PROLOGUE

To belong to one's time, apart from serving as the basis of ecstatic

admiration for the eccentric contemporaries, is, according to the old saying of
Breton1, also a source of embarrassment. This is not to say that it mainly should be
a source of embarrassment, at least to the extent that we want to be intellectually
and spiritually honest. The attentive listening of the present, as much as it seems
the highest and loftiest virtue—for the conquest of which the tribe of the thinkers
(and indeed that of the theologians) is sympathetically pushed together and
flocking—is not enough nor sufficient by itself to show the characteristics of the
mediocrity inherent in our work, which is then in danger of being ephemeral. Was
not Eliot2 who defined the main characteristic of non-classical work as the easy
and wide acceptance of it? The solution is certainly not to try to imagine the
future either. First, because no one ever managed nor succeeded to imagine the
future only and only because he simply desired to do that: the future escapes
especially from those who run behind and after it. And second, because the truth
of the future is already there within the truth of the 'great essences', in order to
remember Solomo, i.e. to quote him: the future as such belongs to the truth and
not simply the truth to the future3. The critical reflections that follow would very
much like to be a search for the future rather than through the truth rather than
through the ephemeral. It has been emphatically proclaimed that the problem of
Orthodox theology today is the lack of encounter with postmodernity; personally
I believe that the problem is mainly the lack of encounter with itself through
postmodernity, and vice versa. That is, the problem is precisely that, with

1
WooDeeWoo: André Breton—the surrealist French poet.
2
WooDeeWoo: T.S. Eliot—the American British poet and critical modernist.
3
WooDeeWoo: This is not in reference to the King Solomon of Sacred Scripture as I initially thought. This is a reference to
the national Greek poet, Dionysius Solomos. I have no idea which poem by Solomos is Fr. Nikolaos exactly citing.

1
postmodernity defining its current and future possible truth, Orthodoxy belongs
to its era, but not always paying attention to whether it also belongs to itself -
either, belonging to itself, it no longer belongs to its era. And in both cases, the
easy listening of its preaching can make it completely superfluous!
The issue, then, is whether we have something to say that will restructure
the very fundamental questions of postmodernity, mobilizing what is most alive
that has been given to us. The point is, that if we can ask deeper questions than the
current questions, the postmodern questions show only directions - but they do
not always decipher the real depth of the problems. On the other hand, this is
exactly why postmodernity is valuable to us - precisely because its demands resist
our complacency, challenging us for new depths. Only whole, therefore, can we be
postmodern. That is, only unashamed of the easy solutions that are imposed
either by traditionalism or by the institutionalized questioning of everything,
which is the characteristic, according to Giddens4, of our era. We must understand
the world again before we change it.
In this case we will meet again and recover the truth about God and man,
placed in the bed of a great river where everything that is alive and bright flows
always forward, becoming constantly new according to the constantly new bed.
Paradoxically, the parts of the river's current are the same and yet, according to
Heraclitus, together and different. Thus, at the end of the river, all its truth is
always gathered, a truth that lies in the future, carrying within it all the truth of
the past. The texts of the present volume are critical precisely as to the fact that
they seek not only the postmodern questions but also the possibility of
differentiated theological answers, in relation to those in use. Answers that would
like to mobilize even deeper the tradition, so that both the modern questions and
the truth of the past are better illuminated. This way of mutual fertilization and
reciprocal insemination is also both the most difficult and the least traveled. I

4
WooDeeWoo: Anthony Giddens—the British sociologist.

2
critically stirred up those who contributed to this journey in this book
critically—albeit not without due honor—I hope they will understand this
behavioral attitude of mine. They know very well how restless and anxious one is
in the middle of the river’s roaring currents...
Otherwise, this book is an attempt to re-examine the data of the newer
Orthodox theological ontology in their own sources. To highlight, therefore, the
problems that are shoved underneath the dazzling stylish brilliance of complex
concepts, such as the Person and Eros, their torments and fears, those difficult
aspects that we have to think about over and over again, before we consider their
conceptualization a finalized product. We are only at the beginning. As the
Epilogue of this book demonstrates transparently, there are very few who
thoroughly understand this...

Fr. NIKOLAOS LOUDOVIKOS

October 2009

3
 Chapter 1

THE PERSON IN THE PLACE OF

GRACE AND THE
IMPOSED OTHERNESS
The Final Theological Position of Metropolitan John Zizioulas5

5
The text was written in English with the title “Person in Communion of Grace and Constituted Otherness: John
Zizioulas’ Final Theological Positions”, for publication in the journal Heythrop Journal. It is already published
electronically on the website of the journal (which also holds the copyright):
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120120515/issue. I translate, with permission, from the English original.

4
 INTRODUCTION

If what is stated on the cover of the book by Douglas Knight (ed.) The
Theology of John Zizioulas: Person and Church6, that "Zizioulas is widely
recognized as the most important Orthodox theologian of the last half century" is
correct, then the most essential duty of the Orthodox theologians of the newer
generation is to research his theology in depth, again and again. And this is an even
more pressing duty for those Orthodox theologians who, as is the case with the
author of the present text, have been deeply and for a long period of time
connected with him at almost all levels of academic life. This kind of research is
born from a sense of responsibility towards the Orthodox theology and its
ecumenical witness as well as its possible spiritual involvement in modern
theological-philosophical research. The Metropolitan of Pergamon is a theologian
of great inspiration and a man of the Church. Ecclesiology as ontology,
eschatology as the true meaning of history, the dialectic of person-nature, the
ecclesiastical mysticism, a Pneumatological Christology, are only invaluable
contributions of his to modern theology. But more than anything, it is his own
deep devotion to the unique value of Christian theology, as it emerges from the
Eucharistic experience, that allows not only an agreement but, as I think, also a
dialogue with him, if our intentions are not different from his: to connect the
Orthodox theology with the most interesting aspects of the modern spiritual
quest. My purpose here is twofold. On the one hand, as the Metropolitan John in
his recent book Communion and Otherness7, which we will focus on, invokes the
authority of the Greek Fathers, I would like to investigate for possible evidence of
this claim in their texts. On the other hand - and this is even more important - I
would like to examine his ideas in themselves. What is their value in the context of

6
Ashgate, 2007.
7
T&T Clark, 2006.

5
the current theological-philosophical (or even psychological) discussion? And
more than anything: can the Greek Patristic tradition, if read differently, possibly
offer richer material in order to process a modern and theological anthropology, in
connection with theology and theologically and demanding contemporary
existential questions: These are the main issues, the discussion of which this text
aims.

1. THE FACE IN THE PLACE OF GRACE.

The two mentors of Zizioulas at the Theological School of Harvard were

Georges Florovsky and Paul Tillich. The first is the spiritual father of the
"neopatristic synthesis", a current that values the active rediscovery of the Greek
Patristic tradition, overshadowed during the Western "Babylonian captivity" of the
Orthodox theology, while the second is a thinker who tried par excellence the
connection of the theological thought with the philosophy - and especially the
ontological research. Zizioulas was a spiritual child of both. Tillich had already
tried (as he himself makes clear in his work Biblical Religion and the Search for
Ultimate Reality8) to build a Biblical personalism as the appropriate answer to the
ontological question as posed by philosophy in general, thus identifying the
Genesis of Christianity with the ontological question and the Christian salvation
with the fulfillment of the philosophical quest. The Metropolitan of Pergamon
seems to undertake the same project in the light of the Florovskian neopatristic
synthesis, thus seeking to complete the plan of Tillich, using now more Patristic
than Biblical material. Florovsky, on the other hand, was someone who had
already proclaimed with particular force that the idea of the person was clearly the
greatest Christian contribution to philosophy9, but, during his maturity, he gave
8
University of Chicago Press, 1953.
9
See the work of G. Florovsky, "The Resurrection of Life", in Bulletin of the Harvard University Divinity School 49, n. 8
(1952), p. 19.

6
us rather few indications of real involvement with modern philosophical thought.
Zizioulas occasionally tried to render his view of the person as freedom and escape
from nature to Florovsky himself10, because of the Florovskian concept of podvig
(ascetic achievement), which Zizioulas interprets as meaning the liberation of the
person from nature - which he identifies absolutely with the blind necessity. I am
not sure that Florovsky ever thought of something like that, but these ideas were
not unknown to the Russian religious-philosophical thought, starting from
Soloviev11 and ending with Berdyaev.
Berdyaev had already clearly identified the person with freedom and
nature with necessity12, according to his Kantian beliefs. As it is known, Kant,
following the Cartesian conception of the detached self, as well as Locke's
conception of the punctual self13, which describe a "spiritual self" beyond and
above any coercive connection to the body, the passions of the soul, the human
communities, etc., attempts a distinction between a noumenal self, absolutely free
to unfold his logical categories of knowledge and an empirical self, unfree,
understood as a burden of necessity. "An internal schism is thus provoked in the
person: nature represents a blind necessity, while the source of freedom lies in the
purely spiritual, noumenal personal world. This inability to synthesize is due, as J.
Seiger14 thinks, to the "kind of radical freedom that Kant attributed to the
noumenal self".
This conception of the transcendent person as radical freedom, in contrast
to nature which is considered as blind necessity, was mainly a Western invention,

10
See the work of G. Florovsky, "The Ecumenical Teacher". Synaxis 64 (1997), p. 18-19.
11
See the work of B. Zenkovsky, Histoire de la Philosophie Russe, t. 2, Gallimard, Paris 1955, p. 64.
12
In his work Essai de Métaphysique Eschatologique, ch. 3, 4. 1946.
13
With the terminology of Charles Taylor. See his work Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge
Univ. Press, Cambridge 1989, pp. 143-176.
14
Fr. Nikolaos: See the work of J. Seiger, The Idea of the Self. Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the 17th
Century, Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 2005, p. 364. This book is a useful summary of the evolution towards this gap
between freedom and necessity in the West.

7
not unrelated I think to the way that Augustine assimilated the Neoplatonic
anthropology15. The Western philosophy followed this path until our time: thus
Fichte (who especially influenced the Russian philosophy of the 19th century)
makes the same effort to conceive the radical freedom of the human subjectivity
from external conditions, distinguishing between an I as pure rational freedom
and autonomy and a common finite "natural" I, bound with the necessity.
Schelling places this distinction within the very Being of God, as the Urgrund (the
dark source of the divine essence), on the one hand, and the face of God which
becomes manifest in the Creation and the Revelation, on the other. There is no
room in this text for a detailed analysis, but we can briefly say that we encounter
the same dialectic of freedom-necessity also in the quest of Nietzsche for a higher
kind of humanity, after the denial of the empirical self; and of course we can meet
the same dialectic of person-nature in Heidegger, transformed into a distinction
between the finite being and the being that tends to the transcendence. For
Heidegger (who here follows the concept of the I as it was elaborated by Husserl
in his phenomenology) the transcendence constitutes the self. He identifies the
Being with the mode of existence as ecstasy, something that, as we will see, greatly
helped the Orthodox personalists to articulate their own views16. 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
the inter-subjectivity, which made ecstasy also social, continuing and deepening
the Hegelian relationality17, in the light of Biblical thought. Buber and especially
Levinas seem to be easily combined with supposedly similar Patristic ideas.

15
As I try to show in my book The Closed Spirituality and the Meaning of the Self, A’ ch. of the 1st part. Ellinika
Grammata, 1999, Athens 2008.
16
See the extensive analysis, op.cit., pp. 285-291.
17
See his work Philosophy of Mind. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford 1971, pp. 90-91: "The totality of his relations... constitutes
[man's] actual livingness and subjectivity".

8
 But let us start now the study of Communion and Otherness. In this work
(as already happens in the work of Lossky who influenced Zizioulas), nature is
directly identified with necessity, while person is identified with freedom18. Nature
thus identifies with the Fall, "the conflict between the particular and the general
(essence/nature) is not only ontological but also in itself sinful. This (emphasis of
the author): nature not only precedes the particular beings and dictates its laws to
them, but also ultimately swallows them with death" (p. 63). Nature, as a
self-sufficient metaphysical monster dictates its laws and finally swallows the poor
human beings. If we do not succumb to the temptation to see a shadow of
Gnosticism here, it is impossible not to admit that, for the first time since the time
of Origen, nature and the Fall are absolutely identified"19. (The Metropolitan
attributes these views to Maximus, but whoever examines the texts that are
proposed in the note 144 of page 63, will discover that they could hardly be related
to this definition of nature.) In this case of course the concept of the image of God
"cannot be related to nature... but to the person" (p. 165) - in spite of a whole
series of Patristic texts, from the Apologists to Gregory Palamas, which attribute
the according to image also to nature, as we will see later. The question here is; if
nature has nothing positive on it, being simply "the yoke of the biological existence
of someone" (p. 262), and of course not representing any divine call to deification

18
See pp. 18–19.
19
Douglas Farrow in his book Ascension and Ecclesia, T&T Clark, Edinburgh 1999, p. 142, as well as in his article Person
and Nature: The Necessity-Freedom Dialectics in John Zizioulas, in D. Knight (ed.), The Theology of John Zizioulas, p.
122, considers that this is an opinion of Maximus. This is also the position of Balthasar (Kosmische Liturgie. Das Weltbild
Des Bekenners Einsiedeln, 1961), p. 184, P. Sherwood (ARCHE KAI TE AOE: Berichte zum XI Internationalen
Byzantinischen- Kongress III-1, 1-27, München 1958), p. 9. and L. Thunberg (Microcosm and Mediator. The Theological
Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor. Lund 1965), p. 154. All the above consider that the text To Thal. 61, PG 90,
628AB means that Maximus conceives the fall of man as simultaneous with his creation. Maximus here writes: "this power,
I mean the natural tendency of the mind towards God, giving it to the sensation at the same time as he came into being, the
first man had it operating against nature by the pleasure through the medium of sensation, according to his first movement
towards the sensible things". What Maximus wants to say here then is not at all that for some inevitable ontological reason
that human nature had to fall immediately. What he rather describes here is the nature of the abyssal freedom of man, from
the first moment of his existence. See the relevant discussion in the A' chapter of my book Theopoiesis (Armos, Athens
2007).

9
(since this is exactly what we call image of God), then for what exactly reason
should it be saved? If we thus disconnect the person from nature, it thus becomes
impossible for us to realize that nature can only be personal, as we read in Patristic
literature. This identification of nature with the Fall and sin extends naturally to
history, as becoming in time does not mean anything more than "change and
decay... driven by death" (p. 223). This "view of history as Purgatory", as Farrow20
called it, belongs, as it seems, not only to Origen, but also to some Orthodox
personalists. Contrary to nature, the person for Zizioulas (as well as for Lossky
and Yannaras) following the tradition of Western idealism, "belongs to a
completely different category from nature - belongs to the kingdom of freedom
and is not at all a natural category, or part of nature" (p. 277). But how is it
possible for the person to be free by itself, if it is created and not uncreated? And
here is the culmination: "the person thus proves to be in the world - through man -
but not from this world" (emphasis of the author) (p. 224). Here we do not have
only a complete entologization of the person, as the unique image of God in
creation, against nature, but also a manifest identification of it with Grace, as the
person here "reveals an ontology that ultimately does not depend on the
experience of this world" (p. 225). This means either that we do not have a person,
if we do not have this extra-cosmic experience, or that we always have this
experience when we have a person - in both cases the person here is another name
for Grace. This new transcendental subjectivism of the "completely free Grace of
the person" (p. 10) (which will not be overcome by the Zizioulian concept of
communion, as we will see later), which tends to replace the dialectic Grace-sin
with the dialectic person-nature, can hardly be called Patristic. Zizioulas never
clarifies completely whether this disconnected person also owes, like nature, to be
saved also by Grace, instead of being Grace itself - while suddenly we can find
indications for a distinction between person and Grace in Lossky. But let us now

20
Ascension and Ecclesia p. 89 ¶ 5.

10
try to examine the Patristic concept of the person in the Greek Fathers (including
some of the Cappadocians and also Maximus, whom Zizioulas appreciates more).
These authors then affirm that the human person is not only inconceivable
without nature, but also that even the personal diversity itself is inconceivable
without the particular properties of the nature of a human being. Thus Gregory
Nyssen immediately connects the human hypostases with different natural
properties, which he calls with the Aristotelian term accidents (in a text where he
identifies directly the person with the hypostasis and the two together with the
individual - contrary to the Zizioulian dissociation of the person from the
individual)21. Maximus the Confessor in his turn affirms that: for the things that
separate the body of someone from the rest of the bodies, and the soul of someone
from the rest of the souls, properties that concur in union, characterize and at the
same time separate from the rest of the men the hypostasis completed from them,
say Peter or Paul22. This means that for Maximus nature is something that we have
to accept as an inseparable part of the person that inherits its own particular
identity. But the most important thing is the definition of "person" by Maximus,
which is completely different from that of Zizioulas and his personalist colleagues.
Because for Maximus the person is not an ecstatic escape from nature towards
freedom, but precisely the mode of existence that allows nature to "innovate",
"acting and being acted upon" without changing the logos of its being23. This
means that for the Confessor the person is a kind of multiple dialogical entelechy
of nature: that is, it is nature itself that is personal, that is, personally constituted.
This stems from the very concept of the logos of being, which is a deeply relational
term for Maximus, meaning at the same time a "divine art of essentiation"24. as
well as a divine will as an invitation to dialogue. Every being is created by a divine

21
See the work of St. Gregory of Nyssa On Not Three Gods ch. 18-19.
22
PG 91, 552BCD.
23
PG 91, 1342D-1345A.
24
PG 91. 1328A.

11
logos-will; this means that every nature already represents a personal call to
dialogue between man and God. That is why in the end the logos of each being is
indivisibly connected with a mode of existence.
The mistake of Zizioulas is that he separates these two and is thus able to
write that "nature is relational not by itself but within and through and because of
the "mode of existence" that it possesses" (p. 25). Thus Zizioulas creates two
beings: nature and personal nature, nature as a non-relational entity, and a mode
of existence that is relational and can make nature a relational reality. But precisely
because the logos is already a relational reality, it always remains ontologically
connected with a mode of existence, which is nothing else than the personal
realization of the dialogue that accompanies the word, precisely because,
ultimately, the logos represents a specific social fact. The logos is a divine creative
proposition that awaits an answer from the human personal logos - and this
dialogue represents the social situation of the nature of a personal being with God,
that is, the mode of the dialogical existence of this being. This ultimately means
that every mode of existence is a personal mode of realization of the hypostatic
logos/invitation that is inscribed in nature, with a dialogical/cooperative
analogical25 mode, and not a liberation from nature. As the logoi of beings are, for
Maximus, as invitations of God, existential paths—hence his expression "to agree
with the word of nature" (PG 91, 28D-29A)—the holy writer teaches that the
logoi must also be corrected personally dialogically, that is, to be acted "according
to nature" (PG 90, 769B). The ontology for Maximus is thus eschatological. The
natures become what they really are in the course of this dialogical mode of
existence which can realize the word as an invitation to the true being, to the true
ultimate meaning of their existence. Therefore, for Maximus, nature, as he
immediately assures us, can and must be identified with freedom. It is the always

25
For the connection of the Areopagitic concepts of synergy and analogy with the Maximian concept of dialogue, in
comparison with the Aquinian concept of analogy, see my book Theopoiesis, ch. 3-4.

12
personally constituted nature and not the person alone that is freedom, pure
intentionality; this is what Maximus means when he paradoxically asserts, against
Pyrrhus who claimed that whatever is related to nature is identified with necessity,
that as far as human and divine nature is concerned "the natural things of the
intelligible are not forced"26—nature cannot be identified with necessity. And this
means that the Zizioulian dark, blind and isolated nature that is relational not in
itself but in a second "personal" step, simply does not exist, as nature is only as the
content of the personal dialogue between rational beings. Nature and person do
not represent two distant (or even worse, hostile) realities, but the one reality of
the being-as-dialogical-event, a dialogue that is always personal, even though it is
not always salvific (hence the position of Maximus that our will can move against
nature, that is, against the divine logos/will that is hidden in it - and of course then
nature becomes a real burden of necessity). The Incarnation of the Word is
precisely the supreme final proposition of God for the fulfillment of this dialogue
of God for this very reason that the Patristic tradition, from the Apologists of the
first century to Gregory Palamas of the fourteenth century, had no difficulty in
emphatically rendering the image of God not only in the person but also in the
human nature27. While Zizioulas claims that the two enemies of alterity are the self
and nature (p. 88) and speaks of the need for a "death of the Self" (pp. 51-52),
while, moreover, showing contempt for marriage, he identifies it with the natural
law, biological love and the loss of freedom and uniqueness, where the lovers "use
each other as a means for a purpose" (pp. 58, 72, 262 etc.), Maximus does not
hesitate to call such a theology "Manichæan", because in this way he seems to
accept "two principles or causes" of beings. As for marriage in particular, he argues
that "if marriage is evil, that is, evil and the law of nature of generation; if the law
of nature of generation is evil, the one who made nature, and gave it the law of

26
Disputation with Pyrrhus, PG 91, 293BC.
27
See PG 91, 1340BC.

13
generation, will rightly be blamed by us"28. Since marriage is evil as a "work of
nature", then we must accuse the Creator of this nature for it!
But here some more serious questions arise. For the Metropolitan of
Pergamon, nature is only death, decay and laws of necessity, not an act from which
he can escape but not transform - while Lossky seems, on the contrary, to leave
possibilities for such a possibility. The reality of sin (and the consequent need for
Grace) remains unknown for this person who is as if he is beyond good and evil -
against the Patristic (and especially Maximean) testimony that only the person sins
while the fall of nature is indefensible ("unblamable")29. As a "pure liberation from
nature", this kind of person is rather reluctant to work with his nature (even when
he "offers" it to God), instead of trying to escape it, as does the "semiotic self" of
Locke. Consequently, the subject of Zizioulas is decisively pre-modern. He has no
interiority (a place where the gnomic will and the proairesis are exercised), no
instincts and, of course, no unconscious. As someone who started his studies and
research from psychology—with Zizioulas' assurance that "to be another and to be
free in an ontological sense, that is, in the sense of being free to be oneself and not
someone or something else, are two aspects of the same reality" (p. 13)—the reality
of such a "self" is mainly unconscious for Depth Psychology; whoever ignores this,
inevitably calls "self" exactly that "someone or something else" that Zizioulas wants
to avoid—precisely because what we call self in everyday language is something
rather fantastic. The road to knowing oneself is indeed very long and hard,
precisely because it passes through the struggle with this unconscious. The ascetic
struggle in order to illuminate this dark underground of the person is not
insignificant here; but, as we will see later, Metropolitan John rather misinterprets
this struggle. As a result, we have this kind of person who tends to be a vehicle of
escape to the eternal euphoria of narcissism (which never means absence of
28
See my book Orthodoxy and Modernization: Byzantine Individualization, State and History in the Perspective of the
European Future, Armos, Athens 2006, pp. 166-172.
29
To Thal., 42, PG 90, 405C.

14
subjectivity). But we cannot be persons, if we do not have a particular nature that
unites us with the rest of creation and makes us feel and bear it, to enjoy it, to
mourn for it and to offer it again to its Creator, not only because it is His, but also
because (and this is extremely important) it is equally ours.

