The Patristic Question

Zizioulas claimed that the Cappadocian Fathers, in identifying hypostasis with prosopon, made personhood ontologically ultimate. Whether they did is a question of fourth-century exegesis, and a series of scholars — Lucian Turcescu, André de Halleux, and in Greek J. Panagopoulos and S. Agouridis — have answered no. This file sets out the challenge, the evidence on both sides, Zizioulas’ replies, and the defences mounted by Aristotle Papanikolaou, Alan Brown and Norman Russell. It adjudicates nothing.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (Ecumenical Patriarchate)

What Is Actually in Dispute

It is worth stating narrowly, because the argument is often conducted at cross purposes.

Not in dispute: that the fourth-century Fathers distinguished ousia from hypostasis; that they used prosopon of the Three; that the Father is the sole source of the Son and the Spirit; that this vocabulary was a genuine achievement without exact pagan precedent.

In dispute: whether the Fathers thereby (a) made the person ontologically prior to the essence, (b) distinguished “person” from “individual” in anything like the modern sense, (c) held that freedom rather than necessity is the ground of being, and (d) intended any of this as an ontology at all rather than as a way of stating the trinitarian faith against Arians and Sabellians.

Turcescu: Gregory of Nyssa Does Not Draw the Distinction

The single most cited challenge is Lucian Turcescu’s article “‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa,” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (2002): 527–539, republished in Sarah Coakley, ed., Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).

Turcescu’s argument, stated at its strongest:

St. Gregory of Nyssa does not distinguish the person from the individual. In Ad Graecos and Ad Ablabium he explains hypostasis in terms of a collection of distinguishing properties (idiomata) — the very account of individuation that Zizioulas treats as the pagan alternative to personhood.
Zizioulas therefore attributes to Gregory a concern that is not his: the modern quarrel with individualism. “Individual” as a term of abuse is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century development, and reading it back into the fourth century imports the answer into the evidence.
The methodological charge follows: Zizioulas uses modern insights and projects them onto the Cappadocians, and is in error when he claims that they did not understand a person as an individual or that they shared our concerns in combating individualism.

Turcescu developed the case at book length in Gregory of Nyssa and the Concept of Divine Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005; AAR Academy Series). It is important to note — because it is regularly lost in polemical summaries — that Turcescu’s book does not conclude that Gregory has no doctrine of the person. It argues that Gregory understood personhood in terms of uniqueness, relationality and freedom, while also treating a hypostasis as an individual constituted by a collection of properties. The dispute is therefore not “does Gregory have persons?” but “does Gregory have Zizioulas’ persons, and does he oppose person to individual?”

De Halleux: A Bad Controversy

An older and in some ways more radical objection comes from the Belgian patrologist André de Halleux, in “Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens? Une mauvaise controverse,” Revue théologique de Louvain 17 (1986): 129–155 and 265–292.

De Halleux’s thesis is that the whole opposition between a “personalist” Greek trinitarian theology and an “essentialist” Latin one is a mauvaise controverse — a bad controversy, built on a schema imposed on the sources. The Cappadocians, he argues, consistently gave equal weight to the unity of the ousia and the trinity of the hypostaseis, and neither subordinated the one to the other. To read them as making the person prior is therefore not a mild overstatement but a misconstrual of what they were doing.

Norman Russell records de Halleux as objecting specifically to Zizioulas’ giving priority to personal categories over essential ones in expounding the Cappadocians (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians and the Greek Fathers,” Philosophy & Theology 18, no. 1 (2006): 77–92, at 86).

