Personhood and Being

Zizioulas’ central philosophical claim: that in identifying the person (prosopon) with concrete existence (hypostasis), the Fathers made personhood ontologically ultimate, so that freedom and not necessity stands at the origin of being. This file sets out the genealogy of the terms as he tells it, the two characteristics he assigns the person — ekstasis and hypostasis — the account of freedom and otherness that follows, and the historiographical question of what he owes to modern personalism.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Problem: Being Without a Face

Zizioulas begins from a diagnosis of classical Greek ontology. For the Greeks, he argues, being is intelligible as substance: what exists, exists as a what, and the who is a determination of an antecedent what. The consequence is that the particular is always secondary — it is an instance of a nature, and it perishes back into the nature. Monism of this kind was, on Zizioulas’ reading, the deepest presupposition of the Hellenic world, so deep that its greatest achievements in cosmology were bought at the price of the person (Zizioulas, 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”).

The Greek theatre knew what this cost, and said so. The prosopon is the mask through which the actor speaks; it gives him a face and a name for the duration of the play, and it is taken off. The tragic hero’s freedom is a freedom against fate that fate defeats. Roman law arrived at the same word from another direction: the persona is the role in which a man appears before the law, an attribution and not an identity, so that one may have several personae or none. In neither case, Zizioulas argues, is the person the being; in both, the person is worn (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 1; the argument is a development of his Greek essay “From Mask to Personhood,” 1977, John Zizioulas Foundation, “Chronology,” zizioulas.org).

The Patristic Move as Zizioulas Reads It

The fourth-century trinitarian controversies compelled the Church to say how God is one and three at once. The vocabulary that emerged — one ousia, three hypostaseis — required distinguishing hypostasis from ousia, since in earlier philosophical usage the two were close to synonymous, and required attaching prosopon to hypostasis, since Sabellian usage had made prosopon alone sound like three appearances of one God.

Zizioulas reads this welding as the decisive event in the history of ontology. The Fathers, he argues, did not merely coin a formula: by identifying the prosopon with the hypostasis they said that the person is the being — that there is no impersonal substance behind the Three, that God’s existence is the existence of Father, Son and Spirit and not of a divinity of which they are modes. And what is said of God bears on being as such, because for Christian theology God is not one being among others but the source of being. The mask has become the face; the person has become ontologically ultimate (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 1).

He credits the Cappadocians in particular with this, and the exegetical question — whether St. Basil, St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Gregory of Nyssa in fact made the move he describes, or whether he has read a modern concern back into them — is the substance of the largest single controversy about his work (see The Patristic Question).

Ekstasis and Hypostasis: the Two Marks of the Person

Zizioulas describes the person by two words which he insists must be held together, because either alone yields a caricature.

The person is ekstatic. To be a person is to exist by going out toward another; the movement of self-transcendence is not something the person does after existing but the way the person exists. He grounds this in the tradition of divine eros — the ecstatic love by which, in St. Dionysius the Areopagite and St. Maximus the Confessor, God goes out of Himself toward what He has made — and in the trinitarian relations themselves, where the Father is Father only in begetting and breathing forth (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 1; Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan, London and New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2006).

The person is hypostatic. The going out is not a dissolution. Relation does not blur the one who relates; it constitutes him as this one and no other. Zizioulas’ word for what personhood confers is uniqueness — the person is unrepeatable, not one of a kind but the only one of its kind, and this is why for him the loss of a person is an ontological catastrophe and not the subtraction of a specimen.

The two together yield the formula that titles his second volume: communion and otherness are not in competition. Every ontology that purchases unity by suppressing difference, and every ontology that purchases difference by suppressing communion, is on his account a failure of the same kind. The Trinity is the case in which they coincide perfectly, and the Church is the place in history where the coincidence is given to human beings to live (Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 2006).

Freedom Against Necessity

The most controversial corollary is Zizioulas’ association of nature with necessity and person with freedom.

His argument runs: a nature is what it is; it does not choose itself; considered simply as nature it is a set of givens, and to be constituted by nature alone is to be constituted by necessity. A person, by contrast, exists in the mode of freedom — the Father is not compelled to beget, and love is not an attribute added to a divine nature that could have withheld it but the very manner in which God is God. In God freedom and nature are not in tension, because God’s being is the Father’s free act of love. In creatures they come apart: we do not choose to exist, we die, and our particularity is bought by separation. Salvation, in this frame, is the constitution of the human being in a new mode — the ecclesial hypostasis given in baptism and realized eucharistically (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 1; see The Argument of the Book).

Zizioulas is careful — more careful than some of his summarizers — to say that this is not a devaluation of nature or of the body. The ecclesial hypostasis is realized in the eucharist precisely because the eucharist is bodily; the “new” existence is not a spiritual escape from creaturehood but its reconstitution. Nevertheless the pairing of nature with necessity is the hinge on which the sharpest Orthodox criticism turns: Jean-Claude Larchet and Nikolaos Loudovikos both argue that it imports into theology an opposition the Fathers do not make and that it distorts the doctrine of grace (Larchet, Personne et nature: La Trinité – Le Christ – L’homme, Paris: Cerf, 2011; Loudovikos, “Person instead of Grace and Dictated Otherness: John Zizioulas’ Final Theological Position,” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 684–699; both treated at length in Person, Nature, and Grace).

