The Priest of Creation

Zizioulas’ answer to the ecological crisis was to say that the human being is not the proprietor of creation but its priest — the creature through whom the world is offered to God and receives from God a future it cannot give itself. This file sets out the three lectures of 1989–90 in which he argued it, the doctrine of contingent creation on which it rests, his proposal to replace “cosmology” with “ktisiology,” the ascetic ethos he drew from it, and the objections it has met.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Lectures

The core text is a set of three public lectures delivered at King’s College London and published as “Preserving God’s Creation: Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology,” King’s Theological Review 12 (1989): 1–5, 41–45; 13 (1990): 1–5. The Greek gathering of the material appeared as Ἡ κτίση ὡς Εὐχαριστία (Creation as Eucharist) (Athens: Akritas, 1992), and the theme runs through the later collections, above all The Eucharistic Communion and the World, ed. Luke Ben Tallon (London: T&T Clark, 2011). The fullest modern gathering of his ecological writing and of the discussion around it is Priests of Creation: John Zizioulas on Discerning an Ecological Ethos, ed. John Chryssavgis and Nikolaos Asproulis (London: T&T Clark, 2021).

Zizioulas’ opening claim in those lectures was that the ecological crisis was perhaps the first problem facing the human community as a whole, and that theology had not yet said anything adequate about it. He was writing in 1989, which is worth remembering when the argument now sounds familiar.

Why Creation Needs a Priest

The theological premise is the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, taken with full seriousness.

If the world was made from nothing, then it is radically contingent: it has no principle of permanence in itself, and left to itself it tends back toward the nothing out of which it was called. This is not a moral judgment on matter — Zizioulas is emphatic against every dualism — but an ontological observation. What has a beginning has, of itself, an end. Creation’s survival is therefore not a natural property to be conserved but a gift to be received, and it can be received only through a relation with the uncreated.

The human being is, in Zizioulas’ account, the point at which that relation can be established from the creaturely side. Humanity is not distinguished from the rest of creation by reason, or by dominion, or by any faculty that would license use; it is distinguished by the capacity to take the world personally — to relate to it not as material but as gift, to gather it, name it, and refer it to its source. That referring is priesthood. The human being is the priest of creation because in him creation is offered, and in the offering it is united to the God who alone can give it a future (Zizioulas, “Preserving God’s Creation,” 1989–90; The Eucharistic Communion and the World, 2011).

Priest, Not Proprietor

The contrast Zizioulas draws is with two rival descriptions of the human place in nature, and he rejects both.

The proprietor. The human being as owner and manager — the reading of Genesis 1:28 in which “subdue” and “have dominion” license exploitation, and in which stewardship, if it appears, appears as prudent estate management. Zizioulas regarded this as the deep religious root of the ecological crisis in the Christian West, and he attacked it not by softening dominion into stewardship but by changing the category: the human being does not manage creation, he offers it.

The mere part. The human being as one species among others, whose pretension to a special place is the problem. Zizioulas rejected this too, and here he differs sharply from much secular environmental thought and from some Christian ecotheology. On his account, if the human being is only a part of nature, then nature has no one to refer it to God, and creation is left with its contingency unrelieved. His theology is unapologetically anthropocentric in structure — but the center it assigns to humanity is a liturgical office, not a licence; and the office is one humanity has catastrophically failed to perform.

Ktisiology

A characteristic Zizioulan proposal: theology should stop speaking of “cosmology” and speak instead of ktisiology, from κτίσις (ktisis, “creation”), because “cosmos” names an ordered whole that is what it is in itself, while “creation” names something whose very being is a relation to a creator. The word carries the whole argument: what is at stake in the ecological question is whether the world is a self-standing system with which we must deal prudently, or a gift whose being is constituted by relation (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Ecology,” zizioulas.org, reporting the proposal).

