Book Review: Dario Chiapetti. The Father’s Eternal Freedom: The Personalist Trinitarian Ontology of John Zizioulas. Edited with a Foreword by Norman Russell. Cambridge, UK: James Clarke & Co., 2022, xvi+279 pp. Price £25.00 (paperback). ISBN ‎978-0-2271-7773-0. (original) (raw)

The Father's Eternal Freedom. The Personalist Trinitarian Ontology of John Zizioulas

James Clarke & Co., 2022

DESCRIPTION John Zizioulas is renowned for his controversial reflection on the ontological freedom as the cause and cipher of God’s being, which also has important implications for anthropology, ecclesiology and ecumenical dialogue. This view is bound up with a personalist conception of the Trinity, recognised in the teaching of the Greek Church Fathers, in which the person represents the primary ontological category. In particular, Zizioulas shows how, by virtue of the Father, personhood coincides with absolute freedom. In The Father’s Eternal Freedom, Dario Chiapetti explores this ontology. Taking into account Zizioulas’ epistemological principles, his patristic reading and his theological development, the author systematically presents Zizioulas’ thesis, verifying its conformity to dogma and its internal coherence. Chiapetti analyses how Zizioulas’ proposal brings back to the centre of systematic theology the teaching of the Greek Fathers, especially the Cappadocians, and the apophatic horizon of dogmatic reflection. Such reflection pushes the discourse on God to its maximum degree, identifying and bringing out, rather than resolving or attenuating, the aporetic terms that structure it. ENDORSEMENTS Dr Chiapetti has produced a comprehensive, profound and fair discussion of Patristic theology, as presented in my work, particularly with regard to its ontological significance. A most successful attempt to bring to the surface the immense significance of Patristic theology for human existence. (John D. Zizioulas, Metropolitan of Pergamon) Despite being the most influential living Greek theologian, John Zizioulas’ publications are largely occasional. Chiapetti knows the thickets of Zizioulas’ oeuvre like no one else. His defence of his theology – against all comers – tests its theological roots and explores its philosophical implications for notions of personhood and freedom. Impressive! (Andrew Louth, Professor Emeritus of Patristic and Byzantine Studies, Durham University)

AUC Theologica 2/2021: Trinitarian Ontology

AUC Theologica, 2021

In recent decades, theological discussion has been characterized by a great return of the Trinity. According to the authors associated with this Trinitarian renaissance, the mystery of the Triune God provides an organizing perspective of the whole theology, not an isolated or marginal truth of Christian faith. From within this new Trinitarian awareness both theological and philosophical question of the so-called "Trinitarian ontology" has emerged, which attempts to express the meaning of being in the face of the Christologically mediated Trinitarian mystery. This endeavour is not entirely new, it builds on the patristic, medieval and renaissance theology, and also critically engages with the modern separation of the theology and philosophy. This new issue of AUC Theologica aims to introduce various forms of Trinitarian ontology, and especially the 20th-century discussion concerning the Trinitarian ontology of the human person.

A Trinitarian Ontology of Persons in Society

Scottish Journal of Theology, 1994

Orthodox Christians, Rahner declares, are ‘almost mere monotheists’, isolating the dogma of the Trinity from any personal relevance to their lives. The doctrine of the Trinity appears in the Church's creeds, prayers, rites, and hymns, but the faithful must often wait till Trinity Sunday to hear the significance of the Trinity for their identity as Christians. Likely, they will hear imperatives without indicatives, moral mandates devoid of ontological grounding in God's grace. No wonder that the laity often ignore the triune God whom they confess and praise in Church amid their life and work in society.

Klaus Hemmerle on the Trinitarian Ontology of the Human Person

AUC Theologica, 2021

The 20th-century quest for a Trinitarian ontology was associated with a critical reconsideration of the modern philosophy of the subject. However, this reconsideration did not reject the question of subjectivity itself. It rather rejected any narrowed ontological assumptions that would identify the very ground of subjectivity with a univocal eidetic structure of being. In its most advanced forms, the modern and postmodern philosophy of the subject proved to be radically structuralist, relational, or even differentialist. While many attempts at Trinitarian ontology have faced this challenge either by adapting Christian dialogical personalism or reviving older metaphysical traditions and notions, e.g., the analogy, the participation, and the concept of the subsisting person, Klaus Hemmerle emphasised in his Theses Towards a Trinitarian Ontology (1976) above all the ontological primacy of the relational self-giving (Sich-Geben), explicated phenomenologically. Every subsisting being, including the human person, gains its concrete contour only from within this relational process. But does this relational reappearance of the human person mean its self-alienated completion, or rather its complete alienation? How can this relational account of the human person be related to older metaphysical, theological, and personalistic traditions? Does Hemmerle avoid the dangerous dissolution of the human person as a mere processual moment of the whole community and the world?