Академический Документы
Профессиональный Документы
Культура Документы
Egyptian church in its various historical contexts, and with his detailed study of a
wide range of sources he brings to life the characters and mentalities that animate this
story. This is a book of great depth and importance that illuminates the manner in
which ideas were appropriated and transmitted in early-modern Europe.
Wisdom from Above: A Primer in the Theology of Father Sergei Bulgakov. By Aidan
Nichols, O.P. Pp. xii, 317, Leominster, Gracewing, 2005, $33.00.
thoughts. They are both necessary reading for anyone seeking to make something of
Bulgakov.
Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church. By John D.
Zizioulas, ed. Paul McPartlan, Foreword by Archbishop Rowan Williams.
Pp. xiv, 315, London/New York, T&T Clark, 2006, d75/d25.
This volume comprises some previously published essays and articles, as well as three
new studies entitled ‘On Being Other: Towards an Ontology of Otherness’, ‘The
Father as Cause: Personhood Generating Otherness’, and ‘The Church as the
‘‘Mystical’’ Body of Christ: Towards an Ecclesial Mysticism’.
Where did John Zizioulas leave us more than twenty years ago, and what has
happened meanwhile since the publication of his influential Being as Communion?
From one perspective, maybe of some significance, he became a bishop (in 1986), a
ministry about which he has thought and written extensively ever since his doctoral
thesis. Well over a dozen books and about twenty doctoral dissertations have been
dedicated to his work (see the list in D. Knight, ed., The Theology of John Zizioulas.
Personhood and the Church, Aldershot/ Burlington: Ashgate, 2007). In today’s ever-
changing theological landscape, Zizioulas’ thought on fundamental doctrines of the
Church seems to be abiding.
Communion and Otherness is the product of a lifetime’s work, the synthesis of
Metropolitan John’s thought, ranging from Trinitarian theology to ethics,
psychology, biology and physics. According to the axiom of his first monograph in
English, the ultimate form of existence is ‘being in communion’. The second axiom,
explored in this complementary volume, asserts that communion implies and is
constituted by otherness. Many readers will find that this book also offers some
insights into the spirituality of the author himself.
These latest studies highlight Zizioulas’ genuine connections with Eastern
spirituality rather than with modern existentialist or personalist philosophy. He
draws, for instance, on the lives of saints, particularly the Desert Fathers, and also
refers to more recent spiritual figures in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, such as Saint
Silouan the Athonite (w 1938) and Fr Sophrony Sakharov (w 1993). In Zizioulas’ own
estimation, despite some coincidence of thought with modern existentialism, the roots
of his theology and that of existentialist philosophy are different: ‘God’ in his case,
‘the human being’ in the latter (p. 177 and n. 84, p. 141). In defending his thesis against
the charge of existentialism, Zizioulas exposes the difference between human and
divine personhood. The term atomon used by Saint Gregory of Nyssa to denote a
concrete individual was not applied to the divine persons and is generally infrequent
among patristic writers (pp. 175–76). Zizioulas turns the issue on its head, and charges
his critics with using modern existentialist personalism in the application of human
qualities to the Trinity (e.g., individuality, a notion which the Fathers only used in
regard to human beings, pp. 176–7). In connection with this debate, the reader will
further profit from consulting the meticulously argued essay by A. Brown, ‘On the
Criticism of Being as Communion in Anglophone Orthodox Theology’, in D. Knight,
ed., The Theology of John Zizioulas, pp. 35–78.
Zizioulas engages Western thinkers on the concept of the ‘Other’, arguing that their
accounts are not so much inadequate as incomplete (pp. 47ff.). His discontent is that
the ‘Other’ is conceived either as a derivation or dependant of the ‘I’ (Husserl,
Heidegger, Sartre), or as the product of relationality (Buber). In the case of Levinas,
who receives particular attention, Zizioulas questions what he calls the artificial