FROM SOPHIA TO PERSONHOOD: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE 20TH C. ORTHODOX
THEOLOGY FROM S. BULGAKOV THROUGH V. LOSSKY AND D. STANILOAE TO
METROPOLITAN JOHN D. ZIZIOULAS PATRISTIC SEMINAR ORGANIZED BY VOLOS
ACADEMY WITH SUPPORT FROM
THE VIRGINIA FARAH FOUNDATION, ATHENS, GREECE
ARISTOTLE PAPANIKOLAOU, FORDHAM UNIVERSITY
THE VIRGINIA FARAH FOUNDATION, ATHENS, GREECE
ARISTOTLE PAPANIKOLAOU, FORDHAM UNIVERSITY
In this essay, I wish to demonstrate the contextuality of contemporary Orthodox theologies of personhood. I will argue that these theologies of personhood are an example, first, of hermeneutical contextuality, by which I mean an attempt to interpret the tradition while simultaneously engaging the thought-forms and questions of a given time and space. Such hermeneutical contextuality is a given dimension of being human and, in this sense, all Orthodox theology, patristic and contemporary, is hermeneutically contextual.
I will also argue that Dumitru Stǎniloae’s and John Zizioulas’s development of the Orthodox trinitarian theology and theology of personhood, which they inherited from Bulgakov and Lossky, is an example of whatI call existential contextuality, by which I mean an attempt to affirm the relevancy of the theology of personhood by relating it to a dimension of human experience. I will then use the notion of existential contextuality to identify a blind spot specifically in Zizioulas’s theology of personhood, which can be addressed by retrieving the ascetical understanding of virtues as a learning how to love. I will end by demonstrating how contemporary theologies of personhood, understood as events of irreducible uniqueness and freedom of necessity realized through ascetical practices designed for learning how to love through the acquisition of virtues, are relevant to the experiences of violence. Why the experience of violence? Because violence is a contrast experience which makes love difficult, and if divine-human communion is a realization of personhood as a learning how to love, then it must make sense in relation to the experience of violence.
Hermeneutical Contextuality
One of the most important insights of contemporary Orthodox theology, which will have the greatest long-term impact on all of Christian theology, is the theology of personhood. The development of the contemporary Orthodox theology of personhood is a much-debated and complicated story. Most contemporary Orthodox theologians have argued that this theology of personhood was first developed during the theological debates of the fourth century; and there are those, of course, who dispute this claim.1 It is clear, however, that certain features of the contemporary Orthodox understanding of personhood are a result of the modern context. For example, the Orthodox theology of personhood rests on a distinction between nature and person, in which nature is identified with necessity and person/hypostasis is identified with freedom. Vladimir Lossky was the first to popularize this way of understanding of “personhood”:
‘person’ signifies the irreducibility of man to his nature—‘irreducibility’ and not
‘something irreducible’ or ‘something which makes man irreducible to his nature’ precisely because it cannot be a question here of ‘something’ distinct from ‘another nature’ but of someone who is distinct from his own nature, of someone who goes beyond his nature while still containing it, who makes it exist as human nature by this overstepping and yet does not exist in himself beyond the nature which he
‘enhypostasizes’ and which he constantly exceeds.2
Elsewhere he elaborates that “the idea of person implies freedom vis-à-vis the nature. The person is free from its nature, is not determined by it.”3
The antinomy, however, between nature-as-necessity and hypostasis-as-freedom is evident in Sergius Bulgakov, even if Bulgakov never developed a theology of personhood with
which we are now all familiar. This antinomy between necessity and freedom in human subjectivity is also discernible in German Idealist philosophy.4 There are those who could argue, that Bulgakov uncritically appropriated German Idealist philosophy, which seems especially evident when he relates the phenomenology of Spirit to trinitarian theology, a move Lossky criticized.5 Bulgakov, himself, indicates that this distinction has its roots in the Christian Trinitarian and Christological controversies. Regarding the Trinity, he states that “deduction is incapable of establishing the fact of divine Triunity, which is given by Revelation; but thought is called to fathom this revealed fact to the extent this is possible for human knowledge.”6
Throughout his corpus, but most especially in The Comforter, Bulgakov traces how the categories of hypostasis/prosopon and ousia were the Christian attempt to “fathom this revealed fact,” and this distinction maps onto the freedom-necessity distinction.
