I’d like to make three somewhat lengthy posts from Being With God (Notre Dame: 2006), Aristotle Papanikaolaou’s (AP) doctoral dissertation comparing the theologies of Orthodox theologians John Zizioulas and Vladimir Lossky. It’s a great book. My three posts are parts 2, 3, and 4 of a four part final chapter to the book. I removed the footnotes but all the emphases are original. I was very struck by (a) Zizioulas’s (and AP’s) emphasis upon personal freedom as constitutive of personhood (I’ve brought this up to D but he’s found problems with it. Do each of the trinitarian persons exercise a personal freedom with respect to the others? D thinks not; AP boldly say, “Yes.” I like AP’s answer); (b) Zizioulas’s philosophical argument for an ontology of personhood (and his emphasis upon relating theology to the existential needs of modern humankind); I generally agree that we are ‘driven’ to a personal identification that is free, unique, unrepeatable and permanent; (c) AP’s answer to Zizioulas’ problematic view on the monarchia of the Father; and (d) AP’s appropriation from Lossky of divine kenosis as constitutive of the divine trinitarian communion (and not JUST incarnation), though I think this should be developed so as not to suggest an essential ‘suffering’ constitutive of the triune relations. I don’t particularly buy into their views on the Eucharistic or their assumptions about time and space. But I don’t see anything in AP’s summary chapter that excludes our being non-divine persons-in-relation to God. In fact, there’s plenty which makes sense only if this IS the case.

I’ll post each part separately. You may want to cut and paste it separately so you can enlarge the font.

-------------------------

II ZIZIOULAS’S PHILSOPHICAL ARGUMENT FOR AN ONTOLOGY OF PERSONHOOD

A second difference, though more methodological than substantive, has to do with Zizioulas’s philosophical justification for an ontology of personhood. Zizioulas himself is adamant that ‘person’ as ekstasis and hypostasis is a strictly theological concept: “The Orthodox understanding of the Holy Trinity is the only way to arrive at this notion of personhood.” His writings, however, betray a philosophical argument for ‘person’ as the only means to fulfill a fundamental drive in human existence. This drive is one away from death toward life realized in communion with others. According to Zizioulas if such a drive is left unfulfilled, then non-existence defines the meaning of existence.

                This philosophical argument for the centrality of the concept of ‘person’ for human existence appears for the first time in his seminal article, “Human Capacity and Human Incapacity: A Theological Exploration of Personhood.” In arguing “for an approach other than the ‘substantive’ one to the human being,” which, of course, is the personal approach, Zizioulas outlines the constitutive elements of his theology of personhood which he develops throughout his career. Early in the article, after discussing the difference between substantial and personal understandings of the human being, Zizioulas illustrates “the greatness and tragedy of man’s personhood” through what he terms the “presence-in-absence paradox” inherent in all creaturely existence. The human being’s personhood and the tragedy of the presence-in-absence paradox are most evident, for Zizioulas, in the human capacity to create. For Zizioulas, to create as an individual is different from creating as a person. The former is a process of “seizing, controlling, and dominating reality.” Beings are turned into things, and insofar as such manufacturing is more often than not “a collective effort,” the human being turns him- or herself into a thing, “an instrument and a means to an end.” To create as a person is to imbue the created object with the uniqueness and irreducibility of the person. Zizioulas uses art as an example of such personal creativity, in which the artist “becomes ‘present’ as a unique and unrepeatable hypostasis of being and not as an impersonal number in a combined structure.” Reminiscent of Lossky’s reference to artists to illustrate the uniqueness of person, Zizioulas argues that “when we look at a painting or listen to music we have in front of us…a ‘presence’ in which ‘things’ and substances (cloth, oil, etc.) or qualities (shape, colour, etc.) or sounds become part of a personal presence.” Thus, a personal ‘presence’, which is one of uniqueness, irreducibility, freedom, is inherent in a work of art.

                If art is a manifestation of personal existence, it is also a revelation of the ‘tragedy’ inherent in creaturely existence. ‘Tragedy’ is an important concept for Zizioulas’s understanding of personhood, especially with regard to its philosophical justifications. Concerning our present discussions, the tragedy of all works of art consists in the fact that art itself manifests the absence of the artist as much as his or her presence. “If we take again our example from the world of art, the fundamental thing that we must observe with regard to the ‘presence’ it creates, is that the artist himself is absent.” Art is just an example of the “paradoxical fact” which plagues all creaturely existence, namely, “that the presence of being in and through the human person is ultimately revealed as an absence.” It must be remembered that Zizioulas is here speaking of a ‘presence’ that is personal. When a person is present, he or she is present as a unique, irreducible, free, relational being. ‘Pure presence’ is a personal existence without absence, i.e., an existence in which the marks of personal existence are immediate and permanent. This ‘pure presence’ is not possible so long as it is mediated or limited by the boundaries of the body.

                What ultimately constitutes this presence-in-absence paradox as tragic, for Zizioulas, is the fact that it indicates a fundamental drive for personal presence in created existence that is thwarted by the co-existence of absence.  “All this means that the ecstatic movement towards communion which is part of personhood, remains for man and unfulfilled longing for a presence-without-absence of being as long as there is no way of overcoming the space-time-limitations of creaturehood.” This “unfulfilled longing” is one for personal presence or personhood and it is on this ‘longing’ with Zizioulas bass his philosophical argumentation for the validity of an ontology of personhood. The longing for pure presence is, in effect, a desire to eradicate absence, and the definitive form of absence is death. Inherent in all creaturely existence is death and, consequently, all creaturely attempts for a personal presence without absence will always be reduced do the absence which is death. The important point here, however, is that Zizioulas isolates in human existence a fundamental ‘longing’ for personhood, for an existence that is free, unique, and unrepeatable. Such a longing is, in the end, a longing to escape death: “All this means that the overcoming of death represents a longing rooted in the personhood  of man.” Since death is inherent in all creaturely existence, “personal presence qua presence is something that cannot be extrapolated from created existence.” What Zizioulas means here is that the longing for personal existence can only be affirmed by uncreated existence. Personal existence, one which is both ekstatic and hypostatic , which attempts to transcend the boundaries and limitations of creaturely existence, namely death, through personal relations, becomes a reality only in a ekstatic and hypostatic movement and communion with the uncreated, with what does not die. It is only in communion with that which is not-created that created being can fulfill its longing for personal existence. Implicit here is a proof for God’s existence: “Personhood, understood in its terrifying ontological ultimacy to which I have tried to point in this Paper, leads to God—or to non-existence.” Either there is a God who fulfills this ‘longing’ for personhood and gives meaning to life; or there is death which envelops all existence, and the only way to affirm one’s personhood, one’s freedom from the given, is to commit suicide, which, however, negates the very freedom one seeks in committing the act. For Zizioulas such meaninglessness is not an option, which leads him to conclude that this fundamental ‘longing’ “reveals that there is a future, an eschaton or a telos, a final goal in creation, which must resolve the problem created by personhood.”

                Zizioulas never speaks to this ‘presence-in-absence’ paradox in his later work, though the basic thrust of this philosophical argument for personhood as the fundamental longing of all human existence remains intact. In the first chapter of Being as Communion, Zizioulas describes what he terms “the hypostasis of biological existence.” This existence “suffers radically from two ‘passions’ that destroy precisely that towards which the human hypostasis is thrusting, namely the person.” The first passion Zizioulas calls ‘ontological necessity’, and consists of the inevitable link between the hypostasis and natural instinct. The second passion is that of “individualism,of the separation of the hypostases.” Both passions as well as the drive to personhood are intertwined in erotic love, which conceals “the deepest act of communion a tendency towards an ecstatic transcendence of individuality through creation.” This new creation, a human being, bears both the marks of personhood and of individuality: “He is born as a result of an ecstatic fact—erotic love—but this fact is interwoven with a natural necessity and therefore lacks ontological freedom. He is born as a hypostatic fact, as a body, but this fact is interwoven with individuality and with death.” Zizioulas’s focus has shifted from the creation of an artist to that of an erotic couple. There is no mention of the presence-in-absence paradox, but the drive toward personhood manifested in the creative act of erotic communion indicates both the capacity for personhood and the inability to fulfill such a longing.” “All this means that man as a biological hypostasis is intrinsically a tragic figure.” Human existence in its longing for personhood, expressed in the act of communion, manifests aspects or degrees of personhood, but such a longing is inherently tragic since it confronts death, which negates all uniqueness. It is not simply either personhood or individuality, but that within the horizon of created, finite existence, all human longing for communion can only lead, in the end, to individuality, as Zizioulas defines it, because of death. Zizioulas is simply arguing that given the limits of finitude the only way that such a drive can be fulfilled in through an eternal relationship of freedom and love with God.

                In his “On Being a Person. Towards an Ontology of Personhood,” Zizioulas explores how the personal and the particular can have ontological import. He analyzes the question “Who am I” from an ontological perspective, indicating that “‘Who’ is a call for definition or ‘description’ of some kind…. The ingredient ‘am’ or to be…is a cry for security, for ground to be based on, for fixity…. The ingredient ‘I’ or ‘Your’ or ‘He/She’…is a cry for particularity, for otherness.” In this basic question is the cry, for Zizioulas, for ‘particularity’ and ‘otherness’ to be permanent or to be grounded ontologically. In characteristic fashion, Zizioulas then argues how an ontology based on substantial categories is inadequate to secure the permanence of otherness. Zizioulas explains that “the inability of Greek thought to create a personal ontology is not due to a weakness or incapacity of Greek philosophy as philosophy….Otherness cannot acquire ontological primacy as long as one begins with the world as it is, as did the ancient Greeks and all philosophy does, if it wishes to be pure philosophy. The observation of the world cannot lead to an ontology of the person, because the person as an ontological category cannot be extrapolated from experience.” Elsewhere Zizioulas explains that “the ekstasies of beings towards humanity or towards creation alone leads to ‘being-into-death’.” Zizioulas reiterates here what we saw in his earlier work, namely, that an ontology of personhood and the particular needs a beyond, an uncreated realm, since creation itself in inherently ridden with death. The particular is not ontologically absolute if it dies.

