The Theology of John Zizioulas

THE THEOLOGY OF JOHN ZIZIOULAS John Zizioulas is widely recognised as the most significant Orthodox theologian of the la...

Author: Douglas Knight

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THE THEOLOGY OF JOHN ZIZIOULAS John Zizioulas is widely recognised as the most significant Orthodox theologian of the last half century and acclaimed advocate of ecumenism. From his indepth knowledge of the intellectual resources of the Church, Zizioulas has argued that the Church Fathers represent a profound account of freedom and community that represents a radical challenge to modern accounts of the person. Zizioulas uses the work of the Fathers to make an important distinction between the person in communion with other persons, and the individual who defines himself in isolation from others, whom he sees as a threat to his freedom. Zizioulas argues that God is the origin of freedom and community, and that the Christian Church is the place in which the person and freedom come into being. This volume offers a critical appraisal of the theology of John Zizioulas. Leading Anglican, Reformed, Catholic and Orthodox international scholars, including Colin Gunton, Nicholas Loudovikos, Paul McPartlan, Wolfhart Pannenberg and Philip Rosato present essays which analyse Zizioulas’ trinitarian doctrine of God, and his theological account of the Church as the place in which freedom and communion are actualised. Many include discussions of Zizioulas’ Being as Communion as well as other lesser known works, now available in Communion and Otherness. Together they represent an unrivalled introduction to the work of this great theologian.

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The Theology of John Zizioulas Personhood and the Church

Edited by DOUGLAS H. KNIGHT

© Douglas H. Knight 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Douglas H. Knight has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hampshire GU11 3HR England Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The theology of John Zizioulas : personhood and the church 1. Zizioulas, Jean, 1931- 2. Theology, Doctrinal I. Knight, Douglas 230'.092 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The theology of John Zizioulas : personhood and the church / edited by Douglas Knight. p. cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5430-8 1. Zizioulas, Jean, 1931-. 2. Theology. I. Knight, Douglas, 1961BX395.Z59T44 2007 230'.19092--dc22 2006021163 ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5430-8 ISBN-10: 0-7546-5430-3

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire.

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction Douglas H. Knight

vii ix

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1 Eschatology and Truth Robert Turner

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2 On the Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology Alan Brown

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3 Divine Economy and Eternal Trinity Wolfhart Pannenberg

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4 The Work of the Holy Spirit: The Differentiation of Human and Divine Salvific Acts in the Pneumatomachian Controversy Markus Mühling

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5 Persons and Particularity Colin Gunton

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6 Person and Nature: The Necessity–Freedom Dialectic in John Zizioulas Douglas Farrow

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7 Christian Life and Institutional Church Nicholas Loudovikos

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8 Church, Eucharist, Bishop: The Early Church in the Ecclesiology of John Zizioulas Demetrios Bathrellos

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9 Authority and Ecumenism Paul Collins

147

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The Theology of John Zizioulas

10 The Ordination of the Baptized: The Laity as an Order of the Church Philip Rosato SJ.

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11 The Local and the Universal Church: Zizioulas and the Ratzinger–Kasper Debate Paul McPartlan

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12 The Spirit and Persons in the Liturgy Douglas H. Knight

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Bibliography: Secondary Works on John Zizioulas Index

197 203

Acknowledgements The early stages of the editing of this volume were greatly helped by Dr Demetrios Bathrellos and Professor Colin Gunton. The chapter by Robert Turner is adapted from ‘Foundations for John Zizioulas’ Approach to Ecclesial Communion’, which appeared in Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniensis, vol. 78, n. 4, 2002. Douglas Farrow’s paper ‘Person and Nature’ has appeared in permission from The Person of Christ, (eds) Stephen R. Holmes and Murray Rae, published by T&T Clark, 2005, and Paul McPartlan’s article ‘The Local and Universal Church: Zizioulas and the Ratzinger–Kaspar Debate’ first appeared in the International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 4.1, March 2004. All are reproduced here with permission. I am very grateful to Liviu Barbu for his bibliography of secondary works on John Zizioulas.


Notes on Contributors Demetrios Bathrellos, until recently priest-in-charge of the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of Hagia Sophia, London, is visiting lecturer at King’s College London, and author of The Byzantine Christ: Person, Nature and Will in the Christology of St Maximus the Confessor (OUP, 2005). Alan Brown is Visiting Fellow in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Durham, where he teaches Byzantine and Medieval Theology and History. His book The Life of Wisdom: Classical Philosophy and Early Christianity is forthcoming with I.B. Tauris. Paul Collins is Reader in Theology at Chichester University College, Chichester, UK, and author of Trinitarian Theology West and East: Karl Barth, the Cappadocian Fathers and John Zizioulas (OUP, 2001). Douglas Farrow is Associate Professor of Christian Thought at McGill University, Montreal, and the author of Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (T&T Clark, 1999). Colin Gunton was Professor of Systematic Theology at King’s College London, and author of many volumes of theology, including The Promise of Trinitarian Theology, The One the Three and the Many, and most recently The Christian Faith (Blackwell, 2001). Douglas H. Knight lectures on Christian Doctrine in London and is author of The Eschatological Economy: Time and the Hospitality of God (Eerdmans, 2006). Nicholas Loudovikos is Professor of Dogmatics and Christian Philosophy at the Superior Ecclesiastical Academy of Thessaloniki, Greece, and visiting Research Fellow at the Orthodox Institute of the University of Cambridge. Paul McPartlan is Associate Professor at the Catholic University of America, and author of The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993). Markus Mühling is Privatdozent at the Faculty of Theology at the University of Heidelberg and author of Gott ist Liebe. Studien zum Verständnis der Liebe als Modell des trinitarischen Redens von Gott (Marburg, 2005).

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Wolfhart Pannenberg is Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Evangelical Theology at the University of Munich, and author of many distinguished volumes of theology, notably his three-volume Systematic Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991–94). Philip Rosato SJ, Emeritus Professor of Dogmatic Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, is an associate at the Woodstock Theological Centre, and lectures at St Joseph’s University, Philadelphia. He is author of The Lord is the Spirit: The Pneumatology of Karl Barth (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982). Robert Turner gained his PhD at the Catholic University of Louvain, and is pastor of the parish of the Holy Rosary, Pomeroy, Washington.

Introduction John Zizioulas is one of the best known theologians of the contemporary Orthodox Church, a central figure in the ecumenical scene and one of the most cited theologians at work today. This volume demonstrates the unity of Zizioulas’ work by setting out the connections he makes between theology, philosophy and the Church. Its twelve contributors discuss issues of theology, ontology and anthropology in order to assess his view of the relationship of community and freedom. Offering Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant perspectives, they come to a range of conclusions about the degree to which Zizioulas brings these issues together to form a coherent theological ecclesiology, but they agree that Zizioulas presents contemporary thought with an unrivalled expression of Christian theology. This Introduction will set out the theological and philosophical context of Zizioulas’ distinctive proposal. Zizioulas’ central concern is human freedom and the relation of freedom and otherness. Freedom is not restricted, but enabled, by our relationships with other persons, Zizioulas argues, for the community in which God includes us is the place in which our personal identity and freedom come into being. God is intrinsically communion and free, and his communion and freedom he shares with us. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the source of the communion of the universal Church, and the promise of real freedom for the world. This communion is being actualized by God in the world in the community of the Church. The persons gathered into this communion will come to participate in the freedom of God, and through them the world will participate in this freedom too. Zizioulas’ account of human beings is at odds with a great part of the Western intellectual tradition, for which it is a basic prejudice that we cannot both be together and free. This tradition conceives man as an isolated unit, separable from all other beings, and believes that each of us must assert ourselves against others, and against society as a whole. The individual struggles against the many, but cannot ultimately secure his or her own identity. It is not even certain whether the otherness and plurality of the world will survive in the long run. Zizioulas points to a quite different understanding of communion and freedom. They are the promise made by God to man, and the goal of the present and ongoing work of God for, and with, man. Mankind is not yet in possession of freedom. The real freedom and diversity promised to humanity has been inaugurated in the Church, the communion in which all diversity and otherness is being perfected, and through which the diversity and very existence of creation comes. The first major insight that Zizioulas offers us is that communion and freedom are not opposed. Communion means both unity and otherness, difference as well as togetherness. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the criterion and guarantor of this otherness. Only these divine persons are truly other and the source of all otherness. It is they

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who establish and confirm us as different from God, and distinct from one another. The divine persons are the guarantee that there is any distinct thing at all, and that the diversity represented by this creation is not an aberration, but will continue and flourish. God has planted his communion as a community in the world, as evidence of his intention to sustain us and promote our variety and otherness. This community is the Church, the sign and inaugurating event of this diversity and unity. Communion is not at the expense of freedom, but freedom and communion together come from God, and taken from God, may be freely enjoyed by man. The existence of the Church and the event of the eucharistic gathering are two aspects of the act and work of God. The Church gives thanks to God for all that comes, and will come, from him, and as it does so it receives these things on behalf of the world. By taking them willingly, as a gift from one person to another, created things cease to be brute givens that we can do nothing about, and become tokens of a relationship of consenting parties, freely in this relationship. The Church declares publicly that God is the source of all things, that he is freely for us, and that he extends his freedom to us so we may participate in it. By confession of God we concede that we have not made the world in which we find ourselves, and that we are the recipients, not originators, of our existence. This declaration releases us to receive the life that is offered us. By becoming avowed and willing recipients, we become participants in this freedom. Zizioulas equally runs against the grain of the Western tradition with a second insight. One does not come before the many, so being is not somehow more fundamental than plurality: diversity is not a merely temporary phenomenon that must eventually disappear. Equally, the many are not more fundamental than the one: the general and collective do not outweigh the particularity of any single entity. A world full of particular things and unique people will endure against all threats to its existence. A third insight offered by Zizioulas is that being (which we may equally call ‘substance’ or ‘nature’) does not precede relation. It is not the case that something first is what it is, and then that it enters various relationships; rather being and relationship are simultaneous. The consequences that flow from these three insights are vast and varied. But these are not merely ideals, but express realities now being actualized for the world in the Church. The Church is the act of God, actualizing communion and diversity, unity and wholeness, particularity and freedom, for us. The radical nature of Zizioulas’ work comes from his determination to speak from within the Christian tradition. Zizioulas wants the Church to learn from earlier generations of the Christian community, so their neglected views and voices can be heard in the contemporary discussion. Our present self-understanding pits the individual against the multitude and against the institution, but the experience and resources of the Church help free us from such an impoverishing dualism. Zizioulas believes that the Cappadocian Fathers represent a vital tradition in European thought which uniquely does not subordinate one to many, or freedom to nature. This brings a paradox. The scholar discussed in this volume is himself keen to avoid scrutiny. Zizioulas insists that he has done no more than hand on the tradition of the Church, so he cannot be given credit for the theology he sets out. He does not believe that anyone regarded as a theologian could be the originator of their

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own product. The theologian merely points to what the Church says in the liturgy, for public confession of the source of our freedom is the beginning of theological discourse. Only the worship of the Church which returns thanks to God can say where freedom and truth come from. Without this confession, theology cannot make the first essential admission that, unless we confess the true God, we will continue to labour under many false gods, chief and most burdensome of which is our own selves. Theology that listens to the liturgy will recognize the revolution that is Christian monotheism, and welcome it as release and emancipation, and for this reason all theological work must be self-effacing. Nevertheless, in the contemporary academic scene Zizioulas certainly represents one of the most rigorous expressions of the neglected themes of the Christian faith. Some biographical detail of the scholar himself is therefore in order. John D. Zizioulas was born in 1931, and studied at Thessaloniki and Athens. His doctoral thesis on the bishop in the early Church was accepted in 1965, and recently published in English as Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries. He was Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Glasgow, and then Visiting Professor at Geneva, King’s College London, and the Gregorian University, Rome. He became Metropolitan of Pergamon in 1986 and has represented the Ecumenical Patriarchate on international Church bodies for many years. He is a member of the committees for dialogue with the Roman Catholic Church, and with the Anglican Church, and has been Secretary of Faith and Order at the World Council of Churches in Geneva. He travels and lectures ceaselessly, and his lectures have been extensively translated and published in Church journals in a variety of languages. His international reputation has grown from his first major work in English, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, which appeared in 1985. Few major theological thinkers have failed to pay their respects to it. Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church was published in 2006. Other work on eschatology and on man as priest of creation remains unpublished. Zizioulas is a peerless teacher and communicator, able to make fundamental issues readily comprehensible, and indeed is very much better at this than his own interpreters. He is concerned to set out the lived context and experience of Christian thought in its encounter with both modern and ancient mindsets, and to show that we may understand ourselves by tracing strands of ancient philosophy as they re-appear in new combinations in modern thought. He is a philosopher precisely inasmuch as he speaks from the Christian Church and tradition, and only the prejudice against distinctively Christian theology prevents the philosophical stature of his work from being recognized. He does not accept that metaphysics or Christian theology are any more difficult now than in any other period, but regards ancient and modern thinkers, both Christian and pagan, as contemporaries in conversation around a single table. These thinkers determine how we conceive of ourselves and what questions we are able to ask, so we need to hear from them in order to know ourselves. Zizioulas believes that the Church is the servant of truth, and that speaking from the Church is the best way to contribute to the public arena. The Church represents a more authentic catholicity and universality than does the contemporary university. Zizioulas interacts with science and public issues, as is apparent in his welcome

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for Darwinism in his lectures on ‘Preserving God’s Creation’. His work represents the most searching enquiry into the relationship of the one and the many, and so of the question, asked by the humanities and social sciences, of how humans can live together without the loss of the particularity of the person. Questions for Zizioulas Of the questions most often put to Zizioulas, the first is how relations can determine being, and how persons are constituted by relations. Some of Zizioulas’ readers have misunderstood him to be saying that persons are relations, with the implication that persons have no substance, so that our being shifts as our relationships change, jeopardizing the continuity of our identity. But Zizioulas does not put relationship, which is merely an abstraction, before persons, and he suggests that similarly we may not put communion, likewise an abstraction, before the particular person of the Father. A second set of questions relates to hierarchy and communion. Some scholars have asked whether Zizioulas’ stress on the monarchy of the Father promotes a hierarchical and clerical view of society that threatens the communion of persons.1 Does Zizioulas represent the institutionalism and monarchism that seem to Western eyes to be the mark of the Eastern Church? A third question could be about the relationship of Church and world. What validity does Zizioulas’ theology have outside the Church and religious discourse? Is this theology able to establish any positive relationship with the world? If existence comes from God, what existence do those outside the Church have?2 Others have asked whether he makes a clear distinction between the creation of the material world and the fall, or whether materiality in the Eastern view already represents some kind of fall. A fourth question is about Zizioulas’ use of historical sources. Does he misrepresent the Church Fathers, in particular the Cappadocians? Zizioulas attributes to Basil and Gregory of Nyssa the view that being is not a uniquely fundamental category, more basic than anything else. He believes that, in order to say this, the Cappadocians settled on the concept of person, and maintained that the concepts of being and of person are co-fundamental. Is Zizioulas anachronistically reading a distinction between person and individual into the Cappadocians?3 Or is he properly interpreting the Cappadocians as teachers of the Church, and the Church as largely right about the direction and intention of Cappadocian theology?4 Surely Zizioulas is right to 1 For example, Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) pp. 79–80; Alan J. Torrance, Persons in Communion: Trinitarian Description and Human Participation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) pp. 290–94; and Thomas Weinandy, The Father’s Spirit of Sonship: reconceiving the Trinity (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994) p. 63. 2 Torrance, Persons in Communion, p. 296. 3 This is the argument of Lucian Turcescu, ‘“Person” versus “Individual” and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa’, Modern Theology 18.4 (October 2003) pp.97–109. 4 Aristotle Papanikolaou, ‘Is John Zizioulas an Existentialist in Disguise: A Response to Lucian Turcescu’, Modern Theology 20.4 (October 2004) pp. 601–7.

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say that, in the course of their exposition of the gospel, the Cappadocians make the distinction between the man in relationship with God, the person or righteous man, and the disconnected individual or unrighteous man, in no relationship with God and consequently in no relationship with any other creature. Our reading of the Cappadocians will differ if we believe them to be giving an evangelical account of God’s work in transforming sinners into righteous men, and individuals into members of the body, and thus catholic persons, or we believe the Cappadocians are giving a philosophical and timeless account of a static human nature. Some Orthodox are suspicious of Zizioulas’ involvement in dialogue with the West. But the East does not realize how deeply it has been influenced by the West: Zizioulas points out that the historical scholarship of Western theologians has recovered some authentically patristic and Orthodox patrimony.5 Orthodoxy should not simply sit safe on a repository of tradition, but should also interrupt the Western monologue, point to a better tradition, and so hand that tradition on. The Orthodox Church that avoids its responsibility to the catholicity of the whole Church is acting in as sectarian fashion as any denomination. Finally, and most frequently, scholars have asked whether Zizioulas has been influenced by existentialist thought. Since all these issues are very closely related, we will set out Zizioulas’ thought on its own terms and let his responses appear in their own order. Zizioulas’ Own Questions We can scarcely put such questions to Zizioulas without hearing the equally fundamental questions he puts to us. Does Western theology manage to move beyond the closed sphere of inter-human relationships, and so to talk about the world? Is it able to set human relationships into the larger context represented by the reality of the world? Only if we are prepared to concede that the world is a reality distinct from ourselves, which we are to some extent formed and disciplined by, can we claim that we really are able to refer to reality. There are a number of ways in which Zizioulas’ basic question may be expressed: 1. Does the West understand salvation as an escape from the body, into disembodiedness? Is the Western intellectual tradition any more than a form of Gnosticism? 2. Does the West understand salvation as evasion of communion and manyness, as antipathy to people and the demands that they represent? 3. Does the West want to avoid the practices and disciplines of the Christian life? Is it a flight from the discipline represented by the whole Church and so a failure to acknowledge its catholicity? Is Western theology concerned merely with ideas and rationality, or with particular forms of individual sentimentality? Is it able to relate salvation to the life lived together, in

5 John Zizioulas, ‘The Ecclesiological Presuppositions of the Holy Eucharist’, Nicolaus 10 (1982) pp. 333–49.


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Christ? 4. Does the West shun the tradition that teaches us the practices by which we can become the people reconciled to one another in Christ? Does it know that Christian faith is a deposit that must be passed on, because this body of truths saves? Is it an antipathy to history, an inability to admit that we are placed and enabled by our history and tradition? Is it a retreat into a specious present in denial about our history or future? John Zizioulas’ charge is that Western theology represents a flight from communion to individualism, away from other people, and even from otherness as such. Western theology finds it difficult to understand freedom in any way other than as freedom from other people, so it assumes that living together involves giving up some measure of freedom. It cannot show that freedom is a God-given absolute that comes through relationship with all other persons in Christ. Is Western Christian theology sufficiently distinct from the non-Christian intellectual tradition to be able to offer that tradition anything it does not already have? Persons and Individual The term which has brought Zizioulas criticism in the English-speaking world is ‘existential’. In European contexts ‘existential’ means real and practical, in contrast to merely intellectual or disengaged forms of knowledge. Zizioulas uses it to remind us that theology is about relationship with God and thus about life. But ‘existential’ also refers to the Continental philosophy associated with Heidegger and Sartre, and he has been accused of being an existentialist in this sense. The accusation is that Zizioulas has imported a philosophy into the Christian faith. But this charge is misplaced, for existentialism is not simply a worldview which we can adopt or not as we like. We are existentialists despite ourselves, for we are the people of the secular, disconnected West. We are each of us that individual, made not in encounter with our peers, but somehow self-made. The individual is an isolated being, without connection, and who must therefore forever struggle to establish his own identity. The best expression of the existential predicament of the individual does not come from Heidegger or Sartre. It is Immanuel Kant who is the real existentialist and best representative of the man disengaged, estranged and without relationship, unwilling to accept any law but his own. Kant has had a colossal significance on our tradition and mindset in making this autonomous man the figure to which we moderns must aspire and conform, and to which the subsequent development of the social sciences and religious studies does indeed conform. Zizioulas is not offering us an account of an intellectual predicament that is peculiarly his own, but one which is common to us all. He sets out this Western predicament most extensively in ‘Personhood and Being’, the long and dramatic opening chapter of Being as Communion. With the patience of a good teacher, Zizioulas describes the tragedy of the individual, so we see how this predicament has arisen and want to know how it may be resolved. He tells the history of the idea of the individual in his struggle with the world of ‘being’ or nature. Nature is given,

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and within it the substance of man is given, but this givenness is the affront to his freedom against which man must protest, and he does so by contesting every given and every relationship, seeing them all as threats to his identity. Like the protagonist of ancient Greek tragedy or of the modern novel, this man without relationship is bound to experiment endlessly with his identity, in the hope of finding an identity not imposed upon him. The tragedians showed that, after any experience of freedom, man’s fate catches up with him and brings that freedom to an end. Man is in a struggle with nature, including his own nature, but it is a struggle he cannot win. Zizioulas’ work is not readily amenable to modern Western theology because such theology is conceived as a religious discourse, confined to the ghetto staked out by Kant and now enforced by religious studies and the social sciences. Such theology is about ethics, the predicament of the individual confronted, and offended, by the world. But Zizioulas’ theological ontology of persons puts him in dialogue, not merely with ethics, but with a much wider tradition of Western thought, that is political and metaphysical, as well as properly theological. Zizioulas believes that the Western worldview has a deep prejudice that persons are not essential. It represents the pessimism of an elite that regards the world as a thing of disorder, and the human crowd as an obstacle, which the lonely individual, the philosopher, has to see over in order to view reality. This tradition wishes this vulgar world away and regards the Christian theological insistence that persons are ultimate as philosophically unserious. Christian theology must continually assert itself against this assumption of the Western tradition, and maintain that the isolated monad is not more fundamental than persons in community, and that diversity is not less real than unity. As long as it remains within the confines of religious discourse, Western theology assumes that there is another reality under the surface of theological statements, that of ethics, into which theology must be translated. Zizioulas believes that ethics, divorced from ontology, is just a game of power. Zizioulas does not believe that Christianity simply tells the world what it has to do and think, for such ethics is simple power-play: why should the world conform to the Christian ethic rather than to any other? What is required is a distinct community with a distinct culture, and it is this community and culture that is given to the world in the Church. Such an ethic cannot come from any source except the life of God, given to the Church, and through it, to the world. Christian theology must make clear the connections between this one specific community and ontology and ethics, and it does so by the doctrine of creation, which teaches that the world, and with it all otherness and distinction, is both the work of God, and, because God intends that we get involved in it, a work still in progress. According to the concept of nature, the world is an inert a place which cannot respond to us. But the Christian doctrine of creation challenges the concept of nature, and this encounter between the concept of nature and the doctrine of creation is termed ‘metaphysics’. As Alan Brown points out in his chapter in this volume, ‘On the Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology’, meeting and confronting the non-Christian accounts of the world, and the task of metaphysics therefore, is an essential part of theological witness, as is the task of identifying those sub-Christian assumptions imported into theology.

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Eschatology and Community The future of the world, and the survival of creation as the project of God, depends on man. Zizioulas explains that, because it had a beginning, creation is finite and likely to come to an end, and since this is the case, the meaning and the truth of every part of creation must be in question. Creation therefore awaits the arrival of the being who is determined, not by his beginning, but by his goal, and this being is mankind, with whom God shares his freedom. As man raises creation up to God, it is freed from its own limitations, and becomes personal.6 Man’s reluctance to take his freedom in relationship with God has delayed the arrival of this freedom for creation, which therefore continues to be held back by its mortality. But, following Maximus the Confessor, Zizioulas states that the beginning will not have the last word on this. The end will re-determine the beginning. Jesus Christ is the goal of creation, and will turn out to be its true origin too. We have to think of history as a movement consisting of two kinds of directions: one is the direction toward the end for which the world was created; the other is away from this end. Since the end decides finally about the truth of history only those events leading to the end will be shown to possess true being or being tout court. The historical events of revelation do not have reality in themselves; they have reality only because they lead to the end from which reality comes What is real is what has reality in the end. Jesus Christ is empowered in the resurrection to be the truly determinative man, the high point and purpose of creation and guarantee of its survival. The future is determined by Christ, who is man with God. By taking the world into his hands, and referring it back to God, the new man liberates creation from the failed custody of man without God. Christ does not therefore make some merely exterior alteration to us. He finds us individuals, without relation to anyone else, and he connects us to himself, so we are made persons, related to what is not ourselves, indeed related to everything that is not ourselves. In the distinction between person and individual Zizioulas is contrasting the disengaged and lost human, and the human related and integrated, and who is therefore a person. Only this person, a catholic being, properly related to all humanity because related to God, and in whom therefore all persons are represented, will turn out finally to be a human being. Four chapters of this book carry this debate forward. In ‘Person and Nature’, Douglas Farrow asks whether Zizioulas has a clear enough distinction between creation and fall. Colin Gunton in ‘Persons and Particularity’ suggests that if the Orthodox East had had a Reformation, it would have found a clearer concept of sin and so sharpened its distinction between createdness and fallenness. In ‘The Work of the Holy Spirit’ Markus Mühling contends that Basil made precisely this distinction in the course of the Pneumatomachian controversy, and so believes that the Eastern Church has indeed maintained the difference between createdness and fallenness. Its pneumatology allows it to say that it is the proper action of man, given by God, to confess in worship that creation is not God. We are not different from God by nature 6 John Zizioulas, ‘Preserving God’s Creation’, Third lecture, King’s Theological Review 13 (1990) pp. 1–5, at 4.

Introduction

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(where would this definition of nature come from?), but by the gracious action of God, that allows us to say, gladly and for ourselves, that God is different from us. In man’s confession that God is his maker and redeemer, all creation differentiates itself from God and so approaches its perfection. Eschatology is built in to every part of Zizioulas’ thought, as Robert Turner shows in ‘Eschatology and Truth’, his patient exposition of Zizioulas’ ecclesial ontology. Zizioulas argues that truth is inseparable from communion. Truth is not only an idea, but the fact of this specific gathering, the Church. All other communities and cultures fail to sustain the real otherness of their members, are therefore deficient in truth, so they cannot last. The eucharist is the event of that gathering, in which all persons, and all things, come together and find their proper relative distance and closeness. In the eucharist the future wholeness of reality comes forward into our time, each eucharistic celebration being an instalment of that future reconciliation of all things and all persons. The Church is the beginning of real otherness because it witnesses to Christ, the source of all diversity and unity. In his body, the Church, all the future manyness of creation, though presently concealed to us, is being brought into being, all identity and difference finally established, so in this body we participate in the diversity and communion of God. We are not concerned only with the existence of creation, but also with its life and its speech. Creation is fallen, in that it is inert and dormant, but its redemption brings it to life, so it is animated and vocal – it praises God and thus becomes truly itself at last. Monarchy and Communion There is no rivalry in God. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit have distinct works, but whatever is the work of one person is the work of the one God. Relations within the Trinity are not just about origins, and so about begetting, sending and proceeding, but also about the reception of and response to these actions. Everything demands an audience, and nothing is what it is until it has been confirmed by the right audience. The constitutive audience of the Son is the Father, and proper audience of the Father is the Son. The Son does not act alone, but is accompanied and driven in all he does by the Spirit. Zizioulas teaches that the life and being of God has its source in the Father, and that the singularity of this source is best expressed by the term monarchia. The Father is an agent who freely does what he does and is the sole source of all his acts. Zizioulas calls the Father the cause, in the hope that ‘cause’ does not have the inanimate and non-personal connotation of the word ‘source’. But if we find that the English connotations of ‘cause’ and ‘source’ are equally non-personal, perhaps the ‘initiator’, for example, would be a better way to translate aitia and so safeguard the freedom of the Father in his act. God is not God because of the Father’s arche – the beginning – alone, but because the Father’s beginning is received and accepted, taken up and followed by the Son, and the Son’s reception of that beginning is itself received and accepted by the Father. It is the sovereign decision and act of the Father that makes the act of God free, but this is because this is not the act of the Father alone, but of the Son and the Spirit, whose recognition make the Father’s act

10


what it is. The Father is Father because the Son who answers him calls him by this name. Since the Father is free to be Father to the Son, the creation is not a necessary outcome of their being. Since God is not dependent on his creation, it may really rely on him, and receive its freedom from him. Similarly the Son’s agency is not his alone; he does not work as an individual. It is the Father’s work he is about, and what he does, he does with the Father, and because he works with the Father, his agency confirms the monarchia of the Father. This agency is plural, ‘of the Son’ because ‘of the Father’, and it is the single agency of the One God, thus not divisible. The trinitarian logic of the doctrine of God is set out in this volume by Wolfhart Pannenberg in ‘Divine Economy and Eternal Trinity’. Pannenberg argues that the Spirit prompts Christ to give glory to, and so differentiate himself from, the Father. The Spirit differentiates Christ from us, and differentiates each of us from one another, while the Son tenders to us the otherness he receives from the Spirit, and returns it from us to the Father. That there is one God is our liberation. It means that necessity is not intrinsic to our createdness. This monarchia and ‘monotheism’ is our freedom from the other gods, forces and guises of necessity. Christ, the Spirit and the Church Another area in which Zizioulas has made a significant contribution is in a more properly theological ecclesiology, that links the Church firmly to a closely interrelated christology and pneumatology. This must be welcomed by Protestant theology in particular, which, having given its account of Christ, often struggles to find a distinct work of Holy Spirit, or any role for man, or robust doctrine of the Church. The Church is first datum of theology. God has made a community in the world, and by this act he has revealed all other communities to be merely partial, not yet the whole truth. It is the unity of the Church that witnesses to the oneness, and thus to the truth, of God. The Church points towards the whole because it is itself that whole in miniature, arriving from what we must regard as the future and establishing itself here among the conflicting fragments of which the world is so far comprised. The Church is not divided by the multiplicity of cultures or nations, but is a single culture and way of life, scattered like seed in all the many cultures of the world, in order that the Church may witness to the truth of God and the future unity of all creation with God. The Church is the manifestation of the plurality and catholicity of Christ. Zizioulas argues that Christ is from the beginning accompanied, supported, even constituted by the Spirit, so christology must always be informed by pneumatology. There is no moment when he is without the Spirit, for Christ ‘exists only pneumatologically’.7 Christ is not an individual who is made many by the addition to him of the Church, for the Spirit makes Christ who he is. The Spirit allows the whole company of heaven and earth to participate in Christ, so he is therefore simultaneously many and one.

7 John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985) p. 111.

Introduction

11

The Person of Christ is automatically linked with the Holy Spirit, which means with a community. This community is the eschatological company of the Saints who surround Christ in this kingdom. This Church is part of the definition of Christ. The body of Christ is not first the body of the individual Christ and then a community of ‘many’, but simultaneously both together. Thus you cannot have the body of the individual Christ (the One) without having simultaneously the community of the Church (the Many).8

The Son is intrinsically plural because he shares the communion of God, and he shares this plurality with the Church. Equally, this plurality brings the Son into history as the one, Jesus Christ. The final resurrection of the many is the cause of the resurrection of the one, Jesus Christ. Christ has set up his Church. For us this inaugural event is an event in the past, a given, and so a unilateral imposition that threatens our freedom. But the Spirit invites and enables us to take this given as a gift that, when we take it for ourselves, makes us plural beings, distinguished from him, and from one another. Though the shape of the future is given by Christ, in the Holy Spirit we can fill it so it is the future that we consent to and constitute, within which we are with God and our freedom is established within his.9 The whole people of the eschatological Church are the glory of Christ. The basis of Zizioulas’ theology is the liturgy, and the Christian caught up in it. Through listening to the liturgy and Scripture the Christian community learns to see the whole world as this liturgy, and watches God at work, creating, judging and providing for all creation. In ‘The Spirit and Persons in the Liturgy’, Douglas H. Knight discusses how man is witness to God’s work of gathering all things to their proper place and, by gathering them, bringing them into existence. Man is caught up into this action that is Christ’s, but in Christ, man’s own action too. Christ makes his people one indivisible whole, the one many and the many one. This means that the whole people is ‘laity’ (laos), so the laity is not defined by contrast with the clergy. The many, the whole congregation, make the one, the bishop, who he is, just as he makes them who they are, the people defined by relationship with him. The one and the many are two aspects of the same being – Christ. By their very baptism all Christians are ordained members of Christ, as Philip Rosato points out in ‘The Ordination of the Baptized’. Every member of the Church, and this means every lay member, is appointed to a position within the body, and receives his or her identity from the body, and the life of the body is renewed in the baptism of each new member.10 As soon as the truth of Christian initiation is forgotten, we start to regard the lay person as ‘not ordained’. But as Rosato points out, there really is a particular status for the bishop, and by extension the clergy, for they are the bodily presence of the apostolic tradition, and so of the Church’s catholicity.

8 Zizioulas, ‘The Ecclesiological Presuppositions of the Holy Eucharist’, p. 342. 9 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 140. 10 Michael Kunzler, The Church’s Liturgy (London, New York: Continuum, 2001) p. 57.

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Bishop and People The whole Christian community is under a discipline imposed upon it by an external authority. It is formed and disciplined, as it is saved, by Christ who comes to it from outside. This is not the merely theoretical authority of an absentee landlord, for the authority of Christ, and of his whole people the Church, is made bodily present to us as the office-holders of the Church. The lordship of Christ presently makes itself felt as these specific overseers. No community of Christians is under its own authority, and so no individual community can ordain its own leaders. This must be done for it by the rest of the Church, by all other congregations, as it were. Such overseers are sent by the whole Church to each local church, which must receive this overseer and his discipline willingly, as a gift received from the whole Church. Because these overseers must be trained in the full deposit of faith, we need a trained and ordained clergy. Christ makes himself present to us in the form of these disciplinarians, who are responsible for connecting us to all the people of Christ, mediating to us the whole Church, and passing on to us all the characteristics of the servanthood of Christ. Obedience to the God who is really God is freedom, and obedience to his word and then to those he made his apostles is the form Christ takes for us now. Our overseers are the love and discipline of God for us as they pass on what they have received of him and enable us to receive it in full and thankfully. We have to help these overseers to be good transmitters of the faith, and we do this by exhorting them to instruct us, and by taking our complaint to them and to God when they fail to do so. So discussion of the office of the bishop is no defence of clerical interests, but an essential part of the living witness of the contemporary Church. In ‘Christian Life and Institutional Church’, Nicholas Loudovikos argues that the bishop is given the fullness of the spiritual gifts in order to distribute them to the Church. We can identify two gifts in particular: that he hands on the whole deposit of faith and with it all gifts, and that he knows how to suffer. The first means that the bishop represents the whole history of the Church, all its apostles and doctors, to his congregation. The second means that he exercises discipline, and when the Church refuses any part of these gifts and disciplines, and sets out to found its faith on something less than the full deposit of faith, the bishop will exercise the discipline that will bring it back to obedience, and will be able to endure the suffering that this will involve. The bishop who stands at the head of the congregation is also one member of it. To the congregation the bishop makes the whole catholic Church, both worldwide and past and present, present to this congregation.11 As long as he is its head, the whole Church is present with this congregation, so that the whole geographic and historic catholicity of the Church is present in that place. As the congregation gathers 11 John Zizioulas, ‘The Theological Problem of Reception’, One in Christ: A Catholic Ecumenical Review 21 (1985) p. 192 ‘Each local church received the gospel as one body through one “episkopos” in each place. This one bishop guaranteed (a) that the reception was in line with previous communities going back to the first apostolic communities; and (b) that the reception was in common with the rest of the ecclesial communities in the world, which was ascertained through conciliar gatherings and decisions. Thus the episcopal office became essential to the how of reception.’

Introduction

13

round the bishop, it is identified as the gathering of the universal Church, and so Christ manifests himself as this people (with bishop) for the sake of the world in that place. In ‘Church, Eucharist, Bishop’, Demetrios Bathrellos asks whether Zizioulas is offering an unnecessarily idealized or authoritarian view of the bishop in contrast to the priest and parish, and in contrast to those non-ordained spiritual leaders who always emerge in the Church. Zizioulas insists that the particular congregation does not come before the universal Church, nor does the universal Church come before the particular congregation.12 The West tends to regard the many and the one as opposites, with the result that it swings between equal and opposite monarchical (or papal) and democratic fallacies. Priority of the local over the universal may be said to be the Protestant emphasis, while the Roman Catholic inclination is the priority of the universal over the local. Zizioulas’ determination that neither has priority has had a significant impact on ecumenical dialogue. In ‘Authority and Ecumenism’, Paul Collins asks whether Zizioulas overemphasizes the extent to which the earliest Church was oriented on the bishop. Does such a hierarchical view endanger prospects for ecumenism with churches which have no such sympathy with hierarchy? Or is it rather that there may be no ecumenism without the subjection and subordination of every church to every other in love? In ‘The Local and the Universal Church’, Paul McPartlan contrasts these different emphases within recent Roman Catholic debate: the then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger represented the claim that the universal Church is not merely the sum of local churches, but has an authority that ‘pre-exists’ them, represented by Rome. McPartlan suggests that Zizioulas’ more eschatological understanding of the unity of the Church shows that the future, and yet already existent, unity of the Church is manifest in every church, so the local and universal are in the same mutually informed relationship as are the present and the future. Catholicity, Ecumenism and Conciliarity Zizioulas’ concern with catholicity, and thus the wholeness of the undivided Church, means that ecumenism is not an extra, but an evangelical imperative. Every church must be orthodox, catholic and ecumenical: the ‘divided Churches are called to receive from one another or indeed to receive one another’. This does not mean simply agreement on doctrine, but mutual ecclesial recognition, ‘the reception of one Church by another Church’ – in the eucharist.13 ‘The Church, although one, exists as churches (in the plural), and these churches exist as One Church in and through constantly receiving one another as sister Churches.’14 The logic that makes any local church a member of the Roman Catholic church is also the logic that makes the Rome one patriarchate with the other (‘Orthodox’) patriarchates. Western and Eastern secession, nationalism and sectarianism throws the catholicity of the whole Church into doubt, and falsifies the truth of God. But each church constituted by communion with the whole Church will be disciplined by conciliarity, which 12 Zizioulas, ‘The Ecclesiological Presuppositions of the Holy Eucharist’, pp. 341–3. 13 Zizioulas, ‘The Theological Problem of Reception’, pp. 189–90. 14 Zizioulas, ‘The Theological Problem of Reception’, p. 190.

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demands the participation of every part of the Church, representing every part of the world, present at each council. Doubtless in such an ecumenical gathering there would be a great deal of readiness to invite the bishop of Rome to take the chair. The Church is whole when all parts of the Church are in communion with all others, and for this reason each part must insist on the centrality of the practice of calling councils of the whole Church, and itself be disciplined by that practice. Conciliarity is the practice of communion. No doctrine or basic practice can be decided without the agreement of every part of the Church in each council. This unity is anticipated and actualized in the eucharist, in which each local congregation is related to all congregations, across space and across time, uniting all times in the time of God. Zizioulas shows us that God witnesses to himself by putting his community here in the world. The Church not only points towards this whole, it is this whole. God has established his ‘whole’, publicly before all the world, and its wholeness is demonstration of its truth. The very existence of the Church, the gathering of all parts, demonstrates that a barrier has been broken. This world is no longer a place of antagonistic parts: all parts begin to orient themselves on Christ, the irreconcilable are reconciled and renewed by him, until each becomes an instantiation of the whole. By bringing doctrines together into their proper relation, Zizioulas has allowed the evangelical narrative of God with man to impact on the deepest assumptions of the Western tradition, and so on our understanding of ourselves. He has demonstrated the intrinsic unity of the Christian doctrine of God, man and the world, and with it brought the substantial new insight that the confession of the Christian community is uniquely directed towards freedom. Zizioulas’ achievement is not simply intellectual. He teaches the doctrine of the Church in order that its reality becomes more clearly set out in the lived form of the Christian community, through ecumenical and eucharistic reconciliation. He invites us to see the Church and eucharist as one event which opens the world up to us, and shows that we can be free in it. All his work relates to that living organism, the Church, within which communion, plurality and freedom are now coming into being. Though he insists that his work is not simply his, it embodies an extraordinary richness of thought, to which the contributors to this volume bear witness.

Chapter 1

Eschatology and Truth Robert Turner

John Zizioulas’ view of the Church as communion has engaged theologians of diverse backgrounds who have produced widely divergent evaluations of his contribution. Since the publications that develop Zizioulas’ ecclesiology were often prepared for conferences or theological commissions, it is fair to say that his collections of essays are not yet a work of synthesis. Our task is to find the unity in his work.1 In this chapter I propose that three principles regulate the ecclesiology of John Zizioulas: an ontological, an eschatological and an epistemological principle. The ontological principle is rooted in the difference between Creator and creation, and points to the ontological importance of salvation. The eschatological principle accounts for the relationship of the eschatological truth to history and shows that salvation is realized in historical and ecclesial events without being determined simply by historical causality. The epistemological principle establishes the role of ecclesial life for theological discourse, recognizes the limits of that theological discourse and the obligation to articulate the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. Ontology of Creator and Creation Zizioulas begins the introduction to his collection of articles, Being as Communion, with the thesis which underlies his work: ‘The Church is not simply an institution. She is a “mode of existence,” a way of being. The mystery of the Church, even in its institutional dimension, is deeply bound to the being of man, to the being of the world and to the very being of God.’2 This ontological perspective articulates the meaning of salvation. Zizioulas is a theologian rather than a philosopher. ‘The eternal survival of the person as a unique, unrepeatable and free “hypostasis,” as loving and being loved, constitutes the quintessence of salvation, the bringing of the Gospel to man.’3 His understanding of salvation establishes the freedom of created being from non-being or non-existence. To account for salvation from death through union with Christ, he explains divine being’s capacity to offer salvation to created 1 John Zizioulas, L’être ecclésial, Perspective orthodoxe, 3 (Genève: Labor et Fides, 1981) p. 19. Zizioulas reminds the reader that this is a collection of essays and not a synthesis. 2 John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985) p. 15. The same introduction is found in Zizioulas, L’être ecclésial. 3 Zizioulas, ‘Personhood and Being’, in Being as Communion, pp. 49–50.

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being and describes the ontological character of life in Christ. Zizioulas bases his approach to ontology on three premises which are fundamental to his understanding of being, both divine and created: a) true being’s freedom from necessity; b) being as a communion of persons; and c) the person as cause of being. Christianity expressed its faith in a world of established cosmologies. Greek cosmology was fundamentally a monistic ontology. ‘Not even God can escape from this ontological unity and stand freely before the world, “face to face” in dialogue with it. He too is bound by ontological necessity to the world and the world to him.’4 A monistic approach eliminates true freedom for God because there is no absolute separation between divine being and the cosmos. In the monistic view, the act of creation by God is an aesthetic act without ontological significance. It achieves beauty by re-ordering of pre-existent matter. Without a beginning, there is no real possibility for the non-existence of created being, with the consequence that the being of God is confronted with a necessary relation to non-divine reality. The scriptural understanding of creation separated God from creation. The notion of creation ex nihilo expressed the otherness of the being of God from the being of the world. The being of creation is the result of God’s will. God is not obliged to create the world in order to be God, nor is the act of creation simply the act of ordering already existing being. God’s freedom in relation to the world is unconditional. In the Christian view of creation God creates because ‘... il veut qu’existe quelque chose d’autre en dehors de Lui, “quelque chose” avec quoi s’entretenir et s’unir.’5 [... he wants something to exist outside Himself, ‘something’ to which he can relate and unite himself.] Creation has ontological, not simply aesthetic, significance because the divine act of creation brings the world into existence. For God to be free requires not only freedom from the world, but freedom within divine being. Freedom within divine being is based on the ontological significance of divine persons, and on the Father as the cause of divine personhood. The doctrine of creation ex nihilo alone fails to establish the freedom of God. The scriptural tradition of creation and the experience of the divine persons are the elements that save divine being from the claims of necessity. Zizioulas develops an understanding of the person with ontological content which conditions the discussion of the unity of divine being. Divine personhood is the starting point for discussion of divine being.6 By giving priority to divine person rather than divine substance, Zizioulas establishes the freedom of divine being. The particularity or otherness of the person is not added to being; rather it causes the being to exist and is therefore the point at which being can truly be treated. The personhood of God could be understood as a secondary characteristic of God, the divine substance being primary. Zizioulas rejects this approach: ‘... unless we admit on a philosophical level that personhood is not secondary to being, that the mode of existence of being is not secondary to its “substance” but itself primary and constitutive of it, it is impossible to make sense of

4 Ibid, pp. 29–30. 5 John Zizioulas, ‘Christologie et existence. La dialectique créé-incréé et le dogme de Chalcédoine’, tr. M. Stavros, Contacts 36 (1984) p. 157. 6 Zizioulas, ‘Personhood and Being’, p. 39.

Eschatology and Truth

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the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.’7 Being is infused with necessity without attributing real being to difference. The question is ‘... whether otherness can make sense in ontology, whether ontology can do anything more than rest on the idea of totality.’8 Zizioulas’ ontology of persons in communion seeks to make a unique contribution to ontology found in the realization of salvation in Christ. Ontological difference within divine being is expressed by the concept of person. The unity of divine persons is expressed by one divine substance, but this one substance is not the starting point for the discourse on divine being.9 Zizioulas does not abandon the importance of the unity of divine being expressed by the one divine substance, but speaks about the unity of divine being with an understanding of person that expresses unity of substance by the communion of persons. Personhood means otherness, difference, but not in isolation, because the full meaning of personhood is found in the communion of persons. Personhood not only describes ontological difference, but is the starting point for ontological unity. Instead of depending on two principles, Zizioulas shows us that personhood serves as the basis for both difference and unity because both ekstasis and communion are constitutive of personhood. Personhood is constituted by ekstasis, the movement outside of self. It is an ekstasis which takes the person beyond the particularity of his ontological identity. Personhood ‘... affirms the integrity and catholicity of being (cf. hypostasis) and must of necessity overcome the distance of individualization (cf. ekstasis).’10 True freedom in an ontological sense is not simply the possibility of choice between limited options. The ecstatic character of the freedom of the person is found fully only in the ecstatic love of divine personhood.11 Communion with otherness is a movement out of self, not by necessity, but by the freedom which constitutes love. The personhood of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit establishes difference and unity by the ecstatic character of personhood. The divine persons are not modes of action in regard to creation, but rather modes of being which constitute divine being. The reason the divine persons are persons is therefore not their work within the economy of salvation, but the freedom of God expressed in ecstatic love that makes divine being personal. In constituting divine being, personhood assures freedom within divine being and so, like the concept of substance, establishes the unity of divine being. The next step is to show that the person is not only the principle of difference and unity but also the cause of being; persons, not substance, cause being to exist.12 The personhood of God is not required by divine substance.13 The personhood of God is caused by the person of the Father.14 The ontological principle of God ‘... 7 John Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity and Human Incapacity: A Theological Exploration of Personhood’, Scottish Journal of Theology 28 (1975) p. 416. 8 Zizioulas, ‘ Truth and Communion’, in Being as Communion, p. 86. 9 Cf. ibid, p. 89. 10 Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 417, and see also p. 408. 11 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Personhood and Being’, p. 46. 12 Cf. ibid, pp. 41–2, n. 36. 13 Cf. ibid, p. 44. 14 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person: Towards an Ontology of Personhood’, in C. Schwöbel and C. Gunton (eds), Persons, Divine and Human (Edinburgh: Clark, 1991) pp. 37–8.


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does not consist in the one substance of God but in the hypostasis that is, the person of the Father.’15 The importance of this starting point is the freedom of the being of God from ontological necessity: ‘... the substance never exists in a “naked” state, that is without hypostasis, without “a mode of existence” ... divine substance is consequently the being of God only because it has these three modes of existence, which it owes not to the substance but to the one person, the Father.’16 The Father as the ontological principle of God does not create a subordinationism because the divine persons share the same substance, and because, considered in isolation from the Son and Spirit, the Father alone is not a personal hypostasis, or personal mode of existence. Father and divine substance would be synonymous because Father would not express a particular personal mode of existence. Zizioulas’ understanding of God begins with the divine persons, but his discussion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit is not limited to the economy of salvation. His interest is the real possibility of God’s freedom from necessity. Neither limiting our discussion to the economy of the Trinity, nor the concepts of substance and person alone would assure the freedom of God in discourse on divine being. Divine being as a communion of persons through ecstatic love, along with the person of the Father as cause of divine being, establishes the freedom of God. Because of this freedom, divine being can be the source of created being’s freedom from non-being. The communion of divine persons is essential for the Christian hope of salvation. Zizioulas contrasts the ontological state of created being and divine being by pointing out that created being is not free.17 The concept of the fall of mankind does not change the fundamental ontological reality of created being. Zizioulas rejects a natural capacity for the survival of the cosmos or the human person. The beginning of the world establishes its separateness from divine being, so its mortality is not simply the mortality of particular beings of all of created being.18 The Fall does not constitute the ontological need of creation for salvation from non-being.19 Speaking of a naturally eternal soul places in question the true distinction between divine being and creation. There is no natural means for the true survival of created being. The mortality of created being is overcome only through communion in the personal life of God.20 This ontological concern means that Zizioulas does not begin his discussion of salvation by talking about sin.21 His starting point is the ontological distinction between divine being and created being. The creation of the human person in the image and likeness of God, as a person capable of freedom, was God’s means of providing for his creation.22 Personhood becomes the link between God and creation, for the human person offers a unique contribution to the rest of creation. Humanity is unique within creation because it

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Zizioulas, ‘Personhood and Being’, p. 40. Ibid, p. 41. Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘Preserving God’s Creation’ (Part II), Sourozh 40 (1989) p. 40. Cf. Ibid, p. 37. Zizioulas, ‘Preserving God’s Creation’ (Part III), Sourozh 41, pp. 37–8. Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Christologie et existence’, pp. 164–5. Cf. Ibid, p. 168. Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Preserving God’s Creation’ III , p. 35.


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was created in the image and likeness of God, and so represents the extension of personhood to created being. The freedom of the person, which makes it possible for his actions to transcend necessity, and the solidarity between mankind and the rest of material creation, are the basis for the mission of mankind in creation. The fall is interpreted within this view of personhood. It expresses the ecstatic movement of the human person who seeks to make the world an expression of its own will, not the will of God.23 Freedom from necessity was possible only through communion with the creator, and this responsibility for communion was given to man.24 His mission is to be the agent of communion between God and his creation. But the freedom of personhood means that mankind may try to realize his personhood, not by communion with God, but by conforming creation to the will of mankind. The individual becomes the creator.25 The desire to be independent, to actualize the individuality of mankind’s fallen state means that ‘... he wishes to be free not only to create but to destroy. Reasonableness and harmony are not his ultimate goals in existence.’26 But this manifestation of freedom, even to choose destruction, proves that personhood was not lost in the fallen state. This is a perverse form of personhood which constitutes its identity in a destructive relationship to other persons and creation. The break in communion with God leads to the experience of the person as an individual, in isolation from others and from the rest of creation.27 For this reason personhood, and the communion constitutive of personhood, is not the foundation for understanding human being. Contemporary culture reflects this by approaching the human person as a ‘... rational individuality on the one hand and psychological experience and consciousness on the other.’28 In these two examples, understanding of the person is based in the mind of the autonomous individual and not the ontological status of the person. But what distinguishes humanity within creation is not reason or consciousness; it is personhood. Darwin found that the difference between the mind of man and of animals is ‘certainly one of degree, and not of kind.’29 When Zizioulas’ distinction between divine and created being, and divine and human person, together with the effect of the Fall on the human person, are understood, we can turn to his understanding of salvation in Jesus Christ. The person of Christ is the means by which the ontological obstacles facing the human person are overcome, and theological understanding of Christ gives us the conceptual means to express the ontological aspect of our salvation. ‘The person as an ontological category cannot be extrapolated from experience.’30 The incarnation of the Son of God is the basis of the person as an ontological category.

23 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 420. 24 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Truth and Communion’ pp. 101–2. 25 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 433. 26 Ibid, p. 429. 27 Cf. ibid, p. 427. 28 Ibid, p. 405–6. 29 Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 406; Zizioulas’ quotation of Darwin, The Descent of Man, vol. I (1898) p.193. 30 Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person’, p. 37.


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To establish that the existing human person, not human nature, is our basis for understanding human being, Zizioulas turns to the concept of hypostasis in the christological formula of Chalcedon.31 The starting point from which to understand Christ is the hypostatic union: ‘it is his person that makes divine and human natures to be that particular being called Christ.’32 ‘One must see in Christ a person in whom the division of “natures” is changed into an otherness through communion.’33 Freedom from necessity for creation is possible by communion with Christ understood as a person. It is not just the divine nature of Christ but the person of Christ who assures the possibility of salvation. Nor is it just the spiritual reality of mankind but his whole person which is brought into union with Christ. Zizioulas insists that the freedom of created being in Christ means a resurrection of the body because the hypostatic union means the incarnate person of Christ. If the understanding of Christ’s incarnate existence as integral to the existence of his personhood is lost, the ontological implications of the person of Christ for created being are also lost.34 The incarnation is the key to understanding the personhood of Christ, but the relation ‘... which is constitutive of Christ’s particular being is the filial relationship between the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit in the Trinity ... man “in Christ” becomes a true person not through another “schesis” [relation] but only in and through the one filial relationship which constituted Christ’s being.’35 Though it may seem that the personhood of Christ is not that of other human persons, this is not the case. There is no true human personhood which is not constituted by a union with the divine persons.36 The hypostatic union of Christ unites the divine person with human nature in one personal existence. The union of the faithful with Christ also constitutes one hypostasis. The Christian does not repeat what is realized in Christ; he shares in the one unique personal existence of Christ. The possibility for salvation in Christ ‘... n’est pas parce qu’il a apporté un modèle moral ou un enseignement pour l’homme; c’est parce qu’il incarne lui-même le dépassement de la mort, parce que, dans sa personne, le créé vit désormais éternellement.’37 [... it is not because he brings a moral model or teaching for man; it is because he himself incarnates the overcoming of death, because in his own person the created now lives eternally.] The union with Christ is neither psychological nor moral but ontological, and therefore surmounts the limits of created existence, not by eliminating them, but by bringing created being into union with divine being. The human person must have an ontological identity that is constituted by communion with God.38 His hypostasis, his unique personhood, is constituted anew in communion with true personhood in Christ.39 The person of Christ is the foundation for the hope of survival of the human person, but the person of Christ is not simply 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Cf. ibid, p. 43. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 434. Zizioulas, ‘Truth and Communion’, p. 109. Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 439. Cf. ibid, p. 436. Cf. ibid, p. 437. Zizioulas, ‘Christologie et existence’, p. 166. Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Personhood and Being’, p. 54. Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Christologie et existence’, p. 171.


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the hypostatic union of two natures in one person. The eschatological Christ is a communion of all the members of the body of Christ with their head: ‘Christ is ‘one’ in his own hypostasis, i.e. as he relates eternally to the Father, but he is also at the same time ‘many’ in that the same ‘schesis’ becomes the constituent element.’40 There is a double perspective to the communion of Christ, trinitarian and ecclesial. But the ecclesial perspective does not constitute a separate ontological existence. It is a communion in the unique personal existence of Christ.41 Baptism is a new birth which constitutes a new hypostasis for the human person. ‘As death and resurrection in Christ, baptism signifies the decisive passing of our existence from the ‘truth’ of individualized being into the truth of personal being.’42 Baptism is inseparable from the community because communion in the life of Christ is a personal existence, a hypostasis which is ecclesial. There is the unique filial relationship which constitutes the hypostasis of the Son of God. From the perspective of the incarnation and resurrection, one recognizes in Christ the communion of all baptized into the life of the Son of God. The incarnation brings the ontological possibility of the survival of created being which is fully realized in the resurrection.43 The incarnation alone does not assure salvation. ‘All things in Christology are judged in the light of the resurrection. The incarnation in itself does not constitute a guarantee of salvation. The fact that finally death is conquered gives us the right to believe that the conqueror of death was also originally God.’44 The resurrection gives Zizioulas’ ontology its basis in eschatology. The incarnation brings the truth of divine personhood into the world, but the victory of the resurrection realizes the eschatological truth, Christ, in time. This eschatological character of the person of Christ is found in Christ as a corporate person and in the role of the Holy Spirit in christology. The whole life of Christ is inseparable from the Holy Spirit. Christ is constituted in the work of the Spirit from his conception to his resurrection. The historical reality of Christ, the Church as the Body of Christ, as well as the eschatological reality of the Church are realized by the Spirit, so ‘... we can say without risk of exaggeration that Christ exists only pneumatologically, whether in His distinct personal particularity or in His capacity as the body of the Church and the recapitulation of all things.’45 The Son of God is a person only by his relationship with the Father and the Spirit. Both the historical and eschatological Christ owes his identity to the intervention of the Spirit.46 Christ exists only pneumatologically; it is this presence of the Spirit in the Christ-event which requires that christology and ecclesiology not be separated. Because the communion realized by the Spirit is not simply with the historical Jesus

40 Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 438. 41 Cf. ibid, p. 437. 42 Zizioulas, ‘Truth and Communion’, p. 113. 43 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Christologie et existence’, p. 168. 44 Zizioulas, ‘Personhood and Being’, p. 55, n. 49. 45 Zizioulas, ‘Truth and Communion’, pp. 111. 46 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘The Mystery of the Church in Orthodox Tradition’, One in Christ 24 (1988) p. 296.

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but with the risen Lord; the historical communion realized by the Spirit is also eschatological and ecclesial. Eschatological Truth Realized in Time What is the significance of human history for Zizioulas’ understanding of ontological communion? How should we understand the historical character of our salvation? The key is that Christ is the truth realized in time. There are five premises to Zizioulas’ approach to salvation that shape the role of history in the subjects he addresses. The events which realize salvation are within history, not merely within the human mind. Salvation truly overcomes human death and division. If salvation is proposed as an escape from nature or does not confront death, it is not the true salvation of creation.47 Salvation does not come just into human history, but into the history of the cosmos. There is not a duality of histories, one human, the other natural.48 Since salvation is a matter of existence and life, it requires that history be understood ontologically. History should not be limited to an understanding of human consciousness, decisions and actions, but understood in terms of the future that all creation will share.49 Salvation must be a fact within history without contradicting God’s freedom and transcendence.50 Salvation must be a fact within history in which historical events do not annul the freedom of the person.51 Zizioulas recognizes three difficulties in contemporary theological exploration of the significance of historical events for salvation, under the general heading of the relation of the Christian to the world. How events in time are understood determines: (a) either an ethical or an ontological approach to Christian life; (b) our understanding of the authority and role of Church institutions and structures; and (c) the relation of mankind to the environment. The role of the Christian in the world has been characterized by two approaches: ‘celui de se confondre totalement avec le Royaume du Christ et le processus historique, et celui de s’opposer à l’histoire en s’engageant dans une vie uniquement spirituelle sous une forme ou sous une autre.’52 [... one of identifying oneself totally with the kingdom of Christ and the historical process and one of resisting history by engaging in a uniquely spiritual life in one form or another.] Both approaches are an ethical approach to life. Protestant theologians in particular propose eschatology as the essence of Christianity, but without grasping its ontological, cosmological and ecclesiological character.53 The 47 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Personhood and Being’, p. 49. 48 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘Implications ecclésiologiques de deux types de pneumatologie’, in B. Bobrinskoy et al. (eds), Communio Sanctorum: mélanges offerts à Jean-Jacques von Allmen (Genève: Labor et fides, 1982) p. 147, n. 23. 49 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, pp. 418–19. 50 Cf. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 20. 51 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘The Eucharistic Prayer and Life’, Emmanuel 81 (1975) p. 470. 52 John Zizioulas, ‘Déplacement de la perspective eschatologique’, in G. Alberigo et al. (eds), La chrétienté en débat: histoires, formes et problèmes actuels (Théologies, Paris: Cerf, 1984) p. 100. 53 Cf. ibid, pp. 89–100.


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new focus on the Kingdom of God resulted in a new interest in changing the social and political structures of the world. ‘Et par conséquent, l’Eglise, de façon paradoxale, sous prétexte d’introduire l’histoire en théologie par le biais de l’eschatologie, s’est engagée dans le monde au point d’abandonner complètement la perspective eschatologique.’54 [Consequently, the Church, in a paradoxical way, became engaged in the world to the point of completely abandoning the eschatological perspective under the pretext of introducing history into theology through an eschatological preference.] The loss of the ontological perspective is due in large part to how one understands truth within history, and this loss makes a fundamental contribution to the polarization of Spirit and institution, the reduction of Christian life to ethics,55 and the crisis of our environment.56 Because of this inadequate treatment of time and history, Christianity in both the East and the West faces a particular challenge in accounting for the place of the Church in the world. Orthodoxy is often thought of, or presented by its spokesmen, as a type of Christian Platonism, as a vision of future or heavenly things without interest in history and its problems. Western theology, by contrast, tends to limit ecclesiology (or even theology as a whole) to the economy, the historical content of the faith, and to project realities belonging to history and time into the eternal existence of God. In this way the dialectic of God and the world, the uncreated and the created, history and the eschata is lost. Orthodox theology runs the danger of historically disincarnating the Church; by contrast, the West risks tying it primarily to history, either in the form of an extreme Christocentrism – an imitatio Christi – lacking the essential influence of pneumatology, or in the form of a social activism or moralism which tries to play in the Church the role as the image of God.57

Zizioulas responds to his concerns about truth in history, and how the Church is understood in the light of that truth in history, by elaborating the meaning of Christ as the truth. Early Christians were influenced by Greek and Jewish approaches to time and history. The Jewish mentality was historical: the acts of God and mankind composed a historical relationship which was oriented to the future where God’s will would be fulfilled in his creation. The Greek mentality was cosmological and looked to the origin of things, so time and history represented decay or destruction. Each approach presented its own advantages and disadvantages to understanding Christian salvation.58 The answer emerged gradually in the patristic period.59 Zizioulas does not find a full articulation of how the truth is present in time in Jesus Christ until we reach St Maximus the Confessor. St Maximus innovates by reworking the insights already found in the tradition. Zizioulas identifies four keys to the thought of Maximus: (a) the incarnation reveals the will of God to be love, so God is truly free in the creation of the logoi of things; (b) 54 55 56 57 58 59

Ibid, p. 95. Cf. ibid, p. 94. Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Implications ecclésiologiques’, p. 147, n. 23. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 19–20. Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Truth and Communion’, pp. 70–72. Ibid, pp. 77–84.


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Christ is the link between the ontological truth of divine being and the ontological truth of created being throughout time; (c) the truth of history is eschatological, because the ultimate end of creation, salvation or oblivion, determines if truth is present in creation; and (d) the elements of historical events that realize the truth of history are not the cause of the truth in history. The eschatological reality therefore comes into history but it does not become history. Zizioulas presents Maximus’ contribution through two approaches, the christological and the iconological approach.60 These move the discussion from an ontological foundation for the truth to an explanation of the truth present and realized in time. The bridge between ontology and time is Christ. The acts of Christ which realize salvation and salvation itself ties the past, the present and the future together by the one truth they share. Saint Maximus develops ‘a christological synthesis within which history and creation become organically interrelated.’61 The logoi of things depend on the will of God for their existence and their unity; they do not exist in themselves or by themselves. They come into being by the will of God. Their existence depends on God, but it is not required by God. Created being is dependent on the freedom of God to will its existence. At this point St Maximus shows how Christ makes a contribution to ontology. The logoi of things come into being through the logos, Christ, but the Greek understanding of logos is not simply synonymous with Christ. By his actions in history, Christ gives additional content to the meaning of logos for ontology. The incarnate Christ reveals that the freedom of God in willing existence for creation is love for creation. ‘Christ, the incarnate Christ, is the truth, for he represents the ultimate, unceasing will of the ecstatic love of God, who intends to lead created being into communion with His own life, to know Him and itself within this communion-event.’62 This means that the acts of Christ in history not only actualize the truth by making it known, but realize the truth. History has ontological meaning. It also means that the incarnation of Christ, divine being coming into history, was not triggered by the fall of creation. ‘All things were made with Christ in mind, or rather at heart, and for this reason irrespective of the fall of man, the incarnation would have occurred.’63 History did not take on a role in regard to the truth only after the fall. The truth of history is found in the realization of the loving will of God in time, because it is the loving will of God which gives being to creation and the freedom of God in creating is revealed in history by the incarnation. The truth of history and of created being is found in the realization of God’s will, so truth is not limited to the beginning in an unchanging state nor is truth present in history as a natural phenomenon intrinsic to the passage of time. The fulfillment of the will of God gives the movement of history more than just a future orientation. The truth of history depends on the future because there would ultimately be no truth in history if the end of history was non-existence for creation. The truth of history and creation are found in Christ because in him is found salvation, freedom from destruction and decay for creation. But the truth of history is not simply the 60 61 62 63

Ibid, pp. 93–101. Ibid, p. 96. Ibid, pp. 97–8. Ibid, p. 97.


