Page 66 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

O r t h o d o x y
Holy Trinity : Persons or Individuals?
God is not a solitary being. His being is relational. Without
communion, we cannot speak of God at all. To say “God
is God” tells us nothing, just as the logical affirmation A = A
is a dead logic and consequently a denial of being which is life.
Being, if it is truly living, cannot be reduced to a static iden-
tity. It is revealed only as relationship.
For this reason, we do not begin with the idea of “one God”
understood abstractly, and then add the Trinity as a secondary
notion. The Holy Trinity is not an addition to God’s being—it
is its very foundation. God is communion: Father, Son, and
Holy Spirit.
In the history of theology, different ways of approaching
this mystery have emerged. In the West, especially in the
thought of Augustine, great emphasis was placed on the unity
of divine substance, within which the persons were under-
stood as relations. While this preserved the unity of God, it
risked placing ontological priority on substance.
The Greek Fathers, and especially the Cappadocians, of-
fered a different vision.
For them, the person is not secondary to substance. Rela-
tion is not something added to being—it is constitutive of it.
Yet the person is not reducible to relation. Each person is a
concrete hypostasis, fully real, yet existing only in commu-
nion. Thus, whereas for Augustine the persons of the Trinity
can be illustrated by the example of three psychological facul-
ties of one (human) being, for the Cappadocians we would
need three (human) beings in order to illustrate the three di-
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