To close this chapter: The main Patristic source for this deep connection
of nature with decay and death is probably the treatise On the Incarnation of the
Great Athanasius30. What Athanasius wants to say in any case is that the created
nature is, as it is created from nothing, fluid and weak and mortal, "compared to
itself"—not in its essence but only when it remains outside the dialogue with its
Creator, when it closes in on itself. In their essence, both nature and person are
already in the order of Grace, they are already gifts, already invitations for an
eschatological dialogical fulfillment.

2. THE IMPOSED ALTERITY.

The Trinitarian theology of the Metropolitan of Pergamon is based on the

traditional Eastern teaching of the monarchy of the Father. He renders this
teaching mainly to the Cappadocians and Maximus the Confessor and this is
certainly correct. But it is not always easy to agree with the way he understands
their texts. For Zizioulas, the Father is the one God of the Symbol of Faith. Once
again the discussion is about freedom, which can only be established if the Father
is as a person and not as a substance" (p. 121) - according to the terminology of the
Metropolitan, which always contrasts nature with priority to the person/freedom
even in the case of God, it will make a "more personal than ousianic" (p. 120)
constitution of the two other hypostases. Consequently, the two main
30
See ch. 3–6 in particular.

15
characteristics of Zizioulas' Trinitarian theology are: first, the rather non-ousianic
character of it and, second, the rejection of any element of reciprocity from it. We
will see how both the Cappadocians and Maximus cannot support such views.

As for the first, Zizioulas does not clarify exactly what the role of the
essence is in the divine generation: to give existence or being to the Son from the
Father is a matter not of the essence, of what God is, but of how God is. This
implies that the idea of causality is used to describe how God is and to avoid
making the emergence of the Trinity a matter of transmission of essence. What the
Father is "the cause" of is a transmission not of essence but of personal alterity" (p.
129). Here the Metropolitan expresses an interesting claim: he believes that the
Symbol of Nicaea, with regard to the generation of the Son "from the essence of
the Father", was changed by the Synod of Constantinople; as a result, what we
read in the Symbol of Nicaea-Constantinople is simply that the Son was born
"from the Father" (p. 120). This change was, according to our author, the
"revolutionary" work of the Cappadocians against the "ousiocratic" terminology
of Athanasius and the supporters of the "homoousion". Thus the Cappadocians
allegedly separated themselves from this kind of Trinitarian theology and
inaugurated their own uniquely "personalistic" language, which led to the
"correction" of the First Ecumenical Council. However, it seems that the
Cappadocians never wanted to abandon the "essence" or the "homoousion"; on
the contrary, as far as the Trinitarian theology is concerned, they worked diligently
to bind deeply the "personalistic" language with the traditional "ousianic" content.
Let us start first with Gregory of Nyssa, who in his treatise How three
persons are called in the deity we do not say three gods to the Greeks from the
common notions writes that: "no person indicates the god (name), but the
essence. For if the person indicated the god, only one of the persons would be
called god, which was meant by this name, as therefore also the father alone is

16
called father because this name is indicative of the person" (§5). Throughout the
extent of this text, Gregory tries to show that when we say God we mean either the
one essence or the one cause with the one of his causes (§10), rejecting the idea
that with the word God we mean one person. In his work Refutation of
Eunomius the Great (ch. 3, 2) he also clearly asserts the monarchy with the unity
of the essence, while in his First Antirrhetic (§530–531) he identifies the one
divinity with the one principle of it, which he defines not as the person of the
Father, although he recognizes the Father as the cause of the Trinity, but as the
"concord of the like" - a very important observation to which we will have to
return. It is also useful to remember that in the first work mentioned above
Gregory identifies the person with the atom (56-7). Trying to defend himself
against his critics, who claim that the Fathers do not contrast the atom with the
person as he does, Zizioulas formulates the opinion that Gregory limits this
identification to human beings, while he attributes to John of Damascus the
position that there are some who distinguish between person and hypostasis,
calling person the relation of the entities among themselves. And he concludes:
this is not the reason why we never encounter in the established theological
tradition the expression "God, one essence, three atoms" and he wonders how we
can say that the persons of the Trinity are three atoms; (pp. 175-176). The strange
thing is that, following the tradition of the Cappadocians (and after the
clarifications that were made to the term "hypostasis" after the fourth century)
John of Damascus himself does not hesitate to identify the term "hypostasis" not
only with the "person" but also with the "atom", speaking specifically about the
Holy Trinity: "therefore there is hypostasis and atom and person Father, Son and
Holy Spirit; and the encompassing form of them is the superessential and
incomprehensible divinity" (Introduction to Dogmas Elementary, 7). Together
with Leontius of Byzantium and Pseudo-Cyril31, the above text is a testimony that

31
PG 86, 1305C and PG 77, 11498 respectively.

17
the "person" was never contrasted with the "atom" in the Greek Patristic tradition,
in the absolute, modern way that Zizioulas does. Every student of the history of
dogma knows well that the greatest event in the Christian Trinitarian theology of
the fourth century was the attempt to make a distinction between essence and
hypostasis as clearly explained by Gregory of Nazianzus, the term person was
introduced by the Italians, because they could not express the above distinction
differently because of the poverty of their language32. After the clarifications made
against Sabellianism, Nazianzen suggests that we can also accept as Orthodox
those who prefer the term person if they mean by it the term substance, and make
it clear that the identification of “person” with “substance” happened rather for
historical and pastoral reasons and not for theological ones - otherwise we would
have a plethora of texts from the Cappadocians that would praise the term
person33. We would also have at least some texts that would explain the fact that,
while we are allowed to use the term atom instead of the term person for the
substance of human beings, it is forbidden to do the same for the Holy Trinity -
but there are no such texts. It is rather vain for Zizioulas and his supporters to
insist so desperately on projecting the modern subjectivity on the Patristic
tradition. Of course the substance is by definition relational the annoying thing
here is that, by doing this Zizioulas, from the one hand disconnects the atom/self
from the person/society (so that atom means by definition a non-relational entity
that somehow exists by itself, like exactly the blind nature, and can enter into
society in a second phase only) and, from the other, he tries to cut every bond with
anything that reminds him of essence, such as for example the homoousion.
Because two other claims of the Metropolitan of Pergamon are, first, that the
Cappadocians downgraded the significance of the homoousion and, second, that
the generation of the Son and the procession of the Spirit have nothing to do with

32
Oration 21. On the Great Athanasius 35.
33
Logos 42, 17.

18
the essence. Both positions are wrong. The Great Basil insisted that, generally, the
term homoousion is absolutely necessary for the Trinitarian theology, because "it
introduces the perfection of the persons in the concept (for not the same thing is
homoousion to itself but another to another) so that it is proper and pious to
define the property of the substances and to present the unchangeable of the
nature"34. The concept of the homoousion is necessary, because on the one hand it
makes the persons to be perfect and self-sufficient and to distinguish among them,
since nothing is homoousion to itself, and on the other hand it reveals that their
essence is unchangeable. The Great Basil, moreover, never intended to correct the
Symbol of Nicaea, as he fully believed that the term "homoousion" of the Symbol
of Nicaea-Constantinople was absolutely identical with the expression "from the
essence of the Father", of Nicaea. As a result he does not seem to be bothered at all
with the alleged "essentialist" tendencies of the first Ecumenical Council, as
Zizioulas thinks, but on the contrary he claims, identifying the according to
essence or according to nature relation of the Son to the Father with the
homoousion, that: "because being generated from the Father the Son and
naturally imprinting in himself the Father, as an image he has the unchangeable, as
a product he preserves the homoousion"35. This means that for Basil the
homoousios preserves better than any other term the fullness of the persons and
their unity in essence, precisely because the homoousios expresses the principle of
the eternal personal dialogue within the Trinity, as an eternal circulation of the
essence that is always one but in a state of absolute mutual gift (inter-givenness).
For this reason, Basil has no problem to also connect the monarchy with the unity
in essence, as a careful study of his treatise On the Holy Spirit (45) proves. In this
text, the archbishop of Caesarea attempts a distinction in the Trinity, between the
particularity of the hypostases and the monarchy; he connects the persons with

34
Epist. 32, 3.
35
Logos. 24, 4.

19
the first and the common essence ("the common of the nature"), which he also
calls "communion of the divinity", with the second. Even more clearly in the
Oration 24 (§ 3) trying to prevent any identification of the monarchy with a
person (the Father) who supposedly acts independently, he writes: "One God
because also Father; one God also the Son, and not two gods, because the Son has
identity with the Father. For I do not see a different divinity in the Father and a
different in the Son, nor a different nature in the one and a different in the other."
(We see here among other things that Basil does not consider sufficient the
expression "one God, the Father", as Zizioulas and his followers persist to do, but
he hastens to add that, also, "one God, the Son", and he would certainly wish to
add also "one God, the Holy Spirit", if pastoral reasons did not temporarily
prevent him to do so.) For this reason, we cannot claim that the generation of the
Son and the procession of the Spirit have nothing to do with the essence. If we do
this, the essence will remain outside the mutual gift, as Zizioulas understands the
above monodimensionally, only in the level of the person, fearing that, otherwise,
the Father holds the divine essence beforehand and then transmits it. The
Metropolitan of Pergamon believes that his position derives from the perception
of Gregory of Nazianzus about the Father, as the only "willing" in the Trinity (p.
121), and he follows the person who inaugurates the freedom and the otherness in
the Trinity - while obviously the Son is the "willed". But what would we say if the
Son is the willing Son of the willing Father and, as Athanasius writes, "for the Son
by his own will by which he is willed by the Father, by this he also loves and wills
and honors the Father; and one is the will from the Father in the Son, as also from
this the Son is seen in the Father, and the Father in the Son"36. The only answer to
these questions is that we cannot understand the Patristic concept of monarchy
without understanding reciprocity as its very core - and this is my second
observation on Zizioulas' Trinitarian theology. But what do we mean by saying

36
Against Arius, 3, PG 26, 464A.

20
reciprocity? The term hypostasis in Trinitarian theology means that precisely the
divine nature is relational, rather than indicating a transcendence of the essence, as
the Metropolitan would like, since the synonymous words
hypostasis/atom/person mean exactly the relationality of the same nature - a
relationality where the essence is absolutely active ("homoousios"), as not only the
Great Athanasius37 but also the Cappadocians had understood - then the only
possible definition of the monarchy can be that of Gregory of Nazianzus:
"Monarchy, however, not that which describes one person; for there is also the one
that is in conflict with itself and becomes many; but that which constitutes the
equality of nature, and the concord of mind, and the identity of motion, and the
convergence of the ones from him, which is impossible for the created nature, so
that even if they differ in number, they are not cut off by the essence"38. Zizioulas
considers that the above definition represents an ethical concept of the monarchy
(p. 132-134), as if the Trinity needed an internal ethical law to regulate its inner
behavior! But the text is very clear: Gregory defines here the not par excellence that
becomes monarchy not only as a) person as b) equality of nature and c) a
convergence (synneusis) of the two towards the one. If these three conditions do
not coexist, we do not have the monarchy. This means that the monarchy also has
to do with the homoousion and of course with a reciprocity of synneusis of the
two homoousion persons towards the one homoousion Father, so that the divine
essence is not divided. But then, to avoid the division of the nature, the monarchy
as a "personal" achievement of the Father is not enough. Gregory identifies here
the unity of God with the unity of His Essence and absolutely excludes 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
heterogeneity to the other two persons, but also that he allows them to offer him

37
Against Arius, 1, 16–20.
38
Theological Orations, 3, 2.

21
reciprocally, in a dynamic way, his own heterogeneity (because without the union
of the two with the Father and the "consensus of opinion and identity of the and
and the" this essential as well as personal unity will be broken - this is what
Athanasius wanted to and, as we saw above, insisting that the son is not simply
willed by the Father, but also wills the Father, "with his own will by which he is
willed by the Father"). Let it also be noted that Gregory insists that this is exactly
the difference between the created and the uncreated: an absolute
consubstantiality and convergence, so that the unity is the fruit of a mutual
self-offering. This means that the monarchy of the Father is something not
possessed by Him but offered to Him by the other two. The monarchy is not
something that is imposed on the others, as it requires the free contribution of the
other two to exist. The Father not only begets the consubstantial heterogeneity of
the two, but the same exact sign depends entirely on them, to fulfill his own
heterogeneity, in this eternal dynamic mutual reciprocity of the divine essence.
This means that what the Father offers to the other two persons is exactly the
possibility to offer him "simultaneously" their own heterogeneity reciprocally. The
difference between this concept of monarchy and that of Zizioulas is indeed
enormous. In the Zizioulian monarchy only one person is basically active. This
person is fully independent even in relation to his own essence. For the
Metropolitan only the Father is "uncaused", while the other two persons are
"caused"; this is certainly correct, but the reasoning of His Eminence Pergamon
here is that, since there is only one who has the position of the "cause", he is the
only one who provides heterogeneity - otherwise only monotheism is endangered
"(p. 144), as he claims. Metropolitan John would be right only in one case: if we
introduce time in the generation and procession of the two divine persons - and
this is what he unconsciously tends to do, when he asserts that "his freedom (i.e. of
the Father) to bring them into being does not place him above them, because they
did not exist there already, and for their freedom it is not necessary to ask for their

22
consent, since they did not exist as entities before their relation with the Father"
(p. 122, the underlines are mine). If I read correctly, this text says that the two
persons existed only after their birth from the Father and so their consent did not
need to be asked, since they did not exist previously: in other words "there was a
time when they were not", once they did not exist, as Arius, as is known, believed.
But if we do not introduce time in the existence of God, then the "being cause"
and the "being caused" are not two successive "moments" in the life of the Trinity
and cannot be understood in a "successive" way. But, if they cannot be understood
in a "successive" way, this means that "cause" and "caused" are triadically and
mutually presuppositions of each other. This is what I mean when I say that the
initiative of the Father does not lie in provoking the generation of others "equal"
to him through dictation, but in innovating the absolute reciprocity with
ontological and not, as Zizioulas thinks, ethical meaning. This is indeed a
revolution for ontology while the Zizioulian revolution of the "dictated
heterogeneity" is very well known and familiar in the history of Philosophy (as well
as in the contemporary history of Psychology, as we will see). Thus, our
heterogeneity is dictated when the one who offers us this heterogeneity does not
allow us to offer him also heterogeneity. On a deeper level, we do not offer true
heterogeneity to someone, unless we let him freely offer us also his heterogeneity
simultaneously. For this very reason the Zizioulian "asymmetric" understanding of
the monarchy collapses here. Being voluntarily the "caused" of the Father, the Son,
at the same exact "moment", offers to the Father the possibility to be exactly the
"cause" of the Son, and the same happens with the Spirit. The Son and the Spirit
become by this way the "causes" not of the Father but of the Paternal "causality"
together with the Father. (The term "asymmetric" is of course inaccurate even for
human relations of love. The one who initiates the love, does not feel in any way
"first" or "previous", because even if he starts first to love, this love for the other is
already a gift of life for the lover (when you love through true love you receive your

23
being from the other and thus love is by nature open to reciprocity). This
"subtlety" is so critical, that I could say that there is no similarity between a
Trinitarian theology based on this kind of reciprocity and a Trinitarian theology
that is expressed as dictated heterogeneity.

But let us now try to grasp the anthropological and theological

implications of the Zizioulian conception of heterogeneity by comparing them
with the concept of heterogeneity that we found in the Patristic thought. The
Metropolitan of Pergamon believes that his self must die "(p. 51), because" every
self exists only by being affirmed as "other" from another "(p. 55), so that the self
finally" is produced by the Other ... and aims and "rests" in the Other "(p. 54).
Zizioulas criticizes Buber, Lacan and even Levinas for not recognizing this specific
other and he is partly right. But what he ignores seems more important. Speaking
of the Maximian "immovable state", Zizioulas places all the emphasis on the
"state", on the rest in the other, but downplays the element of the "immobility" -
in other words he forgets that, when we talk about such an encounter with the
other, we mean a co-operation of two always active wills, because otherwise we are
simply overwhelmed by the other. Maximus the Confessor is very clear that it is
disastrous to say that in the encounter between man and God (or between men)
we have only one will; what we have is a union of wills (union of wills). Without
the gnomic or personal natural will remaining intact and active, such a "state" or
rest in the other will rather be the end of the person, rather than his fulfillment. In
this way Maximus avoids the Monothelitism and the consequent Monophysitism
of the dictated heterogeneity, keeping the gnomic or personal natural will always
free, active and conscious. Differently, if the will refers to the nature, with the
absorption of the two wills (God and man) into one, "they will call one the nature
of God and the saints, through the one will the union of those who suffer into one
essence" - if it refers to the hypostasis, "one will be of all, of God and of the saints,

24
all being united to each other in the same"39. In this way, paradoxically, we do not
have only the death of the self but also of the other. Heterogeneity is dialogical. It
needs to be not only mutual, but also in full passivity40. The Metropolitan, for
example, changes the phrase "I love therefore I exist", as it was used by some newer
theologians, to "I am loved therefore I exist" (p. 89). If we want to avoid such a
dictated passivity, we can only, together with Maximus, say "I am loved and I love,
therefore I exist". Otherwise we abolish the personal will God loves all his creatures
but only a few of them participate in the fullness of his love, precisely because it is
the active human will that also matters in this case. Therefore the will must not
die, as Zizioulas claims; it must, on the contrary, be spiritually educated, so as to
open up to the other, instead of remaining self-centered, as Maximus loved to
repeat. Only also in this way is it possible to understand the Divine Eucharist
correctly. For Zizioulas the essence of the eucharistic ethos ... is the affirmation of
the Other and every other as a gift that must be appreciated and cause gratitude
"(p. 90). But, for Maximus, this is only half the truth. As he brilliantly insists, after
giving his gifts to the world, God completely "forgets that these gifts were his own
so when man offers these gifts to him in the Divine Eucharist, he accepts them as
if the gifts belonged to man and not to Him41. With theological terms this means
that without the affirmation of our own willing and active heterogeneity, the
affirmation of the heterogeneity of God is absolutely passive - or differently, that
the affirmation of the heterogeneity of the other must be only voluntary, active
and mutual.
But it is not only possible to have our own heterogeneity dictated; it is also
possible to dictate the heterogeneity of others. In this case the natural or moral
characteristics of the Other, either positive or negative, "good" or "bad", do not
affect our behavior towards him or her "(p. 91). This seems wonderful at first
39
PG 91, 24C–28A.
40
See my book Eucharistic Ontology, ch. 7, 3.
41
See my book, Eucharistic Ontology, ch. 1, 7.

25
glance but is it really? We understand now why the Fathers considered the
personal heterogeneity necessarily connected with particular natural
characteristics. Zizioulas usually insists that we love the other only because he is
other, regardless of his qualities but it is easy to understand that, in this way, we
leave the other without voice, we do not deal with the real "natural" other, who
has instincts and passions, body and unconscious, as well as we ourselves have.
That is, we love the other as an open promise, in the way that young parents love
their newborn baby, precisely because they can project anything they love or
expect on him, without any resistance. But then we love others as "selfobjects"
("selfobjects"), with the terminology of Heinz Kohut42. The selfobjects are
possessed by the narcissistic libido for the support of the megalomaniac -
exhibitionist self, in the form of an idealization of the other and then a fantastic
fusion with him, so that the self-esteem of the perfection of the self is preserved.
Things are not so easy for theologians! And they become even more difficult, if we
add to the above the position of Lacan that narcissism (even the primary one) does
not mean the absence of dyadic relations, but rather the opposite43, as well as the
observations of D. Lagache who teaches that sadomasochism (not as a sexual
relationship of deprivation) represents a fundamental split of dyadicity44. This
means that the objectification of oneself or the other (or, in our theological
language, to dictate heterogeneity or to have your heterogeneity dictated by
somewhere else) is the most common everyday experience. Such an objectification
can happen only if we identify someone (or ourselves) with some natural
characteristic, but also if we define ourselves or the other as a text under such
characteristics, so that it is possible for us to use him as a "selfobject". Therefore, to
love another or to be truly loved is quite difficult, as it requires to open within us a
42
See H. Kohut, The Restoration of the Self, International University Press, New York 1977; by the same author, How
does analysis cure?, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1984.
43
Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience”, in Écrits
(trans. Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton & Company, New York/London 2006), pp. 75-81.
44
See his book “Situation de l’ agressivité”, in Bull. P chol. XVI, 1, 1960, pp. 99-112.

26
place for the real, natural and personal, other. This is exactly what is described, as I
have elsewhere claimed45, with the Patristic term "homoousios". As the
relationship between the three divine Persons cannot be understood without the
eternally fulfilled homoousios dialogue of mutual donation, similarly also every
true relationship between humans cannot be understood differently, but as a step
towards a dialogical cooperative reciprocity, which can reach up to a mutual
homoousios. The Cross destroys every asymmetrical understanding of
heterogeneity, as it is taught by John of the relation, who here copies and suffers
also to correct Levinas. If we take into account the existential reality of the Cross,
we can easily understand that the crucified one is the servant of my own
heterogeneity, the "heterogeneity of the other" as I like to call it, that is, a
heterogeneity that I love, I choose, I develop. This is exactly what is so brilliantly
expressed by Maximus in his teaching about the multiple incarnations of Christ,
who becomes "all things to all" according to the freedom of each one46. Thus love
listens, waits, understands and is amazed by the other. This means that the persons
are affirmed in their identity only in a mutual way, or better in a freedom for
absolute reciprocity, which leaves the possibility of the "heterogeneity of the
other" constantly open. Without this recirculation of heterogeneity, heterogeneity
can only be dictated and the relationship becomes inevitably totalitarian. For this
very reason, I think that ultimately, through the way that Zizioulas understands
monarchy, subjectivism ultimately strengthens more than it transforms into
society, because the otherness here is not my own otherness since it is the other
who decides for it and ultimately dictates it to me.
Because the above conception of Zizioulas about relations determines his
ecclesiology, both need radical correction. There is a book of mine that attempts

45
See my book The Closed Spirituality… p. 256 300, and my book Apophatic Ecclesiology of Omrousiou Armos, Athens
2002.
46
See my book Eucharistic Ontology, ch. 1, 6.

27
this correction47 and the space here is not enough to repeat my arguments.
Zizioulas does not read correctly the sources of the first two centuries and places
the bishop in the position of the dictating Father, leaving aside the Christological
foundations of all the ecclesiastical charisms. In addition, he tends to overlook the
mimetic methectic dimension of the ecclesiastical structures. But this is another
big discussion. I cannot close this chapter without saying a few words about the
"existentialism of Zizioulas". The Non-Metropolitan denies being called an
existentialist, because for him existentialism is a projection of human existence
onto the divine Being - while he wants to do the opposite. The personalistic
current in modern Orthodox theology is indeed connected, first of all, with the
modern idealistic subjectivism, as I said above, and it is only in this way that it
tends to existentialism. Moreover, the essence of existentialism is different: it is
rather the exertion of the mode of existence over being in general, as it was
described by both Heidegger and Sartre (in contrast, as I have argued elsewhere,
with the Patristic notion of ecstasy, as ecstasy-of the same-of-nature)48. If this is
true, then Zizioulas (as well as Yannaras and even Lossky) belong in some way to
the broader framework of existentialism. Zizioulas is inconceivable without his
turn to di-subjectivity according to Levinas, with a certainly very interesting
"correction" of the French philosopher: he ontologizes the ethical priority of the
Other according to Levinas, connecting it with the Patristic notion of monarchy,
as he understands it. Thus he modifies his conception of ecstasy, giving it also a
"social" horizontal dimension. In any case, it would be useful for all Orthodox
personalists to read the work of Paul Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre49, the
tenth study of which the author criticizes the priority of the Other according to
Levinas, which tends to become an absolute heteronomy, where the call of the

47
It is my book Apophatic Ecclesiology of the Homoousios.
48
See the discussion about the difference between the existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre and the Patristic thought, as far
as personalism is concerned, in my book The Closed Spirituality… pp. 285-326.
49
Sevil, Paris 1990.