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historical Jesus but rather the eschatological Christ found in the historical Jesus. Without this future, there is no truth in history or creation.64 The premise that there would be no truth in history if history leads to a non-existence is consistent with an ontological understanding of salvation and gives truth an eschatological foundation. This eschatological foundation does not mean that the truth, in its proper meaning, exists only in the future. The eschatological truth is not only revealed in history, made actual, it is also realized. This takes us to the question of the relation of the historical event to the eschatological truth. St Maximus relates the past, present and future by the meaning of salvation in Christ. The Old Testament is the shadow, the New Testament is icon, but the future is called the truth because it is the fulfillment of salvation for creation through communion with its creator. For Zizioulas the term ‘icon’ is intended to express a dialectic between history and the eschaton which ‘... empêche l’histoire de “s’eschatologiser” et l’eschaton de se transformer en histoire, tandis qu’il assure en même temps la rencontre existentielle de tous les deux.’65 [... keeps history from “eschatologizing” itself and the eschaton from being transformed into history, while at the same time assuring the existential encounter of the two.] This was the difficulty that Zizioulas recognized in the approach to the world that either abandoned engagement or limited the kingdom of God to ethics. Zizioulas uses the terms ‘icon’ and ‘vision’ when he speaks of the eschatological truth in history. This is not meant to restrict the reality of the truth to ideas or to an object for contemplation. Zizioulas clarifies his use of ‘icon’ with such terms as visit, dwelling, the word, or to incarnate. These terms allow ‘icon’ to refer to the historical life of Christ. St Maximus’ use of the term icon referred to the New Testament experience of Christ, and Zizioulas relates the historical life of the Church to the historical life of Christ by this concept of the icon. The iconological approach refers us to New Testament experience of the coming of the Word or dwelling of the Word of God among us, a true, historical presence of Christ, though bound by time and space. Zizioulas ties the truth in time to the gathering of the faithful for the celebration of the eucharist. For him, ultimate ontological reality is truly seen, here and now, in the eucharist, where God realizes the life of salvation it expresses. It is seen not as a reproduction of the past but as the presence of what will be. The truth present here and now is not simply the historical past nor present, but an eschatological truth. This iconic experience of the eschatological truth is like the iconic experience of the historical Christ. Zizioulas does not strip history of truth, for the truth is realized, not simply actualized in history. But the truth of history depends on the truth of the future. The eschatological truth in time becomes an icon in time of the fullness of truth. What is the authority of the vision of the truth in history? Truth is found in history, but the historical event does not have authority in itself, and its historical character is not the criterion for the authority of truth. Its authority comes from the eschaton. The truth of history is found in the eschatological truth, so the elements of 64 Cf. ibid, pp. 95–6. 65 John Zizioulas, ‘Les groupes informels dans l’Église. Un point de vue orthodoxe’, in R. Metz and J. Schlick (eds), Les groupes informels dans l’Église, Hommes et Église 2 (Geneva: C.E.R.D.I.C., 1971) p. 265.

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the historical event depend on eschatological reality, not the authority of historicity. Zizioulas anticipates the objection that the authority of the eschaton over the objective circumstances of the historical vision of the truth render it impossible to determine exactly which is the authentic vision of the eschaton. ‘True, without what has happened or has been said by the historical Jesus there would be no way of knowing what will happen yet. But the content of revelation is not fully identical with the historical reality.’66 Giving priority to the eschaton means giving priority to the acts of God which realize the truth in history. Zizioulas is determined to ensure that the eschatological reality is clearly understood as an act of God. The truth is realized in the history of the world, but it is realized as an act of God. The ontological and eschatological perspective of Zizioulas provides a way to speak of truth both present within history as well as realized in history. The truth is an ontological communion, and this truth, as an eschatological reality, is an act of God. The truth of history depends on the reality of an eschatological and ontological communion, and the ontological and eschatological nature of this communion plays a constant role in Zizioulas’ approach to every aspect of the Church. The two main components of his explanation of this communion, both ontologically and eschatologically, are the Holy Spirit and the eucharistic assembly. Before we examine the role of the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist, we must turn to the limits and role of both creation and the person in the truth and history. The integrality of the Holy Spirit and the eucharist within the dialectic of the eschaton and history respects the limits of creation and enables mankind to fulfill its role in regard to the truth in creation. The truth of history is Christ. This may give the impression that Christ is prior to the Holy Spirit in the dialectic of the eschaton and history. The focus on the eschatological truth may give the impression that the Holy Spirit has priority over Christ, even though Christ is the truth of history. It is possible to find liturgical or scriptural justification for the priority of either. But the question becomes unnecessary when we recognize the unity of the Trinity in the economy of salvation. For Zizioulas, ‘... the activity of God ad extra is one and indivisible ... the Father and the Spirit are involved in history, but only the Son becomes history.’67 The significance of the role of Christ or the Holy Spirit is the particularity of each. The particularity of Christ is to become a part of history and the particularity of the Holy Spirit is to assure that, in coming into history, Christ is freed from its limits to be the eschatological Christ. If the gift of the Holy Spirit is also an historical event, does not the Holy Spirit become a part of history too? Zizioulas clarifies the difference between the two events by showing the unity of the divine persons in them. The sending of the Holy Spirit is a historical event which brings the eschatological Christ into history. The gospel was proclaimed and the ministry of Christ carried out. The Holy Spirit made Christ present in history through the incarnation and Pentecost. The gift of the Spirit in the life of the Church is inseparable from the presence of Christ. Zizioulas envisions a ‘full and organic synthesis’ of christology and pneumatology in which neither is 66 John Zizioulas, ‘Eschatology and History’, in T. Wiser (ed.), Wither Ecumenism? (Geneva: W.C.C., 1986) p. 36. 67 Zizioulas, ‘Christ, the Spirit and the Church’, in Being as Communion, pp. 128–9.


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prior but each is distinct and particular.68 Only Christ becomes a part of history. There are not two complementary historical truths, one christological, the other pneumatological. Through the Holy Spirit, Christ enters history and by the Holy Spirit, the historical Christ is the eschatological Christ.69 The Holy Spirit assures the presence of the eschatological Christ in history and the freedom of the truth of Christ from the limits of history. The liberation from the limits of history is found in the unity of the believers. It is the truth of the eschaton here and now, the eternal life of God in history.70 The Spirit brings the eschatological truth into the present by making the communion of believers here and now an incarnation of the eschatological Christ. Christ, not the Spirit, becomes part of history but the gift of the Spirit is recognized in time and space in the communion of believers in the Church. The truth of history is therefore not simply a concept but a truly historical reality. It is life and communion as the body of Christ. The truth in history is a person, not an idea, memory or dogmatic formulation. It is Christ united with all the members of his body, through the power of the Holy Spirit in each place in time. The communion is historical, not psychological. It is a living communion within time, not just fragments of the truth sifted out of the historical events. Thanks to the eschatological character of the Eucharist, it is clearly shown that the problem faced by created beings lies not with matter or with the time and space in which they live, but with their cleansing and transfiguration so that these elements become carriers of life rather than death.71 Communion with God is possible for humanity – and through it for the entire creation – only in and through creaturely existence. History is no longer, as it was for the Greek world, the obstacle to communion with God, but its ground.72

Truth does not exist within the world without becoming part of the history of the world. Zizioulas insists that his approach to history is not like Platonism. He does not dismiss the presence of truth in history. Creation is integral to salvation. The communion of divine and created being must become historical reality, for this is the only way in which salvation will come to created reality. The existence of the Church is fundamental to the salvation of the world.73 Creation is integral to the event in which truth becomes part of history, but neither creation nor history is its cause. Creation is essential in this event in which 68 Zizioulas rejects the priority of pneumatology that he finds in Khomiakov and Lossky, along with that of Nissiotis and Bobrinskoy. Although they stress that the Holy Spirit and Christ belong together, their syntheses give priority to the Holy Spirit (cf. Zizioulas, ‘Christ, the Spirit and the Church’, pp. 125–6). 69 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Christ, the Spirit and the Church’, p. 130. 70 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘The Pneumatological Dimension of the Church’, Communio – International Catholic Review 1 (1974) p. 147. 71 John Zizioulas, ‘The Eucharist and the Kingdom of God’ (Part III), Sourozh 60 (1995) pp. 43–4. 72 Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 439. 73 Cf. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 19–20.

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truth comes to history, but is not a matter of historical causality. The fact that the ontological reality of created being has not changed means that, even though the truth exists in the history of creation and was realized in the historical Christ, the historical events that realize the truth are not the cause of the truth. Communion is realized in creation, even though creation cannot ensure its own existence. This has particular implications for the human person as an agent of history, as one whose actions transform the world. The truth in history is realized through human actions. This does not mean that the truth of history was caused by human action. The human act which incarnates truth into history is a kenotic act, not referring to self, and therefore manifests the will of God.74 The kenotic character of human action in the world recognizes that it is impossible for created being to save itself. But it also highlights the role of human freedom. Just as the inability of creation to ensure its own survival does not mean that creation is without a role, so for human freedom. Human action does not cause the Kingdom of God, but it does incarnate it.75 The significance of creation is not limited to the threat of non-being. The meaning of creation is discovered in the freedom of God to create. Creation exists because of the freedom of God. Because creation was not necessary, but rather the free decision of God, the act of creation is an act of grace. Consciousness of the free decision of God to create leads to gratitude to its creator on the part of creation. ‘Man’s responsibility is to make a eucharistic reality out of nature, i.e. to make nature, too, capable of communion ... Christ becomes a cosmic Christ, and the world as a whole dwells in truth, which is none other than communion with its Creator.’76 The act of offering creation to its creator is an act of gratitude; it is a recognition of the act of creation as grace. The kenotic character of human action underscores the eschatological truth in relation to human action. It is an act within history which recognizes the incapacity of human action to cause the truth.77 The Christian act of love recognizes the limits and divisions of the historical context; it does not deny brokenness and suffering, nor claim that our actions are without limits or divisions. The action is made in confidence that the world will be transformed through acts in history which incarnate the truth because God transforms these acts, not because of the acts themselves, nor because suffering in itself has any inherent fruitfulness. Zizioulas’ insistence that God is the cause of the truth in history rejects the transformation of the world by human ethical action, not because human acts are without significance, but because the only cause of the truth is God. The eschatological truth is realized by the Holy Spirit in human history.78 This kenotic character of the life of the Church helps express what

74 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘Communion and Otherness’, Sobornost 16 (1994) p. 14. Three examples of Zizioulas’ reference to kenosis: ‘Preserving God’s Creation’ II, p. 11; ‘Eucharist and Catholicity’, in Being as Communion, p. 161; and ‘La vision eucharistique du monde et l’homme contemporain’, Contacts 19 (1967), p. 91. 75 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘First Comment’ [Response to: ‘Communal Spirit and Conciliarity’ by Professor Zabolotsky], in S.C. Agouridès (ed.), Procès-verbaux du deuxième congrès de théologie orthodoxe (Athens, 1978) p. 145. 76 Zizioulas, ‘Truth and Communion’, p. 119. 77 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Déplacement de la perspective eschatologique’, pp. 97–8. 78 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Les groupes informels’, p. 266.


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Zizioulas means by the work of the Holy Spirit, who realizes in time the communion of Christ with all creation. Epistemology and Theological Discourse The framework for Zizioulas’ epistemological concerns is the ontological and historical character of salvation realized in ecclesial communion. This rests on three points: (a) communion is not additional to being, so communion is integral to knowledge of the truth; (b) the eschatological truth is realized in history, so the mind is not the ground of the truth; and (c) epistemology cannot be the primary question of theology. Because truth is identified with Christ, knowledge of the truth is identified with the communion which constitutes Christ’s unique person, his relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit and his relationship with the members of his body. The Greek patristic approach to truth ‘... rests in the identification of truth with communion.’79 Christ is the truth, not because of his nature or substance, but because he is the person he is, the incarnate Son of God, inseparable from communion with the persons of the Trinity and inseparable from communion with the members of his body.80 Communion is expressed only in terms of historical existence (this is Biblical mentality). It is not a spiritual communion but an incarnate communion, a historical communion. The concrete structures of the community are not ‘forms’ of expression of love – of a love or communion which is somehow conceivable in itself – but they are this communion.81

It must be remembered that the truth of this historical existence is eschatological and the importance of the eschatological truth in history is the ontological meaning of salvation. The greatest obstacle to recognition of communion as the source of knowledge of the truth is that it is contradicted by human experience.82 Human experience does not teach us that communion is essential to attain knowledge. But this is due to the fallen state of existence. This fallen state is characterized by the fact that our approach to truth, to being, is constituted before communion.83 The experience of knowing can still lead to communion, but communion is not essential to the process of knowing. Attaining knowledge is fundamentally a rational process in which ‘... the known and the knower exist as two opposite partners; the res and the intellectus must somehow reach an adaequatio, the subject and the object constitute a pair whose presence determines epistemology.’84

79 80 81 82 83 84

Zizioulas, ‘Truth and Communion’, p. 101. Cf. ibid, p.106. Zizioulas, Procès-verbaux du deuxième congrès de théologie orthodoxe, p. 143. Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, pp. 426–7. Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Truth and Communion’, p. 101. Cf. ibid, pp. 102–3.

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The liturgical and sacramental life of the Church, however, preserve communion as the basis for knowledge. Liturgy and sacrament represent the epistemology fundamental to a theological approach to knowledge. Zizioulas turns to the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church to show the foundations for any understanding of the truth. Zizioulas is not simply building a liturgical theology, but building his discourse within the epistemological constraints of his ontological and eschatological perspective. Because truth is found in communion, communion is fundamental to our knowledge of the truth. This communion is realized in history in ecclesial life, in particular in the eucharist, which is the fundamental source for knowledge of the truth. Since eschatological truth is realized in history, the mind is not the ground of the truth. This integration of the historical character of the eschatological truth is the result of understanding that Christ is the truth. Zizioulas follows St Maximus the Confessor in moving from the understanding that Jesus Christ is the truth to the idea that the truth comes to history.85 Before Maximus, historical events were significant for what they revealed, a significance which was hidden in its historical aspect but accessible through allegory. Knowledge was not tied to the historical event as a source of truth, but only as a means to know a pre-existent truth.86 The connection between the created and the uncreated was formed rationally, not ontologically, in historical events. The event was valued because it provides access to the truth, but no appreciation that the event realizes the truth it reveals. The epistemological presuppositions of earlier Church Fathers, such as Justin, Clement and Origen, made for an approach to revelation which undermined the ontological importance of the events which realized salvation. St Irenaeus’ approach to knowledge gave significance to history and the material world. Insisting that creation is good because it is the direct result of the will of God, Irenaeus refused to accept any rejection of the material world and the human body. The eucharist was an antidote against death, and the resurrection of the body was necessary to enjoy full communion with God. Irenaeus countered the understanding of logos which gave knowledge the key role in salvation, by what Zizioulas calls a biblical approach, which links salvation to the incarnation and to the Church.87 By ‘biblical approach,’ Zizioulas does not mean merely that the memory of foundational historical events is maintained. Irenaeus’ biblical approach is tied to life, to living the truth and especially living this truth in the eucharistic celebration. Zizioulas refers to the biblical approach as a remedy for any theology preoccupied by its own conceptualization. It refers to a real historical and human love lived within the Church. The identification of the biblical approach with historical love, rather than memory of historical events, keeps the biblical method from falling into the same primacy of epistemology over ontology, a trend which Zizioulas found in the logos approach of Justin, Clement and Origen. First Greek ontology raised a question about Christian 85 Cf. ibid, pp. 72–101. 86 Cf. ibid, p. 76. 87 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘The Early Christian Community’, in B. McGinn, J. Meyendorff and J. Leclercq (eds), Christian Spirituality: Origins to the Twelfth Century, World Spirituality, 16 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985) p. 37.


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salvation; how is the truth present within history? Then Greek epistemology raised this further question. Zizioulas proposes that we give the second question the same answer. Knowledge comes from life, from the ecclesial life of love. The emphasis on ecclesial life for knowledge raises another point for clarification. Although knowledge comes from living the truth, living the truth is not to be taken in an ethical sense. The biblical correction of the logos approach was a focus on a living, historical, ecclesial communion. But this emphasis on the living of the truth could be understood in terms of ethics, human strategies for doing the truth. Zizioulas clarifies the notion of living the truth by speaking of the kenotic character of Christian life. Knowledge is based on ecclesial communion, and the kenotic character of the life of Christ is our model. Living the truth is not simply about actions which apply to a body of knowledge. It is a movement of communion, marked by the limits of knowledge, whether due to human incapacity or to the hiddenness of God’s plan. The truth of our action will be found only in the eschatological truth. Christian life is based in eschatological hope rather than the ability to know the outcome of our actions. Zizioulas is determined not to allow epistemology to control theology. Theology must articulate the meaning of salvation, and must not be falsified by accommodation to the demands of epistemology. When method becomes its primary concern, theology’s proper focus on the eschatological truth realized in the historical communion of the Church is lost. This concern pushes Zizioulas beyond an apophatic theology, and though his epistemological concerns have been interpreted as apophatic, this is not exact.88 Zizioulas goes beyond an apophatic theology to examine the interpersonal communion of the divine persons. This concern is the reason for Zizioulas’ criticism of theologians committed to a theological discourse built on revelation alone. Here the problem is that the Trinity itself does not truly become fundamental in the theological method. Zizioulas revalues the revelation and turns to it, rather than concepts such as substance or nature, to renew an understanding of God in himself. By doing this he develops an understanding of person based in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. His use of the term ‘person’ is precipitated by the revelation of God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, not by modern philosophy or culture. Only revelation discloses God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But there is a double problem which results from a discourse on God limited only to revelation. Without the discourse on God apart from his acts in history, the freedom of God is not adequately established. Without developing a discourse on God in himself beyond the historical context of revelation, the personhood of God is not primary and therefore, is not the foundation of the discourse on God. Zizioulas does not limit the understanding of God to revelation, neither does he diminish revelation as the foundation of his theological discourse. Revelation is primary in his epistemological approach, but its historical character is not its limit. Moving beyond a method limited to revelation is not to return to an ahistorical metaphysical approach. By refocusing on what has been revealed in Christ, 88 Cf. A. de Halleux, ‘Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les pères cappadociens?’, in Patrologie et oecuménisme, BETL, 93 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1990) pp. 237ff.

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Zizioulas revisits the discourse on God’s existence in himself. He is able to renew the importance of the concept of person in light of revelation and to then explain salvation in terms of communion, divine and ecclesial in terms based on a renewed understanding of the content and the role of revelation in theological discourse. A focus on revelation alone can produce effects which do not serve Zizioulas’ concerns. When revelation or tradition are separated from ecclesial communion, truth is identified with objective historical authority, with the loss of the eschatological and ontological character of the truth in history. When these two points are lost, there is the further consequence of a diminished understanding of the Holy Spirit. ‘Pneumatology is weakened whenever the approach to God is dominated primarily by the epistemological concern.’89 When theology is primarily preoccupied with epistemological rather than soteriological concerns, theological discourse is dominated by information from the history centered on Christ, with the result that the role of the Holy Spirit is diminished. In Zizioulas’ theological understanding of God and Church, it is the liturgy that prevents epistemology from becoming primary. ‘The safest theology is that which draws not only from the Economy, but also, and perhaps mainly, from the vision of God as He appears in worship.’90 This is seen in the debate about the divinity of the Holy Spirit.91 The liturgy has a fundamental contribution to his theological method because it is the event which within history can express his concerns about epistemology, ontology and eschatology. The eucharist is inseparable from the whole of the life of the particular Church. Zizioulas does not isolate the eucharist as the sole foundation for the realization of the Church. In the liturgy the truth is realized and therefore the truth is known. Knowledge is not isolated from the event in which the eschatological truth is realized. Knowledge in the liturgy is not reduced to an operation of human reason, although the event engages the operation of reason. The mind is not the ground for the truth, but the event is the ground for the truth which the mind grasps. This knowledge in the liturgy is not simply memory of a historical event but the recognition of an eschatological event in which the Holy Spirit implicates the community gathered.92 The integration of the liturgy for knowledge of the truth keeps the discourse which describes the truth from taking the place of the eschatological truth realized in ecclesial life. It keeps epistemology from eclipsing theology. Changes in the liturgy may therefore demonstrate a failure to recognize the ontological basis of the liturgy.93 Zizioulas does not offer an answer to the question of the distortion of the liturgy and its effect on the communion it realizes. He recognizes the situation, but without offering

89 John Zizioulas, ‘The Teaching of the Second Ecumenical Council on the Holy Spirit in Historical and Ecumenical Perspective’, in Credo in Spiritum Sanctum, Teologia e filosofia 6 (Rome: Liberia Editrice Vaticana, 1983) vol. 1, p. 52. 90 Ibid, p. 40. 91 Cf. ibid, p. 41–2. 92 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Implications ecclésiologiques de deux types de pneumatologie’, p. 152, n. 29. 93 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘The Eucharist and the Kingdom of God’ (Part I), Sourozh 58 (1995) pp. 7–8.


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criteria to determine what degree of distortion would mean the loss of the liturgy’s eschatological and ontological character. Conclusion The three principles of Zizioulas’ theological approach makes his ecclesiology quite distinct from other interpretations of ecclesial communion. Without determination of clear theological principles, understandings of the Church as communion will have very little result.94 This is evident in the fundamentally different ecclesiologies of communion.95 Zizioulas’ three theological principles are so interwoven in his approach to the Church that, without them, one cannot authentically appropriate any aspect of his ecclesiology. Zizioulas’ theological principles and his ecclesiology reflect the development of a neo-patristic theological approach in Greece since the 1930s. Zizioulas’ work represents a commitment to setting out the original theological contribution of Orthodoxy, especially in its application to ecclesiology. Zizioulas’ ontological principle makes four important contributions. 1) It renews the theological importance of Trinity and creation for the understanding of salvation. 2) It renews christology in terms of the ontological significance of historical events in the life of Christ and the role of the Holy Spirit, without limiting christology simply to an ethical significance, and without reducing the Holy Spirit to an adjunct to christology. 3) He presents the Church in terms of the renewed understanding of Trinity, creation, and christology conditioned by pneumatology. 4) His theological ontology integrates dogmas as they contribute to setting out our salvation in terms of communion, divine and ecclesial. The second principle of Zizioulas’ theological approach, the realization of the eschatological truth in history, also makes four contributions. 1) It gives human history real meaning for salvation. 2) It relates the historical character of the Church to christology. 3) It clarifies the relationship between christology and pneumatology. 4) The eschatological truth is not historicized, with the result that the autonomy of creation and the human person are clearly established. Zizioulas’ eschatological principle conditions his ontological principle. The movement of the person out of self, the ecstatic character of personhood, realized either in a movement toward God or toward the material world alone, does not lead to a mystification of the relation of the Church to the world, nor to an elimination of authentic autonomy for creation and the human person. The truth is realized in history as an eschatological reality which cannot be identified with history itself. Zizioulas focuses on the ontological character of communion and shows that the movement toward communion is not limited to a religious context, but is integral to human life. This ontological character never eliminates the historical character of creation and, therefore, never eliminates the autonomy of creation or human action. His eschatological principle ensures that 94 Cf. N. Healy, ‘Communion Ecclesiology: A Cautionary Note’, Pro Ecclesia 4 (1995) pp. 49–50. 95 Cf. D. Doyle, ‘Möhler, Schleiermacher and the Roots of Communion Ecclesiology’, Theological Studies 51 (1992) pp. 467–80; P. C. Bori, ΚΟIΝΩΝIΑ. L’idea della comunione nell’ecclesiologia recente e nel Nuovo Testament (Brescia: Paideia, 1972) pp. 1–131.

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the realization of the eschatological truth in ecclesial communion does not mean a fusion or identification of the historical life of the Church with the truth. The truth which this communion realizes in history does not become identical with history. Zizioulas’ epistemological concerns demonstrate the importance of the ecclesial event, in particular by his theological articulation of the eucharistic assembly as event. The eucharist is the most fruitful event in history to elaborate an ecclesiology. Zizioulas does not reduce ecclesial communion to the eucharist, for the object of theology remains the mystery of salvation, not the establishment of the theological system itself. Zizioulas goes beyond an apophatic approach because he rejects the primacy of epistemology in theology. He is able to do this, by speaking about the personal communion of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, because of the vision of the truth in the life of the historical Christ. The mystery of salvation is revealed in the person of Christ as a communion of divine persons. The limits of the discourse of Father, Son and Holy Spirit do not prevent theology from being informed by the reality revealed in Christ. Not to speak about this revelation, which is fundamental to salvation, because of the limits of epistemology, would make epistemological concerns primary in theology. It is not the mind, but the realization of the eschatological truth in history, which is the ground of truth, but the truth revealed is more significant than the constraints on human reason’s penetration of the mystery. Salvation demands recognition of the truth in history, even if this recognition meets real limits both in terms of articulating the recognition, and in terms of understanding the truth fully. But rather than fatal obstacles, these limits may also be viewed as iconological. Christ himself is the model of this approach to the truth. Though more development may reinforce its unity, John Zizioulas’ view of ecclesial communion is an immensely important contribution to ecclesiology and dogma.

Chapter 2

On the Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology Alan Brown

There can be no doubt that within the English-language world the Metropolitan of Pergamon’s Being as Communion constitutes the single most significant Orthodox academic theological work of the last half-century.1 In recent years, when nonOrthodox anglophone theologians have engaged in dialogue with Orthodox theology, it has been primarily with Being as Communion that they have engaged. Yet, like all great work, Being as Communion has attracted criticism, and not only from nonOrthodox theologians, but even from certain sectors of Orthodox theology itself.2 In particular, recent years have seen the development within English-language Orthodoxy of a new temper of patristic scholarship which is resolutely anti-Zizioulian in its orientation. In line with this temper, Orthodox patristic scholars such as Lucian Turcescu, Andrew Louth and John Behr have asserted anti-Zizioulian positions with a volume, force and polemic such that today the status of Zizioulas’ theology within English-language Orthodox theology has become controversial. The criticisms of Zizioulas’ theology emanating from such patristic scholarship are at once theological, historical and genealogical. Particular dogmatic objections are raised to Zizioulas’ position, centring on the rejection of Zizioulas’ alleged ‘social trinitarianism’. Zizioulas’ interpretation of the Greek patristic tradition is criticized, and in particular his opposition of the person/ὑπόστασις to the individual/ἄτοµον is found inconsistent with patristic theology and is therefore rejected. Following this, the thought of the Metropolitan of Pergamon is located within particular traditions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ‘personalist’ and/or ‘existentialist’ philosophical thought, and his entire theological project is then rejected as being ‘philosophical’ – and therefore not Christian theology at all. These criticisms have been made repeatedly, yet there has not as yet been a full and proper theological response to this critique of Zizioulas’ theology. Accordingly, 1 John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: DLT, 1985). 2 Here I will be concerned primarily with the criticisms made in John Behr, The Way to Nicaea (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2001); John Behr, The Nicene Faith (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2004) and Lucian Turcescu, ‘“Person” versus “Individual” and other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa’, in Sarah Coakley (ed.), Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003) pp. 97–109. I will consider also the criticisms of Zizioulas in Andrew Louth, John Damascene: Tradition and Originality in Byzantine Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

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it is such a response that I wish to offer here. My task will be threefold. Firstly, I wish to meet the criticisms of Zizioulas mounted by these patrologists point for point – all the specific criticisms which they make of Zizioulas are, I will argue, invalid. Secondly, I will locate the temper which motivates this patristicist criticism of Zizioulas genealogically within contemporary English-language theology and patristic scholarship. It will be my argument that this patristicist theological temper is, in its distinctive characteristics, dependent upon principles derived from traditions of Anglican theology – namely those of Anglican patristic scholarship and of Anglican postliberal theology. In the light of this, I will argue thirdly that these principles are in fact deeply problematic for Orthodox theology and that consequently (at least certain aspects of) the forms of theology espoused by the anglophone patristicist detractors of Zizioulas are themselves deeply problematic as expressions of Orthodox theology. The Context of the New Orthodox Patristicism English Orthodox Patristic Theology This new anti-Zizioulian patristic temper in anglophone Orthodoxy must be understood historically as the latest stage in the development of a specifically English tradition of Orthodox patristic theology. This tradition arose within the Anglican-Orthodox milieu centred in Oxford, represented by institutions such as the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius and by theologians such as Bishop Kallistos Ware.3 It is a tradition whose conception of Orthodox theology derives from contact with theologically neopatristic Russian émigrés, and which, as a result, has seen Orthodox theology primarily as patristic theology, understood along broadly neopatristic lines.4 Where English Orthodox theology has diverged from Franco-Russian neopatristicism has been in its understanding of that in which contemporary patristic theology consists. For the Franco-Russians (modelling themselves on Maritain’s ‘Neo-Thomism’), the turn to the Fathers was primarily a retrieval of the Fathers’ theology as a means of responding to and resolving intellectual, philosophical and (to a lesser extent) theological problems current in the world around them.5 But for these English Orthodox, the turn to the Fathers has 3 Cf. Nicolas and Militza Zernov, ‘The History of the Fellowship: a Historical Memoir by Nicolas and Militza Zernov’ (Oxford: Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, 1979); Kallistos Ware, ‘Strange yet Familiar: My Journey to the Orthodox Church’, in The Inner Kingdom (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2000) pp. 1–24; Andrew Louth, ‘Biographical Sketch’, in John Behr, Andrew Louth and Dmitri Conomos (eds), Abba: the Tradition of Orthodoxy in the West: Festschrift for Bishop Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2003) pp. 13–27. 4 Cf., for example, Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (London: Mowbray, 1979). 5 Cf. George Huntston Williams, ‘The Neo-Patristic Synthesis of Georges Florovsky’, in Andrew Blane (ed.), Georges Florovsky: Russian Intellectual-Orthodox Churchman (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1993) pp. 287–340; Lewis Shaw, ‘John Meyendorff and the Heritage of the Russian Theological Tradition’, in Bradley Nassif (ed.), New Perspectives on

On the Criticism of Being as Communion

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meant essentially the turn to engaging in the study of patristics, as that subject is practised in the Anglican academic theology around them. Originally an apologetic enquiry seeking to show the doctrinal conformity of the Church of England with the faith of Fathers, by the mid-twentieth century, Anglican ‘patristics’ had lost its apologetic purpose and – despite continuing to describe the theological positions of those Fathers whom it studied in terms of the theological framework of the ThirtyNine Articles – had become an explicitly non-theological, objective enquiry into the history of the patristic period, conceived along unquestioningly empiricist lines, with no direct reference to contemporary issues or intellectual movements beyond its own disciplinary boundaries.6 The identification of such patristic study with Orthodox theology simpliciter has meant that for approximately the last half-century, within English Orthodox theology, to be a ‘theologian’ has meant to be a patrologist, and to study ‘theology’ has meant to learn, and to learn how to engage in, objective, historical and non-theological Anglican patristic scholarship. The result has been that English Orthodox theology, whilst maintaining a theological position which it has inherited from Franco-Russian Neopatristicism, has been in practice divorced from mainstream Anglophone dogmatic theology (since it engages in an explicitly historical not theological enquiry), from mainstream Orthodox theology (since it engages in an Anglican scholarly milieu) and from all forms of wider intellectual culture (especially from wider philosophical culture). However, Anglican patristics has itself changed fundamentally in character since the heyday of the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius. This change has consisted primarily in the reinterpretation of the Fathers according to the philosophicotheological positions of Anglican postliberalism, a position which is deeply at odds with that of the neopatristic synthesis. This in turn has led to a tension within English Orthodox theology between those primarily committed to neopatristic theological positions, and those whose primary commitment is to the consensus of Anglican patristic scholarship. The result has been something of a theological split of English Orthodox theology into two groups, the former (still represented by Kallistos Ware) remaining theologically neopatristic, but the latter breaking with neopatristicism, and asserting in its place the consensus patristic interpretation of Anglican postliberalism to be the position of Orthodox theology simpliciter. (This is most clearly the case in the work of John Behr.) In so doing, theologians of the anti-neopatristic group have attracted to their ranks a number of patrologists from across the Orthodox world who are similarly attracted to the Anglican postliberal consensus in patristic enquiry (Lucian Turcescu being a clear example). Essentially, this is the tradition to which the anglophone Orthodox patristic critics of Zizioulas belong. To see why it leads Historical Theology: Essays in Memory of John Meyendorff (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1996) pp. 10–42; Aidan Nichols, Light from the East: Authors and Themes in Orthodox Theology (London: Sheed & Ward, 1999) pp. 21–56, 129–45. 6 So Maurice Wiles, ‘British Patristic Scholarship in the Twentieth Century’, in Ernest Nicholson (ed.), A Century of Theological and Religious Studies in Britain (London: British Academy, 2003) pp. 153–70. Cf. Maurice Wiles, ‘The Journal of Theological Studies: Centenary Reflections’, Journal of Theological Studies 50 (1999) pp. 491–514.

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them to so oppose Zizioulas’ theology, we must consider the material content of Anglican postliberal theology. Postliberal Anglicanism Postliberal Anglicanism emerged in the wake of the controversy caused in England by the denial of the doctrine of the Incarnation in The Myth of God Incarnate.7 Within this controversy it became evident that the fundamental problem with the Myth was the philosophical inadequacy of the dogmatic theology and historical scholarship in terms of which its conclusions were articulated.8 In particular, its default commitment to metaphysical empiricism and to empiricist conceptions of ‘objectivity’ – commitments which were unquestioningly presupposed within Anglican patristic scholarship at that time – came under scrutiny. Abandoning such philosophical commitments, the theologians and historians who formed postliberal Anglicanism turned instead to the anti-empiricist and post-Wittgensteinian philosophical thoughtforms of neo-Aristotelian communitarianism,9 English Dominican Thomism,10 and (especially) Yale-school postliberalism,11 taking the combination of these positions (all of which arose from the thought-world of analytical philosophy) to be philosophically absolute and unquestionable. Moreover, in contrast to the claims of the authors of The Myth of God Incarnate, postliberal Anglicans have sought to argue that the faith of the Church of England in fact represents a historically legitimate and philosophico-theologically viable expression of Christianity. To do so, and in 7 John Hick (ed.), The Myth of God Incarnate (London: SCM Press, 1977). Cf. Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity 1920-2000, 4th edn. (London: SCM Press, 2001) pp. 649–51; Rowan Williams, ‘Theology in the Twentieth Century’, in Ernest Nicholson (ed.), A Century of Theological and Religious Studies in Britain (London: British Academy, 2003) pp. 237–52, at 245–7. 8 Cf., for example, the material reprinted in Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987) pp. 53–74, as well as Donald MacKinnon’s remark that the contributors to The Myth of God Incarnate were to rational argument what Dad’s Army was to modern soldiering (‘Lenin and Theology’, Explorations in Theology 5 (London: SCM Press, 1979) pp. 11–29, at 29. 9 Especially Alasdair MacIntyre’s trio, After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory, 2nd edn. (London: Duckworth, 1985); Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (London: Duckworth, 1988); and Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy and Tradition (London: Duckworth, 1988). Cf. also Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: the Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 10 Especially McCabe, God Matters, and Fergus Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, 2nd edn. (London: SPCK, 1997). 11 Above all, Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: a Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974); Hans Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ: the Hermeneutic Bases of Dogmatic Theology (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1975); George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (London: SPCK, 1984); and Hans Frei, Types of Christian Theology, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992). Cf. also David Ford, Barth and God’s Story: Biblical Narrative and the Theological Method of Karl Barth in the Church Dogmatics (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1981).


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opposition to forms of social trinitarianism fashionable in late twentieth-century anglophone theology, they have articulated a form of Augustinian-Thomism which they take to represent the authentic faith of the Church across the divides of Roman Catholic versus Anglican, and Greek East versus Latin West.12 They have invested significant energy in articulating an Aquinas free from Reformational confessional oppositions,13 and an Augustine which transcends the dichotomy of Greek versus Latin patristic theology.14 At the service of this last goal, they have spent considerable time arguing for an interpretation of particular Greek Fathers which is not at odds with their own interpretation of Augustine, and have expended much polemical effort arguing against Orthodox – and particularly Zizioulas’ – claims to the contrary.15 It is by means of such work that postliberal Anglicanism has influenced the consensus of contemporary patristic scholarship.16 Such reinterpretation of the Fathers has taken place principally through the consideration of the ‘grammar’ of Christian theology. In this conception, it follows the Yale School’s equation of doctrine with grammar and its understanding of theology as a ‘grammatical’ enterprise. These quasi-Wittgensteinian understandings 12 Cf., for example, Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: on the Liturgical Consummation of Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward (eds), Radical Orthodoxy: a New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999). 13 For example, John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001). Cf. also Anna Williams, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 14 For example, Robert Dodaro (ed.), Augustine and his Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner (London: Routledge, 2000). 15 Thus, for example, Rowan Williams, ‘Sapientia and the Trinity: Reflections on the De Trinitate’, in Barnard Bruning (ed.), Augustiniana 40:1-4 (1990) pp. 317–32; Sarah Coakley, ‘“Persons” in the “Social” Doctrine of the Trinity: a Critique of Analytic Discussion’, in Steven T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Garard O’Collins (eds), The Trinity: an Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) pp. 123–44; Michel René Barnes, ‘Rereading Augustine’s Theology of the Trinity’, in The Trinity, pp. 145–77; Rowan Williams, ‘What does Love Know? St Thomas on the Trinity’, New Blackfriars 82 (2001) pp. 260–72; Lewis Ayres, ‘On not three People: the Fundamental Themes of Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology as Seen in To Ablabius: On not three Gods’, in Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa, pp. 15–44; Michel René Barnes, ‘Divine Unity and the Divided Self: Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology in its Psychological Context’, in Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa, pp. 45–66. Cf. also Michel René Barnes, The Power of God: Δύναμις in Gregory of Nyssa’s Trinitarian Theology (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001). 16 Cf. in general, for example, Rowan Williams, Arius: Heresy and Tradition (London: DLT, 1987); Rowan Williams (ed.), The Making of Orthodoxy: Essays in Honour of Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Michel René Barnes and Daniel H. Williams (eds), Arianism after Arius: Essays on the Development of the Fourth Century Trinitarian Conflicts (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993); Lewis Ayres and Gareth Jones (eds), Christian Origins: Theology, Rhetoric and Community (London: Routledge, 1998); Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its Legacy: an Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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were developed by Hans Frei and George Lindbeck upon the basis of the Yale School’s more general opposition (derived from Karl Barth)17 to any understanding of theology as a scientific discipline such that ‘theology is an instance of a general class or generic type and is therefore to be subsumed under general criteria of intelligibility, coherence and truth that it must share with other academic disciplines’. Against such understandings, the Yale School took theology to be ‘an aspect of Christianity’, and as such determined by ‘its relation to the cultural or semiotic system that constitutes that religion’. Consequently, ‘Christian theology is first of all the first-order statements or proclamations made in the course of Christian practice and belief’, whilst secondly it is ‘the Christian community’s second-order appraisal of its own language and actions under a norm or norms internal to the community itself’.18 Within such an understanding, doctrine consists not in the ‘first-order truth claims’ of Christian practice and belief, but rather in the second-order ‘communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude and action’ which ‘regulate truth claims by excluding some and permitting others’.19 Theology itself is deemed to have two tasks: firstly, it involves the ‘descriptive endeavour to articulate the “grammar” or “internal logic” of first-order Christian statements’, whilst secondly it consists in the ‘critical endeavour to judge any given articulation of Christian language for its success or failure in adhering to the acknowledged norm or norms governing Christian use of language’.20 Now, in what follows, I shall argue that the objections of the anglophone Orthodox critics of Zizioulas arise out of a combination of their acceptance of postliberal Anglican thinking combined with their retention of the methodological commitment of the older English Orthodox theology according to which the only legitimate understanding of the Fathers is that which is obtained by reputable Anglican patristic historiography. Thus, these critics’ criticisms of Zizioulas as a ‘social trinitarian’ are derived from postliberal Anglican objections to social trinitarianism and to Zizioulas understood as a social trinitarian. The criticisms of Zizioulas’ theology overall as being philosophical not theological, made specifically by John Behr, derive from the appropriation of the Yale-School understanding of theology as grammatical and as internal to the Christian community. Lastly the criticisms of Zizioulas’ supposedly ‘existentialist’ and ‘personalist’ ontology are motivated by postliberal intolerance of philosophical modes of enquiry which are not communitarian, grammatical and friendly to Thomism, this intolerance being combined with the absolutization of patristicist modes of enquiry taken over from earlier English Orthodox theology to yield the conclusion that the fact that Zizioulas’ position cannot be derived straightforwardly from the scholarly positions obtainable within the modes of

17 William Placher, ‘Postliberal Theology’, in David F. Ford (ed.), The Modern Theologians: an Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997) pp. 343–56, at 343–4. Cf. Frei, Types, pp. 38–46; George Hunsinger, How to Read Karl Barth: the Shape of his Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 18 Frei, Types, p. 2. 19 Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, pp. 18–19. 20 Frei, Types, p. 2.


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enquiry acceptable within Anglican patristic scholarship, entails that it is therefore illegitimate as Orthodox theology. We shall now consider these criticisms in detail. Objections to Zizioulas Social Trinitarian Objections Postliberal Anglican Objections Anglican postliberalism is quite unceremonious in its representation of Zizioulas’ trinitarian theology as a form of ‘social’ trinitarianism, this being taken either as ‘construing “persons” as “relations”’,21 or as thinking of the Trinity as consisting of three ‘individual centres of consciousness and will’.22 Zizioulas’ differentiation of Greek and Latin traditions of Christianity is equated with an opposition of a Greek triadology – which proceeds by ‘starting from the three and proceeding to the one’ to generate a ‘“communitarian” understanding in which “personhood” is somehow prior to “substance”’ – to a Latin trinitarianism which moves from one to three and which prioritizes substance over person.23 In objecting thusly to the Metropolitan of Pergamon, and in line with its historical and anti-dogmatic-confessional temper, this Anglican postliberalism does not seek to refute Zizioulas’ position by straightforward argument.24 Rather, presupposing its own philosophical framework, it re-narrates the accounts of the thought of the Fathers upon whom Zizioulas is taken to depend – which in practice means the Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries important to Anglican patristics – and then rejects Zizioulas’ position on the grounds that it is incompatible with this renarration. Through such manoeuvring, postliberal Anglicans claim there to be no significant difference between patristic Greek and Latin doctrines of the Trinity, and that in fact the Greek fathers hold to a position which approximates on Zizioulas’ dichotomy (as they understand it) to a ‘Latin’ rather than ‘Greek’ understanding.25 This includes a rejection of the claim that there is any sort of priority of personhood over nature – indeed, it is claimed conversely that the Fathers (or at least St Gregory of Nyssa) endorse a ‘radical Platonism’ which considers ‘the universal more real than the particular’, and so ‘gives logical priority to the divine οὐσία’.26 Beyond this, certain postliberal Anglicans assert that both the theory of persons as relations is incoherent – since ‘persons are ontologically prior to relations’27 – and maintain 21 Coakley, ‘Persons’, pp. 123–44, at 123–4. 22 Coakley, ‘Persons’, p. 128. 23 Coakley, ‘Introduction’, in Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa, p. 4. 24 As does Brian Leftow, ‘Anti Social Trinitarianism’, in The Trinity, pp. 203–50. 25 For example, Rowan Williams, ‘Sapientia’; Coakley, ‘Persons’; René Barnes, ‘Rereading Augustine’s Theology’; Williams, ‘What does Love Know?’; Ayres, ‘On not three People’; René Barnes, ‘Divine Unity’. 26 Coakley, ‘Persons’, pp. 132, 137, n. 52. This claim is made upon the basis of Maurice Wiles, The Making of Christian Doctrine (London: Cambridge University Press, 1967) pp. 132–4. Unfortunately, in that text the position is merely asserted, not argued, leaving this claim without any argumentative support. 27 Coakley, ‘Persons’, p. 137, n. 51, quoting Harriet A. Harris, ‘Should we say that Personhood is Relational?’, Scottish Journal of Theology 51 (1998) pp. 214–34.

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that the theory of persons as individual centres of consciousness is modern and inapplicable to patristic triadology.28 Satisfied thereby that the opposition of Greek and Latin trinitarianisms is ahistorical, postliberal Anglicans then proceed to construct a genealogical account of where Zizioulas’ distinction ‘really’ comes from. Zizioulas’ opposition of Greek trinitarianism to Latin originates, it is asserted, in the work of the French Jesuit Théodore de Régnon.29 Consequently, they observe with scorn that ‘to have the “West” attacked by the “East” on a reading of the Cappadocians that was ultimately spawned by a French Jesuit is a strange irony’.30 Upon this basis, they argue that there are no triadological reasons standing in the way of the restoration of communion between the Orthodox Churches and the Roman Church, nor any preventing the establishment of communion between the Orthodox Churches and the Anglicans. In that Zizioulas diverges from this conclusion, his theology is deemed ecumenically ‘pernicious’.31 Orthodox Anti-neopatristic Objections Such postliberal Anglican criticisms form the bedrock of the Orthodox anti-neopatristic rejections of Zizioulas. They concur generally with postliberal Anglican representations and repudiations of Zizioulas’ theology as a form of ‘communitarian’ and ‘social trinitarianism’.32 They agree with the postliberal Anglican assessment of Zizioulas’ differentiation of Greek and Latin trinitarianisms as ahistorical and derived from Théodore de Régnon.33 And they appear at least to follow the postliberal Anglican interpretation of the patristic grammar of divinity as both approximating far more closely to ‘Latin’ rather than ‘Greek’ trinitarianism,34 and as consisting not in truth-claims but in community rules 28 Coakley, ‘Persons’, pp. 133–4. 29 Coakley, ‘Introduction’, p. 4, depending on André de Halleux, ‘“Hypostase” et “personne” dans la formation du dogme trinitaire’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 79 (1984) pp. 311–69, 623–70; André de Halleux, ‘Personnalisme ou Essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères Cappadociens’, Revue théologique de Louvain 17 (1986) pp. 129–55, 265–95; Michel René Barnes, ‘De Régnon Reconsidered’, Augustinian Studies 26 (1995) pp. 51–79. The posited source is Théodore de Régnon, Études de théologie positive sur la Sainte Trinité, 3 vols in 4 (Paris: Victor Retaux, 1892–98). 30 Coakley, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 31 Coakley, ‘Introduction’, p. 2. Such rhetoric spans the breadth of Coakley’s volume. Cf. also David Bentley Hart, ‘The Mirror of the Infinite: Gregory of Nyssa on the Vestigia Trinitatis’, in Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa, pp. 111–31, at 111, which describes Zizioulas’ assertion of the ontological priority of the Father to be ‘a particularly tedious, persistent and pernicious falsehood’. 32 Cf. Turcescu, ‘Person versus Individual’, p. 98, n. 3, depending on Sarah Coakley, ‘Why Three? Some Further Reflections on the Origins of the Doctrine of the Trinity’, in Sarah Coakley and David A. Palin (eds), The Making and Remaking of Christian Doctrine: Essays in Honour of Maurice Wiles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) pp. 29–56; Behr, Nicene Faith, p. 415, n. 27, depending explicitly upon Coakley, ‘Persons’. 33 Louth, John Damascene, p. 50, n. 30; Behr, Nicene Faith, p. 414, n. 27. 34 This is implicit in the location of Turcescu, ‘Person versus Individual’, in Coakley’s programmatic Re-Thinking Gregory of Nyssa, and also in Behr’s unqualified appeals to Coakley, ‘Persons’ (in Nicene Faith, p. 415, n. 27) and to Karen Kilby, ‘Perichoresis and


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which specify ‘how to deploy the “vocabulary” of Christianity in an appropriate way’.35 Beyond this, Orthodox theology which thus appropriates postliberal Anglicanism develops a number of additional arguments against Zizioulas. Not all of these are new. Thus John Behr uses against Zizioulas an argument, which he appropriates from Karen Kilby, but which she does not herself make against Zizioulas.36 According to Kilby, ‘social trinitarianism’ is necessarily the ‘projection’ of some favoured unifying attribute of human community onto the Holy Trinity. For all social trinitarianism, qua social trinitarianism, postulates a unity of divine persons which necessarily lies beyond our experience, since in our experience, three persons are three not one. Hence, whatever feature of human community is postulated by a social trinitarian as being that which unites the Trinity must be the illegitimate projection of that feature of social existence onto the divine unity. Behr’s employment of this charge is the extension of the accusation to the theology of the Metropolitan of Pergamon. But in addition to such appropriation, Behr also raises questions about the understanding of ‘communion’ in Zizioulas’ triadology. On the one hand, he argues against an equation of divinity with ‘communion’ on the grounds that ‘it is as partaking of the same divinity that Father and Son are in unity’.37 On the other hand, he argues against Zizioulas understanding that ‘the Church as a communion reflects God’s being as communion in the way this communion will be revealed full in the Kingdom’, claiming against this that by ‘juxtaposing the Trinity and the Church … paradoxically’ has the effect that ‘the Church is separated from God, as a distinct entity reflecting the divine being’, resulting in ‘a horizontal notion of … parallel “communions”, without being clear about how the two intersect’.38 Anti-personalist and Anti-existentialist Objections The principal target, however, of the objections made distinctively by Englishlanguage Orthodox theologians is not Zizioulas’ ‘social trinitarianism’, but his supposedly ‘personalist and existentialist ontology’.39 According to this ontology, we are told, ‘person is opposed to nature, [and] existence to essence, in existentialist fashion’.40 (The opposite of such an ontology would be a ‘Platonic transcendental … essentialism that separates existence from essence, and considers existence as an

Projection: Problems with the Social Doctrine of the Trinity’, New Blackfriars 81 (2000) pp. 432–45 (in Behr, Nicene Faith, p. 5, n. 5 and p. 425, n. 39). 35 Again, evident in the unqualified appeal made by Behr, Nicene Faith, p. 425, n. 39 to Kilby, ‘Perichoresis’ which makes this claim. 36 Once more, Behr’s appropriation of this argument is evident from his unqualified appeal in Nicene Faith, p. 425, n. 39 to Kilby, ‘Perichoresis’. 37 Behr, Nicene Faith, p. 310. 38 John Behr, ‘The Trinitarian Being of the Church’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 48 (2003) pp. 67–88, at 67–8, quoting Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, ‘The Church as Communion’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly (1994) pp. 3–16, at 8. 39 Louth, John Damascene, p. 51. 40 Ibid, p. 51.

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accident added to essence’41.) As understood by these critics, in Zizioulas’ ontology the person is ontologically unique, underivable, non-enumerable, ‘communitarian and relational’, in such a way that the concept of ‘person’ (ὑπόστασις, πρόσωπον) is opposed to that of ‘individual’ (ἄτοµον)’.42 The arguments against this ‘personalist ontology’ within these anglophone Orthodox theologians are primarily concerned to show that such an ontology is not found in the Greek Fathers. The first such argument is common and consists in pointing to patristic texts in which the terms ὑπόστασις and/or πρόσωπον are used either as synonymous with ἄτοµον or are used to designate ‘non-personal’ beings (such as horses).43 This argument is considered by at least Andrew Louth as decisive against any identification of Zizioulas’ ‘personalist ontology’ with the patristic ontology (and in particular with that of St John of Damascus).44 Nonetheless, further considerations are mounted against Zizioulas by Lucian Turcescu. Concerned primarily with St Gregory of Nyssa, he claims firstly that the Cappadocians understood the person as an Aristotelian substance with accidental properties, which is to say, as ‘a complex of qualities possessed by the individual’.45 (The identification with Aristotelian thought is entirely unsupported, however.) Secondly, he contends that in St Gregory and St Basil ‘individuals sharing the same substance (or nature) can be counted’.46 Beyond such arguments, both Turcescu and Louth – firmly in line with the rhetorical tradition of postliberal Anglicanism – make genealogical observations on the origin of the ‘personalist ontology’. Turcescu asserts that Zizioulas’ personalism is in fact derived from the twentieth-century personalisms of Martin Buber and John Macmurray:47 Zizioulas, he says, ‘uses nineteenth- and twentieth-century insights which he then foists on the Cappadocians’.48 Louth, on the other hand, (more coyly) offers two reflections on possible beginnings of ‘personalistic’ ontology in late antiquity. Having decided, upon the basis of the semantic employment of the terms 41 Ibid, p. 51, quoting Ioan Ică, ‘“Dialectica” Sf. Ioan Damaschinul – prolegomanā logico-filosoficā a “Dogmaticii”’, Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai, Theologia Orthodoxā 40 (1995) pp. 85–140, at 121. 42 Turcescu, ‘Person versus Individual’, pp. 97–9 (quoted with approval in Behr, Nicene Faith, p. 422, n. 36); Louth, John Damascene, pp. 38, 52, appealing to Halleux, ‘Personnalisme ou Essentialisme’, pp. 133–53. 43 Turcescu, ‘Person versus Individual’, pp. 103–4. 44 Louth, John Damascene, pp. 51–2. 45 Turcescu, ‘Person versus Individual’, pp. 100–1, appealing to Basil of Caesarea, Adv. Eunom. 2.4, in B. Sesboüé, G.-M. de Durand and L. Doutreleau, Basile de Césarée. Contre Eunome, 2 vols, Sources chrétiennes 299 & 305 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1982 and 1983), and Basil/Gregory of Nyssa, Ep. 38.3, in R.J. Defferrari, Basil: Letters, 4 vols, Loeb 190, 215, 243 and 270 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926, 1928, 1930 1934). Turcescu also provides a chain of argumentation here which is, however, logically invalid. 46 Turcescu, ‘Person versus Individual’, p. 102, appealing to Gregory of Nyssa, Ad Ablabium 40.24ff, in F. Mueller, Gregorii Nysseni opera, vol. 3.1 (Leiden: Brill, 1958) pp. 37–57. 47 Turcescu, ‘Person versus Individual’, p. 106. 48 Ibid, p. 106.


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ὑπόστασις and πρόσωπον in St John of Damascus, that ‘there is no attempt [there] to work out an ontology of self-conscious, rational beings in terms of ὑπόστασις’,49 he suggests that two places in which the beginnings of such personalism may be identified are in Boethius’ definition of persona as naturae rationabilis individua substantia and in the Neoplatonic notion of the ‘self-constituted’. For the Boethian definition ‘restricts “person” to what we call personal’,50 whilst the Neoplatonic notion ‘explores the ontological reality of beings that are at least “personal” (e.g. capable of self-reflective consciousness)’.51 Behr’s Fundamental Objection to Zizioulas’ Theology Behr’s Objection Such objections and genealogical observations are criticisms of the historical origin of Zizioulas’ ‘personalist ontology’, and do not call such ontology into question per se. Turcescu does come close to making such a fundamental objection.52 But it is Behr who most clearly objects that Zizioulas’ project is inappropriate for Orthodox theology. Writing passive-aggressively against the author of Being as Communion, in the context of the increasing complexity of theology in the early Fathers, Behr asserts that: The dogmatic formulae of the Church are not abstract, detachable statements which we can use to construct a metaphysical system responding to our existential or philosophical concerns. Of course, theological reflection became ever more abstract, but the point of such ongoing reflection is not to describe ultimate structures of ‘reality’, to elaborate a fundamental ontology, whether of ‘Being’ or ‘communion’ (or both), which then tends to function as if it constitutes the content of the revelation itself. We must be very careful not to substitute the explanation for that which it seeks to explain. The aim of such theological reflection was and is to articulate as precisely as possible, in the face of perceived aberrations, the canon of truth, so as to preserve the undisturbed image of the Christ presented in the Scriptures.53

Behr clearly relishes making this accusation, as he has made it (in virtually identical wording) in several contexts over several years, none of which seem obviously to require discussion of Being as Communion.54 In one place he adds the following accusation to those who seek to ‘elaborate a fundamental ontology … of “Being” or “communion”’:

49 Louth, John Damascene, p. 52. 50 Ibid, p. 53. 51 Ibid, p. 53. 52 Turcescu, ‘Person versus Individual’, p. 107: ‘the Cappadocians were not interested in personalism per se, but in defending the Holy Trinity’. 53 John Behr, ‘Faithfulness and Creativity’, in Abba, pp. 159–77, at 176. 54 John Behr, ‘The Paschal Foundations of Christian Theology’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 45 (2001) pp. 115–36, at 123; Behr, Way to Nicaea, pp. 74–5; and Behr, Nicene Faith, p. 16. Clearly this is an objection Behr relishes making.

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The Theology of John Zizioulas [For] what vantage point could possibly justify such presumption? To undertake theology in this manner reduces the Christian confession to an odd mixture of metaphysics and mythology.55

Here we have about as forceful and total a repudiation of the Orthodox status of Zizioulas’ theological project in toto as ever could be. Orthodox theology is concerned ‘to articulate … the canon of truth, so as to preserve the undistorted image of the Christ presented in the Scriptures’. Zizioulas’ theology, on the other hand, is a ‘philosophical’ and ‘existential’ attempt ‘to construct a metaphysical system’ which has for its aim the description of ‘ultimate structures of “reality”’, the elaboration of a ‘fundamental ontology’. As such it cannot be, properly speaking, considered as ‘Orthodox theology’, but is rather ‘an odd mixture of metaphysics and mythology’. The Meaning of Behr’s Objection The meaning of Behr’s objection, however, is not entirely clear. For it is not clear how he can accuse someone of both constructing a ‘metaphysical system’ and elaborating a ‘fundamental ontology’ responding to our ‘existential concerns’, since fundamental ontology is precisely a critique of metaphysical system-building.56 To speak in such a way is philosophically crude. Accordingly, to understand what Behr means, we must consider his understanding of theology. Basing himself on Andrew Louth’s reading of Gadamer’s notion of the hermeneutical priority of the question,57 and fusing this with Hans Frei’s work on The Identity of Jesus Christ,58 Behr identifies the task of Christian theology as the attempt to answer Christ’s question ‘Who do you say that I am?’ (Matt. 16:15), so that all Christian theology is an attempt to articulate ‘the identity of Christ’.59 He frames this task in terms of, firstly, an opposition of history to interpretation; secondly, a text-based understanding of revelation; thirdly, an understanding of typology; and fourthly, an understanding of canon and tradition centred on the notion of the ὑπόθεσις. Behr’s understandings of these matters, indeed, he says, precedes the addressing of the question ‘Who do you say that I am?’, constituting rather ‘the background against which this question is raised and the framework within which it can be answered’.60 They constitute, that is to say, prolegomena to theology; or, as Behr calls them, ‘the most fundamental level’ of theology.61

55 Behr, Nicene Faith, p. 16. 56 Cf. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996) pp. 1–35; Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002) pp. 42–74. 57 Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery: an Essay on the Nature of Theology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) pp. 38–9. Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinshamer and Donald G. Marshall (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975) pp. 362–80. 58 Frei, Identity of Jesus Christ. 59 Behr, Way to Nicaea, p. 1. 60 Ibid, p. 11. 61 Ibid, p. 1.


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Firstly, Behr maintains that theology pertains to ‘interpretation’ and not to ‘the order of history’.62 Theology, he says, is ‘not an archaeological enterprise’.63 For: The identity of Christ is not explained by the bare details of his biography, but by the interpretation of these particulars, by understanding the significance of the person and work of Jesus Christ.64

The ‘order of history’, he says, concerns ‘raw historical data’65 – namely ‘events, possibly verifiable, possibly not’.66 Interpretation, on the other hand, serves to ‘explain the meaning and significance of this person, his life and works’.67 So history concerns events such as those of Jesus’ being ‘born of Mary and … crucified under Pontius Pilate’,68 whereas interpretation concerns of Jesus ‘who he is and how he stands in relation to those seeking to respond to him’ – for example, his being ‘the incarnate Word of God, the crucified and risen Lord and Saviour’.69 Identifying interpretation as confession,70 Behr is able to say that what is important in basic Christian confession ‘is not the historicity of the events behind their reports, but that the reports are continuous with, in accordance with, Scripture’.71 Secondly, Behr understands Christianity to be ‘committed to a text-based version of revealed truth’.72 Opposing as ‘anachronistic’ any notion that ‘in antiquity God’s revelation was thought of as located in historical events behind the text’ (and so accessible through historical reconstruction),73 Behr asserts that revelation is located ‘in the interpreted events as presented in Scripture, where the interpretation is already given through the medium of Scripture’:74 … God acts through his Word [so that] that Word needs to be heard, to be read, to be understood. [Therefore] the relationship with God is, in a broad sense, literary.75

Thirdly, for Behr, this understanding of revelation is explicated in terms of the typological interpretation of Scripture. Such interpretation is exemplified in the writers of the Old Testament, who ‘used images and figures of earlier events and figures to understand, explicate and describe the events and figures at hand’, making

62 Ibid, p. 12. 63 Ibid, p. 1. 64 Ibid, p. 1. 65 Ibid, p. 15. 66 Ibid, p. 12. 67 Ibid, p. 1. 68 Ibid, pp. 11–12. 69 Ibid, p. 12. 70 Ibid, p. 12. 71 Ibid, p. 16. 72 Ibid, p. 15, quoting Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) p. 57. 73 Behr, Way to Nicaea, p. 15. 74 Ibid, p. 15. 75 Ibid, p. 15.

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the earlier event typological of the later.76 Then the earlier event is understood in terms of the later event. The effect of such interpretation says Behr (borrowing again from Hans Frei) is the creation of a ‘symbolic world’ in terms of which one understands oneself and the events of one’s life.77 The New Testament writers, he tells us – in light of the ‘definitive and unexpected’ action of God in ‘the death and resurrection of Christ’ – came to understand all of the Old Testament Scriptures as typological of Christ.78 Christ thus became the ‘hermeneutical lens’ for a new reading of the Old Testament Scriptures, providing them with a ‘new symbolic coherence’,79 in which all of the Old Testament was understood in terms of Christ. This reading is ‘the “word of the Cross”, the apostolic preaching of “Christ crucified”’.80 In this reading, says Behr, ‘it is Christ who is being explained through the medium of the Scripture, not Scripture itself that is being exegeted’.81 Thus Christ ‘becomes the sole subject of Scripture throughout’.82 This creates the Christian ‘symbolic world’ (a notion derived from Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative): Read in the light of what God has wrought in Christ, the Scriptures provided the terms and images, the context within which the apostles made sense of what happened, and with which they explained it and preached it, so justifying the claim that Christ died and rose ‘according to the Scriptures’.83

It is within this symbolic world, Behr tells us, that the Christian life is lived, a life which seeks to ‘understand’, ‘accomplish’ and ‘incarnate’ God’s Word,84 and which involves as one ‘intrinsic’ aspect the need to respond to the question ‘Who do you say that I am?’ constitutive of theology.85 In the living of this life, theological doctrines and dogmas are ‘elements and structures’ which ‘provide the framework or parameters’ for this task of Christian living.86 (Here we see the wholesale adoption by Behr of a postliberal ‘grammatical’ understanding of theology and doctrine.) Fourthly, for Behr, the notions of canon and tradition are centred on the notion of the ὑπόθεσις, a term Behr borrows from St Irenaeus.87 Taking from Aristotle the understanding of the ὑπόθεσις as ‘the starting points or first principles of 76 Ibid, pp. 23–4. 77 Ibid, p. 23. 78 Ibid, p. 27. 79 Ibid, p. 27. 80 Ibid, p. 27. 81 Ibid, p. 28. 82 Ibid, p. 28. 83 Ibid, p. 27. 84 Ibid, p. 15. 85 Ibid, p. 74. 86 Ibid, p. 3. 87 Ibid, p. 31, quoting Irenaeus, Adv.haer. 1.8.1, in L. Doutreleau and A. Rousseau, Irénée de Lyon. Contre les hérésies, livres 1-2, 2 vols, Sources chrétiennes 263, 264 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1974); L. Doutreleau and A. Rousseau, Irénée de Lyon. Contre les hérésies, livre 3, 2 vols, Sources chrétiennes 210, 211 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1974); L. Doutreleau, B. Hemmerdinger, B.C. Mercier and A. Rousseau, Irénée de Lyon. Contre les hérésies, livre 4, Sources chrétiennes 100 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1965); L. Doutreleau, B.C. Mercier and A.


