Fr. Nicholas Loudovikos and Metropolitan John Zizioulas

I would agree with just about everything that Fr. Nicholas Loudovikos writes in his article PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS: JOHN ZIZIOULAS' FINAL THEOLOGICAL POSITION… if, in fact, his characterizations of Zizioulas were true.  I think that these characterizations come from a profound misreading of Zizioulas.  Where I see Fr. Nicholas’ misrepresentations of Zizioulas’ thought most clearly are the accusations that Zizioulas

1)  Equates nature with the Fall

2) Disconnects personhood from nature

3) Confuses grace and personhood

4) Is,” pouring scorn on marriage, he identifies it with natural law …” (pg.5)

 5) Preaches that generation (of the Son) and spiration (of the Holy Spirit) have nothing to do with essence

 6) Is an Arian (Fr. Nicholas’ not so subtle accusation of pg. 9)

 1)  I don’t believe that Zizioulas equates nature to the fall.  What he does teach is that there is nothing in nature to enable its survival.  Creation ex-nihilo apart from the intervention of the uncreated is destined to return to nothing.

2) This accusation is clearly in contradiction to Zizioulas’ thoughts concerning Chalcedon (see quote #1).

3) I think that Fr. Nicholas is the one confused about grace here.  For some reason when people read Palamas’ teachings on the Energies of God they accept his claim that they are natural energies but ignore that St. Gregory, as did the Cappadocians before him, taught that these energies were en-hypostatic.  

4) This comment is both polemic and ridiculous.  Zizioulas has the highest regard for marriage.  I assume what Fr. Nicholas is commenting on is where Zizioulas speaks about the relationship between death and pro-creation.

5) See quote #2

6) I don’t think that Zizioulas’ position on the Father as cause differs from what Thalassios writes in numbers 99 & 100 of his Fourth Century (Philokalia Volume II)

Quotes are from the notes that were taken from the lectures of Professor I. Zizioulas at the Poemantic Division of the Thessaloniki University’s School of Theology, during the academic year 1984-1985.

Quote 1:

 Nature, therefore, is not that which determines the persona. It is the persona that assumes a nature. Consequently, the persona of the Son of God – which has divine nature eternally hypostatized – now assumes and hypostatizes human nature also.  In this way, human nature not only isn’t demoted or diminished, but is in fact elevated to the personal degree that divine nature has. In other words, it is elevated to God’s state and subsequently becomes god-like.  Thus human nature becomes god-like in the person of Christ; not for any other reason, but only because it has no hypostasis of its own.  If it were not going to acquire a hypostasis of its own, it would have been unable to attain the god-like condition (theosis).  We therefore have here an anthropological maximalism, not minimalism. We are not demoting Man.  What makes it difficult for us in Christology to comprehend this mystery of two natures and one persona, is the existence of certain presuppositions, such as: a) that a nature must have its own persona, which, as I already mentioned, is not correct and b) the other presupposition that is supported is that Man –human nature– has an autonomy that cannot be overcome. This is the Western perception of the natural and the supernatural, which has separated these two statuses to such an extent, that we are unable to re-unite them.  Of course the created and the Uncreated can never overstep their boundaries, (i.e. the uncreated cannot “become” created and the created cannot “become” uncreated), so, consequently, the attaining of theosis by Christ’s human nature does not mean that it somehow ceased to be human nature and became divine. (This is a very serious point.) Nor did divine nature suddenly “become” human nature, on account of the hypostatic union.  Each of the two natures retained its natural characteristics, but, when both natures became united in the same persona, without ceasing to be what they are, without undergoing any change as regards their natures, their essence, each nature assumed the characteristics of the other, and this is what is known as a “reciprocation of characteristics”. The reciprocation of characteristics is precisely that which takes place on account of the hypostatic union; on account of the fact that the persona is one. Furthermore, it is always the persona that expresses these characteristics; they do not express themselves on their own.  Given that we are dealing with only one persona here, it is impossible to have individual characteristics that are not expressed as uniform ones. Thus, whatever Christ did and performed as God became a characteristic and a reality of His human nature also.  Furthermore, everything that He did and performed as a human was also transposed into divine nature, but not as a nature.  You must observe something here.  It is transposed, on account of the hypostatic facet and consequently, it does not affect the other Personae of the Holy Trinity.  That it is transposed thanks to the hypostatic union (on account of the persona and not on account of the natures) is a consequence. Because, if natures in unison were to impart their particular characteristics to each other, then those characteristics – that reciprocation of characteristics – would also have to be observed in the other two Personae of the Holy Trinity - the Father and the Spirit - as they too have the same nature as the Son.   If it were, in fact, the natures that united and reciprocated their characteristics, then, I repeat, we would not be able to make any distinction whatsoever; we could not claim –for example- that “this is happening only to the Persona of Christ, the Logos, the Son”.  If this were the case (the merging of natures), then the Son would always remain incarnate, even to this day and forever more.  I must repeat this detail:  It is not the Father Who was incarnated, nor the Spirit; and theosis of human nature is not theosis attributed to Man’s union with “God” in general; it is because Man becomes united with the Son. In other words, it is theosis in Christ.  There cannot be theosis without Christ.  All these details are extremely important, because they contain consequences, which we must look into. The basic consequence is (a) that Christ Himself would cease to be an individual; He wouldn’t have human nature and humanity with Him. In other words, the notion of “Christ” would be perceived as a summary; the one would have become many, and that would then have constituted the identity of the Son. It is not possible – nor will it ever be possible – to isolate Christ from His body, which is the communion of the Saints, of those who have attained theosis.  Christ, therefore, is an inclusive concept; He is a head, together with a body.  He cannot be imagined without the body; and that body is not a personal body – it is the body of the Church, the body of Saints.  Thus, we cannot tackle Christology without Ecclesiology.  There can be no Christ without a Church. There is no Christ without a body. This is the one consequence. The other consequence (b) on the obverse side of the same coin is that the person who desires to attain theosis, who attains theosis, cannot relate to divinity, i.e., to divine nature, except only through the Persona of the Son, of Christ.  Thus, theosis without Christ does not exist. The third consequence (c) that arises from the first two, when combined, is that there cannot be theosis outside the Church, because there is no Church without Christ and there is no Christ without the Church.  The Church is a part of Christ’s identity – His personal identity.