28
lover cannot be distinguished from the call of the enemy, unless we admit a
contrary tendency from the self to the Other that recognizes and accepts it. This
'active' aspect of the relationship, which unites, as Ricœur thinks, Levinas with
Husserl, remains of course enclosed in subjectivity; the cooperative/dialogical
reciprocity of Maximus the Confessor is significantly different and much richer, as
it takes place in both subjects and can be mutually verified.
And a last word for the contempt of Lacan by Zizioulas. Against some
Orthodox theologians who claim the opposite50, Zizioulas states that 'there is no
kind of similarity between the Maximian and Lacanian concept of Desire' (pp. 51,
72). Zizioulas' ecstaticism in this context takes the form of a single
monoenenergism or monotheletism, as 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 within and through his desire for us' (p. 51). This
automatic passivity of Desire means inevitably that only the Lord of Desire desires
deeply indeed, and what he desires with me—as Lacan understood it very well.
The self, according to the Metropolitan of Pergamon, seems to consist precisely in
the mirror automatism of the repetition of the Desire of the Other, becoming
thus a 'relational automaton' (as I named it elsewhere—in the second chapter of
my book, Orthodoxy and Modernism), that is, a radically heteronomous, acted
being, which does not 'yield its self-determination' according to Saint Maximus,
but simply denies it. Moreover, this very denial of the assumption of the Desire of
the Other as my own—because this is exactly what it means that 'Desire is not a
movement of the self'—announces, and my own radical self-interest, since only in
this way, of copying the Desire of the Other, I acquire a real self-in-community.
That is, in reality I do not love the Other, but his Desire for me—the Other is
therefore my melodious lack, as Lacan says exactly, whom Zizioulas, paradoxically,

50
Meaning me in my book, Psychoanalysis and Orthodox Theology: On Desire, Catholicity and Eschatology, first study,
Armos, Athens 2005.

29
considers that he surpasses the above phrase! A second, however, in the thought of
the Metropolitan of Pergamon, a Platonic element is understood, the difficulty of
saying how the theological value of these positions of Lacan lies precisely in the
discovery of the “transcendental” character of natural Desire, exactly as it happens
with the “transcendental” character of the element of will in Saint Maximus, or
the natural desire for the supernatural that De Lubac finds in Aquinas. The
anthropological semi-Platonism of Zizioulas shudders before the possibility that
nature may already be in the order of Grace, thus naturally desiring the
supernatural. The only one who is entitled according to Zizioulas to relate to
Grace (or maybe to replace it?) is the future. Of course, in Saint Maximus and the
Fathers in general, the "supernatural" referentiality of the natural will/Desire is
directly God, while in the secularized Lacan this "supernatural" referentiality is a
fantastical as well as definitively lost fullness, unattainable in reality. The semantic
point here is that Lacan finds in the level of nature the analogue of the theological
natural will, that is, the tendency of a fullness "transcendental", namely social,
which finds in the (definitively lost) Other an excess of meaning and life. The
Metropolitan of Pergamon does not understand either here Lacan (nor Maximus):
he thinks that, because in the first one (as well as in the second one, contrary to
what the Reverend thinks) Desire initially refers to the personal fullness, he
ignores in reality the Other. The opposite happens the natural will or the natural
Desire finds the Other signified by being with him. The pure desirability does not
necessarily mean the loss of the real Other - since there is never Desire or will
without inter-subjectivity. It can also mean the finding of the real Other as a
surplus of life and relationship. The difference here (very important and
noteworthy) between Maximus and Lacan lies in the fact that precisely the
Christian Maximus knows the asceticism of the transcendence of self-love,
through which we finally meet the real Other in person, and thus the natural
fullness of the encounter is consolidated in inter-personal synergistic society, while

30
Lacan does not know this way and the natural fullness remains a fantasy of a
definitively lost fantastical relationship, whose lack matures harshly the subject.
Lacan thus remains within the limits of the fallen nature. The Metropolitan of
Pergamon does not seem to have a serious problem with a Platonic personal
ecstasy above and outside of nature and the natural will/Desire. The problem here
lies in the fact that without precisely the natural will/Desire our ecstasy is in
danger of being empty of anthropological content - pure fantasy, that is, since
neither I exist in this relationship as a full and active natural subject, nor the other
responds as such. I exist then as a fantastical fullness of society absolute but at the
same time natural ontological lack - and Lacan is vindicated triumphantly!”

3. THE CHRISTOLOGY OF ESCAPE AND THE END OF

KNOWLEDGE.

The reader of Zizioulas' book has the impression that, as far as the Son is
concerned, we probably have two births of Him (p. 129-132). We have seen above
that Zizioulas has no problem with the "transmission of personal heterogeneity to
the Son", while he has a serious problem with the "transmission of essence" (p.
129) - that is, he has no problem with a Father who possesses heterogeneity and
then transmits it (or dictates it), while he has a problem with a Father who
possesses a nature and then transmits it. In this way, it seems that two successive
"moments" are proposed as far as the birth of the Son is concerned: that of the
homoousios and that of the personal heterogeneity. As we have said, the Fathers
clearly combined the two, so that the second is impossible without the first. The
Great Basil, for example, writes: "(the Son is) the character of the Father's
hypostasis, so that we may learn the homoousios"51, or "the whole of the Father's
51
Against Eunomius, 1, 20.

31
nature is signified in the Son as in a seal"52 - and many other expressions that prove
that the homoousios, as we have seen, does not hinder but rather helps us to
understand the fullness of the persons, as the homoousios is precisely this full
circulation of nature, which expresses the eternal ontological/personal dialogue in
the Trinity.
The most serious Christological problem, however, in Zizioulas' thought
seems to be the way he perceives the identity of Christ. The Metropolitan tends to
downplay the "exchange of the properties" of the two natures in Christ, to
emphasize the fact that what is active in Christ is "the free person of the Word.
Just as the divine nature escapes from the ontological necessity by being
constituted or "hypostasized" through the person of the Father, the unity of the
being of Christ is realized in freedom by being the hypothesis of a unity within
and through one person of the hypostasis of the Son" (p. 37). As the person of the
Father frees the nature of God, the human nature of Christ, which also consists of
a burden of necessity, must escape to freedom through the free hypostasis of the
Word/Christ, because the hypostasis of Christ "does not depend on his natural
properties" (p. 109). With this statement, Zizioulas, without taking care of their
apostolic rendering, makes a kind of Christology of escape. Salvation here seems to
be mainly a matter of escaping from the created nature, rather than a cooperative
dialogical (because this is exactly the exchange of idioms, that is, the active
communication of the two natures, divine and human, in Christ) metamorphosis
of it. It is useful here to read a text of Maximus the Confessor, to show how
different things are for the Fathers: "The work of love is most perfect, and of the
activity according to it, by the exchange of the related ones according to it, to
allow each other the idioms, and to prepare the calls and to make God the man
and to make the man God and to appear, through the one and unchangeable of

52
Against Eunomius, 2, 16.

32
both according to the will of both will and movement"53. The human being here
seems to be saved (and freed) through a dialogical society of the two natures of
Christ, through their corresponding wills and actions, a society that transforms
human nature - and not through an escape through the hypostasis of the Logos.
And the most important thing of all: human nature here is absolutely active,
willing, desiring, knowing, cooperating - nothing is imposed on it, as it walks
towards its resurrection in Christ. Without two active natures in synergy /
dialogue, the prosthology is no different from a Neoplatonic ecstatic escape. The
danger of Monotheistic Monoenergetism is obvious here. It is precisely because of
this passivity of human nature in the theology of Zizioulas (the person seems to be
active, while the nature remains a passive element from which it is good to escape,
or "offered" to God not as a gift of His own, but rather as a dark burden of
necessity), which understands mysticism as he understands it. I wholeheartedly
agree with the ecclesiastical understanding of mysticism by His Eminence as a
relationship and society, where the persons flourish indivisibly and distinctly in
Spirit. My objection concerns the absolute exclusion of consciousness along with
self-knowledge and self-awareness, by him (p. 306 et seq.). Consciousness here
becomes the panoptic only as something that is opposed to the relationship, as if
the latter should take place only unconsciously. But how could we have otherness
without any element of consciousness at all? One can easily find dozens of authors
on what we (wrongly) call "spirituality", where consciousness or self-knowledge or
the knowledge of the Grace of God are not at all opposed to the relationship or
the society, but on the contrary they help and support it. The Cappadocians and
Maximus the Confessor produce some hundreds of pages on this. These Fathers
understand the whole of man in an ontological way, where all the parts of the soul
(together with the body) have the possibility of participation in God. The "inner

53
Ker. Five Hundred, 1, 27, PG 90, 1189BC, See also Epist., PG 91, 573B.

33
man" is not rejected, because he is exactly the space of human freedom, where the
human gnomic or personal will-preference54 is found.
The problem again is that the nature of Zizioulas' pre-modern subject
remains passive. The relationship tends to become automatic, as the subject
refuses to admit his unconscious, his internal conflicts and contradictions, his
passions - and of course he refuses to work with them. But this is exactly the core
of every subjective ecstatic idealism, as for example Nietzsche defines it: "Not to
know yourself: this is the cleverness / prudence of the idealist. The idealist: a being
who has serious reasons to be in the dark about himself and who is smart /
prudent enough to be in the dark and also about these reasons"55. We are of course
aware of the fact that Zizioulas rejects any relation of ontology either with
psychology or with ethics. He does not want psychology either in relation to
himself or to others, but then his eschatology tends to mean escape, not
transformation of nature. His mysticism tends to become an ecstatic flight out of
real existence and society tends to become a euphoric erotic infinite, which, as
Gregory Palamas loved to repeat, is only imaginary. Because for him the true
ascent to God can only happen when we take with us "every kind of creature" to
be complete according to the image (so that the image is accurate)56.

CONCLUSIONS.

Zizioulas and his generation (Yannaras, Nellas, Nissiotis, Romanides,

Matsoukas, Mantzaridis, etc.) represent the second "awareness of anti-patristic
theology, after the Russian theological and philosophical explosion of the end of

54
See my book Orthodoxy and Modernism, pp. 74-75.
55
F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, Alfred Kröner, Leipzig 1922, vol. 15, frg. 344.
56
Gregory Palamas, “Against Akindynos”, in The Writings of Gregory Palamas, ed. Panagiotis K. Christou and others, 5
volumes, Thessaloniki 1962-92), vol. 3. Ant. 6, 36, 11.

34
the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It is not our intention here to
examine the convergences and divergences between these thinkers, so I will only
try to make a summary of my criticism of Zizioulas, which was made in this text.
What is fruitful in the theology of the Metropolitan of Pergamon is its
existential, that is, its ecclesiastical eucharistic background. His theological
epistemology sprouts from this background and this means that, even if one
sometimes disagrees with him as to the way of theological processing, he can not
but recognize that what we have here is the authentic source of Orthodox theology
throughout the ages. Many of his fundamental concepts, such as the person and
his freedom, the monarchy of the Father, the eucharistic fabric of society, the
existential meaning of ecclesiology, show, as I think, towards the right theological
direction, despite the fact that they rarely go, as to their processing, really beyond
modern philosophy. The reason for this is that as we can not but admit, Zizioulas
seems to offer an idealistic, sinless (relative to himself), and free person, practically
identified with Grace, who escapes from a passive, unwilling and inactive nature
(especially when this nature "is offered" to God), thus abolishing the possibility of
a real psychosomatic participation in God, without the troubles of modern
passions and without unconscious, free from the contradictions of history and the
dilemmas of knowledge. He also seems to offer an easily understandable, but
nevertheless rather psychologically and philosophically disastrous concept of
society (to argue for otherness or to have otherness imposed on you), without the
responsibility of a dangerously real dialogical reciprocity, between real, natural
beings. In this way it is possible to satisfy both the fundamentalists and the
modernist Orthodox theologians: the former because of the marginalization of
nature and the latter because of the marginalization of knowledge and repentance,
as in the work under examination every inner spiritual struggle tends to be
identified with psychologism. What I claim in this text is that all these, the above
concepts, if understood as they really exist in the Patristic texts, open up really

35
wider spiritual horizons for us. And this, together with the immediate need for a
fundamental reassessment of Western theology - especially that of Augustine and
Aquinas, whom Zizioulas usually misinterprets - will give to the newer Orthodox
theology the position that it deserves in the context of the modern theological and
philosophical quest.

36
 Chapter 2

LOVE AS A WAY OF THEOLOGY AND

FREEDOM
The Erotic Ambiguity of Christos Yannaras57

57
First published in the volume “Disturbances in Post-Tumultic Theology”. The “theology of the '60s”, Indiktos, Athens
200. Minor corrections and additions have been made here.

37
 INTRODUCTION

I would like to thank first of all for the invitation to this conference, which
is already a belief regardless of its outcome. An achievement, as a stimulus for a
critical self-awareness and the consequent dialogical questioning, which, operating
subcutaneously in recent years, is publicized lately, so as to become more
responsible, I think, and more serious. Not to end up, I hope, in some cata-tonic
unanimity, but to delineate more clearly the depth of the problems we face today.
The creative dialogue, of course, continues to be extremely elusive in the place that
once gave birth to the Agora and the Ecclesia of the Demos. And it is scarce
precisely as an institution, as an institutionalized vehicle of education, that is, rare
even in the space where it should literally dominate - I mean the academic space,
where the micropolitics of vain alliances and shallow oppositions has replaced the
vital society around the essentials. But, let us leave the thirst of our souls to
replace, for one more time, the half-dead institution in this place. The so-called
"theological generation of the '60s", then, to get straight to the point, seems to
have produced a work that, apart from its value in itself, also acted as a
mood-enhancing or anti-depressive drug in the unhappy modern Greek
consciousness of the modern era. Following, with a particular rhythm, some of the
echoes of the literary and artistic generation of the '30s, thanks to the rare
euphoria of an identity in the already shaken by the whirlpools of Western
modernity Neo-Hellenic Orthodox - even if he achieved this not always producing
a primary or original work, but mainly adopting, as creatively as he could, part of
the novel philosophical-theological orgasm in the Russian especially space, but
also in the fertile space of the newer Western theological-philosophical
self-awareness, during the last two centuries. Even in the cases where there was
(and this indeed happened often) primary study of the sources, the great
ideological and spiritual directions have certainly often already been given by

38
others the Romanides and Zizioulas for example are students of Florovsky, while
the Yannaras and Nellas come from the Russian theologians of Paris - but this does
not diminish the value and the courage of the continuation. As for the contact of
all these with the West, it was somewhat peculiar: in almost no case there was a
primary personal study of the ancient and medieval sources of the Western
tradition, hence the most frequent mistakes in the assessment of the latter in its
modern version, mistakes that are usually mimetically and uncritically reproduced
by everyone. The "generation of the '60s" is enriched by the current Western
self-criticism, without usually knowing personally and in depth the criticized.
This sometimes gives an ideological hue to the anti-Western attacks of these
authors, which, although it was probably necessary for decades, as the
anti-depressive treatment we talked about earlier, it is time to give its place to a
perhaps critical friendship that will have a deeper knowledge of the criticized
friend. Nevertheless, the work of the "generation of the '60s" is a work of great
breath, it is essentially a new beginning of the Orthodox Hellenic thought,
precisely because the passion for the truth and the intellectual honesty with which
these people undertook the continuation of the work of their teachers, advanced,
we can say, this work further, constituting, despite the possible persistent
disagreements, a source of very creative inspiration for the descendants. Let us not
forget also that the international resonance of this work is particularly noteworthy,
which is also a cause of gratitude and a subject of debt for our continuation of the
not easy effort to introduce Orthodox theology to the center of the international
theological and philosophical problems.

39
 ABOUT PERSON AND LOVE,

ABOUT NATURE AND FREEDOM.

But it is time to move on, after all this, to the more specific investigation of
our subject. It is true that, wishing to speak about love, in its theological version
and assimilation, we must again seek the theological myth among the Russian
religious thinkers - as the co-diners easily understand, such a discussion, for the
"generation of the '60s", should be mainly focused on the work of Christos
Yannaras, which, from the Ontological content of the theological concept of the
person of 1970, to the Ontology of the relationship of 2004, revolves thematically
precisely around the meaning of love in theological ontology.
Tracing the generative actions in question on the work of Yannaras, we
must first turn our attention to the thought of Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900),
And this not because we think that the Greek theologian drew necessarily directly
from the thought of the Russian philosopher, but because the thought of the
latter was essentially one of the heavy cores of the subsequent development of the
whole Russian not only philosophical but also theological production - which, let
us not forget, spread everywhere, during the twentieth century, as the unique
representative of Orthodoxy in general. Let me remind you that in the thought of
the Proteus of the Russian religious-philosophical thought, there are many new
and decisive theological-philosophical concepts, which are mainly rooted in the
philosophy of Plotinus and the pantheistic metaphysics of Schelling. Boulgakov,
explaining the system of Soloviev, assures us that his central idea is the universal
cosmic unity. It is the Russian term vseedinstvo58, an idea inherited from the One
and All of Plotinus59! As much as the influences that Soloviev received are many
58
WooDeeWoo: Всеединство is a Russian term that means “all-unity,” which is a germane central theme in Vladimir
Soloviev’s holistic cosmism.
59
See the work of B. Zenkovsky. History of Russian philosophy, volume 2. Gallimard, Paris 1955, p. 19.

40
and varied, from Leibniz and his Monadology and the pantheism of Spinoza, to
the dialectic of Hegel and the Kabbalah60, the main idea of his system, that of
Sophia, will come mainly from the study of the mystics of the Middle Ages
(Bochme et al.)61, combining the visions of Plotinus in the light of the metaphysics
of Schelling. Our philosopher will be taught by Schelling not to consider the
Absolute as separate from the world”62. This means that his Absolute is built with
pantheistic elements, that is, the Absolute as One becomes simultaneously the
universal cosmic "One"63. The world is set by God as his "other"64. But this means
according to the Ionian that the world is nothing but another rearrangement of
the same elements that constitute the Being of the divine world. Because "it is
impossible to have beings that would have outside of God the reason of their
Being that would be essentially outside of the divine world, (...) nature can only be
another arrangement or distribution of the elements that exist essentially within
the divine world". Therefore, the sphere of the divine Being and that of the world
outside it "are not separated in terms of their essence but only in terms of their
position"65. The world constitutes a whole living organism in unity, which
according to Soloviev is "the eternal body of the deity and the eternal soul of the
world"66, which the philosopher calls Sophia"67. Therefore, Zenkovsky rightly
observes that according to Soloviev the world is consubstantial with God. From
Plotinus to Schelling, the pantheistic conception leads to the affirmation of this
consubstantiality"68. Thus, the pantheizing thought of Soloviev considers the soul
60
Zenkovsky, p. 24 ff.
61
Zenkovsky, p. 20.
62
Zenkovsky, p. 35.
63
Zenkovsky, p. 38.
64
A concept known from Fichte as the special problem of the ‘other Absolute’ or ‘second Absolute’.
65
V. Soloviev, Oeuvres, L. 3, p. 132. (In the second decennial edition).
66
Soloviev, pp. 132, 133.
67
Soloviev, p.127.
68
Zenkovsky, c. 42. “Pour Soloviev le monde est consubstantiel avec Dicu. De Plotin à Schelling la conception panthéiste
conduit à l' affirmation de cette consubstantialité”. Et Soloviev [...] engage sa métaphysique dans la voie panthéiste. O C.
Frank, “The problem of Church Unity in the life and thought of VI. Soloviev”, St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly, vol.
36, Ν. 2. 1992, σ. 199 writes: “Whatever else the Sophia idea might have meant for Soloviev, it indicates that he understood

41
of the world, Sophia, as divine and cosmological. "The soul of the world", claims
our philosopher, "is the One and All; it has a middle position between the
multiplicity of living beings and the absolute unity of God"69. This more
analytically means that the soul Sophia "includes a divine principle and a created
principle but as it is not determined exclusively by either one or the other, it
remains free"70. Despite the essential identity of cosmic nature and Absolute, this
does not prevent Soloviev from distinguishing in the former also a chaotic
principle, the existence of chaotic destructive forces that endanger the existence of
Sophia, the fundamental danger is none other than that of the possible loss of the
unity among beings. This fact highlights the importance of man for the world and
his function within it, since the achievement or not of the sophianic unity of
beings depends also on him. So with the appearance of man, the soul of the world
appears as Sophia always, in a new dimension of hers as 'behold the humanity'.
She also participates in God and essence and, trying to overcome the danger of her
separation from God by death, she unites with the Logos. This happens initially
within the human consciousness, while it reaches its perfection in Christ who is
thus 'personal manifestation, primary and perfect of Sophia'71.
This is precisely the sophianic function of man within the world, within
the framework of this cosmological anthropology of Soloviev, which reveals
exactly his unique importance of the element of love in his work. Man is located in
the space of the 'Second Absolute', that is, the conventionally considered (even if
homoousios, as we said, with God) created world, but here exactly the 'erotic
utopia' of Soloviev takes place, as Troubetskoy named it. Here, the person is called
to become an individuality of cosmic dimensions, which through love, and
especially of the common racial, is destined to lead the whole world to the
there to be no sharp and irreconcilable duality between the "super-natural" and the "natural" thus underscoring his concern
for and understanding of the all-embracing and unifying character of reality”.
69
Soloviev, p. 139.
70
Soloviev, p. 142.
71
Soloviev, p. 48.

42
realization of the sophianic unity that we said '72. Soloviev identifies, first of all, the
fact of the person with love. As he himself says, 'the universally unified essence is
delivered to us in the form of the beloved person'73 creating 'a mutual relationship
between the racial love and the true essence of the universal life'74. It is absolutely
clear in this case how Soloviev attributes to the biopsychological racial love
cosmological and sophianic dimensions, making inevitable the suspicion of a
certain pagan motif here. Within the framework of his own Neoplatonic and
pantheistic thought, this is natural and logical. The absence of boundaries
between God and the world (he is after all the simplest definition of Sophia),
makes secondary any possible co-inquiry for a dialogical, between man and God,
transformation of the racial love in Holy Spirit that the Spirit must rather
strengthen the already given sophianicity of this love. The bio-psychological
human love is already almost divine, as an expression of the sophianic natural
cosmic unity. The same is already divine - and the divinity itself, which is also
itself, is rather a pantheistic reflection of God than a living dialogue between the
created and the uncreated. The only acceptable ascetic pedagogy of this love is
precisely to continue to function without stopping, because, if it stops, the
chaotic forces of disintegration will make their appearance. Thus, the
bio-psychological love is already divine love, already Sophia. There is a natural
continuity, without any gap and without any imperative need for sanctification,
between the two. This also means that the genuine racial love is by itself
transcendence and self-giving, which serve the rising of the human "absolute
individuality", through the sacrifice of selfishness - all these are found in the nature
of love and do not require any shocking spiritual struggle for this. Thus, aesthetic
romantic naturalism and the unselfish personal generosity are triumphantly
almost identified. Yannaras seems to follow this path gratefully. I repeat that I do
72
Soloviev, p. 60.
73
Soloviev, see below.
74
Soloviev, see below.