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demonstrations’,88 Behr observes that, since demonstrations are made in terms of first principles (otherwise we would have infinite regress, and so no demonstrations), it is impossible to prove them,89 and that, therefore, first principles must be taken on indemonstrable faith.90 Behr then tells us that for Christians, ‘the first principle of all knowledge’, and so ‘the (nonhypothetical) ὑπόθεσις’ is ‘the voice of the Lord, speaking throughout Scripture’ and ‘grasped by faith’.91 The first principles of this ὑπόθεσις are ‘the basis for subsequent demonstrations, and are also subsequently used to evaluate other claims to truth’.92 In this light, Behr then understands the proper linguistic articulation of this ὑπόθεσις to be the Church’s canon of truth: … the canon of truth expresses the correct ὑπόθεσις of Scripture itself, that by which one can see in Scripture the principle of a king, Christ, rather than a dog or fox.93

In that the canon of truth is the articulation of the ὑπόθεσις of Scripture, it is ‘neither a system of detached doctrinal beliefs nor a narrative’,94 and as such need not be given in ‘a declarative form’, and may be ‘flexible’ in its wording.95 What matters for fidelity to the canon of truth first of all then is fidelity to this ὑπόθεσις, and it is in terms of such fidelity that Behr understands the tradition of the Church.96 Now, this framework of interpretation, revelation, typology, canon and tradition provides the context for Behr’s fundamental objection to Zizioulas’ theology. Since for Behr any attempt at enquiry without first principles will succumb to infinite regress, and since first principles constitute a ὑπόθεσις, he argues that ‘enquiry is only possible on the basis of a ὑπόθεσις’.97 But whereas Christian faith takes for its ultimate and absolute ὑπόθεσις the Scriptures, philosophy does not, but rather sets out in order ‘to discover [the] ultimate, non-hypothetical first principles’ – that is, to discover the ultimate ὑπόθεσις.98 Therefore, for Behr, philosophy qua philosophy rejects the Christian canon of truth (which accepts by faith the location of the ultimate ὑπόθεσις in Scripture). Thereby separated from revelation (which, as we have seen, for Behr, is located in ‘the interpreted events as presented in Scripture, where the interpretation is already given through the medium of Scripture’), philosophy Rousseau, Irénée de Lyon. Contre les hérésies, livre 5, 2 vols, Sources chrétiennes 153, 153 (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1969). 88 Behr, Way to Nicaea, p. 32, with reference to Aristotle, Metaphysica Δ.1.2 1013a17, in W.D. Ross, Aristotle’s metaphysics, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924) (repr. 1970 [of 1953 corr. edn.]). 89 Behr, Way to Nicaea, p. 32. 90 Ibid, p. 33. It is not clear here how such appeal to Aristotelian first principles is compatible with Gadamer’s hermeneutical priority of the question, as the latter is incompatible with the former. Cf. Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 305–25. 91 Behr, Way to Nicaea, p. 33. 92 Ibid, p. 33. 93 Ibid, pp. 35–6. 94 Ibid, p. 36. 95 Ibid, p. 35. 96 Ibid, p. 45. 97 Ibid, p. 47. 98 Ibid, p. 33, my italics.

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will postulate its own non-Christian first principles – which will be ‘metaphysical’ in content – in terms of which it will comprehend Scripture.99 But for Behr, this cannot yield true knowledge of God, since: … our knowledge about God depends upon his revelation, which is mediated through Scripture, so that God is bound up with Scripture. … ‘We could almost say that even the existence of God is an inference from the existence of the Bible: in the beginning was the Word.’100 The doctrine concerning God, and the truth that is in Christ, is to be found in the exposition of the Scriptures as interpreted by the apostles, who alone proclaimed the Gospel, handing it down in both Scripture and tradition.101

Rather, those who follow such a philosophical path, in rejecting the canon of truth, end up with the heretics thinking that ‘the truth resides in their own interpretations, their own fabrications, and so end up preaching themselves’.102 They will try to fit Christianity into a symbolic world which is other than that of the Scriptures, and as such will be unfaithful to Christianity.103 And since, for Behr, this is true of all philosophy, the names of all different philosophical projects can be lumped together indiscriminately as all being opposed to theology in the same way. Behr’s more specific reason for levelling this charge against Zizioulas arises from what he takes to be Zizioulas’ misunderstanding of the nature of doctrine. What Behr calls the ‘increasingly abstract theological discourse’ of the theology of the time of the Ecumenical Councils, was in fact, he insists, concerned ‘to clarify [the] hypothesis and canon by which [Scripture] speaks of Jesus Christ’.104 It serves to provide, that is to say, ‘the framework or parameters’ within which the interpretative task that seeks to answer the question ‘Who do you say that I am?’ may be carried out.105 But, Behr alleges, Zizioulas takes it to have been the philosophical attempt to describe the ‘ultimate structures of reality’ – that is, the philosophical attempt to arrive at the ultimate ὑπόθεσις, or first principles, of things.106 But in so doing, Zizioulas has, according to Behr, confused theology with philosophy, with the consequence (on Behr’s views) that Zizioulas’ work is a rejection of the canon of truth and is therefore excluded from the possibility of speaking truly about God. This, and nothing less, is Behr’s fundamental objection to the thought of the Metropolitan of Pergamon.

99 Cf.Ibid, p. 20. 100 Ibid, p. 19, quoting Northrop Frye, The Great Code: the Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982) p. 61. 101 Behr, Way to Nicaea, p. 45. 102 Ibid, p. 41. 103 Behr, Nicene Faith, p. 9. 104 Behr, Way to Nicaea, p. 74. 105 Ibid, p. 3. 106 Ibid, p. 75.


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The Ontology of Being as Communion Thus we are clear about the nature of the objections made regarding the theology of the Metropolitan of Pergamon. But in order to assess the significance of these objections, we must weigh them up against Zizioulas’ own thought, and in particular his ontological thought, which is what is called into question by these rejections of his thought. The Categories of Zizioulas’ Project Zizioulas’ primary mode of articulating his own ontology is through an understanding of the historical development of Greek ontology from the classical world to St Maximus the Confessor and St John of Damascus. He articulates his account of this historical development specifically in terms of two concepts – those of ὑπόστασις and ‘person’ (πρόσωπο). By ὑπόστασις, Zizioulas means ‘that which makes a being be itself’, that by which ‘this being is itself and thus is at all’, that which constitutes its ‘ontological identity’;107 whereas by ‘person’, he signifies that which is designated in the employment of the personal pronouns ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘he’ and ‘she’, in distinction to that which is identified in employment by the impersonal pronoun ‘it’.108 It is important to recognize that neither Zizioulas’ demarcation of the concept of ὑπόστασις here, nor that of the concept of ‘person’ commits him to a specific ontological position. One could, for example, follow late scholasticism and say that the essence of a human being is that by which it has its basic identity – then the ὑπόστασις would be the essence of the human being, that is, humanity. Or one could follow the early Heidegger and say that all the ek-static connections of a human being in the world in which it exists – past, present and future – constitute the fundamental identity of that being, and thus constitute its ὑπόστασις. Similarly, there are many different ways in which one could understand metaphysically my being personal rather than impersonal. For example, one could identify my personhood with an immaterial soul-entity distinct from my body – or one could identify my personhood with physical characteristics and processes (brain-states, memory,and so on). Now, none of these views are views which Zizioulas endorses – but the point is that by using the terms ὑπόστασις and πρόσωπον Zizioulas is marking out a subjectmatter for investigation, not advancing a dogmatic thesis (beyond, that is to say, affirming that there is indeed a real difference between personal and impersonal being, and that there is indeed a ‘that by which’ a being is the being it is (has the ontological identity it has).

107 John D. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity and Human Incapacity: a Theological Exploration of Personhood’, Scottish Journal of Theology 28 (1975) pp. 401–48, at 409. In Being as Communion, p. 30, n. 30, Zizioulas offers some reflections on how the the concept of ὑπόστασις came to acquire such a sense. 108 John D. Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person: Towards an Ontology of Personhood’, in Christoph Schwöbel and Colin E. Gunton (eds), Persons, Divine and Human: King’s College Essays in Theological Anthropology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991) pp. 33–46, at 34.


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Thus employed, these concepts function in Zizioulas’ account not as terms to be explained, but as concepts in terms of which Zizioulas explains the ontological positions of classical Greek and patristic ontology. This is why he can argue, for example, that in classical antiquity the word πρόσωπον did not bear a fully ‘personal’ meaning, and why he could hold that at that time ὑπόστασις did not mean what he means by ὑπόστασις.109 (Of course, he does not think these words were entirely unrelated to his understanding of their meanings – after all, the meanings with which they were employed in classical antiquity were the semantic ancestors of the meanings which they have come to possess today – and for this reason, his historical ontology spends time considering the semantic histories of these words.)110 In a nutshell, Zizioulas sees the history of ontology from classical Greece to the Fathers of the Church as a transformation from an ontology according to which the ὑπόστασις of beings are identified with their nature/essence (φύσις, οὐσία, understood throughout as synonymous) to one in which the ὑπόστασις of beings was understood as personal (προσωπικός). That is to say, for classical Greek thought, that by which beings (ὄντα) existed, the ontological principle (ἀρχή) in terms of which they were the beings that they were, was their nature. But in fully formed patristic ontology, on the other hand, that by which beings existed, the ontological principle in terms of which they were the beings they were, was the person. Classical Greek Ontology According to Zizioulas, the ‘basic principle’111 of classical Greek ontology was its commitment to the ontological primacy of unity over the multiplicity of particulars. This entailed a ‘monistic view of reality’,112 one for which ‘particularity is not ontologically absolute; the many are always ontologically derivative, not causative’.113 All things are bound together in an ontological συγγένεια,114 whilst all plurality and differentiation are seen then as ‘a tendency towards “non-being”, a deterioration of or “fall” from being’.115 Because of this ultimacy of unity, the dualism of thought and being cannot be ultimate. Rather, thought and being too must be linked by an ontological συγγένεια, so that, in the final analysis, thought and being (and so also mind and being) constitute a unity.116 This priority of unity meant that for classical Greek ontology, the ὑπόστασις of a particular being (that is, in Zizioulas’ sense, that by which the particular being is the being it is) did not lie within the being’s particularity (its being one of many), nor with its multiplicity (its being itself many [for example, having many bodily parts]). Rather, it lay with the ontological unity of which this being was a part. This

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116

Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 31–3. Cf., for example, Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 38, n. 30. Zizioulas, Being and Communion, p. 29. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 403. Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person’, p. 36. Zizioulas Being as Communion, p. 84. Ibid, p. 29. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 403, n. 2; Being as Communion, p. 29, n. 4.


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ontological unity, in terms of which the particular beings were the beings they were, was the unity of the κόσμος, the unity of nature.117 The nature (φύσις, οὐσία) of a being was identified as the form of existence which a being was determined to have by this natural order. An ‘individual’ nature was thus the determination of nature in an individual – and since this constituted (for classical Greek ontology) that by which the particular being was the particular form of being it was, this ‘nature’ (φύσις, οὐσία) was the ὑπόστασις of the being.118 Therefore, what the being truly was – that which one understood when one understood the λόγος of the being – lay in its nature, in its cosmic determination to be what it was. As such, truth was adequated to the cosmic order, not to the particular being qua particular, so that truth pertained to unity-not-multiplicity.119 Equally, since truth was aligned with the changeless cosmic order, changeable particular beings could not themselves be true in their particular being. Rather, a particular being was an ‘image’ (εἰκών) of the truth, understood as something which (to a certain degree) approximated to, but which did not fully attain, truth itself.120 This meant that particular being qua particular (and so also qua historical, for there is no history without particularity) was meaningless (ἄλογον) and devoid of truth.121 Following from this, since the cosmic determination of a being was the determination of a being to conform to unity, and since unity was the absolute principle of being, it followed that this determination was absolute. Hence it was equated with necessity and fate. All beings, therefore, were necessarily bound and fated by their ὑποστάσεις to conform to the cosmic order.122 Consequently, freedom did not pertain in any way to the ὑπόστασις of the being: the ὑπόστασις of a being was absolutely unfree and fixed, an ontological ‘given’.123 And this was true not only for man,124 but also for divinity: the gods too had to conform to cosmic order.125 It followed also that, for such ontology, the ὑπόστασις of the being could not be identified with the being’s life. For in that the being’s existence was determined by the cosmic order, its life followed from this determination. Therefore, life was something sequent to the ὑπόστασις of the being, and not identical with it: life was something the ὑπόστασις had as long as it was determined to have it, not something the ὑπόστασις was.126 Moreover, the identification of the ὑπόστασις with unity, nature and necessity entailed for classical Greek ontology the non-identity of the ὑπόστασις with the person (both concepts, again, being understood in the senses accorded to them by 117 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 29. 118 Ibid, pp. 30–33; cf. 81. 119 Ibid, pp. 68–70. 120 Ibid, p. 100. 121 Ibid, p. 96. 122 Ibid, p. 30, n. 17a. 123 John D. Zizioulas, ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: the Significance of the Cappadocian Contribution’, in Christoph Schwöbel (ed.), Trinitarian Theology Today: Essays on Divine Being and Act (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995) pp. 44–60, at 54. 124 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 31. 125 Ibid, pp. 29–30. 126 Ibid, p. 79.


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Zizioulas). For the person (that which is designated by the pronouns ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘ye’, ‘he, ‘she’ in employment) is particular,127 and so does not pertain to the cosmic order which constitutes the ὑπόστασις as nature (φὐσις, οὐσία). Rather, the person is what is determined by the cosmic order, and hence by the nature which that order constitutes.128 The Ontology of the Fathers The Basis of Patristic Ontology in Eucharistic Experience The decisive beginnings of the ontological articulation of the Fathers of the Church are seen, says Zizioulas, in the theological work of St Ignatius of Antioch and St Irenaeus of Lyons.129 On the basis of the Johannine identifications of Christ with life, and truth, and upon their identification of life with being for ever, these saints identified life, truth and eternal being. And on the basis of their understanding that the eucharist is truly Christ, they affirmed that in the eucharist we receive life and true being (immortal being). But this life and true being which we receive in communion, precisely in that it is received as a gift, does not pertain to us according to nature (φύσις, οὐσία). And since the communion in which we receive true life is Christ himself – and not a vehicle containing Christ or an intermediary between us and Christ – it follows that this life is itself communion. True life and true being, then, are identified as communion with God.130 And a fortiori, for St Irenaeus, since knowledge is identical to true and eternal life which is communion with God, it follows that true knowledge is likewise communion with God.131 The development of patristic ontology, for Zizioulas, is essentially an analytic of this eucharistic identification of being, life and knowledge with communion. As such, he affirmed, the basis of this ontology is the eucharistic experience of the Church.132 This, he thinks, is of decisive importance: The fact that neither the apologists, such as Justin Martyr, nor the Alexandrian apologists, such as the celebrated Clement and Origen, could completely avoid the trap of the ontological monism of Greek thought is not accidental: they were above all ‘doctors’, academic theologians interested principally in Christianity as ‘revelation’. By contrast, the bishops of this period, pastoral theologians such as St Ignatius of Antioch and above all St Irenaeus and later St Athanasius, approached the being of God through the experience of the ecclesial community, of ecclesial being. This experience revealed something very important: the being of God could be known only through personal relationships and personal love. Being means life, and life means communion.133

127 128 129 130 131 132 133

Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person’, p. 35. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 31–5. Ibid, pp. 80–81. Ibid, p. 81. Ibid, p. 81, citing Irenaeus, Adv.haer. 4.20.5. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 16–17. Ibid, p. 16.


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The Rejection of Monistic Ontological Determination The rejection of the ontological determination of beings by fate and necessity has three strands. Firstly, Zizioulas shows how the Fathers rejected the idea that creation is bound to God by ontological necessity; secondly, he shows how they rejected the idea that God is bound by any ontological necessity; and thirdly, he shows how the Fathers articulated positively the being of God and of creation in a manner free from such necessity. There is no Ontological συγγένεια between Creation and God It was, says Zizioulas, Athanasius who decisively asserted that there was no ontological kinship (συγγένεια) between the divine and the human. This was in his anti-Arian distinction between generation according to οὐσία and generation according to will, which followed from the biblical view that the world is created and does not exist necessarily,134 and according to which he assigned the being of the Son as due to the divine οὐσία and the being of the world as due to the divine will.135 This distinction reaches an ontological level which classical Greek thought never attained. For classical Greek ontology, being was simply given – it was an unquestionable datum which required no explanation, and of which no explanation could be given.136 Now, however, by the notion of creatio ex nihilo, the Fathers extended ontological consideration beyond why things in the world existed to why the world existed at all. This denial of the unquestionable givenness of being, and the identification of being as deriving from the will of God, denied thereby any ontological kinship of the world to God, so that the being of the world was no longer determined by cosmic necessity or fate. Rather, Athanasius’ affirmation that the world was the product of will and not of οὐσία entailed that the being and existence of the world was ‘a product of freedom’,137 namely the freedom of God the Father to create.138 There was no necessity that the world existed; rather, both that the world was and how it was were the result of the divine will. All this, affirms Zizioulas, flows from the eucharistic understanding that true being and life are given in freedom, and not determined of necessity. The freedom of divine being from necessity Athanasius’ ontological connection of the being of the Son to that of the Father through the affirmation that they are of one οὐσία, showed, says Zizioulas, that the divine οὐσία possesses an intrinsically relational character.139 Consequently, in divinity, ‘communion belongs not to the level of will and action but to that of οὐσία’.140 But, says Zizioulas, it was the Cappadocian Fathers who articulated how this was to be expressed in ontology. They did so by showing firstly how relation could be spoken of within the Godhead,

134 135 136 137 138 139 140

Ibid, p. 39. Ibid, pp. 83–4. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 416. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 39. Zizioulas, ‘Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’, p. 54. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 84. Ibid, p. 86.

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and secondly, how such relation did not entail the division of the divine οὐσία into multiple οὐσίαι. According to the Cappadocians, any properties (ἰδιώµατα) that can be spoken of in God pertain incommunicably to one of Father, Son or Holy Spirit (unlike the divine οὐσία which is communicated co-equally amongst the three persons).141 In that the relationships between the divine persons are constitutive of their ontological identities (so that, for example, the Son is only the Son by being begotten by the Father, the Spirit is only the Spirit by being poured forth from the Father, and the Father is only the Father as the Father of the Son), the hypostatic identities of Father, Son and Holy Spirit (in Zizioulas’ sense of ὑπόστασις) are relational: that by which each person is the person that it is, is inseparable from its relations to the other two persons.142 Consequently, ‘the divine persons of the Holy Trinity only have their being in relation to each other’.143 Moreover, in that the sole cause (αἰτία) of being amongst the three persons is the uncaused Father who freely wills the existence of Son and Spirit – and not in any way the divine φύσις – this means that the hypostatic identities of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are entirely free from any necessitarian or fatalistic determination.144 (That is to say, in opposition to the ontology of classical Greek monism, there is no sense here in which the order of nature determines divine existence.)145 This did not, however, entail that the three persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit are divided into three gods (three οὐσίαι), as three human persons are divided into three men (three οὐσίαι).146 According to the Cappadocian Fathers, says Zizioulas, humanity, in its perfect state, is really one, and is only divided into many men according to the mode of fallen existence.147 It is because of this fallenness that no human person is ‘the bearer of the totality of human nature’, so that ‘the unity between human beings is not ontologically identical with their diversity or multiplicity’.148 Fallen humanity is thus divided up into many ‘individuals’, separated and disjointed from one another. (The use of the term ‘individual’ here belongs primarily to the language in terms of which Zizioulas explains this position, not primarily to the Cappadocians themselves.) God, however, does not exist according to such a mode. Therefore, ‘multiplicity in God does not involve a division of his nature, as happens with man’.149 Rather, in God, each member of the Trinity exists without any ‘separation’, but constitute ‘such an unbreakable unity that individualism is 141 Zizioulas, ‘Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’, pp. 49–50. 142 Ibid, p. 49. 143 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 88. 144 Zizioulas, ‘Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’, p. 51. 145 Cf. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 88. 146 Zizioulas, ‘Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’, pp. 47–8. 147 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 52, citing Gregory of Nyssa, De hom. op. 16-18, in J.-P. Migne, Patrologiae cursus completus (series Graeca) (PG) 44 (Paris: Migne, 1857– 1866) 124–256 (PG 44:124–256); and Maximus the Confessor, Amb. 41 (Ambigua) in PG 91:1032–1417 (PG 91:1309A); Amb. 42 (PG 91: 1340Cff.); Ad Thal. 61 in PG 90: 244–785 (PG 90:636B). 148 Zizioulas, ‘Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’, p. 48. 149 Ibid, p. 48.


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absolutely inconceivable in their case’.150 There is thus no sense for Zizioulas that the Holy Trinity consists of three separate individuals:151 The three persons of the Trinity are thus one God, because they are so united in an unbreakable communion (κοινωνία) that none of them can be conceived apart from the rest. The mystery of the one God in three persons points to a way of being which precludes individualism and separation (or self-sufficiency and self-existence) as a criterion of multiplicity. The ‘one’ not only does not precede – logically or otherwise – the ‘many’, but, on the contrary, requires the ‘many’ from the very start in order to exist.152

Consequently, divine uncreated existence – ‘true being in its genuine metaphysical state’ – ‘does not involve the priority of the “One” or of nature over the “Many” or the persons’. Instead, ‘the way in which God exists involves simultaneously the “One” and the “Many”’.153 Neither does this involve any ontological prioritization of nature (φύσις, οὐσία) over the persons of the Trinity, so that the ὑποστάσεις (in Zizioulas’ sense) of Father, Son and Holy Spirit consist in an ontological determination of φύσις (as would have been the case according to the Greek ontology). For that-by-which-theSon-and-Spirit-are is the Father as their cause (αἰτία), whilst the Father himself is absolutely uncaused. As such, the existence of the Father is utterly undetermined by necessity, and as the existence of the Son and the existence of the Holy Spirit is each the expression of the will of the Father – this will being completely undetermined by necessity – so too the existence of the Son and the existence of the Holy Spirit are completely undetermined by any necessity. As such, the being (εἶναι) of the Holy Trinity is entirely undetermined by any necessity. The nature (φύσις, οὐσία) of God does not determine the existence of God – rather the divine nature exists in the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, consubstantial, undivided Trinity.154 Moreover, because God is no longer united to the created world by monistic ontology, the mind no longer possesses the συγγένεια to the divine such that it is able to comprehend it. This is the basis for the Dionysian apophatic recognition that the being (οὐσία) of God transcends mind in an absolute divine otherness, beyond both affirmation and negation.155 As such, God transcends ontologically any situation in which there is a choice of affirmation or negation, of truth or falsehood – such oppositions can now be seen to pertain not to true divine being, but rather to ‘fallen situations where choice imposes itself between the “true” and the “false”’.156 But, again, what grounds this, for Zizioulas, is ultimately the recognition that the eucharistic identification of true being and life as given in freedom requires that the one who gives in freedom is himself free from a determination forcing him to give.

150 151 152 153 154 155 156

Ibid, p. 48. Ibid, p. 50. Ibid, pp. 48–9. Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, p. 51. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 90; cf. p. 92, n. 76. Ibid, pp. 90–91, n. 71, referring to Maximus the Confessor, Amb. 91: 1296C.


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The divine being as communion And all this, thinks Zizioulas, enables the positive ontological articulation of what is meant by the Johannine affirmation that ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:16). Remembering that within the epistolatory context of this affirmation’s utterance, it is the Father who is being spoken of (and not the common nature of God),157 this means, says Zizioulas, that the love of the Father which begets the Son and which pours forth the Holy Spirit is positively that which makes God the Holy Trinity to be. On the one hand, this love – precisely in that in it the Father begets the Son who is not the Father, and precisely in that in it the Father pours forth the Holy Spirit who is not the Father – is the Father’s going beyond himself, and so this love is ecstatic, bringing forth the free communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But on the other hand, this ἔκσταισς is not the Father’s going beyond his own being (οὐσία). As such, the divine being (οὐσία) is a being which exists precisely and only in the ἔκστασις of the Father which eternally brings about the eternal communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.158 Hence: Love is not an emanation or ‘property’ of the οὐσία of God … but is constitutive of his οὐσία, i.e. it is that which makes God what he is, the one God. … Love as God’s mode of existence ‘hypostasises’ God, constitutes his being.159

Thus the freedom out of which God gives himself as true being and life in eucharistic communion is precisely the freedom of his own Trinitarian koinonetic love. Creation as ἔκστασις not Emanation It is upon this basis, says Zizioulas, that the divine creation of the world must, in accordance with Dionysius the Areopagite and St Maximus the Confessor, be understood as an ἔκστασις rather than as an emanation (as in Neoplatonism). For the emanation of lower existences out of higher ones would retain the monistic ontological συγγένεια of the Greeks.160 But creation is the free act of God who is love, and as such is a going ‘outside himself’ in love, and hence itself an ἔκστασις which gives rise to ‘an otherness of being’.161 This too, continues Zizioulas, is the rationale for the Cappadocian and Palamite distinction of divine οὐσία and ἐνέργεια: ‘the relationship between God and the world as ontological otherness bridged by love, but not by “nature” or by “οὐσία”.’162 Again, all of this follows from the eucharistic experience of communion. The Meaning and Truth of Historical Being Beyond these stages, for Zizioulas, the articulation of patristic ontology is fundamentally completed by the clarification of the meaning and truth of historical being provided by St Maximus the Confessor. In contrast to the Greek ontological understanding of history as intrinsically meaningless (because essentially particular), Maximus affirms, on the basis of the biblical narrative of salvation history, that history should be understood as the three157 158 159 160 161 162

Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 46, n. 41. Ibid, p. 44. Ibid, p. 46. Ibid, p. 91. Ibid, p. 91. Ibid, p. 91.


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termed passage from becoming through movement to rest (γένεσις-κίνησις-στάσις). This means that history is ‘meaningful because it possesses a πέρας (fulfilment)’,163 with the corollary that the truth of history lies in ‘a πέρας which summons from ahead’.164 But, says Zizioulas, history was not to be understood, for Maximus, as having meaning exclusively in terms of this end (thereby evacuating the present qua present of significance). Rather, it lies in the incarnate Jesus Christ who constitutes thereby the λόγος (meaning) of being and history, the λόγος of all λόγοι.165 This is argued in two stages. Firstly, since historical being is created, Maximus denies that its meaning (λόγος) can be comprehended in terms of its nature. For its nature precisely as a created nature is itself the expression of the will and love of God which creates it and sustains it in its being. Therefore the nature can only be understood precisely as the expression of the will and love of God, and not as ‘some objective structure of a rational kind which might be conceivable in itself’.166 The creature is as the loving will of God wills it to be. So the λόγος of the creature – what is understood when it is understood – is not different from the loving will of God by which it is. Therefore, the λόγος of that nature is the will and love of God itself.167 Secondly, in Jesus Christ is present incarnate the ultimate will of God, which is to effect the ultimate koinonetic union of creation with itself and with God in love. As such, Jesus Christ is himself the ultimate will of God’s love. But as the ultimate will of God he contains in himself all that which is expressed in every expression of the will of God. But since each λόγος of each being is an expression of the will of God, that means that Jesus Christ contains in himself every λόγος of every being. And Jesus Christ is himself the ultimate will of the divine love, Jesus Christ is the ultimate Λόγος, the Λόγος in whom are contained all λόγοι of all beings. Jesus Christ is thus ‘the ultimate will of God’s love which unifies beings and points to the meaning (λόγος) of being’:168 The incarnate Christ is so identical to the ultimate will of God’s love, that the meaning of created being and the purpose of history are simply the incarnate Christ. … Christ, the incarnate Christ, is the truth, for he represents the ultimate, unceasing will of the ecstatic love of God, who intends to lead created being into communion with his own life, to know him and itself within this communion-event.169

Consequently, the meaning and truth of historical being does not lie beyond the particularities of history, in an indifferent monistic συγγένεια, but precisely in the historical incarnate Jesus Christ:

163 164 165 166 167 168 169

Ibid, p. 95. Ibid, pp. 95–6, referring to Maximus the Confessor, ad Thal. 60. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 96. Ibid, p. 97. Ibid, p. 97, referring to Maximus the Confessor, Amb. 23; ad Thal. 60. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 97. Ibid, pp. 97–8.

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The Theology of John Zizioulas All this removes truth from its Platonic unchangingness and, equally, from the necessity implicit in the Aristotelian “entelechy”. History is neither banished in a platonic manner, nor transformed into a movement inherent in being or “nature” itself. The truth of history lies simultaneously in the substratum of created existence (since all beings are the willed realizations of God’s love); in the fulfilment or the failure of history (since God’s love, in his will and its expressions – namely, created existence – is identifiable with the final communion of creation with the life of God); and in the incarnate Christ (since on God’s part the personification of this loving will is the incarnate Christ). Whereby Christ becomes the ‘principle’ and ‘end’ of all things, the One who not only moves history from within its own unfolding but who also moves existence even from within the multiplicity of created things, towards the true being which is true life and true communion.170

Accordingly, historical beings do not lack truth in the manner in which they are deemed to in classical Greek ontology – that is, they do not lack truth as historical and particular. But historical beings do have the fulfilment of their true being in the future. This ontological fulfilment is ‘true life and true communion’. The εἰκών is, accordingly, the presence of this true koinonetic being in the present: Εἰκών is the final truth of being communicated in and through an event of communion (liturgical or sacramental), anticipating the ‘end’ of history from within its unfolding.171 And it is in this sense that Zizioulas quotes the text of St Maximus which, more than any other, sums up his ontology: The things of the Old Testament are shadow (σκιά); those of the New Testament are image (εἰκών); and those of the future state are truth (ἀλήθεια).172

And this, again, is an ontological consequence of the eucharistic experience of true being and life as coming freely from God in communion. The Ontology of the Human Person Now it is this eucharistic ontology which enables Zizioulas to address the dilemma of personhood according to existentialist philosophy, and to address this dilemma in such a way as to show it to have its resolution only in Jesus Christ. The Existentialist Dilemma Regarding the Human Person As Zizioulas represents them, the demand of the existentialist philosophers is that the human being possess an ‘absolute ontological freedom’, an ontological freedom which is identified with the freedom of the ‘person’. (In what follows, it shall be in this sense that we shall speak of ‘personhood’.) Their dilemma arises from the fact that they cannot recognize this to be possible. There are two main lines of argument offered for this conclusion.

170 Ibid, p. 98. 171 Ibid, p. 101. 172 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 99; Maximus, Sch. in eccl. hier. 3, 3:2, in PG 4: 15–432, 527–576.


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Firstly, they say, ‘the being of each human person is given to him; consequently, the human person is not able to free himself absolutely from his “nature” or from his “οὐσία”, from what biological laws dictate to him, without bringing about his annihilation’.173 In such circumstances, the only way in which the human person can exercise ‘absolute ontological freedom’ is by suicide.174 But that is not to affirm ontological freedom, but to affirm freedom in opposition to being – it is to assert freedom through the annihilation of being. If, on the contrary, the human person does not want to annihilate his being, he is ‘obliged in the last analysis … to submit to certain natural and social “givens”’.175 Then he cannot affirm his existence ‘as the product of his free consent and self-affirmation’.176 Consequently, for existentialist thought, ‘the person as an absolute ontological freedom remains a quest without fulfilment’,177 and ‘humanism proves unable to affirm personhood’178 in terms of ontology. Consequently, the existence of the human being never attains true personhood. He is relativized to the status of being ‘a useful “object”, a “combination”, a persona’179 which disintegrates at death. (The perpetuation through childbearing is a survival of the species, not of the unique person of unique identity.)180 Secondly, for existentialist thought, were man to have absolute freedom, the result would be ‘chaos’.181 For the freedom of one man leads to ‘the denial of others’ [freedom], to egocentrism, to the total destruction of social life’.182 Hence, ‘order’, ‘harmony’ and ‘symbiosis with others’ all require a ‘limitation to personal freedom’. Thus ‘the other’ is a ‘threat to the person, its “hell” and its “fall”’.183 173 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 19. The freedom that is being spoken of here is not the simple ‘freedom of choice’. Such freedom of choice is the freedom to choose between a range of alternatives – the ability to choose between, for example, doing X or Y or Z. But such freedom is bounded by the possibility (a) that there are the options X, Y and Z; (b) that X, Y and Z are the only options; and (c) that you must choose one of X, Y or Z. (And the possibility of refraining from choosing makes no difference: it would just constitute a further choice W, so that you had four possibilities not three – viz. a choice between W, X, Y or Z.) The result is that such freedom of choice is always derivative of the necessities in terms of which you have a freedom to choose. As Zizioulas says: ‘this “freedom” is already bound by the “necessity” of these possibilities, and the ultimate and most binding of these “necessities” for man is his existence itself: how can a man be considered absolutely free when he cannot do other than accept his existence?’ (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 42). 174 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 43. 175 Ibid, p. 19. 176 Ibid, p. 42. 177 Ibid, p. 18. 178 Ibid, p. 43. 179 Ibid, p. 47. 180 Ibid, p. 47. Also, for such thinking, the survival of death by an immortal soul is incompatible with the freedom of the person. For, if the soul is immortal, then its survival of death is necessary, and so is not something freely affirmed by the person. The same holds for any notion of the survival of the person based upon some ‘natural property’ (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 47–8). 181 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 43. 182 Ibid, p. 47. 183 Ibid, p. 43, alluding to Sartre.


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The Orthodox Response Zizioulas’ response is twofold. Firstly, he accepts the existentialists’ recognition that true personhood requires ontological freedom, to accept the impossibility of this freedom for created man whose being is given to him, and to accept that within the situation of his createdness the only way for him to ontologically express his freedom is through suicide. But then secondly, he shows how, according to the eucharistic ontology of the Church, the human being, through the mode of being which he acquires in Jesus Christ in the Church, in fact does come into a state of absolute ontological freedom, such that he attains ontologically true personhood. The Biological Hypostasis For Zizioulas, the existentialist analysis of human personhood is in reality an analysis of what for the Fathers is fallen human existence. This ontological situation Zizioulas calls ‘the ὑπόστασις of biological existence’ (again in Zizioulas’ understanding of ὑπόστασις).184 Within the mode of fallen existence, says Zizioulas, human beings come to exist through the communion of erotic love, a generative communion through which the human being constituted thereby suffers from the two ‘passions’ of ‘ontological necessity’ and ‘individualism’.185 According to the first passion, man is ‘inevitably tied to natural instinct’, and so is bound by the necessities of nature and as such is not ontologically free.186 According to the second passion, men ‘affirm their identity as separation from [and hence opposition to] other unities’;187 it is because men are atomized from each other in this way that they express their freedom over and against each other in a war of all against all. (Were it the case that men were not thus separated, they would act in unity and not in the disunity of opposition and oppression.) Thus the inabilities of human beings to attain true personhood to which the existentialists point have, says Zizioulas, their root in the situation of fallen human existence – not in human existence per se. And insofar as their analyses are analyses of fallen human existence, says Zizioulas, they are entirely correct: inasmuch as man remains constituted ontologically by the ‘biological hypostasis’, he is unable to attain the true ontological freedom of personhood (in the existentialists’ sense). But what the patristic location of such analyses within the mode of being of fallen existence shows is that these inabilities of man to attain true personhood stem from the mode of his birth. As such, what man needs to attain true personhood is ‘a “new birth”, a birth “from on high”’.188 The Ecclesial Hypostasis This ‘new birth’, says Zizioulas, is attained precisely in baptism, where God ‘“hypostasises” the person according to God’s way of being’.189 In baptism, says Zizioulas, man is hypostasized with a different hypostasis from

184 185 186 187 188 189

Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 50. Ibid, pp. 50–51; cf. note 147 above for Zizioulas’ sources. Ibid, p. 50. Ibid, pp. 50–51; cf. note 147 above for Zizioulas’ sources. Ibid, p. 19. Ibid, p. 19.


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that of biological existence. He is hypostasized with ‘the hypostasis of ecclesial existence’.190 Zizioulas argues for this in three stages. In the first of these stages, Zizioulas points out that the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is absolutely personal, in the existentialists’ sense of ‘personal’. For, as we have seen him argue, according to the understanding of the Holy Trinity formulated by the Cappadocian Fathers, the Holy Trinity is not subject to any determination by necessity – rather, Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist in absolute ontological freedom. As such they are ‘persons’ in the first existentialist sense of possessing absolute ontological freedom. Moreover, in that they are united in an absolute κοινωνία, there is no sense in which they are individualized such that they fail to be persons in the sense of the second line of argumentation in the existentialist dilemma regarding personhood. Father, Son and Holy Spirit are, therefore, each absolutely personal in the existentialists’ sense of personhood. Secondly, Zizioulas observes how, according to the Fathers, the person of Jesus Christ is precisely the second person of the Holy Trinity. As such, Christ’s mode of existence is not a fallen mode of existence; rather, he exists ‘in precisely the manner in which God subsists as being’.191 God the Son took on the fulness of human nature in Incarnation, being born of a Virgin (and so not subject to the passions of the biological hypostasis).192 This shows that human nature ‘can be “assumed” and hypostasised in a manner free from the ontological necessity of the biological hypostasis’.193 As such, it is not ontologically necessary for human beings to subsist according to the mode of fallen existence. Thirdly, this mode of truly personal life is something that God brings us into by baptism. Baptism, as the ‘new birth’ in which, dying and rising, we put on Christ, is ‘precisely an act constitutive of hypostasis’: ‘As the conception and birth of man constitute his biological hypostasis, so baptism leads to a new mode of existence, to a regeneration.’194 Here we have ‘the adoption of man by God, the identification of his hypostasis with the hypostasis of the Son of God’,195 so that he is hypostasized according to a truly personal mode of existence.196 The realization of this new hypostatic mode of existence in history is found in the Church.197 As such, Zizioulas calls the hypostasis which man receives at baptism ‘the hypostasis of ecclesial existence’.198 Such existence is an existence which transcends both the necessity and individualism of fallen existence, the mode of existence of divine life, the mode of existence of koinonetic love. Thus, so hypostasized, man is able to transcend the relationships of biological existence through a love which loves ‘not because the laws of biology oblige [it] to’ (that is, a love which compels love for 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198

Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, pp. 54–5. Ibid, pp. 54–5. Ibid, p. 56. Ibid, p. 53. Ibid, p. 56. Ibid, p. 58. Ibid, p. 56. Ibid, p. 53.

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those biologically close to oneself), but which, rather, loves ‘without exclusiveness’, and not out of conformity to a moral commandment, but out of his new ‘hypostatic constitution’.199 Such love – precisely in its non-exclusiveness – transcends all fallen individualism, and expresses rather a ‘catholic mode of existence’, which expresses not a ‘mutually exclusive portion’ of being, but rather being as ‘a single whole, … without division’.200 And then, given that according to the full articulation of patristic ontology in St Maximus the Confessor, the meaning of historical being lies in the incarnate Jesus Christ, this baptismal incorporation into Christ such that one is hypostasized into this catholic mode of being constitutes the meaning and fulfilment of history. The Impossibility of such a Response within Western Christian Ontology Such a response Zizioulas considers to be impossible within the ontological framework of Western Christianity. He gives two primary reasons for this. Firstly, he asserts, within the Western tradition of ‘Augustine and the scholastics’, the ontological principle (ἀρχή) by which God exists is not the person of the Father, but the divine οὐσία.201 As such the Father, Son and Holy Spirit cannot – any more than fallen men – affirm their existence ‘as the product of their free consent and self-affirmation’. Secondly, Western Christianity has understood the person in terms of the Boethian definition of the person as an individual substance with a rational nature, and in terms of the psychological introversion of Augustine’s Confessions.202 As such it has come to understand the person as an individual personality – as ‘a unit endowed with intellectual, psychological and moral qualities centred on the axis of consciousness’, ‘an autonomous self who intends, thinks, decides, acts and produces results’.203 As such, Western Christian thought renders ontologically absolute the state of individualization which, for Zizioulas, is a mark only of fallen human existence. The Refutation of the Patristicist Objections Now, in the light of Zizioulas’ own position, we can turn to consider the force of the objections raised against him by his Orthodox patristicist detractors. 199 Ibid, pp. 56–8. 200 Ibid, p. 58, referring to Maximus the Confessor, Myst. 4, in PG 91: 657–718. Two qualifications must be made. Firstly, the being of this hypostasis is not a denial of the body or biological nature, but the hypostasization of this body and nature according to the ecclesial hypostasis (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 63). Neither is it fully realized in the present. For the ecclesial hypostasis exists in the Church eucharistically or sacramentally: in the present, ecclesial man exists in this state of ecclesiality ‘not as that which he is but as that which he will be’, so that ‘the ecclesial identity is linked with eschatology, with the final outcome of [man’s] existence’ (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 59). Hence the ecclesial hypostasis ‘has its roots in the future and its branches in the present’, so that its present existence is as a ‘eucharistic hypostasis’, ‘drawing its being from the being of God and from that which it will itself be at the end of the age’ (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 62). 201 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 88. 202 Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, pp. 405–6. 203 Ibid, p. 407.


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Social Trinitarianism Firstly, we may consider the objections which allege that Zizioulas is a ‘social trinitarian’. The detractors of Zizioulas understand social trinitarianism to involve commitment to an understanding of the personhood of the persons of the Trinity such that the persons are three (modern) individual centres of consciousness, or involve commitment to an understanding whereby the persons are relations. However, Zizioulas holds neither of these positions. For Zizioulas, the divine persons are not ‘individuals’ in any sense, since each only has its hypostatic identity in relation to the other two; he identifies modern notions of individuality as characteristic of fallen not divine existence. Neither does Zizioulas think of persons as relations: for Zizioulas a person is hypostasized in its relations (in communion); but he does not say that the person is the relation (to say a teacher is characterized by their act of teaching pupils is not to say that the person that is the teacher just is the act of teaching pupils). Of course Zizioulas admits that the person can be named as a σχέσις – but that is to say that the person is named synecdochically by its relational constitution.204 A fortiori, it is illegitimate to object to Zizioulas’ position on the grounds that persons ‘precede’ relations. For, ontologically, persons do not precede their causal relations of origin. And to think of the persons of the Trinity as somehow having to be first and then to be related is to think of the Trinity as existing in time, which is to say, is to think of the divine persons as created not as Creator. In addition to this, it is quite wrong to characterize Zizioulas’ position as ‘communitarian’. For this term designates not merely a number of persons, but rather forms of social existence, in which many human beings live together under some political ordering principle. (Not all groups of persons, we must remember, are communities.) But for Zizioulas, it is precisely not the case that in God the divine persons live together as distinct gods in a community under a common ordering principle. For God is not a society of many gods; rather, Father, Son and Holy Spirit exist consubstantially as one God. And the Holy Trinity, for Zizioulas, does not exist under some ordering principle – there is no ἀρχή of any sort determining the divine persons.205 Consequently, there is no meaningful sense in which Zizioulas’ doctrine of the Trinity is communitarian. Moreover, it is not the case that for Zizioulas ‘“personhood” is somehow prior to “substance”’. Zizioulas’ claim is rather that for Greek patristic ontology, divine personhood is not determined in its ὑπόστασις by nature. This is not the same thing as saying that personhood is ‘prior’ to substance (as, for example, the Plotinian One is ontologically prior to the hypostasis of Mind). Zizioulas is clear: ‘This does not mean that the persons have an ontological priority over the one substance of God, but that the one substance of God coincides with the communion of the three persons.’206 And beyond this, it is false for Zizioulas’ opponents to claim that his doctrine of the Trinity is derived from the work of Théodore de Régnon on the grounds that 204 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’, p. 50. 205 Cf. here the critique of Buber in Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 17. 206 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 134.

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Zizioulas argues that the ‘Greek’ doctrine of the Trinity proceeds from three to one, whereas the ‘Latin’ doctrine proceeds from one to three. For Zizioulas thinks of both Greek and Latin doctrines as proceeding from ‘one’ to ‘three’, with the ‘one’ being the principle (ἀρχή) of divinity. The difference, for Zizioulas, between Greek and Latin doctrines is that the ‘one’ principle of the Greek doctrine of the Trinity is the person of the Father, whereas the ‘one’ principle of the Latin doctrine is the divine οὐσία. This ontological opposition generates no logical compulsion in Zizioulas’ thought to argue from ‘the three to the one’, and so cannot be dismissed as simply regurgitating de Régnon. What underlies these anti-social-trinitarian objections to Zizioulas’ position then is not his own theology, but rather the default communitarianism of postliberal Anglicanism, according to which all harmonious interpersonal relations must be conceived of as those of a communal society of individuals. Reading Zizioulas’ rejections of ‘Latin’ trinitarianism, they take it that therefore he ‘must be’ advocating a community of divine persons, since for them that is the only form of harmonious interpersonal existence. Personalism and Existentialism The Words ὑπόστασις and πρόσωπον Regarding objections to Zizioulas’ supposed ‘personalism’ and ‘existentialism’, we may begin by considering the objection that Zizioulas’ ontology is to be called into question because the words ὑπόστασις and πρόσωπον are identified with both ἄτοµον and with non-personal being in patristic texts. In response to this, we must observe that Zizioulas’ argument is ontological not semantic. He is not providing a semantic history of the words ὑπόστασις and πρόσωπον (although he does make comments on the semantic developments of these terms). To be clear on what he is doing, we must distinguish between three different employments of the terms ὑπόστασις and person. Firstly, we must identify Zizioulas’ employment of the terms ὑπόστασις and πρόσωπο when he uses these terms, according to his own understandings of them, as the terms by which he articulates his ontological account. These understandings are, as we have seen, understandings whereby ὑπόστασις designates that which constitutes the ontological identity of a being, and according to which πρόσωπο signifies that which is picked out by the pronouns ‘I’, ‘ye’, ‘he’, ‘she’ and ‘you’, but not by ‘it’. Secondly, we must distinguish from this first employment the employments of ὑπόστασις and πρόσωπον made by classical and patristic authors. As Zizioulas recognizes, and as is unquestionably the case, the meanings of these terms change throughout the period stretching from classical Athens to the iconoclastic controversy. Thirdly, we must discriminate from both employments the meaning which Zizioulas finds given to personhood in existentialist authors, a meaning according to which the person qua person is possessed of absolute ontological freedom. Zizioulas does not claim that there are any Fathers whose semantic employment of the term πρόσωπον absolutely coincides with the existentialist employment of the term.


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Now, it is not the goal of Zizioulas’ programme to claim that the way in which particular Fathers used the words ὑπόστασις and πρόσωπον must correlate exactly with his own employment of these terms. His account is an account of their ontology, not a revision of a patristic Greek lexicon. When Zizioulas provides an account of the ontological positions of different Fathers, he does not (unless he explicitly states otherwise) employ the terms ‘ὑπόστασις’ and ‘person’ in the sense of the Fathers whom he is considering, but in his own sense. For the patristic texts and language Zizioulas considers belong to the material whose meaning he is explaining; but his explanation is expressed in his own language. And this is exactly as it should be – everyone is entitled to their own voice. Thus, for example, when Zizioulas says that the Cappadocian Fathers identified in divinity the ὑπόστασις with the πρόσωπο, not the φύσις, he is not providing a semantic commentary on the way in which the Cappadocians themselves used the word ὑπόστασις. Rather, he is saying that, for the Cappadocians, in God, that which determines the ontological identity of being is not the ‘nature’ (in Zizioulas’ sense) but the ‘person’ (in Zizioulas’ sense).207 Should the Cappadocians have happened to use the words ὑπόστασις and πρόσωπον in ways different from Zizioulas, this would make absolutely no difference whatsoever to the force of Zizioulas’ ontological and theological claims. It is no part of Zizioulas’ programme to show that the meanings the Cappadocians gave to these words are absolutely isomorphic to the meanings he gives to these words. Similarly, for Zizioulas, the fact that St Athanasius identified the words ὑπόστασις and οὐσία does not make him a modalist – it shows only that he meant something different by these words from what we do today.208 Consequently, it is no refutation of Zizioulas’ ontology to point out that he accords different meanings to the words ὑπόστασις and/or πρόσωπον than does a particular Father. What is more significant here is that Zizioulas’ anglophone patristicist detractors should claim otherwise. Essentially their claim amounts to the assertion that Zizioulas is at fault in his theology for not following the semantic employment of particular words by particular Fathers, a claim which depends upon the presupposition that the only legitimate way to engage in Orthodox theology today is to write theology in which (at least certain) words that occur in the Fathers are used in ‘exactly the same sense’ as they are used in the Fathers. But this really amounts to the supposition that one must conform one’s employment of terms to the ways in which such terms were used by certain favoured Fathers – since not all Fathers used terms in the same way. And it amounts moreover to the assertion that one must conform one’s employment of such terms to the ways in which these favoured Fathers’ employments of such terms are analysed by patristic scholarship – since this is, for these objectors, the means by which one determines what these ‘legitimate’ employments of terms are. Only if one accepts these principles can the observations that Zizioulas uses the words ὑπόστασις and πρόσωπο in a different way from the Fathers have any force against the legitimacy of his theology. Underlying such criticisms is an unspoken presupposition that Orthodox theological speech should be submitted to the bar of the patristics monograph. 207 Ibid, p. 36. 208 Cf. ibid, p. 36, n. 23.

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And what underlies this is the identification of Orthodox theology with Anglican patristics that is characteristic of English Orthodox theology. Against such an approach, we may cite from the Divine Names of Dionysius the Areopagite: In my opinion, it would be unreasonable and silly to look at words rather than at the power of the meanings. Anyone seeking to understand the divine things should never do this, for this is the procedure followed by those who do not allow empty sounds to pass beyond their ears, who shut them out because they do not wish to know what a particular phrase means or how to convey its sense through equivalent but more effective phrases. People like this are concerned with meaningless letters and lines, with syllables and phrases which they do not understand, which do not get as far as the thinking part of their souls, and which make empty sounds on their lips and in their hearing.209

Ontological Question-begging Beyond this, we may observe that of the various ontological objections made to Zizioulas’ position by his detractors, none are argued, and all beg the question. This is true firstly of Sarah Coakley’s assertion that St Gregory of Nyssa endorses a ‘radical Platonism’, according to which Gregory gives logical and ontological priority to the common οὐσία over the particular. (She takes this idea over from Maurice Wiles, who himself merely asserts but does not argue for it. If this objection is to be made good against Zizioulas, it must be made clear in this objection why logical and ontological priority – in Zizioulas’s sense – are to be fused thus, and why it is that St Gregory attributes the ἀρχή of divinity to the divine οὐσία over the persons – again with both terms being understood in Zizioulas’ sense.) Likewise question-begging is Lucian Turcescu’s identification of the Cappadocians’ understanding of the person with an Aristotelian substance with accidents. (To demarcate a particular in terms of its characteristics need be no more than a synecdochical way of speaking; if the objection is to have any force, overall ontological considerations must be mounted to explain why such an identification is not to be understood thus.) Similarly, although not identically, Andrew Louth’s suggestions against Zizioulas that the beginnings of personalist ontology are found in Boethius and Proclus presupposes that which it seeks to demonstrate. For to see the beginnings of personalism in the notion of an ‘individual substance of a rational nature’ and in the notion of ‘self-reflective consciousness’ is to equate personhood with precisely the sort of anti-koinonetic individualism which is what Zizioulas rejects as pertaining to true personhood. As such, to mount an argument which presupposes such an individualistic conception of personhood is to presuppose Zizioulas to be wrong, not to show him to be mistaken.

209 Dionysius the Areopagite, Div. nom. 4.11 (PG 3 708B-C) in B.R. Suchla, Corpus Dionysiacum i: Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita. De divinis nominibus, Patristische Texte und Studien 33 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990).


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Further Theological Objections Divinity and Communion Next, we must recognize the untenability of Behr’s objection that divinity cannot be identified with communion on the grounds that ‘it is as partaking of the same divinity that Father and Son are in unity’. For Behr’s position presupposes an illegitimate denial of the simplicity of God. The divinity is entirely simple, indivisible and without parts ([ἡ Θεότης] ἁπλῆ καί ... ἀµερής καὶ ἀδιαίρετος).210 Such divine simplicity is due, firstly, to the communion of persons: ‘the whole Father is completely in the whole Son and Spirit; the whole Son is completely in the whole Father and Spirit; and the whole Holy Spirit is completely in the whole Father and Son’ (Ὅλος γὰρ ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ Υἱῷ καὶ τῷ Πνεύµατι τελείως ἐστίν ὁ Πατήρ· καὶ ὅλος ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ Πατρὶ καὶ τῷ Πνεύµατι τελείως ἐστίν ὁ Υἱός· καὶ ὅλον ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ Πατρὶ καὶ τῷ Υἱῷ τελείως ἐστὶ τὸ Πνεῦµα τὸ ἅγιον), with the consequence that neither the Father, the Son nor the Holy Spirit exists apart from their union with the other persons such that they could be divided into parts. Simplicity in divinity is due secondly to the fact that there is no division of divinity between the divine persons. For ‘the whole and complete Divinity is completely in the complete Father; the whole and complete Divinity is completely in the complete Son; and the whole and complete Divinity is completely in the complete Holy Spirit’ (ὅλη ἐστὶν ἡ αὐτὴ τελεία τελείως ἐν τελείῳ τῷ Πατρί· καὶ ὅλη τελεία τελείως ἡ αὐτὴ ἐν τελείῳ τῷ Υἱῷ ἡ αὐτή· καὶ ὅλη τελεία τελείως ἡ αὐτὴ ἐν τελείῳ τῷ ἁγίῳ Πνεύµατι). This entails that the divinity is identical to each of the divine persons: the whole divinity is both the Father and in the whole Father ([ἡ] ὅλη [Θεότης] Πατήρ, καὶ ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ Πατρί), is both the whole Son and in the whole Son (ὅλος ὅλη [Θεότης], καὶ ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ αὐτῇ ὁ Υἱός), and is both the Holy Spirit and in the Holy Spirit (ὅλη Πενῦµα ἅγιον ἡ αὐτή [Θεότης], καὶ ἐν ὅλῳ τῷ Πενύµατι τῷ ἁγίῳ). This position entails the identity of divinity with communion. For the communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is not something in addition to Father, Son and Holy Spirit (for example, a fourth hypostateity), but precisely the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in their indivisible interrelatedness. Consequently, the identity of the whole divinity with the Father, with the Son and with the Holy Spirit is at the same time the identity of the divinity with the communion of the Trinity. And this is the position which Zizoulas, in line with the theology of the Orthodox Church, maintains. Behr’s objection to Zizioulas’ position entails that he consider the divinity to not be identical to the communion of persons – which is to say, it requires that he consider the communion of persons in God to be something different from the divinity. But this means either that the divinity is not identical to the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, or that the communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit is something over-and-above the persons themselves. Either way, it entails an understanding of God as consisting of two ontological ‘parts’: a koinonetic part and a non-koinonetic part. But this, either way, is a denial of the divine simplicity and the assertion of an ontological dualism in God quite incompatible with the Orthodox understanding 210 For this and what follows, Maximus the Confessor, Cap. theol. et oecon., 2.1 (PG 90. 1125) in PG 90: 1084–1173.

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of God, and which must be rejected within Orthodox theology accordingly. What underlies this objection is the idea that since the words ‘divinity’ and ‘communion’ have irreducibly different meanings, they must therefore have ontologically diverse references. This presupposes a grammar of sameness and difference which is essentially that of material objects (either these two words name the same object, or they name different objects). However, in the case of God, such criteria of sameness and difference do not apply. What is displayed in Behr’s thought here is the default empiricism of Anglican patristics, for which all being is conceived metaphysically as if it were material being. Projection and Ecclesiology We may now turn to the objections made against Zizioulas concerning ‘projection’ and the allegation that he conceived of there being ‘two communions’, one divine and one human. For Behr, appealing to Kilby, Zizioulas’ position is an illegitimate ‘projection’ of a favoured unifying attribute of human community onto the Trinity; Zizioulas position also, Behr thinks, sets up the Trinity and the Church as two ‘separated’ communions, with the Church ‘a distinct entity reflecting the divine being’ with no ‘clear [notion] about how the two intersect’. The basic problem with these objections is that they each reject positions which Zizioulas does not hold. For Zizioulas, as we have seen, baptism is a new birth in which the human being is newly hypostasized in the mode of being of Jesus Christ. This ontological re-constitution and incorporation is not, however, a re-constitution and incorporation into a separated and individualized hypostasis, but rather one into the hypostasis of the one who is the only-begotten of the Father, existing in and only in an absolute perichoretic reciprocity with the Father and the Holy Spirit.211 As such, the communion of the Church is a participation (an already eschatological participation) in the mode of divine being itself, the mode of catholic, koinonetic love. Consequently, for Zizioulas, it is not possible to ‘project’ the mode of being of the Church onto the divine being, since the mode of being of the Church already is the mode of being of divine being; and, for Zizioulas, there are not ‘two communions’, one divine and one human – rather there is one divine communion, in which humans participate, this participation being the ecclesial mode of being that is the Church. Again, the presuppositions of these objections to Zizioulas reveal something about those who make them. For essentially they presume the notion that baptism is not a hypostatic incorporation into the mode of being of Christ, and that the ecclesial mode of being into which one is baptized is a mode of being which is different from that of the Second Person of the Trinity, and which images it only externally (at best). And what underlies these objections – which both fit very nicely with the FrancoRussian caricature of ‘Western Christianity’212 – is either the universal thesis that it is not possible for humanity to exist in the divine mode of being, or the particular thesis that this is not what happens in the Church. The former possibility entails a denial of Orthodox Christology, since it makes it impossible to uphold the Orthodox 211 Cf. esp. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 56, n. 50. 212 Cf. Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, trans. Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1957), p. 215.


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understanding that the ὑπόστασις of Jesus Christ was God the Word, that in Christ we have humanity existing according to the mode of being of divinity. The latter possibility either forms part of an outright denial of θέωσις, or separates θέωσις from the Church (locating it, for example, in individual non-ecclesial experience). Either way, we have a fundamental rejection of the principle that salvation-as-deification is found in the Church. Behr’s Fundamental Objection to Zizioulas’ Theology Lastly, we may consider the fundamental objection mounted by Behr to Zizioulas’ theological project as a whole. This objection, as we have seen, is based on Behr’s belief that an enquiry requires a ὑπόθεσις, this constituting the ‘first principles’ of this enquiry (conceived in Aristotelian fashion); that the ὑπόθεσις of Christian theology (its canon) is found in the Scriptures; that philosophy does not begin with first principles taken from the Scriptures; that philosophy therefore rejects the canon of truth and so is alien to Christian theology; that Zizioulas’ ‘theology’ is really a philosophy in this sense, and that therefore it is not Christian theology. As with the other objections, this objection too has no force against Zizioulas’ thought, for three reasons. Firstly, this objection has no force against Zizioulas’ account of the development of Greek and patristic ontology. For Zizioulas’ account is concerned to show how the Greek Fathers, upon the basis of the Scriptures and their eucharistic experience (which one cannot oppose to the canon of truth), were critical of and rejected certain ontological views found amongst classical Greeks which were incompatible with the true λόγος of being made manifest in Jesus Christ. This historical account of Zizioulas’ does not abandon the canon of truth for Greek philosophy, but rejects those aspects of Greek philosophy incompatible with the canon of truth. Such reasoning is invulnerable to Behr’s objection. Indeed, if one were to insist upon a Scriptural reference in theology, then such a procedure would be essentially that of showing what it is that the Scriptures do not say. Secondly, Behr’s attack is illegitimate as an attack on Zizioulas’ employment of ontological language. Laying aside the fact that concepts such as ‘being’, ‘λόγος’, ‘truth’ and ‘life’ are all Scriptural, the fact that Jesus Christ is the true Λόγος of being means that all ontological questions are ultimately fulfilled in him. That is to say, the true λόγος of any being, of any region of being, or of being simpliciter is to be found ultimately in Jesus Christ. And again, to make this clear is not to deny the canon of truth; it is to affirm it. It could even be presented as providing a commentary on the meaning of the Scriptures which employ ontological language. Thirdly, Behr’s objection has no purchase against Zizioulas’ argument that existentialist dilemmas concerning personhood have their resolution only in Jesus Christ. For Zizioulas’ argument consists precisely in showing that the λόγος (meaning) of personhood is found in Jesus Christ and nowhere else. If it is on this basis that Behr charges Zizioulas with rejecting the canon of truth, then his objection rests upon the claim that for Zizioulas to show an existentialist that Christ constitutes the resolution of his dilemma concerning personhood, Zizioulas must himself reject the canon of truth. This, however, does not follow. If someone has a problem which they are unable to solve because they lack the principles in terms of which the problem is resoluble, then my explaining to them how their problem is resoluble does not entail

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that I myself, in order to show them, have to abandon the principles in terms of which the problem may be solved. (For example, if I am to show someone how to wire a plug, I do not need to forget how to wire a plug and then re-discover this knowledge along with them from a state of re-found ignorance.) Rather, what I need to do is to guide them stage by stage from the understanding I have. And this is precisely what Zizioulas does vis-à-vis the existentialist: at no point does he bracket Christianity as if it were a possibility but not the actuality; rather he presents Christ consistently as being in reality the fulfilment of the existentialist’s dilemma, by showing how that dilemma does not exist within patristic ontology. As such, Zizioulas in no way departs from the canon of truth in this way either. Orthodoxy and Grammar From this I take it to be clear that the specific lines of argumentation against Zizioulas’ thought mounted by anglophone Orthodox patristic theologians has no force against Zizioulas’ theology. What I wish to do now is to turn more generally to the postliberalism which such patristic theology has appropriated from Anglican patristic thought. It will be my argument here that the understanding of doctrine and theology as ‘grammatical’ which forms the backbone of postliberal thought, and particularly the manner in which this is appropriated by Behr, is deeply problematic for Orthodox theology. For it presupposes ontological notions which are irreconcilable to the ontological commitments of Orthodox theology. Grammar, Ontology and Communion Although presented as if it were a non-ontological thesis, the notion of ‘theology as grammar’ hides within itself an ontology. This ontology becomes evident through the division of language into ‘first-order’ and ‘second-order’, a division upon which the notion of theology as grammar depends. This view alleges that whereas ‘firstorder’ language concerns objects (and so also our interaction with objects), ‘secondorder’ language (‘grammatical’ language) is language about first-order language – in particular, it is about the ‘rules’ by which first-order language operates. On such a view, objects pertain to the first-order, and linguistic ‘rules’ pertain to the secondorder. There are no second-order intrinsically meaningful beings (for example, Platonic Forms) such that the meaning of a first-order object is to be understood in terms of its participation in such a second-order being. But neither are objects of the first-order intrinsically meaningful – for it is only in terms of linguistic rules that first-order objects are understood in the way in which they are understood. (Thus, for example, a chess-piece is only understood truly as a chess-piece by virtue of the linguistic rules of chess.) But then, since second-order language stipulates the rules by which first-order language depicts objects, first-order language does not designate objects simply ‘as they are’, but only according to particular rules of representation/interaction. Apart from rules of representation/interaction, objects do not have particular ‘meaning’ and are then, to that extent, meaningless. But all objects are like this, since all objects are first-order objects. Hence, at the root of


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the notion of ‘theology as grammar’ lies an understanding of being as comprised of intrinsically meaningless objects, given meaning only by rules of representation/ interaction. Such an ontology is, of course, a form of ontological nominalism. As such, all ‘grammatical’ theology, far from being metaphysically neutral, is – to the extent that it is ‘grammatical’ – in fact a species of nominalism. Such a grammatical nominalism in turn commits its adherent to a particular linguistic understanding of communion. On the dichotomy of first- and secondorder which is here presupposed, communion must be conceived of as a secondorder principle, since it is something common in terms of which many beings may be said to be one. But since the second-order domain is understood exclusively in terms of linguistic rules, this means that communion can only be understood as the union of individual human beings by their common adhesion to a particular array of linguistic rules. But, since this is what a social community consists in, communion must therefore be understood as essentially identical to social community. (Here it becomes clear why postliberal Anglicans and their Orthodox followers conceive of Zizioulas’ trinitarianism automatically as a ‘social’ trinitarianism.) The Church as communion must then be thematized as a particular type of social community of individuals. And since linguistic rules are rules which determine first-order linguistic representation of objects, the communion of the Church must consist essentially in a unity of representation and action, in which those in the Church share a common way of seeing and interacting with things. And the significance of this, in turn, is that it entails that ecclesial communion is a matter not of truth, but of community affiliation. For there can be no koinonetic union on the basis of truth simpliciter, since there is no truth outside a particular paradigm of representation/interaction. (On this view, what is ‘true’ within such a paradigm is simply what accords with the paradigm itself.) As such, unity can only consist in the sharing of a common linguistic perspective, not in a shared perception of a truth which transcends such perspectives. (It is for this reason that, for Behr, what unites the Church is a unity of ‘interpretation’ of the Bible and not a unity based upon common recognition of historical truth.) But since the sharing of a common linguistic perspective (in both representation and interaction) is essentially what makes a community, it then follows that ecclesial communion is essentially a matter of community-affiliation not truth (or rather, truth is assimilated to ‘agreement with the perspective of the community’). On such a view, to be in the Church is primarily to be ‘one of us’ – and not ‘one of them’ (since there are always different communities, perspectives, interpretations). This is – significantly – what underlies Behr’s denial that there is any knowledge of Christ outside the Bible. Firstly, since beings possess no meaning apart from some ‘interpretation’, there is no true Λόγος (meaning) to be found in worldly beings in themselves. As such, Christ the Λόγος cannot be discovered in uninterpreted worldly beings. Rather, Christ can only be discovered by means of the ‘true’ interpretation. But interpretation requires a rule in terms of which it interprets (a ὑπόθεσις). And, for Behr, the ‘true’ ὑπόθεσις for discovering Christ – that is, the one that is the ὑπόθεσις of his community of interpretation – is the Church’s ὑπόθεσις for finding Christ in the Scriptures. This entails, however, that for Behr it is only in the Scriptures that Christ may be known.

