The Book and Its Making

Being as Communion was not written as a book. It is a gathering of essays composed over some two decades in French, Greek and English, first collected as L’être ecclésial (Geneva, 1981) and published in English in 1985 by St Vladimir’s Seminary Press and Darton, Longman and Todd. This file traces how the collection was assembled, why the assembly nonetheless reads as a system, and how it was received.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The French Original

The material of Being as Communion first appeared as a book in French: John Zizioulas, L’être ecclésial (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1981) (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Chronology,” zizioulas.org, dating the French volume to 1981). The title — “ecclesial being,” or “the being of the Church” — names the book’s real subject more exactly than the English one does. Zizioulas’ question is not what personhood is in general but what kind of being is disclosed in the Church, and specifically in her eucharist.

The pieces gathered there had been written over roughly twenty years and had appeared in French, Greek, German and English in a scatter of journals and collections (publisher’s description, Being as Communion, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, noting the essays’ varied original languages). Several had begun life as lectures: the Gulandris–Horn Foundation series of five lectures delivered in Athens in 1983 was one of the settings in which the argument was rehearsed in public (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Chronology,” zizioulas.org). Among the underlying pieces, the Greek study “From Mask to Personhood” (1977) is the ancestor of the book’s opening chapter and its most famous stretch of argument — the reading of the Greek theatrical and Roman juridical prosopon transformed by the Fathers into hypostasis (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Chronology,” dating the Greek publication to 1977; see Personhood and Being).

The English Edition of 1985

The English volume appeared in 1985, published simultaneously by St Vladimir’s Seminary Press in Crestwood, New York, and by Darton, Longman and Todd in London, running to 269 pages (review notices in New Blackfriars and the Scottish Journal of Theology, both citing “New York, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press and London, Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985. Pp. 269”). The St Vladimir’s edition appeared in that press’s Contemporary Greek Theologians series, the imprint through which the Greek theological generation of the 1960s — Yannaras, Nellas and others — was introduced to the English-speaking world (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, series listing for Being as Communion).

The book has been reprinted many times and is frequently cited from the 1997 or later St Vladimir’s printings; some bibliographies accordingly give 1997 as the date of publication, which is a printing date rather than a first-publication date [Corrected: reference works including OrthodoxWiki list *Being as Communion* under 1997; the first English publication was 1985, as the contemporary review notices in *New Blackfriars* and the *Scottish Journal of Theology* establish.]

The English title is Zizioulas’, not a translator’s invention, and it shifts the emphasis. L’être ecclésial announces an ecclesiology; Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church announces an ontology with an ecclesiology attached. Something of the book’s later fortune — read by Western systematicians for its trinitarian personalism and by Orthodox for its ecclesiology, criticized by Orthodox chiefly for the former — is prefigured in that change of title.

Why a Collection Reads as a System

Being as Communion is a collection of six studies, and Zizioulas says so. Yet it has been read, taught, adopted and attacked as a systematic statement, and not unreasonably: the essays were written by a man working out one problem from several angles, and the problem is visible in each of them.

The unifying question can be stated in a sentence. What must being be like, if the Church is what the eucharist shows her to be? The 1965 dissertation had established (to Zizioulas’ satisfaction) that the ante-Nicene Church located her unity in the eucharistic assembly under its bishop, and that the assembly was called catholic because the whole Christ was present in it (see The Argument of the First Three Centuries). Being as Communion asks what follows ontologically. If a community can be wholly what it is only in an event of communion; if a person exists as a person only in relation; if the Church is not a collection of individuals who then relate but a relation that constitutes individuals — then being itself is not what the Greek philosophical tradition took it to be, and the Fathers, in developing the vocabulary of hypostasis, made a change in ontology and not merely in terminology (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press / Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985, Introduction and ch. 1).

That is the thesis, and it runs through the six chapters. It is also, precisely, the thesis his critics contest — not the ecclesiology but the ontological inference (see Section 08).

The Reception in the West

The book’s Western career was extraordinary for a work of Orthodox theology. Within a decade it had become a standard reference in Anglican, Reformed and Roman Catholic ecclesiology, and “communion ecclesiology” — a phrase that owes much to it — became one of the dominant idioms of late twentieth-century Western systematics.

