Persons in Relation: Zizioulas on Being as Communion

Central to his trinitarian theology is Zizioulas's contention that to be a person is to be in relation to other persons. For him, there is no such thing as an individual person. As he understands it, a crucial insight of patristic theology is that ‘the being of God could be known only through personal relationships and personal love. Being means life, and life means communion’.Footnote ⁴ This insight entails the radical conclusion that ‘the being of God is a relational being: without the concept of communion it would not be possible to speak of the being of God’.Footnote ⁵ Thus the doctrine of the Trinity is a ‘primordial ontological concept and not a notion which is added to the divine substance or rather which follows it . . . the substance of God, “God”, has no ontological content, no true being, apart from communion’.Footnote ⁶ Zizioulas sees this as a repudiation by the patristic theologians of the individualism of Aristotle. Because ‘communion becomes an ontological concept in patristic thought’, personal identity is always relative: ‘nothing in existence is conceivable in itself, as an individual, such as the of Aristotle, since even God exists thanks to an event of communion’.Footnote ⁷

Zizioulas thinks that the early apologists such as Justin Martyr and the early academic ‘Alexandrian catechetical theologians’ such as Clement and Origen largely missed this crucial theological insight.Footnote ⁸ Instead, it was ‘pastoral theologians such as Ignatius of Antioch and above all St Irenaeus and later St Athanasius’ who pioneered it.Footnote ⁹ Athanasius in particular is applauded for his contribution; his insistence that the Son is of the substance of God ‘implies that substance possesses almost by definition a relational character’.Footnote ¹⁰ But with Zizioulas's obvious appreciation for the brilliance and helpfulness of Athanasius comes some criticism. First, Zizioulas notes that Athanasius still tends to conflate ousia and hypostasis; Zizioulas's second concern is that Athanasius continues to succumb to the temptation to prioritise substance over persons as he champions the homoousion against the Arians.Footnote ¹¹ As Zizioulas sees it, the Cappadocians were the theologians to articulate the distinction between ousia and hypostasis; they grasped the crucial insight, latent in trinitarian thought all along, that ‘being is communion’.

My purpose here is not to pass judgement on Zizioulas's reading of patristic theology, but it should be clear that he works to read the tradition both carefully and critically. Important for our purposes is his insistence that the Cappadocian insight into the priority of the person of the Father is a significant advance over the earlier, and especially Athanasian, formulations. As he sees it, patristic theology has delivered for us the absolutely central insight that the doctrine of the Trinity teaches us that ‘there is no true being without communion. Nothing exists as an individual, conceivable in itself’. The result is clear: ‘communion is an ontological category’.Footnote ¹²

This does not, as far as I can see, commit Zizioulas to a rejection of essentialism. To reject essentialism would be to deny and abandon the homoousion, and Zizioulas surely does not take this route. After all, it was the ‘Homoian Arians’ of the fourth century who insisted that no mention should be made of ousia, and it is hardly conceivable that Zizioulas would side with them against the Cappadocians.Footnote ¹³ Nor does it enlist him in the forces of those who ride forth to battle against the dreaded evils of ‘ontotheology’.Footnote ¹⁴ Instead, he seems to want to rehabilitate the concept of substance. But this is not the same as to deny it or ‘overcome’ it. No, on his account the divine substance just is the communion of holy love shared by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Commenting on the Johannine affirmation that ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:16), Zizioulas states that ‘love is not an emanation or “property” of the substance of God – this detail is significant in light of what I have said so far – but it is constitutive of his substance, i.e., it is that which makes God what he is, the one God’.Footnote ¹⁵

