Canal Auditivo

Without the Eucharist, creation will die, but the Creator wills life for his creation. Zizioulas maintains that, while the redemption of creation was crucially important, the Eucharist was just as much connected in the early Church to the created-uncreated dialectic, even to the point of being viewed as a celebration of the world coming into existence (C&O, 256). The emergence of the understanding of the

Eucharist as a memorial of Christ’s sacrifice and the nourishment of the soul nearly reversed the original understanding of the Eucharist as “a blessing over the material world, the fruit of nature, and a reference of it with gratitude and dedication to the Creator” (“Preserving Creation 1,” 7). This change encouraged an individualistic understanding of the Eucharist, and thereby the Church, jeopardizing the very notion of communion. True eucharistic communion involves God’s self-communication to us and our participation in the divine communion, ecclesial communion, and the mediation of this life to all creation (C&O, 7). Instead of separating us from the created world, the Eucharist was intended to allow us to fulfill our vocation to be the priests of creation.

As the priests of creation, humans mediate God’s eternal life to his creation. In the Eucharist, the life of love and freedom belonging to God becomes the life of his creation (C&O, 261–62). As God’s life should not be conceived as an ethic or psychological state, neither should the Eucharist be thought of in merely ethical or psychological terms, but as “a cosmic event involving the whole of creation” in which

[b]read and wine are not just symbolic elements linking the Church to the Last Supper but are representative of the material world and of creation. Equally, human beings, by participating in the Eucharist, participate in a redeemed material world. Thus the material world has its place in the Eucharistic experience and in the Kingdom of God. The Orthodox Christian, by constantly experiencing the Eucharist, affirms that the material world must survive and be redeemed from whatever prevents it from developing into a world which will unite finally with God (“Orthodoxy Ecological”).

The eucharistic way of being, however, does involve what Zizioulas calls the eucharistic ethos or attitude. This consists in a) considering nothing that one has as one’s own, returning all to someone else, without individualism, superiority or lust; b) an attitude of thanks; c) fighting with one’s entire existence against death itself; and d) offering oneself in an act of freedom paralleling the way in which the world is given its existence (C&O, 256).95 _{In doing this, we do nothing less than participate in Christ’s}

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95. Many factors figure into Zizioulas’s reluctance to elaborate a theological ethics. As Knight emphasizes, “What is required [for the world’s survival] is a distinct community..., and it is this community... that is given to the world in the Church” (“Introduction,” 7)—Knight also emphasizes the church’s “culture,” but this appears in Zizioulas’s work even less frequently than ethics. McPartlan argues that while

recapitulation of creation.

Christ’s offering up of himself, even unto death on the Cross, is the basis and power of our offering up of creation in the Eucharist proper and in eucharistic action in general.96_{As priests of creation we cease grasping creation to ourselves in order to}

squeeze from it whatever temporary sustenance we may. Instead, we bring creation into relation with God by presenting it to God as his rightful possession. Thus, creation is treated with reverence, freed from its limitations as created and finite, and made capable of bearing life. Through this free exercise of the imago Dei, creation is sacralized, and “[w]hen we receive these elements back, after having referred them to God, ...we can take them back and consume them no longer as death but as life” (“Preserving 3,” 39). Through our communion with God, we lose our fear of the other and can now exercise our personal creativity to affirm the otherness of creation as “very good” in all aspects of life just as it is in the Eucharist when the natural elements acquire personal qualities.97_{In sum,}

the Eucharist... gives eternal life. The Eucharist is life eternal, primarily because it offers this set of relationships [which are identical with the Father-Son relationship in the Holy Spirit], which involves an eternal identity. Belonging to the community of the Eucharist is, therefore, tantamount to acquiring eternal

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Zizioulas would acknowledge the reality of Christian maturation, what is called for theologically is not attention to Christ as an individual and the extent to which Christians have interiorized him, but Christ as corporate with and the orders through which Christians are Christ, with only secondary attention to their growth into these “charismatic identities” (297). John Chryssavgis explains that, “While not explicit on the surface..., Zizioulas’s early formation as a theologian bears the marks of the pervasive influence of the Zoë movement in Greece: distorting the ‘mind of the Fathers’ and espousing a puritanical emphasis on the cultivation of personal morality” (“Review, Communion & Otherness: Further Studies on Personhood and the Church,” 512). According to Demetrios Constantellos, such movements focused on Christ’s life as a rigorous ethical standard, “personal” and “spiritual” experience, and claimed to be “a true Christian community” (“The Zoe Movement in Greece,” 12 and 22). Moreover, Vasilios Makrides says these para-church groups “seemed to replace the church in many ways,” created a culture of “self-righteousness and elitism,” and were caught up at points in political messianism (“The Brotherhoods of Theologians in Contemporary Greece,” 183 and 175). Christos Yannaras denounces these movements’ pietism as an “ecclesiology heresy” (The Freedom of Morality, 126); though some like Chryssavgis find in them a challenge to distinguish properly between pietism and proper Orthodox piety (“Piety—Pietism: An Eastern Orthodox Perspective”).

96. For the bulk of what follows, see “Preserving Creation.”

97. “[I]n a para-eucharistic way all forms of true culture and Art are ways of treating nature as otherness in communion, and these are the only healthy antidotes to the present ecological illness” (C&O, 10).