Friday, April 12, 2024

Notes from Christos Yannaras (Eastern Orthodox), Person and Eros

  

The analogy of dissimilar similarities also helps to clarify the radical difference between the apophaticism of the Greek theologians and the negative theology of the Western Scholastics. Negative theology (theologia negativia) compares objective dissimilarities, just as cataphatic theology (theologia affirmative) compares object similarities. In both cases the purpose is the comparison of essences and ontic attributes. Of course, the similarities do not constitute identity. They therefore presuppose a percentage of given dissimilarities, which permits cognition of the relative character of knowledge. Nor do the dissimilarities constitute absolute otherness. They therefore presuppose a percentage of given similarities, which does not permit a complete agnosticism. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) adopted the view that no significant likeness could be posited between the Creator and creature without presupposing an even greater unlikeness (“quia inter creatorem et creaturam non potest similitude notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitudo notanda”). It is evident that even in this statement dissimilarity does not refer to the otherness of the personal mode of existence. Dissimilarity coexists with similarity in a quantifiable-measurable relation. The analogy of similarities, which presupposes at the same time even greater dissimilarities, does not cease to represent objective predicates, or to constitute a quantitative comparison of objectified magnitudes.

 

By contrast the analogy of dissimilar similarities, by which I mean the apophaticism of the Byzantine theologians, is based not on the quantitative comparison of objective dissimilarities, permitting also a percentage of similarities, but on taking the objective similarities themselves as real dissimilarities. That is to say, it refers the dissimilarity to the otherness of the personal mode of existence, to the priority which existence has in relation to the understanding of objective essence has in relation to the understanding of objective essences. This means that for the analogy of dissimilar similarities to function as a cognitive method, a dynamic transformation is presupposed of objective predicates into experiences of personal cognition, a transition from the cognitive level of intellectual categories to the space of the universal knowledge provided by the experience of personal knowledge. This dynamic transition is a possible fact which when accomplished becomes a “moral” achievement. It is a self-transcendence of the natural individuality and objective demands of the individual intellect, an entry into the space of personal relation, an ascent to a personal mode of existence and the completeness of knowledge which this mode reveals.

 

This means that the epistemology of the Byzantine theologians is not just another method of cognition, better or worse, more appropriate or less appropriate than the way of affirmation and the way of negation. It is a dynamically possible “moral” fact, a cognitive potentiality that accompanies that dynamic restoration of humanity to its existential authenticity, its progressive acquisition of the personal completeness of existence. The epistemology of the Eastern theologians presupposes “the transformation of the understanding,” the unification of the fragmented cognitive human faculties (the unit of mind and heart, of logos and action, of morality and being), the single cognitive “contemplation” which is attained within the dynamic limits of ascetic self-transcendence and loving-erotic ecstasy and self-offering.

 

Thus the treating similarities as dissimilarities presupposes, as a cognitive method, the moral-dynamic character of knowledge, the linking of knowledge with the stages of humanity’s existential perfection (the non-alienation of the relations which form the existential act of subjectivity and makes it known). Ultimately, it presupposes a hierarchical ordering of the personal powers of knowledge, which are always analogous to the hierarchal ordering of the stages of existential perfection. It signifies analogy as a hierarchy of cognitive-existential powers and perfections.(Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros [4th ed.; trans. Norman Russell; Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007], 214-16)

 

On universal knowledge via experience of personal knowledge:

 

“For example, in the case of a man or a city, anyone who wishes to tell people about them speaks to them of what he has seen and heard. Those who listen, not having seen the man or the city they are hearing about, cannot know that man or that city merely by a report in the same way as the narrator who has seen them. It is similar with the Jerusalem above and the invisible God who dwells there. Nobody can speak about the unapproachable glory of his countenance and about the energy and power of his all-holy Spirit, or light, unless he has first seen this light with the eyes of the soul and gained precise knowledge of the radiance and energy within himself . . . either can he therefore say that he has arrived at knowledge of God simply by hearing about it. For how can he know what he has not seen?” (Symeon the New Theologian, Ethical Treatises 5 [SC 129.98.100]). (Ibid., 364-65 n. 43)

 

 

Morality and Being: identity and difference

 

The meaning of morality (êthos) refers to the mode of existence: “character (êthê) is what makes us ascribe certain qualities to the agent.” The reference to the “quantity” of being presupposes the truth of existential authenticity and, at the same time, its distortion or alienation, that which we call the Fall of man, the falling away from the mode of existence “according to truth.” The falling away from existential authenticity is defined anagogically by reference to the prelapsarian integrity of existence, and the measure of this reference we call ethos or morality. As a measure of existential authenticity, morality finds its fulfillment or wholeness in the mode of existence “according to truth.” Morality which has been made whole or integral is existence “according to truth.”

 

This definition to the concept of morality an ontological and existential meaning, not a conventional or legalistic one. It identifies the ontological content of morality with the “quality” of the mode of existence, that is to say, with the truth of being or with the distortion of this truth. What I call the prelapsarian integrity of existence is the unity of morality and being, the refusal to make an ontological distinction between the two, or to differentiates at all between morality and being.