                Besides the necessity of a beyond, Zizioulas posits other presuppositions for an ontology of personhood and the particular. The first of these is that “in order to give to the particular an ontological ultimacy or priority it is necessary to presuppose that being is caused and cannot be posited as an axiomatic of self-explicable principle.” The second is related to the first, in that the cause of being must be a person. These two presuppositions are required for Zizioulas for the simple reason that freedom is inherent in an ontology of personhood. By definition, a person for Zizioulas is a free, i.e., ekstatic being.  This personal existence itself must be a result of freedom and not necessity. Personal existence itself is freely constituted only if it is caused by another free being, i.e., a person. If human persons exist as a result of a person, then their personal existence depends on the continuing relationship with this person. Such a relationship is not possible, however, with the first or any human being since death destroys the permanency of any human relationships. “In God it is possible for the particular to be ontologically ultimate because relationship is permanent and unbreakable,” otherwise put, “the conditions that we have set out for this ontology of personhood exist only in God.” It is within God’s life that the ontology of the particular is affirmed, and personal existence on the level of created existence is affirmed only through communion with this divine life, i.e., only through a relationship that is “permanent and unbreakable.” As we saw above, such a relationship occurs through a union with Christ.

                Before concluding, it is necessary to ask Zizioulas why an examination of the presuppositions of an ontology is important or even necessary? If an ontology of personhood is given in the eucharistic communion with the triune God, why attempt to examine the question of personhood from the reverse direction, i.e., from an observation of the human condition? Zizioulas provides an answer in “On Being a Person”:

The ontology of personhood with all the conditions we have just outlined cannot be extrapolated from history or nature. If it exists and is not wishful thinking on man’s part, it is the only ‘analogy’ or proof we have that God exists. If it does not exist, then our faith in God is untrue. Ontology in this situation is not application to personhood. We are left with a drive towards personal identity, which will never be fulfilled. Even so, it is worth keeping it at all costs. For without it Man ceases to be human.

Zizioulas offers a sort of phenomenological argument in identifying a fundamental fact of human existence, which requires a particular understanding of God, if human existence is to have any meaning at all. All this raises the question of the relation between philosophy and theology in Zizioulas’s thought.

                Zizioulas is adamant that the concept of person is itself a theological concept that emerges only through the eucharistic communion with the triune God. One wonders, however, along with Alan J. Torrance, “whether a foundational (ist) ontology of personhood together with attendant notions of personal freedom, creativity and, in particular, causality do not threaten to become the driving force (or ‘critical control’) in his exposition of the doctrine of God…There remains…the suspicion that his exposition of the Trinity is, perhaps, over-conditioned at points by a ‘personalist’ ontology.” Certainly in intent, one must give the benefit of the doubt to Zizioulas, who absolutely rejects the possibility of a non-theological personalist ontology. He argues that “the meaning of person is not borrowed from philosophy…but philosophy is able, if it wishes, to borrow this meaning from theology.” Zizioulas elsewhere amplifies this statement through a series of rhetorical questions:

Is a philosophical justification of patristic theology possible? Or does patristic theology in its essence constitute the converse, that is, a theological justification of philosophy, a proclamation that philosophy and the world can acquire a true ontology only if they accept the presupposition of God as the only existent whose being is truly identified with the person and with freedom?

                The answer for Zizioulas is clearly yes, and it helps explain more clearly such statements as “the person as an ontological category cannot be extrapolated from experience.” Philosophy can identify the fundamental drive to personhood, but only theologically can such an implicit ontology be validated. Such a personal ontology requires not simply any God, but the trinitarian God who is experienced within the eucharistic communion. Specifically, it requires a God whose own existence is personal, i.e., a result of freedom. These conditions are achieved for Zizioulas in the monarchy of the Father, and it is this latter principle, more than any other that confirms for Zizioulas that the notion of person is a strictly theological and not philosophical concept. What gives Torrance’s suspicion some validity, however, is when Zizioulas claims that,

Theology must seek ways of relating the Gospel to the existential needs of the world and to whatever is human. Instead of throwing the Bible or the dogmas of the Church into the face of the world, it would be best to seek first to feel and understand what every human being longs for deep in their being, and then see how the Gospel and doctrine can make sense of that longing.”

This statement places Zizioulas further from Barth and closer to Tillich, in that, for Zizioulas, theological knowledge must be correlated to the existential needs of the human condition. Thus, it is justifiable to wonder whether a particular philosophy is shaping Zizioulas’s theology. Given, however, that Zizioulas’s early work is strictly theological, for the most part ecclesiological, it is more likely that Zizioulas developed his theology of person within a theological framework. The explicitly theological character of his notion of personhood is especially clear in Zizioulas’s understanding of personal freedom.

Post Edited (Tom) : 4/14/2008 1:07:28 AM (GMT-5)

III THE PROBLEM OF ‘FREEDOM’ IN ZIZIOULAS’S THOUGHT

Alan Torrance offers a more substantial critique, not unrelated to that already discussed, in which he argues that Zizioulas’s understanding of the monarchy threatens the doctrine of the Trinity. For Torrance, this insistence on the monarchy of the Father indicates that underlying Zizoulas’s trinitarian theology is an a priori ontology of communion. It heightens his suspicion of whether a foundationalist ontology of personhood together threatens to become the driving force in his expositions of the doctrine of God. This foundational ontology drives Zizioulas, according to Torrance, toward endorsing uncritically “the Cappadocian projection of causal notions into the internal life of God.” According to Torrance, however, introducing such causal notions into the life of God is “potentially damaging to his [Zizioulas’s] identification of being and communion.” It violates the Anselmian axiom for divinity in that it suggests that the Son, as well as the Spirit, is that “than which something greater can be conceived.” As a result, Torrance suggests that Zizioulas subordinates the Son and the Spirit to the Father.

                Torrance further questions Zizioulas’s consistency when the latter claims that God as Trinity is the primordial reality. With the Father as causal principle of divine existence, Torrance asks rhetorically, “does the exclusively primordial reality not actually become the person of the Father?” Torrance’s point is that causality within the divine life threatens the very thing Zizioulas wishes to defend, a trinitarian communion. This communion is affirmed only when the intra-divine communion “is not only a primordial concept but an eternal ‘given’, that is ontologically primitive and original.” Torrance is aware of Zizioulas’s rejection of the “‘structure of communion existing by itself’” as the ultimate ontological category. He adds that

Given that what is being referred to is not some contingent existent or mere ‘structure’ conceived as ‘existing by itself’, but nothing less than God, it seems to us that he fails to offer sufficiently compelling arguments as to why it should be of ‘incalculable importance’ that we do not conceive of the intra-divine communion of the Triunity as the ground of all that is, that is, as sufficient in itself and as indeed ‘capable’ of existing by itself.

But as we have already seen, Zizioulas does give both theological and existential reasons for rejecting Torrance’s suggestion.

                The answer to Torrance’s query about why Zizioulas does not “conceive of the intra-divine communion of the Triunity as the ground of all that is” is, quite simply, Zizioulas’s rejection of linking the divine life to any form of necessity. For Zizioulas, the price for making the intra-divine communion the primordial concept is the negation of absolute freedom. God’s existence is not absolutely free if it is necessarily one of intra-divine communion. Linking the unity of God with the Father as the causal principle of divine life constitutes divine existence as a reality resulting from freedom and not necessity. It is ironic that Torrance himself argues for the intra-divine communion as an “eternal ‘given’,” since the ‘given’ is that which defines absolute freedom for Zizioulas. Freedom, according to Zizioulas, is precisely freedom from the given. ‘Givenness’ is what constitutes “the greatest provocation to freedom.” Existential reasons constitute the importance of absolute freedom in God’s life, in that if God’s life is not free from any ‘given’, then creation cannot free itself from the givens inherent in created nature, the ultimate given being death. God cannot give what God does not have, and without the possibility of this freedom then there is no possibility for personhood, or more importantly, for salvation. Perhaps one can accuse Zizioulas here of allowing an a priori ontology of communion to define salvation and with Torrance ask how does “this causal series of chain of contingency in God integrate with the eucharistic experience that Zizioulas perceives as the context of trinitarian articulation?” But it is precisely in this eucharistic communion that creation experiences this freedom from the ultimate ‘given’ that is death. It experiences this reality only in mirroring the divine life, in the image of this divine life, through communion with the trinitarian life. It receives what God has by being united to the ‘person’ of Christ, and in this union lives eternally as a son or daughter of God, i.e., as an ecstatic and hypostatic person.

                If the above criticism by Torrance seems misplaced, he does set forth another which, in our estimation, is not sufficiently addressed by Zizioulas. This criticism is addressed in the form of a rhetorical question: “is the freedom of the Father to be conceived as qualitatively distinct from that of the Son and the Spirit?” Torrance further asks, “Does the ontological freedom of the arche vis-à-vis the hypostases of the Son and the Spirit parallel the cosmological freedom of the Father vis-à-vis the created order as a whole?” Torrance point is that if creation results from a freedom from the given, then how is freedom inherent in the act of creation different from that of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit? Though the Son and the Spirit may be eternal, their relationship to the Father, who alone constitutes existence, divine and created, through a freedom from the given, appears to be parallel to that which exists between creation and the Father. Zizioulas would, of course, counter that the only way the Son’s and the Spirit’s life could parallel created existence is by introducing notions of time and space within divine existence, which, for Zizioulas, is prima facie absurd. He would add against his critics of divine causality that the very notion of divine causality liberates the latter from the constraints of time and space. The only way the divine causality could imply subordination of the other persons, as Torrance suggests, is if one continues to link causality with time and space. The cause does not produce an effect that is distinct from the cause in terms of time and space. In the divine causality of the triune life, cause and personhood are a simultaneous event and subordination arises only if one links this causality with the conditions of time and space.

                Analytically, however, Zizioulas cannot escape the fact that if the Father “perpetually confirms through ‘being’ His free will to exist,” or put another way, if “the Father out of love—that is freely—begets the Son and brings forth the Spirit,” then the Father has a type of freedom which the Son and the Spirit do not possess. The Son and the Spirit do not possess the freedom to constitute their existence as communion. They may possess the freedom to confirm this existence of communion, but not to constitute it in the way that the Father as the exclusive causal principle is able. If freedom is defined by the person of the Father as freedom from the given, then freedom which the Son and the Spirit possess is qualitatively different, since they are faced eternally with the given of the Father. If freedom from the given is the mark of true personhood, then the Son and the Spirit are not persons in the true sense. The causality of the Father is so crucial to Zizioulas in defining existence as person, as one of freedom and love, yet it alone cannot guarantee such an existence for the divine being. In short, it cannot secure a true trinitarian being.