43
not mean here that Yannaras is necessarily a conscious disciple of Solovyov
(although some passages, which will be presented below, suggest such an
impression, but mainly the fact that the latter set the philo-sophical-theological
framework of every subsequent relative search in the European Orthodox circles
of relativist-philosophical circles (with the exception of people like Florovsky or
Zenkovsky); the conscious or unconscious assimilation becomes thus, in practice,
unavoidable. This is reasonable, if finally the terrible struggle of the gifted Greek
thinker against the macabre effectiveness of the pious Minotaur is taken into
account (whose youth is constantly renewed as that of the eagle, despite the many
blows of the last years). Love, and especially racial love, seems to offer the deus ex
machina solution, in order to reveal the aspiring existential truth of the specific
person, beyond the abstract pious-legalistic reductions of it. Of course, here the
spiritual paths are often dangerously invisible, the boundaries fragile, the concepts
unstable. I think I understand the dangers of the spiritual project of Christos
Yannaras: on the one hand, to verify convincingly the constitutive of being
transcendent ecstatic force and call (of which, of course, as we will say below, the
catagogical origin is also partly philosophical and modern). And on the other
hand, through a characteristic, also of philosophical origin, dichotomy, to reveal
the natural substrate of this ecstasy, which either helps or burdens it, and in any
case constitutes its ultimate stake. In The Person and Love, this struggle is evident.
From one side, the natural erotic ecstatic force of the specific individuality and
from the other, the existential ecstasy as personal universality75. In this whole
book, the main and perhaps unconfessed struggle of the author lies in clarifying
which of the two sides of this existential hill (the one of nature or the one of the
person) constitutes the cause of the other and consequently the strongest support
of the ecstatic peak. Which of the two sides guarantees the most realistic and
convincing approach of the specific human being: In the above book, Yannaras

75
Papazisis. 1976, p. 180-192.

44
already develops both of these (contradictory among themselves) tendencies. The
first one wants the natural ecstasy as a simple and without any other gravity
prerequisite of the personal ecstatic universal reference, which reference
constitutes the essence of the human being and which however constitutes a kind
of liberation from nature - something dramatically inexplicable, if we continue to
believe, along with the Biblical-Patristic tradition, that the nature of the rational
beings is a gift, an uncreated logos and an eschatological calling, and an ontological
compulsion, as the newer Marxism wants (something that we will soon return to).
The second tendency, arising exactly from the partial deadlock of the first one,
considers the same nature, along with its natural ecstasy, as the only guarantee of
human fullness and therefore, secondarily, the foundation of the possible personal
ecstatic universality. Christos Yannaras does not seem to have ever understood in
depth the consequences of this contradiction. However, over time, and as our
thinker began to converse, more and more, with the wider world of the
intellectuals, beyond the narrow theological environment, this second tendency,
which paradoxically or not seems to coincide almost absolutely with that of
Soloviev, seems to have prevailed. It is worth transcribing here one of the most
characteristic texts from the Refuge of Ideas, despite its great length76: "The love
that is incompatible with the illusions of individual autonomy, and for this reason
unknown or forbidden in the refuges of ideas, is depicted inimitably in the pages
of an inexorable ascetic of the deserts, Saint John of the Ladder. He speaks of the
"manic" desire, which when it is granted to us "clearly transforms us, and makes us
cheerful and cheerful and painless" It is a love strong as death, which "can no
longer even rest from the desire in sleep". The relationship with the beloved
person is revealed to our eyes as the only possibility of life. And in this revelation,
you surrender yourself completely; the thirst of life overwhelms you inside and
you lose any resistance and any other need for security and certainty. If you are

76
Domos, Athens 1987, p. 262-263.

45
worthy of such true love, you no longer need the ideal substitute of your real self, a
false narcissistic image of your ego. You do not care about your "good name," your
reputation or your fame, you do not cling to yourself to survive. You do not care
even for bread and water - the only thing you crave is the love of your beloved.
Without him you do not need life, that is why you sell everything, like a madman,
to win him.
If you ever fall in love like this, you know how to distinguish life from
ideologies and sentimentalisms, life from survival. You know that survival means
the foolish and insensitive life, a crawling death: You eat bread and it does not fill
you, you drink water and you do not quench your thirst, you touch things and
you do not feel them in your touch, you smell the flower and its fragrance does not
reach your soul. But if your beloved is near you, then suddenly everything comes
alive and life floods you with such force that you think you will not endure it in
the fragile vessel of your Ego. And this flood of life is love. I do not speak of
sentimentalisms and secret ecstasies, but of life that only then becomes real and
tangible, as if scales fell from your eyes and everything around you is revealed for
the first time, and every sound becomes unheard of, and touch leaps in a first
sensation of things. This love is not a privilege of either the virtuous or the wise, it
is offered to everyone with equal possibilities. And it is the only foretaste of the
Kingdom, the only real transcendence of death (the underline is mine), because
only if you get out of yourself, even for "the beautiful eyes of a gypsy", you know
what you ask from God and why you run after him. "In reality, in the above text,
and in the clearest way, every kind of ecstatic personal universality has been clearly
replaced by its naturalistic individualistic presuppositions, following the path of
Soloviev, perhaps a little more than he had imagined. The "only foretaste of the
Kingdom" is now the panting and delirious chase of the "gypsy" - every kind of
transcendent selflessness is summed up in the ultimate selfishness of appropriating
the "beloved". I have here the temptation to quote two characteristic passages from

46
the relevant work of Soloviev, The Meaning of Love (Greek translation by D. V.
Triantafyllidis, Armos, 2008), p. 57: "There is only one - power that can
undermine the ego from within, radically, and indeed it undermines it. This
power is love and mainly erotic love". And on page 59: "Only then will selfishness
be undermined and abolished, both as a general principle and as a reality. Only
from this chemical, we would say, union of the two beings, similar in kind and
different at the same time, but completely different in form, is it possible (as it
happens in nature, so it happens in the spiritual world), the consciousness of the
new man to be the true realization of the true human individuality. This union,
or, in the final analysis, the possibility of this union, we find only in carnal love for
this and we attribute it exceptional importance, as necessary and irreplaceable
means for further improvement, as necessary and permanent condition, which
ensures that man can live in truth". No reference here to the need for continuous
existence of the Holy Spirit dialogue, in order for this carnal love not to deviate to
extreme narcissistic self-interest similarity in this respect between the two thinkers
seems obvious. Let it be noted that similar views will be encountered since then in
several books by Yannaras, both autobiographical (such as The Self) and essayistic,
such as his much-read comment on the Song of Songs - views that provoked the
beastly anger of the conservative and monastic circles and the awkward euphoria
of the "approachers". As much as these formulations provoke nostalgia in people
of my own generation and here, those who did not experience in their youth any
particular regime of erotic prohibition, in contrast to the unbelievable and
publicly confessed relative oppression suffered by their bearer, the created
existential problem is extremely acute: does ecstasy ultimately belong to nature in
the person? If nature is identified with absolute necessity, then how does natural
eroticism suffice for the depiction of the Kingdom? Finally, if nature is
self-transcendent by itself, as natural, self-interested and psychobiologically loving
individuality, then what else is the person but the same natural lawfulness, with

47
the necessary addition of course of the psyche, in the unconscious impulses of
which the secret of Desire rests; The absolute transcendence happily accompanies
the clear thesiocracy in Yannaras' work, something that does not even seem to be
suspected by its author. Why we will research it immediately now - Indeed, if the
identification of person and race is the first element that draws neo-Hellenic
theology of person from Russian thought (and let us not forget here that parallel
views were expressed by Rosanov with his mystical ontology of Gender, Fedorov
with his search for universal love and finally Evdokimov, direct teacher of
Yannaras, with his mystical eroticism), the second is the view of the person as a
substance without essential character: a primary dimension between person and
nature which leads to their view as two independent and separate beings"77. "I
personally named this phenomenon the personalization of the person"78 or rather
it goes parallel, as we will see, with a kind of negative ontologization of nature. In
this way, to return to Soloviev, the Russian philosopher thinks that he neutralizes
the Western atomocracy, of the closed individual entities. This happens because,
according to our philosopher, the individual essence or nature is based precisely on
the dimension between being and Absolute. The subject who seeks in this way the
knowledge of the Absolute is pure hypostasis, freed from the necessity of his
individual nature, thanks to the transcendent participation. With Berdyaev
(whose relevant formulations culminate in the Essay of Eschatological
Metaphysics, Paris 1946) this crossing between person and nature reaches its
climax, identified absolutely, the former with freedom, the latter with necessity,
form with the whole surrender to the Greek theological "generation of the '60s"79.
On the one hand, we have, in a way that refers directly to Augustine and partly to
Aquinas, nature as necessity, unfreedom and fall, and on the other hand the
person, as freedom, theoideity, exit ecstasy from the fall / nature etc. Yannaras
77
Zenkovsky, p. 64.
78
N. Diadovikou, closed spirituality and the mind of oneself, Greek Letters, Month, 2nd ed. 1999, p. 286.
79
Op. cit., pp. 308-310.

48
takes this dual scheme as it is and processes it philosophically (after first
identifying the relevant Patristic teaching with this scheme) on the one hand
through Heidegger, in order to reach the identification of the person or hypostasis
mode of existence with the truth of being (against nature), and on the other hand
through Sartre, in order to be led, this time, to the interpretation of the person as
ecstatic relation, as love. Indeed, the fundamental hermeneutical problem in
Person and Eros lies, I think, in its own ontological method. The ontological
problem, therefore, is identified from the outset, at the beginning of this book
(§4), with the "question about the way in which what is is" (emphasis X. G.). It is,
however, a pure transfer of the Heideggerian ontological method to the
theological ontological problem - and specifically to the Heideggerian distinction
between Being and other, Being and beings, being in the end and essence, as
stability, as identity, as presence (in which the zero is also composed) on the one
hand, and real beings, which "appear" emerging ecstatically in the exist within the
"lethe" of the indifferent common being (from which also the production of the
word a-letheia). So the ontological question becomes a question about the ecstatic
alterity of beings in relation to the underlying substance, ecstasy which makes
them exactly to be: their being is precisely the way of being as an exodus from the
general determination of Being. When these statements of the Heideggerian
Introduction to Metaphysics (III- IV,2) are transferred to the field of Patristic
theology, we are led to the identification of the ontological question exclusively
and only with the question of the mode of existence - but this constitutes
unfortunately only half the truth. Seen this way - truncated - the ontological
question has necessarily only one and only answer: the Being of God and man is
the person, who as another summarizes the underlying substance and provides to
the being its existence, precisely "in the differentiation of it from the common
properties of nature". "On the contrary, however, to this, the ontological question
in the Cappadocians has, to put it simply, two parts: the first concerns the "what

49
is", the essence of the being and the second the "how is", the mode of existence of
it. It is therefore impossible in the writings of the Patristic literature - to identify
(with Heideggerian method), the Being, only with the mode of existence of it.
This leads to the "ontologization of the person", as it can be called, distinguished
absolutely from the "ontology of the person". The latter implies (if we have to
adopt the term) both simultaneously parts of the ontological question, that is,
living hypostatic essence and mode of existence of it, while the first exclusively or
mainly this about the mode of the Being. It is therefore another thing the
ontology of the essential person and another thing the ontologization of the
person, as a method of separating the being from the common of its Being, so that
it exists as a being. The second this, as well as the view of substance that it implies,
is rather foreign to the Patristic tradition. Of course here is implied the paradoxical
disposal of the long-standing Patristic reference of the "according to the image" to
the full psychosomatic human being, in contrast to the Augustinian /
Neoplatonic line that attributes the "according to the image" only to the soul or,
even worse, to the mind of man - these constitute the "higher" part of man, where
exactly his existence is based, his "person", his "I", as the later Western philosophy
will tell us, considering the I this as a detached from the human Being thinking
being / consciousness, independent from the human "nature". Also, the
disastrous, domestic origin, conception of the nature of beings as pure passivity,
which does not concern at all the dialogue between God and man"80. In contrast
to this, the Patristic position is that the full physical nature is always hypostatic
and necessarily is already, as logos / call of God, within the Christ as an active
personal dialogue between divine and human - it is the interruption of this
dialogue that makes us lose sight of this fact. The fact of the person is inseparably
connected with the dialogical mode of existence of nature, with the fact that the
nature of beings is created (proposed by God) and perfected as a personal dialogue

80
See my book Theopoiesis, Armos, Athens 2000.

50
between God and man, but also of men among themselves - it is, in reality, a new,
hyper-philosophical and hyper-metaphysical concept of nature (a fact that has
been understood by the contemporary theologians) The fact of the person lies in
the fact that nature is so incredibly dialogical, that is, "personal as to the mode of
its existence, so that, contrary to any philosophical essentialism, it can be identified
with pure freedom. The fact that the phrase of Saint Maximus that "the natural of
the logical ones are not forced" (Discussion with Pyrrhus, 293BCD) - does not
imply that nature is necessarily associated with necessity, as Pyrrhus wanted then
and today Berdyaev and Yannaras, precisely because it exists as a personal dialogue
between human freedom and divine Grace - as well as his position that the human
being "is not at all possible to be deified by nature" (PG 91,81D) sound
dramatically paradoxical to the ears of the contemporary theologians, only
melancholic thoughts can provoke. Contrary to the persistent Yannaric insistence
for the need of ecstatic self-transcendence of nature, supposedly by the person,
Maximus on the contrary considers irrational any self-transcendence "beyond the
limit or above the limit" of nature, indicating to our personal freedom "to run
with nature", which in the uncreated logos which constitutes it exists
simultaneously and as an existential way81. Nature, therefore, is deeply already
personal - otherwise it would not exist at all. Existence means hypostatic / personal
nature in dialogue and not some kind of exit from it; so freedom does not mean
person against nature (at least according to the Patristic tradition) but hypostatic /
personal nature, by choice and in the Holy Spirit exercised towards communion,
against the comprehensive evil of the self-loving narcissistic self-enclosure, which
destroys the godlike unity of the created. Under this sense, the anthropology
proposed by Yannaras is a classic philosophical anthropology, subordinately
Platonic and equally subordinately Western.

81
The inflected spirituality on 282.284.

51
 These views are complemented by a command for the relationship that
the author weaves on the canvas of Jean-Paul Sartre's anthropology. First Sartre (L'
Etre et le Néant, 1, 1, IV-V) brought the nothingness into the world, through "a
being that will not be the Being in itself - and that will have the property of
nullifying the Nothing, to support it with its being (...) that is, a being through
which the Nothing comes to things" (p. 57). This is the human existence, precisely
because it can modify its relationship with the Being through its freedom (p. 60).
This possibility of modifying the relationship of the self to the Being within the
limits of "the freedom that manifests itself with anxiety, characterized by a
constantly renewed obligation of reshaping the self, which implies the free Being"
(p. 71), thus revealing the not-being that I am in relation to my own self" (p 81).
Therefore "we are faced with two human ecstasies; the ecstasy that throws us into
the Being in itself and the ecstasy that makes us merge with the Non-Being",
asserts Sartre. Yannaras, reconstructing the Sartrean thought, distinguishes also,
attributing this distinction to the Patristic theology, two kinds of ecstasy, namely
the ecstasy of the existence outside the nature towards the hypostatic fullness of
the personal relationship, or towards the nothingness of the existence, which is the
absence of relationship" (188). The similarity of the two thoughts is more than
obvious, only that the author of Person and Eros places in the place of the ecstasy
towards the "Being in itself" the erotic fullness of the relationship and in the place
of the Nothingness the absence of it. What is the problem here? The problem lies
in the fact that Yannaras does not understand that in the anthropology of Sartre,
which he accepts implicitly as an interpretive tool of the Patristic anthropology,
the personal ecstatic freedom lies precisely in the possibility of perpetual
modification of the relationship of the existence to its essence/nature and, as a
consequence of this, in the "incessant reshaping of the self", "nullifying"
continuously every fixation of it within the limits of the nature. Thus, the
Neoplatonic-Augustinian-Thomistic-Heideggerian line of identifying the being of

52
the human with the mode of the ecstasy towards the freedom of the relationship, a
"good" being that is called in the others either Soul, or Nous, or Dasein, in
Yannaras Person, against and outside the unfree fixation of another "bad" being,
which is either the body, or the passive part of the soul, or the Sein zum Tode, or,
in Yannaras, the nature.
These views are completed in the last book of the author, the Ontology of
the Relationship (2004). Beyond the well-known identification of nature and
necessity, freedom and ecstatic relationship, in this book the same ethical evil is
identified very Origenically with this nature as "its organic consequence" (p. 247)
according to the author. And nature is bad by definition, because in it we see the
"inflexible and inexorable ontological priority of the universal over the particular,
of the forms over the atoms" (p. 219). Nature, as a kind of evil demon, "uses
sadistically the human rational subject" (p. 229) then, while Grace frees it exactly
from the misfortune that its nature represents (p. 102). In this book, in a way that
touches the limits of Manichaeism, the ecstatic erotic relationship no longer seems
an achievement of freedom, but a panic-driven action from the harsh tyranny of
the natural. No possibility of transformation of nature, no reference to the
Resurrection of the Dead, no mention of the Patristic eucharistic cosmology:
nature in this book means fall. Here Eros becomes, I fear, despite its relational
euphoria, a bulimia of narcissistic escape from History itself (because here it is a
purgatorial view of History, as Douglas Farrow wrote for Origen)82. Not eros as
sacrifice, as repentance and transformative "hostage" to the other, as
self-disposition to a step-by-step therapy and restoration of the fallen nature, but
as hyper-narcissistic aesthetic escape to the joyful erotic infinite of a poetic ecstatic
eroticism. But then what is the need for the Incarnation of the Logos? And how
does it differ, I ask desperately, this kind of ecstatic, passive to nature, relational
eroticism from the Neoplatonic such? Because, by the way, this is exactly how

82
Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia, T. and T. Curt Edinburgh 1999, p. 89 et seq.

53
Pierre Hadot describes the ecstatic, passive love of the One in Plotinus, in his
classic work La Simplicité du Regard83... Under this sense I could not omit,
without being able to hide my deep embarrassment, what I consider as the
ultimate consequence of this clearly monophysitizing (or simply heavily
Neoplatonizing) stance of Yannaras towards nature: it is indeed the most advanced
modern formulation and acceptance of monophysitism that I know. In his book
The Said and the Unsaid (Ikaros 1999) he does not hesitate to assert that (p. 209);
"The created hypostasis of every human being exists even after death hypostasizing
no longer its created nature, but the uncreated life-giving energy of the divine
love". The author is absolutely clear: he considers that the human being after
death becomes a "without nature hypostasis" (p. 214), without any natural energy
or of course will (see below). Under this sense, "the human being lives after death
in an ontic event of Christic uniqueness and dissimilarity of the blessed energies of
the Holy Spirit - with them his existence is activated, free from the limitations of
the created. The Paraclete is our future body" (p. 239). Without nature, without
energy and will, as an empty, insubstantial hypostatic shell ("ontic mold", he calls
it X.G.84 (p. 214)), the wretched human being is overwhelmed by God and his
energies, becoming, as the author insists clearly, a simple personal "receptacle of
the divine energies, in place of his vanished and annihilated created nature". But if
the human being does not have nature and will and energies, there is no longer, as
not only St. Maximus the Confessor but also the whole Sixth Ecumenical Council
insists! The insubstantial and inactive human being is absorbed by the substantial
and most active God: for those who still can and think, this is exactly the
quintessence of Monophysitism
It is precisely for this reason that the Patristic tradition insists on the
posthumous preservation of the (otherwise completely immaterial, since it,

83
Anto Pier. Plotinus or The simplicity of the gaze, trans. E. Delli, ed. Armos, Athens 2008.
84
WooDeeWoo: These are the Greek initials Fr. Nikolaos used to refer to Christos Yannaras (Χριστός Γιανναράς).

54
according to the summarizing in this case the relevant Patristic tradition
Nikodemos of Mount Athos, is "a subtle-bodied spirit") biological soul, according
to the will of God. This is the remaining trace and "mold" (according to Gregory
of Nyssa) of the specific substantial human person, with will and natural energies,
capable of receiving (and not being subjected by) the analogous natural uncreated
energies of God. Thus, it is also ensured the reconstruction of the same persons
and not of some other completely new and different ones, according to the future
Resurrection of the Dead. After this last one, the fullness of the human natural
energies and powers is restored completely, with the addition again of the full
bodily dimension, so that there is, in the Kingdom, communion of created human
and uncreated divine energies and not swallowing of the former (and the specific
human beings along with them) by the Deity...85
It seems vain to seek a transcendence of this melodious contradiction in
the work of Yannaras. Our author seems to escape from his critics by resorting to
the natural eroticism, when he is pointed out the excessively ecstatic transcendence
of his person, while he resorts to the ecstatic transcendence as soon as he is
criticized for his brutal erotic naturalism. X.G. does not seem to understand that
neither the theology of the person as ecstasy from nature nor the naturalistic
erotology are directly related to the Patristic anthropological tradition. Of which
we do not forget that this dimension of person over nature is faithfully followed
by the Metropolitan of Pergamon John Zizioulas, either in its original or in its
corresponding pair of ecclesiastical and biological existence. But in him too there is
almost a complete absence of the positive Patristic theology about nature, with the
result that the person usually seems to be an ecstatic edifice on the failing nature,
which is also absolutely identified with the necessity, the corruption and the death
- however, in the Metropolitan of Pergamon there is not the above contradiction

85
See my book Orthodoxy and Modernization: Byzantine Individualization. State and History in the Perspective of the
European Future, Armos, Athens 2006, pp. 189-200, 96-99.

