The Argument of the First Three Centuries

The historical thesis of Zizioulas’ 1965 dissertation: that in the ante-Nicene Church the unity of the Church was realized in the one eucharistic assembly of a place, gathered epi to auto under the one bishop; that this assembly was called “the catholic Church” in a qualitative and not a quantitative sense; and that the fourth-century multiplication of presbyter-led parishes altered the structure decisively. This file sets out the argument and marks where it is a reading of the sources rather than a paraphrase of them.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Question

Zizioulas’ dissertation asks a historical question: in the first three centuries, what did Christians think made the Church one? The answers available in modern theology — a shared confession, a common government, an invisible communion of the elect — are all, he argues, anachronistic to the period. The ante-Nicene sources locate the Church’s unity somewhere much more concrete: in the gathering of the whole community of a place for the eucharist (Zizioulas, 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).

Epi to auto: the Assembly as the Church

The starting evidence is linguistic. The New Testament and the earliest Christian literature use the phrase ἐπὶ τὸ αὐτό (epi to auto, “in the same place,” “together”) in contexts that are unmistakably about the community assembling — Acts 2:1, 2:44, 1 Corinthians 11:20, 14:23 — and the phrase acquires, Zizioulas argues, a quasi-technical sense: the act of coming together for the eucharist, and by extension the assembly itself, and by further extension the Church (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001, on the New Testament and sub-apostolic vocabulary of assembly). St. Paul’s rebuke to the Corinthians — “when ye come together therefore into one place (epi to auto), this is not to eat the Lord’s supper” (1 Corinthians 11:20) — presupposes that the coming-together is the thing at issue.

Alongside this stands ἐκκλησία (ekklesia) itself, a word whose ordinary Greek sense is the summoned assembly of a city, and the striking Pauline usage in which “the whole Church” (holē hē ekklēsia) can denote the assembled Christians of Corinth (Romans 16:23; 1 Corinthians 14:23). The Church of a place, in this idiom, is not a portion of a larger body; it is the Church, assembled (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001).

The Didache supplies the eschatological register: the prayer over the broken bread, “as this was scattered upon the mountains and being gathered together became one, so let thy Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into thy kingdom” (Didache 9.4). The eucharistic assembly is the gathering of the scattered, an anticipation in this age of the gathering of the last day. This eschatological reading of the assembly is one of the permanent marks of Zizioulas’ theology, and it is here at the beginning (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001; cf. the eschatological ontology of The Argument of the Book).

Ignatius: One Eucharist, One Altar, One Bishop

The center of gravity of the thesis is St. Ignatius of Antioch (martyred c. 107–117), whose seven letters give the earliest developed picture of a local church ordered around its bishop.

Ignatius insists on the singleness of the assembly: “Be careful therefore to observe one eucharist; for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ and one cup unto union in his blood; one altar, as there is one bishop, together with the presbytery and the deacons” (Ignatius, To the Philadelphians 4; trans. Lightfoot). And he supplies the sentence that gave the Church a name: “Wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be; even as where Jesus Christ is, there is the catholic Church” (Ignatius, To the Smyrnaeans 8.2; trans. Lightfoot) — the first datable occurrence in Christian literature of hē katholikē ekklēsia (Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, Part II, vol. 2; see Unity Around the Eucharist).

Zizioulas reads the parallelism strictly. Ignatius sets “where the bishop appears” alongside “where Jesus Christ is,” and calls the result “the catholic Church.” The bishop is not an administrator over the assembly; he is its head as its president at the eucharist, standing in the assembly as the image of the one around whom it is gathered. Ignatius elsewhere describes the bishop as presiding “in the place of God” with the presbyters as the council of the apostles (To the Magnesians 6). On Zizioulas’ reading the episcopal office is therefore not a juridical superstructure added to a eucharistic community but a constitutive feature of the community’s eucharistic structure: there is no assembly without a head, because the assembly is an image of the eschatological gathering around Christ (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001; Being as Communion, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press / Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, “Eucharist and Catholicity”).

It should be said plainly, as the repository’s Ignatius collection says it, that this is a modern theological reading of Ignatius and not a paraphrase of him. Ignatius gives the texts — one eucharist, one altar, one bishop, “where the bishop is, there is the catholic Church” — and Afanasiev and Zizioulas build from them an ecclesiology answering questions about the relation of local and universal that Ignatius never posed (see Unity Around the Eucharist). The soil is genuinely Ignatian; the crop is twentieth-century.

Catholicity as a Qualitative Term

From Ignatius Zizioulas draws his most consequential single conclusion: that in the ante-Nicene usage “catholic” is a qualitative, not a quantitative, predicate. To call the assembly at Smyrna “the catholic Church” is not to say that it is a fraction of a worldwide organization but that it is the whole Church, wanting nothing, present in Smyrna — because the whole Christ, and not a part of Him, is present in its eucharist (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001; Being as Communion, 1985, “Eucharist and Catholicity”).

The corollary is that the relation between local churches cannot be the relation of parts to a whole. It must be a relation of identity — each local church being the same one Church, wholly present — and Zizioulas’ later image for this is not a set of segments completing a circle but a set of complete circles coinciding with one another (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Church,” zizioulas.org, summarizing the “unity of identity”; Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985). This is the point at which his ecclesiology diverges simultaneously from Roman centralization (which subordinates the local to a prior universal) and from a congregationalist localism (which dispenses with the universal). Both alternatives, on his account, assume that “local” and “universal” name parts and wholes, which the ante-Nicene evidence does not support.

Justin, Hippolytus, and the Ordination Evidence

Justin Martyr’s account of the Sunday synaxis — the reading, the homily, the prayers, the president (ho proestōs) who offers thanksgiving over the bread and cup, the deacons who carry the gifts to the absent (Justin, First Apology 65, 67) — supplies Zizioulas with a second-century description of exactly the structure he finds in Ignatius: one assembly, one president, one eucharist, the whole community present (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001).

