{"id":3116,"date":"2017-11-03T23:49:50","date_gmt":"2017-11-03T20:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aeneas.byzantinewalls.org\/?p=233"},"modified":"2017-11-03T23:49:50","modified_gmt":"2017-11-03T20:49:50","slug":"giannaras-the-church-as-new-political-paradigm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3116\/giannaras-the-church-as-new-political-paradigm\/","title":{"rendered":"Giannaras: the Church as new political paradigm"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christos Yannaras, “Human Rights and the Orthodox Church”
\nSpeech given at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, October 4, 2002<\/strong><\/p>\n

What is the meaning of the term \u201chuman rights\u201d?
\nThe adjective \u201chuman\u201d attributes something to all humans in general. \u201cRights\u201d belong to
\neach human individually, unconditionally and without exceptions. Each individual
\nexistence, being human, is a bearer of rights. The word \u201cright\u201d refers to the claim-demand of an individual, a claim which is made possible by some commonly accepted (and therefore mandatory for all) code of law. The
\ncode of law (\u201csocial contract\u201d) assures that the right is a legal, i.e. mandatory upon all,
\nindividual claim. The legal (by codes of law) safeguarding of the individual rights is a fundamental
\nattribute of Modernity. It is theoretically grounded on the philosophy of the Enlightment
\n(end of the 18th century). The notion of right has been known in the West since the
\nMiddle Ages, even if it is unclear when exactly the term was first used. However, in the
\nMiddle Ages, the rights concerned specific individuals or specific social classes. The
\nradical innovation of Modernity lies in the fact that Modernity made rights \u201chuman\u201d, i.e.
\ncommon to all humans, without discriminations.
\nThe protection of human rights became the symbol of modem western civilization.
\nTogether with the adoption of advanced technology, the undertaking of the legal
\ncommitments (international treaties) for the protection of individual rights is considered in
\nthe modem world as the proof of a civilized society. Of course, the countries that have
\nsigned these international treaties and have integrated them into their own legal system
\nare not always consistent with the obligations to which they have been committed.
\nHuman rights are even less respected in the field of international relations and the
\nstrategies of the Great Powers.
\nThis means that the protection of human rights remains a moral problem. And morality
\nalways and immediately begs the question: who and with what authority defines morality,
\nwho commits people to obey to its rules? Is it God and His law, as expressed by the
\nreligious institutions? With such a view, the European West lived (in the so-called Middle
\nAges) a very negative historical experience. The religious ethics became linked, in the
\nconsciousness of people, to situations of social injustice, tortures, arbitrariness,
\nnightmarish punishments, ideological terrorism.
\nThe Medieval experience led Modernity to the polemical rejection of any metaphysical
\ngrounding of Morality and Right. The denial of Metaphysics encouraged the absolute
\naffirmation of Nature (Physics). The idea was that normative principles and rules of
\nJustice should not be deduced out of the hypothetical \u201cLaw of God\u201d, which was arbitrarily
\nhandled by religious institutions, but by the logic of the laws of nature which was
\nobjective and controllable.
\nMan is by nature a logical existence; reason is a natural characteristic of everyone.
\nConsequently, we would be able to deduce non-native moral principles form the logical
\ndefinition of the common good and interest. Of course, provided that every person would
\nbe committed, by his own will, to the common (natural) logic, this person would
\nresponsibly accept the conditions of the \u201csocial contract\u201d.
\nThis is how the notion of \u201cNatural Right\u201d penetrated Modernity with an astonishing
\ngrowth of domains and sectors. With it came also the idea of a \u201cnatural\u201d right for every
\n\u201cnatural\u201d person prior to social, class, economic or other differentiations. Religion was
\nrigidly separated from social organization, thus becoming a personal matter; the
\nseparation of the \u201csacred\u201d from the \u201csecular\u201d (Church and State) is nowadays considered
\nas an institutional sine qua non of western societies. Of course, from the end of the 18th
\ncentury already, in an atmosphere of enthusiastic affirmation of nature and rejection of
\nmetaphysics, the marquis De Sade had foretold that the logic of nature was not always
\nbenign and that, on the contrary, crime was inherent in man\u2019s biostructure. The horror of
\ninhuman behavior, the complete destruction of any sense of individual rights, reached its
\nculmination during the 20th century. Even today, when the global hegemony of the West
\nis hailed as the triumph of the defense of human rights, practices of genocide, ethnic
\ncleansing, slaughter of innocent people, torture, policing and censorship, even slavery,
\nlie on the everyday agenda of the international arena. Suffices to recall the tragedy of
\nthe Palestinians, Kurds, Serbs, or northern Cyprus to realize that the West usually
\ndecides which people have human rights and to which people these should by definition
\nbe denied.