The results of this are profound for Zizioulas; there are implications both for personhood and for our understanding of the being or essence of God. Zizioulas recognises the implications for our understanding of the divine essence: ‘Thus love ceases to be a qualifying – i.e. secondary – property of being and becomes the supreme ontological predicate. Love as God's mode of existence “hypostasizes” God, constitutes his being.’Footnote ¹⁶ Thus the divine persons are ‘concrete, unique, and unrepeatable’ entities who exist only in communion. As Zizioulas puts it, ‘the mystery of being a person lies in the fact that here otherness and communion are not in contradiction but coincide. Truth as communion does not lead to the dissolving of the diversity of beings into one vast ocean of being, but to the affirmation of otherness in and through love.’Footnote ¹⁷ God's being, the triune life and love given and shared between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is ‘identical with an act of communion’.Footnote ¹⁸ The persons have their identity only in communion, and the one divine essence is now to be identified with the communion of holy love shared by the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

The priority of the Father: Zizioulas and the Sovereignty-Aseity Conviction

Zizioulas states clearly that ‘discussion of the being of God leads patristic thought to’ the two main theses under consideration in this article.Footnote ¹⁹ As we have seen, the first is the ‘Being as Communion’ (BAC) thesis: ‘communion is an ontological category’.Footnote ²⁰ The second thesis is that of the priority of the Father. Where the BAC thinks of the Holy Trinity as a ‘primordial’ ontological concept which raises communion to ontological status (and supreme ontological status at that), the SAC insists on the absolute priority of the person of the Father. Zizioulas is quite clear about what this means: ‘just like “substance”, “communion” does not exist by itself: it is the Father who is the “cause” of it’.Footnote ²¹

Here Zizioulas insists that neither ‘substance’ nor some abstract notion of ‘communion’ is ultimate; for him it is of supreme importance that the person of the Father is first: ‘the ultimate ontological category which makes something really be, is neither an impersonal and incommunicable “substance”, nor a structure of communion existing by itself or imposed by necessity, but rather the person’.Footnote ²² The radical freedom of God – or, more accurately, the radical freedom of God the Father – is central to Zizioulas's thinking here. As he puts it, ‘God owes his existence to the Father’, and this means that God does not exist necessarily: ‘God does not exist because he cannot but exist’.Footnote ²³ So it means that the existence of God is a contingent fact; God exists because the Father wills that God exist. But it also means that the essence of God is contingent, and so the fact that the divine essence is one of triune holy love is not necessary. For Zizioulas, the radical priority of the Father entails that this communion itself is contingent, for ‘that communion is not a constraining structure for his existence (God is not in communion, does not love, because he cannot but be in communion and love)’.Footnote ²⁴

We can see some of the importance of this for Zizioulas when we see what it is that he is reacting against and rejecting. It is this: he is concerned with the loss of the sovereign freedom of God. At one level, he is exercised to make sure that the freedom of God in creation is not lost. He insists that ‘biblical theology’ shows us that ‘the world is not ontologically necessary’;Footnote ²⁵ he wants to protect the absolute freedom of God in creation. In other words, he is defending a robustly ‘libertarian’ notion of divine freedom.Footnote ²⁶ This is what I, following Jay Wesley Richards and Alvin Plantinga, call the ‘Sovereignty-Aseity Conviction’.Footnote ²⁷ Richards describes the SAC as ‘the conviction that God is the one reality that exists a se (from and of himself) and is dependent on nothing outside of himself for his essence and existence’.Footnote ²⁸ Only God says ‘I Am’ (Exodus 3:14); everything else that exists says ‘I am because . . .’ God alone exists a se, everything else that exists does so in reliance upon him. As such, the SAC has garnered wide acceptance in the Christian tradition.

But Zizioulas radically extends the SAC. For at another level Zizioulas is worried that notions of substance and necessity themselves compromise the freedom of God. He is not simply arguing that God has freedom to do A or -A, to create (or ‘actualize’) this possible world rather than another. As Robert D. Turner puts it, for Zizioulas ‘the doctrine of creation ex nihilo alone fails to achieve the goal of maintaining the freedom of God’.Footnote ²⁹ Zizioulas takes the concept of freedom a step further. And a big step it is, for it leads him to assert the radical freedom of the Father in the face of what he calls the ‘ultimate challenge to the freedom of the person’ – the ‘“necessity” of existence’.Footnote ³⁰ Here he shows a close affinity with Heidegger's notion of thrownness.Footnote ³¹ For Heidegger, to be ‘thrown’ is just to find oneself located in a particular setting with a particular set or range of options before you.Footnote ³² To be thrown is to ‘fall prey’; it is to be limited and thus finite. But for Zizioulas, it seems that the radical freedom of the Father – his ontological affirmation of the SAC – means that thrownness is denied of the Father. The Father – and the Father alone – is radically unthrown. He is the one whose existence is a se; he is the only one whose freedom is so absolute that it chooses both its own existence and essence.

