HeyJ LII (2011), pp.

672683

ON THE VERY IDEA OF AN ONTOLOGY OF

COMMUNION: BEING, RELATION AND
FREEDOM IN ZIZIOULAS AND LEVINAS
TRAVIS E. ABLES
Vanderbilt Divinity School, Nashville, USA

The present article examines the theology of John Zizioulas with a view to understanding its coherence
and viability for ecclesiology. Instead of treating his trinitarian theology, or his historical claims, I focus
upon the basic themes of his personalistic ontology, especially the relationship between the hypostasis
and its nature. I argue that Zizioulass central concept of freedom rests upon an equivocation: he afrms
both that freedom and being are identical, and that they are mutually exclusive. In conversation with the
philosophy of Levinas, I further argue that Zizioulass proposal, as an ontology of communion, falls prey
to the same reduction of being to thought that forms the central tenet of Western conceptions
of subjectivity. In conclusion, I argue that both of these problems trade on a basic inability to account
for grace as the fundamental reality of communion. Throughout my basic concern is to inquire into
just what function the category of being has in Zizioulass theology, and to point out its surprising
obscurity.

In the languishing ecumenical task, constructing a eucharistic theology of ecclesial

communion or koinonia is a laudable and necessary goal; however, it should not be
particularly controversial to point out that, as rhetorically compelling or imaginatively
evocative as the notion of communion might be as a category to rejuvenate ecclesiology,
it cannot get far without a clearly articulated idea of person to give it content. This is
something John Zizioulas knows well, for his ontology of communion is based upon a
theory of person or hypostasis. A hypostasis is characterized by its freedom to enter into
a constitutive relation of communion with its other, a freedom of relation that is grounded
in the communion of the hypostases of the Trinity that eventuates from Gods free self-
constitution in relation. Zizioulas states his central insight succinctly in one representative
passage:
We are interested in discovering not the what of humanity, its nature or substance, but its how, that
is, its way of relating to God and other beings. By making the human being emerge as a
particularity in creation through the divine call, we are dening it as a being distinguished . . . by
way of relationship to God and the rest of creation, that is, by its freedom. The human being
emerges as other or particular vis-a`-vis God and the other creatures only by way of relationship.1

The opposition stated in this passage, the what (nature) of humanity versus its how
(freedom) is one that is fundamental to Zizioulass development of the idea of the
hypostasis as a category of communion or being-in-relation. Nature is conictual and
tragic in a biological hypostasis, but overcome in an ecclesial hypostasis, on the basis of
freedom, which is the sine qua non of the concept of the person:2 just as the divine persons
freely participate in the communion of love that is the Trinity, so human persons are

r 2010 The Author. The Heythrop Journal r 2010 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600
Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
 ON THE VERY IDEA OF AN ONTOLOGY OF COMMUNION 673

constituted by their freedom for participation in koinonia. Personhood, Zizioulas argues, is

a category of the individuation of a nature, the how or tropos huparxeos by which a
human person exists in freedom, insofar as that person exists in nding identity in loving
relation with the other. In short, a person is an existential individuation of being that has
its being in ekstasis or self-transcendence toward the other, which ekstasis constitutes its
own selfhood in a mutual relation of love. As such, the primordial ontological situation is
that of a particular existent in its communion with other existents.
Entailed in this proposal is a twofold rejection of what Zizioulas considers to be
Western-Augustinian modes of articulating personhood: in his ontology, on the one hand,
he argues that personhood is an ontological realization of the nature-hypostasis
relationship, not an ethical or psychological category as it is in the West; on the other
hand, for Zizioulas the realization of personhood qua hypostasis belongs to freedom, not
to nature, for the latter considers personhood as reducible to substance. To dene an
existent by nature (their what) rather than according to their personhood (their how) is
to subject them to ontological necessity: person is to substance as freedom is to necessity.3
Communion is analytic with hypostatic personhood, which is the freedom of a person to
enter into relations of love; in fact, freedom just is the hypostasis of a nature. Zizioulass
aversion to all things Western (or perceived as Western), which he shares with Florovsky,
Lossky, Yannaras, Romanides, and others of the 20th century Orthodox diaspora,4 is well-
known. Particularly in recent work that is explicit in its attempt to engage Western thought
(or at least deploy it as a foil), I dont think it would be overreaching to say that, at times,
Zizioulas simply uses the idea of the West as a rhetorical cipher that embodies whatever
happens to be the opposite of the Orthodox position, even if that means his critiques are
occasionally inconsistent with each other. The above accusation is one such paradox: on
the one hand, the Western grammar of personhood is said to be substantialistic, and thus
bound to necessity and nature all being and no freedom, as it were. On the other, it is to
be faulted for repairing to categories of ethics and psychology instead of ontology all
freedom and no being.
The disjunction in this pair of accusations proves useful for purposes of this article,
because it helps to isolate a surprising instability in Zizioulass thought. In order to examine
the viability of an ontology of communion, I will examine Zizioulass account of the person
here; in particular, I would like to test one of the primary legitimating principles of that
account, namely the opposition of nature on the one hand, and person or hypostasis on
the other, as well as the essential link he makes between the latter and freedom as the
realization of a hypostasis. The article will commence by analyzing the twofold delimitation
of nature and freedom, or alternatively, the two iterations of the category hypostasis
biological and ecclesial. The central issue here, I will argue, is the fundamental
equivocation of the category of being in Zizioulass ontology: his constructive proposal
requires him both to collapse being and freedom, and to set them in opposition to one
another. To illuminate this contradiction, I will focus upon the disjunction just named,
nature versus freedom. Following this, I will discuss Levinass critique of ontology and
freedom in order to clarify some of the problems that emerge from this opposition. Finally,
I will thematize the central weakness in Zizioulass ecclesiological proposal: his articulation
of the logic of grace. Before commencing, I hasten to state that this article operates from a
position of respect for Zizioulass contribution, and with a shared enthusiasm for the
importance of relational articulations of personhood; that I afrm Zizioulass intentions
makes it all the more important, in my view, that we arrive at some clarity on the place of
ontology in ecclesiology and theological anthropology.
674 TRAVIS E. ABLES

