The Apophatic Person

On the relationship between nature and person in Orthodox theology

One of the most significant debates in contemporary Orthodox Christian theology concerns the meaning of personhood—so much so that it was among the central points of discussion at the 2016 Council of Crete. The debate begins in the 20th century, a time when the Eastern Church entered into perhaps an unprecedented degree of conversation with the Western world (although a theological emphasis on the “person” is already present in the writings of the “Slavophiles” and carried into the “Russian Religious Renaissance”). With the rise of the ecumenical movement, the Russian emigres, and other developments, Orthodox thinkers found themselves articulating their tradition in dialogue with modern theology and philosophy, leading to new challenges and new possibilities. Fr. Sergius Bulgakov comes immediately to mind, but he is far from the only figure to have appropriated Western philosophical terminology and concepts in articulating his theology. St. Dumitru Stăniloae’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology engages Western philosophy directly—both critically and constructively—and boldly takes up modern terminology in a way that recalls St. Justin Martyr’s teaching that traces of the Logos is truly present in all things.

At this time, existentialism was ascendant in European thought. Its central claim is the radical freedom of the human subject—its irreducibility to any set of qualities, predicates, or contexts that might seek to define or contain it. For the existentialists, the human person is not first a “what” and then a “who”; existence precedes essence, in Sartre’s famous formulation, meaning that the self is not given in advance but constituted through its own acts of freedom and self-interpretation. To be a subject is to stand over against every determination—biological, social, historical—as something one must take up, refuse, or transform, rather than something that simply is what one is. This freedom is at once the glory and the burden of human existence: we are condemned to choose ourselves, and no inheritance, nature, or essence can do this work for us. The germs of the “existentialist self” are already present in the German idealist conception of human subjectivity—in Kant’s “transcendental apperception” that stands behind all “empirical content” and in Hegel’s identification of the subject as the “true infinite.” Whether we like it or not (and I definitely like it), much of 20th century Orthodox Christian “personalism” takes the form of a creative response to existentialism and the legacy of German Idealism. Sartre’s “existence precedes essence” finds its Orthodox corollary in Metropolitan John Zizioulas’ prioritization of “person” over “nature,” and St. Dumitru’s “apophatic” definition of the person calls to mind Hegel’s correlation of subjectivity and infinity. Orthodox Christian theology today is tasked with sorting through our 20th century theological inheritance—along with continuing its dialogue with the Western world—and this, I hope, will be a small contribution to this necessary work.

Despite the “person” being the focal point of modern Orthodox Christian theology, the term continues to elude any precise definition. The traditional (Cappadocian) understanding of personhood as “nature with properties” is insufficient for properly engaging with the developments of modern philosophy. I say that, however, as someone who fully agrees with the Cappadocian definition—the problem is not the definition itself, but the fact that the words “nature with properties” naturally requires elucidation in light of the conceptual developments of idealism, phenomenology, etc. The task is not to “go beyond” the Fathers but to actualize the so-called “neo-patristic synthesis”—rendering the wisdom of the Fathers intelligible and relevant to contemporary theological and philosophical discourse. Fr. Georges Florovsky says:

We have the creative task of building religious culture on a solid foundation of Orthodox church life, resolutely following patristic heritage. I am not speaking of a “restoration” of Byzantine or patristic antiquity. We must be creative, we must seek new forms in order to express the inner content, which over the ages has remained unchanged in the immediate experience of ecclesial worship, despite the fact that the “forms” have indeed changed.¹

Yet, Florovsky’s understanding of the “neo-patristic” synthesis is arguably limited and requires revision. For one, he denies that “development” is a valid category when speaking of the evolution of Orthodox theology over time. But, as St. Dumitru argues (and St. Vincent of Lerins before him), “development of doctrine” is not only an undeniable fact of Orthodox theological history, but a necessity given the nature of the Church’s commission. Development is never “alteration” but an expansion, through the synergy of our minds with the Holy Spirit, one that creatively participates in the “expansion” of the Word (through the Spirit) into all of creation.

I think that this does, in fact, include the development of the language we use, understood not as a departure from the dogmatic terminology of the creeds and councils (hypostasis, ousia, etc.) but as the inclusion of a greater diversity of terms. While I agree in broad strokes with the “Christian Hellenism” as articulated by Fr. Florovsky, Fr. Dumitru Staniloae—whose Orthodoxy is uncontested—shows that modern philosophical terminology can be used to articulate the eternal dogmas without casting aside (but, rather, supporting and further elucidating) the traditional Greek terminology. For example, he describes the perichoresis of the Divine Persons with the term “intersubjectivity,” which was coined by Edmund Husserl.