A brief comparison with the theology of Karl Barth may be instructive at this point. Zizioulas displays some affinity to Karl Barth's doctrine of God with respect to divine freedom. Like Barth, he wants to insist on the radical freedom of God. Like Barth, he takes this to mean that God wills his own essence.Footnote ³³ Thus for Zizioulas, as we have seen, the divine essence is contingent. And again like Barth, his affirmation of the BAC places very high priority on the one divine act (of communion) that just is God.Footnote ³⁴ But he criticises Barth for his lack of success in the utilisation of Heidegger due to Barth's ‘introduction of the concept of time in God’.Footnote ³⁵ Furthermore, even though Barth insists that God wills his own essence, it is less than obvious that by this affirmation Barth means that God chooses it from among alternatives. Thus perhaps God does choose his essence (and so can be said to freely be who he is), but it is not as if God could have done otherwise. In other words, it may be that for Barth the freedom of God is some sort of ‘compatibilism’. But, for Zizioulas, to say this is to say far too little – if this is true, then God is still ‘thrown’ and thus has ‘fallen prey’ to existence. It seems that even Barth does not go nearly far enough – for Zizioulas, the Father chooses not only his essence but also the very existence of God.

Zizioulas's insistence on the SAC and his view of the radical freedom of the Father is also evidenced in the concerns that he raises about the homoousion. He applauds Athanasius, whose theology he sees as ‘a direct consequence of the ontology of communion’ that he received from the tradition of Ignatius and Irenaeus.Footnote ³⁶ He notes appreciatively that, for Athanasius, the Son belongs to the substance rather than the will of God (as for the Arians), and he celebrates the way that Athanasius ‘transformed the idea of substance’ by making it relational: ‘to say that the Son belongs to God's substance possesses almost by definition a relational character’.Footnote ³⁷ But Zizioulas also worries that Athanasius does not go far enough, for ‘the homoousion presupposes ousia as the ultimate ontological category’.Footnote ³⁸ So, on his account, it is the Cappadocians who finally bring us to the priority of the Father. Although they extend the relational notion of substance found in Athanasius (rather than correct it outright), it is they – rather than Athanasius – who provide us with an ‘ontology of personhood’ that is adequately grounded in the person of the Father.

The theological payoff of this for Zizioulas should not be either overlooked or underestimated. Because of the radical freedom of the Father, the ‘world is not ontologically necessary’.Footnote ³⁹ Furthermore, and more importantly for Zizioulas, personhood is pre-eminent. In his words, ‘the person is no longer an adjunct to a being . . . it is itself the hypostasis of being’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Because of the identification of person with hypostasis, ‘entities no longer trace their being to being itself – that is, being is not an absolute category itself – but to the person, to precisely that which constitutes being, that is, enables entities to be entities’.Footnote ⁴¹

In summary, several things should be clear. The freedom of God, or more precisely the freedom of the Father, is metaphysically absolute. The freedom of the person of the Father means that God chooses his own existence. As Zizioulas puts it, ‘when we say that God “is”, we do not bind the personal freedom of God – the being of God is not an ontological “necessity” or simple “reality” – but we ascribe the being of God to his personal freedom. In a more analytic way this means that God, as Father and not as substance, perpetually confirms through “being” his free will to exist.’Footnote ⁴² The existence of the triune God is contingent – it rests upon the perpetual decisions of the Father both to exist and to exist in relation. But this radical freedom of the person of the Father also means that the essence of God is contingent. Zizioulas is clear that the ‘absolutely crucial point” is that ‘God as person – the hypostasis of the Father – makes the one divine substance to be that which it is: the one God’.Footnote ⁴³ So even the communion of holy love shared among the divine persons in perichoresis is contingent; it is only so because the Father freely wills it to be so, and because the Father does so continually.