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Orthodox Theology cannot be Reduced to Grammatical Ontology Such a grammatical ontology must be opposed by Orthodox theology in each of its distinctive claims. Firstly, grammatical ontology’s equation of truth in Christ with an interpretation and its concomitant denial that beings are intrinsically meaningful must be rejected outright as incompatible with the Resurrection. The Resurrection of Christ marks the eschatological fulfilment of the covenant of God with Israel,213 and as such marks the divine fulfilment of history in the ‘everlasting kingdom and … dominion’ of God which ‘endures throughout all generations’.214 This fulfilment is the fulfilment of the divine will for creation which has been constant from the beginning.215 But the realization of this kingdom is not a secondary imposition upon a previously existent domain of beings. For beings have being only as expressions of the will of God.216 But the will of God is meaningful (λογικός). As such, each expression of the will of God is the expression of a meaning (λόγος). Therefore each being is intrinsically meaningful (λογικός), expressing a meaning (λόγος) – what it is for a being to be is for that being to be the expression of a λόγος.217 As such, the Resurrection, as the realization of the will of God, is the realization of the true meaning (λόγος) of each being. Consequently, the Resurrection entails that beings cannot be understood as intrinsically meaningless nominalistic entities requiring external interpretation to be rendered meaningful. Rather, each and every being has a true meaning (λόγος) which is manifested in the Resurrection of Christ. Secondly, the cardinal distinction of grammatical ontology between firstorder and second-order is invalid. For since the eschatological realization of the Kingdom of God inbrought by the Resurrection is nothing other than the eucharistic incorporation of all things into the crucified and risen Jesus Christ who recapitulates all in himself,218 it follows that the will of God, and hence the meaning (λόγος) of each and every created being, is a participation and communion in the ὑπόστασις that is Jesus Christ. Therefore ‘the one Λόγος is many λόγοι … [and] the many λόγοι are the one Λόγος to whom all things are related and who exists in himself without confusion, the essential and individually distinctive God, the Λόγος of God the Father’,219 of whom, in whom, through whom and to whom are all beings.220 As such, it is not the case that all being may be located on a ‘first-order’ domain of objects, and the second-order level of meaning identified exclusively with nonobjective ‘rules’ (whose ontological status, we must add, is highly unclear). For that by which beings are truly meaningful is the being (ὑπόστασις) Jesus Christ – Christ is the Λόγος of all beings. As such, he is both ‘first-order’ and ‘secondorder’, which is to say, the distinction between first- and second-order collapses in 213 Isa. 25:7–8; 26:19; Ezek. 37:13; 1 Cor. 15:20–28; Col. 1:18. 214 Ps. 144:13. Cf. Dan. 2:44–5. 215 Eph. 1:9–11. 216 Rev. 4:11. Cf. Gen. 1:1–2;4; Ps. 32:6; 103:26–34; 148:5; Isa. 40:12–14, 28; Jer. 10:12–16. 217 Cf. Maximus the Confessor, Amb. 7 (PG 91: 1085A–B). 218 1 Cor. 10:16–17; 11:23–6; 15:28; Eph. 1:10. 219 Maximus the Confessor, Amb. 7 (PG 91: 1077C). 220 Cf. Acts 17:28; Rom. 11:36; Col. 1:15–17.


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Christ, so that it is inappropriate to employ this distinction as basic within Orthodox theology. As such grammatical ontology must be rejected in that it postulates this distinction precisely as basic. Thirdly, since the Church has its being precisely as incorporated into Christ – as the body of Christ – it cannot be understood as a community of interpretation. For what binds such a community together is not the truth, but the interpretation (that is, what the community considers to be true), and indeed the presently agreed-upon interpretation. It is always the present interpretation not the truth which is the principle of the unity of a community (for what is taken ‘as true’ within the community is the shared interpretation). A such, a community is always premised upon an exclusion of otherness – it is always bound together by this interpretation and not another one. But the principle of unity of the Church is Jesus Christ – ‘you are all one in Christ Jesus’221 – which is to say, the principle of unity of the Church is the truth, the true meaning (Λόγος) of being itself, and not a particular interpretation of being. The one who is in the Church is not one of a group, not ‘one of us rather than one of them’, but is the one who no longer lives for himself or for any interpretative group at all, the one in whom Christ lives,222 and who, as such, embraces and takes into himself the fulness, completeness and diversity of being in its true meaning (λόγος).223 Ecclesial existence thus contains within itself the full diversity of true being; it assimilates without absorption every different form of being.224 So the unity of the Church is never the unity of us not them, but a unity such that I have my being, we have our being and they have their being – but we are all one in Christ. And this unity is grounded in the truth that is Jesus Christ, not any interpretative commonality between us. So, whilst ecclesiastical unities observable to the sociologist certainly do exist, such unities in no way constitute the unity of ecclesial existence; rather (where they do not betray the Church) they are reflections of unity in Christ on the social level. This is why it is possible for a saint to be separated from the ‘community’, but yet to remain truly catholic in his ecclesial existence. It is also why in Christ there is ‘neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female’ – ‘for you are all one in Christ Jesus’.225 (The Church is not a new community which stands alongside other communities in opposition to them; it is not in its being a ‘third race’ standing alongside ‘Jewish’ and ‘Greek’ communities, any more than Christians are biologically a third sex which is neither male nor female.) As such – and contra grammatical ontology – the Church in its being is not a community and cannot be understood as having unity upon the basis of a common interpretation.226 Fourthly, it follows from this that the justification of the grammatical denial of knowledge of Christ outside the Scriptures is eliminated. What Behr’s denial that

221 Gal. 3:28. 222 Gal. 2:20; 2 Cor. 5:17. 223 Cf. Sophrony Sakharov, We Shall See Him as He Is, trans. Rosemary Edmonds, rev. edn. (Tolleshunt Knights: Patriarchal Stavropegic Monastery of St John the Baptist, 1988) p. 197. 224 Cf. Maximus the Confessor, Myst. 1. 225 Gal. 3:28. 226 Cf. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 255, 259–60.

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Christ is known outside the Scriptures requires is the affirmation that our mode of being is so corrupt that we are noetically incapable of apprehending any ontological truth. (It is not a question of arguing whether there is any ‘purely natural’ knowledge of God. For according to the purely natural state of our being, when our being is according to the λόγος of our existence, then we are one with Christ and not severed from him noetically. As such, in our natural state, we know Christ.) That is to say, Behr requires a Protestant doctrine of the total depravity of reason. I shall pass this aside, on the grounds that such doctrine is not that of the Orthodox Church.227 I shall note only that, despite Behr’s denial of any ‘natural’ knowledge of God, his theology in fact entails the opposite. For in setting up and presupposing the grammatical ontology which Behr takes over from postliberalism, he in fact sets up a naturally reasoned philosophical framework (of grammar, communities, interpretations) derived from post-analytical followers of Wittgenstein which has no basis in the Scriptures, but which is used as the framework for understanding the Scriptures – and into which even God must fit. This is precisely a ‘natural theology’ of the sort which Behr claims to exclude. It is somewhat disingenuous of Behr to practise the sort of natural theologizing which he claims to reject. Conclusion: Methodological Absolutism If, then, we lay aside the fallacious and question-begging objections, what we have in this anglophone Orthodox patristicism’s rejections of Zizioulas’ thought are two forms of methodological absolutism. On the one hand, we have, in the criticisms of Zizioulas’ opposition of ὑπόστασις to ἄτοµον and of his supposed ‘existentialism’, a methodological absolutism of Anglican patristic scholarship: all Orthodox theology must conform itself in language and practice to the consensus of Anglican patristics, and it is invalid qua Orthodox theology to the extent to which it fails to do so. On the other hand, in Behr’s overall objection to Zizioulas’ thought, and in the anti-socialtrinitarian criticisms of Zizioulas, we have a methodological absolutism of neoAristotelian communitarianism and of the grammatical understanding of theology: Orthodox theology must operate uncritically within the framework of thought bequeathed by these philosophical modes of thought. Now, from what we have already said, it is clear why it is not appropriate for Orthodox theology to thus absolutize a grammatical and communitarian understanding of theology. But we must observe now in addition that no methodological absolutism is permissible within Orthodox theology. For every distinct λόγος in being is its own unique expression of the Λόγος, so that each manifests a unique mode of articulation of the true Λόγος, and as such may be legitimately employed in theology.228 As such, there are, in principle, as many modes of theology as there are λόγοι of beings, and no one of these may be taken as exclusively appropriate for theology. One cannot, therefore, deny that every mode of discourse except one’s own favoured mode is illegitimate as a mode of Orthodox theology. Indeed, to make such a denial is to

227 Cf. Rom. 1:20; Acts. 17:26–8. 228 Cf. Dionysius the Areopagite, Div.nom. 1–2.


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postulate a theological mode which will accord the word ‘Orthodox’ only to what is like me (with my preferences), transforming Orthodox theology from a discursive expression of the eschatological truth of being made manifest in Jesus Christ to a discourse of community-identity (the articulation of the position of me and my friends) – which is precisely that in which the identity of Orthodoxy does not consist. Such an understanding of theology is in essence the replacement of participation with possession, of κοινωνία with φιλαυτία. This is not to say that one may not consult Anglican patristic scholarship in the process of Orthodox theologizing; nor is it to say that one may not employ the language of ‘grammar’, ‘community’ or the distinction between first- and secondorders. What it does mean is that neither such scholarship nor such language may be taken as absolute, as absolutely normative for Orthodox theology. But in order to ensure that this does not happen, that Orthodox theology does not fall captive to a foreign absolute – as it clearly has in these criticisms of Zizioulas – it is necessary for Orthodox theology to engage in the discursive activity of distinguishing between the absolute and the relative in its own theologizing. Such activity is by no means the entire activity of Orthodox theology, but it is certainly one aspect of this activity. It is an activity which distinguishes between what may be said absolutely and what may be said only relative to some qualification – and which then articulates in what manner that which is said relatively is thus said. But this activity is not merely an activity concerned with the meanings of free-floating words. Rather, in that it is Orthodox theology – and so is concerned with the proper articulation of that meaning which is κατὰ Λόγον – it is concerned with conforming our employment of words to the being of that which we designate by those words (this being, of course, being intrinsically meaningful κατὰ Λόγον). Such activity then is concerned with the proper articulation of our language such that our language is in accordance with the intrinsic meanings (λόγοι) of beings (ὄντα). Such activity, that is to say, is ontology. Ontology is thus precisely the activity within which Orthodox theology seeks to ensure that its theological articulations are not falling prey to a philautetic captivity to forms of language and thought which presuppose an understanding of reality incompatible with that of the true meaning of being which is the eschatological Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. This is not the sole function of ontology within Orthodox theology – another is the manifestation of how the ontological aporiai of foreign ontologies are fulfilled in the truth of being disclosed in Jesus Christ – but it is one way in which ontology is manifestly necessary for the continuity of proper Orthodox theologizing. It has been the great work of the Metropolitan of Pergamon in recent years to have striven for the articulation in contemporary academic theology of the true ontology of the Orthodox Church as represented by saints such as St Maximus the Confessor and by elders such as Fr Sophrony Sakharov. In so doing he has sought to articulate the non-relativity of the meaning of being manifest in the eschatological person of the risen Christ. This meaning which he has sought faithfully to articulate shows the relativity of our concepts of ‘community’ and of ‘grammar’, and the nonabsoluteness of particular disciplines such as those of Anglican patristic scholarship. In the current Orthodox theology of the early twenty-first century, we must not forsake the ontological paths travelled by the Metropolitan of Pergamon, in which

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he has followed the Holy Fathers and has sought to articulate the truth of Orthodoxy, not as the perspective of our community, nor as the findings of our scholarship, but as the very truth of being itself.

Chapter 3

Divine Economy and Eternal Trinity Wolfhart Pannenberg

The charge made of the doctrine of the Trinity by the sixteenth-century Socinians, later Armenians and other anti-trinitarians, was that this doctrine has no proper basis in Scripture. Defenders of the doctrine, Protestant theologians in particular, had to show that Scripture really does legitimate the early Church’s development of the doctrine of the Trinity. It had to be admitted that there is no explicit statement in Scripture that the three persons of Father, Son and Spirit share one divine essence and together constitute the one God. Even the commandment to baptize in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit (Matthew 28:19) does not explicitly state the equality of the divine nature of the three, though it does speak of only a single ‘name’. The divinity of the Son and of the Spirit could be argued for separately, but the crucial issue of the equality of their divinity with that of the Father proved to be difficult on purely scriptural grounds. The case for the subordination of the Son and the Spirit to the eternal Father was felt to be strong. It was understood that the orthodox terms for their relationship to the Father, the ‘begetting’ of the Son and the ‘spiration’ of the Spirit, employed biblical words that referred, not to eternal relations between Father, Son and Spirit as distinct from, and prior to, the history of God’s revelation, but to events in that history. When Acts 13:33 quotes from Psalm 2:7 the proclamation of God, ‘Thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee’, it refers to the fulfilment of God’s promise in the resurrection of Jesus; in Luke 3:22 the same word relates to the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. That in the Gospel of John Jesus is called the ‘only begotten’ Son of the Father (John 3:16, cf. 1:14), says no more than that he is the ‘only’ Son. It should not be taken to indicate an eternal act of begetting. That the Spirit is said to ‘proceed’ from the Father (John 15:26) does not refer to an eternal procession prior to the ‘sending’ of the Spirit mentioned in the previous line, because in both phrases the present tense is used, so that the proceeding from the Father and the sending by the Son appear to relate to the same event. Though the idea of an eternal procession of the Spirit from the Father is certainly not to be ruled out, it cannot be derived with cogency from this one term. The classical theological distinction between eternal ‘procession’ and temporal ‘mission’ is not self-evident from the Scriptures, though scriptural language may be used to express such a distinction when it is required. The eternal communion of Father, Son and Spirit in the life of the one God must therefore be argued for on the basis of the threefold revelation of the one God as Father, Son and Spirit. This ‘economic’ Trinity is sufficiently evident from the biblical testimony. It is hardly possible, however, to let theological reflection end here, as Schleiermacher wished. If one recoiled from the apparently ‘speculative’

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assumption of some eternal differentiation within the one God, corresponding with the threefold form of his revelation in history, one quickly ended up with some form of Sabellianism, as is evident in Schleiermacher himself. Discussion of this issue by Schleiermacher’s students, however, initiated a return to the doctrine of an immanent Trinity. Carl Immanuel Nitzsch, in his System of Christian Doctrine (1829), was the first to argue that belief in Jesus Christ requires a threefold divine origin within the life of the eternal God himself, and in 1857 August Twesten agreed that God’s revelation in the threefold form of Father, Son and Spirit suggests a corresponding threefold differentiation within the eternal life of the one God himself. ‘As God reveals himself, thus he really is within himself because otherwise he would not be revealed’ in his revelation. Such reflections encouraged many theologians to make recourse to Augustine and Anselm’s derivation of the possibility of a threefold differentiation in the life of the one God from the idea of God as Spirit (John 4:24), on the assumption that here spirit is equivalent to reason (Nous). The God who is highest reason knows himself, and is identical with himself in that self-knowledge. This argument was the backbone of the affirmation of an immanent Trinity until Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics, where the eternal trinitarian differentiation of the one God was derived from the concept of God’s self-revelation. In revealing himself as Lord, God is subject as well as object of his self-revelation, and also the act of revelation itself. The weakness of such reasoning, however, is first that it is not based on any explicit pronouncement in the Scriptures, and secondly that this concept of God represents not so much a trinitarian as a modalist monotheism, because the three modes of self-consciousness have no personal subsistence in their relations with each other. The argument for the affirmation of an eternal Trinity should rather be taken from the implications of what the Scriptures tell us about the personal relations of the Son and the Father, and between the divine Spirit and the Father and Son. Such a procedure is suggested by Karl Rahner’s famous ‘Rule’, that the ‘economic’ Trinity is the ‘immanent’ Trinity, and vice versa.1 By affirming the ‘identity’ of the economic and immanent Trinity, Rahner did not say that there is no eternal communion between Father, Son and Spirit prior to their revelation in the history of salvation, but rather that the Trinity in the history of salvation is the ‘active revelation’ of the ‘immanent’ Trinity (Rahner, 1967: 346). Thus there is both a distinction and inseparable unity between the eternal Trinity and its revelation in history. The guiding principle of Rahner’s trinitarian theology was the revelation of the immanent Trinity in the history of salvation. He expressed this principle in terms of God’s ‘self-communication’ in Christ and by his Pneuma (Rahner, 1967: 328). His main concern was that the incarnation of the Logos in Jesus Christ was not something accidental to the eternal self-identity of the Logos, which Rahner extended to include the ‘mission’ of the divine Spirit. He did not, however, apply the thesis that the immanent Trinity must be found in the economic Trinity to the issue of the constitution of the trinitarian persons.

1 Karl Rahner, ‘Der dreifaltige Gott als Urgrund der Heilsgeschichte’, in J. Feiner and M. Lohrer (eds), Mysterium Salutis II (Einsiedeln: Benziger, 1967) p. 328.

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In classical trinitarian theology, the constitution of the persons of Son and Spirit comes from the Father, the source of all divinity, through the ‘begetting’ of the Son and through the act of letting the Spirit ‘proceed’ from that source. Both expressions are certainly biblical, and though they may be related to the ‘mission’ of Son and Spirit in the history of salvation (see above), this does not preclude the assertion that these relations also characterize their eternal relationship to the Father. After all, as we have argued, the eternal relations in the Trinity are to be found in the economic revelation of the eternal God. But why, then, are the terms indicating the ‘relations of origin’ of Son and Spirit to the Father singled out in the description of the trinitarian relations from the wealth of other terms in the Scriptures that refer to personal relations between the trinitarian persons? Thus it is said that the Son is obedient to the Father and accomplishes the Father’s work, and that the Father loves the Son and transfers to him all authority in heaven and on earth. Of the Spirit it is said that he will glorify the Son, in whom the Father is glorified. These biblical words indicate a mutuality in the relations between the trinitarian persons, a mutuality that is lost when the persons of Son and Spirit are identified exclusively by their ‘relations of origin’ to the Father. In such a description, there is just one-way traffic from the Father to Son and Spirit, a conception that may give the impression of an ontological subordination of Son and Spirit to the Father. There is certainly an ethical subordination of the Son in his obedience to the Father, and similarly the Spirit glorifies not himself, but the Son and the Father. But there is no ontological inferiority on the part of the Son and the Spirit in relation to the Father. Does this not require that, as the Son and the Spirit are dependent on the Father, the Father is dependent on his Son and the Spirit, albeit in a different way? Many years ago, when I was wrestling with this problem, John Zizioulas called my attention to an important line in Athanasius’ First Treatise against the Arians. Against the claim of the Arians that the Father is superior to the Son, because the order of origin, where the Father is the source of all divinity, is irreversible, Athanasius argued that even the Father would not be Father without the Son (Against the Arians I.29; cf. 14 and 34). Athanasius even ventured to say that Jesus’ claim that he is the truth and the life (John 14:6) implies that his is the truth and the life even of the Father himself, so that the Father would have no truth and no life, if he were without the Son (Against the Arians I.20). It is not the case, then, that the Father is God by himself, even without the Son. Rather, the Fatherhood of God depends on there being this Son. This seems to show that even the divinity of the Father is not independent of his relationship to his Son. How could he be the one God without being the Father? This consideration gives us a new appreciation of the element of mutuality in the personal relations between Father, Son and Spirit as it comes to expression in the Scriptures. The Father not only generates the Son, but entrusts his kingdom to him, making himself dependent on the mission of the Son and participating in his suffering. The resurrection of the Son is not only the vindication of the Son, but also the vindication of the Father who sent him, and of the Father’s kingdom. The Spirit not only proceeds from the Father, but is received by the Son and given by him to the believers, and the Spirit also glorifies the Son and the Father. This element of mutuality in the personal relations within the Trinity does not violate the monarchy

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of the Father. Quite the contrary, the Son and the Spirit serve the monarchy of the Father by bringing about his kingdom on earth as in heaven. The monarchy of Father cannot be considered in abstraction from the Son and the Spirit or from their work in the economy of salvation; indeed the biblical witness does not relate this monarchy primarily to the priority of the Father in generating the Son and in letting the Spirit proceed from him. Rather, if we remember Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of the Father is brought about by the obedience of the Son, and through the glorifying activity of the Spirit who inclines creatures to participate in that obedience of the Son, and thereby spreads the recognition of the Father’s kingdom. Thus the monarchy of the Father, understood in the spirit of Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom of God, unites the three persons in the life of the Trinity. To a certain extent, the mutuality in the personal relations within the Trinity was expressed in the classical doctrine of their mutual perichoresis. But this mutual indwelling was considered more in the sense of an effect of the personal relations, conceived in terms of relations of origin, than as characteristic of the personal relations themselves. Otherwise Athanasius, in his Third Treatise against the Arians, could have used the very Scripture that the Arians called upon (Against the Arians III.7) – like Jesus’ words, ‘No one is good but God alone’ (Luke 18:19), or ‘the Father is greater than I’ (John 18:28) – to spell out the unity of the Son with the Father which Athanasius rightly insisted upon: ‘I and the Father are one’ (John 10:13). Athanasius himself emphasized the personal distinction between Father and Son against the Sabellians (Against the Arians III.4), and he could have taken the words by which Jesus distinguishes himself from the Father as his evidence. This selfdistinction from the Father to the point of subordinating himself indicates precisely the unity of the Son with the Father, as does the obedience of Jesus to the mission that the Father gave him. For this reason I started saying that Jesus’ self-distinction from the Father, expressed in his obedience to the Father’s will, is the condition and evidence of his unity with the Father.2 Then I found a similar self-distinction and self-subordination on the part of the Spirit, of whom it is said that ‘he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak’ (John 15:25). Here the personal self-distinction of the Spirit from the Son and from the Father is evident, and precisely in this self-distinction the ‘Spirit of truth’ is one with the Son and the Father. Does a similar consideration apply to God the Father? If the Father is Father (and God the Father) only in his relationship with the Son he also makes himself dependent on his Son, for his Fatherhood depends on there being this Son. This comes to more concrete expression in that the Father has given all his power to the Son (Luke 10:22; Matthew 28:18). When the Son has ‘put all his enemies under his feet’ (1 Corinthians 15:23) he will subject himself to the Father so that God may be ‘all in all’ (15:28). Thus there is an element of self-distinction even in the relationship of the Father to the Son, in the handing over of his Lordship to the Son, who will hand it back to the Father and submit himself to the Father. From the beginning

2 See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology vol. I (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991) pp. 308ff., pp. 319ff.


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this was the purpose of his obedience to the Father, and of his proclamation of the coming of the kingdom. The thesis that the personal relations within the Trinity are characterized by mutual self-distinction is misunderstood and misrepresented if it is taken as a onesided emphasis on the distinction of the persons at the expense of their unity.3 The point is that self-distinction is the condition of unity, as is most evident in the case of the Son and the Spirit. The obedience and submission of the Son to the Father is the condition of his unity with the Father and of his being the Father’s eternal Son. Again, that the Spirit does not ‘speak on his own authority’, but glorifies the Son and his communion with the Father, is the condition of his being ‘the Spirit of truth’, who is one with the Father and the Son. It has been proposed that we speak of the ‘correspondence’ of the Son to the Father rather than of self-distinction.4 But it is precisely in his self-distinction from the Father, in his obedience unto death, that Jesus ‘corresponds’ to God the Father, and I have used the term ‘correspondence’ in this sense to characterize his personal relationship with the Father. There is no ‘correspondence’, however, with the Father, without obedient submission to his will, which is to say without self-distinction that does not put one’s own person in the place of God, but rather submits to the authority of the Father. Furthermore, it could be argued that the description of Jesus’ relationship to the Father in terms of ‘correspondence’ needs to be interpreted as self-distinction, otherwise his personal distinctiveness would remain unexpressed. Another misunderstanding is that self-distinction, especially in the case of the Father, would imply the idea of an ‘eternal kenosis’ within God.5 There is no reason why this should be so. There is no ‘emptying’ of the divine nature of the Father when he transfers his power and authority to the Son, because it is precisely in this proceeding that Father and the Son are united; as Athanasius said: ‘Since that Father has given all things to the Son, he possesses all things afresh in the Son’ (Against the Arians III.36). To speak of kenosis is to overlook the unity of the trinitarian persons. A similar objection has been raised about the involvement of the Father in the economy of the history of salvation. When the Father made himself dependent on the success of the mission of his Son in the world, and when, by the crucifixion of the Son, not only the Son’s but also the Father’s identity and divine reality is put in jeopardy, it seems to some that such a view ‘potentializes’ God’s highest and absolute reality, with the risk that it is lost in the uncertainties of history.6 But this 3 This charge was raised by K. Vechtel, Trinität und Zukunft. Zum Verhältnis von Philosophie und Trinitätstheologie im Denken Wolfhart Pannenbergs (Frankfurt: Knecht, 2001) p. 271, cf. p. 220, pp. 226f.; also M. Schulz, Sein und Trinität (St Ottilien: EOS Verlag, 1997) pp. 488f., pp. 493f. 4 Vechtel, Trinität und Zukunft, pp. 206ff., 203, 209, 272. 5 J.A.M. Camino, ‘Wechelseitige Selbstunterscheidung? Zur Trinitätslehre Wolfhart Pannenbergs’, in H.-L. Ollig and O.J. Wirtz (eds), Reflektierter Glaube. Festschrift für Erhard J. Kunz (Frankfurt and Munich: Hänsel, 1999) p. 147. See also Vechtel, Trinität und Zukunft, p. 195. 6 Thus Schulz, Sein und Trinität, p. 473; Vechtel, Trinität und Zukunft, pp. 196, 216, 272; and Camino, ‘Wechelseitige Selbstunterscheidung?’, p. 147.


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criticism forgets that, from the point of view of God’s eternity, history is always seen as a whole, in the light of its ultimate completion. Historical incidents that seem to put the authority and identity, and even the absolute reality, of God into question at certain moments in history are overcome in the light of the eschatological completion of God’s kingdom. So it is wrong to say that, with the transition from God’s eternity to the act of creation and to the economy of salvation, no immanent Trinity remains, or that the immanent Trinity is completely dissolved into the economic Trinity or into the historical process.7 Quite the contrary: in the face of the ambiguities of history, the contrast of God’s eternity to the life of the immanent Trinity is intensified, a contrast that will be resolved only at the end, when in the kingdom of God the creation is transformed to participate in the eternal life of the Trinity. In the light of the eschatological future, the process of the divine economy in the history of salvation is not a process of divine kenosis, but a process of God’s spontaneous and gracious offering of himself for communion with his creatures so that they may participate in his eternal life. The eternal Trinity and the divine economy in the history of God’s creation must not be identified without distinction, but neither may they be separated. It is within the divine economy, in the history of God’s self-revelation in Jesus Christ, that we learn about the personal distinctions within the life of the one eternal God. The biblical witness tells us about the personal relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that constitutes the different persons in the Trinity. It tells us about the mutuality of their personal relations, and if mutuality is indispensable to all truly personal communion, the trinitarian communion of Father, Son and Holy Spirit must be understood to be the eternal source and model of mutuality in all personal communion. The emphasis on this element of mutuality between the trinitarian persons, evident in the historical revelation of the trinitarian God through Jesus Christ from the biblical witness, does not replace what has been called the relations of origin in the classical development of the trinitarian doctrine of the Church. The Son is indeed ‘begotten’ from the Father, the Spirit ‘proceeds’ from the Father, and these relations are not reversible. But they have to be understood from, and complemented by, what the Scriptures say about the mutuality of the Father and Son, and between them and the Spirit. The Son is begotten from the Father not without his obedience, or his witness to the kingdom of the Father, and in his voluntary obedience the Son has his personal distinction from the Father. On the Father’s part, the act of begetting cannot be separated from the act of transferring his kingdom to the Son, which manifests his love of the Son. The Spirit again has his personal distinction from the Father in the act of glorifying the Son in his communion with the Father, and the Father in his Son. The ‘procession’ of the Spirit from the Father as such is not yet evidence of his personal distinction, except when the Spirit is understood as the one who glorifies the Father, even as he is received by the Son, and who glorifies the Father and the Son as he is given to the faithful. The mutuality in the personal relations, then, secures the personal distinctions as well as the communion between the persons. In their personal distinctions the persons themselves are active. The activity is not only on the part of God the Father, 7

Vechtel, Trinität und Zukunft, pp. 215f.


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but also on the part of the Son and Spirit. It is this work of self-distinction which constitutes their personal distinctiveness as well as of their communion with the other persons. In distinguishing himself from the Father, the Son corresponds to the Father’s authority and has communion with him, and similarly for the Spirit, and in letting the Son and Spirit be what they are, the Father enjoys his communion with them. The self-distinction of the historical persons, then, connects the classical doctrine of the constitution of the persons with their perichoretic communion. Whatever can be said about the eternal Trinity is to be found in the historical revelation of God, in the economy of salvation. But there are differences between the eternal Trinity and the particularities of the history of salvation. One of these differences is accounted for by the role of anticipation in the historical process and historical experience. In the historical process everything is changed, and our historically conditioned experience of meaning and truth remains provisional. That does not mean that ultimate meaning and ultimate truth are not available within history, but they are perceived by means of anticipation. Anticipation is the form in which, along with elements of the provisional, ultimate truth and meaning are present.8 This is also true for the life of faith, in contrast to the eschaton. In the act of faith we embrace the ultimate truth of God, but the final vindication of our faith is still to come in the eschatological vision. We have an analogy in this awareness of the provisional status of our knowledge of God in a history that is not yet complete, with the act of self-distinction from God that all human creatures must make. Contrary to the first human beings, whose sin consisted in wanting to be like God (Genesis 3:5, 3:22), this act of self-distinction has been fully realized in Jesus’ relationship with the Father. The analogy consists in recognition of this difference. But while, in the case of anticipation, the difference occurs as a qualification of our possession of truth or meaning, in the case of personal self-distinction the focus must be on the difference itself. Certainly the acknowledgement of the difference is a condition of a communion with the one from whom we differ. There is some analogy again with the awareness of such a difference in our anticipatory knowledge of truth and meaning. But in the case of the self-distinction in the personal relation of the Son with the Father, communion with the Father is only dialectically implicit in the act of self-distinction and obedience. In the trinitarian relationships, communion with the other persons is not anticipated, but implicit in the act of personal selfdistinction. So it is incorrect to say that, in his self-distinction from the Father, Jesus ‘anticipates’ his own eternal identity as the Son of the Father.9 Rather, it is implicit 8 Vechtel, Trinität und Zukunft, pp. 240f. recognizes my emphasis on the presence of what is anticipated in the act of anticipation, but with other critics he still tends to stress the element of difference in it, to the point of opposing the concept of anticipation to that of the gift of God’s presence (vorweg geschenkte[n] Gegenwart) in his historical revelation (p. 244), as though Vechtel had forgotten my emphasis on the presence of the truth in the event of anticipation, which not only occurs in our subjective perception, but also in historical reality. I cannot make sense, however, of what Schulz (Sein und Trinität, p. 473) calls my ‘anticipatory theory of truth’ (cf. also Vechtel, p. 241). Each assertion anticipates the truth it affirms, but the truth itself is not anticipatory. I have advocated a coherence theory of truth, not an anticipatory concept of truth. 9 Thus Vechtel, Trinität und Zukunft, pp. 224, 226, 229.

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in his self-distinction from the Father that he is the Son, who perfectly corresponds to the Fatherhood of God. Though it took the Church centuries to develop this trinitarian doctrine in explicit terms, the doctrine of the Trinity is based in the mutual relations of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to which God’s revelation in Scripture and in Jesus Christ testifies.

Chapter 4

The Work of the Holy Spirit: The Differentiation of Human and Divine Salvific Acts in the Pneumatomachian Controversy Markus Mühling

The theology of John D. Zizioulas has become exceptionally influential within and far beyond his own confession. His theology has not only had a profound effect on ecumenical discussion, but has been fruitful in the theologies of almost all Christian confessions, quite apart from ecumenical dialogue. His theology has made contributions in various areas – the doctrine of God, anthropology and ecclesiology – and has assisted with such central themes of theology as, for example, the concept of love.1 Zizioulas presents an innovative and comprehensive personal and relational framework for the entire Christian faith. This framework is not simply his own discovery or the result of his own explication, but comes from patristic, and above all Cappadocian, theology. Adolf von Harnack argued that the development of patristic doctrine represented a Hellenization of Christianity.2 Werner Elert found this thesis untenable and insisted on the contrary thesis of a Christianizing of Hellenism.3 But it has been left to Zizioulas to show comprehensively what this really means. Fourthcentury Cappadocia may have seen nothing less than an ontological revolution. Beginning with the exact conceptual differentiation of ousia and hypostasis within the bounds of a doctrine of the Trinity, a genuine Christian ontological system came into being which ran contrary to all Hellenistic philosophies, regardless of whether they were Platonic, Aristotelian or even neo-Platonic. This Christian system allowed for the ontological priority of the person over substance, of the particular over the general, of freedom over necessity and relationality over individualism.4 1 Cf. J.D. Zizioulas, ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’, in Christoph Schwöbel (ed.), Trinitarian Theology Today (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995) pp. 44–60, esp. p. 56; and M. Mühling, Gott ist Liebe. Studien zum Verständnis der Liebe als Modell des Trinitatarischen Redens von Gott, 2nd Ed. (Marburg: Elwert, 2005) pp. 197–212. 2 Cf. A. v. Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1909) vol. 1, p. 702; vol. 2, p. 52. 3 Cf. W. Elert, Der Ausgang der altkirchlichen Christologie. Eine Untersuchung über Theodor von Pharan und seine Zeit als Einführung in die alte Dogmengeschichte, ed. V. W. Maurer and E. Bergsträßer (Berlin: Lutherisches Verlagshaus, 1957) p. 14. 4 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’.

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Of course we can ask to what degree we find this is genuinely the achievement of the Cappadocians, or an innovation that should be credited to Zizioulas. It must be admitted that as a result of Zizioulas’ work the Fathers are being taken seriously again as discussion partners in systematic theology in the Reformed churches of the West. Despite their historical distance, the Cappadocians are now no less important than the modern Protestant ‘classics’, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Barth or Althaus. From a Reformation perspective, the centre of theology is surely the doctrine of justification, and so the new significance of the patristic theology of the East is a surprise. The centre of the doctrine of justification is the differentiation of the opus hominum and the opus dei, the differentiation and relatedness of human and divine activity, above all in the question of salvation. Right up to our own day there has been no reconciliation with the Roman Church of the West on this issue. It is not usually thought that the Orthodox tradition of the East even addressed the problem of telling apart divine from human works, let alone that it has a solution to offer to us. Can the central concern of Reformation theology, the differentiation of the opus hominum from the opus dei, be formulated and solved by the trinitarian theology discovered by the Cappadocians? To clarify this question, let us take a look in a direction to which Zizioulas has pointed. In this instance, that means examining with the high point of trinitarian doctrine in the theology of the Cappadocians. The Arian-Eunomian controversy is not as significant here as the struggle against the Pneumatomachists and the stress on the full divinity of the Holy Spirit. We will examine Basil’s insights into pneumatology, and adopt them for our own use. At first sight, the historical research does not encourage us to search for an answer to our question in Basil’s writings: Basil, who called for the sovereignty of the Holy Spirit to be recognised, did actually set boundaries to its omnipotence, insofar as he set the moral preparation of human beings as a precondition for the rule of the Spirit.5

We may want to object that the search for clear differentiation of the opus hominum and the opus dei was first underway in the West and was first given a solution by Augustine in the course of the Pelagian controversy, a solution later fully unpacked by Luther. Will we lose our way if we turn to the Cappadocians and the Eastern tradition? After all, they did not address this question explicitly. Surely the doctrine of the Holy Spirit can be summarized as a ‘monks’ doctrine’ so that, if we turn to Basil, we can expect only anachronistically formulated ‘semi-Pelagian heresies’?6 But if Zizioulas is right, Cappadocian theology brings about an ontological revolution. It is the revolution which dissolves Hellenistic metaphysics and generates a genuine Christian understanding of reality in which it is not generalities but the person which takes ontological priority; and in which the fall is to be understood as subjection to slavery under nature and the depersonalization of humanity. The accusation is made against Zizioulas that, in his theology, the fall cannot be finally 5 Hermann Dörries, De Spiritu Sancto: Der Beitrag des Basilius zum Abschluß des trinitarischen Dogmas (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956) p. 184. 6 Cf. ibid, p. 160.

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explained because it coincides with the constitution of the natural world. Zizioulas certainly believes that the fall exists in a limitation, which cannot be assigned to God, of the structures of relationality to creaturely structures of relationality, including the restrictions of the biological hypostasis, but that this does not mean the total destruction of hypostatic nature. We can certainly ask if Zizioulas has to accept a double ontology, a relational-personal one for the creation which is reconciled and full of integrity, and a substantial-natural one for the fallen creation.7 This problem is not insoluble if we see the restriction of nature within the frame of relationalpersonal ontology as an instrument of salvation which ensures that the human being need not be destroyed. In this instance, it would remain to be seen how a substantialnatural ontology for the fallen world could be integrated into a relational-personal ontology without allowing the reverse to happen. If redemption is then the repersonalization of humanity, then one can expect that the new frame of interpretation is also capable of elucidating an adequate differentiation between the opus dei and the opus hominum. This is the point I want to establish in this chapter. I am not going to use Cappadocian ontology to give an account of this differentiation, which is so important for Reformation theology, but simply to suggest that this differentiation is implicit in Basil’s pneumatology. To find this differentiation and isolate the main issues about the Holy Spirit for Basil and his opponents, I will look at the Pneumatomachian controversy. The controversy over the Holy Spirit needs some explanation, so I will look at a number of interpretations and then give my own explanation of what was at stake in the controversy about the Holy Spirit. The Controversy between Basil of Caesarea and Eustathius of Sebaste The controversy between Basil and the Pneumatomachists is not easy to reconstruct. Nothing of note was handed down from the Pneumatomachian side. Even Basil did not appear to be very clear about the background to the argument in which he played a main role. At the end of On the Holy Spirit, he describes the situation of the church of his time. He sums up the Pneumatomachian controversy by using the image or allegory of a sea battle: not only do both parties have to fight under difficult conditions, but in rough seas even friends no longer clearly recognize each other and may open fire on one another.8 Hermann Dörries has given the most detailed account of the controversy.9 Although his interpretation needs modification,10 if we place it properly within the broader reconstruction of Pneumatomachian theology we can use its basic outline here.11 It is likely that Basil of Caesarea and Eustathius of Sebaste were the main adversaries. Before becoming the last bishop of Sebaste, Eustathius was a central figure in the monastic movement in Asia Minor, and from this monastic 7 Cf. Mühling, Gott ist Liebe, pp. 197–212. 8 Cf. Basil, On the Holy Spirit (De Spiritu Sancto) ed. Hermann Josef Sieben, Fontes Christiani 12 (Freiburg i. Br: Herder, 1993) 30, 76–9 (FC 12, 312–25). 9 Cf. Dörries, De Spiritu Sancto, 28–43. 81–90. 120. 10 Cf. Wolf-Dieter Hauschild, Die Pneumatomachen (Hamburg, 1967) pp. 40f. 11 Cf. ibid.

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position he was a powerful influence on the younger Basil.12 The two men were friends, as became clear in the public progression of the controversy. Basil’s efforts were first directed against neo-Arian and Eunomian Hellenism (Adv. Eunomium, ca. 364). The winning move of Nicean theology was its distinction, already prefigured by the Tomas ad Antiochenos of Athanasius, between hypostasis, interpreted as to idion, and ousia, interpreted as to koinon. With that, not only was the Hellenistic view of the unchangeable, general uniqueness of an apersonal God and of a logos as first creation rejected, but also the suspicion of Sabellianism, or modalism, was lifted – a suspicion under which the earlier Nicean party still stood along with the followers of Origin. At the beginning of the 370s, the earlier and later Nicean parties were reconciled, though there was still distrust of Basil because of his relationship with Eustathius of Sebaste, himself under homoiousian suspicion.13 Basil spoke with Eustathius in 373 in Sebaste and received his verbal agreement on the divinity of the Holy Spirit, and this was to be codified in a document of peace (Epistle 125). But Eustathius changed his mind, removed his signature and the controversy broke out. Basil was no longer satisfied with negotiating solely with Eustathius. After a long silence, and after a liturgical enquiry from Amphilochius of Ikonium, Basil edited his On the Holy Spirit (375/6), a text which was only intended for his immediate circle. In this text, Basil presents the Pneumatomachian objections which he refutes so vividly, and they determine the course of discussion to such a degree (even against the logical progression of the text) that there is little doubt that a real discussion with a Pneumatomachian lay behind it. It seems reasonable to assume that Eustathius of Sebaste is that Pneumatomachian. It is likely that in the relevant chapter of On the Holy Spirit we have a recorded text of a real discussion in Sebaste.14 The controversy was never settled. The Pneumatomachists sought a public alliance with the Homoeans.15 Basil himself stood unwillingly between the Niceans and Pneumatomachists who, in the remaining years of Basil’s life, exerted a significant political influence in Asia Minor.16 The defeat of the Pneumatomachists, who naturally understood themselves to be expressing the true faith, was left to Basil’s Cappadocian friends. Differences between Basil and Eustathius The ideas of Eustathius which can be gleaned from On the Holy Spirit are outlined by Dörries as follows.

12 Cf. Wolf-Dieter Hauschild, ‘Basilius von Caesarea’, TRE 5 (1980) pp. 301–13, esp. 302f. According to Hauschild, Pneumatomachen, pp. 219f, it may have been this monastic principle of standing over against the world, to live in this world as if one were not of this world, which Basil learnt from Eustathius. 13 Cf. Hauschild, ‘Basilius’, p. 305. 14 Cf. Dörries, De Spiritu Sancto, pp. 81–90. 15 Cf. Hauschild, ‘Basilius’, p. 306. 16 Cf. Hauschild, Pneumatomachen, pp. 191–210.


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The Holy Spirit should not be placed together with the Father and the Son. Theoretically, baptism by the Son alone is sufficient, but even if one is trinitarianly baptised this does not imply that the Spirit is worthy of the same honour as Father and Son. The Spirit is a gift of God, so it cannot receive the same honour as that accorded to the giver. One may admittedly honour the Spirit, but not together with the Father and Son, it is neither slave nor free and – it is possible that Eustathius allowed himself to get carried away enough at this point to claim – neither creator nor creature. The Spirit has however the same honour as creatures and is actually an instrument. 17

If we also take the statements of the pseudo-Basil text Liber duo de baptismo, which according to Hauschild are actually attributable to Eustathius,18 the Spirit hardly appears as an acting person, rather as a force which takes effect in people, and in particular in monastic ascetics, and enables them to change in the Spirit, which is the preparation for the coming of Christ. If we summarize all Eustathius’ statements, we are left with only these negative points about the Holy Spirit: first, the Spirit is not God and Creator. Hence, second, it should not receive the same honour, and third, it is a non-personal instrument or gift. Basil has just one main concern. He wants to show that the Spirit should receive the same honour as the Father and Son, that he is to be counted together with Father and Son.19 He does not refute objections about the non-personal nature of the Spirit, a point which never even came up in the discussion in Sebaste. But this refutation is not necessary, for if Basil shows that the Spirit is to receive the same honour, the personal nature of the Spirit is implied. He does not even demonstrate the divinity of the Spirit explicitly. Basil shows that there is no ‘third being’ between creator and creature, and that the Spirit cannot stand on the creaturely side because all creation comes into being through the Spirit.20 Yet he is only claiming the homotimaos, not the homoousia, of the Spirit with the Father and the Son.21 Basil does not need to do any more. It is expected that he leads his argument just far enough for mature readers to draw conclusions, which relates to Basil’s didactic distinction between kerygma and doctrine.22 In this way, Basil tries to refute all three of Eustathius’ arguments – not of equal dignity with the Father and Son, not God, and not personal. Basil proceeds from the outset with the idea that he can successfully convince Eustathius and establish positive connections to common ground. This common ground between Basil and Eustathius may be found above all in the acts of the Holy Spirit in humanity or, more precisely, in monastic ascetics. The Spirit is the giver of life, leads to moral perfection, is the origin of sanctification and of the knowledge of truth.23 When the Spirit resides in the soul, the evil passions and the love of the flesh

17 Cf. Dörries, De Spiritu Sancto, pp. 81–3. 18 Cf. Hauschild, Pneumatomachen, pp. 220–24. 19 Cf. Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 17f (FC 12, 198–219). 20 Cf. ibid, 20 (FC 12, 226–31). 21 Cf. Dörries, De Spiritu Sancto, p. 142. 22 Cf. ibid, pp. 121–7. 23 Cf. Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 9, 22 (FC 12, 138f) and On the Holy Spirit, 18, 47 (FC 12, 214f).

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are overcome.24 In Spirit, we become capable of doxology, of worshiping the Father and the Son.25 We have trust in God in the Spirit.26 In the Spirit we are resurrected and keep our place in heaven with Christ.27 These are Basil’s starting points. Basil and Eustathius agree about the Spirit in all the practical acts that the human person experiences, or can hope to experience.28 The two men share the same monastic experience of the effects of the Spirit! The difference exists, so to speak, ‘only’ in the theoretical status in which attributes and implications ensue on the basis of this experience. There is complete conformity on the existence of the Spirit and the effects of the Spirit. It is only the status of the Spirit, personal or non-personal, God or not God (even when not an absolute creature), which is being debated. Now we must examine the background to the controversy, and Eustathius’ and Basil’s motives in it, in order to discover whether this controversy really does go to the core of the Christian faith and identity. Motives for the Controversy 1) We can rule out that the controversy between Basil and Eustathius of Sebaste was purely a matter of ecclesiastical politics. Admittedly after the controversy, the Pneumatomachists did form an alliance with the Homoean party. But as this party, to which Wulfila belonged, tended toward Arianism, and as the Pneumatomachians did not come from the Arian camp (see below), this alliance may have been simply a matter of convenience. Basil’s interest in discussion with Eustathius was admittedly based on the desire for political unification within the Church, but as he himself preferred to remain isolated between the Niceans (Theodot of Nikopolis) and the Eustathians rather than to compromise, his motivations can hardly have been simply peace for its own sake. 2) Was it about a continuation of the Arian, that is, the Eunomian-Aetianic, controversy? Even this possibility falls short. Eustathius laid stress precisely upon the point that the Spirit should not be counted along with the Father and the Son, and that it should not receive the same honour as that given to the Father and Son. Therefore the Pneumatomachian movement did not arise out of Hellenistic Arianism, a point supported by historical research.29 Conversely, there was no reason for the Arians to argue separately against the Spirit. Basil does admittedly pick up anti-Arianistic arguments at the beginning of On the Holy Spirit (not in the discussion with Eustathius), yet these may have been simply to show Eustathius that his Pneumatomachian arguments led to implications which even he would have not wanted to accept. 24 Cf. ibid, 9, 23 (FC 12, 140f), ibid, 19, 49 (FC 12, 223). 25 Cf. ibid, 11, 27 (FC 12, 152f), ibid, 26, 63 (FC 12, 268f). 26 Cf. ibid, 13, 29 (FC 12, 158f), ibid, 19, 49 (FC 12, 222f). 27 Cf. ibid, 28, 69f (FC 12, 288–91). 28 Naturally, a difference exists in the role of the Spirit as mediator of creation. But this is also not to be removed directly from the reality of our experiences. 29 Cf. Hauschild, Pneumatomachen, pp. 176–81.


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3) After excluding possibilities (1) and (2), W-D. Hauschild put forward the thesis that the Pneumatomachian movement represented the continuation of homoiousian and Origenistic middle and majority parties.30 We can describe the homoiousian view so that it clearly rejects Sabellianism and Arianism and accepts a unique relationship between Father and Son, which admittedly is interpreted as not that of ‘same being’ (homoousios) but of ‘similar being’ (homoiousios). In rejection of Arianism then, the homoiousian view would have been such that in the negation it already corresponded to the later orthodox opinion, though not yet to the ontological revolution that differentiated between ousia and hypostasis. It would now be quite plausible to assume that the origin of the Pneumatomachian movement was to be found in homoiousian circles, although with regard to Eustathius here, significant doubts must exist. For the homoiousian view must have appeared incoherent from a homoousian perspective, because in the long run it amounts to teaching a tertium datur between creator and creature, between free and slave. If then, at the time of his discussion with Eustathius, Basil was a homoiousian, he would have had to extend his logical refutation of the tertium datur in view of the Holy Spirit also to the Son. But this is precisely what he does not do. Furthermore, Basil could not have misunderstood Eustathius here, because after all Basil succeeds in convincing Eustathius, before Eustathius finally decides to recant in Basil’s absence. Therefore, we can assume, for the relationship between Father and Son, that Eustathius thought in a Nicean manner and shared the ontological differentiation of ousia and hypostasis with Basil, as well as the ontological priority of the person above abstract being. This negative result that we have reached here has interesting consequences. The differences between Basil and Eustathius, and hence the Pneumatomachian controversy itself, are no continuation of the Arian or trinitarian controversy. The specifics and motivations of the Pneumatomachian controversy must then be explained in other ways. This point is all the more striking when one thinks that Eustathius may have shared the view on the ontological priority of the person of the Father and Son. When, against this background, he really did contest not only the divinity but also the personhood of the Spirit, we are left with an exceptionally significant piece of evidence, for which we must find a suitable explanation. The Motives of Basil and Eustathius Let us be clear once again about what it is that requires explanation. Both Basil and Eustathius agree upon phenomenology, and about the experiential nature of the works of the Spirit. Both share the same view of ousia and hypostasis when it comes to the Father and the Son. Both support the ontological priority of the person against that of an abstract being. But Basil places the Spirit with the Father and Son and sees the Spirit as personal, and this is what Eustathius denies. Why? We must look at Basil’s argument:

30 Cf. ibid, pp. 184–90.

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The Theology of John Zizioulas . . . to the creature holiness was brought in from without, but to the Spirit holiness is the fulfilment of nature, and it is for this reason that he is described not as being sanctified, but as sanctifying.31

Here Basil describes the Spirit as the originator of the sanctification experienced, a point not denied by Eustathius. So far, so good. It is hard to say to what degree Eustathius would deny that the Spirit is not holy per se. From this point of agreement, and in contrast to Eustathius, Basil stresses that we cannot overestimate the honour that must be given to the Spirit. With these thoughts before us are we to be afraid of going beyond due bounds in the extravagance of the honour we pay? Shall we not rather fear lest, even though we seem to give Him the highest names which the thoughts of man can conceive or man’s tongue utter, we let our thoughts about Him fall too low?32

At this point, Basil can reproach Eustathius, who is conscious of the acts of the Spirit, for being ungrateful if honour is not attributed to the Spirit: Do not, then, because the Spirit is in you, – if indeed He is at all in you, – nor yet because He teaches us who were blinded, and guides us to the choice of what profits us – do not for this reason allow yourself to be deprived of the right and holy opinion concerning Him. For to make the loving kindness of your benefactor a ground of ingratitude were indeed a very extravagance of unfairness.33

Yet thankfulness and displays of honour are only possible for personal entities. Here we have more evidence that Eustathius denied not only the divinity but also the personal nature of the Spirit. The answer to the question why Eustathius does this can be found in two further quotes from Basil: Thus whenever we have in mind the Spirit’s proper rank, we contemplate Him as being with the Father and the Son, but when we think of the grace that flows from Him operating on those who participate in it, we say that the Spirit is in us. And the doxology which we offer ‘in the Spirit’ is not an acknowledgment of His rank; it is rather a confession of our own weakness.34

With the preposition with (meta), Basil maintains an inseparable community, a reciprocal-constitutive relation;35 with in (en), however, a non-reciprocal-constitutive relation, or at least one which is not essential for the Spirit. The Spirit must admittedly be together with the Father and the Son, but the Spirit is not dependent upon us. But our divinity is impossible without the Spirit, for the Spirit is the necessary condition of it. Consequently, we recognize our own inability for salvation when we praise the 31 Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 19, 48 (A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd series, vol. 8, [Edinburgh: T&T Clark] 30); (FC 12, 218f). 32 Ibid, 19, 49 (31); (FC 212, 222f). 33 Ibid, 19, 50 (31); (FC 12, 224f). 34 Ibid, 26, 63 (39f); (FC 12, 268f). 35 Cf. Mühling, Gott ist Liebe, p. 336.


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Spirit in this way. We can assume that this was the point that Eustathius denied. It is likely that he did not see the Spirit as personal because he perceived the Spirit to be on his own side, the human side, and so he attributed salvation not just to God, but to the Spirit understood as a non-personal creature. But that would nonetheless require a personal subject of sanctification, and that would be nothing less than the ascetics themselves. This assumption is immediately confirmed by Basil: For the height of folly is reached if we, through the faith in Christ which is in the Spirit, hope that we shall be raised together with him and sit together in heavenly places, whenever He shall change our vile body from the natural to the spiritual, and yet refuse to assign to the Spirit any share in the sitting together, or on the glory, or anything else which we have received from Him. Of all the blessings of which, in accordance with the indefeasible grant of Him who has promised them, we have believed ourselves worthy, are we to allow none to the Holy Spirit, as though they were all above His dignity? It is yours according to your merit to be ‘ever with the Lord;’ and you expect to be caught up ‘in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air and to be ever with the Lord.’ [. . .] I am ashamed to add the rest. You expect to be glorified together with Christ; (‘if so be that we suffer with him that we may be also glorified together;’) but you do not glorify the ‘Spirit of holiness’ together with Christ, as though He were not worthy to receive equal honour even with you. You hope to ‘reign with’ Christ; but you ‘do despite unto the Spirit of grace’ by assigning Him the rank of a slave and a subordinate.36

If we see here in Basil’s reproach a reflection of Eustathius’ actual view and not just polemic, our supposition is confirmed. Not only is divine honour being refused the Spirit, but with the denial of the personhood of the Spirit, he is being given a lower status than humanity, or than the ascetics, at least. This is the core of the argument between Basil and Eustathius in the Pneumatomachian controversy. Hauschild came to the same view, but he failed to draw out the systematic consequences: The view of Eustathius on the being and work of the Spirit should not lead to the assumption that this was less a reality of the faith for him than it was for Basil. On the contrary, he seems to have argued passionately about the divinity of the Spirit precisely for this reason, because he sensed the Spirit as a reality in his own Christian life, almost as a part of himself. The Spirit worked in him as a gift given by God and as the helper of Christians. From this he concluded that the Spirit was no divine entity standing over against himself which gives to humanity particular works of Grace, rather that it sort of stood ‘on his side’ and brought him into a good relationship with God.37

Hauschild is disappointing here, because he does not show the implications of this observation for the Pneumatomachian controversy. We can now summarize these: If the Spirit is not only denied divine status, but also personal honour and personhood, while the gifts of grace are simultaneously accepted, which are above all experienced in the ascetic life, then it remains fundamentally unclear who the subject of these gifts of grace is. It could be the Father or the Son, or it could be the sanctified human being, or all three. But in this respect, the differentiation, in Reformation

36 Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 28, 69f (44); (FC 12, 288–91). 37 Hauschild, Pneumatomachen, pp. 49f.

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terms, between the opus hominum and the opus dei in the attainment of salvation for humanity is left fundamentally uncertain. Basil’s accusation amounts precisely to this, in that he suspects Eustathius of attributing the gifts of grace to humanity as their subject. To use anachronistic terminology, one could say that Basil suspects that the Pneumatomachists support a ‘semi-Pelagian’ soteriology. In contrast, Basil fends off this ‘semi-Pelagian’ soteriology by stressing the homotimaos with the Father and Son which the full personhood of the Spirit encompasses, and by establishing a clear differentiation of opus hominum and opus dei. This fact is especially significant because it shows that the Pneumatomachian controversy was not merely a continuation of the Arian controversy. Differing soteriological consequences lie at its foundation, as well as a differing determination of the relationship between the possibilities of action for creatures and possibilities for divine persons. If this result is right, then one will no longer be able simply to say that it was Augustine in the West who first dealt with the theme of grace and proposed a solution within the setting of the Pelagian controversy, the solution later explicated by Martin Luther. Rather, one would recognize that even in the Cappadocian theology of the East, within the Pneumatomachian controversy the determination of the relationship of the acts of the divine persons and of the acts of humanity in regards to grace was solved. This was done admittedly in an implicit manner, but that is not to say that it was any less exact. Now we are able to answer our question. The ontological revolution in Cappadocian thought, reconstructed by John Zizioulas, is able to express the central concern of Reformation theology, to distinguish between the work of man and the work of God. What is more, the Cappadocians actually seem to have discovered this crucial distinction for themselves and put it to work in the course of the Pneumatomachian controversy.

Chapter 5

Persons and Particularity Colin Gunton

It is a mark of interesting minds that they see a little further or deeper than the customary or fashionable; that they are a little ahead of the field. So it is with John Zizioulas, who reminds us, when all others are calling on the theology of communion in order to place a question mark against Western individualism, of the importance of the particular. Being may indeed be understood in terms of communion, but there is for Zizioulas no communion that is not grounded in the particular. If it is not, it will be based in some general theory of being, and that is the beginning of the end, for where the particular person is not central, the person is in danger of being submerged in the abstract and impersonal. To avoid such an outcome, it is necessary, he believes, to maintain the Cappadocian Fathers’ challenge to the Greek philosophy which simply did not have the capacity to give due weight to the particular. There are, however, two complementary sources for Zizioulas’ conception of particularity: the theological and the anthropological. We shall sketch them one at a time, with a view to asking whether they are truly complementary or whether they introduce a tension between two forces, one of which will have to give way. They correspond, as we shall see, to the two rather different sources of Orthodox theology, ancient and modern alike, which might be supposed to provide one reason for the fact that, despite its apparently rather monolithic character, in its own way it reveals some major differences, even if it is not as fissiparous as that of the West. Between Lossky and Zizioulas, for example, something of a gulf is fixed. Yet what should not be questioned is Zizioulas’ unique achievement in championing the centrality of particular persons, divine and human alike, against those theories of being, all too prevalent in Western thought, which submerge them in some great sea of substance. Divine Persons Everything begins with the particular person of the Father, who is the principle of everything, both divine and created. In Zizioulas’ theology, consisting as it does largely of an interpretation of the Cappadocian Fathers, a move is made beyond Irenaeus’ teaching that the Father is the one whose work is done in the economy by the Son and the Spirit, to a claim that the Father – the particular person of the Father – must be understood as the eternal cause of both the being and the divinity of the other two persons. ‘God’s being, the Holy Trinity, is not caused by divine substance,

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but by the Father, i.e. a particular being.’1 We can see something of the point if we examine his recent reply – in a soon to be published paper upon which I am drawing – to some criticisms of his theology by Alan Torrance.2 Torrance’s objection is that Zizioulas’ description of the Father as the cause of the Trinity endangers his own identification of being and communion. ‘The thrust of these arguments suggests a failure to interpret the Oneness of God in the light of the free communion and mutuality of God. An a posteriori ontology of the free communion and mutuality of God risks being subsumed by a cosmological category of causality.’3 Torrance asks whether communion should not rather be construed as ontologically primordial, and quotes T. F. Torrance’s appeal to Cyril of Alexandria in support of an argument that, to the doctrine that the Father is the cause of the Trinity, we should prefer ‘Cyril’s conception of the interrelation of the three, perfect, coequal, coeternal, enhypostatic Persons ...’;4 and, again, Athanasius’ view ‘of their coinherent and undivided wholeness, in which each person is “whole of the whole”’.5 Against this it should be objected that in their anxiety to expel all traces of Arianism from the scene, theologians like Athanasius and Cyril have stressed too strongly the absolute equality of the three persons of the Trinity, and in so doing have divorced theology, what is called the immanent Trinity, from economy, the biblical account of God’s action in the world. For scripture, as for Irenaeus, the economy is very much the economy of the Father, and the Son and the Spirit are its economically subordinate mediators. To conflate the theology of John’s Gospel and that of 1 Corinthians, the Son comes to bring us to the Father, and will at the end hand over the Kingdom to him. The Son and the Spirit as the ones who obey and are sent are subordinate, though that is not the teaching known as subordinationism, because they are fully divine as obedient to and sent into the world by the Father, and therefore as such are economically although not ontologically subordinate. They are indeed ‘perfect, coequal, coeternal’, but some articulations of that are in danger of subverting the economy, of divorcing theology from economy. In that light, we can summarize Zizioulas’ main points of defence against the charges. The first is that ‘Father’ – like ‘person’ in general – is an inherently relational term. It indicates:

1 John Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person. The Ontology of Personhood’, in Persons, Divine and Human, edited by Colin E. Gunton and Christoph Schwöbel (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991) pp. 33–46, at 40. 2 John Zizioulas, ‘The Father as Cause: A Response to Alan Torrance’, paper delivered at King’s College London, 1998, reprinted as ‘The Father as Cause: Personhood Generating Otherness’, in John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: T&T Clark, 2007). 3 Alan J. Torrance, Persons in Communion. Trinitarian Description and Human Participation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) p. 291. 4 Torrance, Persons in Communion, p. 294, citing Thomas F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988) p. 340. 5 T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith, The Evangelical Theology of the Ancient Catholic Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988) p. 238.

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automatically a relationship, i.e. a specific identity which emerges from a relationship or rather indicates a relationship (schesis). It is, therefore, impossible to make the Father ontologically ultimate without, at the same time, making communion primordial.6

This finds support in Athanasius: ‘When mention is made of the Father, there is included also his Word, and the Spirit who is in the Son.’7 Zizioulas believes that any objection to this is based on a presupposed individualism, and has ‘overlooked that there is no, ontologically speaking, Father without the Son or the Spirit, in other words that there is ontological interdependence between the persons’.8 Notice very carefully what Zizioulas is saying. There is a taxis, a trinitarian ordering, which (like the economy, we might say) issues from the Father, but it is not, as in the Origenist emanationism of which he is sometimes accused, linear; rather, it involves inter-dependence.9 Indeed, it could be said to be but a development into theology of what Irenaeus himself had said of the economy: ‘[The Father] did not make them through angels or powers separate from his will, for God has no need of anything at all; but by his Word and his Spirit he makes everything, disposes everything, governs everything, gives existence to everything ...’10 Zizioulas insists that what is not meant is ‘substantialistic’ causation. The word ‘cause’ does not therefore in this context mean what it has come to mean in the modern West, but has connotations of personal origination; for example, the begetting of the Son is a kind of causation.11 Zizioulas quotes Basil: ‘the names Father and Son, spoken of in themselves indicate nothing but the relation (schesis) between the two. For Father is one who has given the beginning of being (arche tou einai) to the others … The Son is the one who has had the beginning of his being (arche tou einai) by birth from the other.’12 The other chief question concerns communion. Can we not say, Torrance has asked, that the unity of God is constituted by ‘communion’ or ‘perichoresis’? Against this, Zizioulas makes a number of points, one of them appealing to Rahner’s reminder of the truth that in the Bible ‘God’ = the Father. But his crucial theological appeal, and it is surely decisive, is that ‘an a-personal concept of communion as primordial 6 Zizioulas, ‘The Father as Cause’, typescript p. 19. 7 Athanasius, To Serapion 1.14. The Letters of Saint Athanasius Concerning the Holy Spirit, edited by C.R.B. Shapland (New York: Philosophical Library, 1951) pp. 93f. 8 Zizioulas, ‘The Father as Cause’, typescript p. 5. 9 As might be, but probably should not be, suggested by Cappadocian ways of putting it. ‘The Old Testament proclaimed the Father openly, and the Son more obscurely. The New manifested the Son, and suggested the deity of the Spirit. Now the Spirit himself dwells among us, and supplies us with a clearer demonstration of Himself.’ Gregory of Nazianzus, Orations 31.26, in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (eds), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1983 [1894] volume 7) (NPNF 7) p. 326. 10 Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 1.22.1, translated by Robert M. Grant, Irenaeus of Lyons (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 87, cf. 3.6.4. 11 Indeed, it has been suggested that cause is originally a concept oriented to divine agency. H.D. Lewis, for example, has argued that: ‘The principle of cause and effect has its root in the domain of religion.’ The reason he gives is that the modern conception is ‘the appearance on a secular plane of a principle which is, essentially ... a religious one’. H.D. Lewis, Philosophy of Religion (London: English Universities Press, 1965) p. 176. 12 Basil, Contra Eunomius 2.22, cited by Zizioulas, ‘The Father as Cause’, typescript p. 26.

