Person, Nature, and Grace: The Orthodox Objections

The theological case against Zizioulas, at full strength: Jean-Claude Larchet’s book-length argument that the opposition of person to nature is unpatristic and distorts three doctrines at once; Nikolaos Loudovikos’ charge that person has been substituted for grace and otherness “dictated” rather than received; Alexis Torrance’s contention that modern Orthodox personalism severed anthropology from christology; and Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos)’ objection from the neptic and Athonite tradition that “person” is a word for the Trinity. Each is stated in its own terms, with the replies. Nothing here is adjudicated.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

The Shape of the Objection

Underneath the different critics there is one recurring complaint, and stating it once makes the rest legible.

Zizioulas locates freedom in the person and necessity in the nature. His critics answer that in the patristic tradition — above all in St. Maximus the Confessor, whose martyrdom was over precisely this — the will belongs to the nature, and freedom with it; that created nature is God’s good work and not a prison; and that once nature is characterized as necessity, the doctrine of grace changes shape, because grace can no longer be the perfecting of a nature and must instead be the rescue of a person from one. From that single move, the critics argue, a series of consequences follow through trinitarian theology, christology and anthropology.

That is the argument. The rest of this file is who makes it, how, and what is said in reply.

Jean-Claude Larchet: Personne et nature (2011)

The fullest Orthodox refutation is Jean-Claude Larchet, Personne et nature: La Trinité – Le Christ – L’homme. Contributions aux dialogues interorthodoxe et interchrétien contemporains (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2011). Larchet is a French Orthodox patristic scholar of substantial standing, best known for his work on St. Maximus and on the theology of illness and healing; the book’s three parts follow its subtitle — the Trinity, Christ, and the human being — and its final and most polemical section is directed at the personalist theologies of Christos Yannaras and John Zizioulas (Larchet, Personne et nature, Paris: Cerf, 2011; review notice, Nouvelle Revue Théologique, describing the final section as strongly critical of the personalist theories of Yannaras and Zizioulas).

Larchet’s principal contentions:

The Fathers do not oppose person to nature. The distinction between hypostasis and ousia is a distinction, not an opposition; the Fathers use it to say how God is one and three, not to make one term the seat of freedom and the other of constraint. To read a polarity into it is to import a modern schema.
Nature is not necessity. Created nature is God’s good work; the logoi according to which things are made are divine intentions, not fetters. Characterizing nature as the domain of necessity, division and death moves the source of the human predicament from sin to creaturehood — a move Larchet regards as closer to Origenist and gnostic patterns than to patristic ones.
Freedom is a property of the nature. This is the Maximian doctrine of the natural will, defended against monothelitism at the Sixth Ecumenical Council. If freedom is transferred to the hypostasis, the christological settlement is disturbed: Christ’s human freedom would belong to the divine hypostasis rather than to His human nature, which is what the Council excluded.
The trinitarian consequence. Making the Father’s hypostasis the cause of the divine being — rather than the source of the other two hypostases — subordinates essence to person in a way the Fathers do not, and generates the problems examined in The Monarchy of the Father.
The genealogy. The personalism in question derives, on Larchet’s account, from modern Western philosophy — the personalist and existentialist currents of the twentieth century — and its patristic dress is retrospective.

[Disputed: Larchet's reading of Zizioulas. Zizioulas' defenders reply that Larchet attacks a position Zizioulas does not hold — that he does not devalue nature, insists on the bodily and eucharistic realization of the ecclesial hypostasis, and distinguishes the freedom of the person from choice. The dispute is unresolved.]

The book has been influential in French and Greek Orthodox circles; the sources consulted for this collection show no English translation, and English-language discussion of Larchet is correspondingly thinner than his importance warrants.

Nikolaos Loudovikos: Person Instead of Grace

The most painful criticism, because it comes from inside. Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos (b. 1959) studied theology at Thessaloniki, where Zizioulas held the chair of dogmatics, and took his doctorate there in 1989 with a dissertation on “Eucharistic Ontology in the Theological Thought of St. Maximus the Confessor”; he is described in the biographical literature as a long-time student of Zizioulas. [Disputed: whether Zizioulas formally supervised the dissertation. The sources consulted establish the student relationship and the Thessaloniki doctorate but not the supervision, and the collection does not assert it.]

His works bearing on Zizioulas:

A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2010) — the English version of the Greek dissertation-book, and the constructive alternative.
“Person instead of Grace and Dictated Otherness: John Zizioulas’ Final Theological Position,” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 684–699 — the frontal critique.
“Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will,” Participatio 4 (2013): 258–286 — the Maximian comparison in detail.
Analogical Identities: The Creation of the Christian Self — Beyond Spirituality and Mysticism in the Patristic Era (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020) — the mature statement of the alternative anthropology.

