Zizioulas on eschatology

The Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas is most often associated with the Christian doctrine of the person. The concept of the person holds together the two issues of communion and freedom. Zizioulas argues that if there is one person there must be many persons: the concept is intrinsically plural, relational and yet safeguards our particularity. By making a distinction between person and individual, Zizioulas contrasts the human who is related and integrated, and the human who is disengaged and isolated from all others. According to Christian doctrine, Christ is the person in whom we may all be persons. Christ comes to individuals without relation to anyone else, and brings them into communion so that they become persons, related to all others, indeed related to everything that is not themselves. This catholic being who is simultaneously one and many is coming into being in history, and at the eschaton will turn out to be truth of all humanity. In Christ, time and history move towards this reconciliation in which all creatures discover their proper unity and difference; this coming together of all things makes itself known in history in the Church and in the event of the eucharist. For Christian theology, the concept of the person relates to time and purpose and so to eschatology. His confidence in the theology of the Greek Fathers enables Zizioulas to lay out the logic of the Christian doctrine of the person with the utmost clarity, and it is this that makes his account of personhood distinctive and rewarding.

John Zizioulas on Eschatology and Persons

Douglas H. Knight

for a volume on eschatology edited by John Manoussakis and Neal Deroo (Ashgate 2009)

Zizioulas’ central concern is human freedom. His first insight is that communion and freedom are not opposed, for freedom is enabled, not restricted, by our relationships with other persons. God is intrinsically communion and freedom, and he extends this communion and freedom to us in the body of Christ, the communion of the Church. The persons gathered into this communion will come to participate in the freedom of God, and through them all creation will share this freedom. The freedom promised to humanity has been inaugurated in this body; all particularity is being perfected in it so that in this communion the diversity and very existence of creation will have no limits.

Communion means both oneness and otherness, difference as well as unity. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit are the criterion and guarantor of this otherness. These divine persons are truly other, and the source of all otherness. It is they who establish and confirm us as different from God, and different from one another. The divine persons are the guarantee that there is any distinct thing at all, and that the profusion of beings and creation as a whole are no aberration. As evidence of his intention to promote and sustain this profusion of particularities, God has planted his communion as a community in the world. This community is the Church, the sign and inaugurating event of this plurality in communion.

Persons or individuals?
Zizioulas’ account of human beings is at odds with a great part of the Western intellectual tradition, for which it is a basic prejudice that we cannot both be together and free. This tradition conceives man as an isolated unit, separable from all other beings, and believes that each of us must assert ourselves against all that is not ourselves. The individual struggles against his neighbours and against society as a whole, alternately reaching out to them and withdrawing from them, but he is ultimately unable to establish his own identity. Since no creature is finally able to recognise anything that is not themselves, the otherness and very existence of every creature and thus of the world, is in doubt.

Zizioulas regards the individual as essentially cut off and separate from all that is not himself, so the individual is a tragic, even demonic, concept. A person on the other hand is not an individual, but a plural being who includes and represents the entire world of relationships. The identity of a particular person is not to be found somewhere deep inside him or her: he has no self, centre, soul or other form of private existence before coming into relationship with others. The identity of each person is constituted and sustained everywhere and by everyone. Zizioulas is not saying that one person is the function of many other persons, for then the question would be which persons and which community? Rather, each person is the function of all persons; all the persons will be constitutive of the being of each and every person in the world.

The logic of this statement is theological and eschatological. Even working in complete harmony the whole world is not sufficient finally to sustain the being of a single creature in it. But this world has no other logic than as the creation of God, and its Creator is free to be present to his creatures in it, so that they exist in one economy with him. The trinitarian persons are constitutive of all other persons of creation and must therefore be included amongst the persons of the world. God calls into being that which is not himself, and he sustains it so that it may answer his call in freedom; our reception of his call and God’s reception of us gives us our existence. The triune persons of God, who are fully able to give and return their being to another, are also fully able to give and return our being too, and so are the full and sufficient condition of human persons. Because God empersons others, the conditions of personhood for all are met.

