Category Archives: John Zizioulas

The Father Almighty

Posted by on December 19, 2007 1 comment

While Zizioulas’ views regarding the monarchy of the Father are, in some important respects problematic, he does offer some very helpful ways in which to understand the person of the Father, a subject woefully neglected in contemporary trinitarian theology.  A chief issue that Zizioulas illumines is the matter of the Creed which proclaims belief in “God the Father almighty”.  As Colin Gunton was fond of saying, we must not ever separate the omnipotentem from the deum patrem if we seek to avoid a demonic definition of God’s almightiness as sheer voluntaristic power.

Zizioulas helpfully notes that among the patristic fathers the primary understanding of the almightiness of the Father that is confessed in the Creed is not one which emphasizes the power to act, but rather the capacity to embrace and contain.  Thus, to confess that the Father is almighty is to confess that he embraces, encompasses and enfolds all things within his own life.  The Father’s almightiness then, does not so much mean the ability of God to do things, but rather the actuality of the infinite communio which flows from the Father to the Son in the Spirit.

This understanding of the omnipotence of God is helpful, especially insofar as it clarifies how we might helpfully re-conceptualize the idea of the the Father as the arche of the Trinity.  If the Father’s almightiness is his embracing and encompassing of that which is other than himself in communio, then the Father’s almightiness seems correlative to the Son’s kenosis and the pentecostal dispersal of the Spirit.  Or rather, the Father’s infinte openess, his all-encompassing actualization of difference-embraced-in-communion constitutes the ontological ground and the primal form of the inter-trinitarian kenosis about which Balthasar has written so persuasively.  In this light it becomes possible to speak about the Father as the arche of the Trinity without engendering an inappropriate subordinationism.  The Father is the source of the personhood of the Son and the Spirit insofar as he embraces them in love in the ek-static triune relations.  The Father is not so much the fount from which the Son and Spirit eternally spring as he is the circumference of the eternal and unbroken circle of Love which enfolds and constitutes them as his beloved Son in the Spirit of their love.  And it is precisely in so enfolding the Son and Spirit that Father finds his own personhood, his own fatherhood given to him in the form of the loving gift of the Son’s obedience in the Spirit.  The Father, no less than the Son and Spirit receives his personhood in the infinite and eternal circle of the triune relations.  The primal kenosis of the Trinity is from begining to end a circle of mutal self-donation and overabundance.

The Father embraces and lovingly enfolds the Son and the Spirit, and in so doing begets the Son and breaths forth the Spirit, who return to the Father a free sacrifice of love.  Inherent in this understanding of the gift structure whereby the God is God is this sort of kenotic movement in which the going-forth of the Son and Spirit in their respective  economic missions does not alienate them from the Father (as Moltmann would have it in Christ’s cry of dereliction on the Cross), but rather enfolds all created distances within the embrace of the Father, from which they are never torn, even in going into the furthest depths of the far country.

To put it another way, the almightiness of the Father is the reality that takes place when all forms of alienation and distance which seek to  interrupt the divine life in the death and descent of Christ are negated, defeated, and purgatively enfolded into the trinitarian life of communio that is the eternal coinherence of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit.  In short, the almightiness of the Father is the resurrection of the Son, which apocalyptically places all created reality within the new world of resurrection, bringing about the end of the old world of sin and death.  And thus, as Paul says, it is the cross of Christ which is the power and wisdom of God.  Indeed, the power and wisdom of the Father.

Zizioulas on the Father as Cause

Posted by on December 19, 2007 4 comments

One of the points on which John Zizioulas has been roundly criticized is on his insistence that the Father be understood as the arche of the Trinity.  The Father, on Zizioulas’ view, informed by the Cappadocians, is the ground of the personhood of the Son and the Spirit in a distinctly a-symmetrical way.  The Son and Spirit derive their pershonhood, their hypostasis from the Father, and particularly from the Father’s freedom as a person. 

Zizioulas is quick to clarify his view.  Clearly, the Father is never without the Son and the Spirit, they are all co-eternal.  Moreover, the personal causality of the Father vis á vis the Son and Spirit should not be understood at the level of ousia, of substance.  The Father does not bestow the divine nature on the Son and the Spirit (which would result in some sort of Arianism), but rather, personhood.  Zizioulas is clear on this point, the Father is the cause of the personal being of the Son and the Spirit, but the reverse is not the case in any way whatsoever.  The Father’s personhood, unlike that of the Son and Spirit is underived an ingenerate.

This, I think is a fundamental problem in Zizioulas’ trinitarian ontology.  His whole case is built upon the premise that personhood is ontologically ultimate and the personhood can only be rightly understood in an ontological sense as communion.  However, in making the Father the cause of the communion of the Trinity, what are we to make of the Father’s distinctive status as a hypostasis of the Trinity?  How can the Father truly be personal on Zizioulas reading?  He is clear that “a person is always a gift from someone.”  If this is truly the case, how can the Father really be understood as a person?  Zizioulas is clear that the Father does not recieve his personhood from the Son or Spirit in a reciprocal way, because, Zizioulas fears that such a statement would imperil biblical monotheism.