His argument runs as follows.

Grace is displaced by person. In the patristic scheme, the human being is transformed by the uncreated energies of God working within a nature that participates and responds. In Zizioulas’ scheme, Loudovikos argues, the transformation is accomplished by the constitution of a new hypostasis; what was a synergy of grace and nature becomes an ontological substitution, and grace is left as something imposed from outside a nature characterized as necessity and death.

Otherness is dictated, not given in dialogue. If the Father is the cause who confers otherness, and if the creature’s particularity is constituted by being related to by God, then the creature’s own response has no constitutive weight — otherness is dictated. Loudovikos’ counter-proposal is dialogical reciprocity: on his reading of St. Maximus, the logoi of created things are divine wills to which the creature answers, so that the creature’s logos is realized in a dialogue and not in a bestowal. Being is eucharistic precisely in the sense of a gift given, received, and returned — with a real creaturely side.

The Maximian point about the will. Loudovikos presses the christological argument hardest: for Maximus the will is natural, and Zizioulas’ relocation of freedom to the hypostasis inverts the patristic synthesis. His 2013 essay is a sustained textual comparison on exactly this.

Loudovikos has also written more generally against what he sees as the trap set by modern Orthodox personalism — the line running from Berdyaev through Yannaras to Zizioulas — in which the person, cut loose from nature, ends in an ecstatic voluntarism that cannot account for asceticism, for the body, or for growth. (The characterization of his position in those terms is this collection’s summary of his published arguments, not a quotation from a single title.)

Zizioulas replied, chiefly in Communion and Otherness (2006), distinguishing personal freedom from choice, denying that he makes the Trinity the product of deliberation, and arguing that his account of otherness is constitutive of the other rather than imposed on it. The two men were on opposite sides of a page in Douglas Knight’s 2007 collection, which is one of that volume’s virtues.

Alexis Torrance: Christology, Not Personhood

Alexis Torrance (University of Notre Dame) makes an argument of a different kind: not that Zizioulas has misread a Father, but that a whole modern Orthodox idiom has put the wrong doctrine at the center.

“Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate,” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 700–707 — published in the same issue as Loudovikos’ critique, and arguing for a reassessment of the terms in which the whole personhood debate has been conducted.
Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology: Attaining the Fullness of Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020; Changing Paradigms in Historical and Systematic Theology) — the developed case. Torrance argues that an Orthodox account of human perfection faithful to its Byzantine inheritance must place supreme emphasis on the doctrine of Christ, and specifically on the significance of Christ’s humanity; that several tendencies in modern Orthodox theology have severed anthropology from christology; and that the notions of personhood and communion which dominated twentieth-century Orthodox thought need a paradigm shift — from a “personalism” or a theology of “Godmanhood” to the God-man Himself. The book traces the career of “personhood” from the eighteenth century to what it treats as its most famous exposition in Zizioulas.
He also co-edited, with Symeon Paschalidis, Personhood in the Byzantine Christian Tradition: Early, Medieval, and Modern Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2018), a volume assembling the historical evidence on both sides.

Torrance’s objection is therefore not primarily “the Cappadocians didn’t say that” but “even if they did, this is not where the weight belongs” — which is why it is filed here and not in The Patristic Question.

Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos): the Objection from the Neptic Tradition

Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos, a disciple of the Athonite and neptic tradition and one of the most widely read Orthodox writers in Greece, has argued the case from a different starting point: not the academic study of the Fathers but the lives of the saints and the hesychast tradition of purification, illumination and deification.

His book The Person in the Orthodox Tradition (Levadia: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery; English trans. Esther Williams) examines ousia, hypostasis and the patristic teaching on the person, and argues that:

“Person” in patristic usage is a term for the divine Persons of the Trinity, and its transfer to human beings, in the register modern personalism gives it, is not patristic. The Fathers speak of the human being (anthropos) as soul and body, in the image of God, with nous, and the whole vocabulary of the ascetic tradition is built on that.
Modern existential personalism identifies nature with necessity and sin, and locates desire and will in the person — a scheme he regards as a deviation from the patristic tradition rather than a development of it.
The hermeneutic key is the saints. What personhood means is shown by what happens to human beings who are healed and deified, and the criterion of a theology is the therapeutic tradition it produces.

[Disputed: the scholarly standing of Metropolitan Hierotheos' philosophical arguments. Reviewers sympathetic to his patristic and ascetic exposition have nonetheless noted a polemical cast to parts of his work and a reliance on secondary sources in the philosophical sections; the same book was awarded a prize by the Academy of Athens as the outstanding theological work written in Greece in 1991–96. The collection records both and evaluates neither.]

