Aleksandar Bradic

This project seeks to clarify and elucidate some of the central ideas and arguments found in the 'later' period of Yannaras’s work. Of particular interest is the question of the role that Ludwig Wittgenstein plays in shaping some of these ideas, and the extent to which his thought informs Yannaras’s engagement with philosophical questions concerning language. While it may be considered a category mistake to treat Yannaras’s ideas as direct contributions to the philosophy of language in the analytic sense, we nevertheless argue that they intersect with key epistemic concerns of the field and may therefore be regarded as meaningful contributions in their own right. At the same time, we will argue for the importance of such a theologically grounded witness as a distinctive contribution from the Orthodox tradition to the pressing intellectual and cultural challenges of our time. To this end, we will introduce Maximus the Confessor as a second interlocutor, whom Yannaras consistently invokes in order to ground his ideas within the continuity of Patristic thought. We will seek to illustrate how Wittgenstein and Maximus, taken together, serve as twin poles of the intellectual horizon that Yannaras navigates in developing his original insights and contributions to the understanding of language.

In this essay, we contend that the exercise of human dominance over nature extends beyond a mere utilitarian and exploitative attitude toward non-human creation, which inevitably leads to ecological crises, and is also reflected in humanity’s impulse toward ‘escape from nature’, manifesting as a growing detachment from the rest of creation. This impulse, although evident throughout history, holds particular relevance in today’s increasingly digitally mediated world, where the acceleration of the ‘digital transformation’ process is often presented as a key component in the solution to the current climate crisis. While the digitalization of essential aspects of modern life, such as communication, transportation, and even food production, may indeed provide a temporary remedy for the pressing ecological challenges of our time, notably by reducing the global carbon footprint, it also forces a fundamental reevaluation of the significance of humanity’s care for the non-human world. To this end, we argue that Orthodox theology, particularly in the patristic thought of Maximus the Confessor and its modern reinterpretation by John Zizioulas, offers a crucial perspective for recognizing the ontological importance of non-human creation and responding to the ‘ontological threat’ it faces in our digital age. Specifically, we propose that Maximus’ concept of the logoi of being, along with Zizioulas’ emphasis on an eschatological rather than protological view of creation, as well as his affirmation of the universal ‘right to the future’, are key to understanding non-human creation not as a perishable artefact of historical creation but as an essential companion on the journey to its eschatological fulfilment.

This essay examines the contributions of Greek philosopher and theologian Christos Yannaras to the question of the relationship between faith and reason. Although a comprehensive analysis of the entire body of his work is beyond the scope of this project, we will attempt to demonstrate through a selective survey, from the early `On the Absence and Unknowability of God' (1970) to the later `The Effable and the Ineffable' (1999), that he presents a convincing `third way' between rationalism and deism. We will argue that Yannaras accomplishes this by methodologically deconstructing the presuppositions of rationalism and advocating for a more `empirically correct' approach grounded in apophaticism and social verification of knowledge. In doing so, he introduces a paradigm that not only challenges the binary opposition between faith and reason but also establishes a distinctive point of encounter between Orthodox Christian theology and contemporary philosophical discourse.