The Freedom of Morality
Overview
This major Orthodox contribution to the study of ethics focuses on hypostasis, or “person,” not only as presented in the theology of the Greek Fathers, but also as it is experienced in the worship, ascetical life, and art of the Orthodox Church. In this perspective, morality is seen not as “an objective measure for evaluating character and behavior, but the dynamic response of personal freedom to the existential truth and authenticity of man.” Christos Yannaras states that “freedom carries with it the ultimate possibility of taking precisely this risk: that man should deny his own existential truth and authenticity, and alienate and distort his existence, his being.” What we call the morality of man is the way he relates to this adventure of his freedom. Morality reveals what man is in principle, as the image of God, but also what he becomes through the adventure of his freedom: a being transformed, “in the likeness of God.”
Top Highlights
“Christos Yannaras has not attempted to write a systematic treatise on ethics, for he believes that it is impossible, within a genuinely Orthodox context, to provide a ‘system’ of moral conduct.” (Page 9)
“Hell is man’s free choice; it is when he imprisons himself in an agonizing lack of life, and deliberately refuses communion with the loving goodness of God, the true life.” (Page 33)
“God reveals Himself as the hypostasis of being, the personal hypostasis of eternal life. The personal existence of God is the comprehensive and exhaustive expression of the truth of being. It is not the essence or the energy of God which constitutes being, but His personal mode of existence: God as person is the hypostasis of being.” (Page 16)
“But this existential change in the human nature ‘altered’ by the fall is beyond the capacities of fallen man” (Page 38)
“when the nature involuntarily laid aside immortality because of the intention” (Page 35)
- Title: The Freedom of Morality
- Author: Christos Yannaras
- Edition: 3
- Series: Contemporary Greek Theologians
- Publisher: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press
- Print Publication Date: 1984
- Logos Release Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
- Subjects: Christian ethics › Orthodox Eastern authors; Freedom (Theology); Orthodox Eastern Church › Doctrines
- ISBNs: 9780881410280, 0881410284
- Resource ID: LLS:FREEDOMMORALITY
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-25T19:44:58Z