The early ordination material — above all the prayers preserved in the Apostolic Tradition attributed to Hippolytus — is read in the same key. Ordination takes place within the eucharistic assembly, by the whole church, with the bishop’s ordination requiring bishops of neighboring churches; the ordained person is placed in a relation and given a position in the assembly, not endowed with a transferable individual power (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001; Being as Communion, 1985, “Ministry and Communion”). [Disputed: the authorship, date, and provenance of the so-called *Apostolic Tradition* are contested in modern scholarship — the attribution to Hippolytus of Rome and the third-century Roman setting assumed by earlier scholars, including Zizioulas' generation, have been substantially challenged since the 1990s (see Bradshaw, Johnson and Phillips, *The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary*, Fortress, 2002). The collection notes that Zizioulas' use of this material reflects the state of scholarship of the 1960s.]

The Parish, and What It Cost

The most historically interesting stretch of the thesis concerns the transition from the single episcopal assembly to the multi-parish diocese. So long as the church of a city assembled as one body around one bishop, “the local church” and “the eucharistic assembly” were the same thing, and the bishop’s office had an obvious eucharistic meaning. When Christian populations grew — and above all after the peace of the Church in the fourth century — the single assembly became impossible, and the eucharist came to be celebrated in multiple parishes by presbyters delegated by the bishop (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001).

Zizioulas treats this as a real and costly rupture, not a neutral administrative adjustment. Its consequences, on his account: the bishop ceased to be the ordinary president of a eucharistic assembly and became an administrator over a territory containing many; the presbyter, who in the ante-Nicene picture had sat with the bishop in the presbytery, became a eucharistic celebrant in his own right; and the theological visibility of the link between eucharist and episcopate was progressively obscured — with lasting effects on both Eastern and Western ecclesiology (Zizioulas, Eucharist, Bishop, Church, 2001; Being as Communion, 1985). Much of Zizioulas’ later polemic — against a conception of the episcopate as jurisdiction, against ordination understood as the transmission of power, against the treatment of councils as parliaments of individuals — descends from this historical judgment.

It is also the point at which the thesis becomes awkward for its author’s own church, and Zizioulas knew it. If the ante-Nicene structure is normative, the modern diocese is a deviation from it, and the modern parish an anomaly requiring theological justification. He did not conclude that the parish should be abolished; he concluded that the eucharistic meaning of the episcopate had to be recovered theologically even where it could not be recovered structurally.

Cyprian and the Universal Turn

The thesis’ treatment of St. Cyprian of Carthage (d. 258) is where it engages Afanasiev most directly. Afanasiev had argued that “universal ecclesiology” — the conception of the Church as one worldwide body of which local churches are parts — begins with Cyprian, and that it displaced the older eucharistic ecclesiology (Afanasiev, The Church of the Holy Spirit; Zizioulas restating the point in his 2005 30Days interview, where he notes that Afanasiev “insists that universal ecclesiology is unknown in the ancient Church until Saint Cyprian”).

Zizioulas accepts a version of the historical observation — Cyprian’s episcopatus unus est, the one episcopate of which each bishop holds a part in solidum, does introduce a way of thinking about the whole that is not simply the Ignatian one — but he refuses Afanasiev’s evaluation of it. On Zizioulas’ reading the collegiality of bishops is not an alien intrusion into eucharistic ecclesiology but its necessary extension: bishops can act together precisely because each is head of a church that is wholly the Church, and the council is the meeting of those heads. What must be rejected is not collegiality but the subsequent conception of a universal Church existing prior to and above the local ones (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, “Eucharist and Catholicity” and the treatment of local and universal; see Zizioulas and Afanasiev).

What the Thesis Established, and What It Did Not

It established — or at least argued with enough force that the burden of proof shifted — that the ante-Nicene Church understood her unity eucharistically and episcopally at once, and that the two cannot be separated without distorting both. This conclusion has been very widely received, including by Roman Catholic ecclesiologists: Paul McPartlan’s The Eucharist Makes the Church sets Zizioulas alongside Henri de Lubac precisely because the two arrived independently at the conviction that the eucharist makes the Church rather than the reverse (McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue, T&T Clark, 1993).

It did not establish the ontology of the person that Zizioulas would later build. Nothing in the historical argument requires the claim that personhood is ontologically ultimate, or that the Father’s monarchy constitutes the divine being, or that nature is the seat of necessity. Those are further theses, argued on other grounds, and they can be — and by several of his critics are — rejected by readers who accept the ecclesiology entire (see Section 08).

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.
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. (Chapters “Eucharist and Catholicity,” “Apostolic Continuity and Succession,” “Ministry and Communion.”)
Zizioulas, John D. Interview with Gianni Valente, “Where the Eucharist is, there is the Catholic Church.” 30Days, 8 July 2005.
Ignatius of Antioch. To the Philadelphians 4; To the Smyrnaeans 8.2; To the Magnesians 6. Trans. J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, Part II, vol. 2; cf. trans. Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed.
Didache 9.4. (The prayer over the broken bread.)
Justin Martyr. First Apology 65, 67. (The Sunday synaxis and its president.)
Scripture: Acts 2:1, 2:44; Romans 16:23; 1 Corinthians 11:20, 14:23.
Bradshaw, Paul F., Maxwell E. Johnson and L. Edward Phillips. The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002. (The modern challenge to the Hippolytan attribution.)
McPartlan, Paul. The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993.
Afanasiev, Nicholas. The Church of the Holy Spirit. (Universal ecclesiology and Cyprian.)