                If Zizioulas’s understanding of the monarchia of the Father tends toward a subordinationist understanding of the Trinity, the solution is not necessarily to eliminate causal notions in the divine life and affirm the Trinity as a “structure of communion existing by itself” or to locate the divine union in the divine ousia, as the Torrances have suggested. Such solutions continue to link God’s triune existence with necessity, which Zizioulas rejects for both theological and existential reasons. I will argue below that causality within the divine life, while being able to preserve the notion of absolute freedom within the Trinity, does not necessarily lead to subordinationism, especially if this notion of divine causality is extended to all the trinitarian persons. I will also suggest that Lossky’s notion of kenosis could also help resolve the tension between freedom and subordinationism in Zizioulas’s understanding of the Trinity.

                Concerning the problem of freedom within the divine existence, if the Son and the Spirit are to be on an equal footing with the Father in terms of freedom, then they must ‘cause’ the Father’s existence as much as the Father is the cause of their existence. In a certain sense, Zizioulas is already affirming this very principle through the notion of ‘communion’ or koinonia, and ‘relation’ or schesis. As we have seen, Zizioulas affirms that communion and otherness are mutually constitutive. Based on his argument for the necessity of theological ontology, this mutually constitutive relationship between communion and otherness means for the Trinity that the Son causes the Father and the Spirit to be; that the Spirit causes the Father and the Son to be; as much as the Father causes the Son and the Spirit to be. The identity of each person is dependent upon the other persons. On the level of freedom, each person being the cause of the existence of the other persons means that each person freely confirms their free will to exist in communion with other persons, and by so doing, causes the existence of the other as person.

                Zizioulas argues that introducing the notion of cause within the divine existence is the only way for God’s existence to be a result of freedom, but in order for this freedom not to be possessed by only one person, each persons must somehow be a causal agent within the divine life. By extending the notion of causality to the three persons, the act of freedom to affirm God’s existence as trinitarian is one attributable to all three persons rather than simply one person. The existence of each of the trinitarian persons is an act of freedom insofar as each affirms their being-in-relation to the other. If the Father’s being-in-relation to the Son is an act of freedom, this means that Father both causes the Son to exist as Son, since the Son exists as Son only in relation to the Father. But the Son is Son only through an act of freedom of being-in-relation to the Father. Put another way, a person is a person only through an act of freedom of being-in-relation. If this being-in-relation is reciprocal, one both causes the existence of the other, is caused by the other, but also causes oneself insofar as one exists as person through the act of freedom of being-in-relation. Causation in relation to creation, though an act of freedom, is distinct from causation within the divine life. In relation to creation, that creation exists is a result of the will of God. In the divine life, it is not a question of whether God exists since God is an eternal reality; it is rather a question of how God exists. In trinitarian theology, the question arises whether one can extend the notion of causality to the other persons of the trinity and maintain the Father as source (pege). I would argue that though the Father as source introduces other problems into the doctrine of the Trinity, it does not necessarily lead to subordinationism if all the trinitarian persons cause, i.e., through an act of freedom, perpetually affirm God’s existence as Trinity.

                Within the divine life, the notion of causality itself is reconceptualized in that causality is freed from space-time limitations. [Tom: I'm not sure atemporal causality is a meaningful notion. I know Jeff wouldn't think so!] Causality within divine existence does not lead to separation and division that inevitably results within the limits of space and time; divine causality results in distinctions in communion, and eternal event of love and freedom. One might raise the objection that such an understanding of the Trinity is no different than three Zeus’s who decide to live in loving communion together. It is not this, however, in that it is the God who is revealed in the eucharistic communion, and such a God is one that reveals God’s being truly, not falsely. The theological knowledge of the Trinity is rooted in the experience of such a God, who freely affirms divine existence as communion and love. To say that each of the divine persons necessarily relates to the other in communion and love is equally as absurd. A necessary communion is not one based on love. Zizioulas is right to point out the necessary link between love and freedom. If God’s existence is love then it must result from freedom. Each of the persons as cause of the other persons, and hence, of the divine communal existence, gives to each person the same type of freedom. This free and loving confirmation of the divine existence is itself eternal, but to say that it is eternal does not mean that it is ‘given’ or necessary.

                The Losskian notion of kenosis can also strengthen Zizioulas’s theology of person here, especially with regard to the problem of freedom. Kenosis, which literally means emptying but also conveys the sense of denial, is relevant for Zizioulas on the level of anthropology. He rarely refers to kenosis except to convey the necessity of human self-denial for authentic personhood. The image of God, i.e., personhood, is possible only through incorporation into Christ, which “implies the following… Communion with the other requires the experience of the cross.” Zizioulas amplifies that “since the Son of God, moved to meet the other, his creation—by emptying himself through the kenosis of the incarnation—the ‘kenotic’ way is the only way that befits the Christian in his or her communion with the other—be it God or the neighbor.” Zizioulas adds that “in this ‘kenotic’ approach to the other…the other is not to be identified by his or her qualities, but by the sheer fact that he or she is, and is himself or herself.” Thus, for Zizioulas, the incarnation itself is a revelation that true personhood in communion with the other is an event of the cross, a kenotic act of self-emptying for communion with the other.

                Kenosis is an important category for Lossky’s system. He speaks of the kenosis of the Son and the Holy Spirit, whereby kenosis and oikonomia are understood synonymously. I will focus on the implication of Lossky’s claim that kenosis is an eternal aspect of divine personhood. Thus, Lossky can affirm without hesitation that “There is therefore a profound continuity between the personal being of the Son as renunciation and His earthly kenosis.” Making kenosis a constitutive aspect of divine personhood in a way that Lossky implies but does not fully affirm would, I propose, strengthen Zizioulas’s theology of personhood. First, Zizioulas has the conceptual apparatus to affirm a kenotic divine personhood, because his identification of the tropos hyparxeos of trinitarian existence allows for reflection on the immanent Trinity based on the economic activity. If what is revealed in the economy is the mode of existence of the trinitarian persons, then the Son, by his incarnation and passion, reveals that such a mode of existence is kenotic. The notion of kenosis would also allow Zizioulas to incorporate the Cross into his trinitarian theology, without necessarily linking suffering to God. Consistent with his relating kenosis with communion kenosis becomes an act of freedom and reception: the kenotic person, both divine and human, is free from oneself in order to receive the other. Such a notion of kenosis is consistent with Chalcedonian Christology, in which the divine person Christ is free to receive the utterly other, created being and death.

                It would also obviate the problems with divine freedom created by the monarchia of the Father. Personal freedom is no longer defined simply by the Father affirming his free will to exist, but becomes a matter both of ekstatic movement and reception. Each of the divine persons as persons freely receives the ekstasic movement toward their person. Thus, as ekstatic movement is not complete without reception, which itself is a kenotic act. The Trinity is an existence of ekstatic movement and kenotic reception. Personal freedom is defined in terms of both and forms a constitutive part of each person of the Trinity, as they move toward and receive the other.

                In summary, though Zizioulas’s theology of person is more coherent than Lossky’s, his insistence on the monarchia of the Father creates inconsistencies that an expansion of causality into all three persons and a Losskian understanding of divine kenosis would obviate. But Torrance’s critique of Zizioulas raises another, implicit question other than the consistency of Zizioulas’s trinitarian theology. It is a question that can be posed to both Zizioulas and Lossky and it has to do with the extent to which their theologies of personhood, strikingly similar in many respects, are influenced by contemporary philosophies of personalism. But this question implies a further question about the identity of a contemporary Orthodox theologian and her relation to the Greek patristic tradition. What are the criteria for judging the adequacy of patristic retrieval of contemporary Orthodox theology? In this sense, what is contemporary Orthodox theology? Patristic retrieval or patristic fundamentalism? If the former, how is one to relate the patristic texts to contemporary questions and modes of thought?

Post Edited (Tom) : 4/14/2008 1:18:22 AM (GMT-5)

IV ‘PERSON’, PATRISTIC INTERPRETATION, AND THE HERMENEUTICS OF RETRIEVAL

It is beyond the scope of this study to offer a thorough assessment of Lossky’s and Zizioulas’s interpretations of each of the Eastern patristic writers they reference. Both theologians have been critiqued for their readings of the patristic traditions, both Eastern and Western. Their attempts at constructing a history of Eastern patristic thought does, however, raise important hermeneutical questions for theology, some of which I will attempt to address.

                First, the very notion of ‘trajectory’ in historical studies itself raises many red flags. It conjures up memories of attempts to locate the ‘essence’ of Christianity, the only difference being that both Lossky and Zizioulas are attempting to isolate two kinds of essences: a kind of Christianity which intellectualized theology and a kind rooted in the principle of the realism of divine-human communion. These histories that attempt to isolate trajectories or essences attempt to clarify that which defies complete clarification. They are often too simplistic and texts are often interpreted in such a way as to be forced into particular trajectories. For example, in the case of Lossky and Zizioulas, it is debatable whether Origen was primarily influenced by Greek philosophy. He could no more escape the intellectual environment surrounding him than could Lossky and Zizioulas in the twentieth century, but this does not necessarily translate into Hellenization of Christianity. Others have also disputed the charge that the principle of divine-human communion is not at the center of the theologies of Augustine and Aquinas. It would be more helpful to see the theologies of Augustine and Aquinas as particular attempts to think through the principle of divine-human communion in a specific context and faced with particular challenges, such that their theologies are contributions to the broader Christian attempt to express an understanding of the transcendent God who is radically immanent in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit.

                For all their problems, the historical constructions of Lossky and Zizioulas are not with their merit. A simple perusal of the Eastern patristic writings of Ignatius, Irenaeus, Athanasius, the Cappadocian fathers, Dionysius, Maximus, John of Damascus, and Gregory Palamas would reveal that the notion of divine-human communion is central to their theologies. Apophaticism, essence/energies distinction, understandings of the eucharist are all related to this principle of divine-human communion. Both have succeeded in highlighting important strands of the tradition. In doing so, they have also shown how a shared premise, i.e., the realism of divine-human communion, does not necessarily lead to conclusions that are mutually consistent or compatible with each other. The challenge for a theology that takes the realism of divine-human communion seriously would be to bring together the apophaticism of Lossky, with its emphasis on the mystical, ascetical components of the Christian tradition, with Zizioulas’s concern for ontology and personhood, with its emphasis on the communal and liturgical strands within the tradition.

