The Mystical as Political by Aristotle Papanikolaou

Author:Aristotle Papanikolaou
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: 2021-02-27T03:24:51+00:00

Christos Yannaras

The general contours of Lossky’s theology of personhood, together with his attack against neo-scholasticism, are all prominent in the thought of Christos Yannaras. Yannaras affirms all that Lossky does about personhood in terms of irreducibility, freedom (ecstasis), and love. He adds, however, three distinctive elements: (1) an engagement with Heidegger, who, he argues, provides the justification for a reappropriation of Dionysian apophaticism; (2) an identification of ecstasis with eros; and (3) a much more explicit rather than implicit, as it is in Lossky, identification of person as a relational reality.

Heidegger’s singular contribution to the history of philosophy, according to Yannaras, was to discern how philosophical discourse on the question of God is essentially “ontotheological.” God was reduced to the first cause of creation, but, as such, was reduced to the highest “thing” within creation, thus leading to conceptual idolatry. Heidegger’s critique thus opens the door for a revival of Dionysian apophaticism that emphasizes knowledge of God as an experiential event. Apophaticism regarding the knowledge of God is really an apophaticism of the person insofar as the event of communion between God and humans is one between persons. In such an event, humans are encountered as uniquely irreducible to nature, and hence to conceptual knowledge; they are constituted as unique and free beings in relations of freedom and love with the trinitarian persons who eternally exist as a communion of persons.53 Yannaras much more explicitly crosses the apophatic boundary between human and divine personhood in drawing an analogy between the persons of the Trinity and human personhood. This allows him to emphasize the element of relationality in personhood: imago dei becomes imago trinitatis for Yannaras, which means that personhood is not a quality of human nature but a relational event analogous to the communion that exists between the persons of the Trinity. Humans can image the life of the Trinity only in community, specifically, the ecclesial community, that is, the Eucharist.

The knowledge in the experience of union with God is, according to Yannaras, an “erotic affair” and the “gift of an erotic relationship.”54 Person is an event of freedom, or ecstasis, from the limitations of nature in a movement of love, which Yannaras identifies with eros. This movement is simultaneously a self-transcendence from the limitations of nature, a self-offering to the other, and a desire to be united with the other for the sake of the other.55 Eros is a divisive and acquisitive force only in fallen humanity; when redeemed, it is a unifying force that does not annihilate but constitutes true otherness. Creation itself is a manifestation of God’s eros, a desire for loving union with what is other than God and which inflames the human desire for return to God.

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