\nThere is a crucial question, which specialists of human rights leave without answer. How
\nand why Ancient Greece, which, in human history, created politics (both as \u201cart\u201d and
\n\u201cscience\u201d), as well as the so magnificent achievement of democracy, how and why
\nAncient Greece entirely ignored the idea of \u201chuman right\u201d. The same question could be
\nasked about Roman Justice, which crucially influenced every new form of codification of
\nRight in Europe and which also ignored the notion of \u201chuman rights\u201d. Should one
\nconclude that Classical Antiquity, about which Europe is so proud, was indifferent to the
\nprotection of human life, honor and dignity?
\nI will try to give a short answer concerning Ancient Greece, because this is relevant to
\nmy main subject.
\nAncient Greece\u2019s radical innovation in human history was that it transformed simple cohabitation
\ninto the achievement of a city, that it transformed the necessary (for utilitarian
\nreasons) collectiveness into an \u201cexercise of truth\u201d. The city is the state of social relations
\nwhich results when the aim and axis of collectiveness is metaphysical and not utilitarian.
\nThis aim is the imitation of \u201cwhat truly exists\u201d, of the way of existence \u201caccording to the
\ntruth\u201d, the way of incorruptibility and immortality. And this way is the \u201ccommon\u201d (i.e.
\nuniversal) logic, the logic of harmony and order, which makes the Universe a cosmos
\n(ornament).
\nThe imitation of the community of relations \u201caccording to the truth\u201d is the art and science
\nof politics, of the way of transforming collectiveness into a city. This cannot be an
\nindividual effort or an individual aim; it is by definition a social event, a \u201ccommon
\nexercise\u201d. The people who participate in this exercise are citizens: they share the
\nsupreme honor of realizing, by their life and their relations, \u201ctruth\u201d, the mode of existence
\nof \u201cwhat truly exists\u201d.
\nIn Modernity, \u201cindividual rights\u201d protect an individual from the arbitrary exercise of Power.
\nBut in Ancient Greece, the Power meant all citizens together (the demos)\u2014 the \u201cState\u201d
\n(power) belonged to the demos (democracy). Every citizen \u201chas reason and power\u201d:
\nfrom the moment that he is a citizen, he or she is by definition capable of holding any
\npolitical office (this is why citizens were selected randomly and not elected).
\nBecause a political function is \u201csacred\u201d (it serves the truth), a citizen\u2019s body is sacred
\ntoo. In Ancient Greece, any bodily punishment of harm was unthinkable for a citizen
\n(whipping, hitting, etc.); it was unthinkable to insult a citizen\u2019s body. It was also
\nunthinkable to have an executioner: Socrates, who preferred death to exile, drank
\nhemlock by himself\u2014 there was no executioner to kill him.
\nOne can therefore understand that the safeguarding of \u201cindividual rights\u201d was entirely
\nuseless in the ancient Greek world\u2014 the whole idea was incompatible with the Greek
\nversion of politics. The honor of being a citizen provided much more privileges than
\nthose conventionally provided (through the civil code) by the protection of individual
\nrights.
\nThe ancient Greek paradigm helps us to understand the attitude of the Orthodox Church,
\n(if we exclude the ideological \u201cOrthodoxism\u201d of our era and its institutional
\nrepresentations) vis-a-vis the \u201chuman rights\u201d issue. It is no accident that the first
\napostolic (created by the apostles of Christ) Christian communities, in order to express
\nand reveal their identity and their specific difference from any other \u201creligion\u201d, borrowed
\nfrom the ancient Greek political event the tern \u201cecclesia\u201d.
\nSimilar to the ancient Greek \u201cassembly of the people\u201d, Greek citizens did not assemble
\nprimarily to discuss, judge and take decisions, but mainly to constitute, concretize and
\nreveal the city (the way of life \u201caccording to the truth\u201d) ; in the same way, Christians
\nwould not assemble primarily to pray, worship, and be catechized but mainly to
\nconstitute, concretize and reveal, in the Eucharistic dinner, the way of life \u201caccording to
\nthe truth\u201d, incorruptibility and immortality: not the imitation of the secular \u201clogic\u201d, but of
\nthe Trinitarian Society of Persons, the society which constitutes the true existence and
\nlife, because \u201cHe is Life\u201d (1.John 4.16). Participants to this ecclesiastical event, even
\nrobbers, publicans, prostitutes, or sinners, do no need to establish individual rights.