I. FREEDOM AND THE PROBLEM OF THE SUBJECT IN ZIZIOULAS

It is remarkable that, for all the emphasis on ontology in Being as Communion and
Communion and Otherness, Zizioulas nowhere actually denes just what ontology is nor
what he means by being. We are told repeatedly that freedom and communion are
ontological realities, but what this claim actually means is rather opaque, no matter how
many times it appears in italics. It is worthwhile taking a moment to try to explicate this
point, because I believe it proves very important for making a judgment as to the
sustainability of Zizioulass personalistic ontology, and thereby, his communion
ecclesiology. Furthermore, given other comments that reveal an assumption that
substance or nature is determined by necessity and is identical with the biology of the
human species,5 the category of being grows increasingly vague as one probes its function
in his theology. The point I will make here is simply stated: in Zizioulass thought, being
seems to be both nature, the overcoming of which constitutes freedom and communion;
and being also appears to be freedom, the overcoming of nature. This, it seems to me, is a
potential equivocation of serious magnitude.
We have already noted that Zizioulas opposes hypostasis and nature sharply. Nature is
bound to individuation and death, is determined by necessity, and is characterized by the
impersonality of substance. By denition in his system, a person is a free existent released
from the thing-like necessity of nature and existing in freedom to self-transcend in relation.
But this claim is weakened when we recall that for Zizioulas communion must be integral
to being, and thus part of the nature or substance of a person. This follows by virtue of
Zizioulass stress on creatio ex nihilo and his emphasis on the analogical link between the
Fathers personal origination of the world and the capacity of created being to be
personal.6
If Gods being is by nature relational, and if it can be signied by the word substance, can we not
then conclude almost inevitably that, given the ultimate character of Gods being for all ontology,
substance, inasmuch as it signies the ultimate character of being, can be conceived only as
communion?7

Furthermore, Zizioulas states that by attributing divine being to a personal cause rather
than substance, we elevate particularity and otherness to a primary ontological status.8 It
is inherent to Gods being (by nature) that God is relational; thus, it would seem to
follow, the created being is by nature relational. But this sits ill at ease with Zizioulass
claim that person belongs to a different category than nature, indeed that a sharp
contradiction obtains between the two as just noted.9
The polemic against the notion of substance, which was important to Being as
Communion, is even more central in Communion and Otherness. As is the case with his
failure to adequately dene ontology, so far as I know Zizioulas gives no description of just
what a substance metaphysics entails, or why it is exclusive of his notion of a person.10 It
seems clear, however, that much of his polemic against the concept rests on the construal
of substance as the underlying stuff of an existent (the meaning of the Greek
hypokeimenon), rather than the more accurate use of the term in Western thought as the
logical descriptor of the general nature of a being.11 By equating substance with
hypokeimenon, Zizioulas avails himself of the charge, oft-repeated at least since Rahner,
that the Augustinian traditions (purported) stress on the unity of the divine substance
virtually makes substance a fourth person in the Trinity, a charge that rests on the
confusion of the latter sense (ousia) with the former (hypokeimenon).12
 ON THE VERY IDEA OF AN ONTOLOGY OF COMMUNION 675