Bulgakov is also, unlike Lossky, not shy to criticize patristic thought in order to bring its many accomplishments to completion with insights drawn from German Idealist philosophy.
For example, he has no problem making such statements as “Fichte showed convincingly, the creaturely I is, in its freedom, connected with necessity, with not-I, which reflects and limits it.” 7
Bulgakov himself sees his own understanding of the Sophia as the trinitarian being of God as self-revelation as further developing what was left unfinished in the patristic literature. This is indicated not simply by the content of The Comforter, but by the very structure itself, where a historical analysis of patristic thought on the Holy Spirit is abruptly halted, and one encounters a dense phenomenological account of the self-revelation of Spirit, after which Bulgakov continues with a historical analysis of the filioque.8 The reason that the historical account of the filioque occurs after the self-revelation of Spirit is that for Bulgakov, such a phenomenological account
of the self-revelation of Spirit, which is Sophia, is what is lacking in the patristic attempt to make
sense of the revelatory fact of the Trinity, which for Bulgakov is the revelatory fact of divine- human communion. The discussion of the filioque occurs after his phenomenological account of the self-revelation of Spirit because for Bulgakov, the filioque was an unnecessary detour in which both sides are complicit and which obfuscated the issue; in other words, it preclude any progress on attempts to “fathom this revealed fact.” As he states clearly, “From the point of
view of positive dogmatics, this millennium-and-a-half logomarchy pertaining to the procession of the Holy Spirit was totally fruitless.”9
Although one can identify the distinction between hypostasis/prosopon and ousia in the trinitarian and Christological controversies of the fourth century, the mapping of the freedom- necessity distinction onto the hypostasis/ousia distinction resulted from Bulgakov’s engagement with German Idealist philosophy. As he states, “In the creaturely spirit, nature is givenness or unfreedom. It is necessity that is realized in the freedom of the person.”10 Bulgakov, however, does not see such a development as an unauthorized invasion of philosophy into theology, since he sees the German Idealist appropriation as indebted to early Christian debates and, in this
sense, somewhat continuous with this patristic tradition. As a result of this continuity-in- discontinuity between the between German Idealist philosophy and the patristic tradition, Bulgakov has no problem admitting that the phenomenology of the self-revelation of Spirit is in fact what was needed to bring to completion the patristic insights on the Trinity, and to account for divine-human communion. After first affirming in The Comforter that “It is proper to spirit to have a personal consciousness, a hypostasis and a nature as its self-revelation, and the life of
spirit consists in the living out of this personal self-revelation in its nature,” Bulgakov then states toward its last pages that “Not only is this revelation of the Father about Himself the sweetest of religious truths, but it also contains the solution to all the difficulties of philosophical
speculation.” 11 For Bulgakov, however, this appropriation is critically used against such philosophers as Fichte, Shelling and Hegel, as he argues that only God’s trinitarian being as Sophia, which maintains the hypostasis-ousia antinomy even as it transcends it in free necessity and necessary freedom, cannot account for how God’s being is such that God creates the not- God for communion with God’s very existence.12
Vladimir Lossky presents his own theology as a genuine retrieval of patristic theology, which is especially clear when he juxtaposes the “God of the philosophers” against the “Living God” of the fathers of the Church.13 And it is absolutely clear in Lossky that in addition to scholasticism, Bulgakov’s sophiology leans more on the side of the “God of the philosophers” than the “Living God.”14 For Lossky, the slide toward the “God of the philosophers” occurs when theology is not sufficiently apophatic.
