HeyJ XLVIII (2009), pp.

116

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2265.2009.00547.x

PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS: JOHN ZIZIOULAS FINAL THEOLOGICAL POSITION
NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

University Ecclesiastical Academy of Thessaloniki, Greece Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies, Cambridge University of Wales

INTRODUCTION

If what is written on the cover of Douglas Knights (ed.) book The Theology of John Zizoulas; Personhood and the Church,1 that Zizioulas is widely recognized as the most signicant Orthodox theologian of the last half century is right, then the supreme task of Orthodox theologians of the younger generation is to interrogate his theology, again and again, in depth. This is more pressing for those Orthodox theologians who, as is the case with the author of this article, were deeply and for a long time connected with him at almost all levels of academic life. This interrogation comes from responsibility towards Orthodox theology, as well as its ecumenical witness and its possible spiritual involvement in the modern theologico-philosophical quest. Zizioulas is a theologian of great inspiration and a man of the Church. Ecclesiology as ontology, eschatology as the true meaning of history, the personhood nature dialectics, ecclesial mysticism, a pneumatological Christology, are only some of his valuable contributions to modern theology. But above all it is his deep devotion to the unique value of Christian theology, as it stems from the Eucharistic experience, which permits not only an agreement but also, I think, a dialogue with him if our intentions are not different from his: to engage Orthodox theology with the most important aspects of the modern intellectual inquiry. My aim here is twofold. On the one hand, as Metropolitan John in his latest book Communion and Otherness,2 on which we shall focus, appeals to the authority of the Greek Fathers, I want to search for evidence for such an appeal in their texts. On the other hand and this is more important I would like to examine his ideas in themselves. What is their merit in the context of the current theologico-philosophical (and even psychological) discussion? Above all: can the Greek patristic tradition, if it is read differently, offer possibly richer material for the elaboration of a modern theology and theological anthropology, in connection with pressing and demanding contemporary existential questions? These are the main issues, to the discussion of which this article aspires.
1. PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE . . .

Zizioulas two mentors at the Harvard School of Divinity were Georges Florovsky and Paul Tillich. The former is a spiritual father of the neopatristic synthesis, a current that
r The author 2009. Journal compilation r Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

postulates the recovery of the Greek patristic tradition, obscured in the course of the Western Babylonian captivity of Orthodox theology, while the latter is a thinker who aimed par excellence at the adaptation of theological thought to the philosophical and especially the ontological quest. Zizioulas is a spiritual son of both. Tillich had already attempted (as he makes it clear in Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality3) to construct a Biblical personalism as the proper answer to the ontological question put by philosophy in general, thus identifying the event of Christian salvation with the fulllment of the ontological quest. Zizioulas seems to undertake the same enterprise in the light of the Florovskian neopatristic synthesis, thus seeking to accomplish Tillichs project by using patristic rather than Biblical material. Florovsky, on the other hand, was a theologian who had already powerfully claimed that the idea of personality is the principal Christian contribution to philosophy4, but during his period of maturity he gave little evidence of engagement with modern philosophical thought. Zizioulas at times attempted to attribute his notion of person as freedom and escape from nature to Florovsky himself,5 because of the latters concept of podvig (ascetical achievement), which Zizioulas takes as meaning the liberation of person from nature the latter identied with blind necessity. I am not sure that Florovsky meant anything like that, but these ideas were not unknown in Russian religious-philosophical thought, starting with Soloviev6 and ending with Berdyaev. Berdyaev had already explicitly identied person with freedom and nature/ substance with necessity,7 according to his Kantian convictions. Kant, in continuity with Descartes notion of a detached self and Lockes notion of a punctual self 8 that describe a spiritual self above any attachment to body, passions, community, etc, makes a distinction between a noumenal self free to unfold its rational categories of understanding, and an empirical self unfree, conceived as a burden of necessity. An inner split in the person thus arises: nature represents a blind necessity, while the source of freedom lies in the purely intelligible noumenal personal world. The impossibility of synthesis was caused, as J. Seiger claims,9 by the radical kind of freedom Kant envisioned for the noumenal self. This concept of the transcendental person as radical freedom, opposed to nature as dark necessity, has thus been mainly a Western invention, not unrelated, I believe, to the way Augustine assimilated Neoplatonic anthropology.10 Western philosophy has followed this path to the present day: Fichte (who also inuenced Russian philosophy in the 19th century) makes a similar effort to capture the radical freedom of human subjectivity from external conditions by distinguishing between an I as pure reective autonomy and freedom, and a common nite natural I, bound up with necessity. Schelling plants this distinction into the very being of God, as the Urgrund (the dark source of Gods essence) on the one hand, and the person of God which becomes apparent in creation and Revelation on the other. There is no room in this article for a detailed analysis, but we can briey say that we meet the same freedom-necessity dialectic in Nietzsches claim of a higher selfhood, by negation of the empirical self, and we also nd the person-nature dialectic in Heidegger, disguised as a distinction between factual and factical, i.e. nite being and being tending to transcendence. For Heidegger (following Husserls phenomenological transcendental I), transcendence constitutes selfhood. He identies being with its mode of existence as ek-stasis, something which, as we shall see, greatly helped Orthodox personalists to articulate their own views.11 What is paradoxical is that not only philosophers but also theologians such as Lossky, seem to have followed this way of thinking. We must also add here the discovery of intersubjectivity that made ecstasis koinonetic, by following and deepening Hegelian relationality12 in light of Biblical thought. Buber and especially Levinas seem to be smoothly combined with similar patristic ideas.

PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS

Let us now begin reading Communion and Otherness. In this work (as it also happens in Losskys work, which inuenced Yannaras who then inuenced Zizioulas) nature is identied with necessity, while person is identied with freedom.13 Nature is thus in practice identied with Fall: the conict between the particular and the general (ousia/ substance/nature) is not only ontological but also in itself unredeemable (authors italics): nature not only precedes particular beings and dictates its laws to them, but also nally swallows them up through death (p. 63). Nature, like an autonomous metaphysical monster dictates its laws, and nally swallows poor humans up. If we do not succumb to the temptation to see a shadow of Gnosticism here, we cannot but admit that, for the rst time since Origen nature and the Fall are completely identied.14 (Zizioulas attributes these views to Maximus, but anyone who checks the texts he gives in note 144 on page 63 will discover that the latter cannot be connected to this kind of denition of nature). In this case, of course, the notion of the image of God cannot relate to nature . . . but to personhood (p. 165) despite a series of patristic texts from the Apologists to Gregory Palamas that attribute this image also to nature, as we shall see later. The question is: if nature has nothing positive in it, but is simply the yoke of his or her biological hypostasis (p. 262), and cannot represent any divine call to deication (because this is what we mean by image of God) then why does it have to be saved? If we disconnect the person from nature in this fashion, it is impossible for nature to be personal, as we read repeatedly in patristic literature. This identication of nature with the Fall and sin is extended logically to history, as becoming in time means nothing more than change and decay . . . threatened by death (p. 223). This purgatorial view of history, as Farrow called it,15 belongs not only to Origen, but, apparently to some Orthodox personalists as well. In contrast to nature, person for Zizioulas (as well as for Lossky and Yannaras) following the tradition of Western idealism, belongs to an entirely different category from nature it belongs to the realm of freedom and is in no way a natural category, or a part of nature (p. 277). But how can the person be set to be free by itself if it is created and not uncreated? Here is the second point: personhood thus proves to be in this world through man but it is not of this world (p. 224). Here we have not only a full ontologization of the person, as the sole image of God in creation, against nature, but also an unavoidable identication of it with grace, as person here points to an ontology which does not ultimately depend on the experience of this world (p. 225). This means either that we do not have a person unless we have this transcendent connection, or that we always have such a connection whenever we have a person in both cases person is simply another name for grace. This transcendental subjectivism of a totally free grace of the person (p. 10) (that will not be relativized even by the Zizioulian notion of communion, as we shall show later), that tends to substitute a person/nature dialectic for that of grace/sin, can hardly be called patristic. Zizioulas never explicitly asserts that this detached person, as well as nature as a whole, needs to be saved by grace, instead of being grace itself although we can nd some evidence for the distinction between person and grace in Lossky. But let us now examine the concept of the person in the Fathers (including some of the Cappadocians and Maximus, whom Zizioulas favors). These authors assert that the human person is not only inconceivable without nature, but that personal particularity is not conceivable without the particular attributes of nature. Gregory of Nyssa explicitly connects human hypostases with different substantial/ natural attributes that he calls by the Aristotelian term , (in a text where he identies person with hypostasis and both with atomon contrary to the Zizioulian detachment of person from atomon).16 Maximus the Confessor asserts that: If the

NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

attributes that distinguish ones body and soul from others bodies and souls come together, they characterize him and make him a hypostasis, separate from others hypostases; thus the logos of ones hypostasis/person is the sum of his personal substantial attributes.17 This means that for Maximus nature is something we have to accept as an essential part of our person that is implicit in its emergence as such. What is of greatest interest is the Maximian denition of the human person, which is completely different from that of Zizioulas and his fellow personalists: for Maximus the person is not an ecstatic escape from nature to freedom, but precisely that mode of existence that allows nature to become innovated, by acting or being acted upon, without changing its logos of being.18 This means that for the Confessor person is a kind of multiple dialogical entelecheia of nature: that is, it is nature that is personal, i.e. personally constituted. This derives from the notion of the logos of being, which is a deeply relational term for Maximus, meaning both a divine art of creating natures19 and the divine will as an invitation to dialogue. Every being is created by a divine logos/will; this means that every nature already represents a personal call to dialogue between man and God. This is ultimately why the logos of each being is inextricably connected with a mode of existence. Zizioulas error is to separate the two, so that he is able to write that substance is relational not in itself but in and through and because of the mode of being it possesses (p. 25). Zizioulas thereby creates two beings: nature and personalized nature; substance/ nature as a non-relational entity, and a mode of existence that relates and can also make substance a relational reality. But it is because logos is a relational reality that it is always ontologically connected with a mode of existence, which is the personal realization of the dialogue that accompanies logos because logos ultimately is a concrete koinonetic event. Logos is a personal divine creative proposal that awaits a response the human personal logos and this dialogue represents a natures personal status of communion with God, that is, the mode of (dialogical) existence of this being. This means ultimately that each mode of existence (tropos hyparxeos) is a personal mode of realizing the en-hypostatic logos/vocation inscribed in nature, in a dialogical/synergetic/analogical20 way, and not a liberation from nature. As the logoi of beings are also for Maximus existential ways hence his expression to converge with the logos of nature (PG 91, 28D29A) he suggests that the logoi must also be personally/dialogically achieved, (i.e. acted out) according to nature (PG 90, 769C). Ontology for Maximus is thus eschatological. Natures become what they really are in the course of this dialogical mode of existence which can realize their logos as an invitation to true being, to the true nal meaning of their existence. For Maximus therefore, nature/substance as he explicitly claims can and must be combined with freedom. It is always personally constituted nature and not person alone that is freedom or pure intentionality; this is what Maximus means when he asserts paradoxically, against Pyrrhus who claimed that everything that belongs to nature is bound to necessity, that concerning human as well as divine natures the nature of the logical beings is not bound to necessity.21 This means that Zizioulas dark, blind and isolated substance/nature that is relational not in itself but in a second personal step, does not truly exist, as nature only exists only as the content of a personal dialogue between logical beings. Nature and person do not represent two separate realities, but a single reality of being-as-a-dialogicalevent a dialogue that is always personal though it is not always salutary (hence Maximus claim that our will can go , against nature, i.e. against the divine logos/ will hidden in it then nature does indeed become a burden of blind necessity). The Incarnation of the Logos is Gods unsurpassable proposal for the fulllment of this dialogue.

PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS

This is why the patristic tradition, from the Apologists of the rst century to Gregory Palamas in the fourteenth century, had no difculty in attributing the image of God emphatically not only to the person but also to human nature.22 While Zizioulas claims that the two enemies of otherness are self and nature (p. 88) and speaks of the necessity of the death of the Self (p. 5152) while, moreover, pouring scorn on marriage, he identies it with natural law, biological love and loss of freedom and specicity, where the lovers use each other as a means to an end (pp. 58, 72, 262 etc) Maximus does not hesitate to call such a theology Manicheistic because we thereby admit two causes or two principles of being. With regard to marriage specically he maintains that if marriage is evil, this means that the natural law of birth is also evil; and if this natural law of birth is evil, then the creator of this nature, who gave it such a law, must also be blamed.23 More serious questions arise here. For the Metropolitan of Pergamon nature is only death, decay and the laws of necessity never a gift. This kind of nature/fall can escape from its condition through person, but it cannot be transformed while Lossky seems, by contrast, to leave room for this possibility. The reality of sin (and the subsequent need for and availability of grace) remains unknown to this person who seems to be beyond good and evil against the patristic (and especially Maximian) witness that only the person can sin and fall while natures fall is blameless.24 As pure liberation from nature, this sort of person is unwilling to work with his nature (even when he offers it to God) rather than trying to escape from it as Lockes punctual self does. The Zizioulian subject is thus pre-modern; it possesses no interiority (a place where gnomic will and prohairesis lie), no instincts, and of course no unconscious. As a former psychologist, I cannot but feel surprised with Zizioulas assertion that being other and being free in an ontological sense, that is, in the sense of being free to be yourself, and not someone or something else, are two aspects of one and the same reality (p. 13). The reality of such a self is partially unconscious for depth psychology; anyone who ignores this calls the self this someone or something else that Zizioulas wants to avoid precisely because what we call the self is imaginary. The way to know your self, indeed, is through long and very hard struggle as it passes through wrestling with this unconscious. The ascetic struggle to shed light upon this dark basement of the person is not without meaning; but as we shall see later, Metropolitan John misunderstands this struggle. As a result this kind of person seems to be a vehicle for escape towards the eternal euphoria of narcissism (which never means lack of intersubjectivity). We cannot be persons, however, unless (until) we possess a nature that unites us with the rest of creation and makes us feel and hold it, enjoy it, cry for it and offer it back to its Creator not only because it is his, but also because (and this is extremely important) it is ours. To conclude this section: The main patristic source for this connection of nature with death and decay is probably the treatise De Incarnatione of Athanasius the Great.25 What Athanasius wants to say, however, is that created nature is as it is created out of nothing, a uid and weak and mortal one, compared with itself i.e. not in its essence but only when it is left out of the dialogue with its Creator, when it is conceived alone. Essentially, nature as well as person are already in the order of grace, already gift, already a vocation, and the call for an eschatological dialogical fulllment.

2. . . . AND DICTATED OTHERNESS

John Zizioulas Trinitarian theology is based on the traditional Eastern doctrine of the monarchy of the Father. He attributes this doctrine mainly to the Cappadocians and

NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

Maximus the Confessor, and this of course is true. It is not always easy, however, to agree with his understanding of their texts. For Zizioulas the Father is the one God of the Creed. Once again the discussion is about freedom that can be assured only if the Father as a person and not substance (p. 121) (in Zizioulas vocabulary this always opposes nature/necessity to person/freedom, even in God) makes a personal rather than ousianic (p. 120) constitution of the two other hypostases. The two characteristics of Zizioulas Triadology are therefore: rst, its (rather) non-ousianic character, and second, the rejection of any element of reciprocity. As we shall see, the Cappadocians as well as Maximus never supported such views. Concerning the rst, Zizioulas never explains what the role of nature is in the divine generation: giving existence or being (e nai) to the Son by the Father is a matter not of nature, of the what God is, but of how God is. This implies that the idea of causation is used in order to describe the how of divine being and avoids making the emergence of the Trinity a matter of transmission of ousia. What the Father causes is a transmission not of ousia but of personal otherness (p. 129). Here the metropolitan makes an important point: he believes that the Creed of Nicaea concerning the generation of the Son from the substance of the Father was altered by the Council of Constantinople; therefore what we read in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is that the Son simply was born from the Father (p. 120). According to our author, this alteration was the revolutionary work of the Cappadocians against the substantialist language of Athanasius and the supporters of homoousion. The Cappadocians supposedly detached themselves from this kind of theologizing about the Trinity and inaugurated a uniquely personalist language, which led to the correction of the rst Ecumenical Council. It seems, however, that the Cappadocians did not desire to abandon substance or homoousion; on the contrary, concerning Trinitarian theology, they worked diligently to tie their personalist language with the traditional substantialist content. Let us begin with Gregory of Nyssa, who in his treatise How by saying three persons in God we do not mean three Gods . . . writes that: the term God does not mean person but substance. Because if person meant God then only one person could be called God, the one who was meant by this name; in this way we call Father only the Father as this name means person (par. 5). Throughout this text Gregory attempts to show that when we say God we mean either the one substance, or the one cause along with his caused (par. 10). In his Great Catechetical Sermon (ch. 3, 2) he explicitly identies monarchy with the unity of substance, while in his Antirr. A (par. 530 531) he identies the one deity with the one principle of it, which he denes not as the person of the Father, although he recognizes him as the cause of the Trinity, but as the concurrence of the similars a very important remark to which we must return. It is also useful to remember that in his rst work mentioned above Gregory identies prosopon (person) with atomon (individual) (par. 67). In trying to defend himself against his critics who claim that the Fathers do not oppose atomon to person as he does, Zizioulas claims that Gregory limits this identication to human beings, while he attributes to John of Damascus the position that there are some who make a distinction between prosopon and hypostasis, by calling prosopon the relation of entities with one another. And he concludes: is this not the reason why we never encounter in the established theological tradition the expression God, one ousia, three atoma and therefore we cannot say that the persons of the Trinity are three individuals? (p. 175176) What is curious is that, following the Cappadocian tradition, (and after the clarications made to the term hypostasis after the fourth century) John of Damascus himself does not hesitate to identify hypostasis not only with prosopon but also

PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS

with atomon, speaking of the Trinity: therefore the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit are hypostases and atoma (individuals) and prosopa (persons); and the eidos (species) that contains them is the superessential and unfathomable deity (Elementary Introduction to Dogma, 7). Along with Leontius of Byzantium and Ps. Cyril26 this text is a witness that prosopon was not in the Greek patristic tradition opposed to atomon in the modern way Zizioulas uses them. Any student of the history of dogma knows well that the major event in fourth-century Christian doctrine concerning Trinitarian theology was the effort to distinguish between substance and hypostasis; as Gregory Nazianzen clearly explains, person was introduced by the Italians, as they could not express the above distinction otherwise due to the poverty of their language.27 After the clarications made against Sabellianism, Nazianzen suggests that we can accept those who prefer the term person if by this they mean hypostasis.28 This makes clear that the identication of person with hypostasis occurred for historical and pastoral reasons and not for ontological ones we would otherwise have plenty of Cappadocian texts explaining this fact. We would also have at least some texts claiming that while we may use the term atomon instead of person or hypostasis for human beings, we cannot do the same for the Trinity however, there are no such texts. Of course hypostasis is by denition relational; it is futile for Zizioulas and his adherents to attempt to project modern (inter-) subjectivism on the Patristic tradition. By attempting this Zizioulas on the one hand closes the atomon/self to person/ communion, for atomon now means a non-relational entity that exists somehow by itself (like blind nature) but can enter into communion only in a second step; on the other hand he tries to make a radical break with anything that reminds him of substance, such as the homoousion. Two other Zizioulian claims are rst, that the Cappadocians degraded the homoousion and second, that the generation of the Son and the spiration of the Spirit have nothing to do with substance. Both assertions are incorrect. Basil the Great insisted that, in general, the term homoousion (consubstantiality) is absolutely necessary for Trinitarian theology, because it makes perfect the notion of person (as nothing is homoousion with itself, but with something else); thus it is a good and pious term as, on the one hand, it denes the character of hypostases, and, on the other hand, it describes the unchangedness of substance.29 Basil, moreover, never thought to correct the Nicene Creed, as he strongly believed that the term homoousion of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed was identical with the expression from the substance of the Father of the former. He does not therefore appear disturbed about the supposedly ousianic tendencies of the rst Ecumenical Council, as Zizioulas desires him to be, but on the contrary claims that: as the Son exists from the Father by the way of generation, and has the Father by nature (physikos) imprinted upon him, he saves on the one hand the unchangedness as he is an image, and on the other hand he saves the homoousion as an offspring of him.30 That means that for Basil homoousion saves better than any other term both the integrity of the persons and their unity of essence, because homoousion expresses the principle of the eternal personal dialogue within the Trinity, as an eternal circulation of substance that is always one but in a state of absolute inter-givenness. Nonetheless, Basil has no difculty connecting monarchy with the unity of substance, as a careful reading of his On the Holy Spirit, 45, demonstrates. Basil makes a distinction concerning the Trinity between the specicity of hypostases and the monarchy; he connects the persons with the former and the common substance/nature ( ) which he also calls communion of deity ( ) with the latter. More explicitly, in his Sermon 24 (par. 3) to forestall any identication of the monarchy with just one person (the Father) who might act

NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

independently, he writes: there is one God who is the Father; there is also one God who is the Son, but there are not two Gods, because there is an identity between the Father and the Son. Because there is not another deity in the Father, and another in the Son nor another substance (physis) in either of them. This is also why one cannot claim that the generation of the Son and the spiration of the Spirit have nothing to do with substance. If we do this, ousia/substance is left out of mutual givenness, because Zizioulas can only understand such an event one-dimensionally; in this case he is afraid that the Father would hold divine substance in advance, and then transmit it. Zizioulas believes this claim comes from Gregory Nazianzens conception of the Father as the only willing one in the Trinity (p. 121) as such, the person who initiates freedom and otherness in the Trinity while obviously the Son is the willed one. But what if the Son is the willing Son of the willing Father, and, as Athanasius writes, he wills the Father by the same will that he is willed by him and by this will he loves and wills and honors the Father as well; and there is only one will from the Father in the Son, and therefore we consider the Son in the Father and the Father in the Son?31 The only response to these questions is that we cannot appreciate the patristic concept of the monarchy without conceiving of reciprocity as the core of it; this is my second response to Zizioulas Triadology. What do we mean by reciprocity? Hypostasis signies that divine nature is relational, instead of overcoming it, as Zizioulas intends it to do. As the synonymous words hypostasis/person/atomon signify precisely this relationality of the substance/nature itself a relationality where substance is also active (homoousion), as not only Athanasius the Great32 but also the Cappadocians understood the only denition of monarchy must be that of Gregory Nazianzen: Monarchy that cannot be limited to one person, for it is possible for unity if at variance with itself to come into a condition of plurality; but one which is constituted by equality of nature, and agreement of opinion, and identity of motion, and a convergence of its elements to one, something that is impossible to happen in the created nature; so that though numerically distinct there is no division of ousia.33 Zizioulas suggests this represents a kind of moral sense of monarchy (p. 132134) as if the Trinity needs an internal moral law to regulate its inner attitude! The text is explicit, however: Gregory denes the monarchy here not only as (a) a personal causation made by the Father, but also as (b) an equality of nature and (c) a convergence ( ) of the two into one. If these three presuppositions are not active, we do not have the monarchy. This means that the monarchy has also to do with homoousion and of course with a reciprocity of convergence of the two consubstantial persons with the one consubstantial Father for the divine ousia not to be divided. Then in order to avoid a division in the divine nature, the monarchy as a personal achievement of the Father is not enough. Gregory identies here the unity of God with the unity of his ousia/substance, precluding any limitation of this unity to the activity of only one person contrary to what Zizioulas argues. In ontological terms this means not only that the Father offers otherness to the two other persons, but he allows them reciprocally to offer him, in a dynamic way, his own otherness (because without a convergence of the two to the Father and agreement of opinion and identity of motion, this substantial as well as personal unity would be broken. This is what Athanasius meant, as we saw above, by insisting that the Son is not only willed by the Father, but is also willing the Father, by the same will that he is willed by the Father). Note too that Gregory insists that this is precisely the difference between created and uncreated: a complete consubstantiality and convergence, so that unity is the upshot of a reciprocal self-offering. This means that the monarchy of the Father is something not possessed by him but offered to him by the two others.

PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS

Monarchy is not something imposed upon the others, as it requires the free assistance of the two others to be achieved. The Father not only generates the consubstantial otherness of the two; at the same time he depends on them for his own otherness to be fullled, in this eternal dynamic reciprocal inter-giveness of divine substance. This means that what the Father offers the two other persons is the possibility to simultaneously offer him his own otherness in return. The difference between this notion of monarchy and that of Zizioulas is indeed enormous. In Zizioulas monarchy only one person is basically active the Father. This person is independent even regarding his own substance/ousia. For Zizioulas only the Father is uncaused, while the two others are caused; there is thus only one who causes and he is the only giver of otherness otherwise the monotheism is at risk, as he claims (p. 144). Metropolitan John would have been right only in one case: if we introduce time into the generation of the two divine persons and this is what he unconsciously tends to do when he asserts that his (i.e. the Fathers) freedom in bringing them forth into being (my italics) does not impose him upon them, since they are not already (my italics) there, and their own freedom does not require that their consent be asked, since they are not established as entities before their relationship with the Father (my italics) (p. 122). If I read correctly, this text says that the two persons existed only after the Father generated them and thus their consent need not be asked, as they did not exist before; in other words there was a time when they did not exist as Arius believed. But if we do not insert time into Gods existence, then to cause and to be caused are not two successive moments in the life of the Trinity, and they should not be conceived in a successive way. If they cannot be conceived in a successive way, this means that cause and causation are ultimate and reciprocal presuppositions of one another. This is what I mean when I say that the Fathers initiative is not that of causing equal others by dictation, but of inaugurating reciprocity in an ontological and not moral, as Zizioulas thinks, sense. This is a revolution for ontology, while the Zizioulian revolution of the dictated otherness is very familiar in the history of Philosophy (and in the recent history of Psychology as we shall see). Our otherness is dictated when the giver of this otherness does not allow us to give him otherness in return. At a deeper level, we do not truly give otherness to someone unless we set them free simultaneously to offer otherness back to us. This is why the Zizioulian asymmetrical construal of monarchy collapses here as well. By being caused willingly by the Father, the Son at the same moment offers to be his cause as well, and so with the Spirit. The Son and the Spirit become thereby the causes not of course of the Father, but of the Fathers causation along with him. (The term asymmetrical is nonetheless not accurate even for human love. The one who initiates the expression of love does not by any means feel prior, because, even if he initiates love, this love for the other is already a gift of life for the lover; through true love you already receive your being from the other; love is thus by nature open to reciprocity). This detail is so important that I can assert there is no similarity between a Trinitarian theology based on this kind of reciprocity and one based on dictated otherness. Let us look at the anthropological and theological consequences of the Zizioulian concept of otherness compared with the notion of otherness we nd in the patristic texts. Zizioulas believes that the self must die (p. 51), because every self exists only in being afrmed as other by an other (p. 55), so that the self is nally caused by the Other and . . . aims at and rests in the Other (p. 54). Zizioulas accuses Buber, Lacan and even Levinas of not knowing this concrete other, and he is partially right. But what he ignores is more important. Speaking of Maximus ever-moving-rest Zizioulas emphasizes the rest

10

NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

in the other but underplays the ever-moving aspect i.e. he forgets that when we speak of such an encounter, we mean a syn-ergy of two active wills, since otherwise we would be simply overwhelmed by the Other. Maximus the Confessor is explicit on this: it is pernicious to say that in the encounter between God and man (or between men) we have only one will; we can have at most a unity of wills ( ). Without the gnomic (i.e. personal) will remaining intact and active, such a rest would become the end of personhood rather than its fulllment. Maximus thus avoids Monotheletism and the subsequent Monophysitism of the dictated otherness by keeping the gnomic or personal will free, active and conscious; otherwise, if the will is one, the different substances will be melted . . . Concerning hypostases, they will be amalgamated, as the personal character of the hypostases, by becoming identical, will confuse everyone with everyone else . . . .34 In this way, paradoxically, we have not only the death of the self but also the death of the Other. Otherness can only be reciprocal, i.e. dialogical. We otherwise end up not with communion but with passivity.35 The metropolitan changes the phrase I love, therefore I am, into I am loved, therefore I am (p. 89). If we want to avoid such dictated passivity, we must say with Maximus I am loved and I love, therefore I am. Otherwise we have abolished personal will; God loves all his creatures, but only a few of them participate in his love, because it is the active human will that matters. The will must not die, as Zizioulas avers; rather it must be trained spiritually to become open to the other, rather than remaining , self-loving, as Maximus liked to repeat. In this way we can also correctly understand the Eucharist. For Zizioulas the essence of the eucharistic ethos . . . is the afrmation of the Other and of every other as a gift to be appreciated and to evoke gratitude (p. 90). But, for Maximus this is only half the truth. As he brilliantly insists, after he gives his gifts to the world, God forgets that all those gifts were his; so, when man offers these gifts back to him in the Eucharist, he accepts them as if these gifts belonged to man and not to himself.36 In ontological terms this means that without the afrmation of our willing/acting otherness, the afrmation of Gods otherness is absolutely passive; thus, the afrmation of otherness must be willing, active and reciprocal. It is possible not only to have our own otherness dictated; it is possible also to dictate otherness to others. In this case the natural or moral qualities of the Other, whether positive or negative, good or bad, do not affect our attitude to him or her (p. 91). This seems marvelous at rst sight, but is it? We now understand why the Fathers considered personal otherness to be connected with various natural attributes. Zizioulas often insists that we love the other simply because he is other, regardless of his attributes; we can now see, however, that in this way we render the other speechless. We are not dealing with a real natural other who has instincts and passions, body and an unconscious, as we have. We thereby love the other as a kind of open promise, the way young parents love their newborn baby, because they can project everything they like or expect upon him or her, without any resistance. We thereby love others as selfobjects, in Heinz Kohuts terminology.37 Selfobjects are possessed by the narcissistic libido in support of the grandiose exhibitionistic self, in the form of an idealization of the other and then an imaginary melting into him, in order that the illusion of the perfection of the self may be preserved. Things are not so easy for theologians! They become more difcult if we add in Lacans claim that narcissism (even the primary one) does not mean an absence of intersubjective relationship, but just the opposite,38 as well as the remarks of D. Lagache who claims that sado-masochism (not as a sexual perversion but as a mode of relating and being related) represents the principal dimension of common inter-subjectivity.39 This means

PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS

11

that the objectication of the self or of the other (or, in our theological language, dictating otherness or to having it dictated by another) is the most common everyday experience. Such objectication takes place not only if we identify someone (or ourselves) with a certain natural characteristic, but also if we consider ourselves or the other as lying above such characteristics, in order for it to be possible to use them as a selfobject! To love an other or to be truly loved is thus really difcult, as it requires opening a place for the real natural and personal other, in me. This is what is expressed, as I have claimed elsewhere,40 by the patristic term homoousion. Because the relationship between the three divine persons cannot be conceived without their eternally fullled consubstantial dialogue of intergivenness, so too any relationship between humans cannot be understood otherwise than as the step-by-step progress towards a dialogical/synergetic reciprocity that may be extended to a mutual consubstantial co-inherence now by the mystery of the Cross. The Cross destroys any a-symmetrical construal of otherness, as proclaimed by Zizioulas, who here copies but tries also to correct Levinas. If we really take into account the existential reality of the Cross, we are able easily to realize that the crucied is the servant of my own otherness, the otherness of the other as I like to call it, i.e. an otherness that I like, I choose and I develop. This is expressed brilliantly by Maximus in his doctrine of the multiple incarnations of Christ, becoming everything for everyone according to each ones freedom.41 Love always assists the birth of the others otherness, and not the otherness we give to the other. Love thus listens, waits, understands and becomes surprised by the other. This means that persons are afrmed in their own identity only in a reciprocal way, or better, in a freedom for absolute reciprocity that leaves the possibility of the others otherness permanently open. Without this circulation of otherness, otherness can only be dictated, and the relationship unavoidably becomes totalitarian. This is why I conclude that, through his understanding of monarchy, subjectivism is strongly afrmed by Zizioulas, rather than transformed into communion, because otherness here is not my otherness, since it is the other who decides about it and then dictates it to me. Because the Zizioulian concept of relationship determines his ecclesiology, they both need radical correction. I have published a book aiming at such correction42, and there is insufcient space to repeat my arguments here. Zizioulas misreads the sources of the rst two centuries in order to put the bishop in the place of the dictating Father, and ignores the Christological foundations of all the ecclesiastical charismata. He also tends to overlook the imitational/participative dimension of Church structures; but this is another considerable discussion. I cannot close this paper without saying a few words on Zizioulian existentialism. The metropolitan refuses to be called an existentialist because for him existentialism is a projection of human existence on the divine, while he wants to do the opposite. The personalist current in modern Orthodox theology is connected, rst of all, with modern idealistic subjectivism, as I have said above, and it is only as such that it tends toward existentialism. Besides, the essence of existentialism is different: it is the exaltation of the mode of existence above being in general, as it is appropriately described mainly in Heideggers Introduction in Metaphysics, and, of course, the concept of ecstasis out of nature as it is shaped both by Heidegger and Sartre (in antithesis, as I have argued elsewhere, with the patristic notion of ecstasis, as the ecstasis of nature itself ).43 If this is true, then Zizioulas (as well as Yannaras and even Lossky) belong somehow to the wider context of existentialism. Of course Zizioulas is inconceivable without his Levinasian turn to inter-subjectivity, with a very essential correction of Levinas: he ontologizes the Levinasian ethical priority of the Other, by connecting it with the patristic conception of

12

NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

monarchy, as he understands it. He thereby modies his concept of ecstasis by giving it also a social, horizontal dimension. In any case, it would be useful for all Orthodox personalists to read Paul Ricoeurs Soi-meme comme un autre,44 in the tenth study of which he criticizes the Levinasian priority of the Other which tends to become an absolute heteronomy, where the call of the lover cannot be distinguished from that of the executioner, unless we admit an opposite movement from the self towards the Other that recognizes and accepts him. This energetic account of relationship, of course, which unites, as Ricoeur claims, Levinas to Husserl, remains unfortunately enclosed in subjectivity; Maximus synergetic/dialogical reciprocity is something different and much richer, as it takes place in both subjects and can be mutually veried. And a last word on the Zizioulian contempt for Lacan. Against some Orthodox theologians who claim the opposite,45 Zizioulas declares that there is no similarity whatsoever between Maximus and Lacans concepts of Desire (pp. 51, 72). Zizioulas ecstaticism in this context takes the form of an insistent monoenergism or monotheletism, for he assures us that there is no question of any understanding of desire as a movement of the Self: the Other initiates or causes our desire for him in and through his desire for us (p. 51). This automatic passivity of desire means inevitably that only the master of Desire desires in a true sense, and what he desires turns out to be the irresistible internal law of my existence as Lacan well understood. The self, according to the metropolitan of Pergamon, appears to be constituted precisely in the mirror-like automatism of the replication of the Others desire, and is thereby rendered a relational automaton (as I have termed it elsewhere in the second chapter of my Orthodoxy and Modernization (in Greek)), that is, a radically heteronomous existence which cannot reassign its free will according to St Maximus, but simply denies it. Moreover, this denial of the assumption of the Others Desire as my own because this means precisely that Desire does not constitute some movement of the self also manifests my own radical self-interest, since it is only in this way, by copying the Desire of the Other, that I also can acquire a real self-incommunion. This is to say, it is not really the Other that I love, but his Desire for me the Other in effect is my own fundamental deciency exactly as Lacan says. Yet oddly Zizioulas thinks that by using the above phrase he has advanced beyond Lacan. A Neoplatonizing element in Zizioulas thinking is his inability to understand that the theological value of these Lacanian theses lies in the discovery of the transcendent character of natural Desire, as is also the case with the transcendent character of the natural will in St Maximus, or the natural desire for the transcendent which De Lubac nds in Aquinas. Zizioulas quasi-anthropological Platonism is horried at the fact that created nature already nds itself in the order of grace, and consequently desires by nature that which transcends nature. The only thing, according to Zizioulas, which is entitled to have a relationship with grace (or perhaps to replace grace?) is the person. Of course for St Maximus and the Fathers the immediate supranatural referentiality of the natural will/ desire is God while in Lacans secularized thought this supranatural referentiality is a fullness that is imaginary, seeing that it is denitively lost and unattainable in reality. What concerns us here is that it is on the level of nature that Lacan nds the analogue of the theological natural will: the inclination towards a fullness that is transcendent, that is to say, social, which nds in the (denitively lost) Other an abundance of meaning and life. The metropolitan of Pergamon misinterprets Lacan here (as he does Maximus): he thinks that since in the former (and also in the latter, despite what the metropolitan says) Desire refers fundamentally to personal fullness, it is in reality ignorant of the Other. The opposite is the case: the natural will, or natural Desire, tends to nd the Other precisely

PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS

13

through the superabundance that is implied by communion with him. The bare fact of desire does not imply the inevitable loss of the Other; it can also signify the nding of the Other as superabundance of life and relation. The difference here (most important) between Maximus and Lacan lies in the way the Christian Maximus is familiar with the ascetic theory of the transcendence of self-love, through which we nally encounter the real Other in person. The natural fullness of relation is thereby consolidated as interpersonal synergistic communion. Lacan does not recognize this path, and natural fullness is left as the imagining of a denitively lost imaginary relation, the lack of which matures the subject harshly. Lacan thereby remains within the bounds of fallen nature. Zizioulas more or less Platonizing mentality (although he rejects Platonism) does not seem to have a serious problem with a personal/social ecstasy that is above and outside of nature and the natural will/Desire. The problem here lies in the fact that without the natural will/Desire, our ecstasy risks becoming bereft of anthropological content that is, it risks becoming a pure personal imagining, since I neither exist within this relationship as a complete and active subject, nor does the other respond as such. We then exist in an illusory fullness of communion, yet at the same time as an absolute natural ontological deciency and Lacan is triumphantly vindicated!

