ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the meta-ethical considerations and the mechanisms that inform Christos Yannaras’s The Freedom of Morality – his well-known critique of contemporary Christian morals – and reviews his arguments for the retrieval of what he terms a ‘Eucharistic ethos’. Yannaras’s genealogy of Western epistemology and metaphysics functions as the point of departure, which is perhaps most concisely expressed in his thoughtful but challenging work Heidegger and the Areopagite. The chapter affirms that Yannaras makes a real contribution to Christian ethics and, moreover, finds himself in the illustrious company of thinkers such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Bernard Williams in recognizing and diagnosing the extent to which contemporary moral sensibilities have the tendency to be detached from authentic human concerns. Finally, in an attempt to build on Yannaras’s proposals, his own ontological suppositions are evaluated. As the chapter contends, aspects of his personalist perspective work to undermine his efforts to retrieve a Eucharistic ethos and, consequently, require conceptual reconsideration if his approach to morality is to have enduring resonance.