Lossky’s own theology has been interpreted as part of a genuine neo-patristic retrieval of patristic theology, over-and-against the philosophically tainted theology of the West and of Russian religious thought.15 It is clear, however, that Lossky’s theology is itself constructive and indebted to his own context. First, all of Lossky’s major categories—antinomy, the person-as- freedom versus nature-as-necessity distinction, kenosis of the Son and kenosis of the Spirit, individual versus person—are all found in Bulgakov, though Lossky presents them as emerging from the patristic tradition. As but one of many examples, although there does not exist a Greek word for “antinomy,” Lossky does not hesitate to discuss the relation between apophatic and cataphatic theology in Dionysius the Areopogite as an “antinomy,” which he inherits from Bulgakov.16 It appears as if Lossky is co-opting these central categories of Bulgakov and apophaticizing them so as to present self-consciously an anti-sophiological theology. This contextuality is further evinced in Lossky’s identifying the essence-energies distinction as most
adequate to expressing divine-human communion, and over-and-against Bulgakov’s sophiology.17 Finally, and more directly related to the theology of personhood, Lossky argued for a more apophatic understanding of the person-nature distinction both in trinitarian theology and in the understanding of human personhood over-and-against Bulgakov because he felt that only an apophatic understanding of the person-nature distinction could secure the freedom and irreducible uniqueness of the person. As he argues, “Theological thought, which divides nature into its hypostatic and personality principles—as in the Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov—dissolves human personalities with their freedom in their relations towards God and the world in a cosmic process of the return of the created Sophia to God.”18
In the emergence of this contemporary Orthodox theology of personhood, we see the
dynamics of contextual theology, in the sense that one cannot really make sense of this theology of personhood without considering both the continuity of this theology with the tradition and the way in which this theology of personhood has absorbed the thought patterns of both modern and post-modern philosophical trajectories, as it attempts to confront the questions and challenges of the moment. I would further like to define this form of contextuality as “hermeneutical contextuality,” in the sense that as one attempts to given expression to, articulate, interpret or render intelligent Christian truth, one cannot avoid being influenced by the questions and prevailing modes of thought of one’s time and place.19 This is not to say that one simply maps theology onto a particular philosophy; hermeneutical contextuality simply affirms that as one engages one’s own tradition, one cannot escape doing so without having already absorbed the questions and language of particular modes of thought of a given time and place. Such an hermeneutical contextuality denies that there is an identity to ideas, which often migrate across various intellectual systems and worldviews. Such a hermeneutical contextuality is evident in
the fathers of the Church, with the appropriation of such language of hypostasis and ousia, and in other ways; it is also evident in Bulgakov and Lossky. What unites Bulgakov and Lossky with the fathers of the Church, across time and in distinct places, is their concern to faithfully and adequately articulate the realism of divine-human communion, and it is through this attempt at expressing divine-human communion that one can trace the genealogy of the Orthodox understanding of personhood. Indeed, with this understanding of hermeneutical contextuality, I would argue that all Eastern Christian thought from the moment of its inception has been and always will be contextual.
Existential Contextuality
The theologian who has most developed this theology of personhood, and who is most associated with this theology, is John Zizioulas, Metropolitan of Pergumum. In Zizioulas’s theology of personhood, I would argue that we see not simply the continuation of the hermeneutical contextuality evident in the fathers of the Church, Bulgakov and Lossky—hence, Zizioulas continues the tradition of thinking on divine-human communion; but, evident also is what I would call an existential contextuality, as Zizioulas is concerned to articulate an theology of personhood that resonates with dimensions of human experience.
According to Metropolitan John, and as is well known to this audience, personhood should not be attributed to any particular capacity of the human being, such as rationality or self- consciousness. Personhood is a relational event in which the human being—and through the human being all of creation—is constituted as irreducibly unique—hypostatic; and free— ekstatic. This freedom as ekstasis is not a multiplication of choices but a transcendence beyond the necessity surrounding the human being by the finitude of his nature and beyond the
existential necessity of nature caused by human sinfulness. Personhood is a Eucharistic event, and, as such, is the realization of the greatest commandment to love God with all of one’s heart, mind, and soul, and to love the neighbor as oneself; it is an event of communion, of unity-in- difference, of the one and the many.20
Zizioulas has not only demonstrated this understanding of personhood theologically in relation to trinitarian theology, christology and ecclesiology, but has also shown how it is discernible in our everyday lives. He pointed us to the human creation of art,21 the analysis of the question of ‘who am I’,22 and to the procreative act23 in order to illustrate for us the human longing for uniqueness and freedom. I would add that this understanding of personhood is shown to be true by other examples, such as events of history or the suffering of a particular illnesses, and in so doing, extend the existential contextuality of Zizioulas’s theology of personhood; in other words, these examples further reinforce the degree to which Zizioulas’s theology resonates with dimensions of human experience. The Nazi concentration camps and the communist gulags are clear examples of structures of relationships that depersonalize the human being, constituting him as non-unique and unfree while subjecting him to extreme forms of oppression. In such situations, the human being can claim to be unique and free over the oppressor, but the reality is such that this cry for recognition is ignored. The only basis for justifying this claim to uniqueness and freedom in the midst of oppression is an eternal relationship with God, who is eternally relating to each human being in such a way as to always
be constituting the human being as unique and free, even if fallen conditions do not allow for the realization of such an experience of personhood. The relational understanding of personhood in terms of freedom and uniqueness is also clearly manifested in those who suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, which is a disease that seeks to destroy one’s uniqueness and freedom. For those who
suffer from Alzheimer’s, their capacity to remember the details of their own unique story or the people who are a part of that story disintegrates and they are trapped in a world of confused thoughts and fleeting images. In such a state, the only hope for affirming the uniqueness of the Alzheimer’s patient is through their loved ones who have always related to the Alzheimer’s patient as “Helen”, “Maria”, “George”, or “Seraphim”, even as the Alzheimer’s patient cannot remember their own unique name.