3. THE CHRISTOLOGY OF ESCAPE AND THE END OF KNOWLEDGE

The reader of Zizioulas book gets the impression that, concerning the Son, we possibly have two generations of him (pp. 129132). We have seen above that Zizioulas has no problem with the transmission of personal otherness, while he does have a serious problem with the transmission of ousia (p. 129) i.e. he has no problem with a Father possessing otherness and then transmitting (or dictating) it, while he has problem with a Father possessing a nature and then transmitting it. This tends to suggest two successive moments in the generation of the Son: that of the homoousion and that of personal otherness. As we have said, the Fathers clearly connected the two, the latter being impossible without the former. Basil the Great, for example, writes: (the Son is) the character of the Fathers hypostasis, in order for us to learn the homoousion,46 or the whole of Fathers nature is imprinted on the Son as a stamp47 and many other expressions that show that the homoousion, as we have seen, does not prevent but, on the contrary, helps us to understand the integrity of the persons, as the homoousion is this full circulation of nature which expresses the eternal ontological dialogue in the Trinity. The most serious Christological problem in Zizioulas thought, however, seems to be the way he conceives of Christs identity. Zizioulas tends to degrade the communicatio idiomatum in Christ to stress the fact that what is active in Christ is the free person of the Logos. Just as divine nature escapes ontological necessity by being constituted or hypostasized through the person of the Father, the Oneness of Christs being is realized in freedom by being a matter of unity in and through a person, the hypostasis of the Son (p. 37). As the person of the Father frees Gods substance, human nature, which also consists in a burden of necessity, has to escape toward freedom through Logos/Christs free hypostasis, because Christs hypostasis is not dependent on his natural qualities (p. 109). By this afrmation Zizioulas, without being careful to distance himself from Docetism, establishes a kind of Christology of Escape. Salvation is a matter of escape rather than the synergetic/dialogical transformation of created nature. It is useful to read here a text by Maximus, in order to show how different things are in the Fathers: the

14

NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

perfect work of love and the fulllment of its activity is to make the attributes and the names of those who are linked by it to belong to one another. Thus it makes man God and makes God to appear as a man, because of the one and identical agreement of will and movement of the two.48 Here man seems to be saved (and freed) through a dialogical communion of the two natures through their respective wills and acts, a communion that transgures humanitys nature, and not through an escape via the Logos hypostasis. Most important of all, human nature is here completely active, willing, feeling, knowing, collaborating nothing is imposed on it, as it walks towards its resurrection in Christ. Without two active natures in synergy/dialogue, Christology is no different from a Neoplatonic ecstatic escape. The danger of Monotheletism or Monoenergism here is obvious. It is because of this passivity of humanitys nature in Zizioulian theology (the person seems to be active, while his nature remains passively escaped from, or offered to God not as a gift, but rather as a dark burden of necessity), that he understands mysticism as he does. I wholeheartedly agree with the metropolitans ecclesial understanding of mysticism as relationship and communion where persons ourish undivided and distinct in the Spirit. My objection is the complete preclusion of consciousness along with introspection and self-consciousness from it (p. 306f.). Consciousness here is only conceived as opposed to relationship, as if the latter had to take place unconsciously. How could we have otherness, however, without any trace of consciousness? One can nd dozens of authors on what we (falsely) call spirituality, where consciousness, or introspection, or awareness of Gods grace are not opposed to communion or relationality. The Cappadocians and Maximus the Confessor in particular have produced hundreds of pages on this. These Fathers conceive the whole of man in an ontological way, where all the parts of the soul have (along with body) the possibility of participating in God. The inner man is not rejected, because this is the place of human freedom, where lies mans gnomic (personal) will.49 The problem is again that the nature of the Zizioulian pre-modern subject remains passive. Relationality tends to become automatic, as the subject refuses to acknowledge his unconscious, his inner conicts and contradictions, his passions and he refuses to work with them. This is precisely the core of subjective ecstatic idealism as, for example Nietzsche denes it: Not to know your self: this is the cleverness/prudence of the idealist. The idealist: a creature which has good reasons to keep himself in the darkness concerning his self and which is clever/prudent enough to keep himself in the darkness regarding also the nature of those reasons.50 We are of course aware that Zizioulas rejects any relationship of ontology with psychology or ethics in general. He thus does not want to know about his self but then his eschatology tends to mean escape, not transformation of nature. His mysticism also tends to become an ecstatic ight from real existence, and communion tends to become a euphoric erotic innity, which, as Gregory Palamas liked to repeat, is only imaginary. For him the real ascent to God can only happen by taking with us every kind of creature, in order for the image of God to be complete . . .51

CONCLUSIONS

Zizioulas and his generation (Yannaras, Nellas, Nissiotis, Romanides, etc) represent the second prise de conscience of Orthodox theology, after the Russian theologicophilosophical explosion of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is not our purpose to examine here the convergences and the divergences between these thinkers. Thus I give only a brief account of my criticism of Zizioulas.