The de Régnon Paradigm

Behind de Halleux’s objection lies a piece of historiography that has reshaped the field. The commonplace that “the Greeks begin from the three persons, the Latins from the one essence” derives from the nineteenth-century French Jesuit Théodore de Régnon, and modern scholarship — beginning with Michel René Barnes’ “De Régnon Reconsidered” — has argued that the paradigm is a nineteenth-century construction which subsequent theologians, Eastern and Western alike, mistook for a datum of patristics (Barnes, “De Régnon Reconsidered,” Augustinian Studies 26 (1995): 51–79 [Corrected: Norman Russell's bibliography gives the volume as 25; the article is standardly cited from vol. 26 (1995), 51–79]; Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians,” 2006, n. 22, noting Barnes’ demonstration that Vladimir Lossky relied on de Régnon for his assessment of Augustine, and that Lossky’s acknowledgement of de Régnon was dropped from the English translation of the Mystical Theology).

This matters to Zizioulas in a specific way. If the East/West contrast on which so much of the modern Orthodox account of personhood depends is itself a modern scholarly artifact, then a theology built on that contrast is standing on ground that has shifted since it was built. Zizioulas is not the only casualty here — the same critique reaches Lossky, Yannaras, John Romanides and much twentieth-century Orthodox polemic against Augustine — and it is the reason the patristic question about Zizioulas cannot be settled by simply reasserting the Greek/Latin difference (see Vladimir Lossky; St. Augustine of Hippo).

The Greek Front, 1985–1991

The earliest sustained attack was in Greek and is largely unknown to English readers.

J. Panagopoulos, “Ὀντολογία ἢ θεολογία τοῦ προσώπου;” [“Ontology or theology of the person? The contribution of patristic triadology to the understanding of the human person”], Synaxi 13 (1985): 63–79 and 14: 34–47.
S. Agouridis, “Μποροῦν τὰ πρόσωπα τῆς Τριάδας νὰ δώσουν τὴ βάση γιὰ περσοναλιστικὲς ἀπόψεις περὶ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου;” [“Can the persons of the Trinity provide the basis for personalist views of man?”], Synaxi 33 (1990): 67–78.

Both charge that Zizioulas attributes to the Fathers ideas he has in fact imported from philosophical personalism and existentialism; both are discussed at length in Yannis Spiteris’ survey of modern Greek theology (Spiteris, La teologia ortodossa neo-greca, Bologna: Edizioni Dehoniane, 1992, 409–411; the whole exchange summarized in Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians,” 2006, 86–87 and n. 25).

Zizioulas replied directly, in “Τὸ εἶναι τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ τὸ εἶναι τοῦ ἀνθρώπου: Ἀπόπειρα θεολογικοῦ διαλόγου” [“The Being of God and the Being of Man: An Attempt at Theological Dialogue”], Synaxi 37 (1991): 11–36. Russell’s summary of the reply: Zizioulas “responded vigorously to these attacks, defending the patristic basis of his theological approach”; he “is fully aware of modern philosophical currents, which have influenced his thinking but not determined it”; and his personalism “does not refer to God in purely personal terms, ignoring the category of substance” (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians,” 2006, 87).

Zizioulas’ Answers

Four lines of reply run through his responses, and they should be stated as strongly as the objections.

1. The Fathers did not repeat their predecessors either. Fidelity to the patristic mind is not the reproduction of patristic sentences. Russell puts the point in Zizioulas’ favour: “He is faithful to the spirit of the Fathers but is not thereby prevented from building on what they say. After all, the Fathers themselves did not simply repeat the words of their predecessors. Then as now dogma needed to be related to contemporary concerns” (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians,” 2006, 87).

2. The question is what the Fathers’ move implies, not what they said about implications. Zizioulas does not claim that St. Basil wrote a treatise on relational ontology. He claims that identifying hypostasis with prosopon commits one to an ontology, whether or not the Fathers drew the inference — and that theology’s task is to draw it.

3. Substance is not abolished. A standing misreading, which Zizioulas repeatedly corrected, is that he denies the divine ousia or treats it as a fiction. He does not: the Three are homoousios, and his claim concerns the order of ontological grounding, not the reality of essence.

4. The eschatological frame. Zizioulas’ account of personhood is finally eschatological — the true person is what one will be in the Kingdom — which is why he regarded objections drawn from the present constitution of human nature as arguing at the wrong level.