We see another example of existential contextuality in the Romanian theologian, Dumitru Stǎniloae, who is similar to Zizioulas in that he searches for that aspect in human experience that would allow for clarification and understanding of the dogmatic tradition. The dogmas are not sterile propositions, but must speak to the realism of divine-human communion and, thus, must resonate with life experiences. Stǎniloae, Zizioulas and Bulgakov all attempt to interpret the dogmatic tradition in light of some aspect of human experience, though Stǎniloae and Zizioulas do so in a more exploratory fashion, rather than, as with Bulgakov, locating a foundationalist grounding within the human experience of self. Whereas for Zizioulas, the aspect of human experience by which he clarifies his trinitarian theology of personhood is the human experience
of longing for irreducible uniqueness and freedom of necessity colliding tragically with death and finitude, the point of focus for Stǎniloae is the movement of dialogue in relationships of love.
In unison with all contemporary Orthodox theologians, Stǎniloae affirms that humans were created for union with God. Human beings, like no other living beings, realized this union through a dialogue of love that God initiated from the moment of creation. Stǎniloae affirms a notion of creation as God’s gift that initiates the possibility of an exchange of gifts between God and human beings, who function as priests of creation. This exchange of gifts is simultaneously a dialogue of love enabling a personal communion between God and creation. The fact that the world was created for the purpose of communion between the personal God and human persons is a truth of revelation confirmed by the human experience of freedom and relationality. As Stǎniloae states, “It is only with other persons that man can achieve the kind of communion in which neither he nor they descend to the status of being objects of exterior knowledge used always in an identical way. Instead, they grow as sources for an inexhaustible warmth of love and of thoughts that are ever new, brought forth and sustained by the reciprocal love of these persons, a love that remains always creative, always in search of new ways of manifesting itself.”24 That the human experience of love shapes Stǎniloae’s trinitarian theology is especially clear when he wrestles with the question of why a third in God; it is also in addressing this question that Stǎniloae’s speculative tendencies become evident. In a way that is similar to Augustine and Richard of St. Victor, Stǎniloae argues that “It is only through the third that the love between the two proves itself generous and capable of extending itself to subjects outside themselves. Exclusiveness between the two makes the act of a generous overflow beyond the prison walls of the couple impossible.”25 Though Stǎniloae was an independent thinker in his own right, this particular quote reveals his indebtedness to Bulgakov.
In as much as existential contexuality offers confirmation ofnZizioulas’s understanding of personhood as irreducible uniqueness and freedom from necessity constituted in particular relationships of communion, it also indicates a blind spot in his understanding of personhood. This blind spot has to do with his lack of attention to the fact that love itself is not simply an event but also a learning. The interpersonal dynamics of love as a learning is evident in Stǎniloae’s theology as Stǎniloae pays much more attention to what I would call the asceticism of personhood. There is an asceticism to personhood as a learning how to love that is indicated
existentially in day-to-day existence and in the patristic tradition. Zizioulas never denies the importance of asceticism, but there is little development in his thought of the relation between asceticism and his theology of personhood. He gives the impression that personhood as irreducible uniqueness and freedom from necessity is exclusively a Eucharistic event; that which is constituted in and through the Eucharist. Although the realization of personhood as an hypostatic and ecstatic event occurs in the Eucharist through the eschatological in-breaking of
the Holy Spirit, St. Maximos the Confessor, in his Four-Hundred Chapters on Love, helps us to understand that the virtue of love is something that must be learned; it requires humans to engage in ascetical practices that allow us to acquire the virtues, which then form the building blocks for acquiring the virtue of virtues, which is love. St. Maximos offers a relational understanding of
the virtues in which virtues build relationships, while vices destroy relationships. He says, “All the virtues assist the mind in the pursuit of divine love” (1.11).26
This acquisition of personhood is the realization of a Eucharistic mode of being in the world, in which the person relates to others in the world so as to enable further realizations of this Eucharistic mode of being in others and throughout all of creation. This asceticism of personhood is not one that manifests itself in being judgmental or legalistic; but it is a living the truth even in relation to those who have yet to discover it. This asceticism of personhood is a struggle to overcome all that which obstructs the realization of our uniqueness and freedom, which includes our own insecurities and fears, as well as the sin that is committed against us.