Even if we read Zizioulas charitably to mean ousia by substance, such that substance
means the general nature or essence of a being in terms of the clarication just made, the
claim that nature necessity does not follow as a matter of course. Zizioulas wants to
oppose nature, characterized by certain essential capacities, to freedom, the emergence of
the human being in communion with the other. In fact, he even implies that a person as
substance and not yet hypostasis is a mere thing, not even truly being, for being as such is
constituted by its hypostatic character.13 However, we return here to the contradiction:
freedom for Zizioulas is either the realization of a nature, or else it is freedom from nature.
Freedom is either being as such (nature), or it is the transcendence of being as nature.
As Lucian Turcescu has noted, Zizioulas wants to afrm that personhood is not the sum
or combination of a set of individuating properties in a subsistent, but rather the freedom
of ekstasis that constitutes being as communion.14 This ensures that a hypostasis is a
response to the call of the other overowing its nature in freedom toward that other. But
if a person is to be the modality of a nature (a tropos huparxeos, a how of being) existent
in freedom for communion, then it is difcult to see how, as an ontological relation, the
particular how of a nature does not require a certain potency or capacity on the part of
the what: if the hypostasis is the how of substance, then this implies that substance must
have some inherent potency for hypostatization. Hypostatization is an individuating
property of the human substance. Put differently, if freedom is the characteristic mark of a
person or hypostasis, as opposed to necessity which is inherent in its nature, it is
problematic to articulate how freedom is not a quality in potentiality of that substance.
The irony here is that Zizioulass position seems to require something like the very human
capacity for hypostatization that he rejects. But if such a capacity inheres in a nature,
freedom is part of the essence of a person as a subject. For if the realization of communion
is a product of the freedom of a hypostasis, the product of difference instead of the division
of individualization,15 then what else is communion other than a capacity of the
hypostasis?
The upshot of this is that the concept of freedom by which a person is characterized, and
that is essential to communion, remains underdetermined. Indeed, if freedom is the
realization of the nature of a hypostasis, a nature that obtains because of the analogy
between Gods being and created being, then Zizioulas is in fact embracing a classical
notion of substance. This conception of a subject as the realization of its nature is precisely
how Zizioulas portrays Western misunderstandings of personhood: they are alike in
understand[ing] man [sic] by looking introspectively at him either as an autonomous
ethical agent . . . or as the Ego of a psychological complex . . . or as a substance possessing
certain potencies.16 The common thread here is viewing human nature via its particular
qualities the connection between the hypostatic and the substantial that I have suggested
is tacitly assumed by Zizioulas above.
On the other hand, Zizioulass alternative, the disjunction between nature and freedom,
ends up looking very much like the ethics and psychology of Western personhood he
earlier execrated, a modality of subjectivity disconnected from any ontological bearings.
Zizioulas argues strongly that Western equations of being with act obfuscate the
Cappadocian assignation of communion to ontology, asserting that the West has tended
to reduce love the essential characteristic of communion to a moral or psychological
category.17 Zizioulas consistently claims that the Augustinian tradition is bound to a
substantialistic, moral and psychological conception of personhood, and his claim that
this eventuates in a thoroughgoing individualism is one of the central tenets of his
authorship. In a sweeping narrative, he enlists Levinas (among a few others, notably Buber
676 TRAVIS E. ABLES

and Macmurray) in the service of this critique, but it is just on this point that a serious
aw begins to emerge in his ontology beyond the equivocations just described.
Understanding the Levinasian option for the ethical over the ontological will help to see
this more clearly.

II. THE LEVINASIAN CRITIQUE OF ONTOLOGY

The obvious riposte to my argument thus far that freedom in Zizioulas is either arbitrary
dirempton from ones nature, or the realization of the capacity of a nature is to point out
that Zizioulas understands freedom as the gift of the other: it is the call of the other that
evokes my freedom to be a particular, a hypostasis. The problem is that Zizioulas wants to
think this ontologically, such that communion inheres in being as such as created by the
freedom of the Father. What his considered but still swift dismissal of Levinas in
Communion and Otherness misses is that Levinass central contention focuses on just this
consideration of the call of the other as an ontological category.18 For it is precisely a
disrupting of the one in light of the many, a privileging of the particular over the same, and
an assiduous striving after the possibility of a truly relational conception of personhood
that drives Levinass critique of ontology. As Zizioulas well knows,19 Levinass charge,
particularly against Heidegger, is that ontology is nally totalistic: to comprehend the
particular being is already to place oneself beyond the particular.20 But Levinass critique
of comprehension as the fundamental ontological relation is not simply, as Zizioulas
thinks, its function as a category of individualistic (Augustinian) introspection. For
Levinas, the overarching rubric of ontology is the drive to subsume all being under the
comprehensive and comprehending eye of a masterful subjectivity; ontology inscribes
being under a totalizing logic. Introspection is a function of the comprehension of being by
a subject, such that thought and being are coterminous; the other of being is known in its
identity with a knowing subject by virtue of thoughts reduction of the otherness of the
other to the same. This panopticism is operative when the relation of the same and the
other is subjected to an overarching generic or neuter concept when, in other words, it is
comprehended within a general ontology of ekstasis, hypostasis, or communion as a
participation in that ontological schematic. Ontology, even an ontology of communion,
even one which Zizioulas claims is not gnoseological in orientation, is comprehension for
Levinas, a reduction of the other to the same by interposition of a middle and neutral term
that ensures the comprehension of being.21 Thus ontology is concerned with gnosis by
denition, the comprehension of being under a concept; in this case, it is comprehension of
what should be an unrepresentable social relation under an ontological rubric of
relationality: before any participation in a common content by comprehension, it [viz. the
relationship with the other] consists in the intuition of sociality by a relation that is
consequently irreducible to comprehension. The relation with the other is not therefore
ontology.22 In an ontology of communion, the other is, can only be, pure abstraction, an
ontological function in the algebra of being. Only insofar as the idea of the other overows
the thought that thinks it is the other not reduced to the same but as Levinass entire
authorship makes abundantly clear, this is not ontology.
Communion cannot be a category of being for Levinas; the social relation always takes
place beyond being. In his terms, the Other can be truly other only in an ethical relation,
that relation where the other is not the mode of a hypostasiss self-realization23 but is a
hypostasiss interlocutor in the call to responsibility. Anything else, on Levinass terms,
 ON THE VERY IDEA OF AN ONTOLOGY OF COMMUNION 677