The predicament of the creature
Considered apart from God, the creature is an individual. The individual is tragic. To sustain ourselves we break open animal bodies and consume them, and extend our lease on life through their death. We come into existence through sex, and we are drawn together to another person with them to reproduce ourselves; but we do not thereby reproduce or sustain ourselves, but reproduce only children who, however much they are like us, are not us, and who finally replace us altogether. We are driven by our desire to be with others, but the bounds of our own body deny us this communion.

The Augustinian theological tradition assumed that death came to creation to punish the disobedience of man. Against this tradition Zizioulas insists that, since all created things have beginnings and are demarked by boundaries, they also have ends, and so mortality is intrinsic to the world. Yet each creature is created to move through boundaries on its way to freedom and communion. ‘Nothing was created perfect from the beginning. Everything, including especially the human being, was meant to grow into perfection.’ In isolation from the eschaton, each creature remains in immature form, and creation as a whole remains confined within mortality. Since it is not the source of its own life, creation remains liable to dissolve back into nothingness: all created things, left to themselves, tend to divide and drift into isolation and eventual dissolution. Without man to make it free, creation remains disordered so that nothing in it comes to fulfilment. Unlike the Augustinian tradition, Greek patristic theology relates the concept of sin to eschatology, for sin relates to freedom as the end towards which everything is orientated. Sin is not deviation from an original state but from what will be.

God intends no less than absolute freedom for man. If man does not succeed in becoming free, creation loses all hope of a long-term future. It is not because he demanded freedom that man fell, but because he has not exercised the mediatory role for creation for which he is made. Despite the fall, it is vital that man aspires to freedom. Man is called to bring freedom into creation and thereby give it a future: this eschatology is central to the Christian doctrine of creation.

Man as mediator of creation
If the world is to live, death must be overcome. But only a relationship of love, freely willed on both sides, can overcome the limits of our life. Death is the ultimate limit. Created beings are safe from death as long as they are in communion with the life that, being uncreated, is without limits. Man was offered the freedom of God to decide freely, and on behalf of all creation, for participation in the communion and life of God. Because all creation makes up his body, materiality participates in man’s decision. ‘The material creation would in this way be liberated from its own limitations and by being placed in the hands of man, it would itself acquire a personal dimension; it would be humanised.’

The future of the world, and the survival of creation as the project of God, depends on man. Zizioulas explains that because it had a beginning, creation is finite and likely to come to an end, and since this is the case, the meaning and the truth of every part of it is in question. Man’s reluctance to take his freedom in relationship with God has delayed the arrival of this freedom for creation, so creation continues to be held back by its own mortality. If creation is not going to survive, its very truth is in doubt. Creation therefore awaits the arrival of the being who is determined, not by his beginning, but by his goal – mankind who shares the freedom of God.

Man is made for relationship with God, who always intended to be with man, and intended that man should know this and be glad of it. From the first, God meant to be incarnate for man: had he not fallen, man would have been transformed incrementally into Christ, that is, man-with-God. Now in one instance man – Christ – has acted decisively as this mediator. He has established relationships with all men, brought each into relationship with all others, and through them united all creation to God within his own person. Christ is the truth of man and creation, sustained through all limits by unlimited communion with God.

Although man initially refused to act as priest of creation, in Christ man takes up this task and acts within the freedom of the end rather than the constraint of his origin. He overcomes the mortality inherent in these beginnings and ends, and so liberates creation for life with God. So is not how things began that is ultimately determinative, but how they reach their goal and are fulfilled. The end re-determines the beginning: ‘It is the eschaton that gives being to history.’

Only God, who is free, and who, seeking nothing for himself, can disinterestedly and so truly give us recognition and so establish who we are. God is not threatened by the existence of anything, since it is by his will that anything comes into existence. He is free to love and confirm all his creatures without limit, and in love he extends this freedom to us. So it is finally due to its reception and acknowledgment by the Father that anything has the identity and existence that it has. Christ presents us to the Father, regarding us, and all creation, as integral to himself. He raises us continually to God, and he will present us to God finally: because the Father receives us from him, our existence is affirmed. And we can decide in freedom that we have indeed been properly identified, that our freedom and our existence are finally secured, and thus we can be glad.