The dispute became public and institutional at the Holy and Great Council of Crete in 2016, where Metropolitan Hierotheos argued against the phrase “human person” in the conciliar documents and Metropolitan John, supported by Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), argued for it. The Church of Greece resolved in May 2016 to replace all such references with “human being”; on the floor of the Council it withdrew its motion to delete the seven surviving references, and the language remained (Paul Ladouceur, “Human Beings or Human Persons?”, Public Orthodoxy, 6 June 2017; see Ravenna 2007 and Crete 2016).

The Counter-Defence

The defence is not merely a matter of denial, and it should be given at its own strength.

Aristotle Papanikolaou (Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006) argues that Zizioulas’ ontology is required by the doctrine of divine–human communion itself: if theosis means a real communion between God and the human person, an ontology in which relation is derivative cannot state it. His book sets Zizioulas against Vladimir Lossky and — in a judgment that many found counter-intuitive — comes down on Zizioulas’ side.

Douglas H. Knight edited The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), the standard critical volume, whose distinction is that it prints Loudovikos and Alan Brown, admirer and critic, between the same covers; Knight also edited Zizioulas’ Lectures in Christian Dogmatics (T&T Clark, 2008), which is the most accessible statement of the whole system in the author’s own voice.

Alan Brown, in that volume (“On the Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology,” 35–78), argues at length that the critics have attacked positions Zizioulas does not hold.

Norman Russell gives the most balanced verdict available in a single sentence: Zizioulas “is fully aware of modern philosophical currents, which have influenced his thinking but not determined it” (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92, at 87). Russell also records the Roman Catholic historian of modern Greek theology Yannis Spiteris as finding Zizioulas’ synthesis entirely convincing and potentially important for Catholic thought (Spiteris, La teologia ortodossa neo-greca, 1992, 416, cited in Russell, 2006, 87).

Zizioulas himself answered in Communion and Otherness (2006), in Greek in Synaxi 37 (1991), and in occasional pieces; the substance of his replies is set out in The Patristic Question.

What Has and Has Not Happened

A point of fact, and it matters for §4.1.

No Orthodox church has condemned Zizioulas’ theology, censured his books, or taken any canonical action against him. He died on 2 February 2023 an Elder Metropolitan of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in good standing, having been a member and president of the Academy of Athens and the Patriarchate’s principal theologian in its dialogues. What exists is a theological dispute among Orthodox theologians, conducted in journals and monographs, in which several of the participants are bishops and priests of the Church and none of them has been disciplined for taking part.

Equally: no Orthodox council has endorsed his theses, and the Council of Crete’s retention of the word “person” in a document is not an endorsement of an ontology. The Church’s dogma on the Trinity and on the human being stands where the councils and the Fathers put it, and neither Zizioulas nor his critics have altered it. That is the situation this section reports, and it is where the collection leaves the reader.

References

Larchet, Jean-Claude. Personne et nature: La Trinité – Le Christ – L’homme. Contributions aux dialogues interorthodoxe et interchrétien contemporains. Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2011.
Loudovikos, Nikolaos. A Eucharistic Ontology: Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2010.
Loudovikos, Nikolaos. “Person instead of Grace and Dictated Otherness: John Zizioulas’ Final Theological Position.” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 684–699.
Loudovikos, Nikolaos. “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will.” Participatio 4 (2013): 258–286.
Loudovikos, Nikolaos. Analogical Identities: The Creation of the Christian Self — Beyond Spirituality and Mysticism in the Patristic Era. Turnhout: Brepols, 2020.
Torrance, Alexis. “Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate.” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 (2011): 700–707.
Torrance, Alexis. Human Perfection in Byzantine Theology: Attaining the Fullness of Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Torrance, Alexis, and Symeon Paschalidis, eds. Personhood in the Byzantine Christian Tradition: Early, Medieval, and Modern Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2018.
Hierotheos (Vlachos), Metropolitan of Nafpaktos. The Person in the Orthodox Tradition. Trans. Esther Williams. Levadia: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery.
Ladouceur, Paul. “Human Beings or Human Persons?” Public Orthodoxy, publicorthodoxy.org, 6 June 2017.
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.
Papanikolaou, Aristotle. Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006.
Knight, Douglas H., ed. The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
Brown, Alan. “On the Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology.” In Knight, ed. (2007), 35–78.
Russell, Norman. “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers.” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92.
Spiteris, Yannis. La teologia ortodossa neo-greca. Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992.
Nouvelle Revue Théologique, review notice of Larchet, Personne et nature (nrt.be).