02 — Eucharist, Bishop, Church
The 1965 Athens dissertation — «Ἡ ἑνότης τῆς Ἐκκλησίας ἐν τῇ θείᾳ Εὐχαριστίᾳ καὶ τῷ ἐπισκόπῳ κατὰ τοὺς τρεῖς πρώτους αἰῶνας» — is the foundation of everything Zizioulas later wrote, and the one book of his that is a work of historical scholarship before it is a work of systematics. This section treats the dissertation itself and the historical argument it makes about the first three Christian centuries.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The 1965 Athens Dissertation | The Greek title and its meaning; supervision by Florovsky, Williams and Stendahl; defense at Athens in 1965; the second Greek edition of 1990 and the English translation of 2001; the book’s place in the corpus and why it is so often skipped |
| The Argument of the First Three Centuries | The historical thesis: the eucharistic assembly as the Church “in her fullness”; Ignatius of Antioch and the bishop as president of the assembly; the “catholic Church” as a local reality; the emergence of the parish and what it cost; Cyprian and the turn to a collegial-universal ecclesiology |
Why This Section Comes First
Readers who come to Zizioulas through Being as Communion meet the ontology first and the ecclesiology second, and often conclude that the ecclesiology is a deduction from the ontology — that Zizioulas decided the person is ontologically ultimate and then found a church to match. The chronology is the other way round. The historical work came first, in the years at Dumbarton Oaks between roughly 1959 and 1964, and the ontology was built afterwards, to say what kind of being was implied by the eucharistic community he believed he had found in the sources (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, trans. Elizabeth Theokritoff, Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001; McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church, T&T Clark, 1993, on the order of Zizioulas’ development).
This matters for the argument of Section 08 in both directions. It gives Zizioulas’ defenders their strongest reply to the charge of philosophical imposition — the ecclesiology is documented from Ignatius, Justin, Irenaeus, Hippolytus and Cyprian, not deduced from Buber. It also gives his critics a sharper question: whether the ontology he later built is in fact entailed by the historical findings, or is a second and separable move.
See Also
- The Book and Its Making — what he built on this foundation twenty years later
- The Bishop and the Catholic Local Church — the mature form of the ecclesiology
- St. Ignatius of Antioch — the patristic anchor of the whole thesis
- The Holy Mysteries — the sacramental theology within which the eucharistic argument sits
References
- Zizioulas, John D. Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries. Trans. Elizabeth Theokritoff. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001.
- McPartlan, Paul. The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993.