The 1965 Athens Dissertation

Zizioulas’ doctoral thesis — «Ἡ ἑνότης τῆς Ἐκκλησίας ἐν τῇ θείᾳ Εὐχαριστίᾳ καὶ τῷ ἐπισκόπῳ κατὰ τοὺς τρεῖς πρώτους αἰῶνας» (“The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries”) — was researched under Georges Florovsky at Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks and defended at the University of Athens in 1965. It is the least read and most load-bearing of his books: a work of patristic and liturgical history whose conclusions the whole of his later systematics presupposes.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Title and What It Claims

The Greek title of the thesis names three things and puts them in a fixed relation: the unity of the Church, the divine eucharist, and the bishop, in the first three Christian centuries. The English translation of 2001 renders the title Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, trans. Elizabeth Theokritoff, Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001).

The claim embedded in the title is that the question “what makes the Church one?” was answered in the ante-Nicene Church neither by a common doctrine held in common, nor by a juridical structure, nor by an invisible spiritual bond, but by a concrete event: the gathering of the whole local community for the one eucharist under the one bishop. Unity was not a property the Church possessed; it was something that happened, in a place, at an hour, around a table (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001; McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue, Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993, on the thesis and its argument).

Supervision, Defense, Publication

The research was conducted at Harvard and at Dumbarton Oaks, the Harvard center for Byzantine studies, in the years from roughly 1959/1960 to 1964, and was supervised by Fr. Georges Florovsky together with George Huntston Williams and Krister Stendahl, then professors at Harvard (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Athens — Doctoral Thesis,” zizioulas.org; front matter to Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001). The thesis was submitted to the Theological School of the University of Athens and defended in 1965; the Foundation’s account records that it was accepted with laudatory reports from the examining professors and a unanimous grade of “excellent” (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Athens — Doctoral Thesis,” zizioulas.org — the Foundation’s own account of the examination, reported here as such).

[Disputed: the year of acceptance. The Foundation's chronology and most notices give the defense as 1965; some accounts, including the Foundation's narrative page on the thesis, describe the work as accepted in 1966. The Greek first edition is dated 1965. The collection gives 1965 for the defense and first publication and notes 1966 as an alternative date of formal acceptance.]

A second Greek edition appeared in 1990, and it is from this second edition that Elizabeth Theokritoff made the English translation published by Holy Cross Orthodox Press in 2001, thirty-six years after the original (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, trans. Theokritoff, 2001, translator’s note; Holy Cross Orthodox Press catalogue entry, ISBN 9781885652515). The long delay in Englishing the thesis is one reason its argument was for decades known in the West only in the compressed form it takes in Being as Communion, and one reason the accusation of philosophical invention could be made with some plausibility by readers who had not seen the historical work underneath.

What Kind of Book It Is

It is a historical book. The evidence is the New Testament vocabulary of assembly, the Didache, Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr’s First Apology, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian and Cyprian, together with the early canonical and liturgical material; the method is philological and historical; the questions are of the sort a church historian asks — when did the presbyter-led parish appear, what did epi to auto mean, what exactly is claimed when Ignatius calls the assembly around the bishop “the catholic Church” (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001, throughout; see The Argument of the First Three Centuries).

This is worth stressing because of what the book is usually taken to be. It is not a work of dogmatic construction. There is no theory of the person in it, no ontology of communion, no thesis about freedom and necessity. The vocabulary that would make Zizioulas famous and controversial — hypostasis as ecstatic and relational, being constituted by communion, personhood as ontologically ultimate — is not the vocabulary of 1965. What is there is a historical claim about ecclesial structure, and a conviction that the structure was theologically motivated rather than administratively improvised.

Its Place in the Corpus

Every later work of Zizioulas leans on this one.

