03 — Being as Communion
Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (1985) is the book by which Zizioulas is known, and by a common judgment the most influential work of Orthodox theology in English since Vladimir Lossky’s Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. This section treats how it was assembled, what it argues, and why a volume of previously published essays became a landmark.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| The Book and Its Making | L’être ecclésial (1981) and the essays behind it; the 1985 St Vladimir’s / Darton, Longman and Todd edition; the Contemporary Greek Theologians series; how a collection became a system; the reception in the English-speaking world and its scale |
| The Argument of the Book | The six chapters in order — personhood and being, truth and communion, Christ and the Spirit and the Church, eucharist and catholicity, apostolic continuity, ministry and communion — and the four theses that hold them together |
The Claim to Significance
The claim that Being as Communion is the most influential Orthodox theological book in English since Lossky is a judgment, not a fact, and this collection states it as such. What can be documented is the scale of engagement: a volume of essays first published in French, Greek and English between the 1960s and 1980s, collected in 1985, which within two decades had generated a dedicated secondary literature, a book-length comparative study against Henri de Lubac (McPartlan, The Eucharist Makes the Church, T&T Clark, 1993), a multi-author critical volume (Knight, ed., The Theology of John Zizioulas, Ashgate, 2007), a sustained defense set against Lossky (Papanikolaou, Being with God, University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), a book-length Orthodox refutation (Larchet, Personne et nature, Cerf, 2011), and — by the John Zizioulas Foundation’s own count — more than seventy doctoral dissertations worldwide (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Brief Biographical Note,” zizioulas.org).
Very few works of twentieth-century Orthodox theology were read outside Orthodoxy at all. This one was read, adopted and argued with by Anglicans, Reformed, Lutherans and Roman Catholics — Colin Gunton and Wolfhart Pannenberg among the contributors to Knight’s volume — and it was through Being as Communion that “communion ecclesiology” and trinitarian personalism entered mainstream Western systematic theology in the 1980s and 1990s.
The Caveat That Governs This Section
The theses set out here are Zizioulas’ own theological work, offered as an interpretation of the Fathers. They are not the dogma of the Orthodox Church, and no Orthodox council has adopted them. Where this section expounds them, it expounds them as his; where the Church’s confession is at issue — the Trinity, the eucharist, the episcopate — the difference between the confession and his account of it is marked. The objections, which are serious and come from within Orthodoxy, are gathered in Section 08.
See Also
- Personhood and Being — the ontology set out in the book’s first chapter, treated at length
- The Argument of the First Three Centuries — the historical work on which the book’s ecclesiology rests
- Vladimir Lossky — the predecessor against whom Zizioulas is most often measured
References
- 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.
- McPartlan, Paul. The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993.
- Knight, Douglas H., ed. The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
- Papanikolaou, Aristotle. Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
- Larchet, Jean-Claude. Personne et nature: La Trinité – Le Christ – L’homme. Paris: Cerf, 2011.
- John Zizioulas Foundation. “Brief Biographical Note.” zizioulas.org (accessed 2026).