refuses to heed the face of that other, that face which commands us not to kill her and
that refusal is the reduction to the same, or in other words, murder, dissolution of the
others singularity. In fact, for Levinas freedom itself is a reduction of the other to the
same, for it is a totalizing exercise of the ego and the actualization of the subjects
capacities: even as freedom for another, it preserves and realizes an egos nature through
an autonomy that reduces the other to the same just in the fact that the relation with the
other is subordinated to a relation to being, its mediation through a third neuter term
which is not a being but the concept being24 such as a general ontology of communion.
Ultimately, Levinas argues, to have my selfhood constituted in relation with the other is
the grossest narcissism: it is only in responsibility to that other, grasped insofar as the call
of the other interpellates me prior to my own self-relation and dispossesses that relation, it
is only therefore in the priority of the ethical that anything like relationality or communion
is possible. This is the point, it bears remembering, of Levinass opposition of desire to
need:25 the latter entails possession or comprehension of the other for the realization of the
self, whereas desire is characterized by the fact that the innite appears in the face of the
other, such that my traversal toward the other is endless I never arrive at the other, for
this arrival implies mastery of the other, as well as the possibility of a return to myself
such that the other was simply the instrumentality or mediation of my own self-positing.
Need is nite, for it arrives at its end. Desire is for the innite, the epektasis of the call of the
other.
A further irony of this ontological reduction of relation is that the same-other
relationship in a philosophy or theology of communion ends up instantiating its own
oppositional concept, individualism. This is because relation, independent of the persons
who stand in relation, is a purely abstract concept: it has content only through those
particular persons. No one relates to a relation. But this means that this vacuous idea of
relation ends up stressing individuals as pure functions; all one is left with is particulars as
individuals.26 It is worth pointing out just how precisely the ontological schematic
Zizioulas offers fulls the canons of modern liberalism, which is constituted by the zero-
sum relation of competing freedoms, a system of adjudicating the conictual boundaries
where my freedom meets and infringes upon the freedom and rights of the other. This is a
system premised on a self realizing itself, a totalizing of the same right up to the limit of the
other, such that the other serves that realization. Zizioulas may invert this system, but
precisely in doing so offers its apotheosis: this is an economy of self-transcendence in an
objectication of relation.
Hence, to return to the theme of the how-what opposition, a problem arises here for
Zizioulas: if a hypostasis is a particular, a how of a what or general nature (all of which may
be true as far as it goes), then it is nothing but a species of a genus, or a particular instance
of a general category. But positing the many as multiple instances of the one does nothing
to break up the totality of the one. As Levinas says,
The unicity of the I . . . [consists] in existing without having a genus, without being the individuation
of a concept. The ipseity of the I consists in remaining outside the distinction between the individual
and general. The refusal of the concept is not a resistance to generalization by the tode ti, which is
on the same plane of the concept and by which the concept is dened, as by an antithetical term.27

So in light of this ontological problematic, in returning to my concerns above about