Finally, this asceticism of personhood is the realization of the greatest commandment—to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Mt. 23:37).
The fact that our personhood as freedom from necessity and irreducible uniqueness is realized through an asceticism of personhood as a Eucharistic mode of being in the world is
confirmed existentially not simply through the dynamics of interpersonal love, as suggested by Stǎniloae, but also by negative human experiences, including the experience of violence. In my public lecture, I have been exploring the effects of violence on learning how to love, and in so doing, I am following Stǎniloae and Zizioulas in trying to think our tradition in relation to what I have been calling existential contextuality. But the form of contextuality that I am highlighting is what I would call contrast experiences within human existence. Specifically, the question I want to ask if whether the Orthodox theology of personhood as freedom from necessity and irreducible uniqueness make sense in light of these contrast experiences, specifically the human experience of violence.
Without repeating the details that I present in my public lecture, it is absolutely clear that the experience of violence leaves an existential mark on the human person. It is often thought that when one is threatened by or suffers violence, or even commits violence, once the violence is stopped, the person is unaffected. This assumption is wrong. Neuroscience is now able to show that the experience of violence—and even the committing of violence—leave a trace on the body that makes the learning how to love difficult. The trace on the body has to do with actual physical effects on the formation of the brain that have to do with how we regulate fear and anger. For St Maximus the Confessor, the greatest obstacles to learning how to love are anger, fear and hatred. The traces of violence are manifested in the form of not being able to be in public places, such as restaurants, not sleeping, having nightmares of killing spouses or children, and many other such similar symptoms. Thus, this trace on the body can be explained in terms of being locked into a kind of necessity that tragically prevents the fulfillment of one’s longing for freedom from the existential effects of this violence. In so far as it makes being in
relationship difficult it makes love difficult, and by so doing it also tragically prevents the realization of our longing for irreducible uniqueness in relations of communion.
In one sense, the effects of violence offer further confirmation of the Orthodox theology of personhood in terms of freedom-from-necessity and irreducible uniqueness through relations of communion. What situations of experienced violence show is that violence subjects the human being to a state of existential necessity, and the deepest longing of those who experience the effects of violence is to be free from this necessity; or, in the words of contemporary Orthodox theology, to realize personhood. What these experiences also indicate is that what is most damaging about violence is the capacity for relationality, in which this freedom from necessity is most realized.
What situations of violence also manifest is an absence in Zizioulas’s theology of personhood to any attention to how personhood is realized as an event of freedom from necessity as a communion of love. If personhood exists as irreducible uniqueness and freedom as ekstasis from the necessity of nature, then personhood is a result of an asceticism of personhood as a learning how to love through the acquisition of the virtues.
Insofar as virtues build proper relationships while vices destroy such relationships, then the asceticism of theosis as personhood must be relevant to those attempting to undo the asceticism of violence. What’s more, thinking about the healing of violence, in particular, along the lines of practices and virtues provides a way for intersecting the psychological literature on trauma and moral injury with the ascetical/mystical tradition on the formation of virtue and, thus, personhood. The connecting category is that of practices, since the one with a lived experience
of violence must engage in a new kind of asceticism, one that replaces the asceticism of violence in order to combat the demonic images impacting his relationships to self and others. One of the
practices that wires the body for openness to love is truth-telling, and one can see the importance of truth-telling in treatments for both PTSD, such as exposure therapy, where the patient speaks repeatedly to the therapist his trauma in order to reduce the fear reaction to the memories; or Adaptive Disclosure Therapy, where patients engage in “imaginal conversation with the deceased or a compassionate and forgiving moral authority.”27 As I also mentioned in my public lecture, it is being discovered that the practice of yoga is has been shown to help those who have experienced trauma. My basic point is that the experience of violence indicates that personhood as freedom-from-necessity and irreducible uniqueness is not simply realized in the Eucharist, but through particular kinds of ascetical practices that manifest the virtues, and in so doing, increase
the human capacity to form relationship and, thus, to love and be loved.
