Written by Ioannis Neonakis
Born in Piraeus in 1927, with roots in Cappadocia, he experienced from an early age the trauma of uprooting. He grew up in the United States, studied theology at Yale and Harvard, and served as Professor of Dogmatics at the University of Thessaloniki. Yet his significance cannot be exhausted by his biography.
John Romanides was a spiritual event. His personality and his contribution were so significant that Fr. Georgios Metallinos used to say that, for the history of our modern theology and of our national self-awareness, we can speak of a pre-Romanides and a post-Romanides era.
He did not simply practice academic theology. He challenged the entire Western framework through which we were taught to read both our history and our faith. He demonstrated that Orthodoxy is not an “Eastern version of Christianity,” but the experience of the healing of the human person.
That dogma is not philosophy; it is medicine.
That the Church is not religion; it is a therapeutic hospital.
That Romeosyne is not a national fossil; it is a mode of existence.
Read his book “The Ancestral Sin”.
He shattered the false dilemma “Byzantium or Greece.” He revealed that our ancestors were Romaeoi of New Rome/Constantinople; they were Romeoi, and that our ecclesial and cultural identity was Romanía. Not as a romantic memory, but as a historical reality.
Read his book “Romeosyne – Romanía – Roumeli”.
He spoke of the hesychastic tradition as the very core of our civilization.
He brought Saint Gregory Palamas back from the margins to the center.
He highlighted the conflict between Romanía and Frankdom as the key to understanding our modern history.
That is why his thought disturbs.
Because it overturns what we have considered “self-evident” for the last two centuries.
Romanides reminded us that our crisis is not only political or economic.
It is a crisis of identity.
And that the answer does not lie in the imitation of the West, but in the rediscovery of the Romeiko way.
If we wish to speak seriously about rebirth,
if we wish to speak about a New Romanía,
we must understand what John Romanides was saying.
Because he showed us that Romeosyne is not nostalgia.
It is the future.
And as he himself would say,
the issue is not to become “better Westerners.”
The issue is to become what we truly are.
Romeosyne again!
Ioannis Kon. Neonakis