The beginning is reckoned from him who is at the end and from whom all beginnings and ends take their orientation. By taking the world into his hands and creatively integrating it and referring it to God, Christ brings man into communion with God. ‘Man and the world are no longer imprisoned in their past, in sin, decay and death. The past is affirmed in so far as it contributes to the end, to the coming of the kingdom.’ As man raises creation up to God, it is freed from its own limitations, and becomes personal.

Our formation in the Body of Christ requires an account of time, which is what eschatology is. The beginning, and the present state of affairs, does not have the last word. Creation is made up of many voices issuing, and taking up, many invitations. But only Christ, man with God, can hear and give adequate response to all these many created voices and bring them all into harmony. Christ is their proper audience, their ‘end’ because he can hear, interpret and so truly and finally make something of all the beginnings that these invitations represent. All take their orientation from Jesus Christ who alone can finally hear and affirm them.

We have to think of history as a movement consisting of two kinds of directions: one is the direction toward the end for which the world was created; the other is away from this end. Since the end decides finally about the truth of history only those events leading to the end will be shown to possess true being, or being tout court. The historical events of revelation, therefore, are true and real only because they lead to the end from which they came into being, not in themselves.

So, following Saint Maximus the Confessor, Zizioulas suggests that what is real is what has reality in the end. Jesus Christ is empowered in the resurrection to be the truly determinative man, the high point and purpose of creation and guarantee of its survival. The future is determined by Christ, man with God; by taking the world into his hands, and referring it back to God, this complete man liberates creation from the failed custody of man without God. He will receive and re-determine all beginnings, and he who is the audience and goal of creation will turn out to be its origin too. Saint Maximus sets out this eschatological ontology in his Ambiguum 7.

The inclination to ascend and see one’s proper beginning was implanted in man by nature. Whoever by his choices cultivates the good natural seed shows the end to be the same as the beginning. Indeed the beginning and the end are one. As a result, he is in genuine harmony with God, since the goal of everything is given in its beginning and the end of the everything is given in its ultimate goal. As to the beginning, in addition to receiving being itself, one receives the natural good by participation: as to the end, one zealously traverses one’s course toward the beginning and source without deviation by means of one’s good will and choice. And through this course one becomes God, being made God by God.

According to Saint Maximus, all things orient themselves to the Word and so participate in the conversation that the Logos initiates and sustains. Creatures exist as they find their place in the ordered work and creation of God and move towards him, gaining self-control as they do so. Whatever is denatured does not find this orientation; it falls silent and does not survive.

Son and Spirit
Enabled by the Holy Spirit, it is the proper action of man to say that he is not God. He has no knowledge of God until God gives him that knowledge. God is known within his own communion, so the Father is known by the Son who is known by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit glorifies Christ and is always with him; he cannot be recognised as ‘Christ’ outside the body which the Holy Spirit sanctifies for this purpose. An implication is that we cannot know any human being apart from all other human beings in the communion that enables such free mutual acknowledgement in love.

The Spirit makes Christ who he is. Christ is eternally accompanied, supported and even constituted by the Spirit, so he ‘exists only pneumatologically’. Because he shares in the communion of God, the Son is intrinsically plural, and in the form of the Church he allows the world to participate in this plurality.

The Person of Christ is automatically linked with the Holy Spirit, which means with a community. This community is the eschatological company of the Saints who surround Christ in this kingdom. This Church is part of the definition of Christ. The body of Christ is not first the body of the individual Christ and then a community of ‘many’, but simultaneously both together.

Jesus Christ shares the communion of God with the people who are his body. We cannot know Jesus Christ (the one) without simultaneously acknowledging his community (the many). The Spirit brings us into this communion so that we may know Christ and through Christ may enter communion with all other creatures.