One of the tasks of Orthodox Christian theology today is grappling with the “modern subject.” What we cannot do is retreat into a closed chamber and ignore the developments of modern philosophy — even if its walls are covered in icons and its shelves filled with the writings of the Fathers. As Fr. Nikolaos Loudovikos says:

...it is crucially important not to underestimate or completely dismiss the intellectual syntheses made through personal philosophical projections, even if they are apparently less successful than their exponents initially thought, or even if they partially fail to do justice to history. As I already said, they represent openings, which have to be carefully considered in order to keep what is fertile and change what is not so fertile.²

What, then, is fertile in the modern understanding of the person? I suggest there are two primary developments worth attending to, because they represent, as Fr. Nikolaos says, “openings” through which a richer understanding of the Christian view of personhood can be discovered. The first thing grasped by modern philosophy, especially the existentialists and Žižek, is the negative freedom of the person — its capacity to say “no!”, to separate itself from its “life world” through an act of self-reflexive negativity. The second is the irreducibility of the subject to any of its “empirical content” (thoughts, emotions, fantasies, etc.), the “infinity” and “absoluteness” of subjectivity, the fact that it is seemingly always “above” any finite determination, property, or predicate. These two ideas are intimately related, and some of the most significant modern philosophers (Hegel, Sartre, Žižek) locate the infinity of the subject precisely in its radical negativity, its “infinite” capacity to “other itself” from any object or determination.

I have already written a lot about the “negative” understanding of freedom and subjectivity. My basic idea is that it is a description of fallen subjectivity and the “privation” of sin, and therefore immensely valuable as a “hamartiology.” Perhaps, however, there is more to be said here, since a certain “negativity” seems to exist independently of sin and even, it seems, in God: the Father is not the Son or Spirit, and God does not create red elephants. Intimately related to God’s (Trinitarian) personhood and freedom is some sense of the “negative,” leading me to think that perhaps the Fall and sin express a perversion of the Godlike negativity granted to created persons. But this is for another time.

Today I want to focus specifically on this understanding of the person as “infinite.” This is a very relevant question, and engaging with it has already borne fruit for Christian theology. There lies a hidden temptation in correlating personhood and infinity, and that temptation is fully succumbed to in the thought of Sartre, Žižek, and other modern philosophers of subjectivity. For them, the person is not “irreducible” to its determinate content (biology, history, and psychology), but radically opposed to—negatively “split” from—it. The subject, for them, is infinite precisely as an infinite power of negation (or “nihilation” in Sartre), as an empty void of pure self-reflexive negativity. For them, the freedom of subjectivity is located precisely in this negative opposition, in its “freedom from” any finite determination.

I suggest that the properly Christian definition of freedom is not freedom from nature, but freedom for nature. Nature is not negatively opposed to person and vice versa, but positively interior to the very meaning of personhood and freedom. Nature does not restrict the possibility of personal expression; it is the condition of the person’s ecstatic realization of themselves precisely as the fulfillment of their nature. Nature is not a static and self-enclosed set of determinations; rather, it provides the “context” within which the person is capable of determining themselves in relation to the will (logoi) of God. Here, nature is not Aristotle’s “substance” with its “immanent” entelechy, since the fulfillment of human nature is—perhaps paradoxically, albeit entirely reasonably—its self-transcendence beyond its natural limits into the divine nature (theosis). The “form” of this self-transcendence—both going beyond and perfectly fulfilling human nature—is precisely the person, in whom the communion of human and divine natures is preserved “without confusion” (as taught by the Council of Chalcedon), just as in the incarnate Christ. The logoi of human nature, the divine “wills” behind created nature, are “the truth of a thing, its transcendental entelechy,”³ and therefore nature is—from the very beginning—ontologically “open” to the grace of God. It has, as its eternal foundation, a “calling” or vocation of communion with God. In other words, created nature is truly and fully itself in the form of the person who enters into a personal communion with the divine nature, which (as I’ve discussed before) takes the form of adoption as sons into the eternal and natural relationship of Father and Son by the power and operation of the Holy Spirit. This is not the ekstasis from nature, but the ekstasis of nature.

Here, we do not have a dialectical opposition between nature and person. Nature is not, as the existentialists assume, a closed set of given determinations that the person must free itself from in order to realize its self-determined “project” or will. Rather, the telos of human nature is true freedom—the freedom of divine communion, a freedom that satisfies the human desire for eternal life in a way that the spontaneous exercise of a supposedly “free” will never could.

What the modern world mistakes for freedom is nothing less than slavery, grounded on a belief that life is ultimately ordered toward “nothing.” As David Bentley Hart writes in his truly magnificent essay “Christ and Nothing”:

The will, we believe, is sovereign because unpremised, free because spontaneous, and this is the highest good... Desire is free to propose, seize, accept or reject, want or not want — but not to obey... if the will determines itself only in and through such choices, free from any prevenient natural order, then it too is in itself nothing. And so, at the end of modernity, each of us who is true to the times stands facing not God, or the gods, or the Good beyond beings, but an abyss, over which presides the empty, inviolable authority of the individual will, whose impulses and decisions are their own moral index.