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presents the same existential difficulties as making substance primordial’.13 Zizioulas rightly insists that the personal should be primordial, and it follows that any concept like ‘being’ or ‘communion’ which is secondary to the persons should not usurp their pride of place. Similarly, we might add, perichoresis, as an abstraction, cannot do anything, because it is the outcome of the relations of the (particular) persons, not their cause. Zizioulas has also suggested that it is no accident that, under the presidency of Gregory of Nazianzus, the Council of Constantinople replaced ‘from the being of the Father’ with ‘from the Father’ in its confession of the origin of the Son. This ‘is a clear expression of the Cappadocian interest in stressing that it is the person of the Father and not divine substance that is the source and cause of the Trinity’.14 It is the person of the Father that is determinative. For Zizioulas, then, the Father unifies the Godhead by virtue of the fact that he is Father of the Son and breather of the Spirit, and is therefore eternally the ‘cause’ of the being of the Son and the Spirit. One particular person is the principle of the being of the other two; but because he is not himself without them, it is not an individualistic conception. The particular person, the Father, brings it about that the Son and the Spirit are also particularly who they are. Indeed, he says, the concern to refute Sabellianism led the Cappadocians to stress ‘the fullness and ontological integrity of each person of the Trinity ... In their attempt to protect the doctrine ... the Cappadocians were at times ready to speak of “three beings” in referring to the Trinity.’15 But, despite the easy accusations of tritheism sometimes emanating from Western theologians, Zizioulas rightly insists that such is to misunderstand. ‘The Cappadocians called the persons by names indicating schesis (relationship): none of the three persons can be conceived without reference to the other two, both logically and ontologically.’16 Given its tendency to subordinate the divine persons to some concept of divine being or substance, the Western mind has considerable difficulty in even comprehending the nature of the achievement and the ontological innovation that is entailed. Zizioulas traces this to the reintroduction of forms of essentially Greek ontology by Augustine and his successors. ‘The subsequent developments of trinitarian theology, especially in the West with Augustine and the scholastics, have led us to see the term ousia, not hypostasis, as the expression of the ultimate character and the causal principle (αρχη) in God’s being.’17 Only a Cappadocian

13 Zizioulas, ‘The Father as Cause’, typescript p. 5. 14 John D. Zizioulas, ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: The Significance of the Cappadocian Contribution’, in Trinitarian Theology Today. Essays on Divine Being and Act, edited by Christoph Schwöbel (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995) pp. 44–60, at 52. 15 Zizioulas, ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’, p. 46. 16 Zizioulas, ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’, p. 50. 17 John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion. Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985) p. 88. See also: ‘The West, as the study of the trinitarian theology of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas witnesses, had no difficulty in maintaining the Filioque precisely because it identified the being, the ontological principle, of God with His substance rather than with the person of the Father.’ Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 41, n. 35.


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trinitarianism is able to rescue the particular from submersion by virtue of its concept of being in relation. In God it is possible for the particular to be ontologically ultimate because relationship is permanent and unbreakable. Because the Father, the Son and the Spirit are always together, the particular beings are bearers of the totality of nature and thus no contradiction between the ‘one’ and the ‘many’ can arise.18

We shall say more about the particular persons of the Godhead and their relevance, but in the context of an account of Zizioulas’ theology of created persons, to which we now turn. Created Persons Zizioulas traces to the roots of Western culture in the thought of Augustine and Boethius the individualistic tendency to regard the other as a threat. ‘We accept the other only insofar as he does not threaten our privacy or insofar as he is useful for our individual happiness.’19 To that extent, Western theology represents a reversion to the very Hellenism which it was the achievement of the Cappadocians to overcome. With regard to human existence, too, classical Greek philosophy at that time had given priority to nature over particular persons ... To give ontological primacy to the person would mean to undo the fundamental principles with which Greek philosophy had operated since its inception. The particular person never had an ontological role in classical Greek thought. What mattered ultimately was the unity or totality of being of which man was but a portion.20

Against this, the trinitarian witness is explicit. There is for it a stress on the particular which is not individualistic and the basis for such a conception is found in the doctrine of the divine persons. Trinitarian being provides a model, a basis indeed, for a theology of created being: God by being uncreated is not faced with given being: He, as a particular being (the Father) brings about his own being (the Trinity). He is thus free in an ontological sense, and therefore the particular is primary in ontology in this case. But what about the human being?21

It is to Zizioulas’ answer to his own question that we now turn. He sees in the relation between communion and otherness in God the model for theological anthropology. A theology of the particular created person which is not individualistic depends upon principles – in one paper he lists four – derived from the doctrine of God: 18 Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person’, p. 41. 19 John D. Zizioulas, ‘Communion and Otherness’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 38 (1994) pp. 347–61, at 349. 20 Zizioulas, ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity’, p. 53. 21 Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person’, p. 42.

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The Theology of John Zizioulas that otherness is constitutive of unity, and not consequent upon it ... [God’s] oneness or unity is not safeguarded by the unity of substance, as St Augustine and other Western theologians have argued, [but] by the monarchia of the Father, Who is Himself one of the Trinity ... Secondly, a study of the Trinity reveals that otherness is absolute. The Father, the Son and the Spirit are absolutely different ... Thirdly ... otherness is not moral or psychological but ontological ... As a result of this ... otherness is inconceivable apart from relationship … Communion does not threaten otherness; it generates it.22

How does this translate into theological anthropology? Zizioulas’ route is by way of christology and ecclesiology. In the former, it is the hypostatic union which is the key, because it avoids giving priority to nature – or, in this case, the two natures: ‘in Christ, two natures are, only because they are particularised in one person. In Christ the general exists only in and through the particular; the particular is thus raised to ontological primacy.’23 But what of other human beings? To establish the particularity of the human, ecclesiology is necessary because as part of nature, human beings are not free, but simply determined by (impersonal) nature. ‘If biological birth gives us a hypostasis dependent ontologically on nature, this indicates that a “new birth” is needed in order to experience an ontology of personhood.’24 To be sure, this has to be understood in eschatological perspective, for as things stand, ‘nature still dictates its laws to Man, particularly in the form of death’.25 This means that man has the responsibility to realize his freedom this side of the end. If some Western readers see traces of Pelagianism in the following passage, they should at least realize that, while for Augustinians salvation is achieved by grace understood in terms of the moral life, for Orthodoxy the source of empowerment is the sacraments: Meanwhile man is called to preserve the image of God in him as much as possible, striving to free himself from the necessity of nature, experiencing ‘sacramentally’ the ‘new being’ as a member of the community of those ‘born again’ ... and maintaining an eschatological vision and expectation of the transformation of the world.26

Out of this development emerges a massive stress on the uniqueness of each particular hypostasis or person, and it involves Zizioulas in a kind of apophatic anthropology which is parallel to the Cappadocians’ apophatic theology of the hypostases of the Trinity:

22 Zizioulas, ‘Communion and Otherness’, pp. 352f. Compare John D. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity and Human Incapacity: A Theological Exploration of Personhood’, Scottish Journal of Theology 28 (1975) pp. 401–47, at 409: ‘communion does not threaten personal particularity; it is constitutive of it.’ 23 Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person’, p. 43. 24 Ibid, p. 43. 25 Ibid, p. 44. 26 Ibid, p. 44.


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The tendency of the Greek Fathers to avoid giving any positive content to the hypostases of the Trinity, by insisting that the Father is simply not the Son or the Spirit, and the Son means simply not the Father etc., points to the true ontology of hypostasis: that someone simply is and is himself and not someone else, and this is sufficient to identify him as a being in the true sense.27

The apophaticism emerges in Zizioulas’ contention that to discover the ‘who’ we must strip away any general characteristics. ‘Personhood is not about qualities or capacities of any kind: biological, social or moral.’ We must, however, be very careful to understand what is being said here. It is not that qualities are in every way irrelevant to the case, but that they are secondary to the absolute uniqueness of the particular hypostasis, and therefore ‘become ontologically personal only through the hypostasis to which they belong: only by being my qualities they are personal’.28 Zizioulas relentlessly opposes any philosophy – and we should remember that he insists that the Cappadocians have achieved not merely a theological, but also a philosophical, innovation – or theology which might subordinate the particular to the general, the person to nature. Freedom is thus an ontological absolute for anthropology. Some Questions There seems to me no shadow of doubt that the West, with its deeply problematic theology of the Trinity, as perhaps Karl Rahner has most sharply indicated, has great need of what Zizioulas has called the Cappadocian contribution.29 In our tradition the particularity of the persons tends everywhere to be so subordinated to a relentless stress on the unity of God that theology is often unable to follow Scripture in ascribing particular actions to particular persons of the Trinity, the result being that all is attributed to ‘God’ in such an undifferentiated way that his actions cease to be trinitarianly construed. The same can be said of the actions of the persons ad intra. Zizioulas might indeed arouse suspicions that he attributes too little part in the constitution of the deity to the Son and the Spirit. Here we might call upon what are no more than hints of the Cappadocians themselves that the Father might be the cause of the Trinity, but the Spirit is the one who, to use Basil’s words, ‘completes the divine and blessed Trinity’.30 To stress that a little more might obviate suspicions of an excessive ‘monotheism of the Father’, without detracting from the rightness of the fundamental insights about the priority of the Father. But what of the proper question which might be asked by the West? It has often been asserted that the East suffers from not having had a Reformation, and there 27 Ibid, p. 45. For the connection of particularity and hypostasis – that hypostasis entails particularity and uniqueness – see Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 425, n.1. 28 Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person’, p. 45. 29 As in the title of the paper detailed in note 14 above. 30 Basil, Hexameron II.6. The word translated ‘to complete’ is συµπληρωτικον. This occasional reference to the place of the Spirit in the Trinity is to be found not only here but also in Basil, Epistle 243, where Basil says that the Arians deny that the Spirit is συµπληρωτικον της αγιας τριαδος. I owe this reference to Eugene Rogers.

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is much to be said for that. But we can speak for more of the West than merely the churches of the Reformation and include large swathes of the Catholic tradition if we say that the Pelagian dispute also rather passed the East by, to its disadvantage. Confession of sin does indeed bulk large in Eastern liturgy, but appears to have little structural effect on Orthodox theology. It may be the case that Western soteriology sometimes suffers by comparison with that of the East in failing to make enough of the ontological coefficients of salvation. We can agree that salvation is of the whole person, not merely of patterns of behaviour involving no ontological alteration. And yet much Orthodox theology fails adequately to encompass the deep fallenness of the human condition, attested as that is both by Scripture’s emphasis on the cross as the centre of the awesome process and the manifest need of fallen man for redemption.31 In a word, by failing to take adequate account of the bondage of the will, Eastern theologians, among them John Zizioulas, can appear to ascribe to the human capacity more than is justified apart from redemption. Here I must qualify my account, for like all great theologians, this one knows better than to succumb to simplistic versions of deficient soteriology. He is insistent that: the essence of Christian existence in the Church is metanoia (repentance) ... Even the existence of pain and death in the natural world, which is not caused by us individually, should lead to metanoia. For we all share in the fall of Adam, and we all must feel the sorrow of failing to bring creation to communion with God and the overcoming of death.32

And yet there is alongside this a tendency to treat freedom, even human freedom, as a kind of absolute. John Zizioulas’ stress on freedom, his tendency to treat it as a relatively unqualified human possession, is considerable. In particular, Zizioulas bases an argument for human particularity on the individual’s claim to uniqueness, which he finds to be implicit in the questions, ‘Who am I? Who are you? Who is he/she?’33 This generates, he says, an assertion of being, which: is absolute: not simply because nothing else is ‘me’, but also because nothing else can ever be me. Metaphysics in this case applies to ‘me’ as much as it does to ‘am’. Hidden behind this is the cry for immortality, the desire not simply of the ειναι but of the αει ειναι, being for ever.34

Zizioulas appears to hold – although the argument is complex and difficult – that created personal being, simply by virtue of the fact that it is what it is, involves eternity.35 But can such be upheld in a faith for which the resurrection comes as 31 While one should keep denominational polemics to a minimum, the fact of Orthodoxy’s connivance in all kinds of intolerable political regimes indicates that its assessment of human wickedness, including its own, is even worse than that of other communions. 32 Zizioulas, ‘Communion and Otherness’, pp. 351–2. 33 Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person’, p. 34. 34 Ibid, p. 35. 35 Miroslav Volf may exaggerate, but he exaggerates something that is there when he asserts Zizioulas’ ‘conviction that human personhood is not of this world, but rather is divine


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an unmerited,36 indeed, apart from Christ unexpected, gift out of death? Should a theology steer so close to the wind of the Greek philosophical divinization of the human as this might appear to do? Even if I am wrong, the assertion of freedom unqualified by a more robust doctrine of sin than we find here would at least raise questions about the concept. Zizioulas would rightly reply that freedom is not absolute, for as merely natural – that is, apart from ecclesial being through baptism – the person is indeed subject to necessity. The second question therefore concerns a position which appears to presume the opposite, that the personal ontology which is being recommended is an ecclesial ontology, and therefore the outcome of redemption rather than of creation. On the one hand, freedom and the cry for immortality are treated as absolutes; on the other, personal being can be received only sacramentally. The question, then, is whether – despite the eschatological qualification – too much is attributed to ecclesial being, too little to what Zizioulas calls biological being. I admit that this is to couch the question in typically Western terms, but it is Western queries with which we are exercised. Let us return to the question of christology, and of who this Christ is of whom we are speaking. There is, it seems to me, in this theologian a tendency to identify the Church with Christ. However, such an identification comes at a price, and it is that of marginalizing the continuing humanity of Christ and thereby the place of Israel in the economy of salvation. If Christ is the mediator of creation as well as being mediator of salvation and the head of the Church, his body, does it not follow that even our biological selves are already personal, as created? Zizioulas is right, surely, in his assertion that person is an eschatological concept; but is not the person’s eschatological realization anticipated already in creation, albeit less truly under the conditions of sin and death than in the community of salvation? Should we not render respect to those created in the image of God as well as those in whom the image is being daily renewed in Christ? This leads to a further question. We can agree with Zizioulas that the absolute uniqueness of each person is constituted by relationship, and above all by what can be called the vertical relationship, with God. But if we are to take with due seriousness the analogy between the trinitarian persons and created persons, must we not paint into the picture also those relationships with other created persons which are in their own way constitutive for who and what we are? Even at the created level, there is something beyond the merely biological. In other words, there is something to be said about the person which is neither merely biological nor merely ecclesial. It is at this place that I would wish to qualify the things said about the who and the what of the person in the argument reported towards the end of the previous section. Zizioulas’ point was that, because of the absolute uniqueness of each person, ...’ Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) p. 85. 36 I was tempted to say ‘uncovenanted’, but therein lies a problem, as will be obvious. However, is there not a sense in which resurrection is among the uncovenanted blessings with which God’s people are showered? And that apart from it any other claim for immortality is mistaken.

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we should not understand persons in terms of their qualities. It is indeed right that we should understand the qualities as those of the person, possessed by each person uniquely. But does it follow that we should not identify different persons by means of those qualities as well as by the relations of those other created persons who share in their constitution – parents, friends, enemies, colleagues,and so on? And here I wish to encroach briefly on what may well be an often vitiating weakness which is shared by Eastern and Western trinitarianism alike, and is betrayed by Zizioulas’ affirmation of the Cappadocian refusal to say anything about the particular qualities of the three persons of the Trinity. He is indeed right to say that the Western predilection for privileging being over person has crippled its trinitarianism. But has not the same happened in the East by a refusal to particularize the distinctive forms of action, and so the being, of the three persons? Dorothea Wendebourg’s seminal paper here tells us all that we need to know. John Zizioulas will not thank me for suggesting it, but I do wonder whether he is here too influenced by the development of theology in the tradition of PseudoDionysius and Palamas. The development of trinitarian theology from Cappadocia to Palamas drove the three hypostases deeper into the being of God, at the expense of their economic action. God the Father is no longer conceived to operate by his two hands; rather, the triune mystery of Father, Son and Spirit operates by means of the divine energies. Wendebourg argues that this represents what she calls the defeat of trinitarian theology. She shows that, in the first instance, the Cappadocians derived their knowledge of the persons of the Trinity from the economy. The knowledge of the particular persons is derived from what they do. Thus: ‘The actions of the Spirit are nothing alien to his being, but are specifically his; therefore they reveal what he is.’37 However, with Palamas, this principle disappears. [T]he trinitarian persons have no soteriological functions …; the hypostases do not enter the created world, they simply are … And of course, how could they enter the world, since they belong to that level in God which is defined as being unalterably beyond the sphere of soteriological contact with his energies, namely, the level of divine essence? 38

Wendebourg goes on to point out – and this is a precise parallel with the AugustinianThomist principle that any one of the three persons of the Trinity could have become incarnate – that the same syndrome is present in those Orthodox who opposed the Western Filioque. The temporal relationships of the trinitarian persons ‘depend simply and purely on God’s free decision, which could have organized them in a completely different way … They have nothing to do with God’s being: in God the Spirit is directly related to the Father, in history, at least normally, to the Father through the Son.’39 The outcome in both cases is the same: ‘we get to know about the Trinity not while reflecting on the history of salvation, but by special information.’40 The ground, indeed, had already been prepared by some of the things said by the 37 Dorothea Wendebourg, ‘From the Cappadocian Fathers to Gregory Palamas. The Defeat of Trinitarian Theology’, Studia Patristica 17, 1 (1982) pp. 194–8, at 194. 38 Ibid, p.196. 39 Ibid, p.197. 40 Ibid, p.197.


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Cappadocian Fathers, especially Gregory of Nyssa. ‘Have the Cappadocian Fathers themselves not already stated a difference between the essence and energies in God and declared the impossibility of passing beyond the energies to the divine ousia?’41 It must be said that in their anxiety to deny Eunomian claims that we can know God’s essence rationally, the Cappadocians appear sometimes to deny also that we can know God on the basis of his action in the world. The greatness of John Zizioulas as a theologian is shown by the very tensions in his work, by the fact that he allows the weaknesses of the tradition to come into view while operating in faithfulness to it. I write as someone who has learned from him important lessons not only about all the topics I have discussed so far, but also about the need to specify the type of actions performed by – and therefore the kind of eternal qualities possessed by – the particular persons of the Trinity. We have to understand the Spirit, he once said, not as immanent, but as transcendent in his action. That gives pause for much thought to us Westerners, with our ingrained tendency to limit our understanding of the Spirit to his indwelling the Church or our hearts, depending on our tradition. The Spirit, Zizioulas helps us to understand, is not, like the Son, identified with part of the creation in order to save it (for that is what incarnation means). Rather, the Spirit acts over against the creation, realizing the eschatological perfection of the particular. To follow that through might have interesting implications for our treatment of the person. That is to say, might we not ask for, and profit by, a more directly pneumatological construal of the nature of the particular person?

41 Ibid, p.197.


Chapter 6

Person and Nature: The Necessity–Freedom Dialectic in John Zizioulas Douglas Farrow

John Zizioulas’ preoccupation with the dialectic of necessity and freedom is not absent in the patristic sources he prizes, such as the Cappadocians, but it is more prominent in the existentialism that provides the immediate background to his theological project. Zizioulas lays hold of this dialectic and extends it to us as the very branch by which we may escape from the vortex of existentialist thought, and from the assorted intellectual debris which has been gathering around it over the last 70 years.1 That is, he employs it in the service of an ecclesiology which dares to present itself as an ontology of personhood, an ontology which has at its heart what even the most optimistic existentialism does not, that is, a concept of freedom through love: freedom through being as an act of koinonia with God in which all necessity is transcended. When the Church is viewed in this way – that is, as the divine answer to the challenge to human personhood posed by necessity, by nature, by finitude – it is immediately obvious that ecclesiology will rescue ontology, both from the doldrums into which it has fallen in Western thought and from the attack of the sceptical existentialists.2 This orientation of Zizioulas’ ecclesiology to ontology is one of the reasons why Western theologians find it both foreign and fascinating. For the Church is not viewed merely as an instrument of divine grace in the face of human sin, or as a sign of divine sovereignty in human history, or as a model for renewed forms of human sociality. Still less is it viewed merely as an institution, however great or humble. It is viewed rather as an anthropic – and indeed a cosmic – sine qua non. In a period of Western uncertainty about the Church, and about its place in the modern world, Zizioulas offers us an ecclesiology that is nothing less than ontology, indispensable ontology, but an ontology attuned, for all its patristic trappings, to modern questions and difficulties.3 1 See John Zizioulas ‘Human Capacity and Human Incapacity’, Scottish Journal of Theology 28 (1975) pp. 401–47. 2 David Hart, in The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), makes a quite different rescue attempt that relies on a different reading of the Cappadocians. 3 Some might suggest that it is attuned too much to modern questions, or at least charge that Zizioulas misreads his patristic sources in such a way as to favour his own project. That

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Neither the ecclesiology, nor the dialectic that serves it, is unproblematic, however. Metropolitan John will forgive me, I am sure, if I explore these things in an appreciative but critical vein. I begin, as is necessary, by rehearsing what is already well rehearsed.4 Personhood as Freedom from Necessity In the Cappadocians, claims Zizioulas, the being of God is identified with the Father, hence with a hypostatic or personal mode of existence. The Father is the selfgrounding ground of God’s existence and the principle of divine unity. God therefore is not bound by any necessity of substance, but lives in and from the freedom of the Father’s self-determination as Father.5 God’s being as Father – as the one who readies himself for communion by lovingly begetting the Son and breathing the Spirit, without any compulsion whatever – is a transcendence of the necessity which otherwise must characterize that being in its sheer absoluteness. It is in view of the ontological priority of the Father, hence of hypostasis over ousia, that we can make the ontological equation: being = communion = freedom.6 Authentic being is personal being, which means also inter-personal being, or being free even from oneself. And if this is true where God is concerned, then creaturely being (which depends upon God) will also have to be considered in the same light. Persons and personhood and the event of communion will have conceptual priority over being or substance or nature. Now personhood is something which Zizioulas expounds by employing the term ekstasis alongside hypostasis. The former indicates freedom for the other, and indeed the investment and discovery of one’s own being in the other. The latter (when paired with ekstasis) indicates freedom for the whole, which is also freedom for oneself in one’s own particularity as bearer of the whole.7 The two terms thus work together to delineate a concept of personhood, and of communion, which posits a perichoretic capacity for catholicity. This notion of the person as ‘catholic’ is a complex one, about which more will have to be said; it is directly linked, of course, to an ecclesial anthropology. But why has Zizioulas tagged the entire discussion of personhood to the problem of necessity? may be the case (see, for example, Lucian Turcescu’s ‘“Person” versus “individual”, and other modern misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa’, Modern Theology 18.4 (2002) pp. 527–39), but it does not follow that his project is the worse for it. The Cappadocians may be wrong where Zizioulas is right. 4 My task can only be performed by thinking simultaneously (as he does) theologically and christologically, as well as ecclesiologically, about the nature of personhood. This means covering some familiar ground. 5 The Father-person’s being is in his self-disposal for koinonia with the Son and the Spirit, and so in his causing and communing with Son and Spirit, and this is God’s being in freedom. 6 John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood: St Vladimir’s, 1985) pp. 40ff. The equation is also epistemological, of course: being = communion = freedom = truth. 7 Hence it does double duty, indicating both freedom for and freedom from oneself.

Person and Nature: The Necessity–Freedom Dialectic in John Zizioulas

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For Zizioulas, as for many existentialists, necessity is the ultimate threat or challenge to personhood. The truly authentic person is the one who exists in uncompromised freedom, who is determined in his existence by no necessity whatever. Zizioulas, citing Gregory of Nyssa,8 follows through with this logic. The truly authentic person is uncaused and uncreated, and (not being bound even by himself) has his being in communion. He is in fact the Father, apart from whom we ourselves would have no capacity for freedom, no knowledge of personhood, and hence no intuition of the threat to personhood posed by the interpretation of our being in impersonal (that is, substantialist or even mechanistic) terms. That we do have such an intuition is the moment of truth in existentialism. Moreover, as everyone knows, creaturely freedom is threatened by necessity, and not merely by a necessitarian worldview. Our being, that is to say, is threatened by non-being, which presents itself in the form of the demands of biological existence. These demands are reminders of death, in all its inevitability, and come to us as debilitating distractions from the authentically personal mode of existence which constitutes real being. Perhaps some further elaboration is in order, though we are still on familiar territory. Because of the Father, God the Son and God the Spirit are true persons also. Though they are not themselves uncaused, they belong to the Father’s own being as a being-in-communion; as such they are eternal. If they are caused, their cause (and its consequence) is freedom itself.9 The human person, however, is both caused and created. Since he belongs to the creaturely, which is not eternal, he is bound by all manner of creaturely mechanisms of cause and effect. He is bound indeed by his finitude, by his biological nature, by the necessities of his body, and by the self-centredness which all of this inevitably entails. If he is to be free at all, if his personhood is to be realized, he must overcome his natural or biological hypostasis, and all that it stands for. This he does by way of his baptismal or ecclesial hypostasis, which he gains through the liberating communion of the Church, through its corporate participation in the freedom of the divine persons. That is how he too gains authentic personhood. For him personhood is a vocation, a process, a destiny. It is ecclesial in nature, liturgically accessed, and eschatologically consummated. Personhood, properly speaking, is the result of deification.10

8 Great Catechism 5 (Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 428). 9 The aitea concept obviously undergoes alteration here, since where the Trinity is concerned what is caused partakes fully in the freedom of its cause (the Father). This alteration may be worth exploring. We may nevertheless have to ask whether it is possible, on this scheme, to understand the Son and the Spirit as personal in the same sense as the Father. Do the Son and the Spirit require, as we do, to be personalized, and thus also to be made to be? If so, are they as authentically personal as the Father is? And are we to regard the Father’s personhood as something (logically) prior to his communion with the Son and the Spirit? 10 Deification is a trinitarian event, as Irenaeus long ago taught. It rests first of all on the fact that the uncreated Son becomes a human being, linking God and man in his own person. It rests also upon the work of the Spirit, who reconstitutes us (in the Church) as one corporatehypostasis with Christ, so that we may participate in his uncreated nature and in his eternal freedom as the Father’s Son. Ultimately, of course, it rests upon the Father, who is freedom and who gives freedom.

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Zizioulas thus takes up the concern of the existentialists – reversing the traditional association of real being with necessity – but also takes his leave of them, so that he may continue in the company of the fathers. His ontology of personhood may be tagged to the problem of necessity but it is made to rest on the doctrines of the Trinity and of the incarnation; on the claim that the incarnate Son becomes the conduit for human beings of the personalizing power of the Father and the liberating effects of the Spirit. Viewed eschatologically as the Church, the incarnation is itself the complete overcoming of nature, necessity and death, via the advent of free and authentic human personhood. It is the personalization of the not yet personal. And through the Church the cosmos as a whole is destined to become an act of communion, participating thus with man in the eternity of God. For the priestly ministry of redeemed humanity is such as to enable nature to be in freedom.11 In sum, nature spells necessity but deification spells freedom from necessity, through the overcoming of nature in a personalizing act which produces the Church. Ecclesiology, then, is the (philosophical) antidote Zizioulas offers to existentialist anxiety and despair about authentic existence. For ecclesiology is precisely an analysis of the transformation of the stuff of necessity into the stuff of freedom; which is also to say, it is an analysis of the eucharist. In the eucharistic synaxis and koinonia, in the Great Thanksgiving, the conditions are created for creaturely nature to transcend itself and to conquer every necessity – to have its being in the liberty of God, whose synactic principle of unity is the Father, and whose own being as triune communion is a joyful transcendence of all necessity.12 Catholicity and Personhood The free or authentic person, we have said, is the catholic person: the person who lives katholou, which is possible only in and through the Church. A catholic person is free because he has room for the other – indeed for all others – in himself. The other is no longer a source of conflict or of compulsion, but rather an opportunity for communion.13 The catholic person, as a unique and unrepeatable source of this communion, is capable of bearing human nature in its entirety, of making it be.14 Now one is not mistaken to see a variety of influences in the background here. The Romantics, Hegel, Heidegger, Buber, et al., have contributions to make. But obviously there are older resources in Christian neoplatonism which are less likely to lead in a non- or even anti-ecclesial direction. The best such resources are Denys and Maximus, to whom Zizioulas frequently appeals. What we find in Maximus especially is a concept of catholicity that takes up the microcosm/macrocosm 11 See Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 101 ff. 12 Understood as act rather than object, and more particularly as an act of the Holy Spirit – celebrated by the people of God together with their episcopal eikon of the Father – the eucharist constitutes the Church in its true being. 13 The catholic person is undivided internally (for he is given his integrity from without) or externally (since in the Spirit difference does not mean division). 14 Hence the Church is reconstituted, in some quite fundamental sense, with each baptism, while remaining itself.


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dialectic of Greek philosophy, reinventing it on a christological and liturgical template. Zizioulas arguably goes beyond this, however, in developing the catholicity of human personhood in terms of the imago Trinitatis, and in terms of personhood as such. I have elsewhere expressed certain reservations about Maximus’ model, which do not apply to that of Zizioulas.15 Nevertheless there are questions which must be put to the latter as well. We have seen that the Father (with the Son and the Spirit) makes divine being be, not by necessity of substance or nature, but in freedom; that is, personally, by love. Likewise Christ (with you and me) makes human being be, not by necessity but by love; not as a self-possessed something, or series of somethings, but as persons in communion, as Church. He does so by overcoming the Fall: that inversion of our personhood which turns our difference from God, and from one another, into distance or division; which fractures and de-personalizes us, reducing us to thinghood, subjecting us to necessity, and so ultimately to non-being.16 But how does he do so? How does Christ generate the free, the catholic, the existing person? The answer is twofold. First, he does so by the power of his own prior personhood, that is, by virtue of the eternal relation (schesis) to the Father which constitutes him as a person. His personhood enables him to cause his human nature to be (that is, to be in communion), even as the Father’s personhood enables the divine nature to be. Second, he generates the free or catholic person by sharing with him or her the same schesis that is constitutive of his own person.17 This sharing (which requires the cross and the descent into hell) is effected in the Spirit, by sacramental means, through the baptismal and eucharistic liturgies. It has a visible structure, but it remains a mystery which is not fully susceptible to analysis. It is the mystery of the existence of Christ, who is both one and many.18 Each part of this twofold answer requires cross-examination. The first raises a question we might not otherwise think to put to a devoted disciple of Maximus, but we must enquire whether the christology in play here is sufficiently Chalcedonian. It is evident enough that the line Zizioulas is following requires a firm rejection of any Nestorian inclination or procedure. If personhood is prior to nature, and if it involves a form of freedom which can only have its source in God, then we are not going to take two natures as our starting point and run the risk of implying two persons. We are going to begin instead with one person, who invests his divine freedom in 15 Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999) pp. 140 ff. 16 The alternative to necessity is not construed in terms of freedom of choice (which implies division) but in terms of love (which implies unity in difference). Zizioulas does want to speak, however, of freedom of choice as a dimension of personhood which enables us to refuse personhood, that is, to deny ‘the difference between person and nature’ and so to reject our own existence by collapsing into individuality, into thinghood (‘Human Capacity’, pp. 428f.) – in short, to fall away from God rather than to ascend to God by overcoming nature. 17 See Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 435 ff. 18 When Zizioulas speaks of Christ as ‘one’ he means Christ as a particular, which philosophically speaking correlates with the many; when he speaks of Christ as ‘many’ he refers to Christ as Church, that is, to a concept of unity or of the one. The latter, whatever its philosophical colouring, is coloured also by Zizioulas’ reliance (‘Human Capacity’, p. 408, n. 3) on the notion of ‘corporate personality’ drawn from H.W. Robinson and A.R. Johnson.

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his human nature. But what of Eutychianism? In his programmatic article, ‘Human Capacity and Human Incapacity’, Zizioulas remarks that he wants to ‘avoid the dilemma “divine or human person” as well as the curious composition “divine and human person”’.19 This can be done, he believes, by observing that ‘one and the same “schesis” is constitutive of Christ’s being, both with regard to his humanity and with regard to his divinity’. But is this right? Can we say, simpliciter, that the eternal relation of Father and Son constitutes either the being or the person of Jesus Christ? Unless we were willing to abandon the distinction between immanent and economic Trinity, what this would imply is that the incarnation – the event which makes the eternal Son to be the Son also in time, to be the Davidic ‘son’ – has no ontological significance, and no bearing on Christ’s personhood. And this in turn would require us after all to adopt the view that Christ is a divine person with a human nature but is not a human person, which would certainly tend to Eutychianism,20 or to take the view that personhood, regarded in itself, is indifferent to the distinction between divinity and humanity. Neither of these options seems to suit Zizioulas, I hasten to add.21 But would it not be more accurate, then, to say that the Son, in taking to himself a creaturely nature so as to be the Christ, becomes also a human person without ceasing to be a divine person? That he is in fact a divine and a human person? Of course it would not be more accurate unless it were pointed out with Chalcedon that there is no doubling of persons, as there is of natures; that the incarnate one is the divine person as a human person.22 Nevertheless we should be clear that there is here a human person, 19 The phrase ‘divine and human person’ has for Zizioulas (‘Human Capacity’, pp. 435f.) Nestorian overtones. We must avoid the conclusion that two natures means two persons, and we can do so only by recognizing that personhood is not a product of nature, but rather it is the person which allows the nature to be – in this case, which allows both natures to be. (In a cryptic argument, based partly on the vaguely Aristotelian premise that ‘there is no nature “in the nude”’, Zizioulas concludes that ‘it is his person that makes divine and human natures to be that particular being called Christ’.) The phrase in question, however, appears to lead from nature to person and so tends towards the Nestorian error. 20 ‘My God is not of like nature with me! He is not an individual man, but only man by nature. He does not have soma anthropou but anthropinon,’ insists Eutyches (cf. D. Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) p. 86; J.N. D.Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (London: A&C Black, 1985) p. 332). For Eutyches Christ is not homoousios with us in the patristic sense; that is, in Irenaeus’ words, as ‘a man among men’. 21 On the other hand, how exactly shall we read the following statement? ‘The natural qualities are not extrinsic to the identity … but by being “enhypostasized” these qualities become dependent on the hypostasis for their being; the hypostasis is not dependent on them’ (John Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person’, in Persons, Divine and Human, edited by C. Gunton and C. Schwöbel (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992) p. 43). Do such statements about ‘the mystery of personhood’ (cf. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 440) not imply a certain indifference of person to nature? 22 Here we may appeal to ‘anhypostasis’ and ‘enhypostasis’. The point of the former, as of the latter, is not to deny the concreteness of the Son’s humanity – hence also his human personhood – but to affirm it, by denying that it belongs to another. Rightly regarded, these doctrines serve to clarify that, while the personhood of the incarnate Son is subject to consideration from the standpoint of temporal as well as eternal relations, and of a human


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one whose personhood is delineated both by the eternal relation of the Father to the Son and by a temporal relation of the same Son to the Father,23 and to us. This ‘and’ (or rather, both these ‘and’s) will have to be taken into consideration when we examine the second part of Zizioulas’ twofold answer. Let us explore further the difficulty with the first part, however, by querying the way in which Zizioulas understands personhood, which he says is a schesis. This (as far as it goes) may seem unobjectionable, but plainly we cannot simply equate the person with the schesis, as Zizioulas appears to do. Can we say of the Father that his person is constituted by his fatherly relation to the Son? Undoubtedly, but when we go on to speak of his relation to the Spirit we make clear (unless we adopt a radical filioquist stance) that there is more to the Father than this fatherly schesis. Likewise, mutatis mutandis, with the Son. It is this ‘more’ which makes possible a repetition cum alteration in schesis without destroying the unity of his person. It is this ‘more’, in other words, which makes possible his incarnation. In the incarnation a divine person and a human person are one and the same person; and yet this one person is related to the Father as son in two distinct ways, as God to God and as man to God.24 We ought therefore to deny that personhood is a schesis – even if it is necessary to think in terms of particular constitutive relations in order to think of persons and personhood at all – for there is no third or archetypal schesis behind these two, to hold them together. And these two really are two, just as Christ’s natures are two, without Christ being two persons.25 The danger in Zizioulas’ construct is that it cannot fail to undermine either one or the other of these claims. as well as a divine nature, the Son is but one person. This is not because, as a person, he is somehow independent of these relations or these natures, nor yet because only one set of relations (the eternal) and only one nature (the divine) are really his. Certainly it is not because his person can be regarded as the sum of both the eternal and the temporal relations, or as the product of both the divine and the human natures; no such sum and no such product exist. The incarnate Son is but one person because, as has just been said, he is the divine person being a human person. (Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics I.2, pp. 147ff., 159ff.; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III.2.4.) 23 When we ask about this temporal relation from the perspective of the Father, who does not himself become temporal or creaturely, it can only be replied that it is mediated internally by the Son. Any other reply is likely to result in Nestorianism, and to imply a breach between the immanent and the economic Trinity. Colin Gunton’s attempt in The Christian Faith (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002) pp. 109f. to bypass this point pneumatologically leads to an inverse form of monothelitism, for which reason it must be rejected. 24 Persons exist in and through personal relations, not as these relations, though they do not exist apart from these relations. Relations can therefore be altered, even if constitutional. The point of Chalcedon is that, God being God, the alteration which is the incarnation does not undo the intra-divine or constitutional relation. The eternal Son does not cease to be who he is in taking on human nature; nor does he become another person in addition to himself. He does, however, enter into a new and different relation to the Father in which he is constituted as a man. In this new and different relation it is perfectly appropriate to speak of him as a human person, though for fear of adoptionism the tradition has been hesitant to do so (but cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics I.2, pp. 164f.). 25 Two natures does not mean two persons, but it does mean two ontologically distinct ways of being personal. For if natures cannot be abstracted from persons – we may agree that

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Now with every sentence of such a discussion we are in danger of using words and concepts to mediate between God and man rather than letting the mediator mediate. That is, we are in danger of failing to take into account that terms like person and nature and schesis must not be employed in a purely univocal way. The person-nature relation is one thing for God and another for man; to be a person is one thing for God and another for man; to be at all, even as an act of mutual communion, is one thing for God and another for man.26 For just this reason we must not fail to say – not if we intend to take seriously Chalcedon’s double homoousios – that the incarnate Son is both a divine and a human person, and we have already seen that we must not appeal to a single schesis or to ‘the mystery of personhood’ as a way of avoiding this.27 But why are we pursuing this line of questioning? That we cannot make the equation, person = schesis, and that we must speak of the incarnate Son as personally related to the Father (as also to the Spirit) in two distinct ways, becomes still more crucial when we turn from consideration of Christ as one to a consideration of Christ as many; that is, when we turn to the second part of Zizioulas’ answer, the thesis that Christ generates the free or catholic person by sharing the same schesis that is constitutive of his own being. The questions that arise here amount to an enquiry about the hypostatic nature of the Church in its unity with the Son and, conversely, about the hypostatic nature of the incarnate Son in his unity with the Church. They bring us to a consideration of Zizioulas’ ecclesiology along with his christology. We ought, I think, to agree with Zizioulas that Christ generates the free or catholic person by sharing the same filial relation that is constitutive of his own personhood or being.28 But it is only by not making the aforementioned equation that we can do so without implying or asserting that all are one person in Christ. Miroslav Volf, for example, thinks that this is what Zizioulas does imply. The hypostasis, the ‘particularity and uniqueness and therefore ultimate being’, of each and all cannot be ‘constituted through the same filial relationship which constitutes Christ’s being’, as Zizioulas claims, for there would be no principle of differentiation there is no nature ‘in the nude’ – neither can persons be abstracted from natures – there is no person ‘in the nude’ either. Therefore we cannot speak, as Zizioulas asks us to, of a person who ‘makes divine and human natures to be that particular being called Christ’. We can only speak of a divine person who becomes and is a human person, while noting that this statement is not reversible: the human person is, but does not become, the divine person. 26 If God, and only God, is his own nature (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.39.1; cf. III.2.2), all of this follows. 27 Could we not get round the whole problem, however, by observing that from Zizioulas’ point of view Christ is not so much one person in two natures as a person, whose nature is to be personal (and so to be), assuming an impersonal or individualistic nature for the very purpose of personalizing it (making it be)? Would this not also permit us to answer Schleiermacher, who rejects the doctrine of the assumptio in part because he supposes that it must lead back to docetism, since ‘the human nature in this way can only become a person in the sense in which this is true of a person in the Trinity’ (F.D.E. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1976) §97.2; cf. §96.1)? On the contrary, the problem would not be solved but at best postponed. 28 See, for example, Hebrews 2:10f.


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here.29 In making this charge Volf does not do justice, however, either to Zizioulas’ way of relating nature and freedom, or to his understanding of catholicity and of the corporate Christ. For Zizioulas himself does not really want to reduce the person to the schesis. As there is room for distinct persons in God, so there is room for distinct persons in Christ, that is, in deified or personalized humanity. To be personal is to be distinct, but to be distinct for the sake of unity. What renders us personal is our participation in Christ’s sonship, in his filial schesis, in his being for the Father. We become Christ, not by ceasing to be ourselves, but by finding ourselves in Christ by being for the Father as he is for the Father. As for our distinctness, it is a function both of our created individuality and of the deification which overcomes it – that is, of freedom in, as well as freedom from, necessity. This Volf appears to overlook, while shying away from the (right-minded) claim that all human personhood is mediated by Christ, and so involves a form of deification or participation in God. There is nonetheless a problem here, which Volf has highlighted for us by carrying his criticism through into ecclesiology. According to Volf, the particularity and distinctness of the Church is threatened just as that of the person is threatened.30 In the eucharist, the Church (however peculiar and distinct as this or that local church) is Christ, and Christ the Church. And as the distinction (or rather the ‘gap’, to use Zizioulas’ own expression) between the two collapses, so does the unique heavenly ministry of Christ, while the local church takes on a universal authority and an eschatological weight which do not properly belong to it.31 Once again Volf does not do Zizioulas justice, in my opinion – and cannot, perhaps, for reasons to be debated elsewhere, of which Volf’s sacramental nominalism is but one. But the difficulty to which he points can certainly be felt in reading Being as Communion, in which (to approach the problem from the other side) it is often semantically impossible to substitute the name ‘Jesus’ where Zizioulas has the title ‘Christ’.32 That this is 29 Cf. Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 438, and Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) p. 87. 30 ‘Just as through baptism human beings are constituted into persons anhypostatically in Christ, so also does the Church exist in the Eucharist anhypostatically and acquire its entire identity from the identity of Christ. This paralleling of personhood and ecclesiastical being is not fortuitous. Any distance between Christ and the Church would simultaneously mean the individualization of Christ, and the possibility of the deindividualization of human beings would be lost … Yet just as in the constituting of a person the particularity of that person is lost and the individual is absorbed into Christ, so also the Church itself is threatened with being absorbed into Christ.’ (Volf, After Our Likeness, p. 100) This formulation fails to acknowledge the enhypostatic aspect of Zizioulas’ doctrine of personhood – ‘the cause of being is the particular, not the general’ (Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person’, p. 43) – and its ecclesiological implications. 31 Cf. Volf, After Our Likeness, pp. 98ff., and Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 110ff. (for whom the eucharist is the Christ-event in its fullness). In such matters we may share something of Volf’s concern, it seems to me, without colluding in his non-christological approach to human personhood, which subverts Zizioulas’ strength as well as his weakness. 32 To offer an example, Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 115: ‘Christ Himself becomes revealed as truth not in a community but as a community.’ Or, p. 157: ‘The whole Christ, the catholic Church, was present and incarnate in each eucharistic community.’ It does not obviate this particular difficulty to say that the Christus totus is, after all, a familiar theologoumenon.

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the case invites us to consider whether there is not in fact a Eutychianizing process at work here, a process introduced by Zizioulas’ failure to distinguish adequately between schesis and schesis, that is, between Christ as God and Christ as man. Christ as man means Christ as Church, Christ as imago Trinitatis; and this imago is itself understood in divine terms. Like the Godhead, it is a perichoretic reality.33 Now I do not wish to withdraw from the term ‘deification’. Nor do I wish to argue against the notion that humanity, fully achieved, is ecclesial, or that ecclesial humanity is imago Trinitatis.34 But I do think that we must stop short of identifying human personhood, or human catholicity, or the ecclesial mode of being, as a form of the divine perichoresis. The ‘de-individualization’ and deification of the human person, as a bearer of the Spirit together with Jesus, does not mean that the human person is a person in the same sense or in the same way that a divine person is a person. We must not allow (as Zizioulas does) a univocal use of the word ‘person’ in reference to both God and man, whether in christology or in ecclesiology.35 With respect to divine persons, it is true to say that the other divine persons are co-inherent in each, and therefore that the whole of God is in each. With respect to human persons, however, it is not true to say that the others are co-inherent in each, or that the whole of man is in each. It is not true to say that Jesus Christ is the Church, or that each communicant is Christ and the Church.36 It is true to say that every member of the Church is ‘in’ Christ in a way that is ontologically determinative for that member, and so also for the whole Church, and indeed for Christ.37 In other words, I do not And the difficulty is only deepened when we hear that the Church, as eucharistic event, mediates between ‘the historical Jesus and the eschatological Christ’ (p. 206), making them one reality. Should we not say rather that the eucharistic event mediates between Jesus Christ, in his eschatological mode of existence, and the historical reality of the people of God? Or might both statements be true? 33 It does appear that for Zizioulas the term ‘Christ’ has become synonymous with ‘Church’, and that both terms have become analogous to ‘God’ or ‘Trinity’ (the former indicating Jesus, Mary, John, and so on, in their being as communion, just as the latter indicates Father, Son and Spirit in their being as communion). 34 We need to be careful here, however, for this claim requires us to admit that Jesus is the express image of the invisible God only in and with his Church, and not without it. 35 ‘The perfect man is … only he who is authentically a person …, who possesses a “mode of existence” which is constituted as being, in precisely the manner in which God also subsists as being’ (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 55, emphasis his; see pp. 54ff.). This univocity makes it difficult to assign ontological weight to the Jesus of history: ‘the real hypostasis of Jesus was proved to be not the biological one, but the eschatological or trinitarian hypostasis’ (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 55, n. 49). And this in turn leads to formulations which underestimate Christ’s human particularity and undermine the pneumatology that Zizioulas wants to encourage. 36 See Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 60f. With respect to God, we may say that in and with the Father (or the Son or the Spirit) the Godhead is. Respecting the Church, however, things are otherwise. Here we can say ‘in and with Jesus Christ the Church is’ – if that is what Zizioulas really means – but we cannot say that ‘in and with John Zizioulas’, or even ‘in and with Bishop John’, the Church is. 37 This is where the ‘and to us’ comes into play, for if the personhood of Jesus Christ is the personhood of the eternal Son of God, it is for all that a personhood not independent of


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wish to withdraw either from Zizioulas’ notion that each Christian person makes ecclesial humanity to be in a new and unique way. But if this implies a form of perichoresis, it does not imply the divine perichoresis, in which the God-man alone participates.38 On the contrary, it implies a distinctly human form of perichoresis, albeit one which rests on the power of God: a perichoresis which does not make man God, but allows men to share with one another the gifts of God. What, then, is the nub of our disagreement about catholicity, if disagreement it is? It is not a question of accepting or rejecting an ontology of communion, a eucharistic realism, or a doctrine of deification.39 It is a question of adopting a version of this ontology, realism, and doctrine which does not compromise the distinction between the divine and the creaturely – either protologically or eschatologically – and which does not present the Church as a kind of tertium quid between God and man.40 This would seem to be what Zizioulas himself wants, for theosis, he says, does not mean participation ‘in the nature or substance of God, but in His personal existence. The goal of salvation is that the personal life which is realised in God should also be realised on the level of human existence.’41 But this distinction between God’s nature or substance and his ‘personal life’ or ‘personal existence’ is itself problematic; indeed it is not clear how Zizioulas can make such a distinction, or that we should follow him in doing so. And it becomes even more problematic if the latter is abstracted in such a way as to make it strictly transferable to human beings. This line of criticism means, of course, that we must also question Zizioulas at a number of related points, just three of which can be mentioned here. First, does the eucharist, as his controversial maxim has it, make the Church? Yes it does. The that of Mary, or even of Joseph. 38 We need not be embarrassed about saying ‘the God-man alone’, or about the fact that we cannot say how he participates (except ‘enhypostatically’). Nor should we imagine that John 17:21 ff. warrants a theological extension of his unique participation to the Church, though it certainly warrants an ecclesiology based on some form of analogia communionis (cf. Alan Torrance, Persons in Communion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996) pp. 305f.). ‘The Word of God “did not assume human nature in general, but ‘in atomo’” – that is, in an individual – as Damascene says (De Fide Orth. iii, 11),’ remarks Aquinas; ‘otherwise every man would be the Word of God, even as Christ was’ (Summa Theologiae III.2.2). And even when we have heard Zizioulas on the subject of individuality, and taken into account that Christ and the Spirit are sent to liberate us from a false, self-enclosed form of the same, and thought out our eschatology, still we must say nothing to compromise the uniqueness of the God-man. 39 I have agreed that creaturely personhood is a gift of participation with God, who alone (as the Trinity) is personal in se. I have not agreed, however, that human being is communion in the same sense that God’s being is communion. The difference is mediated by the Godman, not removed by the God-man. Nor are we, like the God-man, ourselves mediators of this difference. 40 Treating the unio personalis as something not affecting or touching the person will have such Eutychian effects. 41 On the level of human existence (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 50): it is worth noting that this concern for the integrity of the human, and for the trinitarian – especially the pneumatological – underpinnings of a theology that truly supports the human, is what bound John Zizioulas and Colin Gunton together, notwithstanding the latter’s rejection of ‘deification’ as a concept injurious to that of creaturely integrity.

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eucharist, together with baptism, makes the Church because it is through these sacraments, conducted in the faith of Christ which arises from the gospel, that God joins us to Christ and renders us his body. It makes the Church because this action of God in joining us to Christ is an eschatological action – the ascended Christ being an eschatological reality – which does not derive from (though it implicates) our ‘here and now’, but derives from his ‘there and then’. That said, Christ is not the Church, and the eucharist does not make the Church by making Christ, as Zizioulas might be taken to imply. It makes the Church rather by the Spirit’s overcoming of that which separates or alienates us from Christ, just as Christ overcomes that which alienates us from God.42 Second, is each local church, in its synaxis or eucharistic celebration, really the Church in its fullness? Without endorsing Miroslav Volf’s alternative – an essentially quantitative approach to ecclesial fullness and unity? – we may again need to qualify Zizioulas’ affirmative answer. The local church may be said to be the Church in its fullness inasmuch as it cannot be at all without being with Christ and so with the whole Church, past, present and future.43 But if Christ is not himself the Church, and if the Church’s communal life in Christ is not a form of, but only analogous to, the divine perichoresis, then the local church – even in its eucharistic unity with Christ and with the whole company of heaven – is not as such the universal Church. It is rather, in its own way, an expression or manifestation, however perfect or imperfect, of the universal Church. Third, does the eschaton mean for the ecclesial person (as opposed to his or her human nature) capax infiniti, as Zizioulas suggests? Yes, if capax infiniti – or better, aeterni – means the ability to experience conjointly what cannot be experienced separately, that is, union and communion with God, and to share in its inexhaustible benefits. No, if it means the ability to contain or to become God, as the divine persons contain one another and so exist as God, in absolute freedom. For the eschatological fulfilment of the person (who cannot be abstracted from his or her nature) does not entail elimination of all creaturely limitation or all creaturely necessity, which would mean the elimination of the creaturely as such.44 But the elimination of necessity, we may suppose, is not what Zizioulas has in mind when he talks about freedom from necessity. What he has in mind, as I have already said, is more precisely freedom in necessity, through creaturely communion with God.45 Agreement and disagreement 42 Pace Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 110; cf. Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, pp. 5ff., 70ff., passim. 43 See Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 143ff.; cf. Hebrews 12:18ff. 44 Conversely, it does not entail the dissolving of the distinction between the immanent and the economic Trinity, any more than it entails the dissolving of the difference between the two natures of Christ. 45 It is curious that Zizioulas (‘Human Capacity’, pp. 442ff.) does not bring the freedom and necessity dialectic explicitly into this resolution – if resolution it is – so as to complete the parallel with capacity in incapacity and presence in absence. Less curious, of course, is the fact that he overlooks important aspects of human freedom (cf., for example, Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986) pp. 106ff.) which do not readily fit his theological construct, and that even in emphasizing bodily resurrection he shows little interest in treating it.


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with Zizioulas on the matter of eschatology must be pursued elsewhere, however, for it is time to ask a final question. Questioning the Necessity–Freedom Dialectic Having expounded Zizioulas by way of reference to his nature–freedom dialectic, I have also ventured some critical remarks about the christology he uses to control and deploy that dialectic. I have suggested that this christology suffers from a certain Eutychian tendency, which in turn has a detrimental effect on his ecclesiology. I am happy, of course, to be found wrong, but since I have indeed ventured such an opinion, it seems right to ask how far the tendency in question may be a product of the necessity–freedom dialectic, rather than merely a distorting factor in it. Is there, in other words, a danger in the dialectic itself that should command our attention? I think there is. The danger does not so much lie (as Volf suggests) in the association of nature with necessity and personhood with freedom, but in the setting of nature and necessity over against personhood and freedom, whether theologically or anthropologically.46 It is at this presuppositional level that an even stronger challenge to existentialism (and to Greek thought generally) than Zizioulas attempts needs to be mounted. Divine personhood should not be understood as a freedom won from, or preserved against, necessity or sheer absoluteness of nature, though the concept of divine personhood represents such a victory. Nor – and here is the point of contention – should human personhood be seen as a triumph over our creaturely nature and its exigencies. Which is to say, human personhood and freedom do not arise in contradiction of created nature, nor are they a victory against non-being. It is not as if the creature qua creature must be impersonal, inasmuch as it is created ex nihilo and is subject (as God is not) to certain necessities. Down this path Eutychianism does indeed lie, since such a premise makes it impossible to understand human personhood as human. It is true, of course, that human personhood (understood in terms of the imago dei) cannot be explained adequately by reference to other features of creation.47 Human personhood is sui generis, a gift specially given with and for the twin blessings of the incarnation of the Son and the coming of the Holy Spirit; that is, for communion with the Father, which (as its final cause) ultimately perfects our personhood. But that special gift, resting as it does on the mediation of the God-man, is not something contrary to creation or to our created nature. Creation is for it, and it for creation. Creaturely necessities do not inhibit creaturely personhood; in their proper place and time they enhance it. Whence arises, then, that debilitating competition between freedom and necessity which generates the quandaries of which Zizioulas (like the existentialists) takes notice? It arises not from creation but from the Fall, in which the relation of freedom and necessity is fundamentally altered. And here we must note that, while Zizioulas stresses the doctrine of the Fall, his conception

46 Cf. Volf, After Our Likeness, p. 87. 47 See Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 431.

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of it requires clarification. At some points he speaks as I have just spoken; at others (like Maximus) he appears to conflate creation and fall.48 Any suggestion that the fall is somehow implicit in creation casts the necessity–freedom relation into an oppositional mode, the mode of fallen man’s alienation from himself and from God. This skews the entire debate about the relation between necessity and freedom in the realization of human personhood.49 On the other hand, when we consider the teaching of the Scriptures and the Fathers that human persons, in being made after the image of God, are destined to receive immortality – that the human person, as immortal, exists by virtue of the investment in that person of God’s own immortal Spirit50 – are we not obliged to speak of a triumph over our creaturely nature? And may we not speak of this triumph in terms of a necessity–freedom dialectic, as Zizioulas wishes to do, before speaking of the Church as the divine form of human freedom? May we not indeed regard the Church as the triumph of God over human nature, that is, over the ‘individual’ who seeks relief from necessity and finds it, not in existentialist courage or commitment, but in the new ecclesial hypostasis?51 The answer to all these questions, surely, is yes. But this ‘yes’ still does not commit us to the kind of dialectic which presents human personhood per se as a triumph over our nature. For it is our nature to be open to the gift of immortality, as the proper realization of our personhood, except we be closed to that destiny by the Fall. And this means that the necessity–freedom dialectic is not a nature–person dialectic, but a dialectic internal to human nature as oriented to personhood. Which means in turn that it is internal to human personhood as such. This alteration in perspective removes the temptation to adopt a christology which tends towards the Eutychian, and an ecclesiology which tends towards christomonism. For the function of the God-man is not to introduce personhood (a divine reality) into the impersonal (the creaturely), so that the latter might attain authentic existence.52 His function is rather to perfect, together with the Spirit, a human analogy to divine personhood; that is, to secure for human personhood its essential openness to God and to the other, and so to make possible its pneumatic 48 See Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, pp. 424ff., 434f., but note the word ‘inevitable’ on p. 435, n. 2, and cf. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 49ff. 49 It may be the case that it belongs to the nature of living creatures, including humans, to exist by facing and overcoming necessities of various kinds. But it does not follow that there must be a zero-sum game here, or that human personhood should be defined in terms of this overcoming (that is, in terms of liberation from necessity through communion). 50 Irenaeus put this most succinctly, as I have noted in Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, pp. 59ff. 51 Kierkegaard’s protest against a false ecclesiality notwithstanding (see Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, pp. 227f.). 52 Through an extension and repetition of the hypostatic union? Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 442: ‘Personhood, I have argued, is the mode in which nature exists in its ekstatic movement of communion in which it is hypostasised in its catholicity. This, I have also said, is what has been realised in Christ as the man par excellence through the hypostatic union. This, I must now add, is what should happen to every man in order that he himself may become Christ …’ (his emphasis).


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and ecclesial form, the form requisite to immortality.53 Now immortality is indeed authentic existence, and authentic existence is an existence based on communion. It is personal existence.54 But this same alteration in perspective also removes the temptation to regard personal existence for human beings as an existence that is Godlike in the sense that it is a pure perichoretic communion, or a pure freedom from necessity. To take such a view would be to concede too much to the existentialists. For necessity is not the ultimate threat to personhood. Sin is the ultimate threat, and not by the destruction of our personhood (for the gifts and calling of God are irrevocable) but by its perversion and frustration.55 And what does all this mean if not that Zizioulas’ ecclesiology, while a gift to the Western Church and to Western theologians, requires in its turn to be informed by, and reformed together with, Latin insights? The future lies in attempting an ecclesial ontology of personhood which carefully distinguishes the necessity– freedom dialectic from the sin–salvation dialectic, accommodating both within a more expansive doctrine of perfecting grace. But this latter will have to be governed by a christological and pneumatological paradigm that has yet to be achieved.

53 Or is this all that Zizioulas means when he speaks of our being joined to God in a dialectic of difference rather than division (Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, p. 440)? 54 Cf. Augustine, de Trinitate 13.3 (12) [The Trinity (Brooklyn: New City Press, 1991)]. 55 See Zizioulas, ‘Human Capacity’, pp. 44ff. Shall we refuse to concede, then, that it is communion ‘which makes beings be’? Surely it is God who makes beings be, in whatever way it is appropriate for them to be.


Chapter 7

Christian Life and Institutional Church Nicholas Loudovikos

John Zizioulas’ Eucharist, Bishop, Church, subtitled The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries, has had a dramatic impact on the way we view the Church. Written in a difficult period for Orthodox ecclesiology, it represents the early thought of the most significant Orthodox ecclesiologist of recent times. Despite the ‘eucharistic ecclesiology’ of Nicolai Afanassieff, the long Babylonian captivity of Orthodox ecclesiology, alternating between a Roman Catholic institutionalism and a Protestant institutional relativism, prevented any distinctively Orthodox confessional ecclesiology, or even an account of the ecclesiology of the ancient Church. Zizioulas took up the challenge to provide a new eucharistic ecclesiology properly built on the ancient patristic foundations. He did so by showing that the bishop was the essential component of the unity of the ancient Church. His achievement is a great prize not only for Orthodox theology, but for the whole Church. Such a great achievement has inevitably caused the ‘falling and rising up of many’. Zizioulas’ identification of the bishop as the source of the unity of the Church seemed to some to allow the excessive legal and institutional elevation of the bishop, as almost the sole presupposition of this unity. The structural, legal and institutional emphasis on the bishop’s primacy seemed to push the communal life of the Church into the background, so there is no need for any other ecclesiastical gift or office. If the unity of the Church is identified only by unity around the bishop, there would not be any need for the communion of all spiritual gifts in the bishop. The bishop comes to express the ‘fullness of the Church’ and her ‘charism of truth’ as sole ‘successor of the Apostles’ as it were.1 This demotes the office of presbyter. Presbyters are not considered co-celebrators with the bishop, and it was considered a revolution when the work of the eucharist was entrusted to them, something foreign to the nature of the presbyter. But how could there have been such a revolution if the presbyter did not already possess some eucharistic function, dependent on the bishop as ‘first presbyter’? In the New Testament and after, there are two priestly offices, that of the bishop-presbyter and that of the deacon. The elevation of the bishop to the status of minister of unity par excellence comes from the internal differentiation of this single ancient office of bishop-presbyter. This ancient office was essentially eucharistic. The increasing number of congregations, and so the formation of the parish, led to this differentiation within a single original office. 1 John Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001) p. 160.

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In their present day form, displaying the unity of Christ in the local church, the bishop and presbyter present a single priestly status. The nature of all priestly offices is christological. Thus, although Saint Ignatius saw the bishop as an icon of Christ (for example, Ignatius, Letter to the Smyrnans 8.2) or, elsewhere, of God (Magnesians 6.1), in other epistles, he suddenly relates the bishop to the Father, the presbyters to the Apostles and the deacons to Christ (Magnesians 6.1; 13.2; Trallians 3.1). This flexibility of the icons of these three priestly offices is a reminder of the common christological nature of all priestly gifts and offices. Your noble priesthood, worthy of God, is fitted to the bishop, as the strings to a harp. By the harmony of your love Jesus Christ is sung. Form yourselves one and all into a choir, so that in harmony around the key-note of God, you may sing in unison with one voice through Jesus Christ to the Father, so that he may hear you and by your well-doing recognize you as members of his Son. It is right for you to live in blameless unity, that you may always be partakers of God.2

It is clear that the presbyters did not merely make up the ‘council’ of the bishop, his ‘administrative counselors’.3 They were christological manifestations of ‘the harmony of love’: without a lyre there are no strings, just as without strings there is no lyre. The service of the bishop is eschatologically prior as the frame to which the strings are strung. The ontological basis of this unity is not always perceived by Zizioulas’ readers, so they have used him to argue for excessive institutional elevation of the office of bishop in an authoritarian legal and institutional structure, rather than the harmony of spiritual gifts to which Saint Ignatius refers. The unity of the Church ‘in the eucharist and in the bishop’ is an expression of her unity in Christ, tested continuously ‘by the Holy Spirit and with fire’ (Matthew 3:11) for her faithfulness to this unity. If we forget this, the life of the Church will be determined by its institutions, with resulting problems for the whole identity of the Church. But in the Church this unity is expressed, not merely symbolically, but in suffering. The servant of unity is Christ, who emptied himself on the cross, and the rule of the Father expresses itself in his eternal emptying of himself in love for the Son and Holy Spirit. If the bishop does not empty himself on the cross, expressing and sustaining all offices and gifts, even though he may symbolize unity on a psychological or naturalistic level, the ecclesiality he represents will be missing. Indeed, every spiritual and church-building gift will disappear if it does not summon all the gifts of the Spirit into being. The office of the bishop is determined by this cross-driven self-giving that directs all gifts so that Christ may make himself present to his Church. Zizioulas’ work is driven by passion for the Church. His later inspirational theological work shows the form in which the Church comes into being for us. By a reworking of the Orthodox ecclesiological tradition, and of the Western tradition, particularly perhaps from Henri de Lubac and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the thought of this great theologian reached its culmination. In Being as Communion (1985), 2 Ignatius, Letter to the Ephesians 4.1–2, Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. 1, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1867). 3 Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, p. 249.