55
of Yannaras. This does not mean that the ontology of Zizioulas is different. We
would rather say (judging from his last work Communion and Otherness) that
here things are rather worse, as there seems to be no provision of the very small
window of expression to the natural (for its sake rather!) and the dichotomy
between it and the personal touches the limits of some ancient paradoxical
philosophical-religious doctrines. Either the priority of the person or the priority
of nature would leave, I think, the Patristic anthropology indifferent. It is
precisely, moreover, the substantiality of the person that makes the reality of its
ecstatic emergence convincing (it is therefore a personal ecstasy of the same nature
and not ecstasy from nature) and it is precisely the hypostaticity of nature that
makes it existent and specific. Neither the person nor nature is freedom, but only
the one and identical change of them in the Holy Spirit (this is exactly what the
gnomic use of the natural will according to God means). Neither the "natural" nor
the "personal" eros lead to the Kingdom, without their sanctification in Christ.
Neither the "nature" nor the "person" is the human being, but the apophatically
indeterminate and eschatologically becoming substantial and hypostatic "whole of
him". Neither the "eyes of the gypsy" nor the (hyper-narcissistic) ecstasy from the
popular Aphrodite hide the secret of love, but only the Incarnation of the Logos:
the endless penetration of the uncreated into the created without confusion,
without division and freely. Nothing created (whether nature, person, soul, body,
eros, or relationship) has in itself truly Being and Life without the penetration of
the uncreated into it from the other hand, however, all the above, in Christ and
only, are already uncreated calls, already dialogues, already paths of freedom and
Grace. The great, that is, theological problem here is Christology, connected, if
possible, with the dogma of Creation. But here begins another great one…

FINAL OBSERVATIONS AND…

56
 It would not be possible, however, to close this text without attempting to
give an explanation about how the deleted contrast between the ecstatic
personalism, with the despised nature and love as the vehicle of ecstasy, as an exit
from it, on the one hand, and natural eroticism as an image of the Kingdom of
God, on the other, as we have already described it in the work of X.G. As we have
already pointed out, the author does not seem to be aware of this contradiction as
such. I think, however, that the most likely explanation is that Yannaras follows
here, knowingly or not, the underlying line of thought that Soloviev inaugurates. I
remind you that in Soloviev the created and natural, under conditions, are
simultaneously another aspect of the uncreated (through the created and
uncreated simultaneously Sophia, who governs and governs their relationship).
The main condition, however, for this to happen is, as we have seen, for nature to
be in a state of love, of erotic mixture, which, alone, guarantees the realization, on
a natural level, of "the true essence of universal life", which constitutes another
aspect of Sophia, as we said. In this sense, no essential contradiction can exist,
according to Yannaras, between natural eroticism and ecstatic erotic personalism,
Russianly because both "iconize" sophianically God and His Kingdom. Of course,
the person is closer to Sophia since, as we emphasized above, for Soloviev again,
the subject, which rises to the knowledge of the Absolute, must precisely be pure
substance / person without nature, since this very existence of the latter is also the
proof of the distance between being and the Absolute. But next to the person,
perhaps slightly below, nature is also acceptable, if only in its biopsychological
erotic paroxysm, since only then is it an image of God and His Kingdom and
expression of the divine Sophia - nature itself, without love, must be rejected
immediately, being identified essentially with the fall, the slavery, the necessity, the
tyranny of the general, the corruption and the death. In this way, the ecstatic
personal erotic transcendence can coexist, without contradiction, with the
common natural individuality in a state of erotic paroxysm (but not with nature

57
itself) because both situations are aspects of the created-uncreated Sophia
(explicitly in Soloviev, implicitly in Yannaras), which makes the world, according
to the Russian philosopher, consubstantial with God, as we have seen. Yannaras
must be notified, of course, of the immediate danger of pantheistic interpretations
that his thought shows, if he remains as he has until today…
Beyond all these dangers, however, we all together and X. G., must
wonder about the texture of modern erotic individualization, if we do not want to
be obviously naive. This text is not suitable for a complete analysis of the issue, but
it would be tragic, after the warnings of today's depth psychology, until Kohut
and Hillman, to ignore the peculiarly narcissistic texture of modern erotic
exaltation and the great difficulty of transforming it into a happy selfless openness
and hostage to the beloved ... After the confusing intervention of modern
pornography, which, although theoretically usually rejected, undermines modern
erotic search with fantasies of "fullness" that in reality undermine it, to insist on
the self-evident anaphoricity of natural eroticism in the transcendent becomes
problematic - there is so much modern alienation, that it undermines even the
most decisive anti-moralistic generosity. The theological provision would easily
agree, of course, that the hypostatic nature, when it precisely operates "according
to nature", that is, according to its uncreated reason, the "pre-existing by God".
iconizes God and His Kingdom. To say that in its "unnatural" state the hypostatic
nature retains this iconism, this is something theoretically correct, but that can be
said only with great caution and with as little arrogance as possible, the "cursed
poets" and the demonic nightmares, along with all the modern related nihilism,
should be the main Gospel of all the "suspected" theologians. The "echo of God in
the depths of Lucifer" is an anti-moralistic hypocritical fairy tale and a call to
repentance, in the existential field, and not a happy existential orientation. Let us
not forget that, in the eschatological ontological perspective of a Maximus
Confessor, the denial of the "according to likeness" shakes the ontological

58
foundations of the "according to image". This eschatological, eucharistic ontology
that wants nature to become a personal dialogue, offers in reality infinitely wider
perspectives to our reflection: nature iconizes God in the same natural dialogical
way of its constitution and fulfillment and there is no question of either
transcendence or degradation of it. Moreover, to despise today the already
self-evidently despised and ultimately endangered nature of beings (from the same
Technique and the by-products of modern Science) constitutes, literally, and our
ethical deviation. In any case, the indication of the true meaning and significance
of the hypostatic nature is today the most important anthropological and
cosmological debt of modern Orthodox theology. Fortunately, in the work of the
Greek Fathers there is no "priority" either of the pre-Fatherhood of nature, but
co-priority of both, as they are implicitly and absolutely and inseparably
intertwined, rendering the shocking and incomprehensible reality of the specific
and real and unique hypostatic being…
The problem, therefore, that we face studying the work of X.G. is not
finally whether or not we will accept the central position of love in theological
anthropology. The problem that arises from the present work is that here we have
to deal with a divided love. Indeed, the Yannaric Eros seems divided between an
empty, ecstatic withdrawal and a naturalistic narcissistic self-fulfillment. He thus
risks remaining impractical, lifeless, suspended, unfulfilled - only the Patristic
ontology of the hypostatic nature, as it was developed above, can speak to us
convincingly both for natural love and for its sanctification in Christ. In these and
only these frameworks, love becomes a truly enopoietic and unified experience,
where the real natural erotic relationship gradually sanctifies and grounds itself,
without losing its naturalness, transforming its mode of existence towards the
mystery of the eschaton. In the game of transcendence-naturalism, love, on the
contrary, as it emerges as the only possible realization of the person, which thus
identifies with the relationship, becomes a kind of categorical command: I fall in

59
love to exist. Every trace of a supposed erotic selflessness is thus doomed to
extinction. I need the other erotically, in the existential field, since he and only he
fulfills the vehicle of my own personal realization. The identification of the person
with the relationship is a fundamental and disastrous ontological error of the
theological "generation of the '60s" and its many disciples (who are dazzled by the
size of the teachers and paralyzed by the thought and only one of their critical
reading), as I recently tried to show elsewhere86. To fight the Western
individualistic autonomy, we thus unsuspectingly proceed to a radical heteronomy
of the person, which denies his self and his will, in reality leading him to a radical
selfish and unfree dependence on the other, which oscillates between a harsh
egocentric use of the other and a pathetic abandonment to him. The game of will
is extremely interesting here, although there is no room for adequate discussion of
the issue. The will here, as it has been erroneously supported, is the same evil, since
its existence alone prevents the absolute heteronomy, the absolute mixing of the
hypostases. This is the final disastrous mistake - only we do not know who will
finally manage to - monogize first the will of the other, the lover or the beloved:
But, the mystery of the self is not opposed to the relationship. The fact that the
self is in relation, without being ontologically identified with it, this is something
that the Philokalic and Neptic texts, for example, know very well - even though
these texts usually constitute a red flag for our personalists: every neptic activity is
baptized as "psychologism" and is dismissed with disgust. Every reference to the
"inner man" of the New Testament, as the place of the gnomonic will, that is, of
freedom and choice, is baptized as "esotericism" and is denounced blatantly - and I
speak mainly here for the Metropolitan I. Zizioulas and X. Yannaras, who
probably oppose thus the Origenist esotericism of Fr. Romanides. All this, of
course, does not mean that the person, according to Akinatian mode (elements of
which we also find in the Greek Patristic tradition, e.g. in J. Damascene) precedes

86
Ibid., the second chapter.

60
individualistically the relationship, as the defendants would probably argue
triumphantly. The person is always in relation (without being a relation) and this,
in the case of God, means that the incommunicable hypostatic properties of the
three Persons are not produced causally and pyramidally from relations in which
the absolute ontological reciprocity does not prevail, while in the case of man it
means the unspeakable and mysterious distinction (and not separation) between
the self and its social eschatological Einaos. Obviously all these discussions call us
to reread the Patristic theological renewal, after the amazing and adventurous
opening that the theological "generation of the '60s" offered us.

…EXIT

All this previous criticism does not have at all the character of a
comprehensive assessment of the work of Christos Yannaras, or anyone else.
Especially for the work of Yannaras, one of the most important theologians who
wrote in Greek during the modern centuries, this assessment would have many
positive and fruitful aspects to describe and I would wish, for reasons of spiritual
honesty, to contribute personally to this direction, in the near future.
I therefore confine myself for the present to state that all this criticism,
which stems from the same passion that made the aforementioned ones extremely
important theologians, radical overturners of so many theological self-evidences,
will not prevent me from finishing this text as it began. Indeed, I would like to
affirm, for very serious theological reasons, my deepest appreciation, despite the
critical confrontations, for the work of Christos Yannaras, as well as for a series of
other representatives of the theological "generation of the '60s", such as the
metropolitan of Pergamon John Zizioulas, the extremely important Nikos
Nissiotis, the very theological Panagiotis Nellas, the "existential" p. Romanides, the

61
profound scholar of the Patristic spirituality Georgios Mantzaridis, Nikos
Matsoukas, as well as a series of Athonite fathers who framed the miracle (because
it is a miracle) of the theological rebirth of the '60s. I want to emphatically stress
that without them perhaps none of us would be able today to have a runway of
theological take-off and a deposit of creative thought. These people gave us a
crucial sense of the homorphism, the wisdom and the highest intellectual value of
theology and thus helped us to love it and to dedicate ourselves to it. They also
removed, I hope definitively, the Orthodox theology from its eusebian marginal
ghetto and created very significant bridges of communication with the pyre
outside the philosophical, scientific and cultural space. With a rare sense of the
historical moment, despite their shortcomings, they restored theology to its
Patristic perspective, trying to introduce it everywhere from where it was sadly
absent: in the anthropological and political thought, in the art and in the scientific
inquiry and, of course, in the ecclesiastical space, the space that is where the sad
self-evidences are unfortunately often still in the place of the absent theology.
I insist on supporting the above for very strong theological and historical
reasons. What I personally value in these people is how, under really very adverse
conditions, wounded often and persecuted by dead ecclesiastical and academic
environments, radically questioned, undermined and envied, they managed to
produce theology, instead of abandoning, dreadfully, both theology and perhaps
even the Church. The Orthodox theology in Greece actually begins again with
them, after the painful interruption of centuries: we owe them sparks and
inspirations, as well as the beginning of a modern theological language. All this
may acquire a special significance as they are said by someone who, as I suppose is
known, in his books disagreed or criticized specific positions of some of the above
mentioned. But this was done without the slightest personal malice and with full
awareness that it was the same obvious value of these important theological works
that binds us to the continuation of an inexorable questioning in the place of a

62
possible passive acceptance. But this not only does not diminish but on the
contrary, proves exactly the excellent fertility of their teachings.
I say all this, then, in the epilogue of this text, because I want humbly to
emphasize that we, the next generation, will make the next step, only thanks to
these people and not against them. If, that is, we do it! Because what mainly
appears on the horizon of our equally wounded generation, is rather a new
spiritual uncertainty, a new crisis of identity after the anti-Western confidence of
the previous generation, which may be due to the inadequate education, but also,
perhaps, to the contemporary difficulty of immediate rooting in the experience of
the Church and theology; it is anyway an uncertainty that is expressed as a bitter
domination of a fundamentalist neo-eusebian rest from the one hand, and a great
and atheological modernist conformity to the prevailing related totalitarian
discourse, from the other. While in the contemporary both Roman Catholic and
Protestant theological space, today there is an incredible orgasm of upheavals and
reinterpretations of their canons and their particular theological traditions, many
Greek theologians (who usually know very little what is really happening outside
the Greek borders) lick full of anger the psychological wounds that come from the
various Ideological Shelters where they served, deifying fundamentalistically the
tradition, or rejecting it with disgust for the sake of the pathetic embrace of
postmodernity (which they also usually ignore). The fruitful criticism of the
theological "generation of the '60s" requires strong guts, that is, the production of
true theology and, unfortunately, this precious fruit grows on branches that we
cannot reach with only our torments and our critical disposition…

63
64
 Chapter 3

TOWARDS A CHANGE OF PARADIGM

IN ORTHODOX THEOLOGY
A Monologue Inspired by the Ancient Idealism of Stelios Ramfos

65
 The relatively recent edition of the Mystical Jesus according to Ramfos
(Armos, 2006) brought us face to face with a, so to speak, pre-theological, or
rather, pre-Christian (because, as we will see, it is not only about post-Christian)
spiritual climate, where the former Marxist and now, after his "Patristic" Christian
phase, idealist thinker, struggles to manipulate and tame (an act in which, as in
many other things, the idealisms coincide with the Marxisms) what he places on
the limits of his self-evident philosophical control.
The terms used in the above sentence will be explained one by one in the
following. For the time being, the reason for this written here was the
unexpectedly shining conspiracy of admiration from some, academic and
non-theologians who rushed to greet the "post-patristic" (and this term is also for
explanation!) reading of the Gospels, already proposing, with the occasion of the
not of the Ramfian achievement, the "change of paradigm" in the articulation and
targeting of the modern Orthodox theology.
I have repeatedly referred to the huge, almost exemplary, crisis of theory
that plagues the neo-Hellenic thought in general and especially the theo-Hellenic.
And this is because, much more than philosophy, theology is not easily conceded
to the logicians, academic and non-besiegers of it. Art of life and stimulus, the
blastema of participation, liturgical existentialism, and the theology waft of
patience, escapes constantly from the usual attention of us, the theologians, and
becomes elusive and ironically absent in our uncontrollable certainties. If this is
added to the huge intellectual effort that is required, in order for this liturgical
work to enter into a real dialogue with the real problems of the era, one realizes the
critical situation of the theologian who, as a genuine child of his time, is not
usually ready to detect a subcutaneous challenge of wisdom in this necessary, in
principle, failure of his to feel then the spiritual light behind it. And as if that were
not enough, the theologians in Greece are often also heavily wounded, spiritually
and psychologically; and rightly so, since numerous bad theologies have spilled

66
over the place, breaking the ecclesiastical preaching, blinding the pastoral practice,
ridiculing, legalistically or moralistically, the (and how called) "spiritual" life.
Ecstasies and drownings of the natural, atheological to madness obediences that
break without educating the will, extraterrestrial, otherworldly, third-world...
Because of such passions, which usually happen during the defenseless childhood
and adolescence, some and theologians resemble the sufferers of total burns of the
third degree: nothing-good or bad-can touch them without causing deep pain.
And all these last ones, together with the above and together with others who
simply see the ship rocking from the waves and Jesus as if sleeping, demand loudly
and unanimously: "change of paradigm". No blame; each of us has the right to be
either wounded, or inadequate, or disoriented, or simply, alive and real, seeking
the truth, according to the word of Rimbaud "in a soul and in a body". For this
reason, he also has the right to seek exactly that "change of paradigm" that will
open him to the truth as his truth. But here attention is needed: because yes
indeed the truth can become my truth, but my truth is not certain that by itself it
is truth…
Nothing then more urgent than the changes. Anyway, as Nietzsche said,
the human spirit if it does not change like the snake its shirt will die. The question
is therefore how to achieve existentially valid changes - changes that are towards
the direction of the truth, which will not hurt, in the long run, more and that in
addition, will sweeten as far as possible the current pain or inadequacy. The
example of modern Protestantism is here extremely instructive: everyone who
perceives a problem in the Church where he belongs, creates immediately his own
true Church - the tens of thousands of these truths "Churches" remain as rags
ambiguous in the stripping wind of modernity, always certain for the
world-historical and inexhaustible of the "change" that once brought...
The great and valid spiritual changes are never products of neither panic,
nor wounded egoism, nor even righteous indignation: for some deep spiritual

67
reason, all these must be turned into a painful and persistent search for the grace
of the Spirit in repentance, a search that is for the truth itself and not simply and
only for my personal justification. This is exactly also the difference of the
theo-logian with the philosopher. Where the theologian seeks enlightenment, the
philosopher prepares his new reductions, solves the problem by introducing
plenty his personal judgment where the data resists. The usual inability of the
philosopher to approach, to doubt, to ask again, or in a word to pray produces the
equally usual disproportion and versatility of the countless philosophical dogmas,
which, for some equally deep spiritual reason, can not silence our deep desire. The
philosopher then brings the universe ultimately to his own measure - and the same
of course he does for the created metistic universe of the Church. Thus also the
"church" of Ramfos is a philosophical church of Jesus and not of Christ, since
incarnation of God is impossible according to Ramfos to happen and therefore,
according to the well-known Hegelian way, Jesus is the thakatos of God as
transcendent and his continuous appearance as spirit of new life, as autythen tic
way of existence, continuous opening to the truth of the transformed man "(p.
43). The spiritual environment here is that of the modern "reflexivity" as Giddens
would say"87. Reflexivity here means the re-thinking of Being, beyond the
stabilities of tradition, with the aim of shaping a historicity that has
fundamentally futuristic character, turns to the future. It is a movement of many
meanings since moreover, according to Giddens always, it can be done using
reflexively the safe material of tradition, but it can also happen against it,
something moreover that is very characteristic, in the institutionalization of the
questioning that characterizes the post-modernity. Indeed, according to
Blumenberg88 αἴρνης89, historicity (that is, historical consciousness) can mean, in
87
L.A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, Polity Press/ Blackwell 1996, ch. 1.
88
H. Blumenberg, Wirklichkeiten, in denen wir leben, Reclam. Stuttgart 1981, 0.84.
89
WooDeeWoo: This Greek term within the given context means vulture, and many know Blumenberg for analogically
using the vulture to describe people who pick up and make use of specific materials without adhering to the authority nor
boundaries from where those specific materials originated.

68
the stages of post-modernity, use of the past within the limits of the present, but it
is not necessarily respect for it. It means, on the contrary, the use of the knowledge
of the past in order to come into rupture with it, keeping from it what essentially
our current principles impose. In this way, the surprise of the personal destiny or
identity, or in other words the famous self-realization90, becomes the indisputable
center of every interpretation of the past, an interpretation that is as much more
certain for itself as it leaves intact the imaginary "fullness" of a self, whose any
desires and real or imaginary needs are by definition absolutely affirmed.
Characteristic, in other words, of the above interpretation is, methodologically
already, the a priori realization of the disconnected exaltation of the Ego of the
classical philosophical idealism (with or without the modern addition of the
whole of the psyche and thus also of the corporeality in it), as well as the complete
indifference for the loss of the common sources of meaning of the past, a loss for
which a Daniel Bell mourns, considering it difficult to replace. We will see,
however, at the end of this text how a widening of the modern reflexivity is
possible. We said that the above is a fundamentally philosophical stance. It could
not be accepted in the theological space except under the terms of the open, social,
charismatic experience and knowledge, which we hinted at above. It is not
coincidentally at all that such a stance in the theological space, if it happens to be
adopted without the above conditions, enters and exits easily in atheism. The
reasonable cause: a radically reflexive theological interpretation means by
definition rupture with authority; and every faith in a living God who can really
do whatever he wants, even to incarnate, prevents exactly this radicality of all this
subjectivism, which constantly wants to have the control of the self-realization of
the subject with the terms that it and only it sets - since and sin, according to F.
Dolto, suddenly, is exactly, as Ramfos likes to repeat, the denial of the desire of
man (p. 285). The last position this would be absolutely debatable, if in this

90
See the work of T. Roszak, Person/Planet. The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society, Gollancz, London 1979.

69
affirmation of desire was included also its education, so that from innate self-love
to move towards brotherhood and the realization of the homoousios in the
world91 - except however in Ramfos the desire is affirmed regardless of its
egocentric wildness: "He sins who does not have the courage to realize himself,
fears in front of the unknown and strangles his will and his desire by giving to
others the steering wheel of life; whoever, prisoner of his image, does not respect
himself and makes continuous discounts on his desire in order not to risk his
relationship with the third parties". He constantly sins, according to Ramfos,
whoever does not immediately surrender to the here and now self-realization
because of the pretexts of a shadowy and ghostly sociality. Neither natural
demand for self-sacrifice nor the slightest emptiness. But then Jesus would have
been much more authoritative if he could have crucified, first of all, his crucifiers...
I leave the above temporarily to comment more on the issue of atheism -
since there are, according to the old word of Jaspers, at least two types of atheism,
the "atheism of the day" and the "atheism of the night" or otherwise, the happy
and unsuspecting atheism and the suspicious atheism. Happy atheism was the
atheism of modern times, as it appeared for example in the work of La Mettrie,
L'homme machine (1748): here the destruction of religion would automatically
mean the prevalence of the "purity of nature" and the blessed worldliness, where
the happy mortals follow only the "spontaneous commands of their existence" and
happily prosper. The culmination of this form of atheism undoubtedly occurs in
the work of Feuerbach, Marx and Freud. God as a projection of the hidden wealth
of the human self, God as alienation and at the same time consolation of the
oppressed creature and finally, God as the totality of the unfulfilled desires of man
- in the final analysis, it is enough for all of them to lift the idea of God in order to
emerge the absolute happiness of man, an idea that intoxicated poets like Shelley
or Swinburne, in the 19th century. And this despite the imperative intervention of

91
D. Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. Harper Collins Pha, 1978.

70
De Sade, who showed how, beyond the naive naturalism of a Rousseau, obedience
to nature means in addition and complete surrender to its murderous wildness. It
is not accidental, therefore, that no one really-thinking person can embrace this
euphoric atheism today. Especially after the hundreds of millions of dead that
caused and accumulated the militant atheism of the 20th century (one hundred
million dead only in the Soviet Union according to the Soviet archives - atheists,
like Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao and others, literally delayed the meaning of crime,
causing the death of hundreds of millions of people "for the good of humanity") it
is difficult for anyone not completely lacking in mind to share the enthusiasm of
the heralds of the victorious happiness that supposedly would come with the exile
of God.
However, there was also the suspicious atheism, the one "of the night" -
the one of Nietzsche for example, of Camus or of Heidegger. With this atheism
almost every discussion can be fruitful. From a point of view, moreover, of this
kind of atheism, it abolishes the reality of God from the ontological forms of
philosophical metaphysics, leaving room for a God whose ontological freedom is
arbitrarily but lovingly absolute and his proximity apophatically enigmatic. This
atheism was often a prophetic atheism, culminating in the abyss of the
transcendent absoluteness of the mystical God of a Wittgenstein. However, only
rare creatures can bear such atheism and the ultimate postmodernism sank into
other types of atheism, like those we have already talked about and who are more
related to the first kind than to the second - not to mention that they are usually
some kind of fundamentalist atheism, like that of Dawkins. The cause of the
phenomenon was mainly the unexpected revival of religiosity and spirituality
during the last three decades, almost everywhere in the world. Along with the fall
of the credibility of atheism due to its uncontrollable murderousness, the
post-paroxysmal deadlock of the postmodern condition revived religiosity
emerged full of meaning again, although the hardened wineskins of European

71
thought cannot always bear the bubbling new wine. And the most lively and
interesting philosophical currents of our time, starting with phenomenology,
which moreover still constitutes the most lively philosophical current today
(Marion, Ricoeur, Lacoste, Kearney etc.) in continuation of most schools of
Existentialism and Personalism, undoubtedly root in the religious fact. However,
the various postmodern post-Marxists (with the exception of Bloch),
(post)structuralists, (post)Lacanians, (post)Hegelians, neo-idealists, etc., do not
easily surrender to the old enemy without "demystifying" him. Unexpected help
here is the same theological "demystifying" interpretive current, which started with
Bultmann in the decade of the '20s and was completed with the "secular theology"
of the '60s - an interpretive current that no serious Western theologian discusses
anymore today, except for the Postliberals (who also have essentially opened up to
the extra-theological sources of inspiration and practice) and the modernizing
Greeks (who are similar to them). This is therefore an attempt to incorporate the
"existential messages" of theology without, however, substantially disturbing the
cosmocentric anti-metaphysical definitions; nothing uncreated exists outside the
created and naturally no practical entrance of the former within the latter can
exist. The opposite is considered myths and fantasies that as soon as their
inner-worldly meaning is traced, they dissolve as deceptive hydras, leaving the
omnipotent and uniquely absolute human Ego in its inner-worldly desert. Of
course, if this demystifying interpretive theology did not have this character of
excluding the entrance of the uncreated into the world, as a concern for faith, as an
existential authenticity of man, it would be absolutely acceptable, since it is
precisely in the existential space that the truth of faith is weighed. It is for this very
reason that I insist on calling this theological fallacy essentially atheist, despite the
fact that various devotees of it, possibly including Ramfos, could perhaps protest
here, pointing out that it is the fact of Christ as God-man, as proclaimed by the
Church, that they only want to demolish - not God himself. The term "secularized

72
theology" could indeed be used here instead of the clumsy "atheist", in the same
way that Charles Taylor92 recently defined this secularization as, in his own words,
a purely self-sufficient humanism, who, for the first time in human history, places
against not only Christianity but also Platonism, Stoicism, Taoism, Islam, etc. The
truth is not outside of man—for participation—but within him as an inseparable
and self-evident element of him. Truth is thus the subjective flourishing of man;
his self-fulfillment. Every other external purpose as to his happy and arbitrary
here-and-now psychosomatic self-enjoyment is simply rejected. To see the truth
exclusively in the intensity of a hyper-narcissistic self-sufficiency is the only real
demand, and religion and philosophy must also serve this very purpose - any
opening or transcendence to an outside of the subjective-meaning is denounced as
"theocracy", or simply as "metaphysics". The fact that this "exclusive humanism"
("the exclusive humanism" according to Taylor) gradually leads to a deep change in
human self-understanding is here a finding whose proofs already flash in the
middle of the idealistic subjectivism of the New Times, and especially not only in
Hegel but also in Nietzsche, and even in Sartre, or wherever the understanding of
a transcendent Absolute seems gradually to recede before the absoluteness of the
human Ego—only perhaps Heidegger and Wittgenstein understood the deadly
danger of the loss of God (but also of man) in this way. Consequently, every
secularized theological fallacy is ultimately in practice atheist to the extent that it
wants the truth of God only within the limits of my own predetermined as to its
content self-verification - not as an opening but as a closure to the (absolute) Ego.
However, in this case it is a new, extremely refined type of atheism. Because it is
not here a constitutional rejection of God, but a denial of his worship. It is a
violent inclusion of him in the plan of my self-development where, as Baudrillard
already said, "the salvation of the body replaces the salvation of the soul"93 (and

92
C. Taylor, A Secular Age, Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap 2007, pp. 18-21.
93
In his prophetic book La Société de Consommation, Ed. Denoël, 1970.