The ecclesiology of Being as Communion — the local eucharistic community as the catholic Church, the bishop as its head because he presides at its eucharist, catholicity as a qualitative and not a quantitative term — is the thesis restated in a systematic key (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press / Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, esp. the chapter “Eucharist and Catholicity”; McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church, 1993).
His theology of ministry and ordination — that every ordination is a eucharistic act, situating a person in a relation within the community rather than conferring a power on an individual — is worked out from the ante-Nicene ordination evidence handled in the thesis (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, chapters on “Apostolic Continuity and Succession” and “Ministry and Communion”).
His doctrine of primacy — that the protos exists only within a synod and the synod only with a protos, and that the primate must himself be the bishop of a local church — is a generalization of the thesis’ finding that ecclesial office is always the office of a head of a eucharistic assembly (Zizioulas, interview with Gianni Valente, 30Days, 8 July 2005; see Primacy, Conciliarity, and Canon 34).
Even the ecological theology of the 1989 King’s College lectures depends on it, since the “priest of creation” motif takes its whole force from a eucharistic understanding of the human vocation (Zizioulas, “Preserving God’s Creation: Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology,” King’s Theological Review 12 (1989): 1–5, 41–45; 13 (1990): 1–5).

The Debt to Afanasiev — and the Distance

Zizioulas did not invent eucharistic ecclesiology. The phrase and the programme belong to Fr. Nicholas Afanasiev (1893–1966) of the St. Sergius Institute in Paris, who argued from the 1930s onward that in the earliest Church each local eucharistic community possessed the fullness of the Church, and that a later “universal ecclesiology” — which he traced to St. Cyprian — subordinated the local church to a whole conceived as prior to it (Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit, and The Lord’s Supper; see Nicholas Afanasiev, where the origination of the idea is treated at length). Zizioulas took the programme from Afanasiev and said so, and in the 2005 30Days interview he restates Afanasiev’s central historical contention — that universal ecclesiology is unknown in the ancient Church until Cyprian — as the starting point of the discussion (Zizioulas, interview with Gianni Valente, 30Days, 8 July 2005).

But the 1965 thesis is already a correction of Afanasiev as well as a development of him, and the correction is the subject of Zizioulas and Afanasiev. In brief: where Afanasiev’s formula runs “wherever the eucharist is, there is the whole Church,” Zizioulas insists that the eucharist in question is the episcopal eucharist — the one assembly of the whole local church under its bishop — and that such an assembly is catholic only in canonical communion with the other such assemblies, which is why councils and primacy are not additions to eucharistic ecclesiology but consequences of it. The difference is not a nuance; it is the difference between an ecclesiology that dissolves the universal and one that derives it.

Why It Is So Often Skipped

Three reasons. It existed only in Greek until 2001. It is a technical monograph rather than a book of essays. And its conclusions were, by the time it appeared in English, so thoroughly absorbed into the general Orthodox idiom — through Afanasiev, Schmemann, Meyendorff and Zizioulas himself — that a reader could arrive at them without noticing that anyone had had to argue for them (see Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff, whose parallel labor in the same decades carried the eucharistic recovery into liturgical theology and Byzantine history respectively).

The result is a peculiar asymmetry in the reception. Zizioulas’ ontology of the person has been examined line by line by a dozen critics; his historical ecclesiology has been comparatively spared. That asymmetry is itself worth noticing when weighing the criticism in Section 08: most of the sharpest objections are directed at the ontology of the 1980s, not at the history of 1965.

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. ISBN 9781885652515. (English translation, from the 2nd Greek edition of 1990, of the 1965 Athens dissertation.)
Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985. (The systematic restatement.)
Zizioulas, John D. “Preserving God’s Creation: Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology.” King’s Theological Review 12 (1989): 1–5, 41–45; 13 (1990): 1–5.
Zizioulas, John D. Interview with Gianni Valente, “Where the Eucharist is, there is the Catholic Church.” 30Days, 8 July 2005. (On Afanasiev, Cyprian, the bishop, and primacy.)
McPartlan, Paul. The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993. (The standard comparative study; the development of Zizioulas’ thought from the thesis onward.)
Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit and The Lord’s Supper. (The origin of “eucharistic ecclesiology.”)
John Zizioulas Foundation. “Athens — Doctoral Thesis,” “Chronology.” zizioulas.org (accessed 2026). (Supervision by Florovsky, Williams and Stendahl; the examination; the 1990 second edition.)