February 2, 2024
Archbishop Rowan Williams
Dear friends, it’s a very great pleasure and a very great honor to be able to join you, even if remotely, for this celebration of the late Metropolitan John Zizioulas. Metropolitan John was somebody whom I counted as a real personal friend. Somebody whose faithful friendship, inspiration and challenge was always a deeply significant part of my own exploration in theology. We got to know each other first many decades ago, but that friendship was deepened and developed in the years we spent working together in the Anglican-Orthodox Theological Dialogue Commission. Especially in the years which eventually produced that document, known as “The Church of the Triune God,” which came out of those discussions. And I have the lively recollection of the many others which Metropolitan John and myself spent discussing passages of the Fathers with. Not always complete agreement, but deep mutual respect. And also, I would say an enjoyment of that exploration together.
To speak in those terms is already to say something about the kind of theology which Metropolitan John practiced and communicated. A theology which took very seriously the question of otherness. Metropolitan John, of course, was above all the great theologian of Christian communion, communion in the body of Christ, communion in the Holy Spirit. Everything he wrote in one way or another comes back to these themes. Even when he is writing about the subject like eschatology, the basic topic of his most recently published book, posthumously published, and that is Remembering the Future—very substantial reflection on eschatology. In that book, he insists that basic to our Christian understanding of eschatology as of all other subjects is the reality of epiphany. We do not discover the truth by choice, by exploration, even by experiment in the ordinary sense. We discover the truth when we are addressed and engaged from what is beyond ourselves, beyond the ego and its business, the ego and its concerns, expectations, and preferences.
And where we speak about eschatology, we speak about the future. Speaking to us, addressing, and engaging us here and now. A future which is not our own projection, our own imagination, but the abiding of reality of God, which is not confined to the present moment in which I live, and which speaks to me from the other side, or barriers that I cannot cross for myself. A vision breaks in upon me. A new world, a new creation happens. And because it is a new creation, it’s not something I can make or control. The otherness of God comes to me from a future I don’t see and can’t plan. And yet, a future which I can trust and hope for because it is God’s, because it is the future of the Triune God, the God of communion. And as that vision breaks in upon me, I’m drawn into a relationship with that abiding otherness. That is the relation of Father and Son, through the gift of the Spirit, shared with us in Christ’s body.
Vision, not thought, says Metropolitan John in his work on eschatology, vision and not thought. But that is not for him a way of saying we don’t have to exercise the intellect. Is a way of saying that the intellect is always something engaged in the aftermath of epiphany and gift. That which breaks upon us which dawns upon us, that which is not within our control, which we must respect and love as other. It’s interesting that John Zizioulas says more than once in his works that are the distinctive things about the Christian understanding of freedom is that it focuses our mind and our imagination on that which is particular, that which is unique. Freedom is about moving away from a world of generalization, the anonymous reality in which we are somehow rolled up into general truths, types of some general kind of life. And the absolute particularity of our substantial being at any one moment is overridden in some way. The Christian faith tells us we are always unique, tells us that there is no other standing where we stand, feeling as we feel, thinking as we think. And once we have understood that and understood that it is from that that our freedom arises then it is impossible to look at the world around us in the same way. We see it differently. We see it. In that light of a created order in which uniqueness is at the heart of everything. God’s life is reflected imaged in creation in innumerable incalculable ways, each irreplaceable.
We cannot begin to think or understand to know God without a sense of the need to be part of that interactive, corporate communing reality, which is creation. And in human creation we turn to one another, in our uniqueness, respecting the uniqueness of one another, recognizing that in that kind of relationship freedom exists. There is no freedom if I seek to absorb the other into my own agenda. There is no freedom as the other absorbs me into their agenda, into their collective patterns of power and dominance. But the world that God has created, that God wishes to see, develop, and mature in the human and the nonhuman creation is a world in which each unique reflection of God’s self-giving self-sharing life comes alive in its relation with every other. This is indeed the “being as communion,” which was one of Metropolitan John’s most celebrated formulations, the title of his first major book, which I and others have described more than once as possibly one of “the single most influential theological books of the latter part of the 20th century in any European language.” A book which inspired countless people in every Christian Church.
