04 — Personhood and the Monarchy of the Father
The two theses that made Zizioulas famous and made him contested: that personhood is ontologically ultimate, so that freedom rather than necessity stands at the origin of being; and that the unity of God is grounded not in the divine essence but in the person of the Father, “the one God” being the Father Himself. This section expounds both as his theology, with the vocabulary set out carefully, and points the objections to Section 08 where they are answered at length.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)
Files in This Section
| File | Description |
|---|---|
| Personhood and Being | From the mask to the person: the genealogy of prosopon and hypostasis; the person as ekstasis and as hypostasis; freedom against necessity; otherness and communion as one movement; and the question of the debt to modern personalism |
| The Monarchy of the Father | “The one God is not the one substance but the Father”: the Cappadocian monarchia as Zizioulas reads it, the causality of the Father, the bearing on the filioque, the charge of subordinationism and his answer, and the ecclesiological consequence |
The Vocabulary
Because almost every dispute in this area is a dispute about words, the section fixes them at the outset. The terms are the Church’s; the way of relating them set out here is Zizioulas’.
- οὐσία (ousia), substance or essence — what a thing is; in God, the one Godhead confessed by the Council of Nicaea in the word homoousios (see The Seven Ecumenical Councils).
- ὑπόστασις (hypostasis) — concrete, particular existence; in the fourth-century settlement, one of the Three in God. Its pre-Christian philosophical sense was close to ousia, and the separation of the two is itself a fourth-century achievement.
- πρόσωπον (prosopon) — face, countenance, and in the theatre the mask; in Roman law, the persona, the role or legal standing.
- μοναρχία (monarchia) — literally “single origin” or “single rule”: in trinitarian usage, the doctrine that the Father is the sole principle and cause within the Godhead.
- ἔκστασις (ekstasis) — a standing-outside-oneself; Zizioulas uses it, following the Dionysian and Maximian tradition of divine eros, for the self-transcending movement in which a person exists toward another.
The Rule Governing This Section
The Orthodox Church confesses one God in three hypostases, of one essence and undivided, and confesses the Father as the sole source (pēgē, aitia) of the Son by generation and of the Spirit by procession. That confession is hers, and it is stated as hers in the hub file The Holy Trinity.
What Zizioulas adds is an ontological interpretation of that confession, and the interpretation is his. The claim that the person is ontologically prior to the essence; the claim that “the one God” is the Father; the claim that nature is the seat of necessity and person the seat of freedom — these are theological theses argued by a modern theologian from patristic texts. They have been endorsed by some Orthodox theologians and rejected by others, and no Orthodox council has adjudicated between them. Where this section states them, it states them as his; where the Church’s own confession is at issue, that is marked.
See Also
- The Argument of the Book — the same theses in the setting of the 1985 volume
- The Patristic Question — whether the Cappadocians taught what Zizioulas says they taught
- Person, Nature, and Grace — Larchet, Loudovikos, Vlachos and the objections from nature and grace
- The Holy Trinity — the Church’s confession
- The Filioque — the controversy on which the monarchy of the Father bears directly
- St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. Gregory of Nyssa — the Cappadocians in their own right
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. (Ch. 1, “Personhood and Being.”)
- 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.
- Zizioulas, John D. Lectures in Christian Dogmatics. Ed. Douglas H. Knight. London: T&T Clark, 2008.