To this point we have observed what Zizioulas sets out as two foundational theses. The first of these is the BAC thesis, according to which God exists as a relational being. As Zizioulas puts it, ‘the being of God is a relational being: without the concept of communion it would be impossible to speak of God . . . the Holy Trinity is a primordial ontological concept’.Footnote ⁴⁴ The results are profound: persons exist only in communion, and the holy love of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit ‘ceases to be a qualifying – i.e. secondary – property of being and becomes the supreme ontological predicate’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The second thesis is the SAC: the Father is prior in an absolute sense and as such is radically free. But these theses do not appear to fit together comfortably, and the conjunction of them raises some difficult questions. How are both of these concepts ‘ultimate’ or ‘primordial’? How could communion be an ultimate concept if it must be caused by the Father? How can it be so if it is contingent? And how could the Father be a person if – given the BAC and its affirmation that personhood exists only in communion – he is prior to the other persons and to the communion itself? It is to a consideration of the difficult issues raised by these theses that I now turn.

The SAC of the Father

Several problems confront Zizioulas's predication of the SAC of the Father. One of these is the issue of arbitrariness. If Zizioulas is right about the radical freedom of the Father – if for the Father to be unthrown he must choose his own existence and essence – then is it not possible that the ‘Father’ chooses to be something other than Father? Could not the Father have chosen to actualise a possible world in which moral atrocities are praiseworthy, one in which holy love is the gravest of all evils? Could he not have actualised a possible world in which Zeus and his brood exist and rule, or one in which the identity of Jesus is that of an Arian (or Aryan) Christ? Could he not first will into existence an evil god and then will himself out of existence? It seems that he could, for on Zizioulas's account anything less would compromise the freedom of the Father. And if so, then we are left to wonder if some abstract principle of freedom as unthrownness is finally necessary; it appears as if this understanding of freedom is finally what is thrown as a given.Footnote ⁴⁷ In other words, it is simply a brute fact with which the Father must deal. But if not, then Zizioulas's radical version of the SAC is denied.

Even more serious, however, is the issue of subordinationism. Zizioulas himself accepts subordination at some level: ‘in making the Father the “ground” of God's being – or the ultimate reason for existence – theology accepted a kind of subordination of the Son to the Father’.Footnote ⁴⁸ For him, this is not to ‘downgrade the Logos into something created’.Footnote ⁴⁹ But it is not clear what is going on here, nor is it obvious how Zizioulas's theology comports with patristic doctrine. Traditional affirmations of subordination have revolved around the ‘function’ of the Son – of course the Son is subordinate to the Father, but for the tradition this is a function of the economy of salvation. Granting that the Son is ontologically subordinate would have meant compromise with Arianism. Functional subordination neither equates nor entails ontological subordination; the temporal and functional subordination of the Son does not reflect an eternal or ontological subordination. Quite the contrary is true for the pro-Nicene tradition; had the church not had recourse to this distinction they would have been faced with an incredibly daunting challenge from Arian exegesis.

It is hard finally to escape the conclusion that this is ontological subordination on Zizioulas's view. For, as Zizioulas thinks of it, the divine communion of the triune life is prior to creation and independent of it.Footnote ⁵⁰ So the subordination that Zizioulas refers to is not simply a functional or economic subordination; it is prior to and independent of the work of the Son in creation and redemption.

This raises the further concern that the Father may have different essential properties than does the Son (and Spirit). I take Zizioulas's BAC thesis to reflect a commitment to some form of essentialism. Beyond this rather basic commitment it is not clear exactly how to take him, so (in lieu of direct indication on his part) I shall take this in what I view as a rather standard sense of essence. As I understand it, an ‘individual-essence’ is the ‘full set of properties, individually necessary and jointly sufficient’ to be numerically identical with an individual,Footnote ⁵¹ while a ‘kind-essence’ is the full set of properties, individually necessary and jointly sufficient for inclusion in a kind.Footnote ⁵² In this light, it is hard to know what to make of Zizioulas's theology.

