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Being with God: Trinity, Apophaticism and Divine–Human Communion

Orthodox theology is commonly perceived as monolithic, unchanging and mystical – ‘mystical’ in the sense of claiming immediate experience of God beyond any intellectual notions of him. Aristotle Papanikolaou’s important book on Trinity, apophaticism and divine–human communion – in effect the mystical theology of the Orthodox Church – supplies us with a valuable corrective. Orthodox mystical theology, as Papanikolaou shows, is certainly not monolithic or unchanging, nor does it focus on the merely subjective. Its modern exponents approach it from a variety of different angles, often disagreeing in their epistemological approach but united in their conviction that what they are dealing with is the ontological reality of divine–human communion. Papanikolaou focuses exclusively on two twentieth-century theologians, Vladimir Lossky (1903–58) and John Zizioulas (1931– ). These are perhaps the most widely read Orthodox theologians in the West, largely because they wrote in French or English, which means that their work is in a theological idiom more accessible to the Western reader than is often the case with Orthodox writers. They are very different from each other. Papanikolaou rightly locates their difference in their epistemologies. For Lossky, who draws heavily on the apophatic tradition going back to Dionysius the Areopagite, God is both knowable and unknowable. He is knowable on the economic level in his operations, or energies, but unknowable on the eternal level in his essence. This approach enables Lossky to develop his theological narrative by a series of antinomic statements. For contradictory positions can both be true if they relate to different levels of reality. Zizioulas, by contrast, ignores the energies, relying instead on a relational ontology of trinitarian personhood. Divine–human communion is attained, in his view, by assimilation to Christ through the Eucharist, that is to say, by participating – in a mode appropriate to created being – in the Son’s relationship to the Father. The reason why these epistemologies are different is that Lossky and Zizioulas have different theologies of the Trinity. This brings us to the heart of the book, Papanikolaou’s discussion of his two authors’ different estimations of the divine energies. For Lossky, the essence/energies distinction enables us to maintain that God is utterly transcendent and yet at the same time personal. When we are incorporated into Christ by baptism, the Holy Spirit bestows the divine energies on us, enabling us to grow towards deification. This deification is not a participation in the divine essence, for that would lead to pantheism. It is a participation in the divine energies, which by maintaining our creaturely differentiation allows us to fulfil our potentiality for personal existence. For this to be possible a distinction in God’s being is needed alongside the difference of the Persons, namely, a distinction between his essence and his energies. Zizioulas has reservations about the energies. In his view the distinctions between the hypostases are incomparably more important. Relying International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church Vol. 9, No. 4, November 2009, 361–367