Zizioulass conception of freedom, it becomes clear that articulating personhood via the
opposition person-nature or particular-general does nothing to upset a substantialistic
understanding of personhood. Rather, it exemplies it: a particular hypostasis of a general
678 TRAVIS E. ABLES

nature is nothing more than an instance, a copy or iteration with accidental variations.
Personhood conceived ontologically is personhood understood in terms of a general
concept in terms, in other words, of a general essence, nature, or substance. On this view
freedom, in constituting personhood, is simply the fulllment or realization of a beings
nature: freedom is a capacity of a substance in its particular hypostasis. Or, if it is not this,
it must be a modern Western voluntarist autonomy, an arbitrary self-determination, even
if that determination is for communion. For a subsistent to realize itself in its how in a way
that is not determined by the what of its nature, so far as I can see in Zizioulass terms, it
can only sever its determination by its nature. Levinass alternative, which would be to
think more than it can think, to act in disproportion to its ability with reference to the
alterity of the other, goes unnoticed.
The problem with an ontological articulation of communion is thus, at this stage,
twofold. First, it trades on an equivocation concerning the very nature of being in
question, for it is premised both on the creative agency of God bequeathing to being as
such the capacity for communion, and on the self-transcendence of a hypostasis in
contradiction of its being. Second, Levinas encourages us to ask just what the category of
being is doing here at all. What he suggests is that being, by virtue of its reduction to (and
therefore equivalence with) thought in the comprehension of a knowing subject, is as such
constrained by necessity. This necessity is that of a self-positing subject, the Ego who posits
himself in the knowledge of himself in his other. What ontology supplies here is a reference
to an abstract order, Levinass il y a, that is the context of intelligibility for that relation.
The unrepresentable and singular social relation, once understood ontologically, is
mediated by an abstract term outside itself. Althusser called this ideology; Foucault,
pouvoir-savoir.28 Levinas, in a critique far more radical than that of Zizioulas, isolated it as
the very essence of Western thought. It would be ironic indeed if Zizioulas ended up
exemplifying the object of his critique.

III. COMMUNION AND GRACE

At this point, I will transition to the basic constructive claim I would like to propose, at
least in sketch form. It pushes beyond the critique just made to ask a nal round of
questions of Zizioulass proposal, and to suggest alternative ways in which ecclesiology
might proceed in articulating its basic fact of sociality. The upshot of the argument thus far
is that, if communion is not an ontological category, than communion is not dependent
upon our realization of our personhood. To talk about communion is to talk about our
deication by grace: communion is the gift of God, and our fulllment of our hypostatic
absoluteness cannot be a precondition for it or correlate of it. If that freedom is to be
graced, which it must be insofar as it is participation in the hypostasis of the Son, freedom
cannot be a realization of a nature or an autonomous self-determination.
The trouble with Zizioulass alternatives the disjunction of being and freedom, or their
equation is that they founder on the horns of a dilemma that go back, ironically enough,
to the time of Augustine. The radical disjunction of nature and freedom, on the one hand,
seems to reduce creation to Manichean nihility.29 To correct for the dilemma which
emerges when communion is grounded simply in an analogical relationship with the triune
communion inherent to creation itself, Zizioulas claims that existents have no capability
for hypostatization and communion apart from grace at all. If communion is inherent to
nature, which, I argued above, ends up equating freedom and substance by making a
 ON THE VERY IDEA OF AN ONTOLOGY OF COMMUNION 679

hypostasis simply a bearer of a particular nature,30 then grace seems to be a meaningless

addition to this dynamic. Therefore, Zizioulas seems forced to deny any created capacity
for relation at all in order to ensure that communion is a question of grace. But this has
uncomfortable implications for a doctrine of creation: created beings are oriented to
division and death by nature, he states, having no integrity of their own qua creatures. In
this case, the moribund nature of a biological hypostasis has the peculiarity of having
been created destined for individualized death created, that is, to fail to realize its own
nature.
On the other hand, in the position more regularly maintained by Zizioulas, creation
seems to possess its capacity for hypostatization simply by virtue of its existence. A
hypostasis is a self-realized, self-transcendent exemplication of a capacity that belongs to
its created being, on analogy with the triune communion. But as I have taken some pains
to show, this simply means that communion is an autonomous realization of a hypostasiss
nature. The avoidance of Manichaeism eventuates in Pelagianism. If the rst is a kind of
denial of creation, then the second is its premature divinization; but both reduce to the
same problem, namely that creation has no integrity of its own, just as creation. Thus this
quasi-Pelagian alternative is no more preferable, for it can only result in what the West
early rejected as an inadequate way of understanding our capacity for God. In this case,
the theological account of communion becomes merely superuous: if relationality is
simply something that obtains in the nature of a hypostasis, then it is hard to explain just
what a trinitarian ontology contributes to the point. After all, Macmurray, Buber, and
Levinas all proffered cogently articulated accounts of relational personhood in complete
independence from the doctrine of the Trinity.
The point here in the invocation of Pelagianism is not to invoke authority, engage in ad
hominem criticism, or, especially, indulge in ecclesial partisanship; the issue, rather, lies
with a speculative problem for which Pelagianism offers a deeply awed answer, and which
I am suggesting that Zizioulas recapitulates. If the idea of communion as the idea of
persons constituted in their relationality and love is to be a meaningful model for how
theology conceives the church, that idea will have to be able to account for the true
particularity of persons in some other way than via an ontology. For communion is nally
something realized in the performance of grace that is deication, the love for the other
that is the love of God the Spirit. I have argued that Zizioulass relational ontology
eventuates in an erasure of personal particularity and primordial relationality just by
emphasizing categories of communion and person taken as descriptors of ontological
relation. On the other hand, the communion that constitutes the church as the totus
christus, the whole Christ as a corporate personality convoked by the gathering of the
community in the Spirit, cannot be subject to ontological description, nor does it generate
an ontology of communion as such. What constitutes the church, rather, is the fact that it
is united in the bond of love when it takes Eucharist together: when it participates in
breaking of the bread and pouring of the wine, when the ecclesial body shows itself to be in
unity with the Eucharistic body that is the sacrament of the gloried body of Christ. But
this is not an ontology, just because it has no being apart from the particular gathering
when the church becomes the whole Christ, which is an event beyond the capacities of
created being and is absolutely singular. This is a performative encounter with the risen
Christ through his Spirit, a participation in the self-giving of the Father in Jesus, which
self-giving just is the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit.
My resistance here is to a proposal which draws upon a conception of the church as a
mediating category, or a legitimating concept, from which the social relation takes its
680 TRAVIS E. ABLES

