06 April 2023
Andrew Louth celebrates the life and work of John Zizioulas, Metropolitan of Pergamon, who died recently.
Metropolitan John of Pergamon — John Zizioulas — was certainly the best-known Orthodox theologian both in and beyond world Orthodoxy when he died on 1 February, aged 92. Less than six months earlier, on 24 August 2022, we lost another eminent Orthodox hierarch and theologian, Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia (Gazette, 2 September 2022). With the passing of these renowned theologians — both Metropolitans of the Ecumenical Patriarchate — the world of Orthodoxy, and Orthodox theology, is much diminished.
A little older than Metropolitan Kallistos, Metropolitan John was born in Greece, and studied at the Universities of Thessaloniki and Athens. He spent a year at the Ecumenical Institute at Bossey, in Switzerland (1954-55), and, between 1960 and 1964, engaged in research at Harvard University. There, he was supervised by Fr Georges Florovsky, Paul Tillich, and A. G. Williams. He wrote two doctoral theses — on St Maximos the Confessor, and on early Christian ecclesiology; the latter was submitted at Athens and published in Greek in 1965, and, many years later, in a 2001 English translation by Elizabeth Theokritoff as Eucharist, Bishop, Church.
There followed a stellar academic career, including a post in Athens and professorships at both Edinburgh, and, for more than ten years, at Glasgow, which was combined with a visiting professorship at King’s College, London. Alongside this, from his time at Bossey onwards, he participated in the Ecumenical Movement, working for Faith and Order in Geneva in the late 1960s.
In 1986, he was elected Metropolitan of Pergamon (one of the seven Churches of the Apocalypse), and a member of the Holy Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. At the same time, he was Professor of Dogmatics at the University of Thessaloniki. He played a prominent part in official ecumenical dialogue with both Roman Catholics and Anglicans. His fluency in English certainly helped in making his voice heard worldwide.
His thought, while theological, was fundamentally philosophical, for which — like others of the more adventurous Greek thinkers among his contemporaries, such as Christos Yannaras — he drew on French existential thought, such as Sartre’s.
His central philosophical preoccupation was the notion of personhood, which was closely linked in his thinking with the notion of koinonia, or communion. Koinonia has been an influential concept in ecumenical circles, laying the foundations for much ecclesiological discussion.
For Metropolitan John, koinonia was a sharing in common among free human beings, something rendered impossible by the Fall, since when such freedom has been compromised: it is only by coercion that humans can attain a kind of community, to which the sole alternative is some form of anarchic individualism — both far from true koinonia. Zizioulas’s research into early Christian ecclesiology convinced him that a genuine form of koinonia could be found in the early Christian community, freely gathered together under the bishop to celebrate the eucharist, hence the English title of his published doctoral thesis.
In such a genuine community, its members exist as free persons. Zizioulas drew on a long-established opposition between “person”, nurtured by and fostering koinonia, and “individual”, a unit separated from other similar units, pursuing its own agenda unless coerced by some superior force. This was a contrast that he developed in articles gathered together in two books, Being as Communion (1985), and Communion and Otherness (2006), and especially in an important, early article, called in Norman Russell’s translation “Personhood and Being”, but, more literally, “From Mask to Person: The contribution of patristic theology to the notion of the person”, originally published in 1977.
Here, he argued that personhood is a notion unique to Christianity, and quite unknown in the classical world, which thought in essentially non-personal terms. The notion of personhood, Zizioulas argued, emerged in the Trinitarian theology of the Cappadocian Fathers — St Basil the Great, St Gregory of Nazianzus, and St Gregory of Nyssa — and their distinction between person, or hypostasis, and being, nature, or substance, later given philosophical lineaments by St Maximos’s contrast between the way of existing, characteristic of personhood, and the principle (or logos) of being, belonging to nature.
Zizioulas’s own contribution was to express this in terms of a contrast between “biological” and “ecclesial” hypostasis. A biological hypostasis is the result of the natural process of conception and birth, giving rise to an individual determined by its nature; an ecclesial hypostasis comes about through the new birth in baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, by which we become members of the Church — the body of Christ. True koinonia is to be found in the eucharistic assembly freely gathered together under the bishop.
As biological hypostaseis, humans aspire towards a freedom that they can never attain; as ecclesial hypostaseis, humans are granted freedom that comes through grace — something beyond human attainment.
There are further differences between these two levels of existence. On the biological level, human existence is determined by the past, and subject to nature, whereas, on the ecclesial level, it is set free from the past through repentance and orientated towards the future. Put another way, the horizon of biological existence is natural and bound by death, whereas the horizon of ecclesial existence is personal and eschatological, moving towards the eternal life of the resurrection.
Ecclesial existence is experienced and nurtured in the eucharistic liturgy, made possible by assembly (in Greek: synaxis): coming together epi to auto (“in the same place”, quoting St Ignatius of Antioch). Liturgy is also marked by movement: the Son, having gathered/assembled together those who are sons and daughters in the Son, moves in love and sacrifice towards the Father in the Spirit.
Here, one can discern a fundamental contrast with any pre- or non-Christian understanding of the human condition; for whereas, apart from Christ, human existence is essentially tragic, in the risen Christ, the human looks towards victory, “a victory not of nature but of the person, and consequently not of man in his self-sufficiency but of man in his hypostatic union with God” (Being as Communion): the paschal victory of the cross, manifest in the resurrection.
Archpriest Andrew Louth is a Professor Emeritus of Durham University, Rector Emeritus of the Orthodox Parish of St Cuthbert and St Bede, Durham, and an Honorary Fellow of St Irenaeus Orthodox Theological Institute, in Radboud University, Nijmegen.
Source: Church Times