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we see him arrive at a balanced ecclesiological synthesis. Zizioulas attributes apostolic succession not to the line of bishops only, but to the entire community. He demonstrates that the different spiritual gifts work together, and are valid only as they are held in communion. The concept of corporate personality is vital. Christ exists in the Church not only as one, the bishop, but also as many, the totality of gifts. No single office-holder possesses their fullness, so they are not subject to individualistic possession or employment, and create no institutional pyramid. The bishop orchestrates these spiritual endowments to serve the dynamic manifestation of the living constitution of ‘Christ-as-church’. The structure of the Church is an icon of the eschaton that brings foretastes of itself into the present. This is the fullest ecclesiological synthesis in contemporary Orthodox theology. With Zizioulas we are standing upon the solid ground of the ancient Church tradition at its most creative. Ecclesial charisms and orders are ‘relational events’, that have meaning in their interdependence within the community, rather than in individual functions or services. Unless pneumatology shows how the Spirit works to open up beings to one another, ecclesial ontology becomes essentialist and individualistic. But this affirmation of the gifts through their inter-communion in the Spirit must be conceived only together with a simultaneous affirmation that these spiritual orders and endowments are individuated and unique manifestations of christological fullness in communion. The particular function of ecclesial vocations does not make them individualistic. Orthodox theology unjustly fears the word ‘individualism’. But Maximus’ theology of ecclesial consubstantiality secures an individuation of vocations or functions in the community, without losing their communal content. We need to stress the christological ‘individuation’ just as much as the ‘communality’ of spiritual gifts. The Spirit works out the consubstantial interpenetration of each gift in all the others. The Holy Spirit does not ‘communalize’ except by ‘individuating’ each gift consubstantially. The individuation that affirms the specific human subject constitutes the major problem for Orthodox ecclesiology and anthropology. All attempts at an ecclesiology – always inspired by Dionysius the Areopagite – to conceive the Church as an icon of the eschata, ontologically and existentially interpreted in the divine eucharist, is the way to conceive the institution of the Church. We must pay more attention to the particularity of the individual subject. Our fear of individualization, internalization, or subjectivism should not lead us to an institutional understanding of the Church and Christian life, in which the person and his gifts simply service the institution. There are two risks here. The first is that we lose the true human subject. The point of the ‘structuralism’ of the 1960s was to escape subjectivism, but of course it went on to ‘deconstruct’ the subject. The subject, though, is more than simply a set of ‘relationships’. This is why we need a theology of consubstantiality which can show that individual or subjective internalism is not dangerous when, shaped by the cross of Christ, it is the place in which all created being comes together (synaxis), through Christ, in the Spirit, within us. Consubstantiality ecclesializes the individual and his internal life. The institutional structure of the Church is turned into an apophatic personal imitation and manifestation of Christ. Christ, as Church, is expressed in the institutional structure, not identified with it. The notion of ‘economy’ is necessary in Orthodox canon law as a reminder of the apophacity of the institutional structure. The emphasis on the institution is due to the fear of

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individualism, but we must equally be careful not to lose the individual within the Church institution and hierarchy. The one Holy Spirit brings embodiment to the community. Wholeness and communion can be lost or inauthentic when the integrity of the individual and his or her gifts are not secured. We do not avoid individualism by turning the institution of the Church into a kind of meta-individual. The second danger for an ecclesiology of communion is loss of the relationship of communion and history. When it is not linked to the call to catholicity, any consideration of the institution of the Church is in danger of losing touch with its historical origins. If ‘relationships’ become more significant than communion the Church will cease to be a pilgrimage led by the cross. The Spirit does not present us with static social structures, but brings us into communion freely and of our own volition. As Saint Maximus insisted, the Spirit gives us a Christ-centred orientation, and frees us for this communal apophatic imitation of the life of God. What occurs to the individual is just what happens in his or her communion in Christ: the being of that person remains part of the mystery. Although that life is given, experiential and measurable, this life consists in its existence, opened up for life. The Church conceived in the eucharistic ontology of Saint Maximus the Confessor teaches us to see the eucharist as activity in time and space. It is not solely and utterly above us, but a cooperative act in and with Christ. The gift of the Church is constituted by ‘life’ and ‘institution’ simultaneously and indivisibly. ‘Life’ and ‘institution’ are transcended because every spiritual gift is a ‘particular’ christological manifestation of the whole Church. Contemporary Orthodox ecclesiology swings between Protestant and Catholic positions. The ‘Protestant’ position, represented by Father Romanides, wants the spiritual gifts to structure the Church. The ‘Catholic’ position sees the institution or structure as the gift that constitutes the Church. But in a consubstantial theology, that understands all the endowments of the Church as manifestations of the whole Christ in the Spirit, this antithesis disappears. The institution does not constitute the ‘being’ of the Church or the spiritual gifts its ‘action’. Ecclesial existence does not merely ‘exist’: it is dialogically actuated. No gift or action replaces the Church. Rather, according to Maximus, it moves in a line towards it, because this is the authentic and objective act and Word of God, in Christ, in history. The apostle Paul connects this theology of charisms to love. In the First Letter to the Corinthians the apostle says that the gifts are only sufficient when they are mutually informed in love in the one body of Christ. Love constitutes the ultimate ecclesiological substance of all the gifts, authenticating them as manifestations of Christ. The christological functioning of each gift ‘in the Holy Spirit’ (1 Corinthians 12:12) entails three things. First, it entails the presence and action of the loving God in Christ, who in the Spirit forms members of the Body of Christ through these gifts. Secondly, it entails truly loving subjects who, through this very love, make these gifts manifestations of the whole Christ. Thirdly, it brings into being a true community of ontological love – one Body – where these gifts are shared. The concept of corporate personality, like that of koinonia, is an abstraction until this complex reality of willing love is expressed. For in love, the internality of the true subject and the externality of its communion are absolutely and indissolubly connected. Communion is therefore not a transcendent structure, or an objective or subconscious ‘set of relationships’.


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The gifts are not structural or institutional, but loving and freely willed dialogues of God and his people. Only the theological concept of consubstantiality provides the foundation for an ecclesiology of the true person, and holds these elements together. Perhaps we can then say that the Church possesses the truth in her very structure. Without the concept of consubstantiality, corporate personality and communion simply become static transcendent structures of communion of the one and the many, as we see in Hegel or Schelling. The contradiction in human society, the deep conflicts, the cross and freedom, in short, the struggle for the attainment of communion and its potentiality, are thereby overlooked. It divorces the concept of history from that of freedom. True historicity means a step-by-step verifiable communality, which is what the apostle Paul meant by the ‘fruits of the Holy Spirit’, the existence of which confirms our progress towards ecclesial communality and historicity. Love as christological fulfilment of the gifts in Paul, or Saint Maximus’ concept of consubstantiality, allows confirmation of this because we do not merely conceive of communality, but actually grow in it. Notions such as koinonia and corporate personality are too abstract to allow for this. This is why, in the discussion between Florovsky and Zizioulas, about whether the Spirit acts in history or over history, for the sake of the ‘particular’ in our history, we must decide in favour of ‘in history’. The action of the Spirit does not take us out of history so much as transform particularities in history. We are not dealing with ecstatic elevation out of history, but the transformation of history itself, so these two views are ultimately reconciled. The penetration of the Spirit into history really does produce visible and empirical results. If no historical ‘elevation’ or ‘purification’ (Nietzsche) is visible over the historical long term, our ecclesiology is ‘ecstatic’, an elevation over history, and not a kenotic descent into its deep suffering. This is the correction that the Areopagite looked for and which Maximus found. But I wonder whether abstract structural models, such as the ‘one and the many’ that John Zizioulas uses, perhaps under the influence of Bonhoeffer, are adequate. On this model, the Father is the ‘one’ in the Holy Trinity, while the other persons are the ‘many’. The one in the Church is Christ, the members of his Body are the many. In the Church the one is the bishop, the many the other members. There are a number of things to say about this. First, in patristic trinitarian theology the ‘monarchy’ of the Father does not elevate the Father ontologically above the others who are ‘caused’ by Him. ‘The Father is not God because he is Father, but because of the common essence, which is Father and Son and within which the Father is God and the Son is God and the Spirit is Holy God,’ according to Gregory of Nyssa, writing against Eunomius. Gregory adds: ‘For God is One and the same, because he has one and the same essence, thus each of the Persons are in the essence and God.’4 Thus, in the Holy Trinity only one person ‘in the essence’, the Father, is the principle of the begetting and procession of the other persons. God is these three persons, causing and caused, and not an underlying principle of communion. While this is so for the doctrine of the Trinity, it is not so for the Church. We may not say in the same way that Christ and his members are ‘co-constituted’, or mutually dependent. 4 Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius 3, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1954 [1892]) vol. 5.


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Uniquely asymmetrically, Christ is the foundation and initiator who convenes and sustains his members, with their free acquiescence, as his Body. For those who he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren. And those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified.5

There is no full ontological mutuality of will, or ontological identification of the will, between Christ and his members as there is between the Father and the other two persons. There can only be an end to their assertion of their autonomy against him. The relation of the ‘one and the many’ in the Trinity and ‘the one and the many’ in the Church are not the same. In the first case there is an absolute ontological identity of essence and will between the ‘one and the many’, while in the second there is not even an ontological identity of nature (of the divine nature of Christ), nor of course an ontological identity of will. There is only the mystery of participation by grace through the mysteries in the uncreated will and work of God in Christ through the Spirit. Things are even more complicated in the third case, in which the one and the many model relates the bishop and the Church. Here the will to unify the one and the many belongs, not to the bishop, but to Christ. The bishop, however (who, as a member of the Church, himself belongs also to the ‘many’ for whom the ‘one’ is Christ), can, through the humble cession of his autexousion to Christ be, in the words of St Ignatius, ‘in the mind of Christ’, actuating the gift of unity in the name of Christ. The bishop does not ‘possess’ various gifts, which he distributes according to his will, as Christ does. The bishop does not ‘represent’ Christ in the Church as though Christ was effectively absent, in the Roman Catholic fashion. It is Christ who gives out the gifts in the mysteries, and every such gift is he himself in a specific and particular incarnation. Christ thus has the gifts and distributes the gifts. The bishop, when found ‘in the mind of Jesus Christ’, carries out in his name the distribution (not the possession) of those gifts. He does this, not as some superior gift of his own, but by proclaiming their ontological fulfilment in the communal manifestation of Christ through them. His own gift is precisely the manifestation of the ‘communality’ of the gifts as successive incarnations of the whole Christ in the Spirit. The episcopal office demonstrates the manifold and consubstantial catholicity of each specific gift. It maintains the integrity and eschatological orientation of each of them and for this reason, the office of the bishop is above all the office of pastor. The bishop demonstrates, because he participates in, the loving pastoral providence of Christ, which is the foundation of the Church. According to the Roman Catholic Church, the Pope is the only pastor, occupying Peter’s place. His own pastoral gift is essentially a superior gift, containing all the pastoral gifts of the Church, because the Pope is the ‘representative’ of Christ on earth, assuming in his person all Christ’s pastoral care and administrating all other gifts as his vicar. Despite the resonance of this teaching in Orthodox ecclesiology today, we must stress that in our tradition Christ is absolutely present in the Church 5

Romans 8:29–30.


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through the uncreated activity of the trinitarian God, and every gift, such as that of the pastor, is a direct participation in him. It does not originate in any intermediary who represents Christ or administrates grace in his name. The pastoral gift of the bishop and the presbyter (and these were originally a single office) is a participation in the divine pastoral work of Christ directly. The difference between them is that the bishop expresses this energy visibly, unifying every specific manifestation of it in the pastoral energy of the one Christ who shepherds, and through the bishop is the icon (not representation) of, the whole Church in that place. We need to exercise care in dealing with the parallels between the Trinity, christology and the Church. The three issues are indissolubly connected, but analogies between them risk becoming merely the inventions of piety. The Church is truly an icon of the eschata, but apophatically, not transcendentally. The structural, institutional and charismatic elements in the Church are apophatic icons of the kingdom, under the cross, within the struggle by which ‘Christ is formed in us’ so that all are renewed ‘in Christ’. This task, of course, is not a coerced discipline but the result of ‘friendship and gratitude’ as St Nicholas Cabasilas puts it. ‘Of the law of the Spirit, loving friendship is the rule and works all towards gratitude.’6 This means that our ecclesial being is brought about in the mysteries of baptism, chrism and eucharist. These and only these are the grace of God. It is not concocted by those who participate in them but is revealed doxologically by them as simply as gifts given in the mysteries. We do not have to establish a ‘balance’ between Christian life and the eucharist. Life in Christ, and the perfect grace which this entails, is entirely given in the mysteries, or sacraments. No addition of grace is assumed in Orthodox theology, for it is rather about the maintenance of that life already sacramentally given. The discipline of the Christian life is the thankful cultivation of the given grace of the mysteries. Romanides believed that grace ‘accumulates’, through the mere cultivation of prayer. But grace cannot be ‘added’ to, because it is simply the gift wholly given in the eucharist. It emerges in its free intentional acceptance through the virtues and, most basically, through prayer. The eucharistic mysteries are aspects of the life in Christ, which is why, in his fourth saying in The Life in Christ, Cabasilas stresses their ‘eucharistic’ character. The divine eucharist is their fulfilment, goal, meaning and christological fullness. Baptism is no independent, self-sufficient sacramental event, nor is chrismation some self-sufficient wellspring of gifts. For Cabasilas, passing on the tradition of the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor, these mysteries constitute the sacramental introduction of each member of the Church into the fullness of Christ, by which every member uniquely takes on Christ in the divine eucharist. This eucharistic dialogue between Christ and man is the catholic offering of the personally given gift of eternal life to man by Christ, and the catholic response, in the continual appearance of new forms of fullness in this life, in the gifts from Christ to the baptized Christian. This allows us to say that the eucharist is the foundation of life in Christ. The eucharistic relation of man with God in Christ cannot truly progress if it is not truly ‘dialogical’, that is, if the mind and 6 Nicholas Cabasilas, The Life in Christ (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998) 6.8.

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intention of the people do not participate actively in this relation. The discipleship of the Christian life is the eucharist lived out as a gracious loving response and return of my already-granted eternal being, back to its giver who loves me self-givingly. This understanding of the eucharist, neglected by ‘eucharistic ecclesiology’, demands a dialogical ontology, rather than a transcendent structure which simply reflects the kingdom. The eucharist authenticates the being of all things within the loving dialogue of God and man. The eucharistic constitution of the gifts in the Church makes them both christological manifestations and essentially dialogical. They are continuous dialogues in the Spirit between man and Christ which lead to the full and total realization of their christological content, consubstantial manifestations of the fullness of the Church in communion. There is therefore no difference in effect between the charism and the institution for they both build up the Church. All are dialogical, eucharistic, christological events of consubstantial fullness in the Spirit, granted by God and cultivated freely by man, cooperating with the series of manifold incarnations of Christ which constitute his Church in the multitude of its members. Within this dialogue there is always a participative relation with the reforming action of the Holy Spirit, which guides the christological perfection of every spiritual gift in true history. This living relationship reflects, apophatically, in these ‘vessels of clay’, the grandeur of the Church as the manifold realization of Christ in history and creation, and as a free imitation of the divine labour which works out this realization. The Holy Spirit incarnates, in the true fabric of our freedom, eternally, Christ for all and in all.

Chapter 8

Church, Eucharist, Bishop: The Early Church in the Ecclesiology of John Zizioulas Demetrios Bathrellos

John Zizioulas’ 1965 thesis was finally published in English in 2001.1 From it we can see how his theology has developed since 1965, and what has been constant in his theological vision.2 In this chapter I will summarize this book, say what its main achievements are, raise questions about some of its views, and examine the place and development of the thesis’ arguments in Zizioulas’ theological system. Finally I will suggest ways in which Zizioulas’ ecclesiology can fruitfully develop in the future.3 Zizioulas begins his book with an effort to explain the paradox that, despite the fervent interest in the unity of the Church expressed by historians and theologians, there had been no study of the role of the eucharist and the bishop in the realization of this unity (3/10).4 He finds three reasons for this. The first has to do with the influence of the Tübingen School, which saw the unity, or disunity, of the Church, as a unity or disunity of ideas, based on the Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis scheme (3–6/11–12). The second is due to the influence of Harnack, who understood the unity of the Church on the basis of the antithetical scheme of locality versus universality (6–9/12–13). The third reason is that in Western theology the bishop had been viewed as an administrator rather than as the leader of the eucharist, while the eucharist had been reduced by the Scholastics to one of seven sacraments, a means of the salvation for the individual, with no reference to it as the expression of that salvation which brings man to unity with God (9–10/13–14).

1 John D. Zizioulas, Metropolitan of Pergamon, Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries, trans. by Elizabeth Theokritoff (Brookline, Massachusetts: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001). 2 Given that the first edition of Zizioulas’ thesis is now out of print, our references will be to the second edition, which is essentially identical with the first: Ιωάννου Ζηζιούλα, Η Ενότης της Εκκλησίας εν τη Θεία Ευχαριστία και τω Επισκόπω κατά τους Τρεις Πρώτους Αιώνας (Athens: Γρηγόρης, 1990). 3 I am grateful to Fathers Andrew Louth, Ephrem Lash and Anthony Pinacoulas for reading an earlier version of this paper and for their criticisms and suggestions. 4 I give in parenthesis the references to page numbers, first to the Greek original and then to the English translation.

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Zizioulas argues that the unity of the Church is to be found not in the doctrines that Christ revealed, but in his very person and man’s unity with his person. This unity is not an ideological but an ontological unity. The Church is Christ himself, the whole Christ. For Zizioulas, ecclesiology is a chapter of christology.5 The unity of the Church cannot be studied within a pneumatocentric ecclesiology but only within a christocentric one. The Christ-centred unity of the Church is primarily realized in the eucharist and its leader, the bishop (13–16/15–16). Although Zizioulas draws our attention to the importance of the Eucharist for the reality and the unity of the Church, he takes issue with the ‘eucharistic ecclesiology’ expounded by Nicholas Afanassieff and Alexander Schmemann. Zizioulas charged them with failing to take into account that the unity of the Church is not founded only on the eucharist but also on baptism, faith, love and holiness. (16–18/17–18). Zizioulas moves on to examine the relationship between the Church, the eucharist and the bishop. He argues that in the New Testament the terms ‘ecclesia’ and ‘eucharist’ were virtually identical (30–33/46–49). The expression kat oikon ecclesia refers not to Christian families but to the eucharistic gatherings that took place in Christian houses (33–37/49–52). For Zizioulas, the identification of the eucharistic assembly with the Church reveals the profound connection between the eucharist and the unity of the Church. He argues that the eucharist was the realization of the unity of the many in (the) one (Christ). The significant characterization of the Church as ‘the body of Christ’ cannot be properly understood outside the reality of the eucharistic experience (38–46/53–58). For Zizioulas, all orders in the Church reflect the ministry of Christ. In the New Testament Christ is ‘par excellence the minister, priest, Apostle, deacon, bishop and teacher’ (48/60), and in him all the diverse ministries of the Church find their unity. Zizioulas takes issue with Harnack in denying the validity of the distinction between charismatic and institutionally authorized ministers. The latter, for Zizioulas, are charismatic too, for they receive their own permanent charisma in their ordination (51–52/62). All the charismata of the Church find their expression and unity in the eucharist, which has Christ at its centre and he is the mystical union of the heavenly and the earthly worship (47–52/59–62). But who was the leader of the eucharist and therefore the Christ-like centre of unity in the early Church? Zizioulas points to 1 Corinthians to show that there was an initial differentiation between those who led the worship and those who responded with the ‘Amen’. The eucharist was led by the Apostles, other charismatics, such as ‘prophets’, and the bishops, surrounded by presbyters and deacons, on the model of the Jerusalem Church, in which James was surrounded by presbyters and diakonountes. Soon, the episcopo-centric celebration of the eucharist came to prevail in the entire Church, as evidenced in the writings of St Ignatius of Antioch (52–59/62–68). Zizioulas goes on to argue that in each city there was only one kat oikon ecclesia, and only one eucharist (64–69/89–92). He argues that from the second century 5 On this point Zizioulas is self-confessedly dependent on Florovsky: see Georges Florovsky, ‘Le corps du Christ vivant’, in Georges Florovsky, Franz J. Leenhardt and R. Prenter (eds), La Saint Église Universelle: confrontation oecuménique, in cahiers de l’ actualité protestante, 4 (Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1948) p. 12.

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onwards, Christians in the countryside were also united in one eucharist under the chorepiscopus, who was not a presbyter but a bishop (71–76/94–98). The principle of ‘one bishop and one eucharist’ applied in every geographical region (76–85/98– 106). Then Zizioulas examines the catholicity of the Church. Referring to Aristotle and to early Christian sources, he argues that ‘catholic’ had a qualitative rather than a quantitative sense. He believes that the locality–universality scheme was alien to the early Church. From Ignatius’ epistles, he argues that the catholicity of the Church was not defined on the basis of its universality or its differentiation from the schisms and the heresies, but exclusively on the basis of the eucharist. The ‘καθόλου’ Church is expressed in the eucharist, led by the bishop, surrounded by the presbyters and the deacons. The local church is not a part of the catholic Church, but is the catholic Church itself. Ignatius’ catholic Church surrounding Christ is identical with the local church surrounding its bishop. Each local church with its own bishop is a catholic Church, because it realizes the concrete presence of the whole Christ (87–100/107– 118). Zizioulas refers to the First letter of Clement and the Didache to reinforce the point that the catholicity of the Church is expressed in and identified with the local celebration of the Eucharist (100–106/118–125). Moving on to texts that reflect the reality of the subsequent generation, Zizioulas admits that the catholicity of the Church began also to be linked with Orthodoxy, though still relating to the local church. Zizioulas refers to the martyrdom of Polycarp, to Tertullian, and to Cyprian, in whom the local church is identified with the Catholic Church (106–110/125–128), but concedes that as time went by the catholicity of the Church was more often related to orthodoxy of doctrine than to the eucharist. With the death of the last witnesses of the Apostles, and the appearance of heresies such as gnosticism which made rival claims to apostolic succession, the teaching authority of the bishop had to be emphasized. Zizioulas refers to Hegesippus, Irenaeus, Tertullian, the so-called Muratori Canon, and Clement of Alexandria. For Tertullian and the Canon of Muratori, for instance, ‘catholic church’ becomes coterminous with ‘Orthodox church’, to distinguish it from the heresies, which were without catholicity. The eucharist and the catholicity of the Church remain inseparably bound together nevertheless. ‘Orthodoxy is unthinkable without the Eucharist’, and vice versa, famously expressed in Irenaeus’ words, ‘our doctrine is agreed on the Eucharist, and the Eucharist confirms our doctrine’.6 Orthodoxy was a prerequisite for participation in the eucharist, and the eucharist ‘confirmed’ the sharing of a common Orthodox faith. For Origen too, the eucharistic prayer had to agree with doctrinal Orthodoxy. Thus, Zizioulas concludes, the office of the bishop, initially related to the eucharist (Ignatius, First Clement) and later with his teaching authority (Polycarp, Hegesippus, Irenaeus) is now related to the two together, as we see in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus (110–121/128–137). The bishop was therefore both the leader of the eucharist and the protector of Orthodoxy, and so was responsible for the actualization of the unity and the catholicity of the Church. To make the link between the bishop and the unity of the Church even clearer, Zizioulas moves on to Cyprian, referring to his ‘episcopum in 6

Irenaeus, Against Heresies, IV, 18. 5.

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ecclesia esse, et si qui cum episcopo non sit in ecclesia non esse’ and ‘ecclesia super episcopos constituatur’ (123/139). Separation from the bishop means separation from the Church. Even charismatics and confessors have to be in obedient unity with the bishop, and are obliged to respect and protect the unity of the Church of Christ, realized in the bishop. He who is not with the bishop is not with the Church, and he who is not with the Church is not with Christ. For Cyprian, the Orthodox faith is not the only mark of the catholicity of the Church. In fact the catholic Church is the criterion for Orthodoxy and not vice versa. Only the catholic Church possesses the fullness of the body of Christ, realized in the eucharistic gathering of the Orthodox under the bishop. Schismatics are outside the one eucharist under the one bishop of the catholic Church, so they do not belong to the Church and their sacraments have no validity. Orthodoxy and sacramental life are mutually dependent and found in the Church led by a canonical bishop. Zizioulas argues that Cyprian’s views on the ‘catholic Church’ were shared by the whole Church of his time (including Rome)7 and he seems inclined to accept Cyprian’s identification of the canonical limits of the Church with its essential or charismatic limits (121–134/137–149). Zizioulas goes on to examine the unity of the universal Church. Again this unity has to do with the eucharist and the office of the bishop. Exclusion from the eucharist means exclusion from both the local and the universal Church. The eucharistic communion between the local churches is the supreme expression of their unity. The early episcopal synods and the celebration of the eucharist by a bishop in a church other than his own (as happened in the case of Polycarp in Rome) witness to this reality. Zizioulas tackles the question of how the many local catholic churches may be one Church. He claims that there is one episcopate and one Church in the whole world, but the unity of the universal Church is realized through the local churches. No one can be a member of the universal Church unless he is a member of a local church. Zizioulas claims that for Cyprian no single bishop expresses the unity of all bishops. All bishops are equal; no bishop is the exclusive successor of Peter, but each bishop is the successor of all the Apostles. The unity of the universal Church does not come from adding local churches together but is a unity of all local churches in a mystical identity. It is a unity that runs through time (from the apostolic era onwards) and space and is expressed in the institution of the Councils. The centre of this unity is Christ himself (134–148/149–162). Zizioulas moves on to tackle the thorny historical question of the emergence of the parish. With reference to the relationship between the bishop and the presbyters, he claims that initially the bishop alone had the right to celebrate the eucharist, while presbyters were ordained to govern and teach the people of God. But in some texts of the fourth century that are translations or revisions of earlier texts, the presbyter begins to be called ‘priest’ and in the prayer of his ordination there is a reference to the celebration of the eucharist. For Zizioulas, this development reflects a new historical reality (Zizioulas argues that ‘the practice […] in history always precedes the theory’ (166/208)). This reality begins to take place in the middle of the third 7 This was the case, for Zizioulas, despite the disagreement between Cyprian and Stephen of Rome regarding baptism.


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century and consists in the emergence of parishes, whose eucharistic gatherings are led by a presbyter (148–167/195–208). The presbyter will now become priest and therefore, as Jerome and Chrysostom argued, the only difference between him and the bishop will be that the latter has the exclusive right to ordain. The new situation did not come out of the blue. The presbyter had been able to lead the eucharist from as early as the beginning of the second century, as even Ignatius and First Clement recognized. The persecutions which left many local churches without a bishop had already led to the presidency of the presbyters in the eucharist. Other factors, such as various presbyter-centred activities in the early Church, may have been the model for the creation of presbyter-centred eucharistic communities. Little by little the new situation of the presbyter-centred eucharistic communities was established. For Zizioulas, this was no revolution, but the natural development of the relationship of the bishop and the presbyters in the eucharist, and of the fact that the latter led the eucharist whenever the bishop was absent (167– 176/208–217). But how did the Church reconcile the new situation with the old? In what ways did the many parishes remain in union with the one eucharist offered by the bishop? Zizioulas believes that the unity between the parish and the bishop-centric eucharist survived in several ways. First, through the authorization given by the bishop to the presbyters for the celebration of the eucharist, and later, when the emergence of the parishes had become an established reality, through the practice known as the Fermentum. This was the practice in which the bishop sent a portion of the eucharist that he had celebrated to each parish, to be included in the eucharist celebrated by the presbyter. Zizioulas mentions that the eucharist is celebrated on an antimension bearing the bishop’s signature while his name is commemorated in the eucharist. Therefore, far from being a self-contained and self-sufficient eucharistic unity, the parish made its appearance as an extension within the area of the diocese of the one eucharist which is under the leadership of the Bishop. […] In this way the parish ended up being nothing other than the spatial distribution of the Presbyters’ synthronon, while the one and only centre of eucharistic unity was still the episcopal throne, from which every parish Eucharist drew its substance (176–188/217–227).

In his conclusion, Zizioulas argues that each eucharist was a complete eucharist and each local church was the full body of Christ. All local churches were identical, all bishops were equal, none subordinate to any other, and all local churches were one Church. Their unity was one of identity, not of incomplete parts into one universal Church. This is why there has never been either a ‘universal temple’ or a universal bishop. Against the claims of eucharistic ecclesiology, Zizioulas argues that the diocese, not the parish, is a full and complete Church. This is of course the case as long as this local church is in union and communion with the other local churches around the world. The unity of the local churches is expressed in one episcopate. The collegiality of the bishops, however, is not a reflection of the college of the Twelve under the leadership of Peter. Every bishop is successor of all the apostles together.

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Zizioulas uses some of these ideas to criticize the Roman Catholic understanding of the primacy of the Pope (188–202/247–263). In The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop Zizioulas made a number of points about the unity of the Church. He showed that the unity of the early Church was not wishful thinking but a living reality. It was not based simply on doctrinal agreement, for the Church is not a ‘philosophical school’ consisting of those who share a worldview. The unity of the Church was for Zizioulas primarily an ontological unity. In his later works Zizioulas has insisted on the importance of ontology in our approach to theological problems. Zizioulas believed that this unity was primarily realized in the eucharist and in its ‘proestos’, the bishop. Zizioulas’ emphasis on the bishop not only as a ‘defensor fidei’ or an administrator, but as leader of the eucharist is of great importance. Equally significant is his emphasis on the fullness and integrity of the local church. To relegate the local church to an incomplete part of the universal Church, as the universalist Roman Catholic ecclesiology tends to do, is unacceptable to Zizioulas. This relegation would imply that in the eucharist, necessarily celebrated in the local church, we do not find the whole Christ, which would obviously have disastrous theological and soteriological implications. That the local church is a full Church does not mean that it exists independently of the other local churches. On the contrary, every local church must be in communion with them. This point fits well with Zizioulas’ later theology of personhood, foreshadowed here, according to which authentic personhood necessarily presupposes communion with other persons. Zizioulas’ thesis shows a well-balanced approach to the Orthodox eucharistic ecclesiology movement. While Zizioulas is able to see the importance of the eucharist for the being and the unity of the Church, he justifiably criticizes the almost exclusive emphasis given by eucharistic ecclesiology to the eucharist and points to other sources of unity, such as faith, baptism and holiness. To the best of my knowledge a more detailed and integrated approach to these poles of unity and the way they relate to the eucharist is not to be found either in the thesis, or in Zizioulas’ later theological work. 8 Finally, in his thesis Zizioulas sheds light on difficult historical questions, such as the emergence of the parish and its relation to the bishop and the eucharist in which the bishop presided. The thesis is filled with insightful observations of historical and theological character, which make it an exciting and rewarding work. But any study of the ecclesiology of the early Church raises controversial issues, and Zizioulas’ work is no exception. Zizioulas himself has made criticisms of his book, pointing out that it would be better balanced if two issues had received more attention.9 8 It is a pity that the majority of articles by Zizioulas are published in various journals, collections of papers, and languages, which sometimes makes them extremely difficult to access, with the result that most of us have only a partial knowledge of the corpus of his work. 9 For Zizioulas’ self-criticisms, see the French translation of his thesis, L’ Eucharistie, l’ Évêque et l’ Église durant les trois premiers siècles, trans. by Jean-Louis Palierne (Paris: Théophanie, Desclée de Brouwer, 1994), pp. 7–8. Zizioulas’ self-criticism, as well as most of my own criticisms, complement or modify arguments developed in his thesis rather than contradict them.


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The first issue is pneumatology. Zizioulas recognizes that his thesis overemphasizes the christological aspect of ecclesiology, and that a proper synthesis of christology and pneumatology would have been more productive.10 Zizioulas has since spoken of the constitutive character of pneumatology for ecclesiology.11 Elaborating on his self-criticism however, I would like to add that an emphasis on pneumatology is connected to three relevant points that do not find proper treatment in his thesis. The first is eschatology. Zizioulas speaks, for instance, of the historical Jesus and tends to overlook the risen and ascended ‘eschatological’ Jesus, an imbalance corrected in his later works, where he emphasizes the importance of eschatology to all areas of theology. In Being as Communion, for example, Zizioulas quotes a saying attributed to St Maximus the Confessor, according to which ‘the things of the Old Testament are shadow (σκιά); those of the New Testament are image (εικών); and those of the future state are truth (αλήθεια)’.12 Eschatology has become a criterion for truth. The second point has to do with the gifts, the charismata of the Holy Spirit. Zizioulas has always been strongly in favour of an institutional ecclesiology. For him, the structure and office are more important than the charisma, so the bishop rather than the prophet or saint. In this respect the ‘christological’ aspect of the Church receives too much emphasis while the ‘pneumatological’ is not given enough.13 This observation does not deny that Zizioulas is right in arguing that the bishop, along with the presbyters and the deacons, must be at the head and the centre of the Church. I simply want to draw attention to the role of non-ordained charismatic persons in the Church’s life.14 Zizioulas says little about the significance of charismatic leadership in the early Church. He tries to overcome the, partly dubious, contrast of charismatic leaders and ordained ministers by arguing that the ministers had their charisma conferred by ordination. This is helpful, but tells us nothing about the relationship of the ordained with those leaders who were not ordained; nor does it say anything about the question of whether the candidates for ordination had to be ‘charismatics’ before they could be considered mature enough to receive the charisma of ordination.15 10 For an attempt at a synthesis between Christology and Pneumatology, see, for instance, John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985) especially pp. 123–142. 11 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 140. 12 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 99. In fact the quotation is probably a scholion of John of Scythopolis. For a recent treatment of eschatology and its significance, see Zizioulas’ article ‘Eschatologie et societé’, Irénikon, LXXIII (2000) pp. 278–97. 13 I am using here the terms ‘christology’ and ‘pneumatology’ in the conventional, somewhat loose way. 14 I sometimes use the word ‘charismatic’ to refer to Christians endowed with special spiritual charismata, such as prophesy. At other times, I use the same word in a more general sense. 15 This is important given the emphasis that the Church has always given to the holiness and wisdom that must characterize candidates for the priesthood. The significance of the charismatics in the early Church can be seen in texts like the Didache, where prophets are

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To press the point further, Clement argues in the Stromateis that the true presbyter is he who teaches and acts in accordance with the Lord. In the eschaton this man will have his seat on the twenty-four thrones mentioned in the Revelation, even if he has not been ordained by men.16 Clement uses eschatology here to confer dignity on the ‘charismatic’ rather than the minister. Zizioulas does exactly the opposite. In his work he uses eschatology, which is a criterion of truth, just to validate the bishop and hierarchy of the Church, which he regards as an image of the eschaton. It is difficult not to see some one-sidedness in this approach. Zizioulas’ over-emphasis on structure creates a tension in his theological system. Zizioulas contrasts nature with person, relating the former with what is common, given and necessary, and the latter with particularity and freedom. For him, to overcome nature and in so doing to become person through an ecstasis from nature is an essential element of Christian life. Zizioulas’ one-sided ecclesiological emphasis upon structure, which tends to be seen as a ‘necessary’ and unchangeable ecclesiological ‘nature’, does not seem consistent with his ‘existential personalism’. This ecclesiology runs the risk of leaving little room for proper particularity, development and differentiation in place and time.17 All these tendencies are reflected in Zizioulas’ exclusive emphasis on the bishop’s structural prerogatives over against his personal charismata. This is helpful in removing any Donatist or anti-institutional overtones from ecclesiology, but seems to overlook the fact that, for instance, canonical but unholy or unwise bishops may well damage the well-being and even the unity of the Church. A second criticism that Zizioulas has addressed to his first book is that it does not examine the role of the conciliar institution and of its primate. In later works Zizioulas abandoned the strictly egalitarian model of his thesis – egalitarian in so far as bishops are concerned – for a more hierarchical model, recognizing that the bishops of some Churches did and should exercise a certain primacy. In so doing he has offered suggestions about primacy in general, and about the primacy of the bishop of Rome in particular, an issue on which Zizioulas is one of the leading authorities in modern Orthodox theology. Then there are two other issues, one about Church orders, the other about the idealization of the Ignatian model of Church structure in its original form. characterized as archpriests (αρχιερείς) (13.3), while the bishops and deacons to be ordained are said to perform the service (λειτουργία) of the prophets and teachers (15.1). The prestige of the charismatics was so high that the author of the Didache urged the Christians not to despise the ordained clergy, ‘for they are your honorable men along with the prophets and teachers’ (15.2). In another important text, the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus, it is said that a confessor is not ordained for the office of deacon or presbyter. As the text puts it, the confessor already ‘has the honour of the office of a presbyter through his confession’ (9.1). Finally, there are indications that St Ignatius, whose ecclesiology Zizioulas treats with such significance, was himself a charismatic (see his Letter to the Magnesians, 20.1 and his Letter to the Philadelphians, 7.1–2). 16 Stromateis, Book VI, Chapter XIII. Cf. Rev. 4:4. 17 It is true that the basics of Church structure cannot be altered, but this does not suggest that every change is necessarily undesirable. For more on this see our remarks about Zizioulas’ idealization of the Ignatian model in its original form below.


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Zizioulas says too little about the emergence of the office of the bishop. He does not sufficiently discuss the theory that the leadership of the Church was initially exercised in some cases by a college of presbyters-bishops18 and that only at a later stage was one of these presbyters-bishops raised to the status of the (one) bishop.19 This theory is not necessarily modern or Protestant. St Jerome argued that: A presbyter … is the same as a bishop, and before ambition entered into religion by the devil’s instigation and people began to say: ‘I belong to Paul, I to Apollos, I to Cephas’, the Churches were governed by the council of presbyters acting together. But after each began to think that those whom he had baptised were his, not Christ’s, it was unanimously decreed that one of the presbyters should be elected and preside over the others, and that the care of the Church should wholly belong to him, that the seeds of schism might thus be removed.20

Versions of this theory are accepted by the majority of scholars in both Episcopal (Catholic, Anglican) and non-Episcopal traditions. If the theory is true, Zizioulas’ thesis is in need of revision regarding some of its assumptions and conclusions.21 Zizioulas claims that the presbyter in the early Church was not priest. This runs against compelling evidence, some of which Zizioulas mentions in his thesis. Zizioulas’ main argument is that in the ordination prayer for a bishop that is included in the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus there is reference to the celebration of the eucharist, whereas in the ordination prayer for a presbyter there is no such reference. This, for Zizioulas, proves that the presbyter was not priest. However, he has overlooked the fact that the text of the Apostolic Tradition as it stands clearly indicates that the presbyter was indeed ordained to the priesthood.22

18 It is well known that the terms bishop and presbyter were in some cases indistinguishable and interchangeable, which suggests that they referred to the same persons. 19 For a brief summary of this view, see, for instance, Frank Hawkins, ‘The Tradition of Ordination in the Second Century to the Time of Hippolytus’, in The Study of the Liturgy, Revised Edition, edited by Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, Edward Yarnold and Paul Bradshaw (London: SPCK and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) pp. 347–9. For a detailed dealing with the question of Church orders in the early Church, see, for instance, Francis A. Sullivan, From Apostles to Bishops: The Development of the Episcopacy in the Early Church (New York: The Newman Press, 2001). 20 Commentary on the Epistle to Titus, I, 6–7, cited in Eric G. Jay, ‘From PresbyterBishops to Bishops and Presbyters: Christian Ministry in the Second Century: A Survey’, The Second Century, 1 (1981) p. 159. 21 For a better balanced approach to the question of how Ignatius’ threefold ministerial scheme came to prevail, see Zizioulas’ article ‘Episcopé and Episcopos in the Early Church: A Brief Survey of the Evidence’, in Episcopé and episcopate in ecumenical perspective (Faith and Order Paper 102; Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1980) pp. 30–42. 22 The text reads: ‘In the ordination of a deacon, only the bishop lays on his hand, because the deacon is not ordained to the priesthood, but to the service of the bishop, to do that which he commands’ (8. 1–2). Here we see a clear difference between the ordination of the presbyter, described earlier, during which the presbyters lay also their hands upon the presbyter who is ordained, and the ordination of the deacon, where this does not happen because he is not ordained to the priesthood, as the presbyter is.

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Contrary to Zizioulas’ view, it is likely that the presbyter has always been priest and presided in the eucharist.23 Of course, when a bishop was present, he would preside, as is the case today.24 The difference between then and now is sociological rather then theological. In a smaller community with a bishop, it is to be expected that there will be usually, albeit not always, a bishop-led eucharist. In a big community like Rome, it is improbable that Christians had only one Sunday eucharist under the bishop until some time in the third century, as Zizioulas suggests.25 At any rate, when the Christian communities became larger, it came as a natural development for the presbyters to undertake the role of the leader in their eucharistic communities and thus exercise their priesthood fully, in close unity with the bishop and under his blessing and supervision. Zizioulas’ tendency to devalue the presbyter and over-emphasize the bishop continues in his later works. The exception is the article in which he suggests, with reference to St Cyprian and St Ignatius, that every bishop is the successor of Peter, whereas the presbyters of a local church form the apostolic college.26 Here the danger is not that the presbyter is excessively distant from the bishop, but that the two are brought too close. The second issue that raises critical questions is Zizioulas’ use of Ignatius. Zizioulas idealizes the Ignatian model of only one eucharist under the bishop, surrounded by the presbyters, the deacons and the people of God, and tends to identify it as the model of the early Church. As we have seen, this is controversial. Zizioulas sees the departure from this model in a negative light, discernible in the way he presents the emergence of presbyter-led parishes. We are left with the impression that it was a process of decay, the result of historical and practical circumstances, that has had unfortunate ecclesiological consequences. But, if this is the case, why did the Church allow it to happen? The Church could have prevented this by consecrating more bishops, so that they, and not the presbyters, would be the eucharistic leaders of the new communities. Zizioulas goes as far as to argue that we must reproduce the Ignatian model, which will thus become the norm for the Church in all places and at all times. We should create small dioceses, he suggests, whose eucharist will be celebrated by the bishop, as was the case in Ignatius’ times.27 But is this not a romanticizing of the past that overlooks the present reality of the Church?28 Does this view not reveal a captivity to an ecclesial model that worked well in second-century 23 1st Clement, for instance, refers to the presbyters who have ‘offered the gifts of the episcope’ (chapter 44). 24 It is this practice that may be reflected in the ordination prayers of the Apostolic Tradition. 25 For more on this see, for instance, Andrew Louth’s review of Eucharist, Bishop, Church in The Ecumenical Review (January 2004). 26 See John Zizioulas, ‘The Institution of Episcopal Conferences: An Orthodox Reflection’, The Jurist, 48 (1988) p. 379. 27 See Being as Communion, pp. 251–2. 28 Zizioulas has theological reasons for making this suggestion. The question, however, is whether this suggestion takes the reality of the Church in the last 17 centuries sufficiently into account. Does Zizioulas’ claim that ‘the practice […] in history always precedes the theory’ (166/208) apply here?


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Antioch, but which would produce quite different results if applied to the twentyfirst-century Church, which lives in a very different world? To mention only one of these implications, if Zizioulas’ proposal were to be accepted, the one eucharist of any diocese would usually involve rather too many people. We know from big city cathedrals, where usually individualism reigns in the anonymity of the crowd, that massive congregations tend to undermine the communion which must characterize the relationship of the Christians with each other and with God, and which is at the centre of Zizioulas’ theology. Zizioulas’ suggestion may render him vulnerable to the criticism by Rowan Williams that some aspects of his theology will encourage ‘that static and undialectical conception of orthodoxy which Zizioulas manifestly deplores’.29 Zizioulas’ thesis is a valuable piece of both historical research and theological reflection. I will finish this chapter by pointing to some of the most promising directions in which his ecclesiology can develop. First comes the integration of the institutional and the charismatic aspects of the Church. Zizioulas has done a great job in showing the centrality and importance of the proper eucharistic and episcopocentric structure of the Church, but it also needs to be shown how this structure relates to the ethical and charismatic aspects of Church life.30 Perhaps a less mechanistic view of the eucharistic unity of the Church would make this possible. The First Letter to the Corinthians shows that a eucharistic gathering does not necessarily realize the unity of the Church – in some respects it may even express and reinforce its disunity. We also know from the same source that unworthy participation in the eucharist does not unite us with Christ, but rather separates us from him and may even cause physical death.31 Zizioulas’ ecclesiology would be improved by more attention to the presuppositions that enable our unity with Christ and with one another to be fully realized in the eucharist. Third is the question of the offices in the Church. The question of the relationship between the presbyter and the bishop has not yet been sufficiently dealt with. The role of the presbyter in particular, both as ‘individual’ and as member of the college of presbyters, and his relationship in both cases with the bishop, needs further elaboration. This is related to a fourth point, which has to do with the status of the parish. One of the difficulties of eucharistic ecclesiology is that, if we adopt its basic tenet, 29 Rowan Williams, book review of Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, in Scottish Journal of Theology, 42 (1989) pp. 104–5. See that Zizioulas himself claimed in his thesis that ‘[…] because history is bound up with the factor of development, the unity of the Church, looked at historically, must therefore be studied as something which is developing as a dynamic rather than a static reality operating within space and time […]’ (20/19). 30 Is it, for instance, ecclesiologically insignificant that the altar on which the eucharist is celebrated is founded on relics of Saints (martyrs)? 31 For some dramatic examples of people participating unworthily in the eucharist and the results of this participation, see, for instance, Cyprian’s De Lapsis, 25–26. The most dramatic warning against the view that the eucharist unites people with Christ and with each other independently of other presuppositions is the case of Judas.

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namely that the eucharist equals Church, as Zizioulas does, it becomes difficult not to characterize in some sense the parish as ‘local Church’.32 This is where the eucharist takes place and the members of a congregation, ‘local Church’, come together. There is no eucharist in abstracto, nor is there a ‘diocesan’ or universal eucharist.33 Even when the bishop celebrates, his eucharist is one of the many in the diocese and of course the whole Christ is present not only there but also in all the other eucharistic gatherings that take place in different places and times, in all the parishes, monasteries and chapels of the diocese. I am not sure that it is as easy as Zizioulas thinks to say that all the eucharists in a diocese are one eucharist and that ‘the bishop is in essence the only proestos of the Divine Eucharist’ (ιά-ιβ΄/6). Zizioulas is right to deny the parish full ecclesiological status but his identification of eucharist and Church does not seem consistent with his low view of the parish.34 This is an issue that needs more thought. The opposite difficulty occurs when we come to the relationship between the diocese and the universal Church. Whereas on the local level Zizioulas emphasizes the diocese and not the parish, that is the ‘whole’ and not the ‘part’, at the universal level he emphasizes the local church (diocese) and not the universal Church. It is true that the diocese has something ‘more’ than the parish. But is there not, mutatis mutandis, a corresponding difference between the local church (diocese) and the universal Church? Does the latter not have something ‘more’ than the former? There is certainly a sense in which the local church (diocese) cannot be a part of the universal Church. But is there no sense in which the local church is and should be ‘part’ of the universal Church? Is it not the case that the local church is simultaneously the whole and, in some ways, also ‘part’ of the whole? These questions suggest that Zizioulas’ further thoughts on this matter would be welcome. My final point has to do with other focuses of unity in the Church. Let us take the issue of faith. In his thesis Zizioulas pointed out that, as early as Tertullian, catholicity 32 Zizioulas has recognized the existence of this difficulty by arguing that the Orthodox Church, by considering that the episcopal diocese and not the parish has full ecclesiological status, ‘has unconsciously brought about a rupture in its own eucharistic ecclesiology. For it is no longer possible to equate every eucharistic celebration with the local Church’; see Being as Communion, p. 251. 33 In a conference that took place in France on 1 October 2005, bishop Kallistos Ware argued that ‘if the basis of the life of the Church is the Eucharist, this signifies that the parish has a primordial value. Even if the fullness of the local Church is found in the diocese, and not in every parish taken in isolation, it is also true that the celebration of the Divine Liturgy is accomplished only in a particular place, on a specific altar, with a concrete and visible community ... There is no “universal” celebration of the Liturgy …; there are only celebrations “in one place” (1st Apology of Saint Justin) – in every parish, in every local assembly. Without the parish, without the local assembly, there is no Church.’ Ware’s French text is found on the website ‘Orthodoxie’. The translation from French into English is mine. 34 Zizioulas writes ‘could that gathering [a parish led by a presbyter] be called “Church”? The answer to this question has been historically a negative one with regard to the Orthodox Church. I personally regard this as a fortunate thing ...’ See Being as Communion, p. 250. It is interesting to compare this statement with what bishop Kallistos writes in the previous footnote.


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and Orthodoxy became closely interrelated, and he has drawn our attention to the deep link between doctrine and eucharist expressed by Irenaeus. But in general, he has not said much about the importance of Orthodox faith for ecclesiology. This is surprising given that the Orthodox Church is the only Church that derives its very name from its Orthodoxy. When St Maximus the Confessor in the seventh century was accused of not belonging to the catholic Church because he was not in communion with any church, since all the churches had united in acceptance of the monothelite doctrine which Maximus considered heretical, he replied that ‘the God of all pronounced that the catholic Church [is] the correct and saving confession of the faith in him when he called Peter blessed …’.35 What is the full significance of this statement? Canon 15 of the Protodeutero Council says that whoever will not commemorate his president (bishop, metropolitan, or patriarch), because the latter has pronounced in public and openly in the church a heresy already condemned, will be honoured by the Orthodox as having denounced a ‘false bishop’. It would be interesting to see what Zizioulas would make of this, first about the importance of faith for the unity of the Church,36 second about the possibility that Canon 15 seems to allow a priest to celebrate the eucharist in this extreme case without being in communion with his (false) bishop,37 and third about the very expression ‘false bishop’.38 Zizioulas is one of the greatest Orthodox systematic theologians of our times and a leading authority on Orthodox ecclesiology. More than anyone, he can help us clarify these questions. It is our wish that God will grant him many more years of life, so that he can bring to completion his outstanding contribution to Christian theology.

35 Maximus’ statement seems to be at odds with Zizioulas’ claim that ‘the “Catholic Church” is the criterion for orthodoxy’ and not vice versa – although Zizioulas recognizes that the catholicity of the Church includes orthodoxy (128/143). Maximus’ text and its English translation are found in Pauline Allen and Bronwen Neil (eds), Maximus the Confessor and his Companions: Documents from Exile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) pp. 120–21. 36 This Canon says that severing communion with these pseudo-bishops serves the unity of the Church. 37 Unfortunately, misuses of this Canon have occurred in the Orthodox Church, which shows that its proper application is very difficult. 38 The Church often comes across pseudo-charismatics who raise extraordinary claims for their own authority. But, as Zizioulas correctly says, there can be no ‘charismatic’ person or function in the Church which is not under the blessing of the bishop.


Chapter 9

Authority and Ecumenism Paul Collins

For churches in the contemporary Western context, authority needs justification. Every authority, whether personal or institutional, has to be self-authenticating. Every institution has constantly to re-think, re-present and probably re-negotiate its authority with those over whom it is exercised. For Western churches, perhaps especially those of the Reformation, this is apparent in the pressure to make the Christian community more open to the involvement of the ‘laity’ in decision-making processes. The churches have to shape their exercise of authority in the face of opposition to inherited traditional models of authority. Within this dynamic Zizioulas offers us his reflections on the life and the authority of the Church. He combines an appeal to the traditional inheritance with a substantial critique of the ecclesiology and praxis both of the churches of the West and of his own communion. He offers us an interpretation of the tradition, that is no appeal to an ossified deposit of faith, while at the same time challenging contemporary assumptions about democratization in Western churches.1 Zizioulas does not treat authority as a separate theme in his writings, but much of what he has written has profound implications for the Christian understanding and exercise of authority. Since his understanding of personhood, human and divine, comes from the Greek patristic tradition that roots ontology in koinonia, Zizioulas’ understanding of authority is formed by that relational ontology. This chapter will discuss the origin of authority (exousia) in the divine koinonia, and tentatively offer pointers for ecumenical attempts to find unity and reconciliation on the issue of authority. Three Themes in Ecclesiology To begin our exposition of the relation of authority and the ontology of koinonia we shall examine three themes in Zizioulas’ treatment of ecclesiology. First we shall look at his insistence that any treatment of the Church needs to hold pneumatology and christology together. Then we shall relate eschatology to ontology. Finally, we will see that for Zizioulas any ecclesiology has to be rooted in the life and practice of the Church, and above all in the divine liturgy of the eucharist.

1 See John Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001) p. 251.

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Using evidence from different Christian traditions, both theoretical and practical, Zizioulas reflects on the consequences of employing either christology or pneumatology as the primary source of theological reflection upon the Church. He enumerates various theological strands and institutional practices, and concludes that the only way to understand the reality of the Church, and avoid the pitfalls he outlines, is to proceed in a dynamic dialogue between the role of the Holy Spirit and the person of Christ.2 … the Holy Spirit is not one who aids us in bridging the distance between Christ and ourselves, but he is the person of the Trinity who actually realises in history that which we call Christ, this absolutely relational entity, our Saviour. In this case, our Christology is essentially conditioned by Pneumatology … it is constituted pneumatologically. Between the Christ-truth and ourselves there is no gap to fill by the means of grace.3

The outcome of this dynamic dialogue is not some esoteric ecclesiological construct, but an appeal to Saint Paul’s discussion of the Body of Christ.4 From his exposition of I Corinthians 12, Zizioulas argues that: … we can say without risk of exaggeration that Christ exists only pneumatologically, whether in His distinct personal particularity or in His capacity as the body of the Church and the recapitulation of all things. Such is the great mystery of Christology, that the Christ-event is not an event defined in itself – it cannot be defined in itself for a single instant even theoretically – but is an integral part of the economy of the Holy Trinity.5

He locates all discussion of the exercise of authority within the metaphor of the Body, and thus he establishes the communal and relational context for a Christian understanding of authority. … we have made the Spirit constitutive of the very relation between Christ and the ministry. … this means that there is a fundamental interdependence between the ministry and the concrete community of the Church as the latter is brought about by the koinonia of the Spirit. Methodologically, this means that we possess no other way of knowing what the nature of the ministry is apart from the concrete community and that, equally, we cannot establish first our idea of the concrete community and then look at ministry.6

The second theme arises from the first, in that eschatology is seen in relation to Christ and the Spirit. The eschaton will bring the final outworking and completion of the work of both. The understanding of anamnesis and epiclesis in the eucharistic tradition to which Zizioulas belongs allows him to make the connection between ‘presence’ and ‘parousia’, not only in terms of the eucharist, both the species and the assembly, but also the ongoing existence and praxis of the Church.7 2 See John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985) pp. 123, 124, 125, 132, 209, 215; and Eucharist, Bishop, Church, pp. 11–17, 62. 3 Being as Communion pp. 110f. 4 Ibid, for example, pp. 111, 114. 5 Ibid, p. 111. 6 Ibid, p. 212. 7 Ibid, p. 114.

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As indicated in the passage of the Didache … the local eucharistic assembly understood itself as the revelation of the eschatological unity of all in Christ.8

This discussion of the Body of Christ determines Zizioulas’ exposition of a relational and eschatological ontology.9 The Body of Christ – the eucharist and the Church – is the bearer of the Parousia and presence of Christ. Authority set within the communal and relational context of the Body is understood in terms of ontological immediacy with the crucified and risen and glorified Christ.10 In precisely the same way as the heavenly worship was truly represented typologically in the Eucharist on earth so the authority of Christ was truly reflected in the ministers of the Church. The Church ministries, therefore, were not understood as existing in parallel with Christ’s authority, but as expressing the very authority of Christ.11

This third theme relates directly to the previous two. The anamnesis and epiclesis of this eschatology keep the work of the Spirit and Christ together in the eucharistic assembly. Zizioulas expounds his understanding of worship and the worshipping assembly particularly in relation to the eschatological event of the eucharist.12 In the eucharist Zizioulas sees the life of the Church most clearly manifest. He expounds this with particular relation to the evidence of Ignatius of Antioch, and to the New Testament witness, especially to chapters 10 and 11 of the First Letter to the Corinthians, and to chapters 4 and 5 of the Apocalypse of John. Using Saint Paul’s instruction on the relationship of the one and the many, and Saint John’s vision of the heavenly worship, Zizioulas shows that Ignatius believes that everyone has a part to play in the Church according to their ‘order’.13 This is accompanied by a discussion of the Body of Christ from I Corinthians 12. Authority exercised in the Church is understood as eucharistic assembly, a communal and relational context. In this context each person is a member of an ‘order’, and the proestos of the company of believers is understood to have a particular role in embodying the ‘many’ in relation to the ‘one’. In … the local Church the ‘one’ is represented through the ministry of the bishop, while the ‘many’ are represented through the other ministries and the laity. There is a fundamental principle in Orthodox ecclesiology going back to the early centuries and reflecting the proper synthesis between Christology and Pneumatology which I have been advocating here. This principle is that the ‘one’ – the bishop – cannot exist without the ‘many’ – the community – and the ‘many’ cannot exist without the ‘one’.14

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Ibid, pp. 154 f. Ibid, p. 161. Ibid, pp. 164 f. Eucharist, Bishop, Church, p. 60. Being as Communion, pp. 161, 187, 206. Eucharist, Bishop, Church, p. 61; Being as Communion, p. 216. Being as Communion, pp. 136 f.


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The Body of Christ To this I have four questions, all related to the Body of Christ. My first question is about ‘eucharistic ecclesiology’. Zizioulas roots his ecclesiological reflection in his understanding of the celebration of the eucharist, both in his own tradition and in his interpretation of the evidence of Ignatius of Antioch and other early witnesses. Tillard is reluctant to found ecclesiology wholly on the eucharist, arguing that ‘communion’ is as much generated by baptism as the eucharist.15 While Tillard understands ‘communion’ to be expressed primarily in the local eucharistic assembly, he seeks to maintain an understanding of koinonia which is wider than the eucharist. Whether Zizioulas’ ecclesiology is to be labelled ‘eucharistic’ is another matter. In McPartlan’s book The Eucharist Makes the Church, we find a comparative study of Zizioulas’ thought with that of Henri de Lubac.16 I believe that to equate Zizioulas’ ecclesiology with the statement that ‘the Eucharist makes the Church’ is to misunderstand him. It ignores the nuanced argument Zizioulas puts forward about the institutional and the spiritual which disallows any separation of the Church as institution, or the celebration of the sacraments, from the divine initiative and presence. Zizioulas’ reflection on the Church and eucharist is based in the premise that pneumatology and christology are related together in the formation of the life of the Church. This is reflected in his understanding of the anamnesis and epiclesis in the eucharist. The parousia of Christ, realized in the power of the Spirit in the eucharist, expresses and manifests the Body of Christ in the eucharistic celebration. The Church’s act of celebrating the eucharist is an act of obedience to the divine will and initiative. Zizioulas is clear that the communion which the Church is extends beyond the boundaries of the local gathered community. The implication of catholicity is that each local church is in communion with all other local communities, transcending any simplistic notion that the eucharist makes the Church.17 The relation of Zizioulas’ ecclesiology to the eucharist is linked to the question of the authenticity of at least some of the letters of Ignatius of Antioch.18 Any ancient document is scrutinized in terms of its text, content and authorship, and it is no surprise that the letters of Ignatius have received such scrutiny. While it is important to verify sources, we need to be aware of the motives that lead commentators to question the authenticity of an ancient document. Tillard argues that: It is possible that the record of Ignatius is neither as old nor as coherent, nor even as objective as was spontaneously thought on the basis of the witness of Eusebius.19

15 See J-M.R. Tillard, Church of Churches: The Ecclesiology of Communion, (Collegeville, Min: The Liturgical Press, 1987/1992) pp. 27–29, 185. 16 Paul McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993). 17 Eucharist, Bishop, Church, p. 259. 18 See Reinoud Weijenborg, Les Lettres d’Ignace d’Antioche: Etude de Critique littéraire et de théologie (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1969); Robert Joly, Le Dossier d’Ignace d’Antioche (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruzelles, 1979). 19 Tillard, Church of Churches, p. 185.


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Questioning of the authenticity of Ignatius, Eusebius and indeed Clement of Rome has allowed some scholars to argue for a later date for the developments which these texts testify to. While Zizioulas is dependent upon the evidence of Ignatius (and Clement), and much of his argument rests upon his interpretation of the letters, we need to ask what may be gained from questioning the early date of this evidence. Those who find such relatively developed understandings in such early writings inconvenient would welcome the idea that the notions of episcopacy set out in Ignatius’ letters are a later reading back and justification of practice decades, if not centuries, away. It is important not to read later practices and disputes back into Ignatius’ letters, and Zizioulas himself may not have escaped this temptation. But he does draw a clear distinction between current expressions and understandings of episcopacy, in Orthodoxy and other traditions, and what he seeks to interpret and expound from Ignatius’ evidence.20 Related to the eucharistic focus of Zizioulas’ ecclesiology is the question of the Orthodox tradition’s theology of the eschata.21 Zizioulas’ conclusions are challenged either because his understanding of eschatology, and its implications for the life and practice of the Church, is disputed, or because they are simply misunderstood. The West effectively re-discovered ‘eschatology’ in the twentieth century, only for that re-discovery to be beset by argument about realized or future eschatologies. The ‘end’ in the West had become synonymous with the divine judgement prior to entry into the divine kingdom. This relegation of the eschaton to the far future finds expression in the Roman Canon where in the anamnesis, memorial is only made of the passion, resurrection and ascension of Christ. When compared with the anaphoras of the East, this seems very minimalist.22 The commemoration in the anaphoras of the Byzantine Rite includes the parousia as well, expressing a quite different understanding of the dynamics of anamnesis, paralleled by a different understanding of the eschaton and kingdom, and their relation to the present. Misunderstanding of the Orthodox perspective on the eschata results in the misrepresentation and misinterpretation of Zizioulas’ ecclesiology as simply ‘eucharistic’. His understanding of the relationship of the Church to the eucharist is conditioned by this dynamic view of the relation of the eschata to the world, focused in the celebration of the eucharist in the present. The last question I want to raise relates to Zizioulas’ appeal to the concurrence of pneumatology and christology in expounding the existence of the Church as the Body of Christ. The terminology and the conceptualities are highly developed in Zizioulas’ presentation of ecclesiology, but they appear to assume some decisions about the starting place of the Christian community in the Paschal and Pentecostal events. Perhaps Zizioulas simply commences his argument further up the conceptual ladder than the rest of us. But given that we have to interpret the continuity of the person of Christ before and after the Paschal events, the relation of that continuity

20 Eucharist, Bishop, Church, p. 23. 21 Being as Communion, pp. 114, 179, 205. 22 For texts of these various Eucharistic Prayers, see R.C.D. Jasper and G. Cuming (eds), Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed (Collegeville, Min.: Liturgical Press, 1990); and A. Hänggi and I. Pahl, Prex Eucharistica (Fribourg: Editions Universitaries, 1968).

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to the designation of the company of believers as the Body of Christ and to the Holy Spirit, it may be that the complexity of his terminology is necessary. We may make a comparison with Barth who, though his preconceptions and starting place are very different, sees the role of the Spirit in a way strikingly similar to Zizioulas. A congregation is the coming together of those who belong to Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit. …We cannot speak of the Holy Spirit – and that is why at this point the congregation immediately appears – without continuing credo ecclesiam, I believe in the existence of the Church. And conversely, Woe to us, where we think we can speak of the Church without establishing it wholly on the work of the Holy Spirit.23

Reflection on the pneumatological contextualization of christology in Zizioulas’ thought is rooted in a combination of interpretation of the New Testament witness to the Church, and the lived experience of the contemporary worshipping congregation. Neither Barth nor Zizioulas constructs ecclesiology upon some theoretical basis, even one that is simply biblical. Understanding the Church is much more a matter of existential encounter than it is of theorizing. Both of them interpret the existential reality of the Church in the light of Scripture and tradition, hence Zizioulas’ appeal to a christological understanding of the Church as the Body of Christ formed through the work of the Holy Spirit. Zizioulas’ ecclesiology also raises some real questions for the study of the Church in general, and serves to clarify debate about the life of the Church. Zizioulas’ thought is highly nuanced: he does not treat matters discretely but brings concepts together so they are mutually informing. It is an over-simplification to say that his ecclesiology is ‘eucharistic’, because his understanding of the liturgy is informed by pneumatological and eschatological issues. Communion Ecclesiologies and Authority I will now try to situate Zizioulas’ contribution in the wider field of late twentiethcentury ecclesiologies of communion, and within the revival of the doctrine of the Trinity. This revival of interest was signalled by the British Council of Churches collection, The Forgotten Trinity.24 Zizioulas’ own Being as Communion helped connect re-awakened interest in the doctrine of the Trinity for reflection on the Church. The Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches has made several attempts at producing ecumenical statements of a relational ecclesiology, On the Way to Fuller Koinonia in 1994 and The Nature and Purpose of the Church: A stage on the way to a common statement in 1998.25 23 Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (London: SCM, 1966) pp. 141f. 24 British Council of Churches, The Forgotten Trinity (3 volumes; London: BCC, 1989 and 1991). 25 Thomas F. Best and Günther Gassmann (eds), On the Way to Fuller Koinonia, Faith and Order Paper no. 166 (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 1994); The Nature and Purpose of the Church: A stage on the way to a common statement, Faith and Order Paper no. 181 (Geneva: WCC, 1998).