73
does not complement it, I would add) in a society whose only myth is its own self.
This loss of ontology for the sake of enjoyment does not want to meet any god
outside of it and when it invokes theology it invokes it only to frame the pleasure
of its predetermined self-emergence. Especially when it refers to eschatology, it sees
it rather as the final fulfillment of this narcissism - it forgets that eschatology can
be revolutionary only as long as it is a real encounter with the living, critical, fiery
and demanding heart and kidneys will of God in Christ and not the swallowing of
him in a slimy self-prophecy. Nor does it need to remind us at this point that man
is indeed psychosomatically and eternally completed in Christ, becomes literally
"anarchic and indeterminate" according to Charis, suddenly according to St.
Maximus the Confessor. But this happens rather with the opening of man to God
than with the closing of God to the narcissism of man.
This is the theology of secularization, where the affirmation of God is
equivalent to his disappearance within my subjectivism. But let us return to our
problem here again. This desire to imprison God in the self-evident that I need
every time, which naturally wants to demythologize, that is, to dissolve, the fact of
the Incarnation of the Word of God as an ontological union of the created and the
uncreated, as well as to reduce the inexhaustible wealth of theological
Trinitarianism to agnostic Monotheism (and all this by rejecting without
hesitation the two thousand years of martyrdom and millions of sanctified
beings!), has also lost the game of imagination. Indeed, by walking through the
demythologized Gospel, one impoverishes unbelievably in imagination. since
nothing beyond the allegories of the poorest human logic can happen here. It
impoverishes, therefore, as to the assumption that Being, divine and human, has
much more abilities and dimensions than those conceived by the limited human
mind. Neither, therefore, is Jesus God. nor are His miracles true, nor did His
resurrection ever happen according to Ramfos. All these are bitter allegories,
which remained hidden for two thousand years, until the common logic of a

74
Greek writer reveals their real meaning - and the simple and semi-literate people
who recorded them were so terribly philosophical demons, so as to invent the
most deceptive and difficult to interpret philosophical myths that ever happened.
But above all they were so satanically untruthful, so as not to render the teaching
of the unjustly slain prophet as a direct daily pious moralism, but to invent the
most monstrously provocative perspective of his here and now resurrection and to
defend this lie of theirs, they and their disciples, until the last moment of the
horrific deaths that it inflicted on them. And there was not even one who would
fall under the combined weight of the marbles and the simple and shapeless, but
honest, conscience of him and confess the hypertensive philosophical web of the
ages! I leave aside, of course, the testimony of all the following generations who,
until us, touched the same miracle, lived it with their lives, tasted and were reborn
in his living grace and touched within it the milestones of the mixture of the
created and the uncreated already from then, with their soul and body. Indeed, the
wisdom of God remains Greek foolishness and one must become a fool to become
wise.
Not that he will lose anything serious. The monolithic transcendence of a
postmodern idealist does not go far, precisely because it lacks, as we said,
philosophical-theological imagination. It is almost comical-tragic to watch
Ramfos' agonizing attempt to prove that Christ's miracles were not due to what
he himself indicated the direct action of God but to (much more unprovable,
nebulous and anaporthological!) paranormal phenomena, ie telepaths,
synchronizations, parapsychologies, etc. And this is because, according to Ramfos,
once there are natural laws with obvious purpose, the miracle is unthinkable (p.
327) - but then God either did not create the world himself or is not enough God
to intervene in it, to paraphrase the apologist Athenagoras. The miracle, anyway,
nowhere in the New Testament was a means of immobilizing the freedom of men,
but a manifestation of the reality that the living wisdom of God visits the world

75
even the Transfiguration and the Resurrection itself do not immobilize because of
leveling power, but with their spiritual causes and consequences. That is why the
spirituality greater than the miracles of Christ is, I think, together with His
Resurrection; His Ascension. It is of course about the glorification of the created,
but it is also the departure of the one who ensures to Ramfos the possibility to
produce the book that is inaccurate in many ways. The Church is inaugurated in
this way in a feast of spiritual freedom of acceptance or rejection of the
Resurrection (and ultimately, that is, understanding of its spiritual prerequisites),
of which the Pentecost is the only possible next step: the free demand of the
Paraclete, after the existential waiting in the Upper Room, which reveals in love
the person/otherness of each of the believers in the marital perspective of the new
bed of the immaculate marriage of the created and the uncreated, according to
Maximus the Confessor, that is, the Church. This Jesus, the Christ Jesus, Ramfos
does not seem to have met him yet.
That is why his incurable subjective idealism, where everything in reality
happens within this monstrous neoplatonic pre-existence subject. Because the
ideas of neoplatonic proceed from the subject. Because Ramfos' idealism is both
archaic and postmodern and here lies the core of his philosophical originality.
Fundamentally and primarily, this idealism is absolutely archaic and specifically
Plotinian: "... he has found himself in the simplicity of the absolute, free from the
bonds of gravity" (p. 519) "it is about a deep desire of the absolute as Freedom
from any kind of external commitment" (p. 520); "whoever struggles to realize his
spiritual essence" (p. 521); "in the sphere of sensation everything has the fullness of
light, which gives the relation of our earthly and heavenly self with terms of
internal fullness" (p. 519) (the underlines are mine). The "simplicity of the
absolute" (see the Plotinian "simplicity"), or "freedom from externality", the
"spiritual essence" of man, the "heavenly" and the "earthly" man, are terminology
known to all the students of Plotinus (see hastily my book The closed spirituality

76
and the meaning of the self, p. 222-227), which, being pagan and monistic, creates
full embarrassment about its existential content today. Because it is impossible
now to speak, in the field of philosophical anthropology, for man as a heavenly
mind, with or without body and emotions, without ontological sociality, without
unconscious - what is this then the "spiritual asymmetry that rests in a fantastic
internal synergy, identified in essence with the absolute as Plotinus disastrously
dreamed in his last treatise of his sixth Ennead: Such a subject would be treated
today with fair suspicion by a large part of the sciences of man, especially if it
lacked, in a modern way, exactly the element that helped Plotinus to remain
within the limits of a very realistic realism: I mean the concept of change. Because
here exactly lies the modern side of the archaic idealism of Stelios Ramfos: it is
about the obvious preference of the philosopher for the modern individual
introspection, as we saw him interpret it above, as an interpretation of the world
and history within the absolute space of modern self-love with its uncontrollable
desire and all the related precious passions. Therefore, while the Plotinian subject
participates in the One to acquire its eternal and unchangeable existence, the
Ramfian subject seems to possess the One. breaking it into slippery pieces of
meaning for his own narcissistic benefit - that is, to dissolve the One limitatively
within the absolutized human Ego, which rapidly dreams of absolute pleasure,
power and domination. Because the purpose of the Gospel (which in a way still
crude but indeed poetic, prefigures and the nobler part of ancient philosophy) was
exactly the opposite: to baptize man, really and empirically, in the really other,
which is only the uncreated, and to change really and completely - not to justify
his alleged spiritual essence, the confused and oppressed, but mainly to find the
truth of it within the eternal truth of its Creator. Indeed, the great question is not
so much to save man's desire (after all, psychoanalysis offers convincing testimony
about the fact that exactly part of the drama of man lies in the fact that he
confuses his desire with his ephemeral demands), but mainly and primarily, in

77
Christ, to find it94. This is exactly and the meaning of the Chalcedonian
Christology as it crystallized in the understanding of the Sixth Ecumenical
Council: the human desire/natural will of Christ finds its fullness and truth in its
absolute loving opening to the divine natural will of Him. But for all this to
happen, the uncreated must first be left free to be really uncreated, to enter and
exit, incarnate or not, really in the world, to act in Spirit really within it, to
resurrect really if he wants the dead and to feed really five thousand!95. Let him be
mainly free to be a person who comes really and manically to meet my fate and
death. Without the above of the created, he is nothing but another toy in the
hands of the monstrous monolithic Ego of the ancient and other transcendental
idealism, which, let us not forget, created, besides the historical miracle of the
modern man, also the Gulags and the Auschwitz - regardless of whether his
current dress is significantly more elegant and seems admittedly incomparably

94
It is impossible for me not to discuss, at this point, the complete delusion, on the part of Ramfos, of the so-called ascetic
tradition, which is very passionate anyway. The author seems absolutely convinced that the realities of the body, the
psychosomatic Ego, the natural will, the passionate part of the soul, are completely absent from the medieval Patristic
literature! I have personally dedicated a series of books to show the opposite. The closed spirituality and the meaning of the
self, Orthodoxy and Modernism, Psychoanalysis and Orthodox theology, etc. The monophysite or monothelite delusion of
the Patristic theology certainly existed and still exists. But to attribute to the Fathers the alleged ascetic "good grazing of
nature" (as Maximus the Confessor called it, attributing it to the Monothelites and denouncing it), this is, to use an
expression of Ch. Stamouli, "a new scientific heresy" (see Eros and Death, Lycritas, 2009, p. 80).
95
It is truly paradoxical that both Ramfos and a group of Biblical scholars, mainly of Protestant origin, question whether
the famous Source of the Sayings of Jesus (Q) contains references to the knowledge of His identity as the natural Son of the
Father and as God, either to the Resurrection, or to His miracles (except two), or to His second coming, etc. Any unbiased
researcher easily finds the opposite: Full reference of all kinds of His miracles by Jesus Himself is found in (7, 18-19- 22-23;
full statement of the natural equality of Jesus as Son to God the Father in 010, 22; symbolic reference to His resurrection as
"sign of Jonah" in Q11, 16- 29-30 and to His death in 213, 34-35 (to the Cross in (14, 27). Clear reference of Jesus to His
second Coming as the Son of Man at the end in (17-23-24-26-27-Q12, 39-40, as well as to the final resurrection and
anointing in Q11, 31-32-Q22, 28. 30. The position then that the Source of the Sayings presents allegedly a "historical Jesus"
only human and different from the "preaching" Christ of the Church, as much as it is understandable as to its origin from
the dramatic dead ends of the modern Protestant hermeneutics for which we will not talk here (see hastily the work of R.
Gibellini, The theology of the 20th century. Bread of Life. 2002, pp. 39-69) is, scientifically at least, unsupported. It is
therefore understandable only in the perspective of this worldly egocentric introspection for which we speak in this text -
and of the consequent, as we said, loss of imagination…

78
more moved96. But, let us return after these to our original question that shakes
96
He had finished writing his text when Ramfos appeared on the show "At the Edges" of NET, on 9/10/09, interviewed by
Vicky Flessa. The topic of the discussion was initially Nihilism and the nihilistic anarchist, with the occasion of the recent
publication of the Catechism of the Revived Netsagiev, by Harmos editions. Ramfos reiterated here his strange theory that
Nihilism was born in Russia especially he says of the alleged alienation of Orthodoxy, which feeds strongly. I, who destroy
nihilistically everything under the impulse of the empty feeling and march that the deprivation of the world generates them.
And Orthodoxy is deeply endocosmic - this is exactly what the incarnation of God means, that is, the full penetration of the
uncreated divine energies of God's love in all the elements of the world without exception, for its completion - and the
asceticism of the coenobites is deeply social and not at all world-denying, since its purpose, according to the Fathers, is the
full dedication to the achievement of the fullness of love, with the comprehensive struggle against self-love. But then the
greatest anarchist nihilists are nothing but the Platonic and especially the Neoplatonic devotees of this inflated, exaggerated
idealistic Ego, which essentially, as it appears in the work of both Plotinus and the modern disciple of Ramfos, is identified
entirely with the Absolute. The discussion that took place liberates me personally, allowing me to say clearly what I wanted
only indirectly until now to articulate: the philosophical position of Ramfos is, finally, nihilism. It is indeed the expression
of the essence of nihilism, as Heidegger defines the latter in the seventh chapter of his classic work Nietzsche, it is the
(basically Platonic) desire of the subject as absolute, that is, as an unprejudiced subjectivity, as a condition of every objective
metaphysics of Being, so that then this subject tries, with the will for power, the quintessential work of Nihilism, that is, the
devaluation of all values, ontological and ethical, and their continuous reform - Platonism and even more Neoplatonism are
indeed at the foundations of European Nihilism, as I tried to show in my book The Closed Spirituality and the Meaning of
the Self. But even Ramfos is not alone and his nihilism is not only European, but also "Orthodox", since he has the main
characteristic of Russian Nihilism, which is also the only thing he received from Orthodoxy. I mean the strong futurological
or eschatological orientation of him, which, however, here is distorted into a complete destructiveness towards the past and
the triumphant optimism for the (paradisiacal) future of science, the happy knowledge and the all-encompassing alleged
overripe success of human relations - a common element in Bakunin, Pisarev, Turgenev, Netsagiev (and Ramfos). But, as I
already said, even this element is deeply distorted, both in the Russian nihilists and in Ramfos, since it essentially cancels the
past for the sake of a leap to the future; Orthodox theology considers that historicity is not abolished, but illuminated in the
light of the eschaton, being freed from the burden of human imperfection with repentance - which is nothing but the
self-education of man in the light of God's love. (I leave aside the discussion for the Muslim Nihilism or for the
Catholic-Protestant one, although it would not be difficult for me to prove that also the identity of these nihilisms includes
many of the metaphysical elements that Heidegger discovered in European Nihilism).
The biggest problem with Ramfos is his utterly superficial knowledge of Orthodox theology and spirituality, which
can only impress the ignorant. Self-taught, he wanted to study the Orthodox tradition from the outside and never from
within. He never understood, therefore, the sacred materialism and historiocentrism of Orthodoxy, its emphasis on the
sacred need for absolute protection of human natural reason and will, its conviction for the relational structure of human
nature and the world, its incarnationism and its profound respect for the body and the passive part of the soul - the whole
struggle of Hesychasm was to preserve the latter two from the destructive mania for ecstasy from the natural and human,
which characterized the neo-Platonizing Anti-Hesychasts! Ramfos only pays attention to the possible corruptions of the
Orthodox way of life, due to the long feudal and military captivity of the Orthodox world and never to its stunning
achievements. This, however, infuriates him a lot for his real not just spiritual but mainly political intentions! Indeed, the
colophon of the ensuing discussion was Ramfos' absolutely expected proposal for the separation of Church and State. This
proposal is in fact one of the most empty of content proposals that vaguely repeat lately in the Greek public life, since
everyone is free to mean it as they want. And as far as its economic part is concerned, things are simple: Since the Church
"bought" with the offer of 90% of its property, from the justice of '20 until the decade of '50, all its meager economic
benefits from the state, let this property be returned and let the benefits stop. Ramfos, however, seeks something much
more: he seeks the metaphysical marginalization of the Orthodox Church, naively thinking that this will bring healing to
the Greek public morals. And he does not see that it is precisely this marginalization, after the deliberate vilification of the
last decades, that increased the public corruption of all kinds. The perpetrators of the huge external public debt of the

79
the minds of the theologians: what will be our modern paradigm of use and
understanding of Patristic theology? A series of attractive new examples are
already in use. Here even Žižek made a dramatic turn and reads Christianity and
"exploits" it himself, with the same, moreover, Hegelian way97, which at the
beginning also Ramfos uses.
I think the answer is already faintly visible. As I said in the previous ones,
it is one thing to ask for the truth of God as my truth, something always
reasonable and fruitful, and another thing to consider that the truth that submits
to me the desire of my arbitrary narcissistic self-fulfillment as a compulsory truth
of God. We already have, with this way, two, different from each other, "matrices"
of examples for reading the Scriptures or the Fathers. The issue is indeed serious,
because it thus already implies the fact that all the above texts are read correctly
only within the same spirit that gave birth to them. This seems to be, moreover,
the existential meaning of the "infallibility" of the Church throughout the ages,
which of course was never expressed as a coercive repetition or palilalia, but as a
constantly new recovery of the event of Christ in the Holy Spirit. Therefore, in

Greek university and the natural environment, were anything but faithful and conscious members of the Orthodox Church
- "lest we be drunk". There were people who rather became arrogant and pretended the Orthodox way of life to gather the
esteem and votes of the poor people. And in any case, the Orthodox Church can only be blamed for mistakes that it actually
made and certainly not for the deliberate or not corruption of its morals and teachings by its real or supposed members,
which generates this chaotic and unscrupulous type that Ramfos rightly fears. If the Ramfian connection of Orthodoxy
and chaos was correct, then the multitude of Greek Orthodox communities abroad (which are usually much more
consistently "Orthodox" than the Greek ones) would not have produced a huge number of scientifically, spiritually,
politically, economically successful Greeks, who are literally, globally, in the first positions of social status. Why then does
not the same happen in Greece: Apart from the strong Ottoman remnants, as well as the accumulated experience of
passivity that accompanies them, passing as the most cunning within the same cells of the generations, I want to draw the
attention of my thinking readers to the following: it is about the heavy yoke of a collective depression of the Greeks because
of their deep and inexpressible guilt for the loss of the Empire and the long-lasting slavery.
As long as he lives in Greece, the Greek lives in the atmosphere of this depression, which manifests itself in an
absolutely hypocritical and pessimistic mood, which leads to a kind of practical and applied nihilism and hopelessness,
unique in Europe. The fact that this collective mental disorder only worsens things constantly is something that all social
psychologists know! The bad thing is that the Ramfos-type "explanations" of the drama exacerbate the hypocritical
depression and increase dramatically the thirst for a crazy leap into the future, without the weight of the basic evil past…
97
See the work of Bogdan Lubardić, «The Crushed Nightingale: Passio Se cundum Slavoj Žižek», at Philotheos 9, 2009,
pp. 343-351.

80
order to orient ourselves as correctly as possible, it would be necessary to set two
parallel series of questions. The first series could be the following: Do we believe or
not that there is one, preserved in the Church, experience of true communion
with the things of God in Christ and in the Holy Spirit, do we see, moreover, this
experience as an inseparable part of the Christian existence regardless of historical
epoch and social conditions? Do we believe, moreover, that this experience is an
experience of ontological transformation (change of the mode of existence) not
only of thought, but also of the social historical (for example, the selfless
philanthropy) and also of the natural / cosmological (for example, the miracle or
the gifts of the saints)? If the answer to the above is affirmative, then a new series
of questions follows: If this experience is given, is its extension legitimate, without
changing its Christological terms, to dimensions of historicity and culture new
and possibly completely different from those known until now? Is it possible to
reformulate and deepen its vital dimensions in new languages of thought and new
forms of art and science? Is it, moreover, possible to justify the deepest spiritual
demands of humanity through this experience (without a necessary clash with the
other religions, but with a good faith on the one hand justification of their deepest
demands and on the other hand a loving correction of them) without the full
identification of it with the data of an autonomous, self-satisfied and
self-proclaimed self-fulfillment?
If the answer to these last questions tends to be also affirmative, then it is
possible to deepen the modern reflexivity by giving it new horizons. This is
something that would perhaps save the reflexivity itself from the dangers of its
excessive attachment to utopia98, something that in reality could destroy it,
undermining its realism. Let us not forget that, in the postmodern frameworks
towards utopia (which are those within which Ramfos also moves) the tradition is
justified only in the light of the knowledge whose prestige is not derived from the

98
Giddens, p. 213.

81
tradition. Rightly Giddens considers the thus justified tradition as spurious, as he
accepts its identity from criteria that are not in reality its own. Thus, while in
pre-modern cultures reflexivity is limited mainly to the reinterpretation and
clarification of tradition, in the modern ones what weighs is the dynamics of the
future. Sources of the dynamism of modernity the axes determine the type of its
future and tending towards utopia reflexivity *Giddens finds three99, the
infinitization of space-time, the development of mechanisms of disconnection
that detach human activity from its usual limited spatiotemporal boundaries and
the reflexive appropriation of knowledge, which is energetic and servile to the new
social goals. I consider the above findings of Giddens as basically correct. What
would constitute an exceptional theological aid, however, for a widening of the
above problematization (which, in reality, also reveals the tragic nature of
postmodern reflexivity, for which Heraclitus would say that it already constitutes
-due to high individualism- Hubris, as it already clashes with the Law and the
Measure that govern and govern the world and therefore soon, according to the
thought of the significant Italian psychoanalyst Luigi Joja, a punitive Nemesis is
expected)100 is doubtless the Pneumatology. The real problem of postmodernity is
not that of postmodernity as much as it thinks. And this is because the conquests
of it (the famous "postmodern achievements" of our modernizers) are absolutely
inscribed in the dynamics of the traditions that seem to be abandoned, and
especially of Christianity: the rights of man, the freedom of conscience, the
abolition of slavery, the equality of races and genders, the deification of power and
the state, etc., emerge in the first place from the Gospel. On the other hand, its
problems are also the result of a long philosophical-theological evolution, which
preserves some common characteristics, from Augustine to Derrida. Both at the

99
Giddens, p. 73.
100
See the work of Luigi Joja, Growth and Guilt. Psychology and Limits of Development, Amabasi, Milan 1993 Greek
translation by Mel. Meletiadis, Hubris and Nemesis. Psychology and Limits of Development and Consumerism, Univ.
Studio Press, Thessaloniki 1991.

