HeyJ LII (2011), pp.

684–699

PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED

OTHERNESS: JOHN ZIZIOULAS’ FINAL
THEOLOGICAL POSITION
NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS
University Ecclesiastical Academy of Thessaloniki, Greece
Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge
University of Wales

INTRODUCTION

If what is written on the cover of Douglas Knight’s (ed.) book The Theology of John
Zizoulas; Personhood and the Church,1 that ‘Zizioulas is widely recognized as the most
significant Orthodox theologian of the last half century’ is right, then the supreme task of
Orthodox theologians of the younger generation is to interrogate his theology, again and
again, in depth. This is more pressing for those Orthodox theologians who, as is the case
with the author of this article, were deeply and for a long time connected with him at
almost all levels of academic life. This interrogation comes from responsibility towards
Orthodox theology, as well as its ecumenical witness and its possible spiritual involvement
in the modern theologico-philosophical quest. Zizioulas is a theologian of great inspiration
and a man of the Church. Ecclesiology as ontology, eschatology as the true meaning of
history, the personhood – nature dialectics, ecclesial mysticism, a pneumatological
Christology, are only some of his valuable contributions to modern theology. But above
all it is his deep devotion to the unique value of Christian theology, as it stems from the
Eucharistic experience, which permits not only an agreement but also, I think, a dialogue
with him if our intentions are not different from his: to engage Orthodox theology with the
most important aspects of the modern intellectual inquiry.
My aim here is twofold. On the one hand, as Metropolitan John in his latest book
Communion and Otherness,2 on which we shall focus, appeals to the authority of the Greek
Fathers, I want to search for evidence for such an appeal in their texts. On the other hand –
and this is more important – I would like to examine his ideas in themselves. What is their
merit in the context of the current theologico-philosophical (and even psychological)
discussion? Above all: can the Greek patristic tradition, if it is read differently, offer
possibly richer material for the elaboration of a modern theology and theological
anthropology, in connection with pressing and demanding contemporary existential
questions? These are the main issues, to the discussion of which this article aspires.

1. PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE . . .

Zizioulas’ two mentors at the Harvard School of Divinity were Georges Florovsky and
Paul Tillich. The former is a spiritual father of the ‘neopatristic synthesis’, a current that

r 2009 The Author. The Heythrop Journal r 2009 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600
Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS 685

postulates the recovery of the Greek patristic tradition, obscured in the course of the
Western ‘Babylonian captivity’ of Orthodox theology, while the latter is a thinker who
aimed par excellence at the adaptation of theological thought to the philosophical – and
especially the ontological – quest. Zizioulas is a spiritual son of both. Tillich had already
attempted (as he makes it clear in Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality3) to
construct a Biblical personalism as the proper answer to the ontological question put by
philosophy in general, thus identifying the event of Christian salvation with the fulfillment
of the ontological quest. Zizioulas seems to undertake the same enterprise in the light of
the Florovskian neopatristic synthesis, thus seeking to accomplish Tillich’s project by
using patristic rather than Biblical material. Florovsky, on the other hand, was a
theologian who had already powerfully claimed that the idea of personality is the principal
Christian contribution to philosophy4, but during his period of maturity he gave little
evidence of engagement with modern philosophical thought. Zizioulas at times attempted
to attribute his notion of person as freedom and escape from nature to Florovsky himself,5
because of the latter’s concept of podvig (ascetical achievement), which Zizioulas takes as
meaning the liberation of person from nature – the latter identified with blind necessity. I
am not sure that Florovsky meant anything like that, but these ideas were not unknown in
Russian religious-philosophical thought, starting with Soloviev6 and ending with
Berdyaev. Berdyaev had already explicitly identified person with freedom and nature/
substance with necessity,7 according to his Kantian convictions. Kant, in continuity with
Descartes’ notion of a detached self and Locke’s notion of a punctual self 8 that describe a
‘spiritual self’ above any attachment to body, passions, community, etc, makes a
distinction between a noumenal self free to unfold its rational categories of understanding,
and an empirical self – unfree, conceived as a burden of necessity. An inner split in the
person thus arises: nature represents a blind necessity, while the source of freedom lies in
the purely intelligible noumenal personal world. The impossibility of synthesis was caused,
as J. Seiger claims,9 by ‘the radical kind of freedom Kant envisioned for the noumenal self’.
This concept of the transcendental person as radical freedom, opposed to nature as dark
necessity, has thus been mainly a Western invention, not unrelated, I believe, to the way
Augustine assimilated Neoplatonic anthropology.10 Western philosophy has followed this
path to the present day: Fichte (who also influenced Russian philosophy in the 19th
century) makes a similar effort to capture the radical freedom of human subjectivity from
external conditions by distinguishing between an I as pure reflective autonomy and
freedom, and a common finite ‘natural’ I, bound up with necessity. Schelling plants this
distinction into the very being of God, as the Urgrund (the dark source of God’s essence)
on the one hand, and the person of God which becomes apparent in creation and
Revelation on the other. There is no room in this article for a detailed analysis, but we can
briefly say that we meet the same freedom-necessity dialectic in Nietzsche’s claim of a
higher selfhood, by negation of the empirical self, and we also find the person-nature
dialectic in Heidegger, disguised as a distinction between factual and factical, i.e. finite
being and being tending to transcendence. For Heidegger (following Husserl’s
phenomenological transcendental I), transcendence constitutes selfhood. He identifies
being with its mode of existence as ek-stasis, something which, as we shall see, greatly
helped Orthodox personalists to articulate their own views.11 What is paradoxical is that
not only philosophers but also theologians such as Lossky, seem to have followed this way
of thinking. We must also add here the discovery of intersubjectivity that made ecstasis
koinonetic, by following and deepening Hegelian relationality12 in light of Biblical thought.
Buber and especially Levinas seem to be smoothly combined with similar patristic ideas.
686 NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