Failure to acknowledge the indivisible unity of Son and Spirit has an unfortunate consequence for the unity of the world. When the Son and Spirit are seen in isolation from one another, the temporal world divides into ostensibly opposite movements of ‘past’ and ‘future’. The past is what christology, without pneumatology, describes: the incarnation of Christ took place back there in the past; Christ is confined to an increasingly distant moment, and time appears to carry him ever further beyond our reach. Then the same appears to be so for all the rest of us: time bears us away from all earlier generations. Without pneumatology, christology represents the givens of history, but each particular given is borne away and subject to endless division and dissolution.

The other movement relates to the Spirit who, when considered apart from Christ, is equated with freedom and spontaneity. For a pneumatology without christology, the universal and the particular are opposites: the result is the passing of time represents a flight, away from all particularities, into disembodied universality. When past and future are regarded as antagonists, time, conceived as necessity, pushes up between them. Without christology, pneumatology becomes a totalising principle that erases every particular person: without the specific persons of Christ and the Holy Spirit, either freedom destroys communion or communion destroys freedom.

Zizioulas insists that only a properly pneumatological Christology holds time together, redeeming all time past, and giving all our separate times a common future, and so revealing all time to be the good work of God for man. When we concede that the unity and distinction of these persons are fundamental we gain the specific communion of the body of Christ. The Spirit makes Christ the fundamental and finally indivisible particular, the person, than whom there is no more fundamental particle. In Christ we may also become particulars, whom nothing in creation will ever be able to break up. In the person of Christ, the Spirit holds us together and so is responsible for our unity; within Christ each of us may be a unique and irreplaceable particular, so that we are irreducibly many persons.

It is the communion of God, known to us as the Church, that holds together all time as the good time of God for man: man and communion will not finally be divided, dissolved and carried away by time; rather, time will be held together, rescued from death, redeemed and brought into a single unity, the eternity of man with God. Time will not dissolve the communion of God for man, rather God will sustain man in time without limit and forever. The communion of God, opened to us in the form of the Church, is more fundamental than time. Time does not divide the Church: the Church unites time.

Catholicity
God has put his communion in the world, and so revealed all other communities to be merely partial, not yet the whole truth. All other communities and cultures ultimately fail to sustain the real otherness of their members; because they represent less than the whole truth, they will not last.

The Church, as sign and image of the eschatological community, continues to portray in history the genuine ethos of otherness… the Church is the place where … the fear of the Other is replaced in the Eucharist… by the acceptance of the Other qua Other.

The Church points towards the whole because it is that whole in miniature, arriving from the future. It gathers together the fragments of which the world is so far comprised. If the Church did not make its offering from every part of the world, the diversity and even the existence of the world would remain in doubt. The Church points towards the reconciliation of all things: its very existence demonstrates that a barrier has been broken, and that the world is no longer propelled by the forces of division and dissolution. Now the parts are no longer mutually antagonistic, but assembling around Christ and renewed from him, each is an instantiation of the whole. The Christian people is a vast assembly that includes those who for us are in the past and the future. This assembly makes itself present in each locality in which the Church is found, in each eucharist.

We are being brought into relationship with those who are presently living and with those who are, to us, dead. Though they are dead to us and to each other, they are not so to Christ; he does not allow death’s individualising to prevail over them. They are alive because he does not end the relationship he has with them; as long as he does not let go, they are sustained and cannot die. Though we are presently hidden from one another in different pockets of time, in his communion Christ sustains all in life and sends each into encounter with all others.

The resurrection means that you will be raised to me and I will be raised to you: the relationship we once had will be restored, and the relationship that we never had will now begin. Though we may run away from people, in the event of the resurrection each of us is turned around so that we run into all those whom we have been fleeing. Our sudden encounter and consequent transformation into catholic beings – persons – is what the resurrection is. You will give me my life and I will give you your life as we both receive life from Christ: he will receive us back from one another again, authenticating our reception of one another. Then each human being will be garlanded or anointed with all other persons, ‘Christ-ed’ as it were, with Christ’s whole people.

