07 — Creation and the Priest of Creation

Zizioulas’ ecological theology is not an application of his system to a topical problem; it is the system, stated in another register. If being is communion and the eucharist is where creation is offered and returned, then the human vocation is priestly — to refer the world to God — and the ecological crisis is a failure of that vocation before it is a failure of policy. This section sets out the theology and the institutional work that carried it: the King’s College lectures of 1989–90, the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s environmental initiatives, and the Vatican podium in 2015.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

Files in This Section

File Description
The Priest of Creation The three lectures of 1989–90; the human being as priest rather than proprietor; ktisiology against cosmology; the eschatological ground; and the objections — anthropocentrism, and the charge that the motif is thinner in the Fathers than it is made to appear
Ecology, the Patriarchate, and the Eucharistic Ethos Patmos 1988, the encyclical of 1989 and the 1 September day of prayer, the Halki seminars, the Religious and Scientific Committee he chaired, the seaborne symposia, and the presentation of Laudato Si’ at the Vatican in 2015

The Argument in Brief

Zizioulas’ ecological theology has three moves.

  1. Creation has no capacity to survive on its own. It is contingent — it has a beginning, and what has a beginning tends of itself toward the nothing from which it came. Its permanence must be received from outside itself.
  2. The human being is the creature through whom creation is referred to God. Not because humanity is the crown of a hierarchy entitled to use what is below it, but because humanity alone can take the world, name it, offer it, and receive it back as gift. This is the priestly office, and Zizioulas’ word for its abandonment is not “greed” but “failure of priesthood.”
  3. The eucharist is the place where this happens. Bread and wine — creation worked by human hands — are taken, offered, and returned as the body and blood of Christ. The liturgy is therefore not a symbol of an ecological ethic but the act of which an ecological ethic is the extension.

The consequence he drew is that the ecological problem is not primarily ethical or technological but ontological and liturgical, and that appeals to fear or to self-interest will not reach it. What is required is what he called an “ethos” — a way of relating to the world learned in worship and in ascetic self-limitation.

The Standing Caveat

The Orthodox Church confesses God as creator of heaven and earth; she offers the gifts of creation in her liturgy; she keeps a rule of fasting that is, among other things, a discipline of restraint toward created things. The hub file Environmental Ethics states the Church’s teaching and practice as hers.

“The priest of creation” is a theological motif developed in the twentieth century, drawing on patristic materials — St. Maximus the Confessor above all — and given its most influential modern form by Zizioulas. It is not a defined doctrine, and the extent to which the Fathers taught it in the form he gives it is a scholarly question. As everywhere in this collection, his theology is stated as his.

See Also

References

  • Zizioulas, John D. “Preserving God’s Creation: Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology.” King’s Theological Review 12 (1989): 1–5, 41–45; 13 (1990): 1–5.
  • Zizioulas, John D. Ἡ κτίση ὡς Εὐχαριστία [Creation as Eucharist]. Athens: Akritas, 1992.
  • Zizioulas, John D. The Eucharistic Communion and the World. Ed. Luke Ben Tallon. London: T&T Clark, 2011.
  • Chryssavgis, John, and Nikolaos Asproulis, eds. Priests of Creation: John Zizioulas on Discerning an Ecological Ethos. London: T&T Clark, 2021. ISBN 978-0-567-69909-1.
  • Chryssavgis, John, ed. On Earth as in Heaven: Ecological Vision and Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.