Conclusion
Let me affirm that the Orthodox theological notion of personhood as an event of irreducible uniqueness and freedom from the necessity of sin that has distorted created nature is one of the most important and enduring insights of contemporary Orthodox theology, which, again, traces its roots back to Bulgakov, but which was most developed by Lossky and Zizioulas, and which I would argue, in spite of the protests of Patristic theologians, is implicit in the Trinitarian and Christological debates of the patristic period. I would argue that this theology of personhood is an example of hermeneutical contextuality insofar as it emerges through an
attempt to interpret the tradition, but whose content is not intelligible without taking into account Bulgakov’s, Lossky’s and Zizioulas’s engagement with the questions and thought-forms of their time. The line between what can be attributed exclusively to the fathers and to contemporary philosophers is not easy to draw, as ideas migrate without identity and borders.
I have tried to show how this understanding of personhood as a longing for a personal uniqueness and freedom from the necessity is also an example of existential contextuality, insofar as it resonates with the human experiences of oppression, mental illness and violence. I have also argued that this understanding of personhood needs to be supplemented with the aretaic anthropology of St. Maximus the Confessor, most evident in the theology of Dumitru Stǎniloae, who understood the ascetical struggle as a movement toward the manifestation of the virtues as building blocks toward learning of love. The embodiment of the virtues is the
realization of a Eucharistic mode of being in which the person is rendered irreducibly unique and free from the existential necessity caused by sin. Put another way, the ascetical struggle to
realize this Eucharistic mode of being is itself a training of the body and soul to learn how to love. If we put the two together, the contemporary Orthodox theological notion of personhood and St. Maximus’s understanding of virtues, then we have a profound insight into the human condition that can illuminate the effects of violence on the human person.
One of the pioneers of treatment of PTSD among war veterans is Jonathan Shay, who has said that war is the ruin of good character, or virtue, and we can now understand that statement to mean that the combat veteran has undergone a kind of asceticism of war in which the body is trained both before and during way in such a way that potentially makes love difficult. The absence of virtue as a result of the stress of impending violence in inner cities neighborhoods in the USA also reveals the important link between the acquisition of virtue and learning, a link that St. Maximus understood centuries ago. If love and learning are made difficult through the experience of violence or the impending threat of violence, then a training in the virtues as understood by St. Maximus must have something to say to these human experiences of existential necessity.
If the Orthodox theological notion of personhood as irreducible uniqueness and freedom from the existential necessity caused by is sin is understood in relation to St. Maximus’s understanding of the virtue, then the Orthodox would offer a theological anthropology that would correct the blind spots of just war ethics, that would disrupt the current philosophical and theological discussions of virtue ethics, and would provide the basis of a unique Orthodox voice to the Christian concern for social justice and for social theology, in the sense that the Christian response would not be limited to activism, but would see the training in the virtues as potentially mitigating the problems caused by poverty. The Orthodox often speak of theosis, but do not really know what to say about theosis in relation to situations of post-traumatic stress disorder, mental illness, violence or poverty. A further contextualization of the already contextual Orthodox theology of personhood through St. Maximus’s understanding of the virtues would
help us make theosis more worldly.
1 Most notably, John Behr, The Nicene Faith, vol. 2, The Formation of Christian Theology
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2004); and, Lewis Ayres, Nicaea and its
Legacy: An Approach to Fourth-Century Trinitarian Theology (Oxford University Press, 2004).
2 Vladimir Lossky, “The Theological Notion of the Human Person,” in In the Image and
Likeness of God, eds. John H. Erickson and Thomas E. Bird (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 120. See also, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction, trans. Ian and Ihita Kesarcodi-Watson (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1989), 72: “The Person . . . is then man’s freedom with regard to his nature, ‘the fact of being freed from necessity and not being subject to the domination of nature, but able to determine oneself freely.’ (St. Gregory of Nyssa).” No reference is given for the quote from Nyssa.
