The Person-versus-Individual Debate

Is the distinction between person and individual — the irreducibility of hypostasis to nature — the teaching of the Fathers, or is it modern personalism read back into them? Lucian Turcescu, André de Halleux and Sarah Coakley have pressed the case that the Cappadocians will not bear it; Nikolaos Loudovikos objects to a person set dialectically against nature; Rowan Williams raised the question first; Alexis Torrance and Aristotle Papanikolaou have reassessed the whole debate in more nuanced terms. Lossky’s own admission that he had not found an elaborated patristic doctrine of the human person is the pivot on which both sides turn. This file names the positions and adjudicates none.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox academic (both-sides scholarly debate, per METHODOLOGY §4.2)

What Is and Is Not at Stake

Not at stake: that God is one nature in three hypostases; that in Christ there is one hypostasis in two natures; that the hypostasis of the Word assumed a complete human nature with its own natural will; that the human being is made in the image of God and called to deification. These are conciliar definitions, confessed by the Church and by this repository (METHODOLOGY §4.1). The technical vocabulary of ousia and hypostasis is the Church’s own, forged at Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon, and no participant in this debate questions it.

At stake: whether Lossky’s further construction — that person is irreducible to nature, that person is categorically distinct from individual, and that a theological anthropology and an ethic follow from that distinction — can be exegeted from the Fathers, or whether it imports a modern (chiefly nineteenth- and twentieth-century) philosophy of the person and attributes it to them. That is a scholarly and exegetical question on which the Church has pronounced nothing.

Turcescu: The Sharpest Form

Lucian Turcescu‘s “‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa” (Modern Theology 18, no. 4 [2002]: 527–539) is the most-cited statement of the critique. Turcescu argues that the sharp person/individual opposition cannot be got out of the Cappadocian texts: that Gregory of Nyssa’s account of hypostasis is in fact built from precisely the bundle of distinguishing properties which the modern account calls “individuality,” and that its proponents have “not convincingly exegeted the Cappadocian theology of person, especially that of Gregory of Nyssa and Basil of Caesarea,” but use instead “nineteenth and twentieth-century insights which he then foists on the Cappadocians.”

Two points of precision matter here. First, Turcescu’s named target is Metropolitan John Zizioulas, not Lossky. The article belongs to the wave of criticism of Zizioulas’s relational ontology of personhood, and the charge is that Zizioulas dresses philosophical personalism and existentialism in Cappadocian language. Second, the critique nevertheless reaches Lossky, because Zizioulas’s distinction is a development of Lossky’s, and because the exegetical claim — that the Cappadocian hypostasis is constituted by distinguishing properties — bears equally on Lossky’s use of the Fathers (see Person versus Individual).

The article appeared in the special issue of Modern Theology on Gregory of Nyssa edited by Sarah Coakley, whose own introduction to that issue set out a critique of the de Régnon paradigm as applied to Nyssen (Coakley, Modern Theology 18, no. 4 [2002]: 431–443; see The de Régnon Paradigm and Lossky’s Thesis). The two critiques are of a piece.

De Halleux: Both Personalist and Essentialist

André de Halleux’s two-part study, “Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens? Une mauvaise controverse” (Revue théologique de Louvain 17, 1986), reaches the same conclusion sixteen years earlier and names Lossky directly. De Halleux argued that modern Orthodox theology had broadened the Filioque polemic into an opposition between Greek personalism and Latin essentialism; that Lossky, the principal new anti-Filioquist, had been inspired in this by Slavophile thought and by de Régnon; and that the Cappadocians were “at the same time and equally totally both personalists and essentialists” — so that the whole controversy is a bad one.

Coakley: The Modern “Person”

Sarah Coakley‘s “‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity: A Critique of Current Analytic Discussion” (in The Trinity, ed. Davis, Kendall and O’Collins, Oxford, 1999, pp. 123–144) examines the appeal of analytic philosophers of religion to Gregory of Nyssa’s Ad Ablabium in defence of a “social” Trinity, and questions the transfer of modern notions of personhood — centres of consciousness, subjects of relationship — onto the Cappadocian hypostasis. Her target is again primarily the analytic social Trinitarians rather than Lossky, but the methodological warning applies across the field: the word “person” carries a freight in modern English and French that it did not carry in fourth-century Greek, and the freight is doing argumentative work.