 Quote 2:

In our experience, if we examine the biological hypostasis of man, we can see that this does not apply, because we are all born with this partitioning nature. Hence the existence of death. Apart from the above, in our experience when we refer to personal relations, we can observe the phenomenon whereby a specific person has been regarded as the bearer of the entire human essence, of human existence. For example, in an announcement regarding the victims of a battle, the Ministry of Defence will say that there were ten fatalities. To a person who has no personal relations with those ten dead people, they are ten different people, whose individual deaths did not affect human nature in its entirety. Other people continue to exist, who continue to live and therefore human nature will continue to perpetuate itself. But for the mother of each of those deceased, or for someone who had a personal relationship with them, that one deceased person is a bearer of the entire human essence. He cannot be counted as “one of the ten”. He is the one, the person, the entire person. All of human nature is at risk of vanishing, when one person vanishes.  This is our experience within a personal association. Outside of a personal association, we cannot have this kind of experience. And why is this? Because this unity is so close, between two people, that the one actually considers the other to be the bearer of human essence, of human existence in its fullness,   

With these precise types of categorizing in the back of our mind, we can explain why this paradoxical and no less mysterious phenomenon occurs, as applied to the Holy Trinity. For example, when considering how the murder of one person is equivalent to a “crime against all of mankind”.  Or, when we say “after all, only one man was killed, the world isn’t lost”… Why is this?  Where do all these ideas of generalizing, of absolutizing a single person to such an extent spring from?  Well, all these ideas spring from our experience of personal relations, from our experience of the persona. The more we regard someone a persona, the more we regard him the bearer of humanity overall.

We have taken this from the concept that we have of God, because this is what God, the Holy Trinity means: that a single persona is not a portion of the essence; it is the entire essence. Thus, we can observe in our own experience also, indications of such a Triadic existence - the same manner of existence as the Holy Trinity. And that is what makes us human beings the images of God. When we say that man is made in the image of God, we need to look for the analogies between God and man, based on the triadic association. This is why the dogma on the Holy Trinity is so important. Because it sheds light on man’s very existence.

 An interesting article and wonder how someone who was a student of Zizioulas could be responsible for such characterizations.  I cannot imagine that Fr. Nicholas actually believes some of the things that he has written in this article. 

Micah