Christos Yannaras
Another important doctoral dissertation of the 1960s was The Unity of the Church in the Holy Eucharist and the Bishop during the First Three Centuries by John Zizioulas, since 1986 metropolitan of Pergamon.[1]
Zizioulas had also worked under Florovsky as a graduate student at Harvard. The book is a systematic theology but based on a thorough study of the early Christian sources. It analyzes the testimony of ecclesial experience in the early centuries to prove the priority of the Church’s eucharistic structure over its institutional form, identifying the Church’s eucharistic unity with its “canonical” unity.
A eucharistic structure and unity means that both derive from the Eucharist. For the Church has its origin in the coming together of the faithful for the eucharistic supper. The early Christian texts lead Zizioulas to identify the very definition of the Church with the eucharistic supper. In the Eucharist of every local community the Catholic Church is realized and manifested—the whole Christ, the catholic event of the new mode of existence that constitutes the Gospel’s salvation, humanity’s participation in immortality. In contrast to the catholicity of the Eucharist, heresy is fragmentation: not an ideological difference, but the transferring of salvation to other means outside the complete and full mode of the Eucharist. That is why “faith and Orthodoxy are ecclesiological concepts: correct faith cannot constitute a self-sufficient mode of salvation.” It depends on the participation of the believer in the Catholic Church, in the catholic realization and unity of the body of Christ which is manifested in the local Eucharist. “Orthodoxy does not constitute the criterion of the Catholic Church; the Catholic Church is the criterion of Orthodoxy.” And because the Church’s unity depends on the Eucharist and is completed by it—not in terms of ideological concord and organizational structure but principally in terms of a unified and catholic mode of existence—the hierarchical structure of the Church also derives from the Eucharist. It serves the requirements for the celebration of the Eucharist and ensures the priority of the existential fact of ecclesial unity. Thus the “leader of the Eucharist” or the “president of the Eucharist” is a bishop, in Greek episkopos, literally one who oversees (episkopei) “by virtue of the position he holds in the eucharistic assembly.” Such an assembly represents the image of the heavenly Eucharist, as described in the Book of Revelation: “God is, above all, Episkopos upon the throne, before the altar on which is the lamb that was slain, and before whom is the multitude of the saved, and around the throne are the twenty-four elders.” “Such from the beginning was the position which the bishop occupied as one who offered the divine Eucharist, and consequently the Church looked upon him as an image and type of God or Christ.” But the image implies more than that. The bishop is not simply a symbol of the presence of Christ, nor is he simply the successor of Christ and the apostles in the legal sense of the transfer of privileges. The bishop functions within the ecclesial body like Christ. The “gift of the Holy Spirit” which he received at his ordination makes him capable (irrespective of whether he is worthy) of fulfilling the work of Christ himself present in the Church. It enables him to create the unity of the eucharistic body on the model of the unity and true life of the Holy Trinity. Zizioulas’ analysis of the sources provides convincing support for these fundamental truths which prevent the Church from being transformed into a religious institution with the characteristics of a secular organization. The most important aspect of this historical study is the systematic theological teleology which emerges from it, the systematic and historical aspects illuminating each other. In his analysis of the early phases in the development of ecclesial life, Zizioulas responds to the central problems of ecclesiology, illuminating the Church’s historical formation on the basis of its early documented experience. The genesis of the parish (enoria)—that is, the preservation of the Church’s unity centered on the bishop in spite of its division into separate assemblies—the relationship of the catholicity of the local church to the Catholic Church throughout the world, the visible distinction of the Catholic Church in practice from the heresies and schisms—these are all themes characteristic of Zizioulas’s approach.