Loudovikos: Person Against Nature

A distinct objection, and one from within Orthodoxy, comes from Nikolaos Loudovikos, who criticizes the setting of person in dialectical antithesis to nature. On his account, freedom has to do with nature as much as with person, because nature is God’s loving gift and not a burden of necessity; and he proposes the notion of a “personal” or “hypostatic nature” in place of the antithesis. His most-cited statement of the case is “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will” (Participatio 4 [2013]: 258–286), which argues that prioritizing an ecstatic personhood over nature and grace inverts the patristic synthesis, in which human identity participates analogically in the divine energies without negating created substance.

This objection is significant for Lossky in a particular way. Loudovikos’s positive proposal — that participation runs through the energies and does not require an ontological priority of person over nature — is close to what Lossky himself held, and further from Zizioulas. Some of the force of the Loudovikos critique therefore lands on Lossky’s successors rather than on Lossky.

Williams: The First Critic

Rowan Williams’s Oxford DPhil thesis, “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique” (1975), was the first sustained critical study of Lossky in any language and remains the fullest. It combines close exposition with pressure on the coherence of the apophatic method, the account of experience, and the person/nature architecture. His subsequent essay “The Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology: An Introduction to the Thought of V. N. Lossky” (New Studies in Theology 1, ed. Sykes and Holmes, 1980, pp. 95–117) is the accessible form of the argument, and his “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism” (Eastern Churches Review 9, 1977: 27–44) raises the parallel question about the modern Palamite synthesis (see Lossky as Expositor of Palamas).

That the first and most searching critic of Lossky was a scholar who spent years on his texts, and who went on to become Archbishop of Canterbury, is worth noting: the critique of Lossky begins in admiration, not in hostility.

Gallaher: The Origins Question

Brandon Gallaher attacks from a different direction, arguing that Lossky’s “antinomic theology” derives methodologically from Bulgakov’s sophiological “antinomism,” and that the standard opposition of a neo-patristic Lossky to a sophiological Bulgakov is therefore false at the level of method (Gallaher, “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism,” Scottish Journal of Theology 66, no. 3 [2013]: 278–298). This is a claim about intellectual genealogy rather than about the exegesis of the Fathers, but it converges with the others in suggesting that Lossky’s theology is more a modern construction than its self-presentation as a return to the Fathers allows (see Spor o Sofii and the Acts of 1935).

The Counter-Defence

Five arguments are made on the other side, and they are serious.

1. The distinction is a grammatical consequence of the councils, not an exegetical claim about a text. The defence runs: nobody says the Cappadocians wrote a treatise on personhood. What they did was fix a grammar — one ousia, three hypostaseis; one hypostasis, two natures; will belongs to nature, not to person — in which “who” and “what” are systematically distinguished. Lossky’s claim is that this grammar has anthropological implications which the Fathers did not draw out but which follow from it. That is a legitimate theological operation, not a misreading.

2. Lossky said so himself. The admission is the strongest card the defence holds, and the strongest card the critics hold, which is why both cite it:

“For my part, I must admit that until now I have not found what one might call an elaborated doctrine of the human person in patristic theology, alongside its very precise teaching on divine persons and hypostases.”

(Lossky, “The Theological Notion of the Human Person,” in In the Image and Likeness of God.)

The critics read this as a confession. The defenders read it as a disclaimer, honestly made in advance: Lossky knew he was constructing, said so in the essay where he constructed, and cannot fairly be accused of pretending to quote.