The Eucharist and the Ethos

The liturgical center of the argument is the offering. In the Divine Liturgy, bread and wine — creation as worked and shaped by human labour — are taken up, offered with the words “Thine own of Thine own we offer unto Thee, on behalf of all and for all,” and returned as the body and blood of Christ. Everything Zizioulas says about the priesthood of creation is a generalization of that act: the eucharist is what it looks like when a human being does with a piece of the world what human beings are for (see The Divine Liturgy).

From this he drew two practical consequences.

Ecological asceticism. The disciplines of fasting and self-limitation are not, on his reading, a penitential tax on enjoyment but training in the recognition that the world is not one’s own. An ethos of restraint learned liturgically is what he thought the crisis required, and he did not expect legislation or technology to supply it.

A theology of love rather than of fear. He argued explicitly against fear-driven environmentalism: the appeal should be to “a positive view of ecology, something like an attitude of love toward nature,” because an ethic grounded in the fear of consequences will not survive the discovery that some consequences can be deferred (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Ecology,” zizioulas.org, quoting him).

The Eschatological Ground

Zizioulas’ final move is the one that distinguishes his ecology from stewardship theology generally: the reason to care for creation is not that it is our inheritance from the past but that it has a future in the Kingdom. Creation is destined to be transfigured, not discarded; the resurrection of the body is the pledge that matter has an eschatological future; and Christian action in the world is therefore anticipation and not preservation. This is the ecological application of the eschatological ontology he intended to state systematically in Remembering the Future (John Zizioulas Foundation, “Ecology,” zizioulas.org; on the disputed publication data of that volume see The Book and Its Making).

The Objections

The ecological writings have attracted less sustained criticism than the trinitarian and anthropological ones, but the objections that exist are serious and should be recorded.

The anthropocentrism objection. Making the human being the one through whom creation is saved seems to some critics to reinstate at the level of theology exactly the human centrality that ecological thought was trying to dislodge, and to give non-human creation no standing except as material for a human offering. Zizioulas’ answer is that the alternative leaves creation with no relation to God at all, and that a centrality defined as sacrifice and offering is the opposite of a centrality defined as ownership. The exchange is genuine and unresolved.

The patristic question again. The motif of the human being as “priest of creation” is regularly presented as patristic, and it does have patristic materials — St. Maximus the Confessor’s account of the human being as the microcosm and mediator who gathers the divided orders of creation and refers them to God is the principal source, and St. Gregory the Theologian and St. Gregory of Nyssa supply others. But the phrase itself and the systematic weight placed on it are modern. Scholarship examining “creation and priesthood in modern Orthodox thinking” has made this point, and readers should not assume that a formula so useful in contemporary discussion is a citation from the Fathers rather than a modern development of them (see The Patristic Question for the general form of this problem; St. Maximus the Confessor for the source).

The relation to the wider Orthodox ecological literature. Zizioulas’ account is one of several. Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae’s theology of the world as gift and dialogue between God and man, and Paul Evdokimov‘s and Olivier Clément‘s cosmic sacramentalism, arrive at overlapping conclusions by other routes, and the Orthodox ecological consensus that emerged around Patriarch Bartholomew’s initiatives is a convergence rather than an application of one man’s system (see Fr. Dumitru Stăniloae; Environmental Ethics).

What Is His and What Is the Church’s

The Church confesses God as maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible; she offers bread and wine and receives them back sanctified; she keeps a fast. The identification of the human vocation as a “priesthood of creation,” the doctrine of creation’s contingency as the ground of ecological urgency, and the proposal of ktisiology are Zizioulas’ theology. They have been widely welcomed within Orthodoxy — more widely than his personalist ontology — and they have not been defined.

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.
John Zizioulas Foundation. “Ecology.” zizioulas.org (accessed 2026). (The ktisiology proposal; the “attitude of love toward nature”; the eschatological grounding.)
Maximus the Confessor. Ambigua and Mystagogy. (The human being as microcosm and mediator.)
Scripture: Genesis 1:28.