Let us now begin reading Communion and Otherness. In this work (as it also happens in
Lossky’s work, which influenced Yannaras who then influenced Zizioulas) nature is
identified with necessity, while person is identified with freedom.13 Nature is thus in
practice identified with Fall: ‘the conflict between the particular and the general (ousia/
substance/nature) is not only ontological but also in itself unredeemable (author’s italics):
nature not only precedes particular beings and dictates its laws to them, but also finally
swallows them up through death’ (p. 63). Nature, like an autonomous metaphysical
monster ‘dictates its laws’, and finally swallows poor humans up. If we do not succumb to
the temptation to see a shadow of Gnosticism here, we cannot but admit that, for the first
time since Origen nature and the Fall are completely identified.14 (Zizioulas attributes
these views to Maximus, but anyone who checks the texts he gives in note 144 on page 63
will discover that the latter cannot be connected to this kind of definition of nature). In this
case, of course, the notion of the image of God ‘cannot relate to nature . . . but to
personhood’ (p. 165) – despite a series of patristic texts from the Apologists to Gregory
Palamas that attribute this image also to nature, as we shall see later. The question is: if
nature has nothing positive in it, but is simply ‘the yoke of his or her biological hypostasis’
(p. 262), and cannot represent any divine call to deification (because this is what we mean
by ‘image of God’) then why does it have to be saved? If we disconnect the person from
nature in this fashion, it is impossible for nature to be personal, as we read repeatedly in
patristic literature. This identification of nature with the Fall and sin is extended logically
to history, as becoming in time means nothing more than ‘change and decay . . . threatened
by death’ (p. 223). This ‘purgatorial view of history’, as Farrow called it,15 belongs not
only to Origen, but, apparently to some Orthodox personalists as well.
In contrast to nature, person for Zizioulas (as well as for Lossky and Yannaras)
following the tradition of Western idealism, ‘belongs to an entirely different category from
nature – it belongs to the realm of freedom and is in no way a natural category, or a part of
nature’ (p. 277). But how can the person be set to be free by itself if it is created and not
uncreated? Here is the second point: ‘personhood thus proves to be in this world – through
man – but it is not of this world’ (p. 224). Here we have not only a full ontologization of the
person, as the sole image of God in creation, against nature, but also an unavoidable
identification of it with grace, as person here ‘points to an ontology which does not
ultimately depend on the experience of this world’ (p. 225). This means either that we do
not have a person unless we have this transcendent connection, or that we always have
such a connection whenever we have a person – in both cases person is simply another
name for grace. This transcendental subjectivism of a ‘totally free grace of the person’ (p.
10) (that will not be relativized even by the Zizioulian notion of communion, as we shall
show later), that tends to substitute a person/nature dialectic for that of grace/sin, can
hardly be called patristic. Zizioulas never explicitly asserts that this detached person, as
well as nature as a whole, needs to be saved by grace, instead of being grace itself –
although we can find some evidence for the distinction between person and grace in
Lossky. But let us now examine the concept of the person in the Fathers (including some of
the Cappadocians and Maximus, whom Zizioulas favors).
These authors assert that the human person is not only inconceivable without nature,
but that personal particularity is not conceivable without the particular attributes of
nature. Gregory of Nyssa explicitly connects human hypostases with different substantial/
natural attributes that he calls by the Aristotelian term , (in a text where he
identifies person with hypostasis and both with atomon – contrary to the Zizioulian
detachment of person from atomon).16 Maximus the Confessor asserts that: ‘If the
 PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS 687

attributes that distinguish one’s body and soul from others’ bodies and souls come
together, they characterize him and make him a hypostasis, separate from others’
hypostases’; thus the logos of one’s hypostasis/person is the ‘sum of his personal
substantial attributes’.17 This means that for Maximus nature is something we have to
accept as an essential part of our person that is implicit in its emergence as such. What is of
greatest interest is the Maximian definition of the human person, which is completely
different from that of Zizioulas and his fellow personalists: for Maximus the person is not
an ecstatic escape from nature to freedom, but precisely that mode of existence that allows
nature to become innovated, by ‘acting or being acted upon’, without changing its ‘logos of
being’.18 This means that for the Confessor person is a kind of multiple dialogical
entelecheia of nature: that is, it is nature that is personal, i.e. personally constituted. This
derives from the notion of the logos of being, which is a deeply relational term for
Maximus, meaning both ‘a divine art of creating natures’19 and the divine will as an
invitation to dialogue. Every being is created by a divine logos/will; this means that every
nature already represents a personal call to dialogue between man and God. This is
ultimately why the logos of each being is inextricably connected with a mode of existence.
Zizioulas’ error is to separate the two, so that he is able to write that ‘substance is
relational not in itself but in and through and because of the ‘‘mode of being’’ it possesses’
(p. 25). Zizioulas thereby creates two beings: nature and personalized nature; substance/
nature as a non-relational entity, and a mode of existence that relates and can also make
substance a relational reality. But it is because logos is a relational reality that it is always
ontologically connected with a mode of existence, which is the personal realization of the
dialogue that accompanies logos – because logos ultimately is a concrete koinonetic event.
Logos is a personal divine creative proposal that awaits a response – the human personal
logos – and this dialogue represents a nature’s personal status of communion with God,
that is, the mode of (dialogical) existence of this being. This means ultimately that each
mode of existence (tropos hyparxeos) is a personal mode of realizing the en-hypostatic
logos/vocation inscribed in nature, in a dialogical/synergetic/analogical20 way, and not a
liberation from nature. As the logoi of beings are also for Maximus existential ways –
hence his expression ‘to converge with the logos of nature’ (PG 91, 28D–29A) – he suggests
that the logoi must also be personally/dialogically achieved, (i.e. acted out) ‘according to
nature’ (PG 90, 769C). Ontology for Maximus is thus eschatological. Natures become what
they really are in the course of this dialogical mode of existence which can realize their
logos as an invitation to true being, to the true final meaning of their existence. For
Maximus therefore, nature/substance – as he explicitly claims – can and must be combined
with freedom. It is always personally constituted nature and not person alone that is
freedom or pure intentionality; this is what Maximus means when he asserts paradoxically,
against Pyrrhus who claimed that everything that belongs to nature is bound to necessity,
that concerning human as well as divine natures ‘the nature of the logical beings is not
bound to necessity’.21 This means that Zizioulas’ dark, blind and isolated substance/nature
that is relational ‘not in itself’ but in a second ‘personal’ step, does not truly exist, as nature
only exists only as the content of a personal dialogue between logical beings. Nature and
person do not represent two separate realities, but a single reality of being-as-a-dialogical-
event – a dialogue that is always personal – though it is not always salutary (hence
Maximus’ claim that our will can go , against nature, i.e. against the divine logos/
will hidden in it – then nature does indeed become a burden of blind necessity). The
Incarnation of the Logos is God’s unsurpassable proposal for the fulfillment of this
dialogue.
688 NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