The eschaton, in which all are raised to all, slowly spells itself out to us in time. It gives us only as much of itself as we are ready to take. Like Jacob sending his flocks ahead to Esau, Christ sends us many people ahead of him. We have to receive him by receiving all of these; we may not refuse any, nor define ourselves by any smaller or more exclusive group. Through discipleship, each of us is purified of our fear and consequent aggression, and turned outwards towards others; so we are transformed from one degree of Christ-likeness to another, from partial to whole and perfect, to become catholic persons in unconfined relationship.

Freedom and time
If God were a universally manifest and inescapable fact, freedom would be impossible. So God withholds his glory, so that that it is a mystery, revealed and known only in freedom, by faith. If our own identities were simply given to us complete at birth, freedom would be equally impossible. So it is not enough that Christ gives us our identity: we must also take it up in freedom. Our identity becomes truly ours as we receive all his creatures as our own. We must love them as he does: this love will be free, because it will be our own response to, and participation in, the love that we have received.

Our life and work, enabled by the Holy Spirit, consists in recognising and acknowledging the otherness of other persons and so of attributing absolute particularity to each of them. Christ calls us into reconciliation, in his body, so that none of us remains at war with any other. Christ does not regard himself as complete without us. He listens for us and regardless of how long it takes, he waits for each particular person to hear and answer in freedom. However deep we are buried, he hears us, and can uncover and restore us. He is able to wrest us out of one another’s grasp, tell us apart from all others and confirm who we are. As Christ waits, his whole sanctified communion waits, and we must also wait for each other.

God intends that we be free. If the future were fixed or necessary, it would not be future, but simply more of the present. No future can be foisted on us. We can only be said to be beings with a future if we become, and remain, free: we must be willing contributors to it, for our identity will not be decided without our collaboration. His invitation to the freedom of a life shared with him and with all his people is what the future is.

Our lives are therefore part of a history, enabled by the Holy Spirit which, because we must all participate in it, unfolds through time. Time exists because we are waiting for other people to join us. In this faith we look for the resurrection that will make body of Christ complete. In the prayers of the eucharist we ask God to give us all whom we are waiting for, and we mourn for those who are not yet present, for their absence means that we are not yet present as we want to be. The identity of other people is not to be established without our participation and consent, but we ourselves may affirm it gladly. Through the patience of the Holy Spirit we may learn how to return acknowledgement to one another, and this education in love unfolds through time. Each call from God is a new invitation and summons that frees us to act, and to do so by receiving one another in love. The whole Christ, and our own very being, is waiting for them.

The proper drawing together of all things produces the fellowship which we call the body of Christ. In it all persons, and within them all creation, come into mutual encounter, and finally into mutual recognition and love. The eucharist is the whole, making itself felt among the parts, interrupting their claim to be self-sufficient or complete and inviting them to their much larger future. It brings a taster of the fellowship of the Holy Spirit and so is the drawing together of all things towards integration and order. Left to itself, all creation is splitting and disintegrating. The gulf between each thing and every other is widening, we become confined within ever more constrictive units, and drift towards eventual dissolution. The resurrection is the reversal of this drift apart and the eucharist is the diffident and interrogative presence of the resurrection into our time.

From the concept of person that emerges within the theology of the Greek Fathers, Zizioulas argues that freedom and communion are equally fundamental. Christ is the whole of humankind, and the Church is this whole, offering itself to us in time. Christ sends us instalments of this whole so that, in the eucharist, its outline is always set before us, to be received or refused. When each of us is able to receive all others and affirm their identity in love, this whole will have arrived: each human being will become anointed with the whole plurality of man in Christ. This theological eschatology, which is based in this pneumatological Christology, gives us this account of the absolute particularity of each human person, and so a very high account of humanity. God is the first audience of man. He calls each of us into being and presents each of us to every other so that we can affirm one another in freedom: when each of us is ready to acknowledge that we are known and loved, and is glad of it, man’s life will be underway at last. Though presently concealed to us, in the communion and body of Christ, the future of creation is coming into being and all identity and difference is being established.