3.2. NECROPULPECTOMÍA
3.2.4. MEDICACIÓN INTRACONDUCTO
3.2.4.4. TIPOS DE MEDICAMENTOS INTRACONDUCTO
For those accustomed to thinking about creation and sin according to Western paradigms, Zizioulas’s account may appear to give short shrift to sin, denigrate creation, or open the door to dualism.7 Indeed, many commentators have accused
Zizioulas of collapsing the Fall into Creation.8While Zizioulas certainly opens himself
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5. Note that Zizioulas argues that sinful humans are improperly relationed, not entirely without relationships.
6. According to Zizioulas’s understanding, death is the most serious consequence of sin, but it is not a punishment per se. Zizioulas explicitly attacks Augustine, but see also the Second Council of Mileum (416), canon 1: “whoever says that Adam, the first man, was made mortal, so that, whether he sinned or whether he did not sin, he would die in body, that is he would go out of the body not because of the merit of sin but by reason of the necessity of nature, let him be anathema”; and the Second Council of Orange (529), canon 2.
7. Richard Fermer, for instance, accuses Zizioulas of dualism because of Zizioulas’s distinction (treated below) between the biological and ecclesial hypostasis (“The Limits of Trinitarian Theology as a Methodological Paradigm,” 171, n. 51). Zizioulas, although occasionally making statements that leave his position open to a charge of dualism, is certainly not a dualist: “We do not have a body, we are bodies” (“Orthodoxy and Ecological Problems: A Theological Approach”)—contra Miroslav Volf’s claim that Zizioulas teaches “the person has a body and consciousness” (After Our Likeness, 81).
8. Rowan Williams cautiously notes that “there is in the vocabulary a surprising elision between creation and fall in a couple of instances” (“Review: Being as Communion,” 103*). Similarly, Douglas Farrow equivocates: Zizioulas “appears to conflate creation and fall” (“Person and Nature,” 102*); and Paul Cumin asserts— while acknowledging a few exceptions—that in Zizioulas, “the distinction between
to this understanding with such phrases as “What is created is, by nature, tragic,” or “[i]dolatry, i.e. turning created existence into an ultimate point of reference.... isnatural for created existence,” he simply does not equate creation or createdness with the Fall or fallenness (C&O, 257; cf. BaC, 102).9Rather, as even Miroslav Volf acknowledges,
Zizioulas teaches that “[t]he Fall consists merely in the revelation and actualization of the limitations and potential dangers inherent in creaturely existence” (AOL, 81–82). As we will see, that Volf intends the “merely” to be derogatory indicates that he has not perceived how serious and absolutely unnecessaryZizioulas understands the break in communion to be that “reveals” and “actualizes” the limits and incapacity of creation to sustain itself. Even without grasping the full implications of Zizioulas’s understanding ofbeing as communion, his later ecological writings clearly demonstrate that Zizioulas views creation as good and the salvation of creation as the goal of the incarnation.10Most importantly, these criticisms reveal both how consistently Zizioulas
weaves all of his teaching into the ontological loom of personal communion and how important it is to exegete Zizioulas in light of this loom—even if one ultimately wishes to critique it. Wary of the denigration of creation that has dogged Christianity, these critics appear to think that anything less than an affirmation of the absolute goodness of creation in se collapses into gnostic heresy.11 Zizioulas, however, does not
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creation and fall seems to have been dropped entirely” (“Looking for Personal Space in the Theology of John Zizioulas,” 363). Other critics have been less measured. Volf stridently critiques Zizioulas at this point, “Creation and Fall coalesce into a single entity in Zizioulas’s thinking” (81); and Edward Russell declares, “Zizioulas equates... biological existence with fallenness, and sin appears to be a matter of necessity” (“Reconsidering Relational Anthropology,” 178).
9. Compare these statements in the section on biological hypostases: “suffer from createdness,” “‘passion’ is closely connected with createdness,” and “a biological hypostasis is an intrinsically tragic figure” (BaC, 50–54).
10. See any of Zizioulas’s writings on ecology, for instance “Ecological Asceticism: A Cultural Revolution”; or “Proprietors or Priests of Creation”; or the three-part “Preserving God’s Creation.” Given Zizioulas’s emphasis on death as tragic and on salvation as the salvation of creation as such, Paul Cumin missteps when he describes Zizioulas as a theologian for whom “‘created’ and ‘person’ are fundamentally incommensurable” and “any attempt to be a created person is an attempt to be an oxymoron” (362 and 363).
11. Observe here the distinction Zizioulas makes between createdness and materiality (stressing that the truly radical divide is between created-uncreated, not material-immaterial): “To be subject to death is not a consequence of materiality, for it is our createdness, not our materiality, which makes us subject to death. Just as it is
understand anything to existin isolation. Thus, while he does not collapse creation and Fall, he does not understand creationto be, much less to begood, apart from God.
In fact, Zizioulas argues that sin is the attempt of the created to existin se. This sin, this rupture of the gracious relationship of the Creator with creation, leads to death.12 Ralph Del Colle and Rowan Williams, then, correctly understand Zizioulas’s
harmatology when they describe sin as, “really the constriction of Adam apart from Christ” (“‘Person’ and ‘Being’ in John Zizioulas’ Trinitarian Theology,” 74); and “the separation of being from communion” (“Review,” 101), respectively. This sinful existence could be called an ousianic existence, i.e. being kata physin, according to the essence or nature. Yet such an “existence” does not merit the name as “[l]iving according to the nature (kata physin) [amounts] to individualism, mortality, etc., since man is not immortal kata physin” (C&O, 165).13Thus, the aforementioned references,
which appear to collapse sin and creation, actually affirm the created-uncreated dialectic.14They should be interpreted as statements that the nature, orousia, of creation
is not and cannot be divine, unbounded, or eternal. As Turner recognizes: “The threat of non-being was not initiated by the Fall. This possibility [of non-being] is present from creation and is the result of the difference between divine being and created being” (444). In short, it is necessary that creation separated from God perish, but this
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not evil, materiality is not the cause of death. It is because they had a beginning, and came out of nothing, that death is always a possibility for creatures” (LCD, 94). Cf. Robert Turner (“Foundations for John Zizioulas’ Approach to Ecclesial Communion,” 456).
12. That sin leads to death, the absolute cessation of existence, should answer the first half the criticism made by Russell: “Zizioulas underemphasizes two key aspects of sin; its gravity and its relation to eschatology” (178). The second half, however, stands, highlighting that Zizioulas has not answered explicitly the question: Why do sinful creatures continue to exist, even for a moment? See the section below, however, on the eschatological dimension of his relational ontology—from which one could extrapolate an answer.
13. Cf. Paul’s language of κατα` σα'ρκα. “Living, on the other hand, according
to the image of God means living in the way God exists, i.e. as an image of God’s personhood, and this would amount to ‘becoming God’. This is what the theosis of man means in the thinking of the Greek Fathers” (C&O, 165–66).
14. As Jerry Skira grasps, to say that creation in secannot live “should be taken to mean that the absolute origin of creation (and the continuing life-giving to creation) resides in the creative power of the eternal Trinity” (“The Ecological Bishop,” 203).
separation is not necessary! Fallenness, then, is a distorted way of being in relation to God.15 Thus, humans remain persons and retain their ecstaticfreedom (the imago Dei),
while losing that which was the goal of that freedom: participation in the divine life.16
In order for creation to avoid its fate of returningad nihilum, a new Adam is necessary, a human who looks to the Creator for life, receives it as a free gift of communion and mediates it to the rest of creation—Jesus Christ is this Adam.