Zizioulas wants to retain belief in a divine essence; the BAC thesis is that the divine essence is one of this communion of holy love. Beyond this, however, it seems that the Father has different essential properties than do the Son and the Spirit. For on the SAC thesis, the Father has the radical, ontological freedom of being unthrown. And the Father alone has this property – for the Son and Spirit indeed are thrown (by the free choice of the Father). For as Zizioulas has it, it is by the free decision of the Father that God exists, that God exists as triune, and that the triune God exists as a communion of holy love. The Father alone has the property of being radically unthrown – and he has it by virtue of being the primordial person. Consider the proposition U: ‘The Father chooses his own essence and existence’. To do the ontological and theological work that Zizioulas calls it to do, U cannot fail to be true. U must be true in all possible worlds.Footnote ⁵³ And if U is true in all possible worlds, then U is necessarily true; we are left with the conclusion that the property of being unthrown is a necessary property of the Father. Furthermore, since this is, for the Father, a property that he has with de re (rather than de dicto) necessity, then it appears that it is an essential property of the Father.Footnote ⁵⁴

But the Son and the Holy Spirit do not have this property. They are radically thrown, because the Father decides that they will exist (and indeed that they will exist as they do). The defender of Zizioulas might respond by saying that the SAC of the Father is a personal (rather than an essential) property. She might take recourse to the venerable distinction offered by the Cappadocians against the assaults of ‘Neo-Arianism’. Recall that when pressed by Eunomius that the divine hypostases must be different in either essence or accidents (neither of which was palatable), the Cappadocians responded that the properties that distinguished the divine hypostases were neither essential (which would amount to a denial of the homoousion) nor accidental (which would make the divine hypostases contingent), but that the divine hypostases are distinguished by personal properties. In other words, the hypostases are distinguished by relational properties – properties had by virtue of the relations to the other divine persons.Footnote ⁵⁵

But it is hard to see how the property of being unthrown could be a personal (rather than an essential) property. For personal properties (as traditionally understood) are relational properties; they are the properties that make the persons the distinct entities they are in relation to the other persons. But on Zizioulas's account of the SAC of the Father, the property of being radically unthrown is a property of the Father only. The Father could have decided to actualise a possible world in which there are no other divine persons, he could have decided to actualise a possible world in which there are only evil divine persons, or he could have decided to actualise a possible world in which he ceases to exist and thus in which there remain no divine persons at all (not even himself). So on the SAC of the Father, the property of being unthrown is a property that is possessed by the Father alone. In fact, for the SAC of the Father to work for Zizioulas's theology, it seems that the Father must have it alone. And if it is had alone (without Son and Spirit), then it cannot count as a personal property (in the traditional sense). We seem, then, to be faced with this dilemma: the property of being unthrown must be for the Father either an essential property or an accidental one. But on Zizioulas's account of the SAC of the Father, it is a property that the Father has necessarily. Even if it could be an accidental property (one that the Father could or could not have), the all-important personhood of the Father would be endangered. So it appears that, on Zizioulas's understanding of the SAC of the Father, the Father has (at least) one essential property that the Son and Spirit do not have. Is he not thus of a different essence?

The defender of Zizioulas might yet have a way out. Recalling our earlier distinctions between individual-essence and kind-essence, perhaps the Father is of a distinct individual-essence (thus perhaps a trinitarian hacceity)Footnote ⁵⁶ but not of a different kind-essence. This might bring Zizioulas close to the position of Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. The latter maintains that the divine persons have distinct personal essences (while sharing the ‘whole generic divine essence’), but for Plantinga the distinct personal essences just are their personal and relational properties.Footnote ⁵⁷ Surely this strategy makes the proponents of Latin trinitarianism nervous, but Plantinga can respond that, while the language is unusual, the theology is not heterodox. It is far from clear what Zizioulas might gain by such a defence, for he cannot access Plantinga's strategy. As Plantinga sees it, the personal essences are the properties had by the divine persons in relation to one another. But this route is closed to Zizioulas. For, as we have seen, on Zizioulas's account the individual-essence of the Father (which includes U) is not a property had in relation to other persons (and thus can hardly be said to be a personal property at all). So even if the Father is of a different individual-essence (while sharing the freely chosen kind-essence), on Zizioulas's account this individual-essence of the Father is not a personal essence.