This is why the patristic tradition, from the Apologists of the first century to Gregory
Palamas in the fourteenth century, had no difficulty in attributing the image of God
emphatically not only to the person but also to human nature.22 While Zizioulas claims
that the two enemies of otherness are self and nature (p. 88) and speaks of the necessity of
‘the death of the Self’ (p. 51–52) – while, moreover, pouring scorn on marriage, he
identifies it with natural law, biological love and loss of freedom and specificity, where the
lovers ‘use each other as a means to an end’ (pp. 58, 72, 262 etc) – Maximus does not
hesitate to call such a theology ‘Manicheistic’ because we thereby admit ‘two causes or two
principles’ of being. With regard to marriage specifically he maintains that ‘if marriage is
evil, this means that the natural law of birth is also evil; and if this natural law of birth is
evil, then the creator of this nature, who gave it such a law, must also be blamed’.23
More serious questions arise here. For the Metropolitan of Pergamon nature is only death,
decay and the laws of necessity – never a gift. This kind of nature/fall can escape from its
condition through person, but it cannot be transformed – while Lossky seems, by contrast, to
leave room for this possibility. The reality of sin (and the subsequent need for and availability
of grace) remains unknown to this person who seems to be beyond good and evil – against the
patristic (and especially Maximian) witness that only the person can sin and fall while nature’s
fall is blameless.24 As ‘pure liberation from nature’, this sort of person is unwilling to work
with his nature (even when he ‘offers’ it to God) rather than trying to escape from it as
Locke’s punctual self does. The Zizioulian subject is thus pre-modern; it possesses no
interiority (a place where gnomic will and prohairesis lie), no instincts, and of course no
unconscious. As a former psychologist, I cannot but feel surprised with Zizioulas’ assertion
that ‘being other and being free in an ontological sense, that is, in the sense of being free to be
yourself, and not someone or something else, are two aspects of one and the same reality’ (p.
13). The reality of such a ‘self’ is partially unconscious for depth psychology; anyone who
ignores this calls the ‘self’ this ‘someone or something else’ that Zizioulas wants to avoid –
precisely because what we call the self is imaginary. The way to know your self, indeed, is
through long and very hard struggle as it passes through wrestling with this unconscious. The
ascetic struggle to shed light upon this dark basement of the person is not without meaning;
but as we shall see later, Metropolitan John misunderstands this struggle. As a result this kind
of person seems to be a vehicle for escape towards the eternal euphoria of narcissism (which
never means lack of intersubjectivity). We cannot be persons, however, unless (until) we
possess a nature that unites us with the rest of creation and makes us feel and hold it, enjoy it,
cry for it and offer it back to its Creator – not only because it is his, but also because (and this
is extremely important) it is ours.
To conclude this section: The main patristic source for this connection of nature with
death and decay is probably the treatise De Incarnatione of Athanasius the Great.25 What
Athanasius wants to say, however, is that created nature is ‘as it is created out of nothing, a
fluid and weak and mortal one, compared with itself’ – i.e. not in its essence but only when
it is left out of the dialogue with its Creator, when it is conceived alone. Essentially, nature
as well as person are already in the order of grace, already gift, already a vocation, and the
call for an eschatological dialogical fulfillment.

2. . . . AND DICTATED OTHERNESS

John Zizioulas’ Trinitarian theology is based on the traditional Eastern doctrine of the
monarchy of the Father. He attributes this doctrine mainly to the Cappadocians and
 PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS 689

Maximus the Confessor, and this of course is true. It is not always easy, however, to agree
with his understanding of their texts.
For Zizioulas the Father is the one God of the Creed. Once again the discussion is about
freedom that can be assured only if the Father ‘as a person and not substance’ (p. 121) (in
Zizioulas’ vocabulary this always opposes nature/necessity to person/freedom, even in
God) makes a ‘personal rather than ousianic’ (p. 120) constitution of the two other
hypostases. The two characteristics of Zizioulas’ Triadology are therefore: first, its (rather)
non-ousianic character, and second, the rejection of any element of reciprocity. As we shall
see, the Cappadocians as well as Maximus never supported such views.
Concerning the first, Zizioulas never explains what the role of nature is in the divine
generation: ‘giving existence or being (eı́nai) to the Son by the Father is a matter not of
nature, of the what God is, but of how God is. This implies that the idea of causation is
used in order to describe the how of divine being and avoids making the emergence of the
Trinity a matter of transmission of ousia. What the Father ‘‘causes’’ is a transmission not
of ousia but of personal otherness’ (p. 129). Here the metropolitan makes an important
point: he believes that the Creed of Nicaea concerning the generation of the Son ‘from the
substance of the Father’ was altered by the Council of Constantinople; therefore what we
read in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is that the Son simply was born ‘from the
Father’ (p. 120). According to our author, this alteration was the ‘revolutionary’ work of
the Cappadocians against the ‘substantialist’ language of Athanasius and the supporters of
‘homoousion’. The Cappadocians supposedly detached themselves from this kind of
theologizing about the Trinity and inaugurated a uniquely ‘personalist’ language, which
led to the ‘correction’ of the first Ecumenical Council. It seems, however, that the
Cappadocians did not desire to abandon ‘substance’ or ‘homoousion’; on the contrary,
concerning Trinitarian theology, they worked diligently to tie their ‘personalist’ language
with the traditional ‘substantialist’ content.
Let us begin with Gregory of Nyssa, who in his treatise How by saying three persons in
God we do not mean three Gods . . . writes that: ‘the term God does not mean person but
substance. Because if person meant God then only one person could be called God, the one
who was meant by this name; in this way we call Father only the Father as this name means
person’ (par. 5). Throughout this text Gregory attempts to show that when we say God we
mean either the one substance, or ‘the one cause along with his caused’ (par. 10). In his
Great Catechetical Sermon (ch. 3, 2) he explicitly identifies monarchy with the unity of
substance, while in his Antirr. A (par. 530 – 531) he identifies the one deity with the one
principle of it, which he defines not as the person of the Father, although he recognizes him
as the cause of the Trinity, but as the ‘concurrence of the similars’ – a very important
remark to which we must return. It is also useful to remember that in his first work
mentioned above Gregory identifies prosopon (person) with atomon (individual) (par. 6–7).
In trying to defend himself against his critics who claim that the Fathers do not oppose
‘atomon’ to person as he does, Zizioulas claims that Gregory limits this identification to
human beings, while he attributes to John of Damascus the position that there are some
who make a distinction between prosopon and hypostasis, by calling prosopon the relation
of entities with one another. And he concludes: ‘is this not the reason why we never
encounter in the established theological tradition the expression ‘‘God, one ousia, three
atoma’’ and therefore we cannot say that the persons of the Trinity are three
‘‘individuals’’?’ (p. 175–176) What is curious is that, following the Cappadocian tradition,
(and after the clarifications made to the term hypostasis after the fourth century) John of
Damascus himself does not hesitate to identify hypostasis not only with prosopon but also
690 NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