Because of our belief in “nothingness,” humans are “burdened” with the freedom of determining their own meaning in accordance with their individual will and desires. But this is slavery, firstly because it does not recognize that the subjective desires of individuals are often quite undesirable and, when attained, often deeply unfulfilling, and secondly because the human heart has an insatiable appetite for the “infinite”—for an unending source of life and newness—an appetite that can be obscured and covered over but never truly dissolved.

The Christian proposal is not that freedom involves the negation of the individual will, but rather the recognition that the will itself possesses the unalterable end of eternal life. True freedom, then, is the synergy or cooperation of the will of God and the will of man. Further, the “will of God” is not a uniform or static reality, but one that possesses an infinite content of a personal character. Hence, while the nature and telos of each human being is the same (the Logos), the realization of this common end occurs through the irreducibly distinct and personal modes of communion (the logoi) with God that each of us is called to realize as the acceptance and reciprocation of God’s gift of being.

Through our acceptance of God—realized sacramentally and literally in baptism —we receive a new name. Naming is of utmost significance in Scripture and Christian theology. A name is not something we choose for ourselves; it is given to us. Humanity at the Tower of Babel undertook the metaphysically impossible project of “making a name” for themselves, a story that is immediately followed by Abram who receives a new name from above. The Orthodox Church teaches that the patron saints, whose name we typically receive as our baptismal name, are not subjectively “chosen” by us; rather, we are chosen by them. Naming is a “gift from heaven,” a descent of grace, and our co-operation with it is what constitutes the actualization of the potentials of created nature. We see again that, for Christian theology, nature is not and never can be a static set of determinations that limit freedom, precisely because its realization is the freedom of synergy—the freedom of virtue and, ultimately, of theosis.

The modern tendency is to look at any “natural” qualities as arbitrary and somehow a limit upon the creative expression of the individual. We see this clearly in transgenderism, whose ideological and philosophical proponents often affirm a modern form of Gnosticism in which the “body” is treated as inert matter the will is free to reshape, while the “real self” is located somewhere beneath or beyond it—a pure subjectivity unmoored from the givenness of nature. We also see this in the “internationalism” of leftist politics, where the nation is treated as a purely arbitrary construction (e.g., “borders are just lines drawn on a map”) rather than the natural expression of the distinct characteristics of distinct peoples—characteristics that, as I’ve argued elsewhere, are constituted by the distinct but interrelated factors of biology, history, religion, and more. But as St. Dumitru Staniloae argues in his book Orthodoxy and Nationalism, patriotism and nationhood are not contrary to one’s capacity for authentic personal expression, which, for the Christian, ultimately takes the form of love for God and love for neighbour. Indeed, he argues, it is precisely through love of nation that one’s love for God and love for the other can be expressed, because “the true nationalist does not preach hatred toward other nations, but fulfills a duty toward God by cultivating the nature given to him, developing it through his own powers and with God’s help in all the breadth and beauty contained within it in seed form.” To love one’s nation is not to enclose oneself within it, but to receive what has been given as raw material for the work of sanctification—to take up the concrete inheritance of language, history, religion, and biology and offer it back to God as the very medium through which the human person is made capable of love at all. The nation is not the cage of the self, but the soil in which the self becomes a self. The same applies to nature in general.

Our natural qualities—whether biological, psychological, or spiritual—are not “limits” but the concrete context in which our nature can be fulfilled in our irreducibly unique way, a fulfillment that is ultimately the free realization of who God invites us to become. We have already established that an entirely spontaneous exercise of self-determination is undesirable, since it does not provide true freedom and in fact confines the human person to the “burden” of an ultimately impossible project: constructing an existential “project” that could give life meaning. There is, as St. Dumitru argues in The Experience of God, an “apophatic” dimension of the person, an inexhaustibility that eludes all conceptual capture and is, instead, only ever encountered “face to face.” But even though the person is not identical to its nature or reducible to its natural qualities, this does not mean that the person is opposed to its nature and called to totally transcend it through the exercise of the free will (as, unfortunately, the theology of Met. John Zizioulas’ leans towards). Rather, each natural quality is gifted by God, and therefore possesses the potential for an infinitely unique expression by the person in the realization of their freedom in synergy. Thus, men are saved through fulfilling their “natural” calling as men and women as women,⁴ but both have the same and equal end of communion with God.

For the Christian, the meaning of our life is “received”—but what we receive is precisely a freedom of infinite possibilities constitutive of our nature, the freedom of an inexhaustible love. This love is always personal, and so, far from the person being “restricted” by its nature, both nature and person fulfill each other in love.

1. Quoted in Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance by Paul Gavrilyuk.

2. Nikolaos Loudovikos, “Dialogical Nature, Enousion Person, and Non-ecstatic Will in St Maximus the Confessor: The Conclusion of a Long Debate”.

3. Quoted in Faith Seeking Understanding: The Theological Witness of Fr Matthew Baker by St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

4. As Fr. Matthew Baker has argued, Zizioulas’ idea that salvation consists of the person overcoming the “biological hypostasis” renders “women will be saved through childbearing” (1 Timothy 2:15) quite difficult to explain.