meaning. Levinass talk about the subjectivity of comprehension, the equation of being
and thought which reduces a social relation to the neutrality of the il y a, is talk about
mediation: the notion that the social relation is signicant only with reference to an
abstract bearer of meaning beyond its own particular singularity. Instead, what I am
arguing for is a conception of church that is more strictly focused upon its being as
witness the church exists because it witnesses to the fact that grace has been given,31 grace
that is known only insofar as it is performed in love of the neighbor. In this case, the
church does not exist to mediate the hypostatic; it is witness to the fact that the gift of grace
is always prior to its being, and such grace is encountered in the singularity of my
neighbors face.
If we take up the question of ecclesiology in this manner, then we shall have to
reconsider the very attempt to ground personhood analogically in the doctrine of the
Trinity. Intrinsic to the argument here is the conviction that it is a fundamental
misunderstanding to proceed in trinitarian discourse as if revelation granted a knowledge
of God such that we can extrapolate from the nature of God analogically to the nature of
the church or personhood this would in fact be a kind of positivism of revelation, to echo
a misunderstood criticism of Barth, one that treated revelation as a mode of knowledge
like any other, impersonal and not self-involving. The aw in this structure of analogy is
the assumption that divine personhood is construed independently (via revelation,
philosophical-ontological analysis, etc.) of the mode of human participation in that
personhood. The claim that one can give a theology of divine personhood and
communion, and then and on that basis construct a model of human personhood and
communion, is far too facile. The problem is this: knowledge of God is self-involving
knowledge, and the only God of which we can speak is a God we stand in relationship to.
Moreover, that relationship must be explicitly thematized in speaking of God. The mode
of human knowledge of God is, if not identical, at least in unity with the mode of
construction of the human subject. To speak of God as person (and to consider the
personhood of the trinitarian hypostases) is to make a claim about the manner in which
human beings relate to God: personally, in a manner for which the best analogy we have is
the way in which we relate to other persons, and which implies that the source of our
knowledge and our love in their unity is personal.32 In other words, we speak of the
trinitarian hypostases as persons insofar as, in relating to God, we are formed as persons,
and in so doing, formed in the image of God. Beyond this, however, language must fall
silent.33 By the strict apophatic logic of Zizioulass own tradition, to say any more is
dangerously anthropomorphic.34 In fact, the anthropomorphism of Zizioulass account of
the analogy of personhood reveals a curious reversal in the assumption that divine
personhood-in-community somehow provides the model for human personhood-in-
community: it conceals (or represses) this very dynamic of participation with its apophatic
reserve, which is the epistemological safeguard that prevents projections of human
personhood upon the Trinity, and thereby de-authorizes the anthropomorphic move-
ment.35 For revelation, if it is to be, as it must, the self-communication of God in grace,
will necessarily be self-involving or performative from the beginning: that is, we cannot
speak of God without speaking at the same time of our encounter with God (or more
accurately, Gods encounter with us). Trinitarian theology, understood accordingly, is
that discourse whereby the church seeks to understand its encounter with God in the
divinizing relation. This would refuse two alternatives, equally misleading: rst, the
theological description of a trinitarian God abstracted from our knowledge of God in
order to ground a structure of analogy between trinitarian communion and ecclesial
 ON THE VERY IDEA OF AN ONTOLOGY OF COMMUNION 681