with atomon, speaking of the Trinity: ‘therefore the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit are hypostases and atoma (individuals) and prosopa (persons); and the eidos (species)
that contains them is the superessential and unfathomable deity’ (Elementary Introduction
to Dogma, 7). Along with Leontius of Byzantium and Ps. Cyril26 this text is a witness that
prosopon was not in the Greek patristic tradition opposed to atomon in the modern way
Zizioulas uses them. Any student of the history of dogma knows well that the major event
in fourth-century Christian doctrine concerning Trinitarian theology was the effort to
distinguish between substance and hypostasis; as Gregory Nazianzen clearly explains,
person was introduced by the Italians, as they could not express the above distinction
otherwise ‘due to the poverty of their language’.27 After the clarifications made against
Sabellianism, Nazianzen suggests that we can accept those who prefer the term person if by
this they mean hypostasis.28 This makes clear that the identification of person with
hypostasis occurred for historical and pastoral reasons and not for ontological ones – we
would otherwise have plenty of Cappadocian texts explaining this fact. We would also
have at least some texts claiming that while we may use the term atomon instead of person
or hypostasis for human beings, we cannot do the same for the Trinity – however, there are
no such texts. Of course hypostasis is by definition relational; it is futile for Zizioulas and
his adherents to attempt to project modern (inter-) subjectivism on the Patristic tradition.
By attempting this Zizioulas on the one hand closes the atomon/self to person/
communion, for atomon now means a non-relational entity that exists somehow by itself
(like blind nature) but can enter into communion only in a second ‘step’; on the other hand
he tries to make a radical break with anything that reminds him of substance, such as the
homoousion.
Two other Zizioulian claims are first, that the Cappadocians degraded the homoousion
and second, that the generation of the Son and the spiration of the Spirit have nothing to
do with substance. Both assertions are incorrect. Basil the Great insisted that, in general,
the term homoousion (consubstantiality) is absolutely necessary for Trinitarian theology,
because ‘it makes perfect the notion of person (as nothing is homoousion with itself, but
with something else); thus it is a good and pious term as, on the one hand, it defines the
character of hypostases, and, on the other hand, it describes the unchangedness of
substance’.29 Basil, moreover, never thought to correct the Nicene Creed, as he strongly
believed that the term homoousion of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed was identical
with the expression ‘from the substance of the Father’ of the former. He does not therefore
appear disturbed about the supposedly ‘ousianic’ tendencies of the first Ecumenical
Council, as Zizioulas desires him to be, but on the contrary claims that: ‘as the Son exists
from the Father by the way of generation, and has the Father by nature (physikos)
imprinted upon him, he saves on the one hand the unchangedness as he is an image, and on
the other hand he saves the homoousion as an offspring of him’.30 That means that for
Basil homoousion saves better than any other term both the integrity of the persons and
their unity of essence, because homoousion expresses the principle of the eternal personal
dialogue within the Trinity, as an eternal circulation of substance that is always one but in
a state of absolute inter-givenness. Nonetheless, Basil has no difficulty connecting
monarchy with the unity of substance, as a careful reading of his On the Holy Spirit, 45,
demonstrates. Basil makes a distinction concerning the Trinity between the specificity of
hypostases and the monarchy; he connects the persons with the former and the common
substance/nature ( ) which he also calls ‘communion of deity’ (
) with the latter. More explicitly, in his Sermon 24 (par. 3) to forestall any
identification of the monarchy with just one person (the Father) who might act
 PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS 691

independently, he writes: ‘there is one God who is the Father; there is also one God who is
the Son, but there are not two Gods, because there is an identity between the Father and
the Son. Because there is not another deity in the Father, and another in the Son nor
another substance (physis) in either of them’. This is also why one cannot claim that the
generation of the Son and the spiration of the Spirit have nothing to do with substance.
If we do this, ousia/substance is left out of mutual givenness, because Zizioulas can only
understand such an event one-dimensionally; in this case he is afraid that the Father would
hold divine substance in advance, and then transmit it. Zizioulas believes this claim comes
from Gregory Nazianzen’s conception of the Father as the only ‘willing one’ in the Trinity
(p. 121) – as such, the person who initiates freedom and otherness in the Trinity – while
obviously the Son is the willed one. But what if the Son is the willing Son of the willing
Father, and, as Athanasius writes, ‘he wills the Father by the same will that he is willed by
him and by this will he loves and wills and honors the Father as well; and there is only one
will from the Father in the Son, and therefore we consider the Son in the Father and the
Father in the Son’?31
The only response to these questions is that we cannot appreciate the patristic concept
of the monarchy without conceiving of reciprocity as the core of it; this is my second
response to Zizioulas’ Triadology. What do we mean by reciprocity? Hypostasis signifies
that divine nature is relational, instead of overcoming it, as Zizioulas intends it to do. As
the synonymous words hypostasis/person/atomon signify precisely this relationality of the
substance/nature itself – a relationality where substance is also active (‘homoousion’), as
not only Athanasius the Great32 but also the Cappadocians understood – the only
definition of monarchy must be that of Gregory Nazianzen: ‘Monarchy that cannot be
limited to one person, for it is possible for unity if at variance with itself to come into a
condition of plurality; but one which is constituted by equality of nature, and agreement of
opinion, and identity of motion, and a convergence of its elements to one, something that
is impossible to happen in the created nature; so that though numerically distinct there is
no division of ousia’.33 Zizioulas suggests this represents a kind of moral sense of
monarchy (p. 132–134) – as if the Trinity needs an internal moral law to regulate its inner
attitude! The text is explicit, however: Gregory defines the monarchy here not only as (a) a
personal causation made by the Father, but also as (b) an equality of nature and (c) a
convergence ( ) of the two into one. If these three presuppositions are not active,
we do not have the monarchy. This means that the monarchy has also to do with
homoousion and of course with a reciprocity of convergence of the two consubstantial
persons with the one consubstantial Father for the divine ousia not to be divided. Then in
order to avoid a division in the divine nature, the monarchy as a ‘personal’ achievement of
the Father is not enough. Gregory identifies here the unity of God with the unity of his
ousia/substance, precluding any limitation of this unity to the activity of only one person –
contrary to what Zizioulas argues. In ontological terms this means not only that the Father
offers otherness to the two other persons, but he allows them reciprocally to offer him, in a
dynamic way, his own otherness (because without a convergence of the two to the Father
and ‘agreement of opinion and identity of motion’, this substantial as well as personal
unity would be broken. This is what Athanasius meant, as we saw above, by insisting that
the Son is not only willed by the Father, but is also willing the Father, ‘by the same will that
he is willed by the Father’). Note too that Gregory insists that this is precisely the
difference between created and uncreated: a complete consubstantiality and convergence,
so that unity is the upshot of a reciprocal self-offering. This means that the monarchy of
the Father is something not possessed by him but offered to him by the two others.
692 NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