                A final hermeneutical question implied in the patristic interpretations of Lossky and Zizioulas concerns the hermeneutics of retrieval and the issue of a twentieth-century theologian attempting to retrieve the thought of patristic writers from the first through the fifteenth centuries. Lossky and Zizioulas have often been accused of being influenced by one form or another of modern personalism or existentialism. More specifically, the general critique claims that their theologies of ‘person’ have more to do with modern notions of ‘person’ rather than patristic thought.

                The most recent and sharpest expression of this critique is given by Lucian Turcescu. Since Lossky and Zizioulas agree on essential features of the theological notion of person grounded in trinitarian theology, much of what Turcescu says of Zizioulas could be applied to Lossky. Turcescu’s critique rests on the distinction made my Zizioulas, together with Lossky, between the individual and the person. He summarizes Zizioulas’s own understanding of the notion of the “individual” as, first, a complex of qualities that cannot ensure uniqueness. Second, an individual is an entity that can be enumerated whereas the uniqueness and sacredness of the person defies such enumeration. Third, Western theology and philosophy wrongly define ‘person’ as ‘individual’ and such an identification has its roots in Augustine and Boethius. Zizioulas further claims, according to Turcescu, that this understanding of ‘person’ as ‘individual’ is absent in the Cappadocian fathers. Turcescu then attempts to show that Gregory of Nyssa does in fact speak of ‘person’ in terms that Zizioulas associates with the concept of ‘individual’. By so doing, he hopes to show that Zizioulas’s relational understanding of ‘person’ cannot be attributed to the Cappadocian fathers.

                Turcescu proceeds to provide citations from the works of Gregory of Nyssa as supporting evidence in his attempt to illustrate that “the understanding of a person as a collection, congress or complex of properties is found in the Cappadocian texts when the Fathers try to explain what a person is,” and that “the concept of enumeration of individuals (that is, the individuals being subject to addition and combination) was an important feature of the concept of person. He further argues that the distinction between individual and person was one not made at the time of the Cappadocians and that the terms were used interchangeably. In fact, “[t]heirs was a time when the notion of individual/person was only emerging.” The thrust of Turcescu’s argument can be paraphrased as follows: by looking primarily at the work of Gregory of Nyssa, it can be shown that the Cappadocian fathers do in fact identify person with individual as Zizioulas defines the latter and, therefore, there is no such thing as a relational ontology of person in the trinitarian theology of the Cappadocian fathers.

                Though Turcescu may, in the end, be correct that a relational ontology of trinitarian personhood does not exist in the Cappadocian fathers, this particular article does not by itself discredit Zizioulas’s (or Lossky’s) interpretation. First, Turcescu grounds his critique primarily in an interpretation of passages by Gregory of Nyssa. Of all the Cappadocian fathers, however, Zizioulas’s development of his relational ontology of trinitarian personhood relies least on the thought of Gregory of Nyssa. Put another way, if one were to eliminate the references to Gregory of Nyssa in the works where Zizioulas most develops his relational ontology of trinitarian personhood, there would be little, if any, substantial change. This focus on Gregory of Nyssa is understandable given the fact that the volume in which the essay appeared was devoted to “rethinking” Gregory of Nyssa. But it does not warrant the general claim that a relational ontology of trinitarian personhood cannot be found within the thought of the Cappadocian fathers or in the Eastern patristic tradition. It also does not sufficiently address Zizioulas’s interpretation of other patristic writers upon which he bases his claim about the link between a relational ontology and the doctrine of the Trinity.

                The Cappadocian father that is never mentioned by Turcescu is arguably the one whose thought is most significant for Zizioulas’s claims about a relational ontology of trinitarian personhood: Gregory of Nazianzus. Zizioulas cites the Cappadocian father as support for the Cappadocian understanding of the monarchia of the Father. As we have seen, if there is an ontology that is personal and relational, in which person has ontological priority over substance, it is because of the monarchy of the Father, which means that God

as Father and not as substance, perpetually confirms through ‘being’ His free will to exist. And it is precisely His trinitarian existence that constitutes this confirmation: the Father out of love—that is, freely—begets the Son and brings forth the Spirit. Thus God as person—as the hypostasis of the Father—makes the one divine substance to be that which it is: the one God….Outside the Trinity there is not God, that is, no divine substance, because the ontological ‘principle’ of God is the Father.

It is clear that for Zizioulas, the Cappadocian distinction between ousia and hypostasis, the linking together of hypostasis and prosopon with the result of giving “ontological content” to the category of the prosopon, the distinction between essence and tropos hyparxeos, or “mode of existence,” express a personal, relational ontology insofar as their meaning is grounded in the principle of the monarchy of the Father. Without the monarchy of the Father, according to Zizioulas, there is no such ontology.

                Even a “primordial” communion between the trinitarian persons is not enough to affirm a relational ontology since this communion itself is one of necessity and not freedom. A relational ontology of trinitarian personhood means, for Zizioulas, that freedom is at the heart of ontology insofar as “being” means to be free from the “given.” For created existence, this means to be free from finitude and death that are inherent to created existence. To be is to exist in an eternal relationship with the loving God and only through such a relationship is created existence ‘free’ to be eternally in loving union with this God. But in order for God to give this freedom from the ‘given’, God’s mode of existence, tropos hyparxeos, must itself be free from necessity, so argues Zizioulas, and must be freely constituted. This freedom within God’s very being is the condition for the possibility of the freedom of created existence from the ‘given’ of its own nature, and this freedom within God’s being can only be affirmed, avers Zizioulas, through the principle of the monarchy of the Father.

                Turcescu’s reading of Zizioulas’s understanding of the relation between individual, person, and uniqueness is also in need of greater nuancing. It is not so much that Zizioulas does not think that a complex of qualities embodied within a particular human being actually contributes to personal uniqueness. It is the case, however, that such a complex of qualities does not guarantee such uniqueness. For Zizioulas, uniqueness is identified with ‘irreplaceability’. A particular embodiment of a combination of qualities, which results from the “division of nature” in creation, does contribute to uniqueness but not as irreplaceability. Death ultimately renders all created human being as replaceable, destroying a particular, embodied set of qualities, only to be reconstituted again, perhaps in the same way, in a newly created human being who tends toward death. Personal uniqueness can only be guaranteed, according to Zizioulas, in relationship to a being ‘other’ than created existence, i.e., to the eternally loving God who alone can constitute all human uniqueness as irreplaceable.

                Even with the notion of the monarchy of the Father, is Zizioulas’s (and Lossky’s) thought irretrievably “tainted” by modern thought so as to render it non-patristic? Several things must be said in response to this question. First, for both Lossky and Zizioulas, the core of theological discourse is an ontology of divine-human communion. For Zizioulas, in particular, the monarchy of the Father and, hence, a relational ontology of trinitarian personhood, is rooted in the experience of God in the eucharist understood as the event of the Body of Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Notwithstanding the charge of influence by modern personalism, Zizioulas and Lossky self-consciously are attempting to given expression to this core of theology, which is the realism of divine-human communion. For Zizioulas, the “ontological revolution” is not so much the change in the meaning of the words “person” and “hypostasis,” but in the Christian affirmation that God in the person of Christ has “become history” and , hence, the need to articulate an ontology in which the notions of history, time, change, particularity, otherness, relationality are integrated. In the end, for Zizioulas, this can only be done through the Christian doctrine of the Trinity that affirms the monarchy of the Father.

                    Second, Lossky and Zizioulas do not hide the fact that they are attempting to relate traditional Christian dogma to contemporary questions and concerns. Zizioulas himself is quite explicity when he says that the true task of theology is to “seek ways of relating the Gospel to the existential needs of the world and to whatever is human. Instead of throwing the Bible or the dogmas of the Church into the face of the world, it would be best to seek first to feel and understand what every human being longs for deep in their being, and then see how the Gospel and doctrine can make sense to that longing.” Regarding the specific charge of being influenced by “modern personalism” Lossky himself in The Mystical Theology admitted as such that hypostasis means “person in the modern sense of the world,” while also affirming that person is a Christian theological notion. There is no need, as Turcescu does, “to suggest” possible influences that Martin Buber and John Macmurray are the most substantial influences. But Zizioulas does not appear to hide the fact that both Buber and Macmurray have influenced his thought. Turcescu himself cites Zizioulas’s reference to Buber. Zizioulas has also cited Macmurray. He even givens credit to Pannenberg for helping him to articulate thoughts concerning personhood that he was “struggling to express.”

                Criticisms of Lossky and Zizioulas being under the influence of “modern personalism” do not given the theologians enough credit of being aware of these various philosophies, nor to their attempt to define their own theologies of personhood over and against the prevailing philosophical understandings. Both Lossky and Zizioulas argue that only a theological notion of “person” can ground the various insights or aspects of contemporary philosophical understandings of personhood. In an article written only three years after The Mystical Theology, Lossky qualified his earlier reference to “person in the modern sense of the word,” by arguing that “we should resolutely renounced the sense of the word ‘person’ which belongs to sociology and to most philosophers. We should go to seek our norm or ‘canon’ of thinking in a higher region, in the idea of person or hypostasis as it is found in trinitarian theology.” Even if there are similarities, Lossky is at least attempting to differentiate the theological notion of person grounded in the Trinity from what he knows to be the prevailing sociological and philosophical notions.

                In “The Being of God and the Being of Anthropos,” Zizioulas responds to this very charge by the Greek theologians John Panagopoulos and Savas Agourides; namely, that his understanding of personhood is influenced by modern personalism and existentialism. Here Zizioulas identifies distinct kinds of philosophical personalism of various thinkers such as J. Maritain, E. Mournier, N. Berdeyayev, M. Buber, G. Marcel, as well as the existentialism of S. Kierkegaard. According to Zizioulas, these modern forms of personalism and existentialism, though he recognizes similarities, differ from his understanding of person through either defining the person in terms of consciousness or subjectivity and not in terms of relations; or in giving the notion of communion an ontological priority over ‘person’. Zizioulas then lists four ways in which his understanding of ‘person’ differs from these philosophical approaches. Of the four, Zizioulas refers to the patristic understanding of the monarchy of the Father as providing the most decisive difference between the trinitarian understanding of the person and modern, philosophical accounts, which “precludes any philosophical-personalistic interpretation of God.” In establishing the meaning of trinitarian personhood, “the truth is rather than philosophy is used in this situation, in order to disclose a new meaning of person, which appears in front of us, when the ‘in what way’ of God’s existence is revealed in Christ.” In the end, it is not a philosophy that justifies or influences the theological, trinitarian understanding of personhood, but rather only a trinitarian theology that affirms the monarchy of the Father that can ground and justify the philosophical notions of person in terms of freedom, uniqueness, and relationality.

