Ecology, the Patriarchate, and the Eucharistic Ethos
Zizioulas’ ecological theology was not written in a study. From the Patmos conference of 1988 through the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s first environmental encyclical in 1989, the Halki seminars, the seaborne symposia of the Religious and Scientific Committee he chaired, and the Vatican podium from which he welcomed Laudato Si’ in 2015, he was the theologian of an institutional programme that made the Ecumenical Patriarch the most prominent religious voice on the environment in the world. This file sets out that history and the argument it carried.
Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)
Patmos, 1988
The beginning was a conference at Patmos in 1988, “Revelation and the Future of Humanity,” marking the nineteen-hundredth anniversary of the Apocalypse and organized jointly by the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Greek Ministry of Culture. Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios appointed Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon as his patriarchal representative to it, and the environmental question came onto the Patriarchate’s agenda from that meeting (John Chryssavgis, ed., On Earth as in Heaven: Ecological Vision and Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, New York: Fordham University Press, 2012, and the background material published by the Ecumenical Patriarchate on the “Green Patriarch” initiatives).
The sequence matters for reading the theology. Zizioulas was not a systematician who later took an interest in ecology; the King’s College lectures of 1989–90 were delivered in the middle of the institutional development, and they were a theologian’s attempt to supply an argument for something his church had just committed itself to (see The Priest of Creation).
The Encyclical of 1989 and the First of September
In 1989 Patriarch Dimitrios issued the first patriarchal encyclical on the environment, declaring that the Church could not remain indifferent before the ecological crisis, and establishing 1 September — the first day of the Orthodox ecclesiastical year — as a day of prayer for the protection of the natural environment (Chryssavgis, ed., On Earth as in Heaven, 2012; Ecumenical Patriarchate, “The Green Patriarch” background materials).
The choice of date is theologically pointed and it is worth noticing. The Orthodox liturgical year begins on 1 September; the Church therefore opens her year by praying for creation. This is exactly the move Zizioulas’ theology recommends — locating the ecological question inside the liturgical cycle rather than beside it — and the day has since been adopted far beyond Orthodoxy, being taken up by the Roman Catholic Church in 2015 as a World Day of Prayer for the Care of Creation.
Halki, the Committee, and the Symposia
Under Patriarch Bartholomew, elected in 1991, the programme expanded and Zizioulas was placed at its theological center.
The Halki seminars. From June 1994 a series of five annual summer seminars was convened at the historic Theological School of Halki, each on an aspect of the environmental question: religious education (1994), ethics (1995), communications (1996), justice (1997), and poverty (1998) (Chryssavgis, ed., On Earth as in Heaven, 2012).
The Religious and Scientific Committee. Patriarch Bartholomew established the committee in 1994 to bring theologians, scientists, environmentalists, journalists and policy-makers into sustained conversation, and Zizioulas chaired it — the position from which he did most of his institutional ecological work (Chryssavgis and Asproulis, eds., Priests of Creation: John Zizioulas on Discerning an Ecological Ethos, London: T&T Clark, 2021, describing him as the pioneer thinker and principal spokesman of the Patriarchate’s ecological initiatives and as chairman of the committee).
The symposia. The committee organized eight international, interfaith and interdisciplinary seaborne symposia, each gathering its participants on a ship or along a waterway so that the subject of the discussion surrounded it:
| Symposium | Subject | Year |
|---|---|---|
| I | Patmos and the Aegean/Mediterranean — “Revelation and the Environment” | 1995 |
| II | The Black Sea | 1997 |
| III | The Danube | 1999 |
| IV | The Adriatic | 2002 |
| V | The Baltic | 2003 |
| VI | The Amazon | 2006 |
| VII | The Arctic and Greenland | 2007 |
| VIII | The Mississippi | 2009 |
(List per the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s published account of the Religious and Scientific Committee’s work, reproduced in Chryssavgis, ed., On Earth as in Heaven, 2012.)
The symposia are the reason Patriarch Bartholomew acquired the sobriquet “the Green Patriarch,” and they are the reason Orthodox theology has a public profile on the environmental question out of all proportion to the Orthodox Church’s size in the countries where the question is debated. Zizioulas’ contribution was to supply the theology that kept the programme from becoming a religiously flavoured environmentalism: the constant insistence that the ground is the eucharist and the doctrine of creation, not a general concern for nature.