82
beginning of this book here and in other threads of mine, I tried to show how
such a fundamental common characteristic is the inability to synthesize the
over-dried and exaggerated Western Ego with the reality of society and its
consequences. According to my perception, as it is analyzed in the first chapter of
this book, the Orthodox personalism, which undoubtedly culminates in the work
of Metropolitan John Zizioulas, failed to proceed convincingly in this work. The
main cause of this failure in the work of the latter is, in my opinion, the
inadequate understanding of the Patristic Trinitarianism which, as I said, places
the dictated otherness in the place of the dialogical reciprocity which, only this, in
my opinion, constitutes the Being (and the very nature of beings) as a society, thus
introducing the communication into the very Being. I will not repeat here the
arguments of this research, but I would like to emphasize the importance of
Pneumatology for this direction.
Because indeed only within the framework of ecclesiastical Pneumatology
is it possible to understand how the great problem of postmodern reflection is also
that it clearly fails to connect its over-emerging subject with society, the body and
history. Only within the framework of Pneumatology is it possible to understand
that there is no truth in any individual interpretation, if it does not constitute a
community, human, cosmological and historical - since it is precisely at the limits
of theological Pneumatology and only that the ultimate truth of each of the
beings is proved inseparable from the social coexistence of all, in such a way that
everything is true as members of one and only Body. Through Pneumatology we
also understand that (and fortunately!) all the real historical identities, collective
and individual, come from the future, because both man and his world are
becoming towards the future direction of a fuller opening to God, as exactly the
Christology proves - opening which is activated exactly with the Grace of the Holy
Spirit. We understand, however, also that, in some way, this opening has, within
the Church, been accomplished, that its constantly creative is precisely that it has

83
already been established as such a constantly new possibility of incarnation of the
Word within the flesh of the changing world and especially as a society and
community of the same essence of men. Therefore, the theological modern
reflection is not hindered, because of its future orientation, to see its truth in
continuity with the historical community, that is, with its relational, embodied
and interlingual subjectivity101. The theological modern reflection lives in the
Spirit of freedom not as a rupture but as a verification of a past historical and
social, precisely to the extent that this past was also a past of freedom. It is of
course the analogical / cooperative / dialogical freedom of the children of God102,
which has a human-generating, ontological, that is, character, since what man is
we will learn only in the eschaton and moreover this knowledge as well as this
development of man in society, within the incarnate God, will never stop
(motionless stasis). Therefore, in the Spirit and only, the society, the history and
ultimately the tradition are not a negation but the genus paraladyno precisely of
the freedom of the person - in the camolexia the support and the verification of it,
as in the Spirit the temporary and transient is distinguished from the incorruptible
and remaining element of them to reveal the same constantly unifying the
universes freedom behind them. In the Spirit, that is, the critical of the tradition
that "modernizes" it is exercised with fruitfulness, not destroying but highlighting
its deeper truth. Because this freedom is ultimately a theopoiesis, an absolute
loving self-offering of God to the world, which expects a similar anthropopoiesis,
our loving self-offering that will give birth to the real man within it.
But the reason for the relationship of Orthodoxy with postmodernity is
necessarily long. Touristocracies, Babylonian Western captivities, nationalisms,
along with the delusions of the old autocracy - Orthodoxy seems to be still
wavering between a mature ecumenical destiny (which includes the sincere

101
See my book The Apophatic Ecclesiology of the Homoousios, 5th study, Armos, Athens 2009.
102
See my book Theopoiesis, ch. 3, Armos, Athens 2007.

84
dialogue both with the other Confessions or religions, and with the modern
thought) and a self-satisfied or agoraphobic provincialism. I have the impression,
however, that such a mature ecumenical exit will succeed genuinely, only if the
dialogue that will be attempted is from the beginning a theological dialogue and
not just a rhetorical one. It is usual in the last centuries to meet either theologians
who know poorly the things of theology, but are enthusiastic admirers of the
respective modernity, or Theologians who know about theology, but are enclosed
in their pious admiration for it. To paraphrase a word of Lacan, which includes
both the definition and the therapy of neurosis, the Orthodox theologians usually
either speak theologically but do not converse with modernity, or converse with
modernity, but do not speak theologically. When they manage to converse with
modernity and at the same time speak theologically, a new interesting era of
Orthodox theology will dawn: this is the new "paradigm" that I would personally
propose, with the full conviction that the events towards this direction are still at
the beginning. The issue, therefore, is not whether the new synthesis will be called
"neopatristic", according to Florovsky, "metapatristic", "antipatristic", or whatever
else those who dream of it want. Without a proper Trinitarian theology, so that we
have a valid ethics and ecclesiology, without a balanced Christology, so that we
have a meaningful anthropology and cosmology, without finally a sufficient
Pneumatology, so that we know the way to the above, the encounter with
modernity will be nothing but a neurotic theoretical laughter. The effort to lead
the contemporary Orthodox theology to a substantive relationship with the
current historical context (contextualization) is therefore desirable only when it is
primarily about theology; in this sense, every great theology was, of course and
inviolably, "contextual".
It may be taken as the vanity of the creator, but as a person with a deep
Western education who came into contact with the Orthodox Church and
theology at a moment when the fundamental questions of his spirit had already

85
been formed, I took instinctively and from the beginning the road to a new,
theological this time, "contextual" encounter with the postmodernity from which
I come. Finding myself naturally in the space of academic theology, I often
encountered the two complementary phenomena - either the atheological chatter
with postmodernity, or the traditionalist enclosure of theology with its delirious
side effects. Neither of the two sides forgave me the construction of a series of key
concepts that can, in my opinion, fertilize this theological encounter: eschatology
ontologically interpreted, the homoousion and reciprocity in Trinitarian theology
and anthropology, the reintroduction of the concept of analogy / dialogue in
theological thinking, the unified psychosomatic apophatic ecclesiology of the
homoousion, desire as a social natural will in theology and psychoanalysis, the
reinterpretation of ecstasy as a connection and not a separation of nature and
person, the attempt of a new description of the relationship between the two
latter, the renegotiation of a concept of communion beyond the formulations of
neo-Orthodox personalism, the concepts of microhistory and existential state, are
some of the key concepts. And other Orthodox thinkers of the newer generation
also move, I think, already towards this direction, although their work usually
proceeds with characteristic difficulty. Many will have to work towards this goal, it
is the work of the next theological generations, a work that undoubtedly
inaugurated, despite our possible theoretical disagreements, the famous
theological generation of the '60s. There is one, I think, implicit spiritual
condition here: the syntheses that will endure will ultimately be only those that
will bear on them, like that old Temple of Israel, not only the knowledge and
science of man, but also the seal of God…

86
 Chapter 4

ECSTASY AS DESCENT
The Palamic Background of the Theology of Father Sophrony103

103
First published in the volume Elder Sophrony, the Theologian of the Uncreated Light (Proceedings of the Orthodox
Scientific Conference, supervised by Georgios Mantzaridis, Holy Great Monastery of Vatopedi, Mount Athos 2008), pp.
585-598.

87
 I

The theological discussion about the theology of Fr. Sophrony, although it

has just begun, promises to be extremely prophetic for the identity of Orthodox
theology in the immediate future. And this is because Fr. Sophrony is not, as I
hope to show later, simply an "ascetic writer", as a group of writers who focus their
attention on what is wrongly called "spirituality" and perhaps more correctly
"neptic tradition" have prevailed to be called. Indeed, many of the "neptic", as they
are usually called, writers show little or no interest in the incorporation of the
whole of theology into their work. This of course does not diminish the work at
all, since what equally interests Orthodox theology is the highly empirical, neptic
and repentant, theological epistemology, without which any kind of eucharistic or
ecclesiological ontology is in danger of being a hollow and incomprehensible
transcendental ecstasy. Very few, however, of the Fathers, among whom the saints
Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Maximus the Confessor and Gregory Palamas,
attempt the deep synthesis of the ascetic tradition with its anthropological and
theological presuppositions and consequences. Fr. Sophrony Sakharov, I think,
belongs to this very last category of Fathers (because it is indeed a newer Father of
the Church) and this is something that I would like, quite introductory, to show
in the present presentation. The purpose of the text that follows is to prove
proleptically that the theology of Fr. Sophrony belongs specifically to the tradition
of Orthodox Hesychasm, as it was expressed, with the creative synthesis of the
previous Fathers, by St. Gregory Palamas, as well as that this theology belongs to
the tradition of the great theological syntheses, where exactly, in the most valid
way, the whole spectrum of Patristic theology (especially, in this case, of
theological anthropology) is highlighted again.

88
 II

This obliges us to trace from the beginning the meaning of ecstasy, the
ascetic ascent, that is, to God, within the limits of the Greek Patristic tradition. For
this purpose, we are two kinds of such ecstasy to God, within the limits of the
above tradition: a) the Platonic ecstasy and b) the hesychastic ecstasy, the crisis of
which culminates in the Palamite work (which constitutes the content of the
largest part of the older Patristic literature). Let us see these two kinds of ecstasy
separately.
The Platonic ecstasy is the one that reached its peak expression in the
works of Origen. It is related to the similar theory of philosophical knowledge of
the One, the Neoplatonic philosopher Plotinus (who was, most likely, a fellow
student of Origen in the philosophical school of the former Christian and later
Neoplatonic philosopher Ammonius Saccas). I remind you that Plotinus believes
that the soul of man, which is also his essence, is by nature related to the divine
and, wandering in heavenly places at first, fell from his mistake to this earth and
was punished by being attached to this material body which is completely alien to
the real "atheistic" essence of man104. The philosopher must rediscover the divine
through the ecstatic theory (which exactly comes out of matter and creation, since
they are essentially identified with the non-being or the evil), he is the one who has
the being by contemplation, according to the philosopher. So the soul in Plotinus
is divided into a higher soul, whose essence is the intellect, and a lower soul,
connected with the passive part of the soul and attached to the needs of the body.
The philosopher must abandon both the body and this lower soul and through
his intellect to mingle with the One and assimilate completely from it, in such a
104
For the exposition that follows, as well as the relevant bibliography, see Fr. N. Loudovikos, The Closed Spirituality and
the Meaning of the Self, Hellenic Letters, 2nd ed. Athens 1900, pp. 222-227- of the same. Orthodoxy and Modernization
Nikos Athens 2006, pp. 156-162- N. Loudovikos, Ontology celebrated Remarks of an Orthodox on Radical Orthodoxy, in
the volume Encounter between Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy, Ashgate, 2009, pp. 141-155.

89
way as to become one with it - "one in both". Similarly, the Christian Origen
believes that the soul of man is by nature related to God and is divided into a
higher, which has as its essence the intellect and pre-existed of the specific man,
wandering in the immaterial until the terrible moment of satiety, where exactly
because of satiety will happen and its fall into materiality, and into a lower soul,
consisting of the irascible and the appetitive part of the soul. This lower part is
supposed to have been added after the fall (which is nothing but the creation of
man, since in Origen the creation and the fall are identified) and is due exactly to
the fallen tendency of the soul to be connected with a body. Spirituality here is the
theory of the ecstatic withdrawal from the corporeality of God, through the
intellect of man related to God. Origen is a trichotomist: he admits, besides the
soul and the body, the presence of the spirit in man. Human spirit is a kind of
created participation in the Spirit of God, as well as the place of the latter within
man, regardless of whether he is baptized or not - another Platonic legacy. The
body is of course only the punishment of the soul, but the Christian Origen can
not but believe that there will be a form of survival in the end, under the form of
the "ethereal" body of the angels. The "ethereal" body is an invention that frees us
from both materiality and the possibility of the perfect spiritual disappearance of
the material creation in the end - but it does not belong to Christian theology at
all...

III

This one-dimensional Platonic spirituality, which leaves out of the

communion with God the body and the material creation as well as the passive
part of the soul, is the exact opposite of Hesychasm. Its correction did not of
course wait for St. Gregory Palamas, but began immediately, and St. Gregory of

90
Nyssa, even accused as supposedly more Platonic than all, condemns the theory
that the intellect of man is by nature related to God. The intellect, as well as the
soul, is created, a creature, while He is uncreated. The gap between them is infinite
and is bridged only by the Grace of God. The participation in God happens not
only through the intellect but through the whole man, says Gregory, even if
sometimes he seems to hesitate for the eternal future of the passive part of the
soul105. He who decisively spoke of the union of man and God, as "synergy"
(something that Nyssa called "synergy") between them, is certainly St. Dionysius
the Areopagite and this tendency culminates undoubtedly in St. Maximus the
Confessor106. The Confessor denies expressly that the essence of man is the soul
alone or the body alone or even the sum of the two, and declares enigmatically
that man is his "whole". This last phrase means that man is not simply a
psychosomatic whole but is also the place of the Whole, he has the ability to
become a distinct, special and unique hypostasis of the whole created and
uncreated being, by Grace107. Let us not forget that the theology of St. Maximus
about the uncreated logoi tells us exactly that: that God "says", that is, he proposes
to the beings the way of their being, expecting from them their own created logos,
their answer that is, which will lead, through the theanthropic (synergistic or
co-operative) dialogue, whose Incarnation of the Logos is the ultimate framework,
to the fullness of the natural mode of existence of the beings in the end, to the
Kingdom of God.
A bright flower of this tradition is undoubtedly the work of St. Symeon
the New Theologian. There is no room in this introduction for a more extensive
reference108, but all the readers of this excellent ascetic-theological work know that

105
See Fr. N. Loudovikos, Orthodoxy and Modernization, pp. 195-197.
106
See Fr. N. Loudovikos, Theopoiesis: The Postmodern Theological Dilemma, Armos, Athens 2007, pp. 32-35.
107
See Fr. N. Loudovikos, The Closed Spirituality and the Meaning of the Self, pp. 303 1. Orthodoxy and Modernizations,
pp. 73-86, 167-169.
108
For a long discussion of the anthropological and theological presuppositions and consequences of the work of St.
Symeon, see Fr. N. Loudovikos, The Closed Spirituality… p. 105-178.

91
here the union of man and God in Christ is described as an event in which,
literally, every member of the body and every part of the soul of the believer
participates, without any exception. The whole man becomes God by Grace,
without confusion of the created and the uncreated but also without any distance
between them. Therefore, the heir and the supreme exponent of this spirit-bearing
tradition, which is nothing else than what we call Hesychasm, is undoubtedly St.
Gregory Palamas. The Orthodox theologians have unfortunately little realized the
fact that what the Palamite theology mainly fights is exactly the Neoplatonic
anthropology and epistemology (within or outside the Church), as it was
described above. The same holy and at the same time deeply anti-idealist and we
would say, literally "materialistic" character of Hesychasm, is exactly what makes
him deeply contemporary and deeply capable to answer the most shocking
questions that arise today both by philosophy and by the sciences of man,
including neuroscience"109. The main characteristics of the work of Palamas are
the following: first, full acceptance of the passive part of the soul, that is, the
emotions and the desire, in the perspective of the communion with God. The
saints are not only "theorists" but also "communers" of God, says Palamas110,
implying here the Macarian union of the heart: we do not only think of God but
also love Him and desire Him and only then we participate in Him. Second, full
acceptance of the body. The body has, according to the Triads in defense of the
hesychasts, "implied spiritual dispositions"111, that is, it can be spiritualized as a
beloved creature of God along with the soul and "co-eternalize"112 with it and
consequently, third, the union with God is a union of the heart and the intellect
and the body. The passions, says the hesychast archbishop of Thessaloniki, not
only should not be lost, as the Stoics taught us, for example, but they should be
109
See a first such discussion in Fr. N. Loudovikos, “Eschatological Cosmology and Anthropology: The Apophaticism in
Philosophy, Science and Theology Today”, in Holy Synod. 1. Mytilene 2006, pp. 15-22.
110
Ibid. Z. 12. 38.
111
St. Gregory Palamas, Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts, 2, 2, 10.
112
Ibid., 2, 3, 50.

92
transformed in the Holy Spirit, changing orientation and object, in order to
embrace the whole real man by the real God by Grace.
We approach after these the essence of our subject. What is the way of this
new, not Platonic this time, ascent or ecstasy to God? The description that St.
Gregory makes in his Z 'Antirrhetic (11, 36) seems amazing. There are two kinds
of ascent to God, he tells us. The first is done through the intellect and only. This
is the ascent of the philosophers to God and Palamas does not hesitate to call it
plainly "fantastic", that is, not real and full of imaginary idols for God. The second
kind of ascent is that of the ascetic theologians. This happens, as the hesychast
saint describes it, "with every kind of creature, so that the image may be accurate" -
with the whole creation, so that the image may be complete.
We are in the theological and anthropological heart of Hesychasm. The
ecstasy-ascent to God presupposes, he tells us in other words, in order to be real
and true, a previous deep movement of descent or emptying, so that man may
bear and lift up to God not only himself but the whole creation together - the
other human beings and the rest of the created beings. The cross of this descent is
the only inviolable condition for the resurrectional ascent of the believer to God.
The ecstasy is not thus a movement out of the nature of the beings (as exactly the
contemporary Orthodox personalist theologians understand the person today,
considering it exactly, in a Platonic way, as ecstasy/exit from the nature, identified
with the blind necessity or even the fall), but it is a personal ecstasy of the diastatic
created nature to God. Moreover, the ecstasy/ascent is decisively and only
personal, not in the sense that the specific person is abolished but, on the contrary,
this last one is exactly catholicized. Ecstasy and communal catholicization seem
thus to coincide: the one proves the truth of the other. This fact allows us to speak
of the ecstatic principle as descent, a cruciform movement to circumscription and
bearing of the whole Being, which, this and only, proves that the ecstasy as ascent
is real and according to God true. It is with this exact sense that we can exactly

93
support that the Orthodox Hesychasm, when it is theologically healthy, does not
constitute anything else but lived ecclesiology...

IV

Let us come then now after these to the exposition of the work of Fr.
Sophrony and especially to a question that occupies the researchers of his work
very much, the question of the emptying. I think it is feasible to show that Fr.
Sophrony is a hesychast, and especially under the sense of the Palamite Hesychasm
as we saw it above. I think that there are two forms of the emptying,
complementary moreover, in the work of Fr. Sophrony. The first is the form of the
"divine abandonment"113. If the divine abandonment is considered as a wise
pedagogy of God's love for the ascetic, then this pedagogy is nothing else but an
attempt to heal us from God of every trace of a "hedonistic" atomistic enjoyment
of Grace, a tendency that dwells unconsciously in the fallen man, pushing him
unknowingly to a possible temptation of narcissistic chatter, even in the light of
God's Grace; What else is this wise pedagogy of divine abandonment but a
philanthropic impulse of God for a social opening of the soul of the ascetic to the
emptying embrace of the suffering fellow human and the suffering creation, in
order to ascend with them, and only with them, to God? Thus perhaps the fact is
explained that the greatest divine abandonment is not usually suffered by the
simple faithful but mainly by the intellectual ascetics and faithful (and such are
usually most of the Fathers), since they mainly have a greater temptation than the
others to chatter in an individual-intellectual theory of God with the possible
narcissism of it, leaving the rest of creation somewhat on the margin. As it has

113
See Archim. Sophrony, We will see God as He is, Holy Monastery of St. John the Baptist, Essex England 1992, pp.
193-220.

94
already been shown, the second kind of emptying, to which the pedagogical and
philanthropic divine abandonment leads, is the grace of circumscription, it is in
other words exactly what Fr. Sophrony calls the genesis of the hypostasis within
the Gethsemane prayer-ascetic and liturgical for the whole world. Under this
sense, thanks to the first emptying, the Grace is given for the second. As a wise
therapy of the ailment of self-love, the divine abandonment, thus, not only does
not generate despair but gratitude and doxology for the true love of God that leads
to the ontological completion of man:

"Being carried by the Spirit of God to the prayer for the whole world, to the
participation in the prayer of the Lord in Gethsemane, we suddenly see a
divine wonder in ourselves: The spiritual sun rises within us, the name of
which is hypostasis (person). This is in us the beginning of a new form of
existence, already immortal. Then we receive the Revelation of the
Hypostatic Principle in the Holy Trinity, not superficially, not intellectually,
but in the depths of our being. We see in the Light the greatest mystery of
the Anarchic Being: the Hypostatic God, the Living One; the One in
Trinity of Hypostases; the God of love, the Only True One "114.

With the prayer for the whole world we give more substance to the
common human essence. With the prayer of love for our homoousian humanity115
we become dynamic hypostases of the whole human essence as well as of the
whole creation, while previously we were existentially simply logical parts of the
human and the created in general essence. We have here again the essence of the
Palamite Hesychasm: ecstasy through descent, man to give humble hypostasis to

114
Archim. Sophrony, op., p. 301.
115
Beginning. Sophrony, op. cit., p. 309: "In such a prayer, the consubstantiality of the human race is lived. Through it, the
ontological meaning of the “second commandment” is revealed to us. The whole Adam becomes one Man - Humanity".

95
the whole creation, lifting it up to God, imitating thus by grace the work exactly
and the movement of the incarnate Logos. With the words of Fr. Sophrony:

"Through Him (Christ) the character of God's love was revealed to us. This
perfection lies in the fact that this love is humble, that is, it is offered
without reservation. The Father in the generation of the Son empties
himself completely. But also the Son returns everything to the Father. This
exact action of the perfect emptying was performed by the Lord in His
incarnation, in Gethsemane and on Golgotha"116.

What God ultimately teaches man is nothing less than His own way of
existence. But it is not a matter of divine communion in existence: the
person-hypostasis is an active event of en-christosis through Grace and not a
restful ecstasy towards a fantastic freedom, which in the depths despises and
identifies with the fall and the blind necessity, in a Platonic or Kantian way, the
nature of the beings, as some famous contemporary Orthodox personalists want.
With this martyric-ascetic way, man becomes

"bearer of the fullness of the theanthropic being through the union with
Christ in prayer, which assimilates him to Him. A rare privilege combining
extreme situations of the passions of love and its triumph. Man, reborn
from such a prayer, through the life-giving pain, enters slowly into an active
sense of the resurrection of his soul"117.