                There is, thus, no reason to suggest possible influences on the thought of Zizioulas, since Zizioulas himself admits a knowledge of modern forms of personalism, and that some thinkers such as Martin Buber have actually influenced his understanding of the person. But Zizioulas also attempts to show how the trinitarian understanding of personhood differs from these forms of modern personalism. He and Lossky are no more superimposing a philosophical system on the Eastern patristic writers than did these writers Hellenize the teachings of Jesus. Their attempt to give further expression to the realism of divine-human communion through twentieth-century notions of person is analogous to the patristic co-opting of Greek philosophical categories to express the same principle. They are doing exactly what these writers did insofar as thinking about the authoritative texts of the tradition in light of the questions, challenges, and prevailing philosophical currents of their time. The alternative is either the hermeneutically impossible bracketing of all that the interpreter has read and experienced as they approach the patristic texts in the hope of distilling the pure ‘essence’ of the text itself, or to judge contemporary Orthodox theology as authentic based on its faithful reiteration of patristic texts. The latter, however, is not consistent with the approach of the patristic writers themselves, who did more than simply reiterate their predecessors.

                Zizioulas and Lossky are consistent with the Eastern patristic writers in the most substantial way insofar as they affirm as the core of the theological discourse the realism of divine-human communion. Zizioulas claims that a personal ontology is the most adequate way to express the realism of divine-human communion. The real issue, then, is not whether they have been influenced by modern personalism, but whether a trinitarian theology that affirms the monarchy of the Father is the only way to ground a personal ontology, and whether such an ontology does correct and justify the various modern, philosophical understandings of personhood. If the core of Christian faith is communion with God the Father, in the person of Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, it is difficult to think how such a communion does not imply an ontology that is relational and personal.

Post Edited (Tom) : 4/13/2008 5:25:10 AM (GMT-5)

Jeff-

I debated typing out the first part of that final chapter and decided against it. It's a bit longer. So what I posted here are parts 2, 3, and 4 of that chapter. But part 1 is Person as Ekstasis and Hypostasis. I'll go ahead and type it up. Actually it's pretty good.

Tom

Jeff-

Not sure I’ll have the time to type out the first portion of Papanikolaou’s final chapter, but here’s another brief bit by Zizioulas on ‘person’.

---------------------------------

Personhood
Theology and Church life involve a certain conception of the human being: personhood. This term, sanctified through its use in connection with the very being of God and of Christ, is rich in its implications.

The Person is otherness in communion and communion in otherness. The Person is an identity that emerges through relationship (schesis, in the terminology of the Fathers); it is an "I" that can exist only as long as it relates to a "Thou" which affirms its existence and its otherness. If we isolate the "I" from the "Thou," we lose not only its otherness but also its very being; it simply cannot be without the other. This is what distinguishes the person from the individual.

[Tom’s note: Jeff, apply the bold part, Zizy’s notion of ‘person’, to Christology—in Christ no ‘identity’ emerges other than the identity of the eternal Son. How else can Zizy construe Chalcedon’s “one person, two natures.” I’m fine. But this what I claim is NOT the case with us. In our case there IS the emergence of an ‘identity’ which is distinct from the Son’s identity (even if it derives from the Son’s identity and depends ultimately upon the free relating to the Son in love). Our identity is derived from the Son’s identity in the sense that any ‘adopted son’ derives the meaning of its relationship as son from natural sons who relate to their fathers by birth. But each ‘son’, though expressions of one and the same KIND of relationship (viz., sonship), is a free, unique and unrepeatable son.]

The Orthodox understanding of the Holy Trinity is the only way to arrive at this concept of Personhood: the Father cannot be conceived for a moment without the Son and the Spirit, and the same applies to the other two Persons in their relation with the Father and with each other. At the same time each of these Persons is so unique that their hypostatic or personal properties are totally incommunicable from one Person to the Other.

Personhood is inconceivable without freedom; it is the freedom of being other. I hesitate to say "different" instead of "other" because "different" can be understood in the sense of qualities (clever, beautiful, holy, etc.), which is not what the person is about. In God all such qualities are common to the each three Persons. Person implies not simply the freedom to have different qualities but mainly the freedom simply to be yourself. This means that a person is not subject to norms and stereotypes and cannot be classified in any way; its uniqueness is absolute. This means that only a person is free in the true sense.

And yet one person is no person; freedom is not freedom from the other but freedom for the other. Freedom becomes identical with love. God is love because He is Trinity. We can love only if we are persons, allowing the other to be truly other and yet be in communion with us. If we love the other not in spite of his or her being different but because they are different from us, or rather other than ourselves, we live in freedom as love and in love as freedom.

The other is a condition of our freedom. Freedom is not from but for something other than ourselves. This makes the person ec-static, going outside and beyond the boundaries of the self. But this ecstasis is not to be understood as a movement towards the unknown and the infinite; it is a movement of affirmation of the other.

This drive of personhood towards the affirmation of the other is so strong that it is not limited to the "other" that already exists but wants to affirm an "other" which is totally free grace of the person. Just as God created the world as free grace, so the person wants to create its own "other." This is what happens with art: the artist creating a totally other identity as an act of freedom and communion. Living in the Church in communion with the other means, therefore, creating a culture.

Jeff, here’s the first part of that final chapter. This actually comes before the previous three posts. So I’ve put a ‘I’ before this post, and II, III, and IV respectively on the others. And since this first part is long, I’ll separate them into Part A and Part B.

I PERSON AS EKSTASIS AND HYPOSTASIS

Part A

For both theologians the theological concept of person emerged from the trinitarian discussions of the early church. ‘Person’ was co-opted from the ancient Greek philosophical categories and infused with a new meaning in order to express the trinitarian God. The process by which this christianizing of Greek philosophical categories occurred is given different interpretation by each theologian. To simply summarize what we saw earlier, Zizioulas describes the trinitarian concept of person as an ‘ontological revolution’. For both Lossky and Zizioulas, the concern of the Greek fathers, particularly the Cappadocians, was to avoid tritheism or Sabellianism. Ousia was clearly not the answer to expressing the threeness of God, since three ousiai would be equivalent to three gods. Ousia expressed that which was common to the three persons. What Lossky and Zizioulas disagree over is how the Greek fathers arrived at the concept to express the threeness of God. For Lossky there were two moves: the rejection of prosopon and the selection of hypostasis to express the threeness of God, since the latter was a synonym of ousia; and the reconceptualizing of hypostasis to express irreducibility to nature. Hypostasis as a category to express the threeness of God and as a synonym of ousia indicates that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are each identical with the common ousia. But the category itself required reconceptualization in a Christian form in order to indicate irreducibility to nature. Even though each of the three hypostaseis is identical to the common ousia, they are not reducible to this essence. The chritianizing of hypostasis protects the doctrine of the Trinity from a reductionistic monism. Hypostasis in a Christian form is what Lossky understands to be the theological concept of person (which, again, is not prosopon).

                For Zizioulas, the genius of the Greek fathers comes in the form on an ontological revolution that unites the concepts of hypostasis and prosopon. As we saw, this ontological revolution resulted in giving ontological content to difference, otherness, and particularity. In the doctrine of the Trinity, difference and otherness were not given simply ontological content, but ontological priority. Person becomes the primary ontological category insofar as true being itself is personal existence. What constitutes being in an authentic sense is understood in light of trinitarian existence. Important here is not so much the historical accuracy of these accounts (however important historical accuracy is) but rather the distinct theological frameworks that their two interpretations indicate. In both Lossky and Zizioulas one detects an underlying theological argument woven into a historical interpretation of primarily Greek patristic texts. Lossky sees history with apophatic eyes, which leads him to reject any significance to the category of prosopon in the trinitarian discussion of the fourth century. Prosopon could in no way express the fact that God is three and one and would only lead to Sabellianism. Hypostasis expressed particularity, but it needed to be reconceptualized to express irreducibility to nature. The concern for Lossky was to find the proper categories that would signify the fact that God is three and one, without implying any ontological implications in a trinitarian sense.

                For Zizioulas, the revolution of the tropos hyparxeos of God [divine mode of being] makes necessary the affirmation of a revolutionary ontology in which communion, otherness, and particularity assume priority over sameness. The concern of the Greek fathers, according to his interpretation, was to express this new trinitarian ontology. In this regard, hypostasis was reconceptualized, but only by uniting it with prosopon. The latter, for Zizioulas, was the only category in the repertoire of Greek philosophical categories that signified true difference as relationship distinct from individuality. The reconceptualization occurred not with hypostasis for purpose of expressing an irreducibility to nature, but with prosopon, which already signified particularity through relation but lacked ontological content. Prosopon linked with hypostasis was the adequate category to express the new trinitarian ontology. Moreover, the use of prosopon represents for Zizioulas the radical break with an ontology of substance. A trinitarian ontology demands such a break. To identify the theological concept of a person with a reconceptualized hypostasis is to continue to work within an ontology of substance, since hypostasis itself is derivative of essence or nature. To make prosopon the primary ontological category meant not simply to express the threeness of the Trinity, but to indicate a radical break with traditional understandings of being.

                Whether it be signified by hypostasis or prosopon, the doctrine of the Trinity for both theologians forms the basis for a theological understanding of ‘person’. Given their differences over epistemology and ontology, it is, admittedly, surprising to witness broad agreement over the theological understanding of person. This agreement is explained, in large part, by the simple fact that, for both theologians, the category of person emerges from or has as its basis in the patristic attempt to express a God who is three and one, and who is simultaneously transcendent and immanent. Nature or ousia proved insufficient, since the one would be emphasized at the expense of three. Ousia remains, however, a central category for the doctrine of the Trinity in expressing the oneness of God, not in the sense of unity but in terms of what is common to the three persons. What is common, however, is not what makes them distinct. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are each distinct from each other and from their common ousia. For both theologians, ‘person’ becomes the category that most adequately expresses the distinctiveness or threeness of God, but also, as we have seen, the realism of divine-human communion.

