Alan Brown (right) and I met Metropolitan John Zizioulas in London at Heythrop last Friday. It was wonderful to see the Metropolitan again. We have both got older, but I was more polite about this than he was. We talked about Rome and Constantinople, and then relieved to get off these vexed questions, we talked about books.
Apparently Archbishop Rowan Williams has written an embarrassingly fulsome preface to the Metropolitan’s book Otherness and Communion. The Metropolitan wishes he hadn’t been rushed into this book, though I suspect the rest of us think that the twenty-two years between 1985 and 2007 is a decent enough interval and doesn’t look like a rush into print. Its publishers T&T Clark have been hoping to launch this book at the AAR in November, but the Metropolitan has other things on then.
We talked about Aristotle Papanikolaou’s new book Being with God, which is a wonderful comparison of the theology of Vladimir Lossky and John Zizioulas, the two giants of twentieth century Orthodox theology. Papanikolaou is scrupulously fair, but Zizioulas clearly has the best of it, though Papanikolaou suggests that Zizioulas himself has been too severe on Lossky. It is thorough, meticulous, and works well as an introduction to Orthodox theology, and since it very ably discusses some major issues of systematic theology, it is a gift to the Church as a whole. I have been meaning to review this, but now Liviu Barbu has borrowed my copy – but then that is a commendation.
The Metropolitan told us a bit about his three writing projects. The first of them is on his favourite theme of ecology and man as priest of creation. Secondly, he wants to continue to develop his work on an eschatological ontology, and finally there is his Dogmatics. The Metropolitan gave his Dogmatics lecture notes to the people of the Orthodox Outlet for Dogmatic Enquiries, who have been working hard to make these lectures available on the internet, and we must be very grateful to them, in particular to A.N. who has been doing the translating. They appear to be half way through this important work, so we hope they persevere.
Then we also talked about The Theology of John Zizioulas: Personhood and the Church, and at the insistence of Liviu, gave him a typescript of book and talked through its individual chapters. The Metropolitan was pleased, and I am relieved, that the book has got to this point at least. I gave him a copy of The Eschatological Economy, and we took some photos (but I am no photographer – sorry) and we all promised to stay more in touch from now on.
In person, there is a gentle but really evangelical authority about Zizioulas. I agree with Liviu that he is one of our contemporary ‘spiritual fathers’. I have always been very lucky in the teachers I have had, I don’t know why. Many thanks to Liviu for hosting the meeting.
