Person, Grace, Nature

Nikolaos Loudovikos's personalism

Nikolaos Loudovikos teaches systematic theology at the University of Thessaloniki. In his 2010 Eucharistic Ontology, he sketches out what his subtitle calls “Maximus the Confessor’s Eschatological Ontology of Being as Dialogical Reciprocity.” At the heart of Maximus’s vision of the world is “becoming-in-communion in Christ and life as gift-sharing.” Things are what they will be at the eschaton, and the eschaton is “the ontological realization of Eucharist,” that is, the fulfillment of the mutual communion that takes place at the Lord’s table (1-2).

In Maximus’s vision, the logoi of things aren’t underlying essences. Rather, each of the logoi is a divine call that awaits the response of the creature; since to be is to be in dialogue with the Creator, dialogue possesses an “ontological character.” To be is to be summoned into an exchange of gifts with the Giver of every good and perfect gift. Though things will be fully themselves only at the end, they even now are on their way toward that fulfillment – which is to say, creation even now exists within the ontological dialogue that will reach its consummation in the new creation.

Along the way, Loudovikos distinguishes his project (and Maximus’s) from various alternatives. For Origen and Evagrius, ascent to God is ecstatic, a liberation from nature into “intellectual contemplation of the divine.” Being a result of the Fall, the body doesn’t share in this elevation and eventually dissolves. Origen sees the eschaton as a mere return to the bodiless beginning. On this view, eschatology isn’t creative and “the historical process will yield nothing new or unexpected” (8).

John Zizioulas (Communion and Otherness) adopts an Origenist position, treating nature as “blind necessity” and person as freedom and “an ecstatic outlet from nature,” liberation from “the laws of nature” (Zizioulas’s words).