Roman Catholic: Paul McPartlan’s The Eucharist Makes the Church: Henri de Lubac and John Zizioulas in Dialogue (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1993) set Zizioulas beside de Lubac and argued that the two had converged, from opposite traditions, on the conviction that the eucharist makes the Church. McPartlan afterwards became a member of the Orthodox–Roman Catholic Joint International Commission’s Catholic delegation, and the Ravenna document of 2007 bears the marks of the convergence his book described (see Ravenna 2007 and Crete 2016).
Reformed and Anglican: Colin Gunton built substantially on Zizioulas’ trinitarian personalism in his own work on the doctrine of God and on relationality; Wolfhart Pannenberg engaged him; both contributed to the collection edited by Douglas Knight, The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), alongside Nikolaos Loudovikos, Paul McPartlan and Philip Rosato — a volume notable for placing an admirer and a sharp critic between the same covers.
The Edinburgh connection: Zizioulas had been brought to Britain by Thomas F. Torrance, whose own trinitarian theology developed in close and sometimes contentious conversation with his; the T. F. Torrance Theological Fellowship’s journal Participatio devoted much of its 2013 volume to the comparison, including Nikolaos Asproulis on the two men’s accounts of the divine monarchia and Loudovikos’ essay on Maximus and Zizioulas (Asproulis, “T. F. Torrance and John Zizioulas on the Divine Monarchia,” Participatio 4 (2013): 162–189; Loudovikos, “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will,” Participatio 4 (2013): 258–286).

The Sequels

Being as Communion acquired a companion volume twenty-one years later: Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (London and New York: T&T Clark / Continuum, 2006), xiv + 315 pp. Where the first book argued that communion constitutes being, the second argues the complementary point — that communion is the ground of genuine otherness, so that unity and difference are not in competition (publisher’s description and review notices, Horizons, on Communion and Otherness, T&T Clark/Continuum, 2006). Communion and Otherness also contains Zizioulas’ most direct engagement with his critics, including on the question of the divine will and the Father’s freedom.

Further collections followed, several assembled from lectures and occasional pieces:

Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, ed. Douglas H. Knight (London: T&T Clark, 2008) — the dogmatics course as taught at Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Thessaloniki.
The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today, ed. Gregory Edwards (Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2010).
The Eucharistic Communion and the World, ed. Luke Ben Tallon (London: T&T Clark, 2011).
Remembering the Future: An Eschatological Ontology — the long-promised systematic statement of the eschatological ontology. [Disputed: the publication year. Editions and catalogue entries variously give 2008, 2013 and 2023 for T&T Clark / James Clarke imprints of this title, and it was reviewed as a recent publication in 2025 (*Mission Studies* 42/1, 2025). The collection reports that the book exists in T&T Clark and James Clarke printings and that a definitive first-publication year could not be established from the sources consulted.]
In Greek, Ἡ κτίση ὡς Εὐχαριστία (Creation as Eucharist) (Athens: Akritas, 1992), gathering the ecological material (see The Priest of Creation).

A Note on Reading Order

Because the essays were composed over two decades, Being as Communion is not internally uniform, and the differences matter to the criticism. The chapter on personhood (“Personhood and Being”) is the most philosophically ambitious and the most attacked; the chapters on catholicity, apostolic continuity and ministry are closest to the 1965 historical work and are much less contested. A reader who wants Zizioulas’ ecclesiology can read chapters 4–6 and skip the ontology; a reader who wants the ontology cannot skip the ecclesiology without losing the reason Zizioulas thought the ontology was required.

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. 269 pp. (Contemporary Greek Theologians series.)
Zizioulas, John D. L’être ecclésial. Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1981.
Zizioulas, John D. Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church. Ed. Paul McPartlan. London and New York: T&T Clark / Continuum, 2006. xiv + 315 pp.
Zizioulas, John D. Lectures in Christian Dogmatics. Ed. Douglas H. Knight. London: T&T Clark, 2008.
Zizioulas, John D. The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today. Ed. Gregory Edwards. Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2010.
Zizioulas, John D. The Eucharistic Communion and the World. Ed. Luke Ben Tallon. London: T&T Clark, 2011.
Zizioulas, John D. Ἡ κτίση ὡς Εὐχαριστία [Creation as Eucharist]. Athens: Akritas, 1992.
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. (Contributors including Colin Gunton, Nikolaos Loudovikos, Paul McPartlan, Wolfhart Pannenberg, Philip Rosato.)
Asproulis, Nikolaos. “T. F. Torrance and John Zizioulas on the Divine Monarchia.” Participatio 4 (2013): 162–189.
Loudovikos, Nikolaos. “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will.” Participatio 4 (2013): 258–286.
Review notices: New Blackfriars and Scottish Journal of Theology, on Being as Communion (1985); Horizons, on Communion and Otherness (2006).
John Zizioulas Foundation. “Chronology.” zizioulas.org (accessed 2026). (“From Mask to Personhood,” 1977; the Gulandris–Horn lectures, 1983; L’être ecclésial, 1981.)