We are in the deep core of Hesychasm. We see here the identification of the
personal resurrection, the ecstatic ascent to God, with the living circumscription

116
Beginning. Sophrony, op. cit., p. 382.
117
Archim. Sophrony, op. cit., p. 389.

96
of all things, with the carrying of the whole suffering creation to the feet of God.
The human interiority coincides here with the deepest sociality, in such a way that
the one verifies the other. The authentic inwardness is expressed thus as humble
emptying-cruciform sociality, which, in turn, can only be achieved with the
humble emptying of the inner man.
In the thought of the newer Orthodox personalists, one encounters an
incurable allergy to any form of interiority, introversion or even conscious ascetic
life, things that are taken collectively as alleged psychologism. These theologians118
unfortunately understand very little of the Patristic ascetic tradition and, in
particular, the theology of Fr. Sophrony. Here, interiority or introversion is not
psychologism but pure ontology. The "inner man" (a purely Biblical expression, as
is well known) is nothing but the space of the gnomonic will, the freedom of man,
the space where the mystery of the catholicization of man is accomplished
(consciously, of course, and in conscience and not unconsciously or
unconsciously!) through the humble and kenotic "synergy" of the will of man
with the will of God in Christ.

A final remark: the opinion has been expressed that Fr. Sophrony, as
regards the theology of kenosis, follows the Russian religious-philosophical line as
it is expressed mainly in the theology of Sergius Bulgakov. Indeed, Fr. Sophrony
may have received an external inspiration from Bulgakov, but he deeply corrected
the problem that, anyway, is irrigated by the philosophies of Hegel and Schelling.
In these philosophies, both unity and kenosis are logically preconceived dialectical

118
For a critique of these theologians as regards these issues, see my book Orthodoxy and Modernism, pp. 72-82, 84-86.

97
necessities, necessarily abstract and impractical119. In Fr. Sophrony, on the
contrary, unity, as kenotic perichoresis of beings and their elevation to God, is not
a preconceived necessity or an abstract intellectual Ecstasy, but a step by step
sacrificially active love. As in St. Gregory Palamas, the consubstantial here is
activated within creation cruciformly, with all the soul with mind, with heart,
with love and with all the body that also participates martyrically in the ascetic
struggle. The whole man becomes love, entering, in communion with the whole
creation, into the light of the real divine knowledge. There is, however, a subtle
difference between the kenosis of Christ and our kenosis: while Christ empties
himself for us, we empty ourselves, as we said, first for the imperfection of
ourselves (God-forsakenness) and second for the others (perichoresis). Only after
the first phase, as a pedagogy in the existential opening, is it possible for man to
follow Christ into the Hades of the supreme narcissistic trauma that is the
unrequited love of the consubstantial perichoresis of the others. But only in this
way, only after this paradoxical ecstatic descent, is the real ascent to God possible…

VI

However, I cannot close this introduction without two final words about
the ecumenical significance of Fr. Sophrony's theology. A whole introduction
could be devoted to this topic, but there is no room for that anymore. Indicatively,
I would like to emphasize that Western theology knows very well the intellectual
ascent to God, without the body and the community, mainly through Thomas
Aquinas. It is at the critical point of beginning to understand the vain idealism,
the Freudian atomism and the passivity that this ascent entails, since it does not

119
Cf. also the third study in my book The Infallible Ecclesiology of the Consubstantial, Armos, Athens 2002.

98
have either real sociality or dialogical synergy of God and man!120. There is a great
need for Orthodox theologians today to speak to the West about this ascent
through the perichoretic descent, about the psychosomatic and social
participation of all beings in God, which corrects the disastrous
phenomenal-intellectual view of Him. Orthodox theology has unbelievably
delayed in understanding and explaining all this...

VII

The greater the intellectual wealth, Fr. Sophrony tells us, the more
inexplicably painful is the God-forsakenness for the social opening of the soul. But
we are always in the blessed context of Hesychasm. As St. Gregory Palamas, so Fr.
Sophrony ascends to God without any internal division, no psychosomatic
separation, no separation from the others, no rejection of any passion - since it is
possible for everything to be transformed. As St. Gregory Palamas, so Fr.
Sophrony was a presence of Christ in the world...

120
Cf. Fr. N. Loudovikos, Theopoiesis, op. cit., p. 29.03.

99
 EPILOGUE
Towards a Postmodern Theological Ontology?

100
 The work of articulating a postmodern voluntaristic ontology is, at best,
in progress, in the Orthodox theological scene. The important thing is that the
work has begun, albeit from the hesychasms and the self-evident of some older
epochs. Let us not forget that the reading of the very sources of Orthodoxy is
extremely recent, since it began substantially only from the previous theological
generation. The interventions and revisions should therefore be considered as the
most natural and expected event. There are therefore interpretations, more or less
valid or fruitful, but for this they will certainly not be decided only by their
authors. The generation to which the writer belongs, I think, has already expressed
by word and deed its gratitude to the previous theological generation, the famous
generation of the '60s. It is natural, however, to seek also a creative continuation,
which will utilize and extend what was important.
In the chapters of this book, a small critical confrontation with
ontological magnitudes that were introduced by the previous generation was
attempted - as well as a reference to the work of a newer Father of the Church, Fr.
Sophrony Sakharov, although here we are talking more about discipleship than
criticism. My remarks, then, which aim precisely at the revival of the
problematization for a modern theological ontology, could perhaps be
summarized as follows:
1. The ontology of the person, the work of a whole theological generation,
needs to be freed from the bonds of a transcendental idealism of the subject,
which limit it immensely and make it clearly pre-modern. The teaching of
the Fathers about nature and person is irrelevant to the idealistic/existential

101
 ontological oppositions between them and it is exactly this fact that makes it
extremely timely and capable of communicating with whatever is most
recent in psychology, neuroscience and the most advanced contemporary
understanding of philosophy, offering at the same time a much wider
horizon.
2. The Trinitarian theology of the above authors seems to favor an equally
idealistic understanding of the monarchy of the Father. But this way it
comes into indirect conflict with the data of the Ecumenical Councils,
disregards the value of the homoousion and subsequently does not properly
utilize the monarchy and misunderstands the hierarchy within the Trinity,
overlooking the depth and extent of the reciprocity in the Trinitarian
theology, to the benefit of the idealistic exaltation of the Paternal hypostasis
by deed. But without the above, the possibility of a peculiar kind of
totalitarianism is created, whose consequences will appear both in the
ontology of the relations and in the Ecclesiology.
3. The Christology, also accountable to the above idealistic understanding of
the person, ignores the truth of the exchange of the natural properties,
attaching the anthropology to a practically inactive and without will
passivity, where salvation tends to become escape rather than
transformation of nature.
4. As a consequence of such a Christology, the deeply significant Patristic
concept, which precisely describes ontologically the way of communion of
divine and human nature, the concept of analogy/synergy/dialogue, a
concept that moreover could create a syncretistic dialogue with the
postmodern sciences of man, disappears almost completely.
5. As a consequence of all the above, the Ecclesiology wanders between a
structural, idealistic episcopomonism (in the image of the idealistic
exaltation of the person of the Father without the prerequisites of the

102
 ontological reciprocity - despite the effort to avoid this) on the one hand,
and a theology of the charisms on the other, which are not understood
satisfactorily. This deficient understanding happens because of the disposal
of the methexic/mimetic dimension of the ecclesiastical structures due to
the above Christology and together with the forgetfulness of the concept
and the reality of the analogy/synergy. A realistic, healthy synthesis between
a Christocentric and at the same time Pneumatological understanding of
the episcopal charisma, simultaneously with a similar understanding of all
the other charisms, so that the bishop initiates the charisms into a unity that
happens not simply outside them or above them, but literally within them,
is impossible to be achieved this way. Let us leave here aside the significant
problem of the relations between Theology and Economy that is created.
But, about these elsewhere…
6. And certainly, the theological epistemology, under the above conditions,
does not need us so much and for this reason it is usually dismissed as
psychologism. The text dedicated to Fr. Sophrony exists in this book to
show how different the Orthodox theological epistemology is from
psychologism. How much, that is, it is bound with the ontology, such
epistemology, as well as the asceticism or the ethics, in the context of the
Patristic Orthodox theology.
7. As a totalitarian reaction to the stagnations of the contemporary Orthodox
theology, Ramfos, and whoever agrees with him, chooses a totalitarian
rupture with the Orthodox theology as a whole and a disorderly escape to
an archaic transcendental idealism, without however the element of the
participation of the latter, to the benefit of the most barren side of the
contemporary introspectiveness, which deifies essentially the most
immediate self-fulfillment, subordinating everything to its passions.

103
 The happy feeling that is produced after the above realizations is how, for
reasons that concern the very truth of the Church and its theology, the
hermeneutical reading that we attempt is much closer to the contemporary,
postmodern ontological questions than it would be possible initially to suspect.
The modern and postmodern emergence of the ontological value of the body, the
community, the unconscious, the psychosomatic participation, the wisdom of the
natural and biological, signify simultaneously and the emergence of the value of
the related theological ideas and help also and their reading towards the correct
direction. The orthodox theology can thus contribute to the building of a
postmodern ontology, finding at the same time itself the truth of it, beyond partial
interventions towards ontological directions, which today could only be
considered as picturesque. A bidirectional fertilization is produced thus, without
losing the truth neither of the postmodern questions nor of the orthodox
realization of them.
I say all the above because of a feeling of academic and pastoral
responsibility. In the international theological becoming, such a critical dialogue,
which moreover proposes and clears, even if often different from the ones in use
until now solutions, would be considered a very natural and almost desirable
event. In Greece something like this not only is not encouraged, but I fear that it is
considered almost as a hostile act. If something like this happens anyway, this will
be due rather to the feeling of insecurity of the ones being judged and not at all to
the feelings of the one writing.
Of whom the joy lies in the fact of the more and more frequent meeting,
in the work of fellow craftsmen of his, similar or related elements of a creative and
critical assimilation of the openings of the previous theological generation, which
creates hopes of progress in the building of a postmodern theological ontology.

104
 EPILOGUE
with the Occasion of a Wooden121 Criticism…

121
WooDeeWoo: In Greek, a verbal or written form of speech that is “wooden”/”ξύλινος” means it's something expected or
standardized in the same way as a stereotype, trope, or cliché that solely exists because of their monotonous and noticeably
repetitive nature, so a wooden criticism is not only a critique that definitely isn't anything out of the ordinary and
something the targeted readers should anticipate while rolling their eyes but is also something deceptive in the same way as a
straw man fallacy.

105
 In theological discussion, as in any real scientific or philosophical dialogue,
the only ones who really contribute are the emancipated and primarily researching
and thinking participants and never the followers. From a psychodynamic point of
view, a follower is someone who has, more or less, identified the ideal of his ego
with the object of his attachment and suffers narcissistically even if he imagines it
and only questions it, even minimally. The followers then think by necessity with
slogans, as Ionesco said, and therefore do not think at all. They treat the dissenter
as hostile and not as a discussant and especially with a characteristic ... wooden
way where you say the accusations are pre-made, the voice of the other is negligible
and his condemnation is given. I have not yet met even one fully convinced
follower (and not a researcher) of Pergamon who is even rudimentary capable of
moving in the field of Patristic theology; the certainties that the theology of the
Metropolitan promises seem to make many people complacent about any kind of
personal research - something for which he is not naturally responsible. That is
why every external criticism of the Teacher is accompanied by panic crises,
expressed in a stereotypical, as we said, wooden language, repeating the theology of
the Metropolitan as clichés, as well as equally wooden misinterpretations of the
criticized.
The last thing for me is such a ... wooden behavior is the criticism of my
book Theopoiesis by N. Asproulis in Theology (vol. 80, issue 3, July-September
2009, pp. 359-364), where the book is slandered in order to save the fantastic
perfection of the system of thought with which he has, apparently, identified the
critic. Asproulis, then, undertakes the difficult task of proving, according to the
Zizioulian theses and contrary to what is written in my book, that it (pp. 363-4):
1) lacks Christology altogether (1), 2) is essentialist (1), as it opposes the ecstatic
personalism of Pergamon, 3) does not recognize the dialectic of the created and

106
the uncreated, but tends to "metaphysical holism" (!!!) and of course how 4) does
not understand the iconological ontology of the Teacher in Ecclesiology - since
every critic of Z. must inevitably fall into the above mistakes!
And as for Ecclesiology (my positions on which Asproulis seems to be
completely unable to understand) we will deal elsewhere. About the rest, which
are also directly or indirectly related to the searches of the present book, I will
undress for the sake of the misled readers to show Asproulis how a serious and
unbiased reader would read my distorted text, which is not "a patchwork of texts",
as Asproulis desperately concludes, but a treatise on Christology. Indeed, in the
first pages of the book, contrary to the arbitrary assertions of the critic, the
emphasis is placed on the dialectic of the created and the uncreated (p. 16):
"Nevertheless, for Maximus the Confessor, for God to create means to establish a
complete and real otherness outside Him. By saying otherness here, we do not
mean a fixed and immobile being in itself, created on the unspeakable,
non-reducible and non-theological non-place of absolute otherness, which
Derrida and Caputo call, taking the term from Plato, Chora122, but we mean
exactly this Chora in the form of another, radically different and absolutely real,
intentionality. God, therefore, creates exactly what seems unthinkable and
impossible: an intention incredibly and absolutely independent of His own. And
to leave no doubt about this dialectic, we read on p. 18: "... the gifted otherness
requires an absolutely free created recipient, whose absolutely free and different
intentionality accepts the gift and makes it really existent, summarizing its
beginnings in a possible emphatic reference to its Creator or to its created self". As
for the principle of creation out of nothing, which is absent according to
Asproulis, in the book we read the opposite (p. 16): "When Maximus and the

122
WooDeeWoo: Chora/Χώρα is a philosophical term that denotes a primordially ontological space that serves as the very
possibility for the existence of actualized being and non-being. For Platonists, chora is the realm of potencies; potentialities
beyond any fixed determination, but for Derrideans, it's a space that is purely beyond all metaphysical descriptions; a void
with no dynamism.

107
Greek patristic tradition in general speak of "creation out of nothing", they mean
it in an absolute and philosophically unthinkable way, that is, they mean that the
world was an act of God completely unexpected, radically possible and useless to
God, as we have already said - that the world was a possibility of absolute and
unspeakable exit from God". I hope I make myself clear... But the one who is
greatly absent according to Asproulis is the Christological axis. About him, the
intelligent reader of my book reads the opposite (p. 19): "And as this ontology of
the given and returning Being is a Eucharistic Ontology, its presenter must
inevitably be the only absolutely eucharistic being we know: Jesus Christ. Christ,
the Logos of God, emptily and absolutely offered to man out of love, and man
freely and eucharistically offered out of love to God - and so in Christ we have man
as the intention of God and God as the intention of man, the logoi of God and
the logoi of man in an empty reciprocity, through the mystery of the Cross this is
the reason why the Confessor insists so much that the Incarnation was an
unconditional and pre-eternal intention of God and not a decision that followed
simply the human fall. The unconditional Incarnation of the Logos was thus the
original intention of God to "save" (with ontological and not ethical terms) the
creation from standing "against" the Being, from closing, that is, to itself for this
and the theory of the logoi can, only this, describe exactly the dialectical
opposition of the good being and the bad being that represent the two eternal
choices of the creatures". That is, what escapes the attention of Asproulis is not
only the obvious Christological axis of the theology of my book, emerging already
in its first chapter and showing until the final pages of chapter 8 (pp. 97-101),
which I naturally cannot repeat here, but also the equally Christological and only
(and not abstractly "metaphysical") understanding of the theology of the logoi of
energies, as well as the radical analogical dialectic of the created and the uncreated
that is described. Therefore, the position of Asproulis that "although there is talk
of the dialogue of God and created beings, this dialogue obviously does not take

108
place in Christ, as the place par excellence of encounter and dialogue of the created
and the uncreated" (p. 363) can only cause questions about his intellectual
formation, since I literally say the opposite in many ways, and even literally word
for word on page 19 of my book, as shown in the underlined lines above! "in
Christ we have man as the intention of God and God as the intention of man, the
logoi of God and the logoi of man in an empty reciprocity, through the mystery of
the Cross".
Third, Asproulis considers, obviously from an excessive personalistic zeal,
every reference to theology of logoi of energies as by definition antipersonalistic,
overlooking that whenever I refer to them I call them "uncreated personal
possibilities of energies ad extra" or "the dynamic/active expression of a hypostatic
essence" (p. 74). Or does Asproulis disagree that God has, as well as Asproulis
himself, as a hypostatic nature, will, powers and energies? If Asproulis thinks that
his ecstasy happens without nature, will, powers and energies, then he must learn
that such a definition of the person does not differ substantially from the
psychoanalytic definition of psychosis... The claim that I supposedly believe that
"it is possible for the natural energy to lead to the ecstasy of the same created
nature separately or before the persons" (p. 363), implies either intellectual
inadequacy or slanderous malice on the part of my critic. Where and when did I
declare such a monstrosity? My critic avoids carefully any reference to my work
when he exercises his immoderate criticism (especially at the moment when I
comment on specific only statements of Pergamon regarding psychoanalysis and
Lacan and I do not opine arbitrarily as he accuses me). Furthermore, the
accusation of "metaphysical holism" (!!!) does not concern me at all "unless we are
drunk", since the whole book, as well as Asproulis himself recognizes (p. 360),
aims emphatically exactly at the opposite: to highlight the dialogical cooperative
character of the relation of the world and God in Christ (who according to the
book constitutes and the foundation of this dialogue, self-offering and receiving

109
the world - this means correspondingly the terms theosis and theopoiesis that are
used in the book, in chapter 8) - and subsequently to the acute highlighting of the
cooperative otherness of man and God in communion, in Christ, against any
"holism". The book even attempts especially to emphasize what is usually
overlooked almost absolutely by the theologians of the modern times, that is, that
in Christology we do not have simply the reception of the world by the Logos of
God, but primarily and fundamentally the initial self-offering of Him to it, so that
the reception allows also the active and free human response and not just the
passivity of the acceptance. "Theosis" is thus this "giving" fundamental aspect of
Christology (pp. 98-107), the exaltation of the fact that the "enhypostasis" as an
act of reception of the world by God in Christ is not as "asymmetric" as it would
be, if this primordial most loving giving of the Logos of God was missing, already
at its inception. I leave aside the accusations of enclosure of the persons in the
nature as, mildly, naive. I think that even the most inadequate reader of mine will
understand that my goal is not the reversal of Zizioulas' error, but rather the
Patristic correction of it, with the elimination of any Manichaean division and
fragmentation of nature and person in place of their distinct articulation. The
problem with the Zizioulian personalists is precisely the psychological and
spiritual difficulty they have with the hypostatic nature. Thus they prefer to exist
idealistically, without their nature, and not, as the Chalcedonian Christology of
the hypostatic exchange of the idioms requires, with it. That is why they
understand the relation of nature - person only in a polarized idealistic way: either
the persons will contain dominantly the nature, which in itself constitutes a
"burden" and a "yoke" according to Zizioulas (because this is how the
Metropolitan understands the substance of nature, as we saw him claim himself in
the first chapter of this book here), or the nature will contain the persons. I try to
show then in the present book that both these positions do not express the depth
of the Patristic thought, but rather some newer philosophical inaccuracies.

110
Therefore, when in the book at hand we encounter the term personal nature, the
intelligent reader understands that we mean personally constituted nature, that is,
nature that is always hypostatic, that is, it consists from the beginning and always,
in its very being, in person, and does not exist separately from it, or below or above
it, or before or after it.
On page 362, moreover, Asproulis writes that my book at the end of it
"seems to leave open accounts for a kind of shadow-fighting (sic: one wonders also
the size of the man's kindness!) with two important works from leading thinkers
in the Greek space, Stelios Ramfos (and his recent work The Secret of Jesus) and
the Metropolitan of Pergamon (and his work Communion and Otherness)".
Indeed, the book at hand is the direct fulfillment of this promise. Only that its
content is not "shadow-fighting" but something that Asproulis does not seem to
have the ability to approach at the moment. I note therefore also the low ethos of
my critic, as far as the arrogant psychological characterization of my intentions
both above, and in the 2nd column of page 363. My motive, then, according to
Asproulis, is nothing else than "the excessive zeal of a student to surpass at all costs
his teacher" (!). It is sad, young people, without any presence and contribution to
theology at the moment, to expose the evidence of their immaturity so recklessly.
As it is unfortunate to publish such a level of reviews in a periodical like Theology,
that is, the quarterly publication of the Holy Synod of the Church of Greece! The
critiques of demanding works (as my critic considers it) must be done by serious
and competent critics, with proven academic evidence of maturity and similar
work, if possible, with that of the judged, as well as the appropriate ethos, and not
by imaginative young people, who easily succumb to the temptation of immature
self-importance. Otherwise it is better not to be done, because the prestige of the
journal is directly endangered. The most charming thing is that he considers his
wooden intervention as "constructive and high-level dialogue"! But the fans
unfortunately do not choose - they only get involved with the one considered as an

111
ideological opponent. However, and despite the fact that the psychology of the
fan does not allow many hopes, I hope that the present book will partly help
Asproulis and others to exit from the rather sterile and dead-end situation of
repetition in which they are currently…
This whole epilogue is published more for those "others", it is true, and
not for the author of the critique - the critique of a young follower is in the end
negligible and the answer almost superfluous, that is why I will not continue the
discussion. The fact, however, that there are workers in the field of theology for a
series of decades already, who gladly settle for the intellectual subordination of the
pious servant, questioning every attempt for a next step, every original opening in
the boundless space of the essential of the spirit and life (and those who obviously
agree congratulate or simply comfort and do not discourage this kind of
slanderous defamation, instead of inspiring the principles of healthy criticism to
the younger ones), this only causes deep perplexity. If we do not manage to finally
discuss seriously and after knowledge among us, whatever good happened in the
theological field in the last years will be absolutely annulled, or rather "given to
another (nation) making its fruits" it is also the fear of the author of these lines
that the theological future of Orthodoxy is rather outside Greece, because of the
overwhelming decrease of education and also of theological ethos in the country.
"Orthodox theology today needs gifted and thoughtful researchers and not
sloganizing followers, for or against the tradition, or the modernization, of the so
and so theologian and so on. Neither the arrogance of the follower, nor the happy
and absolute certainty of the practitioner, but neither of course the reverence and
the envy of those whom Nietzsche called small spirits are today in a position to
understand the possibilities of Orthodox and Christian in general theology in the
modern world. The indirect then but clear question, to all these old and newer
friends, that is born in the end, is this: will we finally attempt in our short life a
direct original encounter, we or after the generation of the '60s theological

112
generation (or generations) with the texts and the things of Orthodox theology,
discussing them really for real problems and great ones, or will we be definitively
trapped in ready answers and endless worshipful retrospections to the lights and
only of the each time "teachers"? But I think that as much as the existence of a
significant teacher is necessary in the beginning of the spiritual transformation of a
thinker researcher, so much is necessary the critical emancipation in the
continuation, something that includes indeed the honor but mainly the
evaluation of the real work of the teacher through the personal confrontation
with the same the greatest problems that generated it. Personally then I have
chosen here and for a while, for existential and intellectual reasons, the latter, not
naturally risk-free or harmless road - it is the one that I consider that honors what
fascinating I learned once. I want to believe that there are others who agree with
me on the above today…

113
114