The Monarchy of the Father

“The one God is not the one substance but the Father.” Zizioulas’ most quoted trinitarian sentence states his claim that the unity of God is grounded in a person and not in an essence, and that the Father’s free act of love is the ontological ground of the divine being. This file sets out the claim, its patristic warrants as he gives them, its bearing on the filioque and on ecclesiology, and the objections — subordinationism, the priority of a hypostasis over the nature it bears, and the disagreement of theologians who read St. Athanasius differently.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Sentence

In the first chapter of Being as Communion Zizioulas writes:

“Among the Greek Fathers the unity of God, the one God, and the ontological ‘principle’ or ‘cause’ of the being and life of God does not consist in the one substance of God but in the hypostasis, that is, the person of the Father. The one God is not the one substance but the Father, who is the ‘cause’ both of the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit.”
— Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1985), 40–41.

Everything in this section follows from that paragraph, and so does a large part of the criticism.

What the Church Confesses, Stated as Hers

The Orthodox Church confesses one God in three hypostases, of one essence, undivided and inseparable; and she confesses that within the Trinity the Father alone is the source — that the Son is begotten of the Father and the Spirit proceeds from the Father, and that neither the Son nor the Spirit is a source in this sense. This is the monarchia of the Father, and it is not Zizioulas’ invention: it is the plain sense of the Creed of Nicaea–Constantinople, it is the standing Orthodox objection to the filioque, and it is set out in this repository as the Church’s teaching in The Holy Trinity and The Filioque.

What is Zizioulas’ is the ontological weight he places on it: the inference from “the Father is the sole source of the Son and the Spirit” to “the one God is the Father,” and from there to the thesis that a person rather than a nature is the ground of being as such. That inference is the contested step, and Orthodox theologians who confess the monarchy without reservation have declined to take it.

The Patristic Warrants as Zizioulas Gives Them

His argument rests chiefly on the Cappadocians.

  • St. Gregory the Theologian is his most important witness. Gregory speaks of the divine unity in terms of the Father as source: the Three are “one God” because they are referred to one, and the monarchy is not confined to one person in the sense of Sabellius but is a monarchy of origin. Zizioulas reads the Cappadocian handling of aitia — the Father as cause, aitios, of the other two hypostases — as making the source of the Godhead personal rather than essential (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985, ch. 1; Lectures in Christian Dogmatics, ed. Douglas H. Knight, London: T&T Clark, 2008, on the doctrine of God).
  • St. Basil the Great’s distinction of ousia and hypostasis, and his account of the divine names as relational, supply the grammar.
  • St. Maximus the Confessor supplies the further doctrine that the will belongs to the nature, not the hypostasis — a point which, as we shall see, his critics turn against him.

Zizioulas’ further step is to say that because the cause is personal, the divine being is not something the Father “has” and passes on, but something He is in the act of giving it. The Father’s begetting and spiration are, in his language, an act of love and freedom rather than of natural emanation; God is not first a divine essence which then happens to be triune, but a Father whose being is the giving of Himself to a Son and a Spirit.

Why It Matters to Him: Three Consequences

1. Ontology. If the ground of God’s being is a person, then person is prior to nature in the order of being, and the Christian doctrine of God constitutes a break with substantialist ontology rather than a version of it. This is the whole of Personhood and Being.

2. The filioque. The monarchy of the Father is the classical Orthodox ground of objection to the Latin addition, and Zizioulas restates the objection in his own terms: a double procession makes the Godhead, and not the Father, the source, which in his frame means substituting an essence for a person at the origin. His treatment is unusually irenic in tone — he was for decades a participant in the official dialogue — but the substance of the Orthodox objection is not softened (Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 1985; Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan, London and New York: T&T Clark/Continuum, 2006; see The Filioque).

3. Ecclesiology. The structure “one and many” — one who is first, and many who are not first, neither intelligible without the other — is for Zizioulas the shape of God’s own life, and therefore the shape of the Church at every level: the bishop in his eucharistic assembly, the protos among the bishops of a region, the protos among the patriarchs. This is the bridge from the doctrine of God to the primacy question, and it is the reason his ecclesiology cannot simply be detached from his trinitarian theology by readers who like the one and distrust the other (see Primacy, Conciliarity, and Canon 34).

The Objections

Subordinationism

The oldest objection: if the Father is the cause of the being of the Son and the Spirit, are they not less than He? Zizioulas’ answer is that causality here is not temporal, not voluntary in the sense of choice, and not a granting of something the Father possesses in advance; the Father is Father only in the begetting, so that the “cause” is constituted in the same act as the caused. The Son is homoousios, of one essence; nothing of the divine nature is withheld or diminished. His defenders regard the charge as a category mistake; his critics regard the answer as a repair rather than a solution.

