Ravenna 2007 and Crete 2016

Zizioulas spent nearly forty years in the official dialogue with Rome — drafting its plan in 1978, drafting its early agreed texts, and co-presiding over the commission that produced the Ravenna document of 2007 — and a comparable span in the pan-Orthodox preparation that ended at the Council of Crete in 2016. This file reports what he did in both, what the documents say, where they record disagreement rather than agreement, and the dispute over the word “person” that he lost on the floor of the Council and won in the final texts.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Dialogue with Rome: 1978 to Ravenna

The preparation. From 1978, when the technical preparatory committee of the theological dialogue was established, Zizioulas was among its central figures, drawing up on the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s behalf the dialogue’s plan, method and thematic programme (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Orthodox–Roman Catholic Dialogue,” zizioulas.org). The dialogue’s opening decision — to begin from the sacraments and the Church rather than from the papacy — was itself a strategic choice in which his ecclesiology is visible: if the eucharist makes the Church, then the eucharist is the ground on which the primacy question must eventually be argued.

The first phase. The Joint International Commission produced three agreed statements in that key, and Zizioulas produced initial drafts for all three:

Munich, 1982 — “The Mystery of the Church and of the Eucharist in the Light of the Mystery of the Holy Trinity.”
Bari, 1987 — “Faith, Sacraments and the Unity of the Church.”
New Valamo, 1988 — “The Sacrament of Order in the Sacramental Structure of the Church.”

(John Zizioulas Foundation, “Orthodox–Roman Catholic Dialogue,” zizioulas.org, stating that he produced the initial drafts of these texts.) The titles alone show the programme: Trinity, eucharist, Church; then faith and sacraments; then order. It is the sequence of Being as Communion.

The dialogue then turned to the problem of uniatism, producing the Balamand statement of 1993, and thereafter stalled for most of a decade (see The Official Dialogue for the fuller documentary history).

The second phase and the co-presidency. The dialogue resumed in 2006, and Zizioulas became Orthodox co-president of the Joint International Commission, working opposite Cardinal Walter Kasper and later Cardinal Kurt Koch (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Orthodox–Roman Catholic Dialogue”). [Disputed: the year he laid down the co-presidency. The John Zizioulas Foundation's own page states that he stepped down from the presidency of the joint committee in 2015, while the same page credits him with the unanimous adoption of the Chieti document in 2016; obituary notices generally describe him as co-president "until his retirement" without a year. The collection reports the discrepancy and does not resolve it.]

The Ravenna Document (2007)

The commission met at Ravenna in October 2007 and adopted, on 13 October 2007, the text “Ecclesiological and Canonical Consequences of the Sacramental Nature of the Church: Ecclesial Communion, Conciliarity and Authority.”

What it agreed. Conciliarity and authority operate at three levels — local, regional and universal; at each level there is a protos, a first; and the relation between the first and the rest is governed by the mutual conditioning set out in the 34th Apostolic Canon, which the document cites. The text also states that “conciliarity reflects the Trinitarian mystery and finds therein its ultimate foundation,” and that the eucharist manifests the trinitarian koinonia in the faithful (Ravenna Document, 13 October 2007, §§5, 6, 10, 24, 17–42).

Readers of Being as Communion will recognize every one of those moves. Ravenna is the closest thing to an official reception of Zizioulas’ ecclesiological grammar that exists in an ecumenical text, and it is fair to say — as the repository’s schism collection says — that his eucharistic ecclesiology shaped the Orthodox side of it (Zizioulas’ role noted in The Official Dialogue).

What it did not agree, and said so. Ravenna’s most important paragraph for honest reading is §41, which records that Catholics and Orthodox “disagree on the interpretation of the historical evidence from this era regarding the prerogatives of the bishop of Rome as protos, a matter that was already understood in different ways in the first millennium” (Ravenna Document, §41). The document establishes a common grammar; it does not establish a common answer.

The absence that shadows it. The Moscow Patriarchate’s delegation withdrew before the Ravenna session began, over the seating of the Constantinople-sponsored Estonian Apostolic Orthodox Church, and has never subscribed the document; Moscow subsequently published its own position paper on primacy in December 2013, holding that universal primacy is a primacy of honour without prerogatives of power (Moscow Patriarchate, “Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church,” 26 December 2013; the walkout in A. Edward Siecienski, The Papacy and the Orthodox: Sources and History of a Debate, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Ravenna’s authority within Orthodoxy is therefore contested, and this collection follows the schism collection in reporting it that way.

Chieti (2016) — “Synodality and Primacy during the First Millennium,” adopted 21 September 2016 with Moscow participating — carried the work forward, describing a first-millennium Roman primacy of honour within the communion of churches rather than authority over an Eastern synod; Alexandria (2023) carried it into the second millennium without resolving the core (Chieti Document, 21 September 2016, esp. §§15–21; Alexandria Document, 7 June 2023).

The Road to Crete

Zizioulas’ pan-Orthodox work ran in parallel with the Roman dialogue and used the same ecclesiology.

He presided over the pre-conciliar consultations at Chambésy that prepared the Holy and Great Council, including the Fourth and Fifth Pan-Orthodox Pre-Conciliar Conferences, and served as president of the preparatory committee for the Council (John Zizioulas Foundation, “The Holy and Great Synod,” zizioulas.org).
The document “The Mission of the Orthodox Church in Today’s World” — the product of the Fifth Pan-Orthodox Pre-Conciliar Conference at Chambésy in October 2015, signed by the primates in January 2016 (Antioch excepted) — is the text most marked by his hand.
One month before the Council he chaired the committee that drafted the Message of the Primates, which met at Ormylia and approved the text he had drafted (John Zizioulas Foundation, “The Holy and Great Synod”).
At the Council itself, convened at the Orthodox Academy of Crete 19–26 June 2016, he served as a principal theological adviser to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and worked on the reformulation of several documents (John Zizioulas Foundation, “The Holy and Great Synod”).

