficient’ existence is revealed as insufficient by the experience of beauty, which calls us to ek-static self-transcendence. The wonder and desire that physical beauty provokes in us, however, is all-too-easily referred back to our isolation as atomic individuals, and prevents us from experiencing beauty as the erotic self-disclosure of divine energy. “Thus beauty appears as a tragic call to a fullness of life which proves unattainable. The more sensitive we are to the need for communion, the more the world’s beauty torments us, a tragic unquenchable thirst” (83). This emptiness or lack calls for a response; and when the response is based upon our common nature or atomic self-isolation from emergent Being, it takes the form of “a natural necessity, nature’s obligatory reproductive urge, which aims at the self-preservation of nature through the perpetuation of the individual species and is realized as a movement of self-satisfaction of individuality” Procreation, the bearing of children, according to Y, is “the objective manifestation of the inescapable slicing up of nature, in the ‘condemnation’ of the newly born human being to be the bearer of an individual nature” (143). In short, the production of children ensures repetition of the fall of the human being into the irrrational loneliness of atomic individuality. But is this due to the subversive force of common nature, understood as the given structures of objectified existence? Or is the “condemnation” of the newly born human being to atomic individuality the result of a flaw arising from another source?

Early in this work, Y describes Plato’s concept of beauty as “revelatory of life rather than of a personal presence” (75). Y’s misunderstanding of Plato on this point unfortunately taints his discussion of the soteriological role of beauty in Platonic thought. Quite simply, Y has it reversed; for Plato, life is revelatory of beauty. Life is the given, the ground from which the well-intentioned human being begins his or her gradual ascent to Beauty Itself, the Good-beyond-Being. As Diotima explains to Socrates in the Symposium (206a-212b), love does not desire beauty, but rather “procreation and birth in beauty” [gennêseôs kai tou tokou en tô kalô] (206e.5), for love is directed not toward the beautiful, but toward immortality. This is why sensual desire naturally results in offspring, and is the reason why all animals, including humans, care for their young, even at the expense of rationality. Of course, the mortal part of our nature, the body, cannot partake of immortality, so seeking after immortality by way of biological procreation is a hopeless endeavor. What one must do is seek immortality through one’s eternal nature, which is the rational part of our soul, the mind (nous. We take our start from life, which is loving instances of physical beauty, and then, by way of practice, rise up from the particular and physical to the intelligible and universal, and finally to immortality (211c-212b). This immortality is not, as Y has it, a “vision” or “an experiential-internal relationship with [beauty], an eros toward the beauty that is beheld” (189), but exactly what Plato tells us it is: the knowledge (gnôsis of what it is to be beautiful (211c). The “relationality” that Y would like to find here is simply not part of Plato’s thought. One does not relate to Beauty; one becomes beautiful. This means sloughing off the accretions of bodily existence, and leaving behind the irrational aspects of our nature. However, it does not lead to the conclusion that anyone born is “condemned” to an atomic-individualistic existence. Birth is the necessary first stage on the ascent to the Good that is Beauty. It is a promise of the possibility of true life. Granted, we all too often find parents treating their children as extensions of themselves, and encouraging their children to simply repeat the mode of existence of the parents. Yet this is not the fault of our common nature, but of the fallen beings who, for whatever reason, are capable only of procreation and not creative self-expression – i.e., of those who never engage their nous and strive to become beautiful.

It would be a mistake to conclude that Y is dualistic in his thinking about human life, or that he is against the physical aspects of our nature, including the need for perpetuating the race through child-bearing. I believe he would agree that life provides the ground for the revelation of beauty in its manifold forms. The Beautiful Itself, however, must be attained through an ‘ascent’ (which is really an internal orientation of the mind toward its essential nature, which is rational and good and beautiful) from the givenness of life to the possibility of eternity. This is a theme in the writings of the Eastern Church Fathers utilized by Y in his discussion of the ultimate goal of existence. St. Gregory of Nyssa, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, and St. Maximus the Confessor, all of whom are to a greater or lesser degree Platonists, did not stop short at the revelation of God in the created realm; they sought the truth of our being in the life to come. While relation to God and to others was, for them, indispensable to our cultivation of the image and likeness of God within us, leading to theôsis, it was not the final end. When Y writes: “Even when objectified and neutralized in the greatest possible degree, human nature does not cease to differ ontologically (as a mode of existence) from irrational ontic units” (241), I believe that Y is lapsing into a pessimism that is a result of his downgrading of human intellectual ability. The extension of our mental activity into ek-static relation with others runs the risk of dispersing our intellectual powers amidst the endlessly fluctuating realm of becoming. With his heavy emphasis on relationality, Y ends up seriously downplaying the importance of maintaining our personal (understood as private, unique) intellectual powers.