However, does it even make conceptual sense to deny that the Father’s personhood is constituted by his relations with the Son and Spirit?  The tradition of the church has made clear that the only things which distinguish the persons of the Trinity from one another are their relations.  Thus, the Father is the Father because he begets the Son and spirates the Spirit, the Spirit is the Spirit because he is spirated by the Father (through the Son we might add) and the Son is the Son because he is begotten by the Father (through the Spirit we might also add).  If this is the case, then the Father, as a distinct person of the Trinity does not constitute the personhood of the Son and Spirit a-symmetrically, but is himself constituted by his relations of generating and spirating the other two.  In other words, the Father’s fatherhood, which is what makes the Father a distinct hypostasis is only a reality on the basis of his relations with the Son and the Spirit.

Because the Father can never be the Father without the Son and Spirit, how can we say in any meaningful way that the Father causes the personhood of the other two, but is not reciprocally “caused” by the other two?  Clearly the personhood of the Father is constituted by his relation of fatherhood, which is dependent on the eternal co-reality of the Son and Spirit.  There seems no way to say in any meaningful sense that the Father’s personhood, his distinct nature as a hypostasis is underived, for it is contingent upon the Son and Spirit.

All of this seems to indicate the problematic nature of positing the Father as the cause of the personhood of the other persons of the Trinity.  In the first place, it imperils the Father’s own personhood and risks introducing and individualist notion of personhood into our understanding of the personhood of the Father.  Secondly, it introduces the very problematic notion of causality into the Trinity.  As such, it seems that Zizioulas’ monarchical model of the Trinity should not be embraced.  Rather than identifying the One God with the person of the Father, we must be more rigorous in insisting that the Three persons are the One God without remainder.

John Zizioulas on Intelligent Design?

Posted by on August 3, 2007 4 comments

I’m now reading what I take to be the best book written by an Orthodox theologian in the last 20 years, with the possible exception of Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite.  John Zizioulas’ Communion and Otherness is a masterpiece that is not only beautifully Eastern, but philosophically erudite and which engages meaningfully with Western theology.  Herein Zizioulas further develops, refines, and defends his relational ontology of personhood that he first put forth in Being as Communion.  Central to his new book is properly configuring the relationship between Otherness, Freedom, and Communion, all of which he takes to be ontologically primordial, and in some sense coterminous. 

Here’s a quote which spurred my thoughts in relation to the whole idea of “intelligent design”, a newish favorite idea among apologetically-minded evangelicals.

What the scientist sees today as a relational, indeterminate, ‘chaotic’ universe does not call simply for a creator God, but for a God who is so personal as to be capable of self-modification to the point of lending his very ‘mode of being’ to constitute and sustain the being of creation. (p. 32)

What Zizioulas means by “self-modification” is made explicit in the book where he, following Maximus the Confessor argues that ontologically we must distinguish between the ‘what’ of being (its logos) and the ‘how’ of being (its tropos).  Thus, Zizioulas argues that in Christ, God “modifies” his tropos, his “mode of being” in such a way as to assume humanity and all of creation in such a way for it to participate in the divine life, without thereby confusing the logos of God with the logoi of creation.  Thus, creation has true, ontological communion with God, through his “mode of being” as the incarnate Son.  Thus, there is an ontological relationship between creator and creation, but because it takes place through the tropos of God as the Son, it is not as a relationship of fusion or confusion between divinity and humanity but of communion in otherness, which is to say communion in freedom.

The point I take to be interesting about the above quote is that Zizioulas rightly notes that the dynamic and chaotic nature of the world that is noted today by science points not to the need to posit an intelligent designer, but a Redeemer who will graciously elect to bring created being into communion with an imperishable, transcendent life.  What we see in creation, as fallen is not an intelligently designed world, but a world whose very be-ing cries out for ontological liberation – from death – in the Triune life.  

Zizioulas on Mysticism & the Church

Posted by on March 2, 2007 Comments Off

Ecclesial mysticism implies an experience which takes us away from what is normally called mysticism. Here union with God does not take place at the level of consciousness. The problematic of mysticism operates normally with the assumption that the organ (centre) of spirituality is consciousness. Hence it opposes to knowledge, ignorance. However, this presupposes or leads to individualism in mystical experience. The crucial thing is not what happens in me, in my consciousness, but what happens between me and someone else. Knowledge emerges from love, and mystical experience is not preoccupied with what I feel or am conscious of. Ecclesial mysticism turns one’s attention outside oneself. Introspection and self-consciousness have nothing to do with ecclesial mysticism…The Church as the body of Christ points to a mysticism of communion and relationship through which one is so united with the ‘other’ (God and our fellow man) as to form one indivisible unity through which otherness emerges clearly, and the partners of the relationship are distinct and particular not as individuals, but as persons.

John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2007), 306-307.

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