In his essay, "Personhood and Being," in Being as Communion,[1] John Zizioulas presents an important challenge to the relationship between theology and philosophy, namely, by questioning the use of Heideggerean philosophy for support of patristic theology. His discussion, and tentative conclusion that Heidegger's philosophy cannot support Trinitarian theology, takes place in a substantial footnote. Certainly, this is not the only, or the most important challenge presented by Zizioulas in this work, but it is in many ways central to his brand of personalism, and deserves further treatment. His comments are particularly worthy of attention in the current climate of post-modern theology, which is largely 'founded' on Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their successors such as Jean-Luc Marion.[2] Because he relegates his comments to a footnote, it seems as though Zizioulas is not emphasizing his challenge to the relationship between Heideggerean thought and theology, but is getting it out of the way, so that his readers can dismiss any possible relationship and move on. This note is rather strangely placed given the many parallels throughout his work to Heideggerean concepts, such as the ontological relation/dependency of God and communion and that of Being on Dasein, and the historical analysis of the treatment of person as substance in Western theology.[3]

More recent discussion, such as found in Laurence Paul Hemming's, Heidegger's Atheism,[4] argues that certain readings of Heidegger, particularly influenced by Karl Löwith, prematurely closed the door to theological readings and uses of Heidegger's corpus. For Zizioulas, grounding theology on philosophy is the main problem. In the climate of contemporary philosophy (largely grounded in issues that have arisen when confronting Heideggerean ideas), a reversal of theo- and onto- prefixes in the uncomfortable discussion between philosophy and theology may not be as far-fetched as previously thought.

Zizioulas's areas of contention pertain to the concepts of ekstasis, subjectivity, time, and horizon in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit ontology. While outlining the series of problems presented by Zizoulas for the use of Heidegger's program in Being and Time for theology (in Karl Barth and Christos Yannaras, for instance), it is not the scope of this paper to solve these problems or to answer his objections. It is simply my intention to bring Zizioulas' personalism and his understanding of Trinitarian theology of Orthodoxy to the table of postmodern theo-philosophical discussions that are already largely grounded both on use of, and confrontation with, Heidegger's philosophy. While Zizioulas' note on Heidegger seems to take a position that shuts down discussion of the relation of existential-phenomenological ontology and Orthodox theology, it may have the reverse effect of opening up a world of thought.

Taking the position (against earlier interpreters)[5] that Being is not God for Heidegger, and that his criticisms of Christianity as a part of the metaphysical machinery in works such as Introduction to Metaphysics are toward a theology found largely in the Western development of Christian thought (culminating in Scholasticism), I can only wonder what the outcome of Heidegger's thinking would have been had he been confronted from the outset with a more authentic reading of the Church Fathers, such as that of Zizioulas.


Ecstatic Temporality

Although not posited as central to his own criticism, Zizioulas opens his note[6] with an alignment of the concept of ekstasis in the Church Fathers[7] and in Heidegger:

The concept of ekstasis as an ontological category is found in the mystical Greek Fathers (particularly in the so-called Areopagitical writings and in Maximus the Confessor) and also totally independently in the philosophy of M. Heidegger.[8]

If we are to find any comparison between Heidegger's Being and Time philosophy and early Christian theology, it will not be in the ekstasis or ecstases of temporality. It is safe to say that Heidegger's ecstatic temporality is not of the same order as the ekstasis of Maximus. Lack of comparison, however, does not entail incompatibility.

To summarize Heidegger's position on ekstasis in Division II on Dasein and Temporality,[9] our everyday thinking of time as a succession of a series of 'nows' as past-present-future, a conception that privileges the Present as a moment on an infinite continuum, is a derived and 'inauthentic' (meaning less than what is actually fundamental to our human existence and which makes such concepts possible). We grasp this temporality as an object in which other entities or objects of pastness, presentness, and futureness, appear. This sense of temporality is derived from a more primordial experience of time, with ecstases of temporality that are described as having "the phenomenal characteristic of the 'coming-towards-oneself, the 'having-been' and the 'letting-oneself-be-encountered-by'.[10] In a lecture series shortly following Being and Time, he refers to these moments of primordial phenomenological time as 'expectancy', 'retention' and 'making present'.[11] 'Expectancy' is listed first for "[t]he primary meaning of existentiality is the future."[12] The ekstasis of this temporality is future, since as human beings we can project our wishes, expectations, visions onto a blank screen of possibilities that we recognized as limited by our unknown span of existence in body on earth. Experience of authentic temporality (as a contemplatory vehicle for the authenticity of Dasein) is not attained like a level or step of being, but is a continual effort—choices are made, we create our personal fate in the taut pull between the forgetful automation of inauthentic living and the pull of our mortality and unfulfilled possibility and striving. This being-toward-death need not be morbidity, but can be a gift of positive anxiety and highly personal relating of our potential divine nature and the realization of it through our lives, through our sense of finite worldly time. While I momentarily attribute a value of impoverishment to the inauthentic 'leveled' temporality, authentic time in the Heideggerean sense not have an equal and opposite positive value. It is rather an ontological structure that grants free possibility—good or bad. That such a structure is unearthed does