Monarchy is not something imposed upon the others, as it requires the free assistance of
the two others to be achieved. The Father not only generates the consubstantial otherness
of the two; at the same time he depends on them for his own otherness to be fulfilled, in this
eternal dynamic reciprocal inter-giveness of divine substance. This means that what the
Father offers the two other persons is the possibility to ‘simultaneously’ offer him his own
otherness in return. The difference between this notion of monarchy and that of Zizioulas
is indeed enormous.
In Zizioulas’ monarchy only one person is basically active – the Father. This person is
independent even regarding his own substance/ousia. For Zizioulas only the Father is
‘uncaused’, while the two others are ‘caused’; there is thus only one who ‘causes’ and he is
the only giver of otherness – otherwise ‘the monotheism is at risk’, as he claims (p. 144).
Metropolitan John would have been right only in one case: if we introduce time into the
generation of the two divine persons – and this is what he unconsciously tends to do when
he asserts that ‘his (i.e. the Father’s) freedom in bringing them forth into being (my italics)
does not impose him upon them, since they are not already (my italics) there, and their own
freedom does not require that their consent be asked, since they are not established as
entities before their relationship with the Father (my italics)’ (p. 122). If I read correctly, this
text says that the two persons existed only after the Father generated them and thus their
consent need not be asked, as they did not exist before; in other words ‘there was a time
when they did not exist’ as Arius believed. But if we do not insert time into God’s existence,
then to cause and to be caused are not two successive ‘moments’ in the life of the Trinity,
and they should not be conceived in a ‘successive’ way. If they cannot be conceived in a
‘successive’ way, this means that ‘cause’ and ‘causation’ are ultimate and reciprocal
presuppositions of one another. This is what I mean when I say that the Father’s initiative
is not that of causing ‘equal’ others by dictation, but of inaugurating reciprocity in an
ontological and not moral, as Zizioulas thinks, sense. This is a revolution for ontology,
while the Zizioulian revolution of the ‘dictated otherness’ is very familiar in the history of
Philosophy (and in the recent history of Psychology as we shall see). Our otherness is
‘dictated’ when the giver of this otherness does not allow us to give him otherness in return.
At a deeper level, we do not truly give otherness to someone unless we set them free
simultaneously to offer otherness back to us. This is why the Zizioulian ‘asymmetrical’
construal of monarchy collapses here as well. By being ‘caused’ willingly by the Father, the
Son at the same ‘moment’ offers to be his ‘cause’ as well, and so with the Spirit. The Son
and the Spirit become thereby the ‘causes’ not of course of the Father, but of the Father’s
‘causation’ along with him. (The term ‘asymmetrical’ is nonetheless not accurate even for
human love. The one who initiates the expression of love does not by any means feel
‘prior’, because, even if he initiates love, this love for the other is already a gift of life for the
lover; through true love you already receive your being from the other; love is thus by
nature open to reciprocity). This ‘detail’ is so important that I can assert there is no
similarity between a Trinitarian theology based on this kind of reciprocity and one based
on dictated otherness.
Let us look at the anthropological and theological consequences of the Zizioulian
concept of otherness compared with the notion of otherness we find in the patristic texts.
Zizioulas believes that ‘the self must die’ (p. 51), because ‘every self exists only in being
affirmed as ‘‘other’’ by an ‘‘other’’’ (p. 55), so that the self is finally ‘caused by the Other
and . . . aims at and ‘‘rests’’ in the Other’ (p. 54). Zizioulas accuses Buber, Lacan and even
Levinas of not knowing this concrete other, and he is partially right. But what he ignores is
more important. Speaking of Maximus’ ‘ever-moving-rest’ Zizioulas emphasizes the ‘rest’
 PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS 693

in the other but underplays the ‘ever-moving’ aspect – i.e. he forgets that when we speak of
such an encounter, we mean a syn-ergy of two active wills, since otherwise we would be
simply overwhelmed by the Other. Maximus the Confessor is explicit on this: it is
pernicious to say that in the encounter between God and man (or between men) we have
only one will; we can have at most a unity of wills (‘ ’). Without the gnomic
(i.e. personal) will remaining intact and active, such a ‘rest’ would become the end of
personhood rather than its fulfillment. Maximus thus avoids Monotheletism and the
subsequent Monophysitism of the dictated otherness by keeping the gnomic or personal
will free, active and conscious; otherwise, ‘if the will is one, the different substances will be
melted . . . Concerning hypostases, they will be amalgamated, as the personal character of
the hypostases, by becoming identical, will confuse everyone with everyone else . . . ’.34 In
this way, paradoxically, we have not only the death of the self but also the death of the
Other.
Otherness can only be reciprocal, i.e. dialogical. We otherwise end up not with
communion but with passivity.35 The metropolitan changes the phrase ‘I love, therefore I
am’, into ‘I am loved, therefore I am’ (p. 89). If we want to avoid such dictated passivity,
we must say with Maximus ‘I am loved and I love, therefore I am’. Otherwise we have
abolished personal will; God loves all his creatures, but only a few of them participate in
his love, because it is the active human will that matters. The will must not die, as Zizioulas
avers; rather it must be trained spiritually to become open to the other, rather than
remaining , self-loving, as Maximus liked to repeat. In this way we can also
correctly understand the Eucharist. For Zizioulas ‘the essence of the eucharistic ethos . . . is
the affirmation of the Other and of every other as a gift to be appreciated and to evoke
gratitude’ (p. 90). But, for Maximus this is only half the truth. As he brilliantly insists, after
he gives his gifts to the world, God ‘forgets’ that all those gifts were his; so, when man
offers these gifts back to him in the Eucharist, he accepts them as if these gifts belonged to
man and not to himself.36 In ontological terms this means that without the affirmation of
our willing/acting otherness, the affirmation of God’s otherness is absolutely passive; thus,
the affirmation of otherness must be willing, active and reciprocal.
It is possible not only to have our own otherness dictated; it is possible also to dictate
otherness to others. In this case ‘the natural or moral qualities of the Other, whether
positive or negative, ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘bad’’, do not affect our attitude to him or her’ (p. 91).
This seems marvelous at first sight, but is it? We now understand why the Fathers
considered personal otherness to be connected with various natural attributes. Zizioulas
often insists that we love the other simply because he is other, regardless of his attributes;
we can now see, however, that in this way we render the other speechless. We are not
dealing with a real ‘natural’ other who has instincts and passions, body and an
unconscious, as we have. We thereby love the other as a kind of open promise, the way
young parents love their newborn baby, because they can project everything they like or
expect upon him or her, without any resistance. We thereby love others as ‘selfobjects’, in
Heinz Kohut’s terminology.37 Selfobjects are possessed by the narcissistic libido in support
of the grandiose – exhibitionistic self, in the form of an idealization of the other and then
an imaginary melting into him, in order that the illusion of the perfection of the self may be
preserved. Things are not so easy for theologians! They become more difficult if we add in
Lacan’s claim that narcissism (even the primary one) does not mean an absence of inter-
subjective relationship, but just the opposite,38 as well as the remarks of D. Lagache who
claims that sado-masochism (not as a sexual perversion but as a mode of relating and being
related) represents the principal dimension of common inter-subjectivity.39 This means
694 NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