3. Lossky’s conclusion is apophatic, not maximalist. Alexis Torrance notes that Lossky’s account of person — as the irreducibility of the human being to his nature, one who is distinct from his own nature, who goes beyond it while containing it, who makes it exist as his nature — terminates in the characteristically apophatic judgment that only God can know what the person finally is (Torrance, “Personhood and Patristics in Orthodox Theology: Reassessing the Debate,” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 4 [2011]: 700–707). This is a much more reserved position than the confident personalist ontologies of some who followed him, and it is not obviously vulnerable to the charge of foisting a modern doctrine on the Fathers.

4. The critique’s real target is often elsewhere. Turcescu, Loudovikos and Coakley name Zizioulas and the analytic social Trinitarians; de Halleux names Lossky, but on the triadological rather than the anthropological question. Torrance’s reassessment argues that even Zizioulas’s relation to patristic thought is more nuanced than usually presented, and that a continuity of personalist concern can be traced in early Christian teaching through the categories of divine–human communion and the Church (Torrance 2011). If that is right, the sharpest form of the accusation is overdrawn against everyone.

5. Papanikolaou’s positive account. Aristotle Papanikolaou’s Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame, 2006) treats the Lossky–Zizioulas divergence as a productive disagreement internal to a shared Orthodox commitment to the realism of divine–human communion, rather than as a case of one party misreading the Fathers. On this account the modern Orthodox theology of person is a legitimate development, and the question is which form of it best secures the underlying commitment (cf. Papanikolaou, “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood,” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 [2003]).

What Remains Standing

Without adjudicating, three observations can be recorded because both sides accept them.

The conciliar grammar is not in question. Whatever the outcome, one ousia and three hypostaseis, and one hypostasis in two natures with two natural wills, remain the faith of the Church.

Lossky is less exposed than his successors. He made a smaller claim, made it more apophatically, and conceded its constructive character in print. Much of the criticism directed at “Orthodox personalism” lands on the ontological maximalism of the generation after him rather than on him.

The debate is live. No Orthodox Church has taken a position; the participants are in good standing on all sides; the literature continues to grow. This collection names the positions and leaves the weighing to the reader and to the Church’s continuing reception.

References

Turcescu, Lucian. “‘Person’ versus ‘Individual’, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa.” Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (2002): 527–539.
Coakley, Sarah, ed. Special issue on Gregory of Nyssa, Modern Theology 18, no. 4 (2002); reprinted as Re-thinking Gregory of Nyssa. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
Coakley, Sarah. “‘Persons’ in the ‘Social’ Doctrine of the Trinity: A Critique of Current Analytic Discussion.” In The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall and Gerald O’Collins, 123–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
de Halleux, André. “Personnalisme ou essentialisme trinitaire chez les Pères cappadociens? Une mauvaise controverse.” Revue théologique de Louvain 17 (1986), parts 1 and 2.
Loudovikos, Nikolaos. “Possession or Wholeness? St. Maximus the Confessor and John Zizioulas on Person, Nature, and Will.” Participatio: Journal of the Thomas F. Torrance Theological Fellowship 4 (2013): 258–286.
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.
Williams, Rowan. “The Theology of Vladimir Nikolaievich Lossky: An Exposition and Critique.” DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1975; “The Via Negativa and the Foundations of Theology: An Introduction to the Thought of V. N. Lossky,” in New Studies in Theology 1, ed. Stephen Sykes and Derek Holmes, 95–117 (London, 1980); “The Philosophical Structures of Palamism,” Eastern Churches Review 9 (1977): 27–44.
Gallaher, Brandon. “The ‘Sophiological’ Origins of Vladimir Lossky’s Apophaticism.” Scottish Journal of Theology 66, no. 3 (2013): 278–298.
Papanikolaou, Aristotle. Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006; and “Divine Energies or Divine Personhood: Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas on Conceiving the Transcendent and Immanent God,” Modern Theology 19, no. 3 (2003): 357–385.
Zizioulas, John. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.
Lossky, Vladimir. “The Theological Notion of the Human Person.” In In the Image and Likeness of God. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974. (The admission that he had found no elaborated patristic doctrine of the human person.)