PERSON INSTEAD OF GRACE AND DICTATED OTHERNESS

15

What is fertile in Zizioulas theology is its existential, i.e. ecclesial/eucharistic background. His theological epistemology stems from this background, and this means that, even if one disagrees sometimes with him on his way of elaborating it theologically, one cannot but recognize that what we have here is the authentic source of Orthodox theology through the ages. Many fundamental conceptions of his, such as the person and his freedom, the monarchy of the Father, the eucharistic texture of communion, the existential meaning of ecclesiology, point I think in the right theological direction, although they rarely move beyond modern philosophy. The reason for this is that, as we cannot help admitting, Zizioulas seems to offer an idealistic, sinless (almost by itself) and free person (be yourself!), practically identied with grace, escaping a passive, unwilling and non-active nature (especially when one offers this nature to God), thus abolishing the possibility of a psychosomatic participation in God without the troubles of modern passions and the unconscious, and exempt from the inconveniences of history and the dilemmas of knowledge. He also seems to offer an easily conceivable, but nonetheless philosophically and psychologically perilous notion of communion (to dictate or to be dictated to), without the responsibility of a dangerously real dialogical reciprocity between real, natural beings. He is thereby able to please both the fundamentalist and the modernizing Orthodox theologians: the former because of the abolition of nature, and the latter because of the abolition of knowledge and repentance, because he tends to identify almost any inner spiritual struggle with psychologism. What I claim in this paper is that all the above notions, if they are properly understood as they actually exist in the patristic texts, open wider intellectual horizons for us. This, along with the necessity of a fundamental reassessment of the origins of Western theology especially of Augustine and Aquinas, whom Zizioulas usually misunderstands will give modern Orthodox theology the merit it deserves in the context of the modern theologicophilosophical quest.

Notes
1 Ashgate, 2007. 2 Edinburgh : T&T Clark, 2006. 3 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953. 4 See G. Florovsky, The Resurrection of Life, in Bulletin of the Harvard University Divinity School, 49, n. 8 (1952), p. 19. 5 See his G. Florovsky: The Ecumenical Teacher, in Synaxi, n. 64 (1997), pp. 1819, (in Greek). 6 See B. Zenkovsky Histoire de la Philosophie Russe, (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), t. 2, p. 64. 7 In his Essai de Metaphysique Eschatologique, (1946), ch. 3, 4. 8 In Charles Taylors terminology. See his Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 143176. 9 See J. Seiger, The Idea of the Self. Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the 17th Century, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 364. This book is a very useful summary of the evolution towards this split between freedom and necessity in the West. 10 As I strive to show in my Closed Spirituality and the Meaning of the Self (Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 1999, 3 2008), rst chapter of the rst part. The book will soon appear in English. 11 See the extensive analysis in my Closed Spirituality . . .. pp. 285191. 12 See his Philosophy of Mind, (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1971), pp. 9091: the totality of his relations . . . constitutes [mans] actual livingness and subjectivity. 13 See pp. 1819. 14 Douglas Farrow in his Ascension and Ecclesia, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark 1999), p. 142, as well as in his Person and Nature: The Necessity-Freedom Dialectics in John Zizioulas in D. Knight (ed.) The Theology of John Zizioulas, p. 122, thinks that this is a Maximian position. This is also the position of Balthasar (Kosmische Liturgie. Das Weltbild Des Bekenners Einsiedeln, 21961), p. 184, P. Sherwood (APXH KAI TELOS: Berichte zum XI Internationalen Byzantinischen Kongress, III1, 127, Munchen 1958), p. 9 and L. Thunberg (Microcosm and Mediator. The

16

NICHOLAS LOUDOVIKOS

Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor, Lund 1965), p. 154. All the above understand the text Ad Thal. 61, PG 90, 628AB, as meaning that Maximus considers the Fall of man as simultaneous with his creation. Maximus here says that man gave this power, i.e. the natural movement of his mind toward God, immediately after his creation to the senses . . . but this does not mean that, for some inevitable ontological reason human nature had to immediately fall. Maximus here rather describes the nature of Adams abyssal freedom. For further discussion see my A Eucharistic Ontology. Maximus the Confessors Eschatological Ontology of Being as Gift (Boston MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, forthcoming, ch. 7). 15 Ascension and Ecclesia, p. 89 f. 16 See Gregory of Nyssa How by Saying Three Persons in God, We do not Mean Three Gods . . ., ch. 1819. 17 See PG 91 552 BCD. 18 PG 91 1342 D 1345 A. 19 PG 91, 1328A. 20 For the connection of the Areopagitic concepts of analogy and synergy with the Maximian concept of dialogue and in comparison with the Aquinatian notion of analogy see my Eucharistic Ontology, ch. 7, 34. 21 Disputatio cum Pyrrho, PG 91, 293 BC. 22 See my Orthodoxy and Modernization: Byzantine Individualization, State and History in the Perspective of the European Future, (Athens: Armos, 2006) (in Greek), pp. 166172. 23 See PG 91 1340 BC. 24 Ad Thal., 42, PG 90, 405C. 25 See ch. 36 in particular. 26 PG 86, 1305C and PG 77, 1149B respectively. 27 Sermon 21, For Athanasius the Great 35. 28 Sermon 42, 17. 29 Epist. 32, 3. 30 Sermon 24, 4. 31 Cont. Arian., 3, PG 26, 464 A. 32 Cont. Arian. 1, 1620. 33 Theol. Or., 3, 2. 34 PG 91, 24C28A. 35 See my Eucharistic Ontology, ch. 7, 3. 36 See my Eucharistic Ontology, ch. 1, 7. 37 See H. Kohut, The Restoration of the Self, (New York: International University Press 1977), , How does Analysis Cure? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 38 Jaques Lacan, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalitic Experience, in Ecrits (Bruce Fink transl., New York/London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), pp. 7581. 39 See his Situation de lagressivite, in Bull. Psychol.,, XIV, 1, 1960, pp. 99112. 40 See my Closed Spirituality . . ., pp. 258300, and my Apophatic Ecclesiology of Consubstantiality, (Athens: Armos, 2002), pp. 264270. Both books will soon appear in English. 41 See my Eucharistic Ontology, ch. 1, 6. 42 It is my Apophatic Ecclesiology of Consubstantiality. 43 See the discussion of the difference between Heideggerian and Sartrian existentialism and patristic thought, concerning personalism, in my Closed Spirituality . . ., pp. 285326. 44 Paris: Seuil, 1990. 45 Including myself, in my book Psychoanalysis and Orthodox Theology; On Desire, Catholicity and Eschatology (Athens: Armos, 22005), rst study. 46 Cont. Eun., 1, 20. 47 Cont. Eun., 2, 16. 48 Cap. Quin. Cent., I, 27, PG 90, 1189BC. See also Epist. PG 91, 573B. 49 See my Orthodoxy and Modernization, pp. 745. 50 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, (Leipzig: Alfred Kroner, 1922), vol. 15, frg. 344, (my translation). 51 Gregory Palamas, Contra Acindynum, in Writings of Gregory Palamas, ed. Panagiotes K. Chrestou et alii. (5 vols, Thessaloniki, 196292), vol. 3, Ant. 6, 36, 11 (in Greek).