that the objectification of the self or of the other (or, in our theological language, dictating
otherness or to having it dictated by another) is the most common everyday experience.
Such objectification takes place not only if we identify someone (or ourselves) with a
certain natural characteristic, but also if we consider ourselves or the other as lying above
such characteristics, in order for it to be possible to use them as a selfobject! To love an
other or to be truly loved is thus really difficult, as it requires opening a place for the real
natural and personal ‘other’, in me. This is what is expressed, as I have claimed
elsewhere,40 by the patristic term ‘homoousion’. Because the relationship between the
three divine persons cannot be conceived without their eternally fulfilled consubstantial
dialogue of intergivenness, so too any relationship between humans cannot be understood
otherwise than as the step-by-step progress towards a dialogical/synergetic reciprocity that
may be extended to a mutual consubstantial co-inherence – now by the mystery of the
Cross. The Cross destroys any a-symmetrical construal of otherness, as proclaimed by
Zizioulas, who here copies but tries also to correct Levinas. If we really take into account
the existential reality of the Cross, we are able easily to realize that the crucified is the
servant of my own otherness, the ‘otherness of the other’ as I like to call it, i.e. an otherness
that I like, I choose and I develop. This is expressed brilliantly by Maximus in his doctrine of
the multiple incarnations of Christ, ‘becoming everything for everyone’ according to each
one’s freedom.41 Love always assists the birth of the ‘other’s otherness’, and not the
otherness we give to the other. Love thus listens, waits, understands and becomes surprised
by the other. This means that persons are affirmed in their own identity only in a reciprocal
way, or better, in a freedom for absolute reciprocity that leaves the possibility of the
other’s otherness permanently open. Without this circulation of otherness, otherness can
only be dictated, and the relationship unavoidably becomes totalitarian. This is why I
conclude that, through his understanding of monarchy, subjectivism is strongly affirmed
by Zizioulas, rather than transformed into communion, because otherness here is not my
otherness, since it is the other who decides about it and then dictates it to me.
Because the Zizioulian concept of relationship determines his ecclesiology, they both
need radical correction. I have published a book aiming at such correction42, and there is
insufficient space to repeat my arguments here. Zizioulas misreads the sources of the first
two centuries in order to put the bishop in the place of the dictating Father, and ignores the
Christological foundations of all the ecclesiastical charismata. He also tends to overlook
the imitational/participative dimension of Church structures; but this is another
considerable discussion.
I cannot close this paper without saying a few words on Zizioulian ‘existentialism’. The
metropolitan refuses to be called an existentialist because for him existentialism is a
projection of human existence on the divine, while he wants to do the opposite. The
personalist current in modern Orthodox theology is connected, first of all, with modern
idealistic subjectivism, as I have said above, and it is only as such that it tends toward
existentialism. Besides, the essence of existentialism is different: it is the exaltation of the
mode of existence above being in general, as it is appropriately described mainly in
Heidegger’s Introduction in Metaphysics, and, of course, the concept of ecstasis out of
nature as it is shaped both by Heidegger and Sartre (in antithesis, as I have argued
elsewhere, with the patristic notion of ecstasis, as the ecstasis of nature itself ).43 If this is
true, then Zizioulas (as well as Yannaras and even Lossky) belong somehow to the wider
context of existentialism. Of course Zizioulas is inconceivable without his Levinasian turn
to inter-subjectivity, with a very essential ‘correction’ of Levinas: he ontologizes the
Levinasian ethical priority of the Other, by connecting it with the patristic conception of
 PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS 695

monarchy, as he understands it. He thereby modifies his concept of ecstasis by giving it

also a ‘social’, horizontal dimension. In any case, it would be useful for all Orthodox
personalists to read Paul Ricoeur’s Soi-même comme un autre,44 in the tenth study of which
he criticizes the Levinasian priority of the Other which tends to become an absolute
heteronomy, where the call of the lover cannot be distinguished from that of the
executioner, unless we admit an opposite movement from the self towards the Other that
recognizes and accepts him. This ‘energetic’ account of relationship, of course, which
unites, as Ricoeur claims, Levinas to Husserl, remains unfortunately enclosed in
subjectivity; Maximus’ synergetic/dialogical reciprocity is something different and much
richer, as it takes place in both subjects and can be mutually verified.
And a last word on the Zizioulian contempt for Lacan. Against some Orthodox
theologians who claim the opposite,45 Zizioulas declares that ‘there is no similarity
whatsoever between Maximus’ and Lacan’s concepts of Desire’ (pp. 51, 72). Zizioulas’
ecstaticism in this context takes the form of an insistent monoenergism or monotheletism,
for he assures us that there is no question of ‘any understanding of desire as a movement of
the Self: the Other initiates or ‘‘causes’’ our desire for him in and through his desire for us’
(p. 51). This automatic passivity of desire means inevitably that only the master of Desire
desires in a true sense, and what he desires turns out to be the irresistible internal law of my
existence – as Lacan well understood. The self, according to the metropolitan of
Pergamon, appears to be constituted precisely in the mirror-like automatism of the
replication of the Other’s desire, and is thereby rendered a ‘relational automaton’ (as I
have termed it elsewhere – in the second chapter of my Orthodoxy and Modernization (in
Greek)), that is, a radically heteronomous existence which cannot ‘reassign its free will’
according to St Maximus, but simply denies it. Moreover, this denial of the assumption of
the Other’s Desire as my own – because this means precisely that ‘Desire does not
constitute some movement of the self’ – also manifests my own radical self-interest, since it
is only in this way, by copying the Desire of the Other, that I also can acquire a real self-in-
communion. This is to say, it is not really the Other that I love, but his Desire for me – the
Other in effect is my own fundamental deficiency – exactly as Lacan says. Yet oddly
Zizioulas thinks that by using the above phrase he has advanced beyond Lacan.
A Neoplatonizing element in Zizioulas’ thinking is his inability to understand that the
theological value of these Lacanian theses lies in the discovery of the ‘transcendent’
character of natural Desire, as is also the case with the ‘transcendent character’ of the
natural will in St Maximus, or the natural desire for the transcendent which De Lubac
finds in Aquinas. Zizioulas’ quasi-anthropological Platonism is horrified at the fact that
created nature already finds itself in the order of grace, and consequently desires by nature
that which transcends nature. The only thing, according to Zizioulas, which is entitled to
have a relationship with grace (or perhaps to replace grace?) is the person. Of course for St
Maximus and the Fathers the immediate ‘supranatural’ referentiality of the natural will/
desire is God – while in Lacan’s secularized thought this ‘supranatural’ referentiality is a
fullness that is imaginary, seeing that it is definitively lost and unattainable in reality. What
concerns us here is that it is on the level of nature that Lacan finds the analogue of the
theological natural will: the inclination towards a fullness that is ‘transcendent’, that is to
say, social, which finds in the (definitively lost) Other an abundance of meaning and life.
The metropolitan of Pergamon misinterprets Lacan here (as he does Maximus): he thinks
that since in the former (and also in the latter, despite what the metropolitan says) Desire
refers fundamentally to personal fullness, it is in reality ignorant of the Other. The
opposite is the case: the natural will, or natural Desire, tends to find the Other precisely
696 NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

