Reason and will in Christianism

Abstract

This article is an answer to two critics concerning my previous article in the Review of Political Science, no 2/1993, on «Orthodox Christianism and nationalism as two aspects of modern Greek political culture». In this article I emphasize the lack of the concept of will and its ambiguous linguistic status in the greek orthodox and cultural tradition. This fact as well as the rejection of critical Reason by Orthodoxy, have been overlooked by the author of one of these articles. She proposes instead the orthodox concept of «person». But the latter is unlikely to resolve the problem, because it ignores conflict and the splitting of the subject, and it is based only on face-to-face relations. On the other side, given the actual conservative and nationalist attitude of the orthodoxs in Greece and their efforts to build an «orthodox alliance» along with their coreligionists in Serbia and Russia, gives some evidence to the hypothesis of Huntington about the «conflict of civilizations».