The Mystery of Person in the Theology of Metropolitan John Zizioulas

Abstract

The personal identity has become a very important issue in the contemporary anthropological discussion. Many thinkers try to explain the existence of human person from atheist point of view. They often have been very hostile towards Christianity. Today there is a crisis concerning the understanding of human person particularly in such disciplines as psychology, sociology and medicine. Christian intellectuals have been called to respond to various philosophical and psychological currents which tend to diminish and reduce human person and treat it as solely earthly creature. Orthodox Metropolitan John Zizioulas during last five decades have been defending the Christian concept of person. In his theological investigations he has undertaken such difficult issues as human freedom, otherness and truth. Successfully, he managed to combine the theological wisdom of the Fathers of the Church with a very good knowledge of ancient and modern philosophy in order to help both Christians and non-Christians to take a fresh look on the meaning of person.

This article is an attempt to present in a very concise manner a very sophisticated ontological thought of Zizioulas. It starts from describing the content of two archaic Greek notions, such as: prosopon and hypostasis. This basis is a necessary introduction to depict the essence of the creative contribution of early Christian intellectuals, who combined the meaning of notions prosopon and hypostasis and applied them into theology. Zizioulas defines that exceptional work as the revolution of the Cappadocian Fathers. The main purpose of this endeavour was to create a notion, which would express an ontological content to each person of the Holy Trinity, without endangering its main biblical principles: monotheism and the absolute ontological independence of God in relation to the world. According to Metropolitan of Pergamon only an absolute person could have created the world in freedom and in this way rendered human personhood possible.

Zizioulas distinguishes two different modes of human existence: the hypostasis of biological existence and the hypostasis of ecclesial existence. This is basically the distinction between human personhood understood as “individuals” and as persons. Conceiving human beings as individuals it means conceiving them as creatures so that substance, or their biological nature, has preceded. The individual, being of a part of the created world, is a “personality” understood as a complex of natural, psychological or moral qualities centered on the axe of consciousness. Human being as the individual is subject to the law of necessity and usually affirm oneself in contrast to all other beings. Hypostasis of biological existence in order to become the hypostasis of ecclesial existence needs to become the subject of deindividualization and personalization, what can be possible only in the Church – the pneumatologically constituted body of Christ. Human beings can become persons through baptism and can live as persons through the Eucharist. The Metropolitan of Pergamon underlines the fact, that the person is an identity that emerges through relationship. He also stresses that human beings can love only if they are persons, i.e., if they allow the other to be truly other, and yet be in communion with them. If we love the other not only in spite of his or her being different from us but because they are different from us, or rather other than ourselves, we live in “freedom as love” and in “love as freedom”.