Today is the second anniversary of Christos Yannaras’s falling asleep. So, I thought I would remember him by quoting his very trenchant critique of contemporary institutional Christianity:
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. 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 sealed 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. (Freedom of Morality, p. 115)
With the saints give rest, O Christ, to the soul of Thy servant Christos, where there is neither sickness, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting.
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