                Whether it be a reconceptualizing of hypostasis or the linking of hypostasis with prosopon, the patristic attempt to express the threeness of God gives rise to the theological understanding of ‘person’ in terms of ekstasis and hypostasis. Given that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not three natures, but three hypostaseis, or persons, they are distinct from nature. Both Lossky and Zizioulas translate such a distinction from nature into a freedom, or ekstasis from nature. To be a person is then to be free from nature, to have one’s identity not be determined by the content of one’s nature. A person is free vis-à-vis his or her nature, and thus, free to determine one’s own destiny or identity.

                 Personal freedom according to Lossky and Zizioulas is better understood in the context of their reaction against Greek or Sholastic monism. According to their interpretation, Greek and Scholastic thought, in the context of a metaphysics of substance, subject both the world and God to necessity. In the attempt to determine the ‘essence’ of God’s being, God’s identity becomes identified with God’s nature. It is God’s nature which then determines God’s being, thus subjecting the being of God to what is necessarily determined by God’s nature. If, for example, God is in God’s essence love, then God necessarily loves, and the logic of love then explains God’s trinitarian existence. The trinitarian distinctions are derived from the divine essence. If God’s being is determined by the fact that God in God’s ousia is love, then God is not absolutely free, but subject to the determination of God’s essence which, according to some theologians, is love. ‘Person’ as ekstasis, or freedom from nature, signifies that God’s trinitarian being is not linked to the necessity of an impersonal substance. God is not trinity because God’s nature is necessarily identified with an attribute such as love or goodness. To be person, then, for both Lossky and Zizioulas, is to be free from the necessary determinations of nature. It signifies the absolute transcendence of God from any necessity. For Zizioulas, this translates into the priority of person over nature, and to the affirmation of an ontology of the particular. It is person that gives existence to nature, and not nature which forms the basis for personal existence. It is not that one is and is then a person; one simply is as person. What is ultimately maintained with the priority of person over nature is the absolute freedom of God.

                The importance of the concept of person for maintaining the absolute freedom of God in theology can be clearly seen in the emphasis both theologians give to the monarchia or monarchy of the Father. The monarchy of the Father, insist both Lossky and Zizioulas, is necessary for preserving the absolute freedom of God, despite criticisms which argue that this monarchia gives a pre-eminence to the Father that threatens the trinitarian equality of persons. As discussed above, if the Father, for Lossky, were not the source of the other two persons of the Trinity and, hence, the principle of unity in the Trinity, then the only alternative would be the common essence. As the principle of unity, the common essence would overthrow the persons and transform “them into relations within the unity of the essence.” Lossky adds that the antinomy between nature and person collapses with the common essence as the principle of unity. The monarchy of the Father “maintains the perfect equilibrium between the nature and the persons, without coming down too heavily on either side….The one nature and the three hypostases are presented simultaneously to our understanding, with neither prior to the other.” Thus, in thinking the monarchia of the Father, one thinks of both person and nature together, the one and the three simultaneously, rather than the one first and then the three. The antinomy of person and nature functions as any antinomy in precluding a reduction of God to any particular concept. As a central aspect of apophaticism, antinomy both frees the mind from itself in order to transcend itself in union with God, but it also affirms the transcendence of God from anything created, including a rational concept. Thus, nature is not sufficient to express the trinitarian God, who lies beyond any rational calculus. In thinking Trinity, one must think person and nature together, and affirming the monarchy of the Father protects this antinomy.

                Lossky further argues that only a personal principle can generate persons who are themselves unique and irreducible. The Father as source and principle of unity preserves the integrity, distinctiveness, and irreducibility of the Son and the Holy Spirit. If the ‘cause’ of trinitarian existence were the impersonal essence, then each of the divine persons would be derivative beings. God the Father as aitia or ‘cause’ of trinitarian existence means that God the Father is not simply identified with God’s essence. God the Father ‘causes’ the existence of the Son and the Holy Spirit, who are themselves distinct from the Father, but possess the fullness of the divine nature. Thus, the meaning of person is to be distinct from one’s nature, but also to be in relation with other persons who possess the fullness of this nature. Lossky adds that God the father “could not be fully and absolutely Person unless the Son and the Holy Spirit are equal to Him in possession of the same nature and are the same nature.” If God were, as Eunomius affirmed, identified with God’s essence, then the Father could not share the fullness of this essence without fundamentally altering God’s identity. The sharing of the fullness of this nature is what constitutes God as Father, as distinct though not separate from this nature and relation with other persons who possess this nature fully. The monarchy of the Father alone is able to maintain this personal freedom from nature.

                Zizioulas would not disagree with the main thrust of Lossky’s insistence on the monarchy of the Father. He would disagree, however, with Lossky’s insistence upon preserving, on the basis of apophaticism, the antinomy between nature and person. As we have seen, Zizioulas affirms the priority of person over nature and such a priority must be given to person to maintain God’s absolute freedom. Thus, for Zizioulas the monarchy of the Father is not necessary in order to maintain the person/nature antinomy, which itself is rooted in the apophatic character of theology. God the Father as aitia is the logical consequence of his ontology of personhood, which is nothing less than an ontology of divine-human communion.

                Zizioulas more forcefully and explicitly argues that God the Father as aitia of trinitarian existence is the only way to maintain God’s absolute freedom. As we saw above, for Zizioulas, the eucharistic communion with the trinitarian God forms the basis for affirming an ontology of personhood in which otherness, communion, and freedom are given, for the first time, ontological significance. Such an ontology gives priority to person over nature with regard to the ‘cause’ of personal existence. In terms of God’s own trinitarian existence, God’s existence itself is a free existence, not subject to necessity, only if God the Father is aitia of such existence. Zizioulas argues pege or source was not adequate enough for the Cappadocians to express the relation of the Son and the Spirit to the Father, because it “could be understood substantially or naturalistically” and thus, link God’s existence to necessity. Aitia needed to complement pege, since the former “carried with it connotations of personal initiative…of freedom. Divine being owes its being to a free person, not to impersonal substance.” In rooting the source and unity of God’s existence to the person of the Father, “when we say that God ‘is’, we do not bind an ontological ‘necessity’ or simple ‘reality’ for God—but we ascribe the being of God to His personal freedom.” Zizioulas adds that “in a more analytical way this means that God, as Father and not as substance, perpetually confirms through ‘being’ His free will to exist. And it is precisely His trinitarian existence that constitutes this confirmation: the Father out of love—that is freely—begets the Son and brings forth the Spirit.” In a personal ontology in which person is the ultimate ontological category, freedom itself becomes the presupposition of being, even of God’s being.

                Zizioulas’s logic for affirming the monarchy of the Father, which some might interpret as introducing a certain arbitrariness into God’s being, is simple. If the eucharistic experience reveals salvation to be a communion with the divine, one that bestows eternal life, then this salvation is personal in the sense that it is a freedom from the giveness of created nature inherent in which is that reality of death. Evident here are the profound existential concerns that underlie Zizioulas’s theology. Salvation is defined in terms of absolute freedom which for Zizioulas is a freedom from the given. This given for created beings is created nature itself and the necessity of death. In communion with God, one transcends this giveness and is affirmed in his or her unique identity in an eternal relationship of love with the triune God. [Tom’s emphasis] If, however, Zizioulas argues, God’s own existence is not a result of freedom, then God cannot give what God does not have. Freedom becomes the precondition for love, the possibility for an unforced communion with the other. Though Zizioulas roots the ontology of personhood in God’s being, and though God’s trinitarian existence gives meaning to ‘person’, the ‘necessity’ of absolute personal freedom in God’s existence for personal salvation from death reveals the extent to which existential concerns inform his theology. That notwithstanding, Zizioulas and Lossky, despite their differences, identify person with freedom based on trinitarian theology. [Tom’s emphasis] The monarchy of the Father for both theologians protects the reality of personal existence within the triune life and maintains God’s freedom from the necessity of monism inherent in Greek and Scholastic metaphysics. Zizioulas more forcefully than Lossky, based on his ontology of personhood, argues that the monarchy of the Father is essential if God’s being is to be one of absolute freedom, and if such absolute freedom is the condition for the possibility of transcending death.

                The other aspect of personhood on which the two theologians share agreement is its hypostatic element. Person is hypostasis for Lossky and Zizioulas, which in itself is a bit confusing since hypostasis was the category used by the Greek fathers to express the diversity within God’s being. ‘Person’, however, is not strictly hypostasis, in that person for Lossky is the reconceptualization of hypostasis and for Zizioulas is the uniting of hypostasis with prosopon. A person is hypostatic, but a hypostasis in and of itself is not a person. What it means to be hypostatic for both theologians is distinct from the classical understandings of hypostasis. Its meaning is based on the doctrine of the Trinity, and, in short, a person is hypostatic by possessing the fullness of nature. The persons of the Trinity do not share the nature, or participate in the nature, or possess a part of the divine nature; within each divine hypostasis is the fullness of the divine nature. Person is the hypostatization of nature, and the Father as the aitia of the Son and the Spirit, constituting their distinctiveness, bestows the fullness of the divine nature. It could not be otherwise if the Son and the Spirit are to be truly persons, for to be ‘person’ is uniquely distinct, and such uniqueness is possible only if one were to possess the fullness of nature. Each person possesses this nature in a unique and distinct way the Father as Father, etc. [Tom’s note: Herein lies the key to understanding how the divine will, if indeed ‘one’, may be understood as exercised freely by each divine person in ways definitive of their unique identity.]

                The notion of God being simultaneously person and nature, in which person is neither derivative of nature nor an identity-in-distinction with the common nature, but rather the hypostatization of nature, is one unique to the Greek patristic tradition, and one which emerges from the attempt to give expression to a God who is one and three. By affirming person as being distinct from nature but fully possessing nature, the Greek fathers wish to signify that personal existence is itself an existence of love and uniqueness. In terms of love, as hypostasis of nature the person is not isolated, but in communion with other persons who share this nature. The Father as person gives the common essence to other persons, so that he is the person of the Father, not by possessing the common essence for Godself, but by giving it to the Son and the Spirit. Thus, a person possesses the fullness of nature in communion with other persons and such a communion is one of love. The communion itself is a perichoretic existence, in which the persons co-inhere, the one in the other, each affirming both the common identity and the otherness of the other. In possessing the fullness of nature, the otherness of the person is not absorbed but constituted. To be hypostatic is, thus, to be unique, as each person is not defined by what is common, but possesses what is common in a unique way. [Tom’s bold: Another clue to how we can understand the one divine will being exercised freely by each divine person in ways definitive of their unique personal identity. Each possesses a common ‘will’, but possesses it in “a unique way”; and the only way to possess a ‘will’ uniquely is to ‘exercise it freely', as determined by a unique person.] Furthermore, if hypostatic existence is one of loving communion, then love itself is the condition of such uniqueness. One becomes uniquely person only in loving communion with other persons. Communion, thus, does not threaten otherness; it constitutes it.