\nBeing a participant and a member of the body of the Church means that one only exists
\nin order to love and be loved\u2014 therefore, far from any expectation of self-protection
\nthrough a legislation which would be \u201cmandatory for all\u201d.
\nThis historical transformation of the ancient Greek political event into a Eucharistic body
\nof the Christian Church has two basic consequences:
\nFirst consequence: the Greek political model was the historical flesh which realized and
\nrevealed the radical difference between Church and religion. The Church is an event and
\na way of communion between persons, a way of love i.e. freedom of the existence from
\nnature, freedom from the physical limitations of time, attrition and death. On the contrary,
\nreligion is an individual event, subject to the natural need of every man to worship and to
\nappease the unknown and transcendent,\u2014 it is an individual effort towards individual
\nfaith, individual virtues, individual justification, individual salvation.
\nIn the first case (the Church) the individual identity is realized and revealed through selftranscendence
\nand self-offering. This is the identity of what we call a person, i.e. an
\nexistence with an active creative otherness, which is the fruit of relations of communion,
\nlove, and freedom from the ego. In the second case (the natural religion and the
\nreligionized versions of Christianity in both West and East), the individual seeks his or
\nher justification and salvation, the safeguarding of his egocentric metaphysical
\nprotection, through virtues, good actions etc.
\nConsequently, the opinion that, in European history, religious individualism preceded the
\negocentrism of a religionized (from Charlemagne and after) Christiamity and became the
\ncast of the absolute importance of individual rights in Modernity, is not arbitrary. When
\nthe tyranny of metaphysics was rejected, the aim of the individual metaphysical salvation
\nwas replaced by the aim of a secularized (legal) protection. And thus was born the
\npolitical system of the so-called \u201crepresentative democracy\u201d, which lies at the antipodes
\nof the ancient Greek democracy (in the same way that the religionized individualized
\nChristianity lies at the antipodes of the Orthodox Church).
\nThe second consequence of the transformation of the ancient Greek political event into
\nthe eucharistic body of the Christian Church is the preservation and revealing of the
\ndifference between metaphysics and ideology: the various forms of \u201ctheocracy\u201d have no
\nrelation at all to the ancient Greek politics as an \u201cexercise of truth\u201d, nor with the
\necclesiastical realization of the image of the Trinitarian Communion. Theocracy is the
\nuse of metaphysics (as a supreme authority) in order to impose normative principles of
\nbehavior or aims of power by force upon the collectivity (ex. The Djihad of the Islamic
\ntradition of the phrase \u201cIn God we trust\u201d on every American dollar). But any use of
\nmetaphysics for secular aims transforms metaphysics into ideology, into a psychological
\nillusions.
\nIn the cases of ancient Greek democracy and of the Orthodox Church, the social event
\ncannot become subject to ideological rules or aims, as its dynamic realization is an aim
\nin itself. Relations that realize the communion of life are in both cases the unique
\nobjective of collectiveness, as they constitute the way of \u201cthat which truly exists\u201d (even if
\nthis way refers to two different models).
\nMetaphysics are subject to ideology (leading to such phenomena as \u201ctheocracy\u201d,
\n\u201ckingship by the grace of God\u201d, papocaesarism, caesaropapism or fundamentalism)
\nwhen they evacuate their ontological content (i.e. the question about existence, about
\nthe cause and purpose of being). Metaphysics without ontology serve individual
\npsychology (the priority of individual feelings, sentimental \u201ccertainties\u201d, \u201cconvictions\u201d
\nwhich protect the ego). And metaphysics borrow these psychological \u201ccertainties\u201d and
\n\u201cconvictions\u201d from ideologies.
\nThe well-known Samuel Huntington, in his famous book on the \u201cClash of Civilizations\u201d (a
\nbook with astonishing inaccuracies and monumental interpretative arbitrariness), blames
\nthe contemporary societies whose culture has often been developed by the Orthodox
\ntradition for their incapacity to assimilate the principles of the protection of individual
\nrights. In his view, the difficulties of these societies to adapt to the current demands of
\nwestern ideologies such as \u201cpluralism\u201d, or to the claim for \u201ctolerance of differences\u201d, is a
\nresult of this incapacity.