The Defences

Aristotle Papanikolaou answered Turcescu directly in “Is John Zizioulas an Existentialist in Disguise? Response to Lucian Turcescu,” Modern Theology 20, no. 4 (October 2004): 601–607, and set out the constructive case in Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). His argument, as Russell summarizes it, is that if the core of the Christian faith is divine–human communion, it is difficult to see how Zizioulas is not right in claiming, on the basis of the Fathers, that this implies an ontology which is relational and personal (Papanikolaou, Being with God, 2006, 161, with the discussion of Turcescu at 155–159; Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians,” 2006, 87).

Alan Brown‘s “On the Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology,” in Douglas H. Knight, ed., The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 35–78, is the longest and most combative defence, and it is directed squarely at the English-language critics, Turcescu among them. Brown’s general strategy is to argue that the critics have misread Zizioulas — attacking a philosophical thesis he does not hold — and that their own readings of the Fathers are no less shaped by modern assumptions than the reading they impugn.

Norman Russell’s verdict is the most quotable because it is the most temperate. Surveying the whole Greek generation, he grants the force of the criticism and declines the conclusion: the accusation that existentialism has been imported “is more weighty” than others made against these theologians, but it “argues from a very narrow idea of Orthodoxy” if it gives no weight to Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas (Russell, “Modern Greek Theologians,” 2006, 84, on Yannaras; 86–87 on Zizioulas).

Where This Leaves a Reader

Four things can be said without adjudicating.

The historical challenge is serious and has not been answered to the satisfaction of the field. No competent scholar now writes as though Zizioulas’ reading of the Cappadocians were simply the state of the question.
The challenge is narrower than it is often taken to be. It concerns the person/individual distinction and the priority of person over essence. It does not touch his eucharistic ecclesiology, which rests on different evidence and is much less contested (see Section 05).
The methodological question cuts both ways. If Zizioulas is convicted of reading modern concerns into the Fathers, the de Régnon literature suggests that so, in different ways, were Lossky, Romanides and much of the tradition of critique itself.
A theological thesis is not refuted by a historical finding. Even if the Cappadocians did not teach relational ontology, the question whether relational ontology is true, and whether it is consonant with the faith, remains open. That is the subject of Person, Nature, and Grace.

References

Turcescu, Lucian. “‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa.” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (2002): 527–539. Repr. in Sarah Coakley, ed., Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Turcescu, Lucian. Gregory of Nyssa and the Concept of Divine Persons. AAR Academy Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Halleux, André de. “Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens? Une mauvaise controverse.” Revue théologique de Louvain 17 (1986): 129–155, 265–292.
Barnes, Michel René. “De Régnon Reconsidered.” Augustinian Studies 26 (1995): 51–79.
Panagopoulos, J. “Ὀντολογία ἢ θεολογία τοῦ προσώπου;” Synaxi 13 (1985): 63–79; 14 (1985): 34–47.
Agouridis, S. “Μποροῦν τὰ πρόσωπα τῆς Τριάδας νὰ δώσουν τὴ βάση γιὰ περσοναλιστικὲς ἀπόψεις περὶ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου;” Synaxi 33 (1990): 67–78.
Zizioulas, John D. “Τὸ εἶναι τοῦ Θεοῦ καὶ τὸ εἶναι τοῦ ἀνθρώπου: Ἀπόπειρα θεολογικοῦ διαλόγου.” Synaxi 37 (1991): 11–36.
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. “Is John Zizioulas an Existentialist in Disguise? Response to Lucian Turcescu.” Modern Theology 20, no. 4 (2004): 601–607.
Papanikolaou, Aristotle. Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. (Turcescu discussed at 155–159; the verdict at 161.)
Brown, Alan. “On the Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology.” In Douglas H. Knight, ed., The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church, 35–78. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007.
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. (Pp. 363–416 on Zizioulas; 409–411 on the personalism charge.)