This study provides a sound historical foundation for a systematic eucharistic ecclesiology. This expression, introduced by the Russian emigre theologians Florovsky, Schmemann and Afanasieff, has been at the center of ecumenical theological interest in recent years. Zizioulas adopts the Russian approach but goes beyond it. He is particularly critical of Afanasieff, who was influenced by Khomiakov. He notes that the Russian understanding of catholicity (sobornost) makes the concept of communion an autonomous “principle” of catholicity—autonomous in itself and with regard to the existential character of the fact of communion. On the ecclesiological level, such a perspective tends to minimize personal freedom and Church unity as a product of catholicity, that is, of Orthodoxy. In his later writings Zizioulas moved on from the ecclesial mode of existence centered on the Eucharist to ontological problems. In his article “La continuite avec les origines apostoliques dans la conscience theologique des eglises orthodoxes,”[2] he analyzes salvation historically and eschatologically, arguing that a combination of historical and eschatological approaches allows us to locate the Church’s apostolic identity and unity throughout the centuries in the Eucharist. And in another article, “Verite et communion: Fondements patristiques et implications existentielles de I’ecclesiologie eucharistique,”[3] he studies the ontological presuppositions of eucharistic ecclesiology and their epistemological implications, analyzing the relationship between truth and person, person and history, history and salvation, and salvation and the Church in a patristic perspective. It is characteristic of Zizioulas’s theology that he maintains a dialogue with other Orthodox theologians, promoting a fertile discussion of real problems in the Orthodox world. Although his ecclesiological studies were inspired by the eucharistic ecclesiology of the Russians, his shift towards ontology, specifically the theology of personhood, reflects a Greek influence. His reflections on ontological problems in Orthodox theology are summarized in his article “From Mask to Person: The Contribution of Patristic Theology to the Concept of Personhood,”[4] and are expanded in another study: “The Being of God and the Being of Man.”[5] Zizioulas demonstrates briefly but persuasively that the concept of person as an ontological category (a category determining the mode of existence which constitutes an existential otherness, that is, freedom from the need for existence to be determined by its nature or essence) “is generated historically as the Church attempts to express its faith in the triadic God in ontological terms.” In the Greco-Roman world the concept of existential otherness was unthinkable, since reality presupposed a given logos which (as essence—form) determined the mode of existence of everything that was. This given logos ensures the world’s rationality and order, “but in such a world it is impossible for freedom and the unexpected to arise.” Even God is determined by the logos of his essence. He cannot be or act in a manner other than that which is required by his being part of the universe’s rationality. The “causal principle” of everything that exists is consequently necessity, not freedom.
The Church’s historical experience is different from this ancient Greek understanding of reality. In the historical person of Jesus Christ the Church knows God not to be predetermined by his essence, but to be capable of also existing in the logos-mode of humanity’s essence, free from whatever necessarily limits human existence, such as mortality.
The Church therefore recognizes experientially in God a mode of existence not subject to any predetermination or necessity. And in this mode it seeks the truth of personhood. Zizioulas uses patristic thought to show that the causal principle of what exists is embodied in the truth of personhood: God is the cause of Being, not as an impersonal essence or nature, but fundamentally as Person. God the Father “timelessly and lovingly,” that is, in absolute freedom, constitutes his essence (i.e., produces hypostases) by begetting the Son and causing the Spirit to proceed. His personal freedom determines the mode of existence of his essence. In the same freedom of love, the common energy of the three divine persons creates the world ex nihilo. The world’s rationality is a logos revealing the person of the Creator, just as an artist’s or poet’s logos is revealed in their work.
If God exists, he exists because the Father exists, that is, he who out of love freely begets the Son and brings forth the Spirit ... This means that God, as Father, not as substance, perpetually confirms through “being” his free will to exist. And it is precisely his Trinitarian existence that constitutes this confirmation ... and the one divine substance is consequently the being of God only because it has these three modes of existence [fatherhood, sonship, and procession] which it owes not to the substance but to one person, the Father.
Zizioulas arrived at these theological conclusions through studying the Church’s eucharistic identity. This study is apparent in every aspect of his later theological writings. His eucharistic ecclesiology led him to reformulate theology as a whole on the basis of ecclesial experience, not speculative thought, in the way that Gregory Palamas clarified the distinction between essence and energies, or Maximus the Confessor the two wills in Christ.
Zizioulas’ theological synthesis is analogous to the syntheses that defined Orthodox self-awareness in the patristic age. No other theologian since Palamas has had a comparable impact on Orthodox thought.
After his doctorate Zizioulas worked at the World Council of Churches. He then became a professor of patristic theology, lecturing in patristic thought first at Edinburgh, then at Glasgow, and finally at Kings College London. Since 1984 he has also been a professor at Thessalonica. In 1986 he was ordained bishop directly from the lay state with the title Metropolitan of Pergamon. During these years he has contributed significantly to the ecumenical movement, chiefly as a representative of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The first doctoral dissertation on his thought was published in Canada in 1989.[6]
[Source: Christos Yannaras, Orthodoxy and the West: Hellenic Self-Identity in the Modern Age, trans. Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2006), pp. 284-289]
[1] Athens 1965; 2nd ed. 1990. On Zizioulas see also Spiteris (1992) 363-416. To his bibliography of studies on Zizioulas add McPartlan (1993).
[2] Istina 19 (1974) 65-94.
[3] Irénikon 50 (1977b) 451-510.
[4] Published originally in Greek in the festschrift for Metropolitan Meliton (Zizioulas, 1977c) and in English (trans. N. Russell) in Zizioulas’ Being as Communion (1985) 27-65.
[5] Synaxi 37 (1991) 11-35.
[6] Baillargeon (1989); cf. McPartlan (1993) 123-235.