communion; second, the projection onto this God of the determinations of the religious
self-consciousness.
The dynamic of the knowledge of God is rather more complicated: knowledge of God,
which animates the church, is an enactment of the love of God that is inscribed into the
very nature of graced subjectivity, simultaneously dispossession of the subjects self-
relation and the construction of that subject as an ecclesial being. It is here that Levinas
helps us: the ethical is that call to responsibility in the encounter with the face of the other
(or in the late Levinas, in the non-encounter with the trace of the other36). This call to
responsibility is precisely the nature of the gift of the Spirit: if God is love, and if the gift of
the Spirit is thereby the gift of the inmost nature of God in its utter interiority to the world,
a transcendence that transcends by dwelling in deepest intimacy, then the gift of grace is
only actualized in the encounter with the neighbor. The call of responsibility convokes the
Christian subject into being as a vocation to discipleship, a care for the neighbor that is
simultaneously the ascent to God in partaking of the body of Christ together. A Christian
account of subjectivity opens onto an ineluctable aporia in the subjects self-constitution,
not an ekstasis but an incurvatus in se transcended only in the gift of grace which is
identical to the call to responsibility to the neighbor. But this cannot be the subject of an
ontology: it can only a performative, evental reality, something we simply do. We hear
and respond in an irreducible relation to this neighbor and this enemy, in a manner which
cannot be determined in advance in a general account of being. My neighbor is not a
concept of communion; she is a face that calls me to innite responsibility, a responsibility
which is the devastation of my ekstasis. Our most urgent ecclesiological need, at this time
in history, is not to articulate an ontology of communion at all, because the important
ecclesiological category is not freedom, but responsibility, just as the important ecumenical
issue is not an ontology of trinitarian derivation but the question of how to practice our
divinization as pilgrim people. The theological exigency incumbent upon us is, simply, to
be deied: that is, to be those persons who participate in the event of communion in Christ,
through the Spirit that is, or might someday be, the church.

Notes

1 Communion and Otherness: Further Studies on Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (New York: T & T
Clark, 2006), p. 42. Emphasis original, here and throughout.
2 On this, see esp. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: 1985), pp. 50ff.
3 E.g. Communion and Otherness, p. 195.
4 I use this phrase loosely, noting Maria Hammerlis recent objection to its usefulness; see , Orthodox Diaspora: A
Sociological and Theological Problematisation of a Stock Phrase, International Journal for the Study of the Christian
Church 10, nos. 2 & 3 (May 2010), pp. 97115.
5 In a note to the above cited passage (n1), Zizioulas mocks the fundamentalistic use of patristic texts to ground
freedom (the autoexousion) of humanity in human nature, which would lead us to the absurdity of looking for freedom
in human genes! Communion and Otherness, p. 42n53.
6 I have argued elsewhere that the manner in which Zizioulas legitimates the analogical relationship between divine
and human relationality is seriously hindered by an equivocation between grounding that analogy in the creation of the
Father and mediating it through the Logos. See Travis E. Ables, Being Church: A Critique of Zizioulas Communion
Ecclesiology, in Ecumenical Ecclesiology: Unity, Diversity and Otherness in a Fragmented World, ed. Gesa Elsbeth
Thiessen (New York: T & T Clark, 2009), pp. 11527.
7 Being as Communion, p. 84.
8 Communion and Otherness, p. 35.
9 Communion and Otherness, pp. 277f, where the assumption mentioned above, that nature is bound by denition
to necessity, is made clear.
10 Indeed, there is no real contradiction in imagining a nature whose essence is dened by its capacity for self-
determination, whether or not that nature happens to coincide with what we know as human nature.
682 TRAVIS E. ABLES