3 Ibid., The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary
Press, 1976), 122.
4 On this point and its influence on Bulgakov, see Brandon Gallaher, Freedom and Necessity in
Modern Trinitarian Theology (Oxford: OUP, forthcoming August 2016).
5 Lossky, The Mystical Theology, 62: “Nevertheless, we may ask, does not this triadology [the
monarchy of the Father] fall into the opposite excess: does it not place the persons before the nature? Such would be the case, for example, if the nature were given the character of a common revelation of the persons (as in the sophiology of Father Bulgakov, a modern Russian theologian whose teaching, like that of Origen, reveals the dangers of the eastern approach, or,
rather the snares to which the Russian thinker is prone to stumble.)” In a footnote to this citation, Lossky quotes Bulgakov as affirming God as a “’person in three hypostases’ who reveals himself in the ousia.” Such a quotation is taken out of context. Bulgakov technically considered God as Spirit whose self-revelation is ousia-as-Sophia-as-three-irreducibly-unique-persons. God as self- revealing Spirit is not exactly the same as God as Person. Although Bulgakov is not always consistent in his use of language, he firmly states that “Sophia is not a hypostasis” (The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim [Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,
2002], 80).
6 Sergius Bulgakov, The Comforter, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 53.
7 The Bride of the Lamb, 127.
8 Bulgakov, The Comforter, 1-151.
9 Ibid., 129.
10 Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, 128. This is but one of numerous citations in Bulgakov’s work mapping the freedom-necessity distinction onto the person-nature distinction.
11 The Comforter, pp. 61 and 393.
12 For this critically appreciative engagement with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, see The Lamb of
God, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008),
89-117.
13 Vladimir Lossky, “The Procession of the Holy Spirit,” in In the Image and Likeness, p. 81.
14 In addition to critical remarks throughout Lossky’s corpus, he is well known for writing early in his career Spor o Soffi (The Controversy over Sophia) (Paris: Confrérie de S. Photius, 1936),
which was a refutation of Bulgakov’s sophiology.
15 For this reading of Lossky’s place in Orthodoxy theology, see Christos Yannaras, Orthodoxy
and the West, trans. Peter Chamberas and Norman Russell (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross
Orthodox Press, 2006).
16 The Mystical Theology, 26.
17 On this point, see The Mystical Theology, 80.
18 Vladimir Lossky, “The Spiritual Legacy of Patriarch Sergius,” Diakonia 6 (1971): 168.
19 On the relationship between Orthodox theology and hermeneutical philosophy, see Assaad Elias Kattan, “Gadamer ‘Ad Portas’: The Orthodox Understanding of Tradition Challenged by Hermeneutics,” Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 66:1-2 (2014): 63-71. See also, Aristotle
Papanikolaou, "Tradition as Reason and Practice: Amplifying Contemporary Orthodox
Theology in Conversation with Alasdair MacIntyre," St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly 59:1 (2015): 91-104.
20 For a fuller analysis of Zizioulas’s theology of personhood, together with the relevant citations,
see Aristotle Papanikolaou, Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism and Divine-Human
Communion (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), esp. pp. 129-61.
21 John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church, ed. Paul McPartlan (New York, NY: T&T Clark, 2006), 206-49.
22 Ibid., 99-112.
23 John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1985), 50-53.
24 Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: Revelation and Knowledge of the Triune God, vol. 1, Orthodox
Dogmatic Theology, trans. and ed. Ioan Ionita and Robert Barraniger (Brookline, MA: Holy
Cross Orthodox Press), 10.
25 Ibid., 267.
26 Maximos the Confessor, Selected Writings, in The Classics of Western Spirituality, trans.
George C. Berthold (Mahwah, New Jersey: 1985), 36. For more on Maximus’s understanding of virtues as a learning to love, see Aristotle Papanikolaou, “Learning How to Love: St. Maximus on Virtue,” in Knowing the Purpose of Creation Through the Resurrection: Proceedings of the Symposium on St. Maximus the Confessor, ed. Bishop Maxim Vasiljević (Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press & The Faculty of Orthodox Theology – University of Belgrade,
2013): 239-250.
27 Shira Maguen and Brett Litz, “Moral Injury in Veterans of War,” PTSD Research Quarterly,
23:1 (2012): 3. (http://www.ptsd.va.gov/professional/newsletters/research-quarterly/v23n1.pdf)