The ascent to the Good, the Beautiful, God, always begins with the self, the I, the ego. And for a Christian Platonist like St. Maximus (whom Y quotes extensively) it ends there as well – i.e., with the overwhelming of the ego by the divine presence (see, for example, Maximus the Confessor, Chapters on Knowledge 2.88). Whatever mysterious intra-personal relationship subsists within or as the Holy Trinity, and no matter how powerfully this essential relationality of the Godhead is to Itself, the fact remains that we are creatures, and limited in our abilities, as Y himself admits (261). Yet from this he goes on to consider the other as a limitation or hindrance to the self-expression of the person. “Every ‘other’ is an empirical proof of the impossibility of the person to annul the dynamic impulse towards the fragmentation of nature into individually self-complete units. The ‘other’ is my condemnation to be the bearer of an individual natural will” (265). Properly understood, the soteriology of both Plato and St. Maximus ends with the radical transformation of my self, my person, into an individual bearer of the divine nature. Salvation begins with the life of the individual self, but cannot be accomplished apart from relation to others. Y is quite aware of the problems encountered when one attempts to engage in a self-giving relation to others: “the realization of relation collides against the hard shell of ‘freedom’ of the ‘other,’ that is, atomic self-defensiveness” (266). This is quite true; yet this closing off on the part of the other, when allowed to affect the personal (understood as private, unique) striving for true life, for ascent to the Good, to God, reveals the weakness of the self, the ego, which must be overcome, not any primacy of the power of the other in relation to my salvific striving.

The lack of a developed soteriology in Y’s work leads him to a rather grim assessment of rationlist ethics, notably Immanuel Kant’s famous “categorical imperative,” which he considers as representing “a standard of conventional values, a utilitarian estimate of objective human relations, without the slightest reference to the problem of existence, to the question regarding a mode of existence ‘according to truth’ – a non-alienated existence” (279). I cannot help, at the risk of flippancy, wondering if Y has not created this problem of existence with his own philosophizing. Indeed, if we simply cannot escape the alienating power of the common nature, if we are condemned to such an existence, then do we not require an ethical program such as Kant’s, which begins and ends with the supposedly alienated ontic unit of the self? To exist simultaneously as my own lawgiver and subject, am I not doing the best I can, within my limitations as a creature of God, to respect the dignity and autonomy of others – and myself?

Y’s philosophy, of which the book under review here is but a representation, must, like the human existence of which it treats, be approached as an ongoing project. The human being is poised between Being and nothingness, and must choose, through his or her response – or not – to the call to ek-static, self-expressive life, an existence in truth, or in the oblivion of irrational loneliness. “The ethos of humanity is this adventure of its freedom, its never-ending choice between Being and nothingness, a choice which is ever confirmatory of its personal truth” (293).

Person and Eros is a profound and important work, and well worth a careful read. While a bit of background in the philosophy of Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, not to mention the writings of the Eastern Church Fathers and Thomas Aquinas, would aid the reader, it is not absolutely necessary for an appreciation of Y’s thought. The translation by Norman Russell is, despite the heavy (and necessary) use of technical philosophical and theological terminology, eminently readable, and should give no trouble to the reasonably intelligent reader. One minor complaint: the numerous and sometimes lengthy footnotes are placed at the end of the book, that is, they are endnotes. Given the depth of argument presented by Y, having to continually flip to the back of the book, and thereby interrupt the flow of reading, was not a little annoying. I’m sure the publishers had their reasons for arranging it so, but it was still a pain. That said, I highly recommend this volume.