The Freedom of Morality Quotes

“Increasingly, Christian life seems to be nothing more than a particular way of behaving, a code of good conduct. Christianity is increasingly alienated, becoming a social attribute adapted to meet the least worthy of human demands - conformity, sterile conservatism, pusillanimity and timidity; it is adapted to the trivial moralizing which seeks to adorn cowardice and individual security with the funerary decoration of social decorum.”
― Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality

“Once the Church denies her ontological identity-- what she really, essentially is as an existential event whereby individual survival is changed into a personal life of love and communion-- then from that very moment she is reduced to a conventional form under which individuals are grouped together into an institution; she becomes an expression of man's fall, albeit a religious one. She begins to serve the "religious needs" of the people, the individualistic emotional and psychological needs of fallen man.”
― Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality

“Today, in this atmosphere, the very word and idea of asceticism is probably incomprehensible to a very large number of Christian people. Anyone talking about fasting and chastity and voluntary restriction of our individual desires is sure to meet with condescension or mockery. This does not, of course, prevent people from having their “metaphysical convictions” and believing in a “supreme being” or in the “sweet Jesus” who had a wonderful ethical teaching. The question is, however, what is the use of “metaphysical convictions” when they do not go any way towards providing a real answer — as opposed to one that is idealistic and abstract — to the problem of death, the scandal of the dissolution of the body in the earth. This real answer is to be found only in the knowledge granted by asceticism, in the effort to resist death in our own bodies, and by the dynamic triumph over the deadening of man. And not just in any kind of asceticism, but in that which consists in conformity to the example of Christ, who willingly accepted death so as to destroy death — “trampling down death by death.”

Every voluntary mortification of the egocentricity which is “contrary to nature” is a dynamic destruction of death and a triumph for the life of the person.”
― Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality

“The people who really thirst for life, who stand daily on the brink of every kind of death, who struggle desperately to distinguish some light in the seated mystery of human existence— these are the people to whom the Gospel of salvation is primarily and most especially addressed, and inevitably they all remain far removed from the rationalistically organized social conventionalism of established Christianity.”
― Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality

“In the Church, bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road to
theological knowledge. It is not possible for man to come to know the truth of life, the truth of God and the truth of his own existence purely through intellectual categories...”
― Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality

“In the Church, bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road to
theological knowledge. It is not possible for man to come to know the truth of life, the truth of Godand the truth of his own existence purely through intellectual categories...”
― Christos Yannaras, The Freedom of Morality