\nCertainly, the Orthodox ecclesiastical tradition ignores the idea of collectivity as societas,
\nas a \u201cbending together of individuals in the pursuit of common interests\u201d. It ignores
\ncollectiveness as an arithmetic sum total of non-differentiated individuals, it ignores
\nhuman co-existence as a simple co-habitation on the basis of rational consensus, it
\nignores the ideal of societies of unrelated individuals. We have briefly seen the
\nconception of the social and political event that is carried by the orthodox ecclesiastical
\ntradition and the infinite value of the human person that this conception entails.
\nHowever, in the Orthodox bibliography, the understanding and respect for the principle
\nof the protection of individual rights, which was introduced by Western Modernity, also
\nexists. The more (a society or persons, the revealing of the personal uniqueness,
\notherness and freedom through social relations) does not invalidate or destroy the less
\n(the legal, institutional and uniformed protection of every individual from the arbitrariness
\nof Power). We Orthodox people acknowledge that the historical existence of such
\nexperiences as the Western Middle Ages prove that the protection of individual rights is
\na major success and a precious achievement.
\nNevertheless, we would be doing violence to the historical memory and critical thought if,
\nsimultaneously, we did not recognize that, compared to the ancient Greek city or the
\nByzantine (and meta-Byzantine) community , the protection of human rights is a prepolitical
\nachievement. It is an undisputable achievement, but an achievement which has
\nnot yet attained (perhaps not even understood) the primordial and fundamental meaning
\nof politics: politics as a common exercise of life \u201caccording to the truth\u201d, politics
\nconstituted around the axis of ontology (and not self interested objectives).
\nThe notion of \u201cindividual right\u201d is not a mere production of the philosophy of the
\nEnlightenment, a notion that is characteristic of the civilization of Modernity. In the
\npresent historical reality, the individual rights are the primary constructive material for the
\nrealization of the modem \u201cparadigm\u201d, our contemporary way of life. In the functioning of
\npolitics and economy, in \u201csocial struggles\u201d, or in individual existential problems (like
\neuthanasia), the notion of \u201cindividual rights\u201d is pre-supposed as the self-evident criterion
\nof any action, planning, or logical validity.
\nParallel to that, a huge international bibliography points out and analyzes the undeniable
\ncrisis of the modem cultural \u201cparadigm\u201d. Scholars generally recognize the \u201chistorical end\u201d
\nof many fundamental coordinates of Modernity: the end of ideologies, the end of the
\nparliamentary system, the end of rationalism, etc. And it is not just a theoretical
\nspeculation. Every citizen of the so-called \u201cdeveloped\u201d societies has a direct everyday
\nexperience of the rapid decline and alienation of the fundamental coordinates of
\nModernity:
\nThe commercialization of politics, their submission to the laws of publicity and the
\nbrainwashing of the masses, have literally abolished the \u201crepresentative\u201d , parliamentary
\nsystem. Politicians do not represent citizens and their interests but the economic capitals
\nof the electoral propaganda and the interests of fund providers. In the international
\nsphere, the networks of economic and political interests lead to a social corruption which
\nincreases dramatically through the immorality of the media and their functioning
\naccording to the \u201chype\u201d and \u201creadability\u201d. The commerce of arms sustains wars and
\nconflicts and the commerce of drugs destroys the youth. Faith in the rationalism of the
\n\u201csocial contract\u201d has collapsed long ago; only the logic of the antagonism of interests
\nseems to prevail.
\nSymptoms of such a magnitude are never products of a mere moral decline; they are
\nclear proofs of the end of a cultural \u201cparadigm\u201d. The \u201cparadigm\u201d of Modernity was
\ngrounded on the egocentrism of \u201chuman rights\u201d. A communion-centered version, based
\non the protection of the human existential truth and authenticity might bear the arrival of
\na new cultural \u201cparadigm\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christos Yannaras, “Human Rights and the Orthodox Church” Speech given at Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology, October 4, 2002 What is the meaning of the term \u201chuman rights\u201d? The adjective \u201chuman\u201d attributes something to all humans in general. \u201cRights\u201d belong to each human individually, unconditionally and without exceptions. Each individual existence, being human, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6599,10,46,6,6602],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3116","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-european-union","category-orthodox-christianity","category-philosophy","category-politics","category-secularism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3116","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}