through the superabundance that is implied by communion with him. The bare fact of
desire does not imply the inevitable loss of the Other; it can also signify the finding of the
Other as superabundance of life and relation. The difference here (most important)
between Maximus and Lacan lies in the way the Christian Maximus is familiar with the
ascetic theory of the transcendence of self-love, through which we finally encounter the real
Other in person. The natural fullness of relation is thereby consolidated as interpersonal
synergistic communion. Lacan does not recognize this path, and natural fullness is left as
the imagining of a definitively lost imaginary relation, the lack of which matures the
subject harshly. Lacan thereby remains within the bounds of fallen nature. Zizioulas’ more
or less Platonizing mentality (although he rejects Platonism) does not seem to have a
serious problem with a personal/social ecstasy that is above and outside of nature and the
natural will/Desire. The problem here lies in the fact that without the natural will/Desire,
our ecstasy risks becoming bereft of anthropological content – that is, it risks becoming a
pure ‘personal’ imagining, since I neither exist within this relationship as a complete and
active subject, nor does the other respond as such. We then exist in an illusory fullness of
communion, yet at the same time as an absolute natural ontological deficiency – and Lacan
is triumphantly vindicated!

3. THE CHRISTOLOGY OF ESCAPE AND THE END OF KNOWLEDGE

The reader of Zizioulas’ book gets the impression that, concerning the Son, we possibly
have two generations of him (pp. 129–132). We have seen above that Zizioulas has no
problem with the ‘transmission of personal otherness’, while he does have a serious
problem with the ‘transmission of ousia’ (p. 129) – i.e. he has no problem with a Father
possessing otherness and then transmitting (or dictating) it, while he has problem with a
Father possessing a nature and then transmitting it. This tends to suggest two successive
‘moments’ in the generation of the Son: that of the homoousion and that of personal
otherness. As we have said, the Fathers clearly connected the two, the latter being
impossible without the former. Basil the Great, for example, writes: ‘(the Son is) the
character of the Father’s hypostasis, in order for us to learn the homoousion’,46 or ‘the
whole of Father’s nature is imprinted on the Son as a stamp’47 – and many other
expressions that show that the homoousion, as we have seen, does not prevent but, on the
contrary, helps us to understand the integrity of the persons, as the homoousion is this full
circulation of nature which expresses the eternal ontological dialogue in the Trinity.
The most serious Christological problem in Zizioulas’ thought, however, seems to be
the way he conceives of Christ’s identity. Zizioulas tends to degrade the communicatio
idiomatum in Christ to stress the fact that what is active in Christ is ‘the free person of the
Logos. Just as divine nature escapes ontological necessity by being constituted or
‘‘hypostasized’’ through the person of the Father, the Oneness of Christ’s being is realized
in freedom by being a matter of unity in and through a person, the hypostasis of the Son’
(p. 37). As the person of the Father frees God’s substance, human nature, which also
consists in a burden of necessity, has to escape toward freedom through Logos/Christ’s
free hypostasis, because Christ’s hypostasis ‘is not dependent on his natural qualities’ (p.
109). By this affirmation Zizioulas, without being careful to distance himself from
Docetism, establishes a kind of Christology of Escape. Salvation is a matter of escape
rather than the synergetic/dialogical transformation of created nature. It is useful to read
here a text by Maximus, in order to show how different things are in the Fathers: ‘the
 PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS 697

perfect work of love and the fulfillment of its activity is to make the attributes and the names
of those who are linked by it to belong to one another. Thus it makes man God and makes
God to appear as a man, because of the one and identical agreement of will and movement
of the two’.48 Here man seems to be saved (and freed) through a dialogical communion of
the two natures through their respective wills and acts, a communion that transfigures
humanity’s nature, and not through an escape via the Logos’ hypostasis. Most important of
all, human nature is here completely active, willing, feeling, knowing, collaborating –
nothing is imposed on it, as it walks towards its resurrection in Christ. Without two active
natures in synergy/dialogue, Christology is no different from a Neoplatonic ecstatic escape.
The danger of Monotheletism or Monoenergism here is obvious.
It is because of this passivity of humanity’s nature in Zizioulian theology (the person
seems to be active, while his nature remains passively escaped from, or ‘offered’ to God not
as a gift, but rather as a dark burden of necessity), that he understands mysticism as he
does. I wholeheartedly agree with the metropolitan’s ecclesial understanding of mysticism
as relationship and communion where persons flourish undivided and distinct in the Spirit.
My objection is the complete preclusion of consciousness along with introspection and
self-consciousness from it (p. 306f.). Consciousness here is only conceived as opposed to
relationship, as if the latter had to take place unconsciously. How could we have otherness,
however, without any trace of consciousness? One can find dozens of authors on what we
(falsely) call ‘spirituality’, where consciousness, or introspection, or awareness of God’s
grace are not opposed to communion or relationality. The Cappadocians and Maximus
the Confessor in particular have produced hundreds of pages on this. These Fathers
conceive the whole of man in an ontological way, where all the parts of the soul have (along
with body) the possibility of participating in God. The ‘inner man’ is not rejected, because
this is the place of human freedom, where lies man’s gnomic (personal) will.49
The problem is again that the nature of the Zizioulian pre-modern subject remains
passive. Relationality tends to become automatic, as the subject refuses to acknowledge his
unconscious, his inner conflicts and contradictions, his passions – and he refuses to work
with them. This is precisely the core of subjective ecstatic idealism as, for example
Nietzsche defines it: ‘Not to know your self: this is the cleverness/prudence of the idealist.
The idealist: a creature which has good reasons to keep himself in the darkness concerning
his self and which is clever/prudent enough to keep himself in the darkness regarding also
the nature of those reasons’.50 We are of course aware that Zizioulas rejects any
relationship of ontology with psychology or ethics in general. He thus does not want to
know about his self – but then his eschatology tends to mean escape, not transformation of
nature. His mysticism also tends to become an ecstatic flight from real existence, and
communion tends to become a euphoric erotic infinity, which, as Gregory Palamas liked to
repeat, is only imaginary. For him the real ascent to God can only happen by taking with
us ‘every kind of creature, in order for the image of God to be complete’ . . .51

CONCLUSIONS

Zizioulas and his generation (Yannaras, Nellas, Nissiotis, Romanides, etc) represent the
second ‘prise de conscience’ of Orthodox theology, after the Russian theologico-
philosophical explosion of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is not our purpose to
examine here the convergences and the divergences between these thinkers. Thus I give
only a brief account of my criticism of Zizioulas.
698 NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