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Of the various attempts to craft an ecclesiology of communion, some are closer to the Zizioulas model than others. I shall examine one Catholic and one Protestant attempt. Jean-Marie Tilliard’s Church of Churches: The Ecclesiology of Communion, published originally in French in 1987 (in English in 1992) and Miroslav Volf’s After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity, published in 1998. Neither of them addresses the conceptualization and embodiment of ecclesial authority. Of course they each deal with order and ministry within the Body of believers, and with the authorization or ordination of those ministers. But any explication of the connection between authorization and forms of authority as such remains implicit. Even those who seek to critique ecclesiologies of communion, such as Nicholas Healy in Church, World and Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology,26 fail to remark upon this lack or omission. Patricia Fox, in God as Communion: John Zizioulas, Elizabeth Johnson and the Retrieval of the Symbol of the Triune God,27 does raise some issues about authority in her critique of Zizioulas, but she does not pick up the question of what forms of embodiment of authority are appropriate in relation to the category of koinonia. By omitting a discussion of this issue, Fox implicitly endorses Zizioulas’ defence of a traditional, if nuanced, understanding of episcopal polity and authority. The consequence of the failure of communion ecclesiologies to deal with the shape of ecclesial authority is that these theologians are employing the category of koinonia to defend a conservative understanding of Church polity and authority. I do not want to deny that Zizioulas offers a real critique of and challenge to the actual expression of polity and authority of the Churches of both East and West. He offers a detailed and nuanced re-reception of the relationship between the Church understood as eucharistic community and its authorized ministers.28 But despite tantalizing moments where he suggests that the inculturation of the Church may call traditional forms of Church life into question, discussion of how ecclesial authority is to be embodied is peripheral to his argument.29 This is a problematic omission. Eucharist, Bishop, Church and Being as Communion are substantially defences of traditional polity, and lend weight to the contemporary expression of this polity and exercise of authority. The failure to address issues of the theory and practice of ecclesial authority has consequences. It means that traditional forms of polity and embodiments of authority are deemed, at least implicitly, to be appropriate expressions of the fellowship of the Church, understood in terms of koinonia and a relational ontology. Daniel Hardy in ‘Created and Redeemed Sociality’, and Colin Gunton in The One, the Three and the Many argue that sociality is a transcendental, or at least an ontological,

26 Nicholas M. Healy, Church, World and the Christian Life: Practical-Prophetic Ecclesiology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 27 Patricia Fox, God as Communion: John Zizioulas, Elizabeth Johnson and the Retrieval of the Symbol of the Triune God (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 2001). 28 Being as Communion, for example, p. 255. 29 Ibid, for example, p. 140.

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category.30 It is therefore surely incumbent on communion ecclesiologists to analyse any expression of ecclesial authority which creates and supports the manifestation of redeemed sociality in the Church. It cannot be enough to assume that a traditional and inherited polity will fit the bill, particularly if we want to discern those embodiments of ecclesial authority appropriate in the light of the contemporary world. Zizioulas and others anchor the defence of traditional episcopal arrangements in an appeal to early patristic writings, in particular to the seven letters of Ignatius of Antioch. The separation of a defence of an ecclesial polity, based on the letters of Ignatius, from an attempt to craft an ecclesiology of communion, allows us to ask what forms of expression and embodiments of ecclesial authority are appropriate to the category of communion. The One and Many in the Traditional Polity In his defence of the traditional arrangement of authority within an ecclesiology of communion, Zizioulas refers to Saint Paul’s teaching on the one and the many in I Corinthians 10.16–17. The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.

Zizioulas’ interpretation of the passage is complex. He writes: Thus the mystery of the Church has its birth in the entire economy of the Trinity and in a pneumatologically constituted Christology. The Spirit as ‘power’ or ‘giver of life’ opens up our existence to become relational, so that he may at the same time be ‘communion’ (κοινωνια, cf. II Cor. 13:13). For this reason the mystery of the Church is essentially none other than that of the ‘One’ who is simultaneously ‘many’ – not ‘One’ who exists first of all as ‘One’ and then as ‘many’, but ‘One’ and ‘many’ at the same time.31

Zizioulas is making connections between the eucharistic connotations and the unity and communion of the Body of Christ, but explicates this motif in relation to the person of Christ and to the tradition of the ‘Servant of God’ who serves the unity of the community. In Eucharist, Bishop, Church, he argues that: the connection of the Eucharist with the primitive Church’s sense of the unity of the ‘many’ in the ‘One’ goes back to the historical foundation of the Church also by way of another fundamental tradition, that of the Lord as ‘Son of Man.’32

30 Daniel W. Hardy, ‘Created and Redeemed Sociality’, in C.E. Gunton and D.W. Hardy (eds), On Being the Church: Essays in the Christian Community (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989); Colin E. Gunton, The One, The Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: CUP, 1993) pp. 222f. 31 Being as Communion, p. 112. See also Being as Communion pp. 145f.; and John Zizioulas, ‘Die Pneumatologische Dimension der Kirche’, Communio (1973). 32 Eucharist, Bishop, Church, p. 55.


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This servanthood is extended to those authorized in the Church and relates to Ignatius’ notion of the one bishop in each local church who is president of the eucharist. In support, Zizioulas appeals to another Pauline motif επι το αυτο (I Corinthians 11:20). He argues that this phrase is to be translated, ‘coming together in the same place’, and immediately adds that επι το αυτο has ‘at once ecclesiological and eucharistic content’.33 He justifies this interpretation by relating the use of the motif to the Last Supper, where he argues the Church was offered by Christ ‘a real image of the Kingdom’.34 In the Eucharist, therefore, the Church found the structure of the Kingdom, and it was this structure that she transferred to her own structure. In the Eucharist the ‘many’ become ‘one’ (I Cor. 10:17), the people of God become the Church by being called from their dispersion (ek-klesia) to one place (επι το αυτο). Through her communion in the eternal life of the Trinity, the Church becomes ‘the body of Christ’…35

Zizioulas weaves these two Pauline motifs together to argue that Ignatius’ understanding of the bishop as president of the eucharistic community is an image of the Kingdom in which Christ, servant-like, serves all his people. Thus the traditional arrangement of the bishop in episcopal polity is identified de fide with a trinitarian shaping of ecclesial authority. Is this, as Zizioulas claims, a ‘culture-free’ expression of ecclesiality?36 Does an eschatological understanding of the eucharist and the Church as eucharistic community set this form of polity and authority above cultural relativity? The privileging of a moment in the development of the life of the Church is questionable, particularly when the moment itself is the subject of a wide variety of interpretations in scholarly debate. The Pauline motif of the one and the many is important for reflection on the life of the Church, but it does need to be reassessed. Nicholas Healy’s appeal to theodrama, for example, may allow us a more open exploration of the one and the many motif in ecclesiological reflection. According to Miroslav Volf: at the lowest ecclesiological level, that of the local church, we actually find a reversal of the trinitarian relationships. At the trinitarian level, the one person constitutes the communion; at the ecclesiological level persons are constituted by the communion.37

In Zizioulas’ construction of the Church as eucharistic community, Volf argues that only the bishop is designated as ‘a concrete and free person’.38 This understanding of the person: cannot refer either anthropologically or ecclesiologically to every person living in the communion, but rather only to the one through whom the many are constituted as an 33 Ibid, p. 48. 34 Being as Communion, p. 206. 35 Ibid, p. 206, and see also p. 248. 36 Ibid, , p. 206. 37 Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness: The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998) p. 106. 38 Being as Communion, p. 18.

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The Theology of John Zizioulas ecclesial communion and thus also as persons. As we shall see, this is the function of the bishop ‘representing’ the one Christ. The community constituted through this one takes precedence over the individual persons.39

If Volf is correct, the patterning of the communion of the Church and its ecclesial structures is not based upon the traditional understanding of the divine koinonia. If this is so, Zizioulas would be using the concept of the one and the many to set out an account of the relationality of the Church that is the opposite of the relationality of the persons of the Trinity. We have already noted that it is not possible to read directly from ecclesial communion to divine communion. The Personal, Collegial and Communal The use of the concept of the one and the many in defence of episcopal polity raises another question. Those arguing for ecclesiologies of communion believe that any form of authority and authorized ministry must be understood in communal and relational terms. Zizioulas argues that ordained ministers have no role apart from the people (laos) of the Church. I have suggested that his defence of a traditional polity means that his argument is developed to maintain the inherited structures of authority, with little discussion of the forms of embodiment of authority appropriate in a given context to express the relationality of the Church. So we must ask, is the threefold order of bishop, presbyter and deacon to be received de fide as the most authentic expression of ecclesial authority? If our answer to this is no, what contribution to an understanding of ecclesial authority and structure can we find in contemporary ecclesiologies of communion? Part of the answer to this question may be found in Zizioulas’ concept of the laos. His understanding of the correlation between human personhood, the status of the baptized and the Church as eucharistic community offers us a rich ground from which to identify a new paradigm for ecclesial authority. Why is it that Zizioulas does not do this himself? Why is he content to defend a modified traditional polity? The answer lies in his rhetoric about the democratization of polity in the churches of the Reformation. Zizioulas sees traditional polity and democratization as two opposing alternatives for the Church. This rhetoric has led him to his defence of traditional authority structures, for he sees no middle way between these alternatives. My contention is that there is a third way, resourced from the relational understanding of the human person situated in the context of transcendental sociality, and by dialogue with the contemporary world. The motif of the one and the many may be employed, not to privilege one strand of the Christian tradition over others, but to interpret different traditions to one another. We could stop using the concept of the one and the many to interpret Ignatius and Saint Paul to defend the traditional polity, and use it instead as a hermeneutical tool to enable dialogue between different traditions and visions of ecclesial authority and polity. This would not only allow differing traditions, with different polities, to dialogue with one another, but also to find an authentic means of acknowledging each other’s understandings and forms of ecclesial authority. Thus rather than 39 Volf, After Our Likeness, p. 106.


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defending what might be called ‘the historic episcopate’, the principle of the one and the many could be used to assess and develop a variety of different polities in relation to transcendental sociality. Redefinition of the role of the concept of the one and the many may also produce new ways of relating hierarchy and authority in the contemporary context. Something approaching this methodology has been employed recently to produce ecumenical rapprochement between different traditions and denominations. The Porvoo Statement and Meissen Agreement have acknowledged that the apostolicity inherent in ecclesial authority can be manifested in different forms.40 Through such acknowledgement that ecclesial authority can legitimately be embodied in different ways, it becomes possible for different Church traditions to work towards reconciliation and the fellowship of eucharistic inter-communion. The focus of these discussions has been the problems that the Reformation has caused for ecclesial authority. The re-employment of the concept of the one and the many might enable these and future agreements to find ways of valuing divergent traditions. But would the concept lead to visible unity, or to reconciled diversity? Does a vision of the visible unity of the Church necessarily mean privileging one particular form of polity? Is it not possible to think of the one Church with different but comparable forms of polity, interpreted through the concept of the one and the many? If we were to allow that such a vision of the one Church and of the multiple forms of embodiment of authority were possible, a further, complementary tool of interpretation would be the ecumenical principle of the personal, the collegial and the communal. The Ecumenical Principle If the attempt to describe a trinitarian shaping of ecclesial authority is to become more than a vague wish, or a defence of the traditional polity of bishop, priest and deacon, we first need to describe the trinitarian shaping of personhood and fellowship in the Church. Zizioulas, Tillard and Volf have attempted to do this, but the application to the question of ecclesial authority has remained implicit or neglected. The recent Faith and Order Paper, The Nature and Purpose of the Church, is vague about the embodiment of authority, parcelling out roles to various forms of authority rather than rigorously working through the implications of the category of koinonia. The ecumenical motif describing authority as personal, collegial and communal may help us describe the shape of ecclesial authority in trinitarian terms. The concern for the personal, collegial and communal aspects of authorization can be addressed to our concerns for the unity of the Church in its contemporary context. These categories can be used to highlight the tensions between the different traditions’ emphases on either democratic or hierarchic institutions, and to seek ways of discerning what is of legitimate diversity and what may be ‘church-dividing’.41

40 Council for Christian Unity (Church of England), The Porvoo Common Statement (London: CCU, 1993); Council for Christian Unity (Church of England), The Meissen Common Statement: On the Way to Visible Unity (London: CCU, 1988). 41 The Nature and Purpose of the Church.

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The multiplicity and unity of the divine ousia, understood in terms of the relational category of koinonia, is expressed in the tradition through the theological and ontological understanding of the term ‘person’. One person is the origin of the divine ousia and koinonia. The unity of the persons is accounted for by the transcendental or ontological category of koinonia. The ecumenical understanding ‘communal’ appeals to this transcendental sociality. The fellowship of the Church is an ontological reality, as is the communal dimension of the embodiment of ecclesial authority. The ‘collegial’ principle is no less important. The designation of the Apostles as a ‘college’ is a commonplace. Zizioulas argues eloquently for the collegiality of the Twelve in terms of the demands of the eschata.42 If we use collegiality as a mediating model, the concept of the one and the many will not simply oppose the general authorization of the Church to the specific authorization of some. The collegiality of those with a collective, rather than individual, authorization reminds the Body that all embodiment of authority is for the sake of the up-building of the Body in fellowship. It is possible to make use of the ecumenical ‘personal–collegial–communal’ principle in conjunction with the Pauline concept of the one and the many to change the goal of our ecumenical endeavours. We can adopt a new hermeneutic of the interpretation and reception of divergent traditions of ecclesial authority.43 We can go beyond Reformation hermeneutics to change the way we acknowledge divergent traditions of ecclesial authority, and reach a fresh understanding of the ecumenical goal which does not oppose reconciled diversity and visible unity. In this new framework, hierarchy could be addressed not only as an internal debate but alongside others as the Church sought to fulfil its calling of celebrating God’s gift of redeemed sociality in God’s world.

42 Being as Communion, p. 174. 43 Cf. The Kairos Document: Challenge to the Church: a Theological Comment on the Political Crisis in South Africa, 2nd ed. (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1986). [US edition: Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986.]

Chapter 10

The Ordination of the Baptized: The Laity as an Order of the Church Philip Rosato SJ.

The twentieth century represented a theological challenge for the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. Since the Reformation they had defended their teachings on the ontological difference between, on the one hand, the solemnly ordained, and on the other, those who were simply baptized and confirmed Christians. Their insistence on this distinction created a crisis. It seemed to most Protestants that they were deliberately defending what was fundamentally a class distinction. This was a serious charge in a political era in which the inherent value, equality and freedom of each individual person had to be asserted.1 These Churches had to rebut the accusation that their teaching about the baptized and the ordained was socially divisive, and that it underwrote the exploitation of workers, the persecution of dissenters, indifference towards immigrants and refugees, and refusal of social or political change. The crisis was acute. Several attempts by individual Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologians to restate the dignity, attested in Scripture and tradition, of the baptized and confirmed members of the Church on the one hand, and the ordained on the other, met opposition. To many clerical and lay members of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic communities, any attempt to reduce the difference of the two orders appeared to contradict those passages in the Christian sources which teach the special sacramental character and authority of ordained ministers. Nonetheless, scholars within these Churches sought to uphold the fundamental, even if not absolute, equality of all Church members. They based this on the patristic reading of the Scriptures and the tradition which consistently attributes an important role to the baptized and confirmed, without diminishing the unique role of the ordained.2 By the persistence of their efforts, leading Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologians eventually provided an authentic and contemporary interpretation of the fundamental equality of all Christians, affirmed by Scripture and tradition. This interpretation 1 In order to manifest the Christian concern for the dignity of each human person, efforts were made to show the relevance of specific ecclesial teachings for a proper understanding of the world and of the necessity of human freedom for its well-being. One of John Zizioulas’ earliest articles attempts to provide a eucharistic view of contemporary reality: ‘La vision eucharistique du monde et l’homme contemporain’, Contacts 19 (1967) pp. 83–92. 2 The right of the laity to exercise their own initiative in building up the Church is affirmed by John Zizioulas in ‘Les groupes informels dans l’Église: une vue orthodoxe’, in Yves Congar et al. (eds), Les groupes informels dans l’Église (Strasbourg: University of Strasbourg, Cerdic Publications, 1971).

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rested on the theological identity, the communal life and eschatological mission of the baptized and confirmed. They saw this equality not as negating the hierarchical nature of the Church, but as guaranteeing the co-constitution and cooperation of its lay and clerical members. In terms of eventual Christian re-unification, it was this dilemma that drove the ecumenical movement in the twentieth century. Theologians of the East and West collaborated to formulate a contemporary understanding of the relationship of the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and holy orders. One thinks immediately of the influence exerted by exiled Russian Orthodox theologians in Paris on the early work of Yves Congar on the indispensable role of the laity in the Church.3 Notable Protestant theologians, such as Jürgen Moltmann, became aware of the efforts of their Orthodox and Roman Catholic counterparts to develop a theology of the baptized and confirmed. They reflected together on the special responsibility of the ordained ministers in their respective communities. Once the local bishop commissions them to serve and build up the faith of their fellow Christians, these ministers are bound primarily by the gospel, rather than by any other form of rationality.4 These theologians did not declare the sacramental nature of orders explicitly, and thus contradict Protestant recognition solely of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, along with the Word of God, as signs of salvation. But they did argue for the centrality of ordained ministers in the mission of the Church, properly identified in relationship with the baptized and confirmed. As a committed ecumenist, John Zizioulas has helped Roman Catholic theologians to show that the baptized and the confirmed are participants in the common priesthood of the Church, and he has challenged Protestant theologians to explicate their understanding of ordained ministry. He has demonstrated that the Orthodox tradition possesses a particular understanding of the baptized and confirmed, one which its own theologians should articulate more clearly than they have done. This can help Roman Catholics to find a way to overcome the erroneous designation of the laity as the ‘non-ordained’, and it could encourage Protestants to see ordained ministers as participating in a sacramental reality at the service of the baptized and confirmed.5 Zizioulas expresses this Orthodox comprehension in a manner both traditional and innovative, affirming that the baptized and confirmed are truly ordained as Christians by means of the two moments which comprise the sacrament of ecclesial initiation. The faithful form a proper order of the Church, along with the deacons, presbyters and bishops.6 Zizioulas’ articulation of the Orthodox position is 3 For an autobiographical account of the ecumenical experience of Yves Congar, cf. Bernard Lauret, Fifty Years of Catholic Theology: Conversation with Y. Congar, trans. J. Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1988). 4 Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology, trans. M. Kohl (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) pp. 300–314. 5 A pertinent and detailed study of this thematic has recently been undertaken by Stanley Pulprayil, The Theology of Baptism and Confirmation in the Writings of Yves Congar and John Zizioulas (Rome: Gregorian University, 2001). 6 John D. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985) p. 153: ‘the people of God, that order of the Church which was constituted by virtue of the rite of initiation (Baptism-Chrismation).’

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marked by its trinitarian, eucharistic and eschatological perspectives, which together illumine the theological identity, communitarian existence and the temporal mission of the order of the baptized and confirmed. In this chapter, I will set out the principal insights of Zizioulas on this topic and attempt to incorporate them into my own framework.7 I will argue that the Father is the initial Creator and the final Guarantor of the order of the baptized and confirmed, who eternally intends to grant its members a theological identity as gratuitous participants in his relationship with the Son, in and through the Spirit. The missions of the Logos and of the Pneuma realize this paternal intention in history. I intend to show that the Son is the recreator of the order of the baptized and confirmed, in that, in the power of the Spirit, he fulfilled this intention by instituting it definitively at a moment in time as the visible, effective and lasting communion of those justified by his Paschal mystery. I will argue that the Spirit is the transcreator of this order, since he complies with the paternal intention by constituting it in every subsequent period of history as the eschatological people awaiting the return of the Son. By means of their prophetic calling, they are sent out into the world to extend the Pentecostal mystery, and to direct all things with the Son towards the Kingdom of the Father. Created by, and Oriented to, the Father: the Theological Identity of the Laity In his presentation of baptism and chrismation, Zizioulas regularly claims that these two moments of Christian initiation entail an ontological change in the personhood, or hypostasis, of those who receive them. They no longer belong to the corrupt impersonal order of nature, but share in another order, marked by the loving filial relationship which the Son enjoys with the Father, in and through the Holy Spirit. Thus, led by the divine Pneuma to call the Father ‘Abba’ (cf. Romans 8:15–17; Galatians 4:6–7) and Jesus Christ ‘Lord’ (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:3), the faithful pass from their biologically determined hypostasis to their spiritually determined one, from mutable and individualized being into definitive and communal being.8 According to Zizioulas, the filial identity of the order of Christians demands that the first and foremost agent of the sacraments of initiation be the Father. The efficacy of these rites depend on the eternal, benevolent will of the Creator that all people be included in his interpersonal existence with the Son in and through the Holy Spirit. The priority attributed to the activity of the Father-Creator in determining the theological identity of the members of the Church is a central insight of the Greek patristic writers. Zizioulas expresses it like this: The Church exists first of all because the Father – as a distinct person – wills her to exist. It is the initiative and good pleasure of the Father that brought her into existence. But not only that, but it is to the Father – as a person other than the Son – that she will be finally 7 The following description of the Father as the Creator, the Son as the recreator and the Spirit as the transcreator of the universe, and of the human race as its steward, is employed in the sacramental theology of this author: cf. Philip J. Rosato, Introduzione alla teologia dei sacramenti (Casel Monferrato: Editrice Piemme, 1992). 8 Cf. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 113.

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The Theology of John Zizioulas brought when Christ submits everything to him. Thus, both from the point of view of her origins and of her destiny the Church is above all the ‘Church of God’ (God = the Father in the Bible) before she is the Church of Christ or of this and that place.9

Here Zizioulas highlights the truth that the benevolent intention of the distinct person of the Father is the origin and the goal of the Church. This explicitly ‘theological’, rather than christological or pneumatological, explanation of ecclesial existence is certainly not meant to reduce the respective roles of the Word and of the Spirit in the historical foundation and eschatological orientation of the Church. It is aimed at giving a forceful contemporary restatement of the conviction of the Greek patristic writers that the Church exists, ‘from Adam’, if we consider the whole human race, or ‘from Abel’, if we emphasize the just remnant of humanity.10 This insistence on the priority of the Father-Creator in the divine activity of establishing and conducting the ecclesia roots its identity in the compassionate will of the first person of the Trinity. Since the Father-Creator is principally loving, he is capable of sending into the world both the Son-Recreator, who is principally loved and loving, and the SpiritTranscreator, who is principally loved. In ecclesial terms, this means that the loving intention of the Father that there be an order of baptized and confirmed persons is the foundation of the ‘Church of God’. This basis is revealed in history with the anticipation, arrival and the triumph of the Son incarnate. In the Christ-event, the filial existence of the Word takes on, in a given time and place, a visibility and tangibility through the loved and loving people, the mystical body of Christians, reborn in the Paschal mystery. With the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, the ‘Church of God’ assumes a specific holiness and finality as the loved people, the mystical temple of Christians. Through the Pentecostal mystery, they are sanctified, to effect the words, symbols and foreshadowings of the eschaton within history until this mystery attains its fulfilment.11 Thus, in the words I quoted from Zizioulas, they are to be regarded as members of this ecclesia Dei before they can be understood to take part in the ecclesia Christi, or in the Church ‘in this and that place’, that is, the ecclesia Spiritus. In effect, Zizioulas affirms in his theology of baptism and chrismation the axiom that the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity, and vice versa. The roles of the three divine Persons in the origin, the nature and the goal of the Church within time are antecedent in the immanent reality of the one divine substance in which the three Persons participate differently.12

9 John Zizioulas, ‘The Mystery of the Church in the Orthodox Tradition’, One in Christ 24 (1988) p. 295. 10 Cf. Henri de Lubac, Catholicisme. Les aspects sociaux du dogme (Paris: Cerf, 1983) pp. 13–14. 11 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘The Pneumatological Dimension of the Church’, Communio (Eng.) 1 (1974) pp. 142–58. 12 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘The Doctrine of God the Trinity Today: Suggestions for an Ecumenical Study’, in Alasdair Heron (ed.), The Forgotten Trinity, III, A Selection of Papers Presented to the BCC Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today (London: BCC, 1991) pp. 19–32.


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To some Orthodox readers, Zizioulas’ emphasis that the baptized and confirmed belong primarily to the ‘Church of God’, rather than to the ‘Church of Christ’ or the ‘Church of the Spirit’, may seem new and daring. His insistence on the primacy of the order of the baptized and confirmed as the indispensable prerequisite of all other orders might also appear to threaten the respect given to ordained ministers, and the obedience owed to them for the well-being and unity of the ecclesia. Most Orthodox, however, praise Zizioulas’ emphasis on the theological identity of those who receive the sacraments of baptism and chrismation.13 His affirmations do not lead to any misguided accommodation of modern democratic trends, or mistaken transfer to the laity of the dignity previously given to the hierarchy. It is patently clear that, for Zizioulas, fundamental equality has not become more important than divinely willed authority in the Church. From the Roman Catholic viewpoint, the thesis proposed by Zizioulas might at first appear to be a novel formulation of the identity of the baptized and the confirmed. The texts of Vatican II do not categorically state that there is an ‘order’ of Christians who share a new ontological personhood conjoined to the filial relationship of the Son to the Father in and through the Holy Spirit. Yet his thesis certainly corroborates, and perhaps renders more explicit, the theological intent of the relevant text of Vatican II which affirms that the laity comprise the common or baptismal priesthood.14 Although this is essentially different from the hierarchical or ministerial priesthood of the ordained, it is necessarily linked to it.15 Roman Catholics who hear the statement that their baptism and confirmation entail the process of becoming ordained as members of the order of Christians could well accept it as a clarification of the statement that they belong to a common priesthood. Furthermore, the emphasis on the Father-Creator as the initial author and final guarantor of the Church of God would render more intelligible this phrase from Vatican II: ‘The presbyters gather God’s family together as a community of living unity, and lead it through Christ and in the Spirit to God the Father.’16 Just as the loving reception of the first person of the Trinity is the end of the Church, and thus also of the order of the baptized and confirmed, his benevolent intention is its origin. Recreated and Instituted by the Son: the Communitarian Existence of the Laity If the theological identity of the order of the Christians is anchored in the loving being and activity of the Father-Creator, their concrete existence in history is grounded in the self-emptying being and activity of the theandric Son-Recreator, 13 Cf. Boris Bobrinskoy, ‘Jean Zizioulas, théologien de l’Église’, Service orthodoxe de presse, n. 112 (November 1986) pp. 11–13. 14 Cf. B. Dupuy, ‘Review of John Zizioulas, L’Etre ecclesial’, Irénikon 36 (1980) pp. 205–6. 15 Cf. ‘The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church’, n. 10, in W. Abbott (ed.), The Documents of Vatican II (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1967) p. 27. 16 ‘The Decree on the Ministry and Life of Presbyters’, n. 6, in The Documents of Vatican II, p. 543.

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Jesus of Nazareth. They are a united, yet diverse, community of redeemed persons through him. Being both loved and loving, the second divine Person recreated once and for all time the relational nature of human persons, which our misuse of freedom has refracted into individualization and alienation. The Son-Recreator still institutes anew the communal existence of the order of Christians as it makes its way in the world towards the Kingdom. According to Zizioulas, this occurs by means of a double movement within the liturgical life of the ecclesia, propelled by the sacraments of baptism and chrismation: This relational nature of the Church is constantly revealed by way of a double movement: i) as a baptismal movement which renders the Church a community existentially ‘dead to the world’ and hence separated from it, and ii) as a eucharistic movement which relates the world to God by ‘referring’ it to God as anaphora and by bringing to it the blessing of God’s life and the taste of the Kingdom to come.17

In this passage, Zizioulas alludes to the constant and dynamic character of the manner in which the Church re-enacts the prophetic and saving symbols inaugurated by Jesus of Nazareth. At the Jordan, he became sin and died to the world of injustice, so that all others might be righteous (cf. Matthew 3:13–17; 2 Corinthians 5:21). And in the Cenacle, he became the sacrificial Lamb, and referred himself and the world to the Father in self-giving prayer and action, in order that all others might be liberated (cf. Luke 22:14–27). The sacraments of baptism and eucharist depend, therefore, on the objective truth of the Son’s restoration of the filial relationship of all human beings with the Father. Yet this truth is repeatedly revealed and actualized whenever human beings are separated from the world for the sake of God (the baptismal movement), and relate the world to God through the liturgical synaxis, in which they all participate (the eucharistic movement).18 Thus, the order of Christians already enjoys a relational existence with Christ the Head of the mystical body, and at the same time repeatedly provides others outside their community the blessing of the triune God which is an anticipation of the eschaton. For these reasons, Zizioulas maintains that Christ both instituted the corporate order of Christians during his ministry on earth, and continues to do so through baptism and chrismation, which comprise ‘the sine qua non condition for the eucharistic community to exist and to express the Church’s unity’.19 Zizioulas makes it clear, however, that a one-sided understanding of the ecclesia will result if the christological perspective is considered without the pneumatological perspective. The former without the latter restricts the freedom of Christians to participate in the ever-new reality of genuine ecclesial communion: If pneumatology is made constitutive of ecclesiology, the notion of institution itself will be deeply affected. In a christological perspective alone we can speak of the Church as instituted (by Christ), but in a pneumatological perspective we have to speak of it as

17 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 221. 18 This insight is further explained in John Zizioulas, ‘The Eucharist and the Kingdom of God’, Synaxis 49 (1994) pp. 7–18. 19 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 153.


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constituted (by the Spirit). Christ institutes and the Spirit constitutes. The difference between two prepositions (in- and con-) can be enormous ecclesiologically. The ‘institution’ is something presented to us as a fact, more or less a fait-accompli. As such, it is a provocation to our freedom. The constitution is something that involves us in its very being, something we can accept freely, because we take part in its very emergence.20

In this text, the in-stitution of the Church by Christ is viewed as the ground of the communal being of Christians, which was fully posited outside the realm of their freedom. In contrast, the con-stitution of the Church by the Spirit is perceived as the valid, transcendental ground of the communal existence of the baptized and confirmed which entails the creative exercise of their liberty. In other words, by his unique prophetic words and acts, Jesus of Nazareth in-stituted baptism, chrismation, eucharist and holy orders. Their liturgical enactment is thus meant to provoke human freedom to receive redemption as the gratuitous and lasting gift from the SonRecreator, which is to be remembered (anamnesis). From Pentecost onwards, the Holy Spirit has gathered Christians together, con-stituted their liturgical assembly, rendered their words and gestures effective, and been creating their desire for unity (epiclesis). Thus, at each Christian ritual, baptized and confirmed persons are challenged to take part in their own sanctification or divinization as graced and responsible collaborators with the Spirit-Transcreator. Here Zizioulas’ insights correspond to Karl Barth’s distinction between the incarnate Word as the objective reality and possibility of the revelation of God, and the outpoured Spirit as its subjective reality and possibility.21 They also relate to Yves Congar’s idea that the Word is the extra nos, and the Spirit is the in nobis of divine revelation and salvation, so the divine Logos institutes the Church, and the divine Pneuma serves as co-institutor.22 Zizioulas insists that the balance between the christological and the pneumatological perspectives of the ecclesia must be maintained. This balance is reflected by the four pairs of terms proposed by Karl Rahner. Every origin implies a future; every history connotes a transcendence; every gift intends a receiver; and every knowledge is oriented to love.23 In effect, Zizioulas claims that Christ in-stituted the order of Christians by providing it with an origin, which the Spirit con-stitutes in the future free choices which its members make. Christ has enacted salvation historically, and the Spirit assures that Christians allow the past to transcend itself in their allegiance to it. Christ proffered the gift of himself, and the Spirit activates the freedom of Christians to welcome that gift. Christ has 20 Ibid, p. 140. 21 Cf. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2: The Doctrine of the Word of God, G. W. Bromiley and T. Torrance (eds) (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1963) pp. 1–44, 203–79. 22 Congar develops these reflections in ‘Pneumatologie dogmatique’, in B. Lauret and F. Refoulé (eds), Initiation à la pratique de la théologie, vol. 2 (Paris: Cerf, 1982) p. 496; cf. J.P. Quinn, The Two Hands of the Father: The Role of the Holy Spirit along with Christ as the Co-institutor of the Church in the Writings of Yves Congar (Rome: Gregorian University, 1997). 23 Cf. Karl Rahner, The Trinity, trans. J. Donceel (New York: Seabury Press, 1974) pp. 91–4; the original German ‘Der dreifaltige Gott als transzendenter Grund der Heilsgeschichte’ in Mysterium Salutis, II, chapter 5 (Einsiedeln: Benzinger Verlag, 1967).

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enabled himself to be known, and the Spirit draws the baptized and confirmed of each era to love him. This is why Christians should not confess that Christ in-stituted their communal existence without adding that the Spirit con-stitutes it. Zizioulas, Barth, Congar and Rahner are united in their understanding of the tract De Deo uno et trino as an address and summons. The doctrine of the Trinity is not to be considered a matter of abstract speculation about the divine Persons, but as an invitation to enter into a personal relationship with them.24 I have said that Zizioulas is arguing that the members of the order of Christians respond to the Father-Creator as the eternal wellspring of their identity as persons proceeding from his benevolent will. Zizioulas also encourages them to regard Christ as the historical source from which their unity is drawn by means of the baptism, chrismation and eucharist. The task remains to relate the baptized and confirmed to the unfathomable reservoir of the Spirit-Transcreator, in which Christ the origin, the history, the gift and the knowledge of it, is extended in time through the future, the transcendence, the acceptance and the love afforded him by Christians.25 Transcreated and Con-stituted by the Spirit: the Eschatological Mission of the Laity The theological identity and the communal existence of the baptized and confirmed represent a sacred mystery and a sign to the world. Zizioulas believes that, by the way they live and work, rejoice and suffer, the laity provide a foretaste of the kingdom of God. In other words, the order of Christians is engaged in an eschatological mission, which is sacramental, and social and cosmic. The divine agent of this mission is the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life who speaks through the prophets and serves as forerunner of the eschaton. The mission of the order of Christians arises from their baptism, and thus from their ability and willingness to allow the crucified and risen Christ to find a future, a transcendence, an acceptance and a love in the whole creation: ‘Baptism is not an act which concerns only human beings, but in relation to the entire mystery of Christ, it becomes a process of conversion through which all the world has to enter along with human beings, if it is to be accepted into the body of Christ.’26 For this reason, Zizioulas states that the baptized and confirmed know their mission, the conversion and the incorporation of all things into Christ, by means

24 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘The Doctrine of the Holy Trinity: The Significance of the Cappadocian Contribution’, in C. Schwöbel (ed.), Trinitarian Theology Today (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995) p. 60. 25 This analogy between the oneness and the distinctions among the three divine Persons and the natural phenomenon of a course of water is found in Anselm of Canterbury, ‘Incarnation of the Word’, chapter 13; the English text is found in Complete Philosophical and Theological Treatises of Anselm of Canterbury, trans. J. Hopkins and H. Richardson (Minneapolis: Banning Press, 2000) pp. 289–91. 26 John Zizioulas, ‘Some Reflections on Baptism, Confirmation and Eucharist’, Sobernost, series 5, number 9 (1969) p. 648.


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of ‘an eschatological vision and expectation of the transformation of the world’.27 The particular result of the relationship of Christians with the Spirit-Transcreator, therefore, is that their identity and unity are not closed within the ecclesia, but are invariably oriented to the new heavens and the new earth of the kingdom of the Lord and of his Christ. The distinctive feature of the theology of the laity proposed by Zizioulas is its dependence on a laying on of hands (cheirotony) carried out both by the Holy Spirit and the Church in the rite of Christian initiation. Although it is differentiated from the cheirotony received by the clergy, it is similar, and is indeed its very basis: These [all ecclesiological competencies] were necessarily accompanied by the corresponding ‘charism’ communicated to them by the Holy Spirit. He is the one who ‘distributes the charisms’ in the proper moment, a moment always related to the Eucharist. For the clerics who were conducting the Eucharist, this moment was cheirotony (official moment), for the laity who were replying to them, it was Baptism and Confirmation which represented the ‘cheirotony’ for their entrance into the order of laity.28

This forceful statement understands that the Spirit-Transcreator, acting in and through the liturgy of the Church, is the divine Person who effects the related ordinations of laity and clergy. These ordinations are linked to the presiding function of the clergy or to the replying function of the laity at the eucharist, in which ‘the total body of the Church’ is manifest.29 Implied rather than explicitly stated in this passage are the prophetic function (preaching the Gospel) and the pastoral function (providing external signs of the Kingdom) which are exercised by the members of the various orders. Elsewhere Zizioulas treats the proclamation of the good news (kergyma) as the prerequisite of the eucharistic synaxis, and the sacramental, social and cosmic mission of service (diakonia) to the inorganic and organic realities and to persons as its consequence.30 Zizioulas states another truth implied in this passage in an important essay. Even if varying and distinct charisms are granted by the Holy Spirit to the baptized and confirmed on the one hand, and the clergy on the other, this does not mean in any way that the laity ‘represent either a morally lower or generically general prior kind of charismatic existence, but exist together with other orders’.31 From 27 John Zizioulas, ‘On Being a Person: Towards an Ontology of Personhood’, in Christoph Schwöbel and Colin E. Gunton (eds), Persons, Divine and Human (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991) pp. 43–4. 28 John Zizioulas, L’Eucharistie, l’Evêque et l’Église durant les trois premiers siècles, translated from the Greek by J.-L. Palierne (Paris: Desclée, 1994) p. 195. 29 John Zizioulas, ‘The Ecclesiological Presuppositions of the Holy Eucharist’, Nicolaus 10 (1982) p. 337. 30 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘The Local Church in a Eucharistic Perspective: An Orthodox Contribution’, in L. Newbigin (ed.), In Each Place: Towards a Fellowship of Local Churches Truly United (Geneva: WCC, 1977) pp. 50–61; ‘Preserving God’s Creation. Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology’, King’s Theological Review 12 (1989) pp. 1–5; 41–5; 13 (1990) pp. 1–5. 31 John Zizioulas, ‘Ordination … a Sacrament? An Orthodox Reply’, Concilium (Eng.) 4 (1972) p. 36.

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the pneumatological perspective, all the orders in the ecclesia are indispensable to its eschatological mission. This becomes evident as, guided by the Spirit, they collaborate at the eucharist, which is the ongoing icon of the Church. This sacrament provides the spiritual force, the apostolic unity and the eschatological direction necessary for the pastoral tasks of the baptized and confirmed and the clergy. By continually empowering their freedom, the Spirit-Transcreator assures that they work towards the coming recapitulation of all things in Christ, and their entry into the kingdom of God. By way of conclusion, we can ask how the insights of John Zizioulas on the ordination of the baptized and confirmed as Christians can be developed by Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant theologians in the future. We could begin with an analogy taken from the field of cytology, the study of the living cell. Just as in the natural world the smallest unit of plant and animal life is a composite formed of the cytoplasm, the body of the cell, and of the nucleus, its unifying centre, so every ecclesial cell is a composite. Its body is made up of the laity whose ontic personhood is determined by baptism and chrismation, while the clergy, whose ontic personhood is further specified by the deaconate, the presbyterate or the episcopate, constitutes its nucleus. The ecclesial cell could not exist if the order of Christians, its cytoplasm, were removed, since it contains the RNA, which alone produces protein and nourishes and activates itself and the nucleus, and so determines the environment in which they exist. Equally, the ecclesial cell would cease to exist if the ministerial orders, its nucleus, were taken away, since the latter contain the DNA, which safeguards and transmits the genetic knowledge which governs the particular structure and the practical functions of itself and of the cytoplasm.32 In effect, the ontic coordination and the ontic collaboration, which the order of Christians along with the other orders are to manifest, do not negate their ontic difference, which arises from the distinct charisms and competencies bestowed on each of them by the Holy Spirit. In the future, Orthodox and Roman Catholic scholars might well pursue the implications of this analogy, or search for others, to serve to affirm that each ecclesial cell enjoys both an ontic unity and an ontic complexity. Contemporary catechesis demands an answer for those who want to know how the Church can consist of fundamentally equal members, and at the same time include certain persons who alone carry out essential offices. Most Protestant theologians regard the search for analogies, modern as much as patristic and scholastic, as inadequate. They would claim that such comparisons shed no light either of divine revelation or of ecclesial existence, since only faith aided by grace correctly illumines the minds of believers. The call for analogies, such as that between the biological cell and the local church, do not seem to them helpful for ecumenical dialogue, for such analogies, they believe, fly in the face of the Reformation principle of the absolute priority of biblical faith, against excessive reliance on the relationship between fides and ratio.33 32 Cf. A.G. Loewy and P. Siekevitz, Cell Structure and Function (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969). 33 For a classical Protestant reaction against all analogies of faith, based on nature, culture, history, religion and the human soul, cf. K. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, trans. G.T. Thomson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1969) pp. 383–99.


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Even in contemporary Protestantism, however, questions concerning the authority of church leaders do exist, and recourse has been made by many bishops and theologians to the claim that the ordained pastors are not bound to the views of those who elected them, but are to show allegiance to the inherent truths and values enunciated in the Scripture and in their particular tradition. Thus, though the analogy between the cytoplasm and the nucleus of every living cell and the laity and the clergy in every local church may not be considered convincing, the manner in which it explains the biblical and theological principles of the fundamental unity of all Christians and the existence of diverse yet complementary competencies may help future ecumenical dialogue.34 Zizioulas defends the ontic unity and the ontic difference between the baptized and confirmed on the one hand, and the ordained ministers on the other. If the members of the order of Christians can be likened to the cytoplasm which conjoins the cell both to the nucleus and to the surrounding environment, then it can be said that the baptized and confirmed point to the immanence of Christ in the Church and in the world. Wherever two or three of the baptized and confirmed are gathered together, there is Christ, the divine ‘member’ of the Church, the One who will abide with them until the end of time (cf. Matthew 18:20; 28:20). Their office is to testify to Christ in and through their activity at the eucharistic synaxis and in the world, both of which forms of witness are meant to bless the latter in his name, and to direct it towards his final coming. It follows that, if the members of the other orders can be likened to the nucleus which preserves the truths and the values of Scripture and tradition, and extends them in a given setting by the cytoplasm, then the deacons, presbyters and bishops can be said to point to the transcendence of Christ over the Church and the world (cf. Luke 22:28–30; Acts 1:11).35 Whenever they enact their charismatic offices to preach, to preside or assist at the liturgy and oversee the internal harmony and the missionary endeavour of their local church, they lead the baptized and confirmed in the power of the Spirit-Transcreator towards the Son-Recreator who is already in glory, and yet awaits their arrival, in order to hand them and the entire renewed cosmos to the Father-Creator. Moreover, since the members of the cytoplasm are ordained as Christians, they recognize that the labours of the ordained ministers on their behalf are aimed at deepening their awareness of their filial identity in relation to the Father, of their communitarian existence in relation to the Son and of their eschatological mission in relation to the Holy Spirit.36 34 Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, p. 389 claims that such analogies may be interesting, edifying, instructive and helpful, but should not be applied as a foundation or proof of a dogma in the strict sense. Instead, ‘they can be valued as supplementary, non-obligatory illustrations of the Creed which are to be thankfully received’. 35 Cf. P.J. Rosato, ‘Priesthood of the Baptised and Priesthood of the Ordained: Complementary Approaches to Their Interrelation’, in Gregorianum 68/1–2 (1987) pp. 215– 66. 36 Cf. John Zizioulas, ‘Ordination and Communion’, Study Encounter 6 (1970) p. 192; here all Christians are considered priestly, and the deacons, presbyters and bishops are viewed as possessing a ‘specificity of relationship’ to all the others which results not from gradations of dignity, but from diversity of charisms.

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Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians can agree that the unityin-diversity of each local church makes it a complex sign of the immanence and transcendence of Jesus Christ. All Christian theologians can agree that those who encounter this complex sign within history can understand that Christ is both with the Church, encouraging it on its pilgrimage to the Kingdom, and ahead of the Church, beckoning it from the future towards this trans-historical goal. Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologians would affirm at this point that the Church, in its essential and complex structure, is an icon or sacrament of the humanity and of the divinity of Christ. Baptism, chrismation and holy orders are sacramental realities: these three liturgical acts determine the permanent sacramentality of the church.37 Protestant theologians, however, though less likely to employ this language, could concede that the sacramentality of baptism needs the dedicated kerygmatic service of the ordained pastors, so that the entire church validly confesses Jesus Christ and acts in his name in the world.38 The wonderful contribution of John Zizioulas to the theology of the laity is his ability to urge Protestant theologians, more effectively than Roman Catholics presently can, to admit that the sacramental order of Christians needs the sacramental order of deacons, presbyters and bishops. The very sign-function of the Church necessitates that we see the one form of sacramentality, that of the baptized and confirmed, as in no way lessened by that of the ordained pastors. John Zizioulas has been astute and courageous in stating that the eventual desired re-unification of the Churches demands that Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians come to agreement on the equal evangelical dignity, diverse charismatic offices and the one eschatological mission both of the sacramental order of Christians and the sacramental orders of their pastoral leaders.

37 Cf. P. McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993) pp. 269–71; here the teaching of Zizioulas on the identity of the baptized and confirmed is described as a ‘rhythmic stability’ constantly gained and lost at the eucharist, at which all the sacramental orders of the Church experience a foretaste of their eschatological divinization. 38 Cf. W. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, volume III, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998) p. 397, where ordination is called a sign-act or sacrament of the one mystery of salvation which unites Christ and his Church, ‘even if, unlike Baptism, it does not impart justifying grace to the recipients or their institution as children of God, but presupposes already the relationship to Christ and his Church that has its basis in Baptism’.

Chapter 11

The Local and the Universal Church: Zizioulas and the Ratzinger–Kasper Debate Paul McPartlan

Many would testify that the Orthodox theological perspectives and emphases of Metropolitan John Zizioulas frequently enable difficult issues which bring Western theology to something of an impasse to be seen from a new angle and in a fresh light. In very grateful tribute to him, I would like to indicate how it seems to me that his thought can illuminate the recent, much publicized debate between Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and Bishop, now Cardinal, Walter Kasper regarding the relationship between the local church (or ‘particular church’) and the universal Church. The debate arose from some points made in the Letter on the idea of the Church as communion that was issued in 1992 by the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), whose Prefect was Cardinal Ratzinger. Kasper, then Bishop of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, made a sharp critique of these points in a Festschrift article (for Bishop Joseph Homeyer) in 1999, to which Ratzinger replied in an address at the Vatican in February 2000. While the exchanges continued, Kasper was appointed a cardinal by Pope John Paul II and named as President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity (PCPCU) early in 2001.1 1 The main documents relevant to the debate between these two distinguished Catholic theologians and eminent churchmen are listed A–H , and I shall use these capital letters to designate the texts in references: A. 28 May 1992, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on Some Aspects of the Church understood as Communion (‘Communionis Notio’), available at www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/doc_doc_index.htm B. 7 July 1993, ‘Church unity rooted in Eucharist’, article to mark the first anniversary of Communionis Notio, in L’Osservatore Romano (English edition), 7 July 1993, pp. 4, 10. C. 1999, Walter Kasper, ‘Zur Theologie und Praxis des bischöflichen Amtes’, in W. Schreer and G. Steins (eds), Auf eine neue Art Kirch sein (München: Kevelaer, 1999), pp. 32–48. D. February 2000, Joseph Ratzinger, ‘L’ecclesiologia della costituzione “Lumen Gentium”’, in Rino Fisichella (ed.), Il Concilio Vaticano II (Milano: San Paolo, 2000) pp. 66–81; also available in Italian and Spanish at www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ cfaith/doc_rat_index.htm E. December 2000, Kasper, ‘Das Verhältnis von Universalkirche und Ortskirche’, Stimmen der Zeit 125.12(2000), pp. 795–804. English translation (by Robert Nowell): ‘On the Church’,

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The Ratzinger–Kasper debate deals with complex and profound issues, only some of which, unfortunately, can be addressed in this short space. Central to our discussion here is the fact, not much heeded by the two parties, that ‘universal Church’ is a term actually capable of various meanings. Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, itself uses ‘universal Church’ in two different ways: on one hand, to refer to the final heavenly eschatological Church of all ages, the assembly of all the just ‘from Abel ... to the last of the elect’ (Lumen Gentium 2), and, on the other, to refer to the present worldwide Church of today (for example, Lumen Gentium 25). An element of ambiguity therefore attaches to the decisive principle stated in Lumen Gentium 23, namely that local churches around their bishops are ‘constituted after the model of the universal Church’.2 It is the second, worldwide meaning of ‘universal Church’ that effectively predominates and is operative in Lumen Gentium, probably because Western theology cannot comfortably embrace an eschatology so strong as to believe that the local church, especially in its eucharist, is actually constituted after the model of the eschatological Church and is, indeed, the icon of the final gathering. Significantly, neither Ratzinger nor Kasper employs such an eschatological idea; perhaps it is simply so unusual that it is not seriously considered. On the other hand, Orthodox theology and ecclesiology use precisely this notion, as is plain from a comment that John Meyendorff directed critically towards Vatican II. The ancient Church saw in each bishop the head of the ‘whole’ manifested locally, and this ‘whole’ was not a geographical concept – the universal Church of 150 or 1966 – but the Body of Christ which includes infinitely more members than the empirical and visible Church can count today, since it includes the Mother of God, the angels and the whole communion of saints.3

Meyendorff himself uses the term ‘universal Church’ to refer here to the worldwide Church, but he clearly rules out any idea of the local church being constituted after the model of the worldwide Church. All local churches are modelled after the final, ‘whole’ Church. Ratzinger and Kasper thus appear to be united in espousing the first of the two kinds of eschatology that Zizioulas illuminatingly contrasts in his celebrated book, The Tablet, 23 June 2001, pp. 927–30. A looser translation (by Ladislas Orsy SJ) was published in America, 23 April 2001, pp. 8–14. References below are to Nowell’s translation. F. 12 November 2001, Kasper, ‘Present Situation and Future of the Ecumenical Movement’, Presidential address at the Plenary Meeting of the PCPCU, in PCPCU Information Service n.109 (2002/I-II), pp. 11–20, particularly pp. 15–19. This paper does not refer to Ratzinger or to the debate but is relevant because of its content. G. 19 November 2001, Ratzinger, ‘The Local Church and the Universal Church: A Response to Walter Kasper’, America, 19 November 2001, pp. 7–11. H. 26 November 2001, Kasper, Letter of reply, America, 26 November 2001, p. 28. 2 Cf. Paul McPartlan, ‘The Eucharist as the Basis For Ecclesiology’, Antiphon 6:2 (2001) pp. 16–17. Quotations from Vatican II are taken from A. Flannery (ed.), Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1996). 3 John Meyendorff, Orthodoxy and Catholicity (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1966) pp. 163–4.

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Being as Communion, while Meyendorff obviously espouses the second kind. Zizioulas is actually speaking of apostolic succession, but the passage gives an insight into his fundamental ecclesiological perspective. I maintain the view that there is a difference between eschatology conceived as orientation, and eschatology conceived as a state of existence which reveals itself here and now. As orientation, eschatology appears to be the result of historical process as the climax of mission ... whereas as a state of existence it confronts history already now with a presence from beyond history. In the latter case an ‘iconic’ and liturgical approach to eschatology is necessary more than it is in the former. It is the understanding of eschatology as this kind of presence of the Kingdom here and now that requires convocation of the dispersed people of God and of the apostles. As such, this image presupposes the end of mission. This proleptic experience of the presence of the eschata here and now –and not simply the orientation towards this end – was there from the beginning (Acts 2:17) and was realised mainly in the Eucharist (Didache). It is with this kind of eschatology that I wish to relate my subject here.4

To the Western mind, eschatology as orientation appears to be common sense. How can the end be other than simply our eventual destination? The Orthodox would say that there is a paradox here that confounds common sense, namely the truth that the end is present and formative of the earthly pilgrim Church in the regular celebration of the eucharist. In my book, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue, I argue that Henri de Lubac, one of the great pioneers of Vatican II, is himself an exponent of eschatology as orientation and that this is one of the main divergences between his theology and that of Zizioulas.5 I further argue that Zizioulas’ advocacy of eschatology as presence is essentially connected to his understanding of Christ himself as constituted by the Holy Spirit and so intrinsically corporate (‘[t]he Church is part of the definition of Christ’6), whereas Christ for de Lubac is an individual, that is, conceivable apart from the Church.7 Significantly, one of the features of the debate between Ratzinger and Kasper is the fact that they both esteem the theology of de Lubac and invoke him at various points (cf. E, pp. 929–30; G, p. 10; H, pp. 28–9). In a sense, they are both disciples of this outstanding Western master, and the debate between them is an intra-Western debate which, I would respectfully suggest, could benefit from a more eschatological Eastern perspective. The five sections below deal, respectively, with the first five texts (A-E) of the debate. Unless otherwise indicated, references by numbers and pages are to the main text being considered in that particular section and italics in quotes are from the original. The first text must be treated at some length because it lays the groundwork 4 John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985) p. 174, n. 11 (italics in original). 5 Paul McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993; new edition, Fairfax, VA: Eastern Christian Publications, 2006) pp. 256–64. The Meyendorff quotation appears on p. 107. 6 John Zizioulas, ‘The Ecclesiological Presuppositions of the Holy Eucharist’, Nicolaus 10 (1982) p. 342. 7 McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church, pp. 65–7; 88–9; 108–20; 166–86.

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for the debate. A conclusion follows, with mention particularly of the final two texts. A. Communionis Notio (1992) The Letter Communionis Notio starts by saying that communion ‘is very suitable for expressing the core of the mystery of the Church, and can certainly be a key for the renewal of Catholic ecclesiology’ (n. 1). It clearly defines ‘universal Church’ to be the worldwide Church when it says: ‘The Church of Christ, which we profess in the Creed to be one, holy, catholic and apostolic, is the universal Church, that is, the worldwide community of the disciples of the Lord’ (n. 7). ‘The universal Church is therefore the body of the Churches’ (n. 8; cf. Lumen Gentium 23), ‘a communion of [particular] Churches’ (n. 8). However, the Letter immediately points out that this does not mean that the universal Church is ‘the result of a reciprocal recognition on the part of the particular Churches’ (n. 8). In other words, there is no priority of the particular churches; each fundamentally needs ‘real communion with the universal Church and with its living and visible centre’ (n. 8), that is, the papacy. Again, the worldwide sense of ‘universal Church’ is clearly operative. There is, indeed, a ‘mutual interiority’ between the particular churches and the universal Church, and the universal Church can therefore not simply be ‘conceived as the sum of the particular Churches, or as a federation of particular Churches’ (n. 9). As we shall see, Ratzinger and Kasper agree on such a ‘mutual interiority’. There then follows the most controversial statement in Communionis Notio. ‘It [the universal Church] is not the result of the communion of the Churches, but, in its essential mystery, it is a reality ontologically and temporally prior to every individual Church’ (n. 9). In explanation, the Letter says: ‘Indeed, according to the Fathers, ontologically the Church-mystery, the Church that is one and unique, precedes creation, and gives birth to the particular Churches as her daughters. She expresses herself in them; she is the mother and not the offspring of the particular Churches. Furthermore, the Church is manifested, temporally, on the day of Pentecost ... ’ (n. 9). What is immediately apparent is that another term has been introduced: the preexistent ‘Church-mystery’. This is the ‘essential mystery’ of the universal Church, and, being transcendent, is clearly not the same as the universal Church itself as just defined, namely the ‘worldwide community’. Conceptually, it will therefore be important to keep these two notions, the transcendent mystery and the worldwide community, distinct. However, the Letter rather blurs the distinction, by effectively identifying both notions with the Jerusalem community on the day of Pentecost, as we shall see. My thesis here is that this blurring precipitated Kasper’s reaction to the Letter (because it enabled interpretations that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith did not necessarily intend), and that, if the transcendent mystery is firmly identified as eschatological (which need not mean that it is not already operative), any danger of such blurring can be prevented. Communionis Notio explains its stance as follows: ‘Furthermore, the Church is manifested, temporally on the day of Pentecost in the community of the one hundred and twenty gathered around Mary and the twelve apostles, the representatives of the


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one and unique Church and the founders-to-be of the local Churches, who have a mission directed to the world. From the first the Church speaks all languages’ (n. 9, with footnote reference to Acts 2:1 ff.). So, the Church-mystery took this definitive historical form on the day of Pentecost and, in speaking all languages, the Jerusalem Church itself prefigured the worldwide Church of today. The worldwide Church of today is thereby effectively assimilated to the Church-mystery and the important distinction between these two concepts is effectively blurred. Kasper subsequently objected that this is an idealization of the actual historical beginnings of the Church, ‘a Lucan construction’, and that there probably was no such clear, unitary beginning, but rather ‘communities in Galilee in addition to the community in Jerusalem’ (C, p. 44; E, p. 929). Why, then, is the idea attractive to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith?8 There is, of course, a biblical warrant, but we may also suggest doctrinal implications of the idea. By translating the transcendent mystery of the Church into an earthly, historical form, it provides a striking precedent for strong cohesion in the earthly, historical Church. Towards the end of n.9, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith takes a formula of Vatican II, previously praised for its ecumenical potential by Kasper, namely, ‘The Church in and formed out of the Churches (Ecclesia in et ex Ecclesiis)’,9 and says that it is ‘inseparable’ from another formula, namely, ‘The Churches in and formed out of the Church (Ecclesiae in et ex Ecclesia)’. One consequence of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s approach is a strong emphasis on the papacy, which stands at the centre of the earthly, historical Church, as Peter stood in the midst of the community on Pentecost day (cf. B, p. 4, below). What Communionis Notio says about baptism may already be seen as significant in this regard. Every member of the faithful, through faith and Baptism, is inserted into the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. He does not belong to the universal Church in a mediate way, through belonging to a particular Church, but in an immediate way, even though entry into and life within the universal Church are necessarily brought about in a particular Church (n. 10).

The First Vatican Council defined papal primacy in the following terms: We teach and declare that, in the disposition of God, the Roman Church holds the preeminence of ordinary power over all the other Churches; and that this power of jurisdiction of the Roman Pontiff, which is truly episcopal, is immediate.10 8 Ratzinger later stressed that the Letter was written by the CDF, not by him personally (G, p. 8). 9 Lumen Gentium 23; cf. Kasper, ‘Church as communio’, Communio 13 (1986) pp. 109–10. Kasper noted that this formula marked a return to the communio-ecclesiology of the first millennium and offered prospects for dialogue particularly with the Eastern Churches. “The understanding of the unity of the Church as a communio-unity leaves space again for a legitimate multiplicity of local churches within the greater unity in the one faith, the same sacraments and offices.” 10 First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution, Pastor Aeternus (1870) chapter 3. Cf. H. Denzinger and A. Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum (1965), hereafter DS nn. 3060,

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The definition teaches that the faithful are subject to the jurisdiction of the Pope not in a mediate way, through their adherence to the local bishop, but in an immediate way. We can see that the statement from n. 10 of Communionis Notio is structurally similar to it. Of course, baptism most fundamentally inserts us into the transcendent mystery of the Church (cf. Colossians 3:1–4). However, the fact that the way in which the insertion is described here so clearly echoes the definition of papal primacy invites us to interpret Communionis Notio as speaking also, and equivalently, of the way in which we belong, by baptism, to the universal Church in the sense of a worldwide fellowship that is not bounded by one’s own particular church, especially since Communionis Notio then says: ‘whoever belongs to one particular Church belongs to all the Churches, since belonging to the communion, like belonging to the Church, is never simply particular, but by its very nature is always universal’ (n. 10). In fact, much later in the debate, having just heard Kasper describing the effect of baptism in similar terms, Ratzinger went so far as to say: ‘this statement clears up the controversy’ (G, p. 11). We see that Communionis Notio moves readily and almost imperceptibly between transcendent and worldwide understandings of the Church, that is, between the Church-mystery and the ‘universal Church’. Belonging to the transcendent mystery of the Church, which is the very core of our Christian identity, effectively translates into membership of the worldwide fellowship of the Church under the jurisdiction of the Pope. A little further on, the Letter explicitly recalls the definition of Vatican I that papal primacy essentially involves ‘a truly episcopal power, which is not only supreme, full and universal, but also immediate, over all, whether pastors or other faithful’ (n. 13; cf. DS 3064), and then itself says: The ministry of the successor of Peter as something interior to each particular Church is a necessary expression of that fundamental mutual interiority between universal Church and particular Church (n. 13).

Clearly, Communionis Notio is very much also a Letter on papal primacy, understood as the key to that unity of the Church which has been transmitted down to the present from the day of Pentecost when the Church was born in the single unified gathering to which the Letter refers. The Letter also quotes Vatican I’s teaching that the Roman Pontiff is ‘the perpetual and visible source and foundation’ of the unity not only of the episcopate but also of the entire Church (n. 12; cf. DS 3051–3057), and then comments: ‘This unity of the episcopate is perpetuated through the centuries by means of the apostolic succession, and is also the foundation of the identity of the Church of every age with the Church built by Christ upon Peter and upon the other apostles’ (n. 12). This is a firmly historical account of the Church’s identity, very different in appearance from the eschatological statement of Zizioulas that the Church ‘is what she is by becoming again and again what she will be’.11 However, the eucharist, which is the repeated occasion of the Church’s becoming for Zizioulas, is also 3064. 11 John Zizioulas, ‘The Mystery of the Church in Orthodox Tradition’, One in Christ 24 (1988) p. 301; McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church, p. 187.


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notably prominent in the Letter. In n. 11, there is almost a direct echo of Zizioulas when it says: ‘it is precisely the Eucharist that renders all self-sufficiency on the part of the particular Churches impossible’12, and the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s warning against eucharistic ecclesiology fostering a ‘one-sided emphasis’ on the local church (n. 11) directly corresponds to Zizioulas’ own criticism of the ‘localism’ of eucharistic ecclesiology’s pioneer, Nicholas Afanassieff.13 In fact, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith shows that it wants to relate the papacy intimately to the eucharist: ‘the existence of the Petrine ministry ... bears a profound correspondence to the Eucharistic character of the Church’ (n. 11).14 Zizioulas could, perhaps, make a rather similar statement, for he too, from a rigorously eucharistic standpoint, regards a universal primacy as something required ‘in an ecclesiology of communion’.15 Zizioulas is also committed to a mutual interiority of the local church and the universal Church (that is, the ‘Catholic Church in the World’), and considers that the requirement that a new bishop be ordained by at least two or three bishops from neighbouring churches is an expression of that fundamental principle.16 Were he to envisage the ministry of a universal primate being also an expression of that principle (cf. the statement in n. 13 of Communionis Notio, above), he would, of course, be reaching that position by his own distinctive route. Based on an eschatological understanding of the Church, he believes that each local church is given its identity by receiving the eucharistic imprint of the eschatological reality,17 and then that all of the local churches are profoundly united by that same imprint into a ‘unity in identity’,18 which absolutely requires them to be open to one another and in communion. A universal primacy would have its place within that eschatological framework. In other words, for Zizioulas, the mutual interiority of the local and the worldwide Church is based on the mutual interiority of the local and the eschatological Church, as a result of which all local churches “coincide with one another”.19 The primacy would be a sign of that profound coincidence. B. ‘Church Unity Rooted in Eucharist’ (1993) On the first anniversary of the Letter, this anonymous and authoritative article appeared in L’Osservatore Romano. Cardinal Ratzinger might reasonably be presumed to be its author, or at least to have approved it. The article is essentially 12 Cf. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 156–7. 13 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 24–5; cf. Paul McPartlan, ‘Eucharistic Ecclesiology’, One in Christ 22 (1986) p. 329. 14 Cf. Paul McPartlan, Sacrament of Salvation. An Introduction to Eucharistic Ecclesiology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995) pp. 68–71. 15 John Zizioulas, ‘The Church as Communion’, in T.F. Best and G. Gassmann (eds), On the Way to Fuller Koinonia (Geneva: WCC, 1994) p. 108; cf. McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church, pp. 203–11. 16 Cf. Zizioulas, Being as Communion, pp. 154–5. 17 Ibid, pp. 154–5; and Meyendorff, above. 18 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 158, n. 66. 19 Ibid.