Post Edited (Tom) : 4/13/2008 5:24:18 AM (GMT-5)

AP (discussing Zizy): This given for created beings is created nature itself and the necessity of death. In communion with God, one [viz., a created human being] transcends this giveness and is affirmed in his or her unique identity in an eternal relationship of love with the triune God.

Tom: What else can he mean D, if not that each of us becomes a free, unique, and unrepeatable person/identity?

AP: If, however, Zizioulas argues, God’s own existence is not a result of freedom, then God cannot give what God does not have. Freedom becomes the precondition for love, the possibility for an unforced communion with the other. Though Zizioulas roots the ontology of personhood in God’s being, and though God’s trinitarian existence gives meaning to ‘person’, the ‘necessity’ of absolute personal freedom in God’s existence for personal salvation from death reveals the extent to which existential concerns inform his theology. That notwithstanding, Zizioulas and Lossky, despite their differences, identify person with freedom based on trinitarian theology.

Tom: I only enlarge fonts ONCE a year! This will be it for 2008.

So are Zizy and Lossky tritheists too?

Tom

I PERSON AS EKSTASIS AND HYPOSTASIS

Part B

For both theologians, the person as the hypostasis of nature, i.e., possessing the fullness of nature is contrasted with individuality, which is the division of nature. According to Lossky, “as for hypostasis ... it no longer contains any­thing individual. The individual is part of a species, or rather he is only a part of it: he divides the nature to which he belongs, he is the result of its atomization.” Elsewhere he explains that

men have therefore a common nature, one single nature in many human persons . . . individual and person mean opposite things, the word indi­vidual expressing a certain mixture of the person with elements which belong to the common nature, while person, on the other hand, means that which distinguishes it from nature . . . When we wish to define, ‘to characterize’ a person, we gather together individual characteristics, ‘traits of character’ which are to be met with elsewhere in other indi­viduals, and which because they belong to nature are never absolutely ‘personal’.

                Zizioulas likewise contrasts person with nature, identifying the latter with division: “At the same time, and in contrast to the partiality of the individual which is subject to addition and combination, the person in its ecstatic character reveals his being in a catholic, i.e., integral and undivided, way, and thus in its being ecstatic in becomes hypostatic, i.e., the bearer of its nature in its totality. Zizioulas uses Maximus’s distinction between diaphora (difference) and diairesis (division) to contrast personhood with individuality. “Different beings be­come distant beings: because difference becomes division, distinction be­comes distance. St. Maximus makes use of these terms to express this universal and cosmic situation. Diaphora (difference) must be maintained, for it is good. Hiairesis (division) is a perversion of diaphora, and is bad.” Elsewhere, Zi­zioulas says, “individualisation is precisely the fact that accounts for the im­possibility of real communion, because it implies distance and hence division instead of difference."

For both theologians there are at least two distinguishing characteristics of individuality: isolation and repeatability. Concerning the latter, an individual, who is not the hypostasis of the fullness of nature and, thus, not distinct or free from nature, receives its identity from the common nature. In this sense, the individual is a derivative of the common nature, a combination of common traits of human nature that are repeatable. The individual is isolated in the sense that his or her identity is constituted over against the other individual who is constituted through natural qualities. The individual is a static reality, not relating in love in relation to those who possess the fullness of nature, but a self-possessed thing in itself, defined over-and-against those who ‘possess’ natural qualities different from his or her own. Thus, if personhood, accord­ing to the trinitarian model, is the hypostatization of the fullness of nature, then the non-person or individual is the division of nature into isolated beings who are unable to transcend their created nature in loving communion with God and others.

Thus, for both theologians, personal existence is one in which, as Zizioulas puts it, “the hypo-static and the ek-static have to coincide.” Freedom and love, communion and otherness, the one and the many exist simultaneously in the person. As Zizioulas explains,

Thus personhood implies the ‘openness of being’, and even more than that, the ek-stasis of being, i.e. a movement towards communion which leads to a transcendence of the boundaries of the ‘self’ and thus to free­dom. At the same time, and in contrast to the partiality of the individual which is subject to addition and combination, the person in its ekstatic character reveals its being in a catholic, i.e. integral and undivided way, and thus in its being ekstatic it becomes hypostatic, i.e. the bearer of its nature in its totality.

                As we saw above, analytically freedom is the condition for the possibility of love; however, ontologically love and freedom are simultaneous. Zizioulas is able to say that the Father “confirms through ‘being’ his free will to exist,” “but the Father exists as Father eternally as freedom and love. In ‘freely’ willing to exist as Trinity, the Father identifies this freedom with love. Though lacking the ontological import, we see Lossky's thought in fundamental agreement with Zizioulas in saying that, “‘person’ signifies . . . someone who is distinct from his own nature, of someone who goes beyond his nature while still con­taining it.”

                The implication of this convergence of love and freedom in per­sonal existence further implies for Lossky as well as for Zizioulas , the mutual conditioning of the one and the many, of unity and multiplicity, of otherness and communion. According to Lossky,

it is precisely because each one opens itself to the others, because they share nature without restriction, that the latter is not divided. And this indivisible nature gives every hypostasis its depth, confirms its unique­ness, reveals itself in this unity of the unique, in this communion in which every person, without confusion, shares integrally in all the oth­ers: the more they are one the more they are diverse, since nothing of the communal nature escapes them; and the more they are diverse the more they are one, since their unity is not impersonal uniformity, but a fertile tension of irreducible diversity, an abundance of a ‘circumincession with­out mixture of confusion’ (St. John Damascus),

                Equally, Zizioulas, responding to the emphasis on the ‘one’ in ontology, affirms that “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. This, therefore, seems to be the great innovation in philosophical thought, brought about by the Cappadocian Trinitarian theology.” Person is, for Zizioulas, “otherness in communion and communion in otherness.” He adds that communion without otherness is nothing but “an arrangement for careful co-existence,” while otherness without communion is non-existent. What both theologians seem to be implying is that love and communion are the precondition for otherness and difference. It is only in loving communion with others that true difference is not simply respected, but constituted. One becomes other as one relates to the other, but this difference or otherness is given permanence, or as Zizioulas puts it, ontological significance, in a rela­tionship of love. In an eternal communion of love, the persons of the Trinity affirm the other's identity. Otherness, however, is also the precondition for communion and not community that is simply a fellowship of individuals. Communion or unity requires real difference, otherwise the unity is less a union than an absorption into sameness. Love, which is the force of commu­nion and unity, requires freedom or an ekstasis from oneself toward the other. This freedom in communion does not become division but true diversity or otherness.

                Personhood, for both Lossky and Zizioulas, is existence in which otherness and communion, freedom, and love coincide. It is the fulfillment of the image of God in the human. Given their epistemological differences and methodo­logical differences, it is somewhat surprising to find such broad agreement on the theological notion of person. This agreement leads one to suspect that Zizioulas may owe more to Lossky's thought than he admits. Another expla­nation, however, could be that at the heart of both theological systems lies the basic Orthodox axiom of salvation in terms of the unity between the divine and the human. Though this union may take different forms for both theo­logians, the two theologies, and I would venture to say most of Orthodox theo­logical tradition up to the present age, seem to be rooted in the famous Athanasian dictum “God became anthropos so that the anthropos can become God.” It is this soteriological principle that leads to the rejection of a metaphysics of substance as inadequate to express this truth. The this-that, either-or, created-uncreated oppositions simply prove incapable of expressing a communion with the divine in which otherness—of God, within God, of the human—and freedom are simultaneously affirmed. Another category is needed, and person ultimately becomes, for both theologians, the means of expressing this reality of divine-human communion. If Zizioulas did not in fact rely on Lossky for the basis of his theology of personhood, then perhaps the two theologians, at­tempting to clarify the patristic insights in light of contemporary questions, simply followed the logic of divine-human communion that affirms true exis­tence as the simultaneity of freedom and love. In either case, certain features of Zizioulas's theology of personhood, besides its ontological import already discussed, indicate a break with Lossky's thought.

                The single most distinguishing factor of Zizioulas's theology of personhood from that of Lossky's is his emphasis on relationship. This is not to imply that Lossky's understanding of person does not include relations. As we saw, a person, for Lossky, exists “not by excluding others, not by opposition to the ‘Not-I,’ but by a refusal to possess the nature for himself. . . . Personal exis­tence supposes a relation to the other; one person exists ‘to’ or ‘towards’ the other.” Even in the realm of trinitarian existence, Lossky argues that the monarchy of the Father does not confer upon the Father any hypostatic pri­macy since the Father “is a person only because the Son and the Holy Spirit are also.” The Father is person, i.e., not identified with the divine essence, since, as person, the Father gives the fullness of this essence to other persons. He could not give the divine essence in this way if the Father were not distinct from the essence, i.e., a person.

                Since, for Lossky, to be a person is to relate, one encounters confusion when reading “the (trinitarian) relations only serve to express the hypostatic di­versity of the Three; they are not the basis of it.” What Lossky is referring to here is the ‘relations of origin’ that he contrasts with the Thomistic ‘relations of opposition.’ The ‘relations of origin’ in Greek patristic trinitarian theology indicate, for Lossky, that the Son and the Spirit have a different mode of origin from the Father. This difference in the mode of origin is what protects their hypostatic diversity, otherwise if they originated in the same way from the Father, they would not be hypostatically diverse.