Rome, 18 June 2015
Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, dated 24 May 2015, was published on 18 June 2015 at a press conference in the New Synod Hall at the Vatican. Among the presenters was Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon, speaking as the representative of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew — an Orthodox hierarch presenting a papal encyclical to the world’s press, which had not happened before (Vatican Radio, “Metropolitan John Zizioulas: Laudato Si’ give Orthodox ‘great joy’,” 18 June 2015; John Zizioulas Foundation, “Comment on the New Encyclical of Pope Francis Laudato Si’,” zizioulas.org; the full text of his presentation is reproduced by Ecojesuit).
He conveyed Patriarch Bartholomew’s satisfaction at the encyclical and welcomed it as a convergence with what the Ecumenical Patriarchate had been saying since 1989. The moment is a fair emblem of his career: an Orthodox theologian whose ecclesiology had been drafted into an ecumenical document eight years earlier, now standing at the Vatican to welcome a Roman text on a subject his own church had raised first.
That the encyclical itself cites Patriarch Bartholomew is a matter of record and is noted in the hub file on the Church and the environment (see Environmental Ethics).
The Ethos Rather Than the Ethic
Running through all of this is a distinction Zizioulas insisted on and which is easily lost in the institutional narrative: he did not think the Church’s contribution was an ethic — a set of rules or a programme of action — but an ethos, a way of being in the world learned in worship.
The reasoning: rules require enforcement and generate evasion; an ethic of consequences is hostage to calculations of consequence; and the ecological crisis is on his diagnosis too deep for either, because it is a crisis in the way human beings hold the world. What changes that is the liturgy, which teaches a person to receive the world as gift and to return it, and the ascetic discipline that trains the same disposition into ordinary life. Hence his preference for the language of love over the language of fear, and his resistance to reducing the Church’s voice to advocacy (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Ecology,” zizioulas.org).
Whether this is a strength or an evasion is a fair question, and it has been asked. An ethos is not a policy; a theology that declines to prescribe can be commended for its depth or faulted for its convenience. The collection records the criticism without settling it.
The Reception Within Orthodoxy
Zizioulas’ ecological theology has been the least contested part of his work. The anti-ecumenist and traditionalist critics who reject his personalist ontology and distrust his ecumenical career have generally not attacked the priesthood of creation, and the ecological programme of the Ecumenical Patriarchate has drawn a broad Orthodox consensus that his trinitarian theology never approached. Where criticism exists it is of two kinds: the theological objection about anthropocentrism and patristic warrant, treated in The Priest of Creation; and a political suspicion, voiced in some quarters, that the environmental programme functions as a means of international visibility for a patriarchate under pressure in Türkiye. The second is an inference about motives rather than an argument about theology, and this collection reports it as such and does not endorse it.
See Also
- The Priest of Creation — the theology
- Environmental Ethics — the Church’s teaching and practice, stated as hers
- Ravenna 2007 and Crete 2016 — the other half of his institutional career
- The Divine Liturgy — the offering at the center of the ethos
- The Shape of His Influence — where this work stands in the whole
References
- Chryssavgis, John, ed. On Earth as in Heaven: Ecological Vision and Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. (Patmos 1988; the 1989 encyclical and the 1 September day of prayer; the Halki seminars 1994–1998; the eight seaborne symposia 1995–2009.)
- Chryssavgis, John, and Nikolaos Asproulis, eds. Priests of Creation: John Zizioulas on Discerning an Ecological Ethos. London: T&T Clark, 2021. (Zizioulas as chairman of the Religious and Scientific Committee, established 1994.)
- 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. The Eucharistic Communion and the World. Ed. Luke Ben Tallon. London: T&T Clark, 2011.
- Vatican Radio. “Metropolitan John Zizioulas: Laudato Si’ give Orthodox ‘great joy’.” 18 June 2015.
- John Zizioulas Foundation. “Ecology” and “Comment on the New Encyclical of Pope Francis Laudato Si’.” zizioulas.org (accessed 2026).
- Pope Francis. Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. Encyclical letter dated 24 May 2015, published 18 June 2015.