Transformation of Ontology: The Personhood of Christos Yannaras in the Face of Heidegger’s Critique of Onto-Theology

The article examines Christos Yannaras’s ontology of personhood in critical dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s deconstruction of Western metaphysics. Drawing on the Chalcedonian dogma, Gregory Palamas’s distinction between essence and energy, S. S. Khoruzhy’s synergic anthropology, and Alexander Schmemann’s liturgical theology, the study explores Yannaras’s attempt to overcome the traps of onto-theology and the forgetfulness of Being. The central thesis is that by distinguishing the “individual” from the “person” and identifying Being with Communion and Eros, Yannaras offers a paradigm that transcends phenomenological nihilism. Yet the article argues that by absolutizing Personhood as the supreme constitutive principle of Being, Yannaras inadvertently falls into a form of “reversed onto-theology,” creating a new personalist metaphysics that encounters logical aporias when trying to autonomize natural existence.