Category: personhood

Updates

MEDITATING on the material in previous posts has moved some updates into my brain. I have tended to add “update: some stuff” to the posts, but I think that doesn’t get the updated material out to readers by email. Going forward I will do update posts like this one and add an update link to the earlier posts.

Further Thoughts on Personhood

To follow up on the post about personhood and communion. It’s still essential to avoid the trap into which Zizioulas falls, namely to seem to say that if you’re outside the Church you’re not a person. But if personhood is the same as communion (or somehow one carries the other) how can that be avoided?

I think perhaps a solution could be found in breathing with both lungs.

Aquinas insists that everything that is is participating in God’s beingness.
So, to follow Zizi, everyone is, already, participating in communion even without realizing it. The Holy Spirit is “everywhere present and filling all things”. Yes, on earth and in our timeline, the fullest realization of this communion is in the Eucharistic Mystery in the Church… But God is not bound by our timeline: the church is the sacrament of universal salvation and so (pace Aslan, et al) no one is denied personhood. Because they exist: they are loved by God into being, into communion. 

There’s always (on this side of glory) room to grow. We’re not even finished in heaven but move, then, “from strength to strength”.

More time

The post on calendars and Pascha mentioned a culture clash. I did not clarify it. It’s a clash because the Roman Calendar + Metonic Cycle did not fix the problem of a “real” year with no Pascha or with two Paschas. We can see this now.

As I mentioned the next Pascha is five weeks after Easter, on 5 May. That means there are 12 months with only the Pascha from this year (6 April 2023) but the following Pascha is on 20 April 2025, meaning that there are two Paschas in the 12 months beginning 1 May 2024. I count from the day following so, as Pascha was on 16 April this year, there are no Paschas at all in the 365 days that follow.

So the current Julian calendar has the same problem – as does the Gregorian calendar. So the “two Pascha/no Pascha” issue is a red herring. So, also, the move from the “aviv” calendar to the “fixed” calendar in 358 AD.

At issue was, exactly, being dependent on the Jewish community for the information. It might be possible to read other motives into it – Christian Antisemitism is a real issue – but I think it can best be understood as an answer to the very modern questions, “Can we do this in-house somehow? Do we have to outsource it?”

To Be or Not to Be

METROPOLITAN JOHN ZIZIOULAS (Memory Eternal!) has this great line in Being as Communion, “to be and to be in communion are the same thing”. It’s not an exact quote. I pulled it out and wrapped it into my final presentation to be graduated from CIIS in 2002. The argument continues – as I understood it – that since it is in Christ, and more specifically in His Church, that we find the fullest expression of communion, it is there, in the Church, that a Human Being can come into his fullest beingness. I wasn’t too far off, actually, despite being a new convert to Orthodoxy at that time (I entered the Church only a couple of months earlier). Reading a blurb for a book about his theology, I find:

Zizioulas has argued that the Church Fathers represent a profound account of freedom and community that represents a radical challenge to modern accounts of the person. Zizioulas uses the work of the Fathers to make an important distinction between the person, who is defined by a community, and the individual who defines himself in isolation from others, and who sees community as a threat to his freedom. Zizioulas argues that God is the origin of freedom and community, and that the Christian Church is the place in which the person and freedom come into being.

The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church Gracious! $41 for the Kindle edition?!?!?! Someone buy me books? NEway…

I’ve been on this for a while, especially since COVID. This all came back into my brain recently over some really amazing margaritas with a friend who said that this was the exact reason he rejected Zizioulas. And then, one day later, listening to the audio version of The Orthodox Way, I heard Metropolitan Kallistos Ware (Memory Eternal!) say the same thing in another way:

First, a “person” is not the same as an “individual”. Isolated, self-dependent, none of us is an authentic person but merely an individual, a bare unit as recorded in a census. Egocentricity is the death of true personhood. [p. 28]
He [the Holy Spirit] transforms individuals into persons. [p. 95]
Ignorance and sin are characteristic of isolated individuals. Only in the unity of the Church do we find the defects overcome. Man finds his true self in the Church alone: not in the helplessness of spiritual isolation but in the strength of his communion with his brothers and with his Saviour. [p. 108]

This is stated by King David in the Psalms (Ps 49:20): “a man with honor without understanding is like the beasts that perish.” To sin is to forego understanding, to become like a beast – to step away from our humanity into which God always calls us deeper, to become more of what we are, not less.

Then finally yesterday, on a phone call with one of my brother Knights, I commented that so many Christians are terrified of preaching the Gospel. What caused the Church to go from 12 guys to thousands in Jerusalem in only a few months? They spread city to city – and not always by the “official routes” of the Apostles. What was happening that carried this message even faster than feet?

We take it for granted now, but Christianity carried personhood as we understand it, out from the Jewish teachings where it begins in Genesis 1 with the image and likeness of God to the rest of the world. It was possible to enter into full, personal, salvific communion with the God who made everything and yet wanted you – fully, personally, you – to be his Son or Daughter by adoption and grace. This came to you no matter who you were – Jew, Greek, Scythian, Barbarian, Slave, Free, Man or Woman. You mattered: not just data as a census number or a member of a social hierarchy invented to keep the same hierarchy in place. You were a real, loved, person who could enter into loving relationships with other real persons on an equal footing. And those relationships would last forever – because the one relationship that made them possible between you and God would last forever as well.

This Gospel swept the world and changed the world. We come into the modern world thinking of persons exactly as the Church has taught, “endowed by their creator”. Ironically, the idea that “you are important in God” has been turned into “I am God” and, lo: we’re all data points again. We are turned into isolated individuals who live in perpetual fear that our personal self-definition will be shattered by someone using the wrong pronouns for us. Metropolitan Kallistos is right to call this “self-dependent”. We might add to that, “self-debted”. When I am subtracted, I will be no more. If I am not around to make me, I won’t be made.

A beast that perishes.

We are afraid of a Gospel that demands a full change of thinking, a full rejection of the disorder that the world calls “normal”. There is no way, apart from God, to know who you are. Rejection of even the possibility of that truth makes for meaninglessness and lived nihilism.

Eternal life is possible. Lived in unchanging truth; turning away from the foolish idea that you define yourself, that you are making yourself. Let God make you. Let others love you as he is making you – not because of what you have or what you can do or what you can imagine but because you are the very icon of God. Become the You God made you to be – in the body God gave you used according not to your feelings but to the owner’s manual… Enter into communion with God and others who seek him. “Become who God made you to be and you will set the world on fire” (St Catherine) and “the Glory of God is a living human being” (St Ignatius).

Come in. Be a real person.

Updated here 4/17/2023