The Council’s own history — the long preparation from Rhodes in 1961, the withdrawal of Antioch, Bulgaria, Georgia and Russia in the weeks before it opened, the six documents, the “churches” terminology controversy, and the divided reception that persists as of 2026 — is set out in the hub file and is not repeated here: see The Holy and Great Council (Crete, 2016).

The Anthropos/Prosopon Dispute

The liveliest theological exchange on the Council floor was, remarkably, about Zizioulas’ own life’s work: whether the conciliar documents should speak of the human being as ἄνθρωπος (anthropos, “human being”) or as ἀνθρώπινο πρόσωπο (anthropino prosopo, “human person”).

The objection. Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos argued that “person” is a term the Fathers reserve for the divine Persons of the Trinity and that applying it to human beings imports modern existential personalism into the Church’s language — a personalism which, on his account, identifies nature with necessity and sin and locates freedom and will in the person, and so deviates from the patristic tradition. His preferred term was the biblical and patristic anthropos. In May 2016, at his urging and that of others, the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece resolved that all references to “human person” in the conciliar documents should be changed to “human being” (Paul Ladouceur, “Human Beings or Human Persons?”, Public Orthodoxy, publicorthodoxy.org, 6 June 2017; Metropolitan Hierotheos’ broader position in his The Person in the Orthodox Tradition, Levadia: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, trans. Esther Williams).

The defence. Metropolitan John (Zizioulas), supported by Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), argued that speaking of the human being as a person is consonant with patristic anthropology and with the doctrine of the image and of theosis, and that the term carries theological and moral weight — including for the language of human dignity — that anthropos alone does not (Ladouceur, “Human Beings or Human Persons?”, 2017).

The outcome. On the floor, according to the account in Bishop Maxim (Vasiljević)’s Diary of the Council, as reported by Ladouceur, the Church of Greece withdrew its motion to delete the seven remaining references to personhood that had survived pre-conciliar editing, and the disputed language stayed in the final texts (Ladouceur, “Human Beings or Human Persons?”, 2017). The Council thus neither adopted nor rejected personalist anthropology; it declined to remove the vocabulary, which is a considerably weaker thing.

This is worth stating precisely, because it is sometimes reported as a conciliar endorsement of Zizioulas’ theology. It is not. A council that leaves a word in a document has not defined the doctrine some associate with the word, and the Crete texts contain no ontology of the person. The dispute did, however, make visible how far Zizioulas’ theses had travelled and how much resistance they met inside Greece.

A second exchange at the Council set Zizioulas against traditionalist objectors over whether the term “church” may be applied to non-Orthodox Christian bodies; the compromise adopted in §6 of “Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World” — that the Orthodox Church “accepts the historical name of other non-Orthodox Christian Churches and Confessions that are not in communion with her” — and the Athonite and other objections to it are reported in the hub file (see The Holy and Great Council (Crete, 2016) and The Ecumenism Debate).

The John Zizioulas Foundation records that he was personally dissatisfied with the level of theological discussion at the Council (John Zizioulas Foundation, “The Holy and Great Synod,” zizioulas.org). Coming from a man who had spent thirty years preparing it, that is a judgment worth preserving.

The Anti-Ecumenist Objection, Stated

Zizioulas’ ecumenical career is not neutral ground in Orthodoxy, and the collection reports the objection rather than passing over it.

A substantial body of Orthodox opinion — the Athonite communities in their interventions from 1965 onward, Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) among contemporary hierarch-theologians, and the tradition of critique associated with St. Justin Popović’s The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism (1974) — holds that the method of the bilateral dialogue is itself the error: that treating the Orthodox Church and a body she has judged as symmetrical partners seeking a lost unity concedes ecclesiologically what no document then needs to concede. The counter-position, which Zizioulas held and Metropolitan Kallistos defended, is that the Church owes the separated West a serious account of the faith, that no dogma has been conceded, and that refusal to speak is a temperament rather than a doctrine. Both positions are set out at length, with their proponents named and unadjudicated, in The Official Dialogue and The Ecumenism Debate.

References

Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. Ravenna Document, 13 October 2007, §§5, 6, 10, 24, 41, 43–44; Chieti Document, 21 September 2016, §§15–21; Alexandria Document, 7 June 2023; Balamand Statement, 1993.
Agreed statements of the first phase: Munich (1982), Bari (1987), New Valamo (1988).
Moscow Patriarchate. “Position of the Moscow Patriarchate on the Problem of Primacy in the Universal Church.” 26 December 2013.
Siecienski, A. Edward. The Papacy and the Orthodox: Sources and History of a Debate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.
Ladouceur, Paul. “Human Beings or Human Persons?” Public Orthodoxy, publicorthodoxy.org, 6 June 2017. (The anthropos/prosopon dispute; the Church of Greece’s May 2016 resolution; the withdrawal of the motion on the floor, citing Bishop Maxim (Vasiljević), Diary of the Council.)
Hierotheos (Vlachos), Metropolitan of Nafpaktos. The Person in the Orthodox Tradition. Trans. Esther Williams. Levadia: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery.
Holy and Great Council. “The Mission of the Orthodox Church in Today’s World”; “Relations of the Orthodox Church with the Rest of the Christian World,” §6; Message and Encyclical. Crete, 19–26 June 2016. holycouncil.org.
John Zizioulas Foundation. “Orthodox–Roman Catholic Dialogue” and “The Holy and Great Synod.” zizioulas.org (accessed 2026).