At the heart of all of this lies Metropolitan John’s commitment to a Trinitarian theology and a Trinitarian account of being itself. There is no pure singleness at the beginning of everything. And there is no uncontrolled plurality at the beginning or source of everything. There is at the heart and source of all we see, and all we are—a relation, a reciprocity. A movement between Father, Son, and Spirit. A movement between three unique points. Each unique because of its relation with the others. There is no unity beyond that. That is why in so many aspects of the Eastern apathetic tradition, and above all, in the writings of the pseudo-Dionysius, we’re told that we cannot think of God in terms either of unity or of plurality as we normally use those words. To call God one is true, but if we think that that means God is an individual, or some kind of impersonal undifferentiated substance, we are gravely, terminally, damagingly wrong. We can call God Three quite truthfully. And yet, if we think that that means God is three instances of a kind of life which we call divine, once again, we are lethally wrong. There is, and metropolitan John might have been rather surprised to be reminded of this, there is even in Thomas Aquinas a statement quoted originally from Saint Bernard, saying there is no unity greater than the unity of the three divine persons. There’s nothing beyond the three divine persons that is more one more unified than their communion, their relationship. And that insight shapes and determines so much of what Metropolitan John has shared with. There is no unity greater than or beyond the communion of the three divine persons. And as he spells out in several of his works, this has implications not only for our understanding of Church and Liturgy, and society. But also implications for how we understand knowledge itself. What is it to know God, or indeed anything? If reality is communal, communal, in this way, the knowledge can never be simply absorption into the otherness of what is known. And it can never be an arm’s length examination of what is known as an object with which I have no intrinsic relation. When I know anything, I enter into communion. I allow its otherness to shape and recreate the uniqueness of my own being. I grow in that I test the boundaries of it. I discover its implications, its mysteries. I become more human in that process. But of course, above all, when I know God, I’m neither absorbed to some general truths about God, nor am I standing at a distance looking at God as a remote object. I’m coming alive in the life of the eternal sun by the gift of the Eternal Spirit, growing into the life that the Eternal Father is sharing. That is how I know.
How much in our life, as individual Christians, our life as church communities, do we, in fact assist people and nourish people in growing in that kind of knowledge. Well, not very much if the truth be told. Metropolitan John was rightly very skeptical of many of the modes of both worship and theology, which were prevalent in modern Christianity. And he was able to point out that Eastern Christianity and Western Christianity alike have at times fallen into these traps, even if Western Christianity has perhaps done more to canonize and regularize these errors.
Liturgy, our coming together to the word of Christ in the Spirit, to the Father, has so often become an activity remote from theology, from the true existential knowledge of God. It has not looked as though it is building human community, it has not looked as though or felt as though it is building the true knowledge of God. And yet our coming together, all of us in our diversity in one place, which is the place of Christ at the table of the Lord, our coming together into one place is above all an intensification of that future which we seek and pray for, the future in which we are released from the prison of our individuality, our self-orientation, released to receive from one another, released to receive from God. That is what the most Holy Eucharist is all about. And from that model derives all we want to say about knowing God. Our knowledge of God is always being said by God and so growing in that communion, which belongs in the Holy Trinity.
All this seems you will be exploring and discussing in greater depths in your meeting, and I wish very much that I could be part of those conversations. All I’ve sought to do in this few minutes is to remind you of some of the main themes of Metropolitan John’s theology and the way in which his thought so powerfully and vividly connects areas of theology that we so often separate: a theology of the Trinity, a theology of the church, a theology of the end times, a theology of epistemology, a theology of how we know, a theology of human nature and human society of theology too—and this is of great importance—of theology that has to do with the human relationship with the otherness of the material world of which we are apart. One of Metropolitan John’s greatest gifts was to make these connections, to help us to see the activity of theology as integrated. Not simply a series of topics which we went through one by one, ticking off the correct orthodox things to say about each subject, but instead the constant search for words that would express the epiphany that I’ve mentioned; words that would bring into our consciousness into our communication with one another, a deeper sense of that vision which had remade our world.
Like Metropolitan John and I suspect, like most of those taking part in this conversation today, I would say that Christian theology cannot live and breathe or become a transfiguring power in our world, our imaginative intellectual and intellectual world unless we are able with Metropolitan John to stand before that epiphany, to open ourselves to vision before we seek to control, to map them, to chart the reality before us. And so, my prayer for this conversation will be that in the course of our exchanges there will be a genuine opening to that epiphany; the kind of opening which Metropolitan John’s works so powerfully said before us. Of course, in his writing there are areas where many will disagree with detail, or arguments may be pursued about how precisely to understand the doctrine of creation, about the way in which Metropolitan John uses the concept of will, for example, about some aspects of his Christological analysis. These are areas which he and I happily discussed in many contexts, which I trust we both learned—I certainly did.
I wish you every blessing. In this exchange. I join with you in giving great thanks for this utterly remarkable theologian. His presence in the theological world of the 20th and 21st centuries, who allowed us not simply to dust off the theology of the Fathers, as if retrieving some beloved antique, but to enter into the inner dynamism of patristic thought. The novelty and the freshness of the thought of the Christian Fathers. That new discovery of a unity and communion undreamed of before, that new discovery of the utter priority of the unique. Freedom, understood as inseparable from the communion of unique living substances reflecting the eternal truths and the eternal beauty of God—the Holy Trinity.
His memory be the eternal. And may our celebration of him today help us to become the theologians God would have us be. I send you my best wishes, my blessings and my gratitude for the opportunity to be just briefly a part of this.
Online video: Address to webinar participants by Archbishop Rowan Williams - In Memoriam Metropolitan John Zizioulas