The Person Is Not the Individual

A distinction that runs through the whole scheme, and which Zizioulas shares with Christos Yannaras and with the older Russian religious philosophy, separates the person from the individual. The individual is the unit arrived at by division — a specimen marked off from other specimens by boundaries; individuality is thus a function of separation, and its logical end is the isolated self of modernity. The person is arrived at by relation and is constituted in communion; personal uniqueness is the opposite of individual self-enclosure rather than its intensification.

This is the point at which the modern polemical energy of Zizioulas’ theology is felt: it is offered explicitly as a diagnosis of Western individualism, and it was received in the West as such. It is also the exact point at which Lucian Turcescu contested him, arguing that St. Gregory of Nyssa neither drew nor needed the person/individual distinction, and that reading it into him imports nineteenth- and twentieth-century concerns (Turcescu, “‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa,” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (2002): 527–539).

The Debt to Modern Personalism: an Open Historiographical Question

Zizioulas’ account is offered as an exegesis of the Fathers. Critics have argued that it is in substantial part a restatement of twentieth-century personalist and existentialist philosophy, and that the Fathers are being asked to underwrite it.

The philosophers usually named are Martin Buber (I and Thou), John Macmurray (The Self as Agent; Persons in Relation), and behind them the Russo-French personalism of Nikolai Berdyaev and Emmanuel Mounier, together with the existentialist thematics of freedom, ecstasis and death.
Zizioulas cites Buber and Macmurray, and he did not conceal his reading. His position was that his personalism is derived from the Cappadocians and that modern philosophy supplied the questions rather than the answers — that he is, so to speak, a personalist before the fact rather than a personalist in the modern school (Zizioulas’ self-description as reported in the survey literature; the fullest statement of his defence is his Greek reply to his Athenian critics, “Τὸ εἶναι τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ τὸ εἶναι τοῦ ἀνθρώπου: Ἀπόπειρα θεολογικοῦ διαλόγου” [“The Being of God and the Being of Man: An Attempt at Theological Dialogue”], Synaxi 37 (1991): 11–36).
Norman Russell, surveying the whole Greek generation, states the matter evenhandedly: Zizioulas “is fully aware of modern philosophical currents, which have influenced his thinking but not determined it,” and adds that fidelity to the Fathers does not require repeating them, since “the Fathers themselves did not simply repeat the words of their predecessors” (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92, at 87).
The contrary case — that the influence is determinative and not merely stimulating — is pressed hardest by Larchet (2011) and, in Greek, by J. Panagopoulos and S. Agouridis, whose articles in the journal Synaxi in 1985 and 1990 provoked Zizioulas’ reply (Panagopoulos, “Ὀντολογία ἢ θεολογία τοῦ προσώπου;” Synaxi 13 (1985): 63–79 and 14: 34–47; Agouridis, “Μποροῦν τὰ πρόσωπα τῆς Τριάδας νὰ δώσουν τὴ βάση γιὰ περσοναλιστικὲς ἀπόψεις περὶ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου;” Synaxi 33 (1990): 67–78; both cited and discussed in Russell, 2006, 86–87 and n. 25, and in Yannis Spiteris, La teologia ortodossa neo-greca, Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992, 409–411).

[Disputed: the extent of Zizioulas' dependence on modern personalist philosophy. The dispute is genuine, it is carried on by competent scholars on both sides, and it is not settled. This collection reports the positions and does not adjudicate between them; see METHODOLOGY §4.2.]

What the Church Has and Has Not Said

The Orthodox Church confesses one God in three hypostases; she uses prosopon and hypostasis of the Three; she has defined nothing about the ontological priority of person over essence, nothing about ekstasis as a constitutive mark of personhood, and nothing about whether “person” may properly be predicated of human beings in the same register in which it is predicated of the Three. That last question was argued on the floor of the Holy and Great Council of Crete in 2016, between Metropolitan John himself and Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos, and it was not resolved doctrinally — the disputed language survived in the conciliar texts after the Church of Greece withdrew its motion to delete it (see Ravenna 2007 and Crete 2016; Paul Ladouceur, “Human Beings or Human Persons?”, Public Orthodoxy, 6 June 2017).

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. “Τὸ εἶναι τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ τὸ εἶναι τοῦ ἀνθρώπου: Ἀπόπειρα θεολογικοῦ διαλόγου.” Synaxi 37 (1991): 11–36. (His reply to Panagopoulos and Agouridis.)
Panagopoulos, J. “Ὀντολογία ἢ θεολογία τοῦ προσώπου;” Synaxi 13 (1985): 63–79; 14 (1985): 34–47.
Agouridis, S. “Μποροῦν τὰ πρόσωπα τῆς Τριάδας νὰ δώσουν τὴ βάση γιὰ περσοναλιστικὲς ἀπόψεις περὶ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου;” Synaxi 33 (1990): 67–78.
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
Spiteris, Yannis. La teologia ortodossa neo-greca. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992. (Pp. 363–416 on Zizioulas; 409–411 on the personalism charge.)
Turcescu, Lucian. “‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa.” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (2002): 527–539.
Larchet, Jean-Claude. Personne et nature: La Trinité – Le Christ – L’homme. Paris: Cerf, 2011.
Loudovikos, Nikolaos. “Person instead of Grace and Dictated Otherness: John Zizioulas’ Final Theological Position.” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 684–699.
Ladouceur, Paul. “Human Beings or Human Persons?” Public Orthodoxy, publicorthodoxy.org, 6 June 2017.
John Zizioulas Foundation. “Chronology.” zizioulas.org (accessed 2026). (“From Mask to Personhood,” 1977.)