                Lossky adds, alluding to the Thomistic ‘relations of opposition,’ “no at­tempt is being made to establish a relation of opposition between the Son and the Holy Spirit . . . because relations of origin in the Trinity—filiation, pro­cession—cannot be considered as the basis for the hypostases, as that which determines their absolute diversity.” Thomistic trinitarian theology, accord­ing to Lossky, affirmed that the diversity within the Trinity must be based, lo­gically, on ‘relations of opposition’ between the persons of the Trinity. For a person to be person there must be a relation opposite that of another person. In trinitarian theology, the relation between the Father and the Son is easily explained in terms of generation. The difficulty lies in establishing the relation of opposition to the Holy Spirit. If it is only to the Father, then the Holy Spirit is no different than the Son; hence, the relation of opposition must be to tin Father and to the Son as one principle of spiration. For Lossky, this emphasis on ‘relation of opposition’ in order to establish hypostatic diversity is to make the latter depend on the Aristotelian concept of relation. This attempt run contrary to Lossky's apophatic thrust, which affirms that God lies beyond concepts. To base the hypostatic differences on a particular concept is to reduce God's trinitarian existence to the necessity of relations. Furthermore, the attempt to logically conceive how the one divine essence can be logically differentiated through the Aristotelian concept of relation is, for Lossky, to break the antinomy between person and nature and to prioritize the divine essence over trinitarian diversity. This priority not only threatens the personal diversity within the Trinity, but it reflects the precedence given to the rational over the mystical in theological method in undertaking to give a rational expla­nation to that which is beyond rationality. Thus, when Lossky says that the re­lations do not serve as the basis for hypostatic diversity, he has in mind the Thomistic ‘relations of opposition’ which he interprets as making the trini­tarian God dependent on the logic of the concept of ‘relation.’ But in order to affirm that a person is person only in relating, Lossky cannot escape the con­clusion that relations do form the basis for personhood. Words such as ‘basis’ or ‘dependence’ smack of rational necessity and fly in the face of Lossky's apophaticism. In order for his theology of personhood to be coherent, the re­lation must be constitutive of person without undermining the freedom of personal existence.

                Not being caught between the either-or of essence and superessence, be­tween mystical and rational theology, Zizioulas is able to affirm that even for the divine life, relations are constitutive of personhood. Zizioulas's argument for the notion of the tropos hyparxeos in expressing God's existence allows him to close the gap between the immanent and economic Trinity. This distinction allows for ontological statements in relation to God's existence without effac­ing God's transcendence. Moreover, the eucharistic participation in the tropos hyparxeos of God's existence demands the affirmation of an ontology of particu­larity or of personhood. Inherent in this ontology of personhood is relation: relations constitute personhood. For Zizioulas, a person is “only as it relates to.” He adds that in a personal ontology, “the particular is raised to the level of ontological primacy, it emerges as being itself without depending for its iden­tity on qualities borrowed from nature and thus applicable also to other be­ings, but solely on a relationship in which it is inconceivable for the rest of beings to be outside a relationship with it.” Moreover, it is this relationship or communion with others which constitute an identity that is personal, i.e., unique and unrepeatable. It is not, however, any relationship which consti­tutes personhood, but only those defined as love: “The more one loves ontologically and truly personally, the less one identifies someone as unique and irreplaceable for one's existence on the basis of such classifiable qualities.” Thus, for Zizioulas, “personal identity is totally lost if isolated, for its ontological condition is relationship.” Relationship as love does not simply constitute the person as person, but gives that person the uniqueness inherent in personal identity: “It is the other and our relationship with him that gives us our identity, our otherness, making us ‘who we are', i.e. persons; for by being inseparable part of a relationship that matters ontologically we emerge as unique and unnpeatable entities.” With the framework of his ontology of per­sonhood, Zizioulas is able to affirm that the Father is particularly Father because of the Father's relation to the Son and the Spirit. Thus, the Father's fa­therhood is constituted in and through particular relations of love; the Father's identity ‘depends’ on relations.

                This affirmation, however, does not necessarily slide trinitarian theology into a metaphysics of substance; Zizioulas is not saying that the one divine es­sence first is and then relates, and in relating is three persons. Integral to Zi­zioulas's theology and his ontology of personhood is the notion of ‘simul­taneity.’ Person and relation are simultaneous events. Personal identity, love, relationship, freedom are all concurrent. They are marks of divine existence, which is eternal existence, and hence simultaneous existence. Thus, God's being is all at once love, freedom, and relationship, though analytically, one could state that the “ontological condition of personal identity is relationship.” Though he shares Lossky's rejection of a metaphysics of substance in order to express the doctrine of the Trinity, Zizioulas also avoids the apophatic turn. Within an ontology of personhood, Zizioulas is able to affirm that relation is, in fact, constitutive of personal identity, even those personal identities within the triune life.

Oh my goodness. I just ran across the following quote of Zizy by AP in AP’s book:

“…the world [is] a product of freedom and love, not of necessity. This has important existential consequences in that created existence results from the love of God and depends on the love of God for its survival. As Zizioulas himself says, ‘[...] the Christian God does not create because God loves the beautiful and wishes to give form and beauty to the cosmos. God creates because God wishes to exist something other than God’s own self, with which…God wishes to be in communion’.” [Tom’s italics and bold]

I’m afraid even to comment, so perfectly has Zizy expressed my intentions. I’ll just post this for now and leave it. I’ll have some comments later.

Just let it simmer.

T

Post Edited ("I am-in-I Am") : 4/14/2008 6:46:47 AM (GMT-5)

Post Edited ("I am-in-I Am") : 4/14/2008 6:44:09 AM (GMT-5)

D: Can a "person" have a legitimate "I-Thou" relationship with themselves? (Loving oneself)

Tom: I don’t think so, no. The ‘otherness’ that Zizy grounds personhood in (the ‘I-Thou’) is a ‘personal’ other. So while the relationship to the self as we experience it is legitimate in the sense that self-perception is a legitimate activity, it can’t itself constitute the otherness required for inter-personal relations.

But…and I’m not sure this model works, but it’s just an analogy. Remember, D, how Edwards describes the triune relations in terms similar to how I self-reflect, or self-perceive. I can throw up onto my image of myself, conceived in my own mind, some of my properties (I can consciously contemplate an image of myself as male, 5’10”, dorky nose, Arabic interpreted), but I can’t pull up everything about myself and contemplate it’s actuality. Edwards said God CAN do this, and DOES do this. In fact, the ACT of doing this defines the Father, and the image that comes to the divine mine just IS the SON. No property of the Father gets left out—including actuality. So the ‘image’ comes to life, an actual ‘other’ person. It’s not perfect, but it helps illustrate some of the issues. Self-perception IS a good analogy on some levels. It’s just that self-relation or self-perception AS WE EXPERIENCE IT doesn’t parallel the divine act of self-perception and the ‘personal otherness’ that God’s act of self-perceiving generates. We don’t generate a personal other simply by thinking about ourselves. God can. It’s the definitive divine act of being, and as such is impossible for created beings. That’s WHY we (as Zizy says) are ‘driven’ by the existential ‘longing’ for personal identity and permanence. We can’t generate it on our own. God can and does.

D: As far as AP's quote of Zizy, I'm fine with it. God wanted something “other” than Godself to exist, including non-divine, created ‘I’s. No biggie there.

Tom: WT*! No biggie? It’s been the whole debate for 5 months now. God wants not ‘someTHING’ other, but some ‘self’, someONE, other than God’s own self. That means some ‘person’ other than the divine ‘persons’. If you grant this, then we can close out this whole debate. Our ‘personal distinction’ from God is all I’ve ever been arguing for. Now you’re gonna tell me you’re fine with it?

You do see that Zizy is affirm our ‘personal distinction’ from God don’t you? That’s what his quote says.

D: To me, the interesting thing is HOW God wants to have communion with the non-divine. When we look at the hypostatic union in Christ-the-Logos of the divine and human natures in one person...AND...we look at the depths of the Eucharistic mystery (through epiclesis, we participate in and "become" Christ, being one with the Lord in "spirit", "mind", and "body/blood" )...Christ's Bride/Body being in deepest intimacy with Christ the Bridegroom/Head Himself.

Tom: Let the HOW be a mystery, or pursue it for the rest of your life. Whatever. But dude, if we relate to God by becoming Christ “himself” (as you say), then we’re not selves “other than God’s own self” (as Zizy says), selves OTHER than the divine selves/persons. But you just said you’re cool with Zizy’s quote. So there’s a problem here. If you’re going to grant that we are ‘personally distinct’ from the divine ‘persons’, THAT affirmation will constrain your options for explaining HOW God and we enjoy this relationship. For HOWEVER it occurs, it cannot be because we are the divine Son himself and not our own personal selves. And I do NOT mean “our own” in the individualistic sense Zizy condemns. I mean it in the required sense of ‘otherness’ that he defends. If my identity just IS the identity of the Son, then God is not, as Zizy says, “having personal communion with selves other than God’s own self”; he’s just having communion with his own divine ‘self’ of the Son. So long as you limit the HOW of divine-human relationality to the HOW of the incarnation, you CANNOT be fine with God’s wanting to have selves/persons other God’s own triune selves with whom to have interpersonal communion. Why? Because (a) there is no interpersonal communion between the divine PERSON of the Son and the human NATURE of the Son, and (b) you’re limiting your explanations/models to the incarnation.

Sorry.

D: It seems that God REALLY wants to be IN, WITH, and FOR humanity on the deepest of levels.

Tom: What God wants (going with Zizy here), D, is a loving interpersonal relationship with ‘personally distinct’ selves who are other than his own self (or selves, F, S, and SP). God wants to be as one as possible GIVEN PERSONAL OTHERNESS. That IS the greatest relational oneness there is, the oneness that lets others be selves. But the incarnation (in my view) is NOT an example of this—since there is no ‘personal human other self’ with whom God relates in love (as there is in our case). What we see in the incarnation is the SON and the FATHER relating interpersonally in human nature. God brings to earth, in human nature, the same eternal relationship that defines him essentially, so we can SEE what love and interpersonal relations look like. But when I look at YOU relating to God, I don’t see that—no. I see a HUMAN SELF, a non-divine person relating interpersonally with God in the same way (freely, kenotically, creatively, personally, etc.) the Son and the Father demonstrated via the incarnation. We love and relate as persons the only possible way any personal being loves and relates, the way God does. But that doesn’t mean we ARE the self of the Son, the person of the SON (himself) loving and relating to the Father.

T

Post Edited ("I am-in-I Am") : 4/14/2008 8:24:14 AM (GMT-5)

I ask a sensual man, “Who are you?” and he replies, “I am I,” and he thinks of his body.

I ask a thinking man, “Who are you?” and he replies, “I see two sides in myself and I make my way between them, associating first with one and then the other,” and he is thinking of his instinctive and conscious soul.

I ask a spiritual man, “Who are you?” and he replies, “There is someone in the depths of my soul. I stretch out my hand to grasp him but see that to do that I would need arms longer than the universe. Ask him (CHRIST-THE-LOGOS) who I am.”

St. Nicholai of Zicha (Velimirovich)