The priority problem

A sharper objection, urged from within philosophy of religion as well as from Orthodox theology: if the Father causes the divine being, what is the Father before He causes it? Either the Father must already possess the divine nature in order to bestow it — in which case nature is prior after all — or He does not, in which case the Father is a bare hypostasis with no nature, which is incoherent. Zizioulas’ reply is that the question smuggles in a temporal or logical “before” which has no application in God, and that the Father’s being and His fatherhood are not two things. [Disputed: whether this reply resolves the objection. It is treated as decisive by Aristotle Papanikolaou (*Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion*, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006) and as unresolved by Jean-Claude Larchet (*Personne et nature*, Paris: Cerf, 2011). The collection reports both.]

The will and the freedom of the Father

The most technical objection concerns the will. In St. Maximus the Confessor the will is a property of nature, not of hypostasis — this was the whole point of the monothelite controversy and of Maximus’ martyrdom. If the Father freely wills to beget, and if freedom is located in the person, then Zizioulas appears to attribute to the hypostasis of the Father something Maximus assigns to the nature, and to reopen a settled question. Zizioulas addressed this directly in Communion and Otherness, distinguishing the freedom of the person from choice between alternatives and denying that he makes the Trinity a product of deliberation (Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 2006). Nikolaos Loudovikos — who has written the most sustained comparison of Zizioulas and Maximus on exactly this point — holds that the reply does not succeed and that the resulting scheme substitutes person for grace (Loudovikos, “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will,” Participatio 4 (2013): 258–286; “Person instead of Grace and Dictated Otherness: John Zizioulas’ Final Theological Position,” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 684–699).

The Athanasian counter-reading

A distinct disagreement, and not an Orthodox-versus-Western one: Thomas F. Torrance, the Scottish Reformed theologian who brought Zizioulas to Edinburgh in 1970 and remained in argument with him for decades, read St. Athanasius as locating the monarchia in the whole Triunity of God rather than in the Father’s hypostasis alone, and held that the Cappadocian causal language, pressed as Zizioulas presses it, endangers the equality of the Three. The comparison was worked over at length in the T. F. Torrance Theological Fellowship’s journal (Nikolaos Asproulis, “T. F. Torrance and John Zizioulas on the Divine Monarchia,” Participatio 4 (2013): 162–189). The dispute is genuinely a dispute about the Fathers: which patristic voice is normative, and whether the Cappadocian and Athanasian idioms can be harmonized.

The Cappadocian question itself

Finally, the historical challenge. André de Halleux argued in 1986 that the standard opposition between a “personalist” Greek trinitarian theology and an “essentialist” Latin one is a bad controversy resting on a misreading, and objected specifically to giving priority to personal categories over essential ones in expounding the Cappadocians, who in his reading held the unity of ousia and the trinity of hypostaseis in equal balance (de Halleux, “Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens? Une mauvaise controverse,” Revue théologique de Louvain 17 (1986): 129–155, 265–292; noted as a criticism of Zizioulas in Norman Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92, at 86). This line of argument is pursued in The Patristic Question.

The Careful Statement

Because this material is easily flattened in both directions, the collection states the position of the parties as precisely as it can.

  • All parties confess one God in three hypostases, of one essence, with the Father as sole source of the Son and the Spirit.
  • Zizioulas holds that this confession entails an ontology in which person is prior to substance and in which “the one God” is properly the Father.
  • His Orthodox critics hold that the confession entails no such ontology; that essence and hypostasis are equally ultimate in God and neither is prior; and that the language of priority, applied to God, generates more problems than it solves.
  • No Orthodox council has decided between them, and this collection does not.

See Also

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. (Pp. 40–41 for the quoted passage.)
  • 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. (His reply on the divine will and the Father’s freedom.)
  • Zizioulas, John D. Lectures in Christian Dogmatics. Ed. Douglas H. Knight. London: T&T Clark, 2008.
  • Halleux, André de. “Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens? Une mauvaise controverse.” Revue théologique de Louvain 17 (1986): 129–155, 265–292.
  • 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.
  • Loudovikos, Nikolaos. “Person instead of Grace and Dictated Otherness: John Zizioulas’ Final Theological Position.” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 684–699.
  • Larchet, Jean-Claude. Personne et nature: La Trinité – Le Christ – L’homme. Paris: Cerf, 2011.
  • Papanikolaou, Aristotle. Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
  • Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.