Caution at the crossroads: the BAC and the SAC

As we have seen, Zizioulas's predication of the SAC to the Father raises some serious questions and concerns. Unfortunately, however, yet more problems come at the intersection of the BAC and SAC theses. For at one level, both appear to be ultimate. According to the BAC, the Trinity is a ‘primordial ontological concept’; there ‘is no true being without communion . . . communion is an ontological category’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The result of the BAC is that (divine) love is ‘the supreme ontological predicate’.Footnote ⁵⁹ But the SAC suggests that the radical freedom of the Father is the ultimate; the Father freely chooses both the love and even the very life of God. But both cannot be ultimate, and we are left to wonder how the two theses might ‘ultimately’ cohere.

Suppose we follow what seems to be the clearest direction from Zizioulas and take the SAC as finally ultimate. Then we are faced with a contradiction, one that goes to the heart of Zizioulas's theology. Consider:

1. (1) The Father alone is ultimate. (SAC)

2. (2) The Father is a person. (SAC)

3. (3) Persons exists only in communion. (BAC)

(1) is clearly a piece of the SAC, for the SAC is predicated of the Father alone. Not even communion is a ‘constraining structure for his existence’; both the essence and existence of God are contingent upon the will of the Father. Similarly, (2) is central to Zizioulas's thought as well, for it is because of the free act of the Father as person that ‘entities no longer trace their being to being itself – that is, being is not an absolute category itself – but to the person’. And (3) is obviously at the heart of the BAC, for the divine persons are ‘concrete, unique, and unrepeatable’ entities who exist only in communion.

But this is an inconsistent triad. According to (3), without communion there are no persons. Thus, without communion the Father does not exist – at least not as a person. But the Father has no communion without Son and Spirit. The unfortunate consequence is that both the BAC and the SAC are compromised by trying to retain both in the manner desired by Zizioulas. The BAC is undermined by the SAC, for the BAC is contingent – and thus hardly the ‘supreme ontological predicate’ – while the SAC is necessary. At the same time, however, the SAC itself is endangered, for on Zizioulas's view it is the Father as person who is ultimate – but the Father does not exist (at least not as person) without communion.

I may have misinterpreted Zizioulas – perhaps the BAC is ultimate. But there is still a problem when it is put together with the SAC. Consider further:

1. (4) Persons exist only in communion. (BAC)

2. (5) The Father is a person. (BAC and SAC)

3. (6) Therefore, the Father exists only in communion.

As we have seen, Zizioulas is firmly committed to (4) and (5). But (6) flatly contradicts Zizioulas's account of the SAC, for he insists that it is the triune communion of holy love is freely chosen by the person of the Father: ‘God is not in communion, does not love, because he cannot but be in communion and love’.Footnote ⁶⁰

Perhaps this is too quick. It may be that Zizioulas's view could be rescued by something like an appeal to

1. (6*) Therefore, the Father exists as a person only in communion.

On this account, the ‘Father’ exists alone, but he only exists as Father – as a person – in communion. In other words, his existence does not depend on the relationality of communion, but his existence as a person does. But it is hard to see how this helps much. Zizioulas's motivation, after all, is to protect the primacy of personhood. Going this route would ultimately undercut what Zizioulas wants to affirm by (5) – that the ultimate source of reality is a person. Taking (6*) would mean that the ultimate source of reality would be an entity that is merely potentially and contingently a person, and surely Zizioulas wishes to affirm more. As Zizioulas himself puts it, according to the BAC, the divine persons ‘are so united in an unbreakable communion (koinonia) that none of them can be conceived apart from the rest’.Footnote ⁶¹