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a defence of the doctrine contained in n. 9 of Communionis Notio. It refers to ‘the mutual interiority between the universal Church and the particular Churches’ as the ‘hermeneutical key’ of the Letter, and complains that ‘all too frequently the universal Church is considered as an abstract reality’ in contrast with ‘the concrete reality of the particular churches’. Consequently, ‘in [the] sentence about priority, the Letter considers the universal Church in the most concrete and at one and the same time the most mysterious way’. The universal Church it speaks of is the Church of Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. There is nothing more concrete and localized than the 120 gathered there. However, the unique originality and the mystery of the 120 consists in the fact that the ecclesial structure constituting the Church is the structure of the universal Church herself: Here there are the Twelve, with Peter at their head, and in communion with them the whole Church which grows – the 5000 – and speaks all languages, in a moment of unity and universality which is at the same time extremely local without being – in that it is the Church of Pentecost – an ‘individual particular Church’ in the sense given to that term today. At Pentecost there is no ‘mutual interiority’ between universal and particular Church, because these two dimensions are not yet distinct (p. 4).

The article thus closely assimilates the Church-mystery to the concrete reality of the Jerusalem Church, effectively as two ways of looking at the same thing, and moreover the ‘universal Church’ which the Letter defined as the ‘worldwide community’ is now expressly identified as the same ‘Church of Jerusalem on Pentecost day’. The worldwide Church is thereby itself even more firmly assimilated to the Churchmystery, and the blurring to which I referred above duly intensifies. C. Kasper’s Article (1999) Kasper quotes the conciliar formula, ‘in quibus et ex quibus’ (Lumen Gentium 23), and specifies that the one catholic Church is not a federation of particular churches, nor is it a ‘Super-Church’ with the particular churches merely as ‘provinces of the universal Church’. Local church and universal Church realize themselves in one another ‘perichoretically’ (p. 43). The conciliar formula was inverted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Communionis Notio, he says, so as also to affirm the formula: ‘Ecclesiae in et ex Ecclesia’, lest anyone erroneously maintain that the universal Church is only the unity of particular churches. He agrees with this complementary formula (cf. also later, F, p. 18), subject to the notable condition, very welcome for our discussion here, ‘that it is explained what is concretely meant by Church or Universal Church’. If the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church ‘with all the magnificent images with which the Church Fathers described it’ is intended, then ‘of course it applies’. However, ‘the formula becomes thoroughly problematic when the one universal Church is surreptitiously [unter der Hand] identified with the Roman Church, de facto with the pope and the curia’. ‘If that is the case,’ he says, ‘then the Letter of the CDF cannot be understood as a help towards clarification of communion ecclesiology but must be understood as its dismissal and as an attempt at a theological restoration of Roman centralism’ (p. 44).


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D. Ratzinger’s response (2000) Not surprisingly, Ratzinger was stung by such comments into a sharp reply. He starts by defending n. 9 of the Letter once again, and it is clear that he fundamentally wants to defend a unitary concept of the Church, in accordance with Scriptural imagery. ‘This ontological precedence of the universal Church, of the one Church and one Body, one Spouse, with regard to the concrete empirical realisations in individual particular Churches seems so clear to me that I find it difficult to understand objections to it.’ He fears that ‘the Church as a theological topic’ is being ‘cancelled out’ (p. 72). Ratzinger implies that his critics are pure empiricists who have lost a sense of the transcendence of the Church. He also manifests his understanding of eschatology simply as orientation when he stresses: ‘in Galatians, the Apostle speaks to us of the heavenly Jerusalem, and of it not as a great eschatological reality, but as a reality that precedes us: “This Jerusalem is our mother” (Galatians 4:26)’ (p. 72). Evidently, he does not think that the Church, if eschatologically understood, can really be ‘mother’, already operative and formative of the Church on earth. Resistance to the idea of the ‘precedence of the universal Church’ is understandable, Ratzinger says, only if it derives from the suspicion that Kasper states, namely that those who advocate it are tacitly trying to restore Roman centralism. But then he wonders why people should have such a suspicion and interprets it as a symptom of ‘a growing inability to give a concrete meaning to the universal Church, to the Church one, holy, catholic and apostolic’. He asserts that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith does not identify the universal Church with the Roman Church and says that that would only be possible ‘if the local Church of Jerusalem had already previously been identified with the universal Church, that is, if the concept of Church is reduced to the communities which empirically belong [to it] and its theological depth is lost from view’ (p. 74). He reiterates that Lumen Gentium itself, in line with the Fathers of the Church, spoke of the Church theologically, as being fundamentally dependent on the mystery of Christ and thereby on the Trinity (cf. Lumen Gentium 1–4). ‘Precisely because the Church is to be understood theologically, it always transcends itself’ (p. 75). Though Ratzinger’s own priorities are plain, we have seen that the original Letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the article which followed themselves effectively identified the universal Church with the Jerusalem community on the day of Pentecost. That was what prompted Kasper’s original protest. E. Kasper’s reply (2000) Ratzinger is adamant that he is simply trying to interpret Vatican II and retain a sense of the mystery and unicity of the Church against a reduction to empirical diversity. Kasper is equally adamant in his reply that ‘for 10 long years as a bishop’ he tirelessly fought ‘the sociological reduction of the Church to individual congregations’ (p. 927), but nevertheless that, on the basis of his pastoral experience, he is concerned about the centralizing tendencies that have reasserted themselves since Vatican II.

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Kasper stresses that he holds firmly to the pre-existence of the Church: ‘it is theologically indispensable for understanding the Church’. But he maintains that this pre-existence ‘does not in fact offer any proof of the primacy of the universal Church’. ‘It could just as well be used to support the idea that I and many others hold that the universal Church and the particular Churches occur simultaneously’ (p. 930). There is, then, a true primacy of the pre-existent Church, so to speak, but Kasper will not allow that to be interpreted as the primacy of the universal Church, which means the worldwide Church in common usage. The latter concretely exists in the differentiated form of many local churches, and he suggests that the Church, even in its pre-existence, might be a communion of local churches, existing ‘in and from’ them (p. 930). This way of envisaging the Church-mystery may well seem rather strange and somewhat at odds with scriptural images of the Church-mystery as one single community (for example, Hebrews 12:22–25; Revelation 7:9; 21:2), but how can that oneness be embraced without legitimating the priority of the worldwide Church, as a single community, over the local churches? That is the conundrum at the heart of the debate. Ratzinger translates the oneness into priority as a matter of course. Kasper wants to avoid priority, but seems then to need a rather difficult hypothesis. So we must ask: is there another way? The answer will require a shift from the strongly historical framework within which both Ratzinger and Kasper work into a more eschatological one. Conclusion In the debate with Ratzinger, Kasper argues not just as a theologian but also as a pastor, with concern too about the ecumenical harm caused by ‘a one-sided emphasis on the universal Church’ (E, p. 930). In his final contribution, Ratzinger implies that the real theological issues have been clouded by ‘false associations with Church politics’ (G, p. 11). We have seen, however, that the original Letter from the CDF itself invoked the teaching of Vatican I on the papacy and so could hardly fail to have implications for Church politics. More specifically, by blurring the distinction between the transcendent ‘Church-mystery’ and the ‘worldwide community’, it opened the way for the undoubted priority of the former, which has strong but subtle implications for papal primacy, as Zizioulas himself would maintain, to be translated into the priority of the latter, which has strong and not so subtle implications for papal primacy, with regard to local churches. Ratzinger’s final contribution was an article in America, which drew a final reply from Kasper in the same journal. Kasper declares that he is not inclined to pursue the ‘speculative question’ of whether the Church even in its pre-existence might itself be a communion of local churches (that is, the difficult hypothesis above) now that Ratzinger has just clearly affirmed that ‘local churches and the universal church ... interpenetrate one another’ and are ‘simultaneous’ (H, p. 28; cf. G, p. 10). The word ‘simultaneous’ would seem to be particularly important here, since the interpenetration was already stated in the original Letter. However, having made this affirmation, Ratzinger himself declared that this was not ‘the actual point at issue’


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(G, p. 10). As far as he was concerned, something else had been at stake all along. He explained as follows: The basic idea of sacred history is that of gathering together, of uniting – uniting human beings in the one body of Christ, the union of human beings and through human beings, of all creation with God. There is only one bride, only one body of Christ, not many brides, not many bodies. The bride is of course, as the fathers of the Church said, drawing on Psalm 44, dressed ‘in many-colored robes’; the body has many organs. But the superordinate principle is ultimately unity. That is the point here (G, p. 10).

Kasper fully agrees with this point, but indicates in his reply that it was the way Ratzinger was previously making it that caused him concern. In his argument in support of the pre-existence of the universal church, Cardinal Ratzinger quite rightly says that there is ‘only one bride’ and ‘only one body’. He does this by way of making over [that is, recasting] the thesis of the priority of the church universal into the thesis of the priority of inner unity. On both philosophical and scriptural grounds I can fully concur with this latter thesis, which avoids the confusing language about the precedence of the universal church (H, p. 29).

Kasper thus accepts the idea of a pre-existing Church, one bride, one body. As such, the Church undoubtedly has an ‘inner unity’ which is ontologically and even temporally prior to any local church. He simply objects to this being taught in terms of the priority of the ‘universal Church’, which generally means the worldwide Church in normal Catholic usage. If the worldwide Church has priority, then Rome and the curia naturally have a higher profile than they do if the worldwide Church and the local church are interpenetrating and simultaneous. I have suggested that ‘language about the precedence of the universal Church’ is ‘confusing’ because the very term ‘universal Church’ is ambiguous; it can mean the pre-existing Church (cf. Kasper’s own words, above) or the worldwide Church, and the distinction between these two meanings can be crucial, as in this debate. Communionis Notio blurred the distinction by explaining the temporal precedence of the ‘essential mystery’ of the universal Church historically, in terms of the temporal manifestation of the Church on the day of Pentecost, when, in speaking all languages, the Church of Jerusalem prefigured the worldwide Church of today. Perhaps the term ‘pre-existence’ rather invites such a potentially controversial historical line of interpretation and should itself come under scrutiny. Zizioulas would urge that the Church is pre-existent only in the sense that its reality, which is truly eschatological, because history must run its course to the end and be respected, was already mysteriously operative from the beginning of time. In other words, his perspective prevents the blurring of meanings that has fuelled the Ratzinger–Kasper debate. There is no danger of confusing the transcendent Church-mystery with the current worldwide Church if the transcendent Church-mystery is a reality still to come. Paradoxically and crucially, Zizioulas maintains that the transcendent Churchmystery is powerfully operative from the future. In the power of the Spirit, the Church does indeed live by anamnesis, but not in the everyday ‘psychological and

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experiential’ sense. In the liturgy we encounter ‘the eucharistic paradox which no historical consciousness can ever comprehend, i.e. the memory of the future’.20

20 Zizioulas, Being as Communion, p. 180.

Chapter 12

The Spirit and Persons in the Liturgy Douglas H. Knight

It is widely acknowledged that John Zizioulas offers us a personalist ontology, an account of persons in constitutive relation. What is not so well known is where this ontology comes from, and how different it is from the ontology that otherwise governs the way we view the world. I want to make three points. The first is that this is not merely an ontology but also an account of our coming into being, second that it comes from the divine liturgy, and lastly that it is able to provide a much more instructive account of who we are and what future we have. First, Zizioulas is not offering merely an ontology, a theory of being, but also an account of becoming. In order not to misrepresent the theological definition of this ontology we have to grasp that, according to Christian doctrine, all created things are being brought into being, and thus that they are not yet what they will be. A theory of being cannot be adequate where everything is changing and nothing is yet properly itself. Instead we need to understand that we are spectators at an event in which things are unfolding before our eyes, and for this reason, in order to account for what we see, we have to resort to narrative and say what it was, what it is now, and anticipate what it might become. Moreover, we are not merely spectators, for in the course of this event, we ourselves are changing and indeed coming into being. We are patients and recipients in this process. What is more, these changes are not merely happening to us, we are participants in them, so not only recipients but also actors, whose input gives things the characteristics that they bear for ever after. An ontology that corresponds to the doctrine of creation must show both that we are being changed, and that we are involved in this very event, for nothing happens without us. This complex Christian account of being and becoming is driven by all that is sung and said in the course of Christian worship and reading of Scripture. The Christian community and its proclamation is formed by the worship of God, in which the company of heaven and the whole Christian Church participate. In the words of the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom: O Master and Lord our God, who established the heaven and orders and hosts of angels and archangels to minister unto thy glory: Grant that the holy angels may enter with our entrance, to minister with us, and with us to glorify thy goodness.1

1

The Orthodox Liturgy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) p. 42.

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This divine liturgy starts with the Father’s joy in the Son and the Son’s joy in the Father. The Son and Spirit express this joy in their work, in which they bring creation to perfection and bear it back to the Father who receives it from them, again in joy. For the theology of John Zizioulas, all talk of God originates in worship, and the discipline of theology is commentary on this worship.2 Zizioulas’ ideas about persons come from the theology of the triune persons of God, which is derived from the witness God gives of himself to us in the divine service and the Church.3 To show that persons come from God, we have to link a number of Christian doctrines. We have to show that persons come into being through other persons, and that they therefore come into being as they come into relationship with other people, and as they become particular beings. We come into being as we become distinct persons who participate in the great assembly of persons, who receive our life from all persons there, and who return recognition for this life to all other persons. Being a body – flesh, in the biblical term – is the means by which we are present and available to one another.4 We become particular persons as we grow into the very particular form of humanity that comes from exactly one human being, Jesus Christ. All human being is sourced from Christ and receives its definition from him: he is the criterion of humanity, and therefore of what it is to be a particular human, present to the rest of us as a particular body. This means that our being as persons is not given to us complete at birth, but is part of a process, caused by the Holy Spirit, which unfolds through time because we must all participate in it. As we are sanctified we become more human, more responsive and available to God, and through God to one another. We become persons as we properly identify God, who causes and substantiates all distinctiveness and particularity, and from whom all reality comes. On this definition, becoming human is about becoming better able to concede the otherness of other people. We come to be ourselves by properly seeing people for who they are and attributing to them the distinctiveness that God intends for them. Our ability properly to respect others, giving them neither too little nor too much recognition, is itself given to us by God. The worship of God allows us to see others as his creatures, and thus to understand that they are ours because they are first his. By this act of worship we are witnesses of the act by which they are called first into existence and then into their full future stature. We not only see them for what they 2 John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1985) p. 131: ‘Ecclesiology in the Orthodox tradition has always been determined by the liturgy, the Eucharist; and for this reason it is the first two aspects of pneumatology, namely eschatology and communion that have determined Orthodox ecclesiology.’ 3 John Zizioulas, ‘The Theological Problem of Reception’, One in Christ: A Catholic Ecumenic Review 21.3 (1985) p. 190: ‘What is received in the first place, and also in the final analysis, is the love of God the Father incarnate in his own unique and beloved Son and given to us in Holy Spirit … The Church exists in order to give what she has received as the love of God for the world.’ 4 In the formulation of Robert W. Jenson, your body is the means by which you are available to others. ‘You Wonder Where the Body Went’, in Essays in the Theology of Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) p. 221: ‘What bodies really are, is availabilities that enable freedom.’

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are, but in the Holy Spirit we contribute to making them what they will be. Worship of the true God is decisive in letting others become freely human, and our ability to let others become human is also the basis on which we may also grow into our own full stature. Man is not an autonomous being. He receives his being from others and he gives it away to others. If man withholds his worship from God, from whom he receives his being, he invariably gives that worship, and with it the powers entrusted to him, away to other creatures. In alienating his own proper powers, he brings into being entities which, though they are intrinsically less than he, come to assume authority over him. By giving his powers away, man inadvertently creates those entities that Christian doctrine refers to as gods. Such entities need the worship of man, for they have no life or existence other than that which man’s worship gives them. Only the real God is not needy, but provides out of his generosity everything we have. If we do not pass back to God in thanks all we receive from him, these other entities will emerge as rivals for God’s praise and will prevent our apprehension of the unlimited otherness and uniqueness of other persons. Over generations such misdirected praise accumulates to create amorphous corporate entities and climates of thought that reduce our whole social and cognitive world. Worship of God redirects our praise from all entities to God, the source and custodian of their real identity and ours. Worship simply returns to God the acknowledgment he first gave us, on which we live. We confess that, other than Jesus Christ, no creature on earth is God, and no one but he can say what we are, or ensure that we will have a future. If we withhold that truth from other creatures, we not only withhold their identity and life from them, but in consequence cheat ourselves of the fullness of life. As we are more and more able to hear the call of God and reply to it, and do so publicly, before the great assembly, we become freely able to share in the life we have received with all other creatures. Christians worship God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, because, though their divine life is complete in itself, these divine persons have determined to share their life and conversation with us. Worship is the form in which God shares his life with the whole company of heaven and with the Church on earth. God does not need our worship, but by the generosity of God, we may participate in this divine conversation. In it the Holy Spirit makes us confess the one true God, and so publicly concede that we are not ourselves divine. We have no other authority to speak about God than the authority he gives us in the liturgy. Only as the Holy Spirit makes us the people of Jesus Christ is God our God, and only thus does the issue of God, and possibility of true knowledge of God and consequently true knowledge of ourselves, arise. The Spirit makes us participants in the speaking and answering of the Son, and draws us into the Son’s work of ordering and nurturing the world, speaking on its behalf, and presenting it to the Father. By hearing and participating in the conversation and labour of their liturgy we come into communion with other beings, and into truth. The speech of God is also the act of God. God’s Word leaves nothing the same, but transforms, opens and completes everything. It is the irruption of the holiness of God into the world, that gives all things their sense and purpose. This divine service creates the antiphonal conversation of the heavenly assembly with the Church on earth, by which all creation becomes part of the reply the Son makes to the Father. As

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we praise God, we become willing and free participants in this assembly, and grow into our full estate. As this praise and thanksgiving is made in public, the world can hear it and join in with it. So far I have indicated the connections between our coming into being, becoming persons in communion, our becoming articulate in worship of God. Next I will run through each of these assertions, and say who this theological account is addressed to, what it rules out and what it enables. The World The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the constitutive persons, and the full and sufficient condition for all other persons, created and human. God has initiated the drama of personhood, in which each person in human history will contribute to the being of every other person in the created world. This account of persons requires that we not only talk about persons, but also about the world, both as the place constituted by the regularities described by physics and biology, and as the sum of human action. Zizioulas insists that the doctrine of creation obliges us to talk about the world, and to do so in conversation with those accounts represented by metaphysics. The Western philosophical tradition has often been in denial about the outside world, but in the crisis this causes, Western theology has not always clearly said that the world is the gift of God for us, and as such has its own legitimacy and existence. Instead Western theology has been content to discuss everything through the concept of mind, and to do without notions of plurality that we need to represent the claims on us of other persons, or of the political and physical world, and so it has disregarded the beneficial constraint that the outside world represents for us. When disengaged from Christian doctrine, the Western tradition understands God and the world as opposites, by nature at enmity. It defines spirit and material in opposition, and so arranges things that what is spiritual returns to its place above, and what is material returns to its place below, with the result that we have two separate realms, one above, the other below, or alternatively, one interior to us, our minds, the other exterior, the world of other people. Without Christian theology, and so without a doctrine of the Spirit who relates the world to Christ and makes Christ mediator of God and the world, the Western tradition has no third term that can hold these realms together. This tradition that identifies two separate realms sees us as trapped by materiality, and in need of liberation from the world. This dualism receives its clearest expression in Kant’s belief that other people, and the history we share with them, represent an unfortunate constraint on our freedom. Kant insisted that theology is not discourse about the world, so has no scientific reference, but is simply an expression of ethics, the effort of the individual to establish himself in the face of the world. As long as Western theology struggles to say that the world is not only a given for us, but that it is good, indeed that it is a gift which we may accept with the graciousness with which it is given, it cannot talk convincingly about the world or secure its


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talk about persons in any reality outside the human mind.5 For Western theology in this position, an examination of the Eastern theological understanding of the liturgy might bring welcome new insight. The doctrine of creation insists on the goodness and reality of creation, distinct from ourselves, and on which we may depend. Talk about ourselves must be anchored in such an understanding of the reality of the world. The possibility of talk about the world is underwritten by the doctrine of God. In support of this account I have two pieces of evidence: that the Son and the Spirit, at work together, are able to make the world, and all creatures in it, really distinct from God, and that they are able to encourage man to become co-worker with them in this work. The Spirit allows us to take on the body of the Son, which is the form of his personhood, and he shares with us the work of the Son in making the world declare that it is other than God. The Western Account The Western philosophical tradition, of which we are the heirs, assumes that each of us is already a complete individual, fully identifiable in isolation from all others. It believes that individuals are given by nature and self-sustaining. This tradition finds it difficult to show that being is related to doing, so it deals with bodies (being as substance) and action (being as being, as doing) in two separate metaphysics. The result is that we find it difficult to see what action and work the person has to do, or how our interaction with others makes any real difference to us.6 This philosophical tradition determines profoundly our view of ourselves. Generations of thinkers have, from the seventeenth century, increasingly adopted reductive metaphysics to describe our moral space. We have inherited our metaphysics from these thinkers, and live and think within the orbits that these packages of conceptualities allow us. The influence of these thinkers on us is not lessened because we are unaware of it – rather the reverse. We are, for example, the heirs of Thomas Hobbes. We believe that we are driven by our passions, and that violence is inevitable until we surrender our right to unrestricted aggression to the state, which then makes life with others possible. We are heirs of John Locke: we make an absolute distinction between things and persons, understand that we may possess or dispose of the former but have no possessive relations with persons, nor they with us, so that, we believe, we are not answerable to them or for them. We do not admit that we owe people their identity and existence, or understand that if we withhold it from them, their very being, and indeed even our own being, as persons is diminished. Instead we believe that our fundamental duty to others is to keep out of their way. We are heirs of Rousseau, for our social self-understanding is informed by his belief that law, social habit and civilization are constraints which the free spirit must escape. We are heirs of David Hume’s

5 Dietrich Ritschl, The Logic of Theology: A Brief Account of the Relationship between Basic Concepts in Theology (London: SCM Press, 1986) p. 151. 6 See Douglas H. Knight, The Eschatological Economy: Time and the Hospitality of God (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) chapter 1.

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belief that there is no assurance of knowledge of the world, so we should treat with scepticism all claims to knowledge and all reference to the good as our guide. Kant made himself heir to all these thinkers and the greatest single advocate of this non-Christian philosophical tradition.7 He represents the high point of this tradition’s refusal to concede the givenness of reality, of the good, or a social definition of human being, and he exemplifies the life of epicurean detachment allowed under such atomistic and contractarian conceptions of mankind. Following Kant, we have identified freedom with refusal to accept any externally given definition, and determined not to place ourselves under any authority but our own, a view which makes it difficult to see how we can learn anything from one another. We deny that we are under any authority but our own, and we do this without understanding that we have been taught to do so, precisely because we have put ourselves under authority – the authority of Kant. The decisions of earlier generations have reduced the moral space within which we are able to make our own decisions. The chief result of the teaching of Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Kant, and the large measure of acceptance it has received from subsequent generations, is that we are not able to see how others take decisions that affect us. Indeed we are encouraged to assume that our choices never either increase or decrease our options. We do not believe that we can diminish our freedom by poor choices, or that under discipline we can learn to exercise better choices that bring greater freedom in which more substantial choice may increasingly be exercised. Instead we believe that we can never alienate our ability to choose, and that we can limitlessly reinvent ourselves. We may think that we may free ourselves of our past simply by an exercise of will, but by this very belief we reproduce the myth of autonomy propounded by these thinkers. Only by naming these key figures and identifying the impact they have had on us, are we able to achieve any perspective on this tradition that otherwise utterly determines us. But this Western philosophical tradition cannot concede this because it has abandoned the conceptuality by which we can say that, for better or worse, other people make us who we are. The action of previous generations, represented by these proponents of the autonomous mind, defines and constrains the social and moral space within which we live. Their thought represents a retreat from the understanding that man is a social animal, embedded in a world given to him, and they did not pass on to us those resources of memory and tradition by which we could challenge their judgment. They have left us an inheritance of reduced moral and conceptual resources, that produces only stunted people. But we do not have to remain the inheritors of this reductive tradition. By appealing over the heads of its representatives to a superior and more generous source, we can again grow beyond the bounds allowed by these predecessors of ours. Christian worship, and the Christian theological tradition sourced from it, gives us the means to call for release from our masters. It is the duty of the Church to remember what the world cannot be bothered to remember, and to pass it on to

7 A convenient history of this progress of political philosophy towards Kant is given in Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).


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subsequent generations.8 The act of Christian worship is fundamentally the two acts of looking back, to the inauguration of the new creation in Christ, and looking forward to the fulfilment of that new creation by the Spirit in the reconciliation of the world with Christ and his people. For this reason Zizioulas refers all theological statements to the anamnesis and epiclesis of the eucharist. Anamnesis does not only mean remembering events, but looking forward to them, because the events of Jesus Christ are not only in our past but, much more importantly, they are in our future. Remembering (anamnesis) to Zizioulas means we are being re-membered, re-made as members of Christ. What is really past and foundational for us will be determined by what turns out to make persons of us, and those elements of our past which do not fit that outcome will be overcome and turn out to have no reality.9 The Christian confession of Jesus Christ as Lord is the true giver of our identity, and it is our cry to God for help. In the act of epiclesis, the worshipping congregation begs its Lord to redeem us from the ancestors who otherwise determine us, and to make us more than they can make us. This is what is going on in the liturgy, and for this reason we must now turn to the Eastern account, in which the Christian is a witness to the liturgy of God. Other people give us our being and role. A convenient way of alerting us to a vital difference between the Eastern and the Western traditions is to say that the Eastern tradition includes a political philosophy. The claim that God is Lord means that he rules the whole world, the secular as much as the spiritual sphere, and is therefore judge of all shapers of our mindset and our world. It shares the classical political view that the context of justice is generosity. Ruling and giving justice are generous acts of hospitality, afforded by someone who acts as the father and patron of his people. The Christian people has the unique liberty to pray to the provider and ruler of creation, and is able to ask him to be more and more released from all other authorities and their impoverishing accounts of our identity. We may beg God for our release from those of our ancestors who have become obstacles between us and our Lord. In the course of their confession of God, the Christian people tell such unaccountable authorities that they have no authority over us, that they are not gods or masters: they are named and driven out, and their expulsion is weekly celebrated and affirmed so such influences cannot return. By this worship we are also prevented from making our own unsustainable claims to mastery over others. This worship and confession, which comes from heaven to us, is the act by which God makes us free, and we come to have wills that are truly our own.

8 Zizioulas, ‘The Theological Problem of Reception’, p.190: ‘This Gospel is the Good News of God’s love to the world in Christ, but in the concrete form of a teaching and of a creed stating the historical facts that make up this giving of the love of God to us … The Church receives in this way a Creed which she confesses to be a true statement of the acts of God in the history of his people and Man, and of the way God so loved the world as to give his only Son for it … Attempts to maintain the purity of the original kerygma of the facts through which the love of God is received led the Church to develop a magisterium which is responsible for protecting this kerygma from heretical distortions.’ 9 John Zizioulas, ‘Towards an Eschatological Ontology’, paper given at King’s College London, 1999, p. 14.

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The Spirit Vindicates the Son This brings us back to the doctrine of creation, which declares that the world is the possession of God for us. It is his on two counts. First, he made it, and secondly, he went to war to win it back from rebellious forces for our sake. We need not only the static account, in which creation is finished, and on which we can look back (anamnesis) in joy and relief. We also need the account in which this process and trauma is live. The Lord makes us witnesses of the six days of creation, so we watch as he now subdues the forces whose rebellion threatens to make the earth unmanageable – albeit that these forces are nothing but our own alienated powers, lost to us by our own negligence. Though the battle against them is won, in the liturgy we also see this creation-battle as present and ongoing, while we spectators learn that we are those for whom this battle is being fought. The earth trembled and quaked; the foundations of the mountains shook; they reeled because he was angry … He reached down from on high and took me; he drew me out of the mighty waters.10

The liturgy tells worshippers about the descent and ascent of Christ through creation, and his victory over our insurrection, until they see the whole world and its Lord in the terms in which this liturgy describes them. Since it is our lives that are at stake in Christ’s struggle, this victory may not be achieved without us, but must also receive our approval. In the evangelical narrative of the liturgy we hear the advent of the Son of God to the world, and hear how he was refused and rejected, denied all worship, abandoned and displayed in complete isolation on the cross, left altogether without being. But the Father, reversing the action of mankind, overturned this public assessment of his servant. You with the help of wicked men put him to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him … You will not abandon me to the grave, nor will you let your holy One see decay (Acts 2:23–27).

The forces of this world could not keep the Son down. He was torn out of our grip, raised over us, and promoted to the right hand of the Father. The authorities of this world, unable to make their verdict on the Son stick, are shown to be without real power: the Son is given glory, while those who withheld glory from him are now shamed and exposed. According to Nicholas Cabasilas’ Commentary on the Divine Liturgy:

10 Psalm 18. This liturgical account relates to the Chaoskampf theme in the theology of the Old Testament, for which see Jon D. Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); or Robert Murray, The Cosmic Covenant: Biblical Themes of Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation (London: Sheed and Ward, 1992).


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That is why it was necessary that actions of this sort, capable of inspiring such feelings in us, should find a place in the ordering of the liturgy. It was necessary not only that we should think about but that to some extent we should see the utter poverty of him who possesses all, the coming on earth of him who dwells everywhere, the shame of the most blessed God, the suffering of the impassible, that we should see how much he was hated and how much he loved; how he the Most High, humbled himself; what torments he endured, what deeds he accomplished in order to prepare for us this holy table.11

In the liturgy we are witnesses that Christ’s victory, demonstrated in the resurrection, brings all rebellion to an end, and vindicates those who had no one to rely on but him. In the course of the ascension journey of the Son back up through the cosmos, all those who joined the general disorder return to the leadership of the one God. In the liturgy we see that Christ is now patiently bringing our resistance to an end. He is at work policing the powers, and maintaining order, so we appreciate the cost of this peace that will make the world the good gift of God to us. Man stands behind Christ, watching the event of creation happen before him, live. Around him are the worshipping company of heaven, all creatures and all the elements of creation. God has invited us to watch his ongoing action, intending that we should become reliable witnesses. The service of worship is, in Cabasilas’s words, ‘a figure of the whole mystery of Christ’s redemptive work’.12 By listening to the liturgy and Scripture that tells us about it, we are able to follow God at work, creating and judging and providing for all creation. With the saints we may learn to appreciate God’s performance for what it is, and to be thankful for it and to express that thanks and praise. God invites us to name, describe and order other creatures properly. We are caught up into this action that is first Christ’s and then, in Christ, ours too, and so we are given his action and in it find our life. Eucharist Christ is the true man, who is properly able to say Amen to the Father, and in whom the real dialogue of man with God is inaugurated. The Son calls together and assembles all the scattered elements of the cosmos. Assembly (ecclesia) means the coming together (synaxis) of all things, and this event of gathering brings about thanksgiving (eucharist).13 The command of God brings this assembly into being around the Son, from whom it receives its identity and permanence. Christ is the whole future world, come to us as one person. He is the glorious body that we are being given, which will be made not merely of this or that part, but of every element of the world, and will therefore radiate the glory of that entire creation.

11 Nicholas Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998) I, 1, p. 29. 12 Cabasilas, A Commentary on the Divine Liturgy, 2,,16, p.,52. 13 John Zizioulas, ‘Ecclesiological Presuppositions of the Holy Eucharist’, Nicolaus 10 (1982) p. 334.

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Presently, however, every part opposes itself against every other and against the whole, and as long as it does so, it is worn down and will die. Now Christ, with his body, endures all resistance until it is overcome and until every part finds its proper place within that body, which will then no longer be partial, but perfect, never to wear out. The liturgy follows the labour by which God upholds the economy of creation against those who hold out against it. Nothing that stays in our hands remains in the condition in which we received it, so God takes his gifts from us again to renew them, receiving our involuntarily given gifts from the willing hands of the Son. He arbitrates between the claims of his creatures: when those he has commissioned to exercise this task of justice fail to do so, the Lord steps in, bringing justice and redistribution until proper circulation is restored. God takes away from those who have abrogated to themselves too much, and have refused to do the generous work of distribution and redistribution. Whatever he gives he also draws back, re-assigns and redistributes in order to keep the whole body supplied. The concept of sacrifice serves this theological account of this circulation, within which the Son returns to the Father whatever needs restoration, and by the Father’s acceptance it is made holy and good. The eucharist also represents the transforming and renewing of the material world. The material world is already good. But Zizioulas warns that the Western tradition has not been sufficiently clear about this, sometimes leaving the impression that what is created and material is passing away in favour of what is uncreated and spiritual.14 But in the eucharistic prayers, as the elements of bread and wine are raised, all persons and created things are lifted and presented to God.15 As it holds these things up, the Church thanks God for them, and so all these things move towards their fulfilment and become good. These material things are not replaced by spiritual things, but rather the Spirit brings things and persons into the relationships they were meant for: each person and every thing is brought into complete relation with all other persons, and all other creatures, so each reaches their goal. As each creature is received from God with thanks, it is made perfect and catholic. In offering the elements to God these mortal things become the good life-giving act of Christ, the eternal source of life, which motivates and perfects the Church as a whole, and every member of it. The Church is the figure of both the spiritual and sensible world, as Saint Maximus puts it: Through it, he effects in his infinite power and wisdom an unconfused unity from the various essence of beings, attaching them to himself as a Creator at their highest point, and this operates according to the grace of faith for the faithful, joining them all to each other in one form …16

14 John Zizioulas, ‘Preserving God’s Creation: Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology’, King’s Theological Review 12 (1989) Lecture One, pp. 1–5. 15 Zizioulas, ‘Preserving God’s Creation’, Lecture One, p. 4. 16 Maximus the Confessor, ‘Mystagogia’, in Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, Classics of Western Spirituality, translated by George C. Berthold (New York: Paulist Press, 1985) p. 208.


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Each eucharist is an event of the transformation and perfection of creation, or rather a moment in which the finished creation makes itself felt within the present, unfinished and partial, creation. Man as Priest of Creation Man is called to be priest of creation, the mediator between creation and its maker.17 It is his work to shepherd creation and keep it in order, allowing all things to praise their maker. But Adam has not yet grown into his role. The first Adam asserted his freedom in the form of independence from God, with the result that creation has lost its connection with its source. A gulf opened between God and his creation, and between man and the world: decay, death and sin entered and disintegration began. Man has not given the creaturely forces the rule they need, not performed his mandate to arbitrate between them and call them to account, with the result that everything is out of kilter. Mistaking parts for the whole, and attributing too much to some creatures, Adam has alienated to other creatures the powers by which it is intended that he exercise God’s rule over them. Instead of being images of the authority devolved to them from above, they are images that reflect, not God’s, but their own glory. Those undisciplined creatures, which hoard power rather than employ it for the good order of all creation, now represent obstacles to every other part of creation. Christ did what Adam failed to do. He obeyed the Father, joined creation to its Creator, so the creation is continuously given its life from outside itself and so redeemed. In the new Adam there is direct rule from heaven, a combined economy of earth-with-heaven, by which the earth will be renewed. As man gives thanks to God, he and all creation receive this life, and creation is transformed from being a disordered place, to become a choir of diverse voices, variously representing creation to God so this world is not one undifferentiated and inert thing, but many distinct persons – a whole company. Becoming Spiritual Bodies The Son is fully present to the Father by the Spirit. The Spirit assembles a great company around the Son.18 The Son is their whole definition, and he is also distinctly

17 Zizioulas, ‘Preserving God’s Creation’, King’s Theological Review 13 (1990) Lecture Three, pp. 4–5. 18 Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 41, On Pentecost chapter XI: ‘He wrought first in the heavenly and angelic powers, such as are first after God and around God. For from no other source flows their perfection and their brightness, and the difficulty or impossibility of moving them to sin, but from the Holy Ghost. And next in the Patriarchs and Prophets, of whom the former saw visions of God or knew him and the latter also foreknew the future, having their master part moulded by the Spirit and being associated with events that were yet future as if present, for such is the power of the Spirit.’

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present to them as their head.19 Jesus Christ is never without the Holy Spirit, and is therefore accompanied by his company as any commander is accompanied by his troops. Though the Spirit does not leave the saints without a detachment for their support and protection, they must always ask him for reinforcement. His servants introduce and accompany us into this great assembly, and so bring us into being, escorted by these sponsors and supporters sent by the Son. As yet we fail to return to one another that real bodiliness that Christ has prepared for us, with the result that we have only a partial and fading body. We are not able to give one another enough support, so our mode, fallen human nature, has only a very patchy being and existence. But Christ has taken the peculiar fragmented sequential way in which we perform our availability to one another, and in it he has performed the full presence of the human creature in unbroken relationship with his Creator. He has performed the whole action of the creature that God intends us to become, and he now sustains this performance, using our temporality and spatiality, with his virtuosity to do so. His good performance of humanity makes it no longer fallen humanity. He is more real and solid in our time than we are, he has more time in our temporality than we do, indeed in it he has time enough for us. We must not decide therefore that Christ has either a spiritual body or a physical body, or attribute some actions to a divine nature and others to a human nature. We must say that Christ is fully present to the Father – fully embodied to him – by the Spirit. The Spirit makes the Son embodied and present to us, so the Son always has a spiritual body and is dressed, escorted and presented by the Spirit. The Son is fully present to the Father by the Spirit. The Spirit assembles us around and within the Son. The assembly is both in the Son and with the Son. I said that Western theology finds it difficult to talk about the world, and thus to relate its talk of persons to anything outside the mind of the individual. It is suspicious of metaphysics, and fears that the cosmology represented by this liturgical pneumatology is an impersonal discourse of emanation and return on the old Greek pattern. But, controlled by the evangelical narrative of Jesus Christ, and serving the discourse of Father and Son, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit allows us to account for plurality, and so to say that God is bringing into being a diverse world. The Holy Spirit is an unbroken continuum of action that drives, informs and holds in being everything that is, extending the life of God to a world of subordinate things, and returning that life back to God in thanks and praise. The Spirit brings into being the difference, particularity and freedom, and above all the worship of God, which is required by our talk of persons. When these creatures are finally able to return their praise to God, and be glad that they are able to do so, we can properly call them persons.

19 We are in Christ, so not separate from him, because Christ does not regard us as separate from him. But Christ is distinct from us, made so by the Holy Spirit.


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The Spirit Makes us Persons A truly theological account, in which the Spirit and the Son function as the two hands of the Father, will not turn what is spiritual and what is material into opposites. It will show that the single continuum of God’s action has as many degrees of differentiation as are required to aid our progress from immaturity to maturity, from the bottom of the ladder of being to the top. It is not the case that Christ either has a spiritual body which is therefore non-physical, or a physical body which is therefore not spiritual. We must say he is embodied by the Spirit. The Son is fully present to the Father – fully embodied to him – by the Spirit, and the same Spirit makes him embodied and present to us. The Son therefore always has a spiritual body: he is anointed, escorted and presented by the Spirit. But we are not formatted to receive such a direct embodiment. Because we are not spiritual – not yet proficient in the life God gives us – this spiritual body in which Jesus meets us must have the specific form that we do share. It must be a body in the partial and serial sense in which we are embodied and present to one another: for our sake he dresses down. Christ wears the body that we can catch hold of, and so is present to us in the slower and more diffident way that we use when talking to a child, that involves reinforcement, reassurance and checking for comprehension. So Jesus Christ is the Son, clothed by the Spirit in a body constituted by all the bodies of all the people of Israel who looked forward to him. He is present to us as the faithful of Israel. Yet this host is also too overwhelming for us to receive. So he is embodied in the single body of Jesus Christ, and present in this way only to a single generation of faithful Israel. The Son is always spiritual, and the Son is always material to us by means of the many physical bodies of the people of God, determined by the one physical body of Jesus. Now because they saw Jesus Christ, and because we have believed the reports of those who saw him, we have started to receive him, first in the form of all the saints who presently surround us in this generation, and through the apostolic witness of the Scriptures, and through the Spirit in eucharistic worship, increasingly in the company of all the saints through history, past and to come. In this way we give a properly eschatological definition to our understanding of materiality. At first ‘material’ means not very competent, not yet sanctified to receive all others as gifts of God. But the process of our sanctification will make us competent to recognize and render the distinctiveness and otherness of every other person, and to be embodied and so available to every other person. The whole difficulty of talking about time and eternity comes because we attempt to do so without saying what time is for. Time is for learning and growing up in. We can distinguish God’s time and ours as God’s patience and our impatience. God has time because he is generous and patient. Because we are not yet mature, we inhabit a stop-start mode of action, can only do one thing at a time, and are available to only a few other persons at a time. So the time God has for us is this serial, fractured time we inhabit and impose on one another. From our end, because we do not yet have patience, God’s infinite time appears finite. But God has perfected the art of patience and so has time without limit, and so he is able to wait for us to grow towards him. As we hear his voice and grow towards him, it will indeed turn out to have been time

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well-spent. If we do not hear him or turn towards him, the time he gave that did not return to him with any fruit will turn out to have been no time at all. The world is the act and the hospitality of the Son. All the people who make up the world represent the Son to us. We have to receive them from him, and refuse none of them, in order that the promise of catholicity is fulfilled. The progress of the worship of God on earth will persuade even the most recalcitrant to confess God and receive their share of the life that results from this worship. Our distinct and embodied being is not a state of affairs with which we have nothing to do, but it is the act of the Holy Spirit in us by which we are at last enabled to say that we are not God, and that you are different from me. Our being distinct from God is caused by God, but also by our very own action, Spirit-enabled. By it we for the first time freely and really act, and we act freely and willingly precisely as we are able to say that the Lord is God.

Bibliography

Secondary Works on John Zizioulas Compiled by Liviu Barbu

Books Areeplackal, Joseph. Spirit and Ministries: Perspectives of East and West (A critical study of the views on ordained ministry of Yves Congar and John Zizioulas), (Bangalore: Dharmaram, 1990). Baillargeon, Gaëtan. Perspectives orthodoxes sur l’Eglise – communion: l’œuvre de Jean Zizioulas, Collection Brèches théologiques 6 (Montréal, QC: Editions Paulines/ Paris: Médiaspaul, 1989). Collins, Paul M. Trinitarian Theology, West and East: Karl Barth, the Cappadocian Fathers and John Zizioulas (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Fontbona I Misse, Jaume. Comunión y Sinodalidad. La eclesiologia eucaristica déspues de N. Afanasiev en J. Zizioulas y J.M.R. Tillard (Sant Pacia, 52), (Barcelona: Edicions de la Facultat de Theologia de Catalunya-Herder, 1994). Fox, Patricia. God as Communion: John Zizioulas, Elizabeth Johnson and the Retrieval of the Symbol of the Triune God (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2001). Knight, Douglas H., ed. The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church (Aldershot, Hants/Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007). Małecki, Roman. Kościół jako wspólnota: dogmatyczno-ekumeniczne studium eklezjologii Johna Zizioulasa (Lublin: Redakcja Wydawnictw Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 2000). McPartlan, Paul G. The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1993). Melissaris, Athanasios G. Personhood Re-Examined: Current Perspectives from Orthodox Anthropology and Archetypal Psychology: A Comparison of John Zizioulas and James Hillman (Katerini: Epektasis Publications, 2002). Papanikolaou, Aristotle. Being with God. Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). Pavlidou, Eleni. Cristologia e pneumatologia tra Occidente cattolica e Orente ortodosso neo-greco; per una lettura integrate di W. Kaspar e J. Zizioulas in prospettiva ecumenical (Rome: Dehoniane, 1997). Pulprayil, Stanley. The Theology of Baptism and Confirmation in the Writings of Yves Congar and John Zizioulas (Rome: Pontifical Gregorian University, 2001). Turner, Robert D. Foundations for John Zizioulas’ approach to ecclesial communion (Louvain-la-Neuve : Université Catholique de Louvain, 2005).

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Essays, Book Chapters and other Discussions Farrow, Douglas. ‘Person and nature: a critique of the necessity-freedom dialectic in John Zizioulas’, in S.R. Holmes and M. Rae, eds., The Person of Christ (London/ New York: T & T Clark, 2005). Reprinted in Douglas H. Knight, ed., The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Gunton, Colin E. ‘The Church: John Owen and John Zizioulas on the Church’, in C.E. Gunton, Theology Through the Theologians: Selected Essays 1972–1995 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996). Heim, S. Mark. The Depth of Riches: Trinity and Religious Ends (Sacra Doctrina: Christian Theology for a Postmodern Age), (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001), pp. 168–74. Hunt, Anne. Trinity: Nexus of the Mysteries of Christian Faith (Theology in Global Perspective), (New York: Orbis Books, 2005), pp. 45–7, 130–31. Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. ‘John Zizioulas: communion ecclesiology’, in V.-M. Kärkkäinen, An Introduction to Ecclesiology: ecumenical, historical and global perspectives (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2002). Kärkkäinen, Veli-Matti. ‘John Zizioulas: Communion Christology’, in V.-M. Kärkkäinen, Christology: A Global Introduction (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Academic, 2003). Knight, Douglas H. ‘John Zizioulas on the eschatology of the person’, in D. Ferguson and M. Sarot, The Future as God’s Gift: Explorations in Christian Eschatology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2000). Nerney, Catherine T. and Taussig, Hal. ‘An Eastern Orthodox contribution to understanding koinonia: the work of John Zizioulas’, in C. Nerney and H. Taussig, Re-imagining Life Together in America: A New Gospel of Community (Lanham, Md.: Sheed & Ward, 2002). Skira, Jaroslav Z. ‘Breathing with Both Lungs: John Zizioulas and Yves Congar, O.P.’, in J.Z. Skira and M.S. Attridge, eds., In God’s Hands: Essays on the Church and Ecumenism in Honour of Michael Fahey, S.J. (Leuven: Peeters Publishers & Press, 2006). Torrance, Alan J. ‘Karl Rahner and John Zizioulas: “Two Contrasting Expositions of Triunity” ’, in A.J. Torrance, Persons in Communion: An Essay on Trinitarian Description and Human Participation with special reference to Volume One of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996). Torrance, Alan J. ‘What is a person?’, in M. Jeeves, ed., From Cells to Souls and Beyond: Changing Portraits of Human Nature (Grand Rapids; Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2004). Volf, Miroslav. ‘Zizioulas: “Communion, One and Many’’’, in M. Volf, After Our Likeness. The Church as the Image of the Trinity (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1998). Williams, Rowan. ‘Eastern Orthodox Theology’, in D.F. Ford, ed. with R. Muers, The Modern Theologians. An Introduction to Christian Theology since 1918, 2nd ed., (Blackwell Publishing, 2006), see pp. 583, 587.

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Williams, Rowan. ‘Foreword’ to J. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness. Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. P. McPartlan (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2006). Doctoral Theses Agoras, Constantin ‘Personne et liberté ou ‘etrecomme communion’, ‘einai os kuinonia’,’ Université Paris Sorbonne, 1992. Areeplackal, Joseph The pneumatological dimension of ordained ministries as presented by Yves Congar and John Zizioulas, Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, 1988. Bachmann, Steve. ‘Enigma variations: the Imago Dei as the basis for personhood; with special reference to C.E. Gunton, M. Volf and J.D. Zizioulas’, Brunel University, London, 2001. Chiavone, Michael L. ‘The unity of God as understood by four twentieth century Trinitarian theologians: Karl Rahner, Millard Erickson, John Zizioulas and Wolfhart Pannenberg’, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Wake Forest, 2005. Chin, Soh Guan ‘A Trinitarian covenantal theology of the church’, University of Aberdeen, 1993. Clancy, Finbarr G. ‘St Augustine of Hippo on Christ, his Church and the Holy Spirit: a study of the De baptismo and the Tractatus in Iohannis evangelium’, Oxford University, 1992. Collins, Paul M. ‘The Divine Fellowship of Love: A Study in the Relationality of the Godhead in the Church Dogmatics of Karl Barth’, King’s College London, 1995. Fisher, Christopher L. ‘Human significance in theology and natural sciences: an ecumenical perspective with reference to Pannenberg, Rahner and Zizioulas’, University of Edinburgh, 2004. Ingle-Gillis, William C. ‘The Church as Event-in-Process: A Trinitarian Response to provisionalist ecclesiology in modern ecumenism’, King’s College London, 2004. Jackisch, Jan G. ‘Der Geist, Christus und die Kirche: John Zizioulas, Georges Florovsky, Martin Luther und Johannes Calvin im Dialog’, University of Heidelberg, 2003. McHardy, David ‘Eucharist, ministry and authority in the ecclesiology of John Zizioulas’, University of Edinburgh, 1997. McPartlan, Paul G. ‘The Eucharist makes the Church: the eucharistic ecclesiologies of Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas compared’, University of Oxford, 1989. Norris, Barry J. ‘Pneumatology, existentialism and personal encounter in contemporary theologies of church and ministry with particular reference to John Zizioulas and Martin Buber’, King’s College London, 1995. Papanikolaou, Aristotle ‘Apophaticism v. ontology: a study of Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas’, University of Chicago, 1998.

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Perks, Catherine C. ‘Towards a Realist Theology of Christian Community’, University of Aberdeen, 2003. Robinson, Peter Mark B. ‘Towards a definition of persons and relations with particular reference to the relational ontology of John Zizioulas’, King’s College London, 1999. Shaw, Fitzhugh L. ‘An Introduction to the Study of Georges Florovsky’, Cambridge University, 1991. Skira, Jaroslav Z. ‘Christ, the Spirit and the Church in modern Orthodox theology: A Comparison of Georges Florovsky, Vladimir Lossky, Nikos Nissiotis and John Zizioulas’, University of St Michael’s College, Toronto, 1998. Stoicoiu, Rodica M. ‘The Sacrament of Order in its relationship to Eucharist, Church and Trinity in the theological writings of Edward Kilmartin and John Zizioulas’, Catholic University of America, Washington, 2004. Tibbs, Eve M. ‘East meets West: Trinity, Truth and Communion in John Zizioulas and Colin Gunton’, Fuller Theological Seminary, California, 2006. Whitefield, Keith R. ‘Between God and Man: Personhood, Trinity and the Metaphor of Text’, University of Aberdeen, 1990. Journal Articles Agoras, Constantin. ‘L’anthropologie théologique de Jean Zizioulas: A bref aperçu’, Contacts 41/ 1989: 6–23. Agoras, Constantin. ‘Vision ecclésiale et ecclésiologie. A propos d’une lecture de l’ouvre de Jean Zizioulas’, Contacts 43/ 1991: 106–123. Agoras, Constantin. ‘Hellénisme et Christianisme: le question de l’histoire, de la personne et de sa liberté selon Jean Zizioulas’, Contacts 44/ 1992: 244–69. Agourides, Savas. ‘Can the persons of the Trinity form the basis for a personalistic understanding of the human being?’ (in Greek), Synaxe 33/ 1990:67–78. Baillargeon, Gaëtan. ‘Jean Zizioulas, porte-parole de l’Orthodoxie contemporaine’, Nouvelle Revue Théologique 3/ 1989: 176–93. Behr, John. ‘The Trinitarian Being of the Church’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 48.1/ 2004: 67–88. Cumin, Paul. ‘Looking for Personal Space in the Theology of John Zizioulas’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 8.4/ 2006: 356–370. de Halleux, André. ‘Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens? Une mauvaise controverse’, Revue théologique de Louvain 17/ 1986: 129–155. Del Colle, Ralph. ‘“Person” and “Being” in John Zizioulas’ Trinitarian Theology: Conversations with Thomas Torrance and Thomas Aquinas’, Scottish Journal of Theology 54.1/ 2001: 70–86. Fermer, Richard M. ‘The limits of Trinitarian theology as methodological paradigm (Examining the foundational argument of Colin Gunton and John Zizioulas regarding divine and humane personhood)’, Neue zeitschrift fur systematische theologie und religionphilosophie 41.2/ 1999: 158–186.

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Fisher, David A. ‘A Byzantine Ontology: Reflections on the Thought of John Zizioulas’, Diakonia 29.1/ 1996: 57–63. Galvin, John P. ‘Comments on Metropolitan John’s ‘Primacy in the Church: An Orthodox Approach’ ’, Eastern Churches Journal 5.2/ 1998: 21–8. Groppe, Elisabeth T. ‘Creation ex nihilo and ex amore: Ontological Freedom in the Theologies of John Zizioulas and Catherine Mowry LaCugna’, Modern Theology 21.3/ 2005: 463–496. Hankey, Wayne. ‘Theoria versus Poesis: Neoplatonism and Trinitarian Difference in Aquinas, John Milbank, Jean-Luc Marion and John Zizioulas’, Modern Theology 15.4/ 1999: 387–415. Harrison, Nonna V. ‘Zizioulas on Communion and Otherness’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 42.3–4/ 1998: 273–300. Hart, David. B. ‘The Mirror of the Infinite: Gregory of Nyssa on the Vestigia Triniatis’, Modern Theology 18.4/ 2002: 542–556. Reprinted in S. Coakley, ed., Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa. Directions in Modern Theology (Blackwell Publishing, 2003). Heim, S. Mark ‘The Depth of Riches: Trinity and Religious Ends’, Modern Theology 17.1/ 2001: 21–55. Hunt, Anne ‘The Trinity and the Church: Explorations in Ecclesiology from a Trinitarian Perspective’, Irish Theological Quarterly 70.3/ 2005: 215–236. Ickert, Scott S. ‘The Missing Word in John Zizioulas’ Ecumenical Theology’, Dialog 37. Sum/ 1998: 220–227. Lawrence, Marilynn. ‘Theo-ontology: notes on the implications of Zizioulas’ engagement with Heidegger’, Theandros (An Online Journal of Orthodox Christian Theology and Philosophy) 3.2 (2005/2006). Manoussakis, John P. ‘The anarchic principle of Christian eschatology’, Harvard Theological Review 100.1/ 2007: 29–46. McPartlan, Paul G. ‘Mary and Catholic-Orthodox Dialogue’, Month 29.12/ 1996: 476–484 McPartlan, Paul G. ‘The local church and the universal church: Zizioulas and the Ratzinger – Kasper debate’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 4.1 /2004: 21–33. McManus, Eamon. ‘Aspects of Primacy According to Two Orthodox Theologians’, One in Christ 36.3/ 2000: 234–250. Melissaris, Athanasios. ‘The challenge of patristic ontology in the theology of Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon’, Greek Orthodox Theological Review 44.1–4/ 1999: 467–490. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. ‘Geschichtliche Offenbarung Gottes und ewige Trinität’ (God’s historical revelation and eternal trinity), essay on John Zizioulas’ Seventieth birthday, Kerygma und Dogma 49.3/ 2003: 236–246. Papanikolaou, Aristotle. ‘Divine Energies or Divine Personhood: Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas on conceiving the transcendent and immanent God’, Modern Theology 19.3/ 2003: 357–385. Papanikolaou, Aristotle. ‘Is John Zizioulas an existentialist in disguise? Response to Lucian Turcescu’, Modern Theology 20:4/ 2004:600–608. Rigal, Jean. ‘Trois approches de l’ecclésiologie de communion: Congar, Zizioulas, Moltmann’, Nouvelle Revue Théologique 120.4/ 1998: 605–619.

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Russell, Edward ‘Reconsidering relational anthropology: a critical assessment of John Zizioulas’ theological anthropology’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 5.2/ 2003: 168–186. Schroeder, Paul ‘Suffering towards personhood: John Zizioulas and Fyodor Dostoevsky in conversation on freedom and the human person’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 45.3/ 2001: 243–264. Sheehan, Rowan B. ‘The freedom of the person in Christ: the concept of hypostasis in John Zizioulas and Panayiotis Nellas’, Sourozh 100. May/ 2005: 35–47. Skira, Jaroslav Z. ‘The synthesis between Christology and Pneumatology in modern Orthodox theology’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 68.2/ 2002: 435–465. Skira, Jaroslav Z. ‘The ecological bishop: John Zizioulas’ theology of creation’, Toronto Journal of Theology 19.2/ 2003: 199–213. Skublics, Ernest ‘The rebirth of communion ecclesiology within orthodoxy: From nineteenth century Russians to twenty-first century Greeks’, Logos 46.1–2/2005: 95–124. Small, Joseph D. ‘What is Communion and When is it Full?’, Ecclesiology 2.1/ 2005:71–87. Stavrou, Michael ‘Linéaments d’une théologie orthodoxe de la conciliarité’, Irenikon 76.4/2003: 470–505. Tataryn, Myroslaw. ‘The Munich Document and the Language of Unity’, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 26/ 1989: 648–663. Tataryn, Myroslaw. ‘Orthodox ecclesiology, cultural pluralism and Orthodox perspectives as defined by John Zizioulas and Christos Yannaras’, Sobornost 19.1/1997: 56–67. Turcescu, Lucian. ‘ “Person” versus “Individual”, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa’, Modern Theology 18.4/ 2002: 527–539. Reprinted in S. Coakley, ed., Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa. Directions in Modern Theology (Blackwell Publishing, 2003). Turner, Robert D. ‘Foundations for John Zizioulas’ approach to ecclesial communion’, Ephemerides theologicae Lovanienses 78.4/ 2002: 438–467. Volf, Miroslav. ‘‘The Trinity Is Our Social Program’: The Doctrine of the Trinity and the Shape of Social Engagement’, Modern Theology 14.3/ 1998: 403–423. Wilks, John G.F. ‘The Trinitarian Ontology of John Zizioulas’, Vox Evangelica 25.Nov/ 1995: 6388. Williams, Anna N. ‘“Instrument of the union of hearts”: The Theology of Personhood and the Bishop’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 4.3/ 2002: 278–300.

Index Adam 162, 193 Analogy 85, 105, 119n.38, 122, 168–69 Anamnesis 148–51, 165, 181, 189–90 Anglican 36–7, 41 Apophaticism 31, 34, 57, 102–03, 131 Arianism 81, 92 Aristotle 44, 48, 60, 87, 114n.19, 135 Ascetism 91, 95 Athanasius, Saint 55, 82–83, 98–99 Augustine, Saint 39, 64, 88, 96, 100–02 Authority 12, 25–26, 83–84, 135, 147–58, 159–63, 188–89

local and universal Church 171–81 Communion 1–2, 5–6, 14, 17–21, 27–30, 69, 84–85, 98–102, 110–11, 150, 152–54 Creation 7–8, 16–20, 23–28, 55, 58–60, 105, 121–22, 190–91, 193 Cyprian 135–36 Cyril of Alexandria 98

Baptism 11, 21, 62–64, 131, 160–66, 175–76 Basil, of Caesarea, Saint 88–96, 99, 103 Behr, John 37, 43, 45–50, 71–76 Bishop 12–13, 125–27, 129–31, 133–45, 155–56, 172, 177 Body of Christ 9, 11, 21–28, 29 105, 134, 139–40, 148–54, 172, 176, 179, 181, 184, 191–95 Cabasilas, Nicholas 131, 190–1 Cappadocians 4–5, 44, 55–56, 67, 87–96, 100–07, 110 Catholic (Roman) 13, 128, 130, 135, 138, 159–60, 163, 171–81 Catholicity 12–13, 112–13, 118–19, 135–36 Cause 9, 16–18, 27–8, 56–57, 97–100, 111–13 Charism, charismata, charismatic, (see also gifts) 127–32, 134, 139–40, 167–69 Christ 20–1, 54, 59, 74–75, 82, 102, 105, 114–16, 190–95 Christology 10, 21, 33, 102, 113–18, 134, 148–49 Church 9–14, 70, 75, 112, 117–18, and ministry 125–32, 159–70 and bishop 133–45 and authority 147–58

Economy 17–18, 82–85, 98–99, 127 Ecumenism 136, 152, 157–8, 160, 175, 180 Epiclesis 148–51, 165, 189 Epistemology 29–32 Eschatology 21–28, 30–32, 105, 120, 127, 139–40, 148–49, 151, 172, 176, 179, 195 Ethics 7, 22–23, 31, 186 Eucharist 9, 13–14, 25–26, 28, 30, 34, 54, 64n.200, 74, 112, 120, 125, 131–38, 144, 150–51, 164, 182, 191–93 Existential, Existentialism 5–6, 35, 43, 46, 60–63, 66, 71–72, 109, 111–12, 152

Death 21–22, 30, 61, 102, 193 Deification 111–12, 117–19 Doctrine 48, 50, 134–35

Fall 4, 8, 18–19, 24, 29, 56, 62–62, 88–89, 121–22, 194 Father 9–10, 17–18, 56–58, 79–86, 99–100, 110–111, 129, 161–63, 184 Filioque 100n.17, 106 Freedom 1–2, 6–7, 10–11, 16–20, 28, 55–58, 60–2, 104–5, 109–12, 119–22, 188 Future 8–9, 11, 24–5, 60, 64n.200, 84, 165–66, 189, 191 Gifts (see also charisms) 12, 95, 125–32, 139, 165, 192

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Gregory of Nyssa 41, 44, 68, 107, 129 Hierarchy 4, 13, 128, 140, 157–58 History 8, 22–28, 30, 47, 58–60, 80, 83–85, 129, 165 Holy Spirit 21, 26–27, 32, 69, 79–85, 88–96, 99, 106, 127–28, 165–68, 192–95 Hypostasis 15, 17–18, 20–21, 62–64, 70, 93, 102–03, 110–11, 122, 161 Ignatius, Saint 126, 136, 142, 149–51, 155 Incarnation 19–21, 24, 63, 112, 114–15, 130 Irenaeus, Saint 30, 48, 54, 99, 135 Kant, Immanuel 6–7, 186, 188 Kasper, Walter, Cardinal 171–181 Liturgy 3, 11, 30, 32, 144n.33, 165, 183–84, 190–92 Lossky, Vladimir 27n.68 Louth, Andrew 44, 46, 68 Maximus, the Confessor, Saint 23–25, 30, 51, 58–60, 74, 112, 127–28, 139, 145, 192 Modalism 67, 80, 90, 93, 100 Monarchia, of the Father 4, 9–10, 81–82, 129 Mystery 34, 113, 166, 174–76, 181 Nature 22, 28, 31, 52–54, 57–58, 59–61, 102, 11–14, 121–22 Necessity 10, 16–20, 55, 57, 61, 63, 109–23 Offering 28, 84, 131, 151, 192 Office 12, 125–27, 130–31, 135–36, 139, 143, 168–69 Ontology 15–19, 22–26, 33, 44, 51–55, 60–61, 87, 89, 109, 183

Orthodoxy 23, 36–37, 67, 77, 125, 128, 135–36 Otherness 1, 9–10, 16–17, 58, 75, 102, 184 Participation 70, 77, 84, 111, 117, 119, 131, 184–85 Particular, particularity 26, 52–53, 97–98, 100–02, 117, 174–78, 184 Person, personhood 4–6, 8, 16–21, 33, 35, 41–45, 51, 56–57, 60–63, 67, 69, 81–85, 89, 97–106, 110–123, 134, 184–9 Pneumatology (see Holy Spirit) Pope 130, 175–77 Priest, presbyter 131, 141, 159–170 Ratzinger, Joseph, Cardinal 171–181 Reception 12n.12, 13, 184n.3, 189n.8 Resurrection 8, 11, 21, 74, 81 Sacrament 30, 102, 131, 133, 160, 170 Salvation 5, 15, 17–20, 22, 24–25, 27, 29–31, 34, 88, 104–05 Social trinitarianism 41, 43, 65–66 Son 69–86, 98, 162–66, 190–91, 194–95 Time 9, 14, 22, 24, 27, 194–95 Torrance, Alan 98 Trinity 80–86 Truth 8–10, 22–28, 30–32, 42, 46, 49, 53, 73–75, 81–85, 139 Turcescu, Lucian 37, 42, 44–45, 68 Volf, Miroslav 104n.35, 116–17, 153, 155–56 Ware, Kallistos, Bishop 36–7 Worship 32, 134, 149, 183–85, 189–91

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