 

If the truth of being is defined by the freedom and otherness of the personal mode of existence, then morality, as the measure of the reference to existential authenticity, defines the nearness or distance from the fulness of the truth of the person, or personal communion and relation, of freedom from the self-containedness of atomic individuality. With regard to the divine existence, where there is no occurrence of fall from existential authenticity, the morality or ethos of God is identified with Being (the mode of divine existence), with the triadic communion and mutual interpenetration of divine persons. When Christian revelation lays down that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), it refers not to a partial property of God’s conduct but to that which God is as the fullness of the triadic communion of persons within the “framework” of an undivided nature. The communion and mutual interpenetration of the divine persons, that is, the mode by which the Godhead is, reveals the morality of the divine life, the love and the Being of God. But with regard to human existence, which introduces a fact of fall from existential authenticity, morality is differentiated from being by the concept of the difference between the measure and the measured: As a measure of reference to the truth of Being (to the freedom and otherness of the personal mode of existence), morality defines and “measure” the fact of the “preservation” of the person within the bounds of the realization, or failure to realize, a relation beyond and outside of the distantiality of atomic individuality. (Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros [4th ed.; trans. Norman Russell; Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007], 275-76)

 

 

Apophaticism at the boundaries of the ontological problem: apophaticism of essence and apophaticism of person

 

The ontological meaning which Greek patristic literature of the Byzantine period gave to the term prosopon (“person”) became the occasion of an ontology radically different from that which the Western theological and philosophical tradition represents in the course of its historical development. The West has trapped in a polarized view of Being as either analogically absolute and ontic or else mystical. This came about as the inevitable consequence of the priority Westerners gave, eve in the first Christian centuries, to the intellectual definition of essence over the historical and existential experience of personhood—in contrast to the Greek East, which always relied for its starting-point on the priority of person and essence.

 

The priority of the need to define essence within the context of the ontological question requires the objective definition of the existence of beings and the intellectualist (analogical-ontic) and etiological explanation of Being. The Scholastics established the threefold way (“via triplex”) in the West of the analogical cognition of Being: the way of negation (“via negationis”), the way of eminence (“via eminentiae”), and the way of causality (“via causalitatis”).

 

In contradictory but historical conjunction with its cataphatic-analogical determination of Being, the West was also preoccupied with the apophaticism of Being, with the impossibility of the human intellect to exhaust the truth of Being by means of definitions. Apophaticism in the West arose from the need to protect the mystery of the divine essence. That is to say, it is always an apophaticism of essence. It is characteristic that the two thinkers who did most to shape the positive-analogical approach to the knowledge of God, Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), at the same time proclaim the apophatic nature of this knowledge, the essential unknowability of God, the inaccessibility of Being. And we find following this line on the apophaticism of essence not only the leading Scholastics but also the great mystics of the Middle Ages—Peter Abelard (d. 1142), Albert the Great (d. 1280) and John Duns Scotus (d. 1308), as well as Meister Eckhart (d. 1327) and Nicholas of Cusa (d. 1464).

 

But it is impossible for the apophaticism of essence to confront the ontological problem as an existential problem, as a question about the mode by which whatever is is, about the “mode of existence.” The absolutizing of the existential fact by the Scholastics, with regard to God, who is defined as “pure act” (“actus purus” [in Greek katharê energeia tou hyparchein]), interprets the mode in which the essence is and this mode is to exist (“essential est id cuius actus est esse”). But it does not touch upon the mode of existing (tropos tou hyparchein), and consequently it continues to limit the ontological problem to the field of abstract definitions.

 

By contrast, Eastern theology had always rejected any polarization between the analogical-ontological and the mystical determinations of Being. The ontology of the Easterners was primarily existential because its basis and startling-point is the apophaticism of the person, not the apophaticism of essence.

 

In the tradition of the Eastern Church there is no place for a theology, and even less for a mysticism, of the divine essence . . . If one speaks of God it is always, for the Eastern Church, in the concrete: “the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob; the God of Jesus Christ.” It is always the Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Ghost. When, on the contrary, the common nature assumes the first place in our conception of trinitarian dogma the religious reality of God in Trinity is inevitably obscured in some measure and gives place to a certain philosophy of essence . . . Indeed, in the doctrinal conditions peculiar to the West all properly theocentric speculations runs the risk of considering the nature before the persons and becoming a mysticism of “the divine abyss,” as in the Gottheit of meister Eckhard; of becoming an impersonal apophaticism of the divine nothingness prior to the Trinity. Thus by a paradoxical circuit we return through Christianity to the mysticism of the neo-platonists. (Lossky, La theologie mystique, 63-64 [ET, 64-65)

 

The distinction between the apophaticism of the person and the apophaticism of the essence cannot be fully accounted for as a theoretical difference. It represents and constitutes two diametrically opposed spiritual attitudes, two modes of life, in short, two different cultures. On the one side, life is based on truth as relation and as existential experience; truth is actualized as life’s social dynamics and life is justified as the identification of being true with being in communion. On the other side, truth is identified with intellectual definitions; it is objectivized and subordinated to usefulness. And truth as usefulness objectivizes life itself; it comes to be translated into technological hype, into the tormenting and alienation of humanity.

 

But the historical and cultural consequences arising from the differences between East and West in the realm of ontology must remain the subject for another book. Here I simply draw attention to the brilliant formulation by Martin Heidegger (perhaps the last “essence mystic” in the West) of the quandary created by the priority of the apophaticism of essence. Heidegger’s approach showed clearly how the apophaticism of essence defines and respects the limits of thought, and consequently the limits of metaphysics or of the ineffable, but leaves the problem of ontic individuality on the borders of a possible nihilism, reveals Nothingness as an eventuality as equally as possible as Being, and transposes the ontological question to the dilemma between being and Nothingness: “[why is there something that exists at all and not rather nothing?]” With Heidegger the apophaticism of essence proves to be as much a possibility of ontological and theological nihilism as an ontic-intellectual definition of essence. (Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros [4th ed.; trans. Norman Russell; Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007], 20-23, comments in square brackets added for clarification)

 

 

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