11 The latter is more precisely dened in the Aristotelian distinction of ousia, in terms of deutera ousia, the essential
nature that makes an individual a substance, and prote ousia, an individual bearer of an essence and properties. Prote
ousia is a rather precise equivalent of the Greek hypostasis.
12 For a helpful discussion of the matter, see William P. Alston, Substance and the Trinity, in Stephen T. Davis,
Daniel Kendall, SJ, and Gerald OCollins, SJ, eds., The Trinity: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Trinity, (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 179201; the distinction between primary and secondary substance in
Aristotle is discussed on p. 185. It is worth pointing out that Augustine explicitly rejects the understanding of the divine
substance as a kind of substrate in De Trinitate 7.4.76.11 (cf. 15.23.43) and Epistle 120.3.13. See further on this point
Travis E. Ables, A Pneumatology of Christian Knowledge: The Holy Spirit and the Performance of the Mystery of God in
Augustine and Barth, Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 2010, esp. pp. 6367.
13 Communion and Otherness, p. 213. Cf. ibid., p. 107: if we wish to build the particular into ontology we need to
introduce relationship into substance itself, to make being relational.
14 Lucian Turcescu, Person versus Individual, and Other Modern Misreadings of Gregory of Nyssa, Modern
Theology 18, no. 4 (2002), p. 528, quoting Human Capacity and Incapacity: A Theological Exploration of
Personhood, now in Communion and Otherness.
15 Turcescu, Person versus Individual, p. 529n13.
16 Communion and Otherness, p. 210.
17 This charge applies to divine being as well as human: Zizioulas claims that the Latin translation of the creedal
pantokrator (omnipotens) confuses the Cappadocian understanding of almighty as the capacity to embrace and
contain, that is, to establish a relationship of communion and love rather than the typically Western fashion as the
power to act (action has always been equal to, if not identical with, being in Western thought). Communion and
Otherness, p. 116, emphasis removed. As to human personhood: the concept of personhood, if it is viewed in the image
of divine personhood, is, as I have insisted in my writings, not a collection of properties of either a natural or a moral
kind. It is only a mode of being comprising relations . . . of ontological constitutiveness. Ibid., p. 173, by way of reply
to Turcescu; cf. p. 215n51.
18 Communion and Otherness, pp. 4352.
19 Communion and Otherness, p. 45.
20 Is Ontology Fundamental? in Emmanuel Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak,
Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 5.
21 Levinas, Totality and Innity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 43.
22 Levinas, Is Ontology Fundamental?, p. 7.
23 That this structure the Hegelian master-slave dialectic obtains in Zizioulas is unavoidable, for if my
particularity and uniqueness obtains in the call of the other, then it is still my identity that is constituted in relation with
the other. The other serves the production of my identity. On this, see Ables, A Pneumatology of Christian Knowledge,
pp. 116132; 269293.
24 Totality and Innity, p. 42; cf. Levinas, Philosophy and the Idea of the Innity, Collected Philosophical Papers,
trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), pp. 48, 52.
25 A point of strong critique for Zizioulas; see Communion and Otherness, pp. 4951.
26 That this is so is clear from an ironic development in modern trinitarian theology: the greater the sociality of the
Trinity is stressed, the more autonomous the trinitarian hypostases become, such that various versions of the social
Trinity imagine the unity of the divinity to be akin to that of a community, family, or committee. This is a point
Zizioulas grasps with respect to Martin Bubers between in Communion and Otherness, p. 47; but he does not see that
the problem of the vacuous between is inherent in thinking the social relation ontologically.
27 Totality and Innity, pp. 11718. This is in fact an argument for the interiority of the I which con-
stitutes happiness in enjoyment; but for Levinas, enjoyment precisely assumes exteriority and the call of the Other. The
point in this context is that the subject as the aftershock of the social relation is an exaltation, an above being,
p. 119.
28 See Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays,
trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 12788. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge:
Selected Interviews and Other Writings 19721977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
29 On this paragraph, see again Ables, Being Church, p. 119, with references in Zizioulas.
30 This is integral to his position that the biological hypostasis is moribund by nature, e.g. Communion and
Otherness, p. 257.
31 Something like this I take to be the gist of Matthew Myer Boultons important God against Religion: Rethinking
Christian Theology through Worship (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2008).
32 See esp. Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), pp. 27580.
33 This is the point of Augustines much-maligned reticence to attach too much importance to the language of
persons in the Trinity. See also Richard Cross, Quid tres? On What Precisely Augustine Professes Not to Understand
in De Trinitate 5 and 7, Harvard Theological Review 100, no. 2 (2007), pp. 21532.
34 Zizioulas can aver, jumping across all apophatic boundaries, that the notion of person, if properly understood,
[is] perhaps the only notion that can be applied to God without the danger of anthropomorphism, Communion and
Otherness, p. 224. By making this critique, I am disagreeing with Aristotle Papanikolaou, who avers that Zizioulas,
contra Lossky, is not negating the importance of apophaticism for theology, but afrming the priority of ontology
 ON THE VERY IDEA OF AN ONTOLOGY OF COMMUNION 683

over apophaticism. See Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism, and Divine-Human Communion (Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), p. 92. I would argue that this confuses the relation of ontological and apophatic
speech, the latter of which marks the limit of ontology, for apophatic predication is language of that which is beyond
being. Zizioulas is not a critic of ontotheology precisely the opposite, pace Papanikolaou, p. 93.
35 For some helpful points, see Karen Kilby, Perichoresis and Projection: Problems with Social Doctrines of the
Trinity, New Blackfriars 81, no. 956 (Oct. 2000), pp. 43245. I cannot, however, follow Kilby in her Lindbeckian
construal of trinitarian grammar; see also Matthew Levering, Friendship and Trinitarian Theology: Response to
Karen Kilby, International Journal of Systematic Theology 9, no. 1 (Jan. 2007), pp. 3954.
36 Otherwise than Being: Or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
1993).