What is fertile in Zizioulas’ theology is its existential, i.e. ecclesial/eucharistic

background. His theological epistemology stems from this background, and this means
that, even if one disagrees sometimes with him on his way of elaborating it theologically,
one cannot but recognize that what we have here is the authentic source of Orthodox
theology through the ages. Many fundamental conceptions of his, such as the person and
his freedom, the monarchy of the Father, the eucharistic texture of communion, the
existential meaning of ecclesiology, point I think in the right theological direction,
although they rarely move beyond modern philosophy. The reason for this is that, as we
cannot help admitting, Zizioulas seems to offer an idealistic, sinless (almost by itself) and
‘free’ person (‘be yourself’!), practically identified with grace, escaping a passive, unwilling
and non-active nature (especially when one ‘offers’ this nature to God), thus abolishing the
possibility of a psychosomatic participation in God – without the troubles of modern
passions and the unconscious, and exempt from the inconveniences of history and the
dilemmas of knowledge. He also seems to offer an easily conceivable, but nonetheless
philosophically and psychologically perilous notion of communion (to dictate or to be
dictated to), without the responsibility of a dangerously real dialogical reciprocity between
real, natural beings. He is thereby able to please both the fundamentalist and the
modernizing Orthodox theologians: the former because of the abolition of nature, and the
latter because of the abolition of knowledge and repentance, because he tends to identify
almost any inner spiritual struggle with psychologism.
What I claim in this paper is that all the above notions, if they are properly understood
as they actually exist in the patristic texts, open wider intellectual horizons for us. This,
along with the necessity of a fundamental reassessment of the origins of Western theology
– especially of Augustine and Aquinas, whom Zizioulas usually misunderstands – will give
modern Orthodox theology the merit it deserves in the context of the modern theologico-
philosophical quest.

Notes

1 Ashgate, 2007.
2 Edinburgh : T&T Clark, 2006.
3 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.
4 See G. Florovsky, ‘The Resurrection of Life’, in Bulletin of the Harvard University Divinity School, 49, n. 8
(1952), p. 19.
5 See his G. Florovsky: ‘The Ecumenical Teacher’, in Synaxi, n. 64 (1997), pp. 18–19, (in Greek).
6 See B. Zenkovsky Histoire de la Philosophie Russe, (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), t. 2, p. 64.
7 In his Essai de Me´taphysique Eschatologique, (1946), ch. 3, 4.
8 In Charles Taylor’s terminology. See his Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 143–176.
9 See J. Seiger, The Idea of the Self. Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the 17th Century, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 364. This book is a very useful summary of the evolution towards this split
between freedom and necessity in the West.
10 As I strive to show in my Closed Spirituality and the Meaning of the Self (Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 1999,
3
2008), first chapter of the first part. The book will soon appear in English.
11 See the extensive analysis in my Closed Spirituality . . .. pp. 285–191.
12 See his Philosophy of Mind, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1971), pp. 90–91: ‘‘the totality of his relations . . .
constitutes [man’s] actual livingness and subjectivity’’.
13 See pp. 18–19.
14 Douglas Farrow in his Ascension and Ecclesia, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark 1999), p. 142, as well as in his ‘Person and
Nature: The Necessity-Freedom Dialectics in John Zizioulas’ in D. Knight (ed.) The Theology of John Zizioulas, p. 122,
thinks that this is a Maximian position. This is also the position of Balthasar (Kosmische Liturgie. Das Weltbild Des
Bekenners Einsiedeln, 21961), p. 184, P. Sherwood (APXH KAI TELOS: Berichte zum XI Internationalen
Byzantinischen – Kongress, III–1, 1–27, München 1958), p. 9 and L. Thunberg (Microcosm and Mediator. The
 PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS 699

Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, Lund 1965), p. 154. All the above understand the text Ad Thal. 61,
PG 90, 628AB, as meaning that Maximus considers the Fall of man as simultaneous with his creation. Maximus here
says that ‘‘man gave this power, i.e. the natural movement of his mind toward God, immediately after his creation to
the senses . . . ’’ but this does not mean that, for some inevitable ontological reason human nature had to immediately
fall. Maximus here rather describes the nature of Adam’s abyssal freedom. For further discussion see my A Eucharistic
Ontology. Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Gift (Boston MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press,
forthcoming, ch. 7).
15 Ascension and Ecclesia, p. 89 f.
16 See Gregory of Nyssa How by Saying Three Persons in God, We do not Mean Three Gods . . ., ch. 18–19.
17 See PG 91 552 BCD.
18 PG 91 1342 D – 1345 A.
19 PG 91, 1328A.
20 For the connection of the Areopagitic concepts of analogy and synergy with the Maximian concept of dialogue
and in comparison with the Aquinatian notion of analogy see my Eucharistic Ontology, ch. 7, 3–4.
21 Disputatio cum Pyrrho, PG 91, 293 BC.
22 See my Orthodoxy and Modernization: Byzantine Individualization, State and History in the Perspective of the
European Future, (Athens: Armos, 2006) (in Greek), pp. 166–172.
23 See PG 91 1340 BC.
24 Ad Thal., 42, PG 90, 405C.
25 See ch. 3–6 in particular.
26 PG 86, 1305C and PG 77, 1149B respectively.
27 Sermon 21, For Athanasius the Great 35.
28 Sermon 42, 17.
29 Epist. 32, 3.
30 Sermon 24, 4.
31 Cont. Arian., 3, PG 26, 464 A.
32 Cont. Arian. 1, 16–20.
33 Theol. Or., 3, 2.
34 PG 91, 24C–28A.
35 See my Eucharistic Ontology, ch. 7, 3.
36 See my Eucharistic Ontology, ch. 1, 7.
37 See H. Kohut, The Restoration of the Self, (New York: International University Press 1977), –, How does Analysis
Cure? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
38 Jaques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalitic Experience’, in
Écrits (Bruce Fink transl., New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), pp. 75–81.
39 See his ‘Situation de l’agressivité’, in Bull. Psychol.,, XIV, 1, 1960, pp. 99–112.
40 See my Closed Spirituality . . ., pp. 258–300, and my Apophatic Ecclesiology of Consubstantiality, (Athens: Armos,
2002), pp. 264–270. Both books will soon appear in English.
41 See my Eucharistic Ontology, ch. 1, 6.
42 It is my Apophatic Ecclesiology of Consubstantiality.
43 See the discussion of the difference between Heideggerian and Sartrian existentialism and patristic thought,
concerning personalism, in my Closed Spirituality . . ., pp. 285–326.
44 Paris: Seuil, 1990.
45 Including myself, in my book Psychoanalysis and Orthodox Theology; On Desire, Catholicity and Eschatology
(Athens: Armos, 22005), first study.
46 Cont. Eun., 1, 20.
47 Cont. Eun., 2, 16.
48 Cap. Quin. Cent., I, 27, PG 90, 1189BC. See also Epist. PG 91, 573B.
49 See my Orthodoxy and Modernization, pp. 74–5.
50 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, 1922), vol. 15, frg. 344, (my translation).
51 Gregory Palamas, ‘Contra Acindynum’, in Writings of Gregory Palamas, ed. Panagiotes K. Chrestou et alii.
(5 vols, Thessaloniki, 1962–92), vol. 3, Ant. 6, 36, 11 (in Greek).