In a recent newsletter, (Letter #50, 2010/09/24, see Inside the Vatican magazine), Dr. Robert Moynihan, a journalist covering the ‘Vatican beat’, discusses a recent meeting in Vienna of high-level church officials from the Catholic and Orthodox churches. At least some of those officials are also theologians. It would seem good that there are serious movements towards unity of the the oldest churches in Christianity, but I’m most interested for now in Dr. Moynihan’s summary of the thoughts of a Greek Orthodox theologian regarding the nature of the human ‘person’. In the thought of Metropolitan John Zizioulas, human beings are not born as persons capable of sharing the life of God — the only meaningful definition of ‘person’ for Christians. Like me, he thinks a human being (human biological hypostasis in his more traditional metaphysical language) becomes truly a ‘person’ when he has entered a certain relationship with God that will lead to a sharing of the life of the Holy Trinity. Actually, I would reserve the term ‘person’ for those who have matured in their relationship with God and that can only happen in the world of the resurrected. This is the relevant section from the newsletter:
The Ultimate Victory
The Christian message offers an entirely new type of existence to men and women.
Preserving and defending the Church is to preserve and defend the vehicle, the means, of this message.
The theology of one of the participants at the Vienna meeting, Metropolitan John Zizioulas, has expressed this in a striking and powerful way.
Zizioulas, who studied under the Russian Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky, received his doctorate in 1965 from the University of Athens and has taught theology at the University of Edinburgh and then the University of Glasgow, Scotland.
Zizioulas has argued that full humanity is achieved only as “person” so that one may participate (koinonia) in the personal Trinitarian life of God — participate in the life of the divinity.
He argues that man initially exists as a biological hypostasis (person), constrained as to the types of relationships such a being can have (biological) and doomed to the eventual end of this type of being — death.
He argues that Baptism constitutes an ontological change in the human, creating an ecclesial hypostasis, or person.
This rebirth “from above” gives new ontological freedom as it is not constrained by the limits of biological existence.
Such an ecclesial being is eschatological, meaning it lives in a paradoxical “now,” but “not yet.”
The completion of this rebirth from above is the day of resurrection when the body will no longer be subject to death.
Metropolitan Zizioulas speaks in more traditional theological terms than I do — a mistake since this way of speaking tends to freeze current views into a schema while Thomistic ideas applied to modern views of a dynamic and developing world will leave, for example, our views of how a human being becomes suited to share God’s life, as itself a developing set of ideas. This dynamism isn’t something and human thought which follows it is something else. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the human mind is shaped in response to his environments, ultimately to the thoughts God has manifested in His Creation. It’s not a process of a human mind trying to shape itself to a static world but rather a process of a human mind shaping itself to a world which is itself dynamic, a story and not a defective reflection of some sort of static realm of truths. The human mind is dynamic because Creation is dynamic. I’ll pursue this line of criticism in my next article, but, for now, I just wish to express agreement with the general thrust of the ideas stated by Dr. Moynihan and attributed to Metropolitan Zizioulas.
I have to believe that such a theory of human nature, even when stated in terms of a traditional Hellenistic metaphysics, had to have been motivated at least partly by both personal observations and modern scientific knowledge. We can watch a parent, or even a child, deteriorate in many of their human characteristics as some sort of brain disease or injury takes its toll. We can watch video shows about our apish ancestors. We can watch other shows, or read serious or pop books, about all the supposedly unique human characteristics which show up, if only in a primitive form, in chimps or gibbons or wolves or even humble and monstrous octopuses.
Reality rules. After all, reality is what God made it to be and He’s powerful enough to force us to see things His way, the way He chose when He first brought this particular Creation into existence. He moves slowly but I suspect He’s not happy with all the human beings who prefer to impose their own desired ideas upon the world around them — He may be downright angry with Christians who do this. But there’s been some progress. Often reluctantly, Christians have bowed — slightly — to God’s reality and have admitted that man is a natural creature descended from apish creatures who were also the ancestors of chimpanzees, but our intellectual and spiritual leaders have pulled off the trick of endorsing evolutionary theory while continuing to preach and teach as if the first man was a special creation from the mud of Eden. Monday through Saturday afternoon, man rose from an apish state to a creature with a higher but quite defective moral nature. And some of those National Geographic documentaries are quite interesting, especially the ones which present the well-supported theory that the last common male ancestor of all human beings lived about 75,000 years ago while the last common female ancestor lived about 150,000 years ago. Not to worry… Saturday evening (in the Catholic Church) through Sunday, man fell from a god-like state when the first human couple rebelled against God. If we could identify such first human beings, if they had lived within even a thousand years of each other, we would find ourselves putting a lot of moral responsibility upon creatures whose parents were apes.
We need to work honestly and courageously with empirical knowledge of the human species and to explore the implications of the insight that man is born an animal and remains such until the grave. I would support Metropolitan Zizioulas in his movement towards a sane view of man and his relationship to Creation and Creator, but he has only moved partway. We need to realize man is an empirical creature and not one whose nature is to be built up from metaphysicial principles. We need the courage to accept the near certainty that mortal man is truly mortal, not possessing a soul of immaterial substance and only God-like in potential. We need to ask: “What sorts of events, or single event, can realize that potential?” I think Zizioulas is right to emphasize baptism’s central role in forming man’s proper relationship to his maker but wrong to speak of ontological changes, as if man the ape becomes man the angelic creature at some identifiable point in space-time, but I have to admit I’ve only begun to think about the proper ways of discussing the Sacraments in my worldview. And I’ve not yet published a word on the topic.
In my next article, “Evolutionary Thomists Don’t Do Ontology,” I’ll explore these issues a little, mostly dealing with empirical matters for now. It’ll take some time and effort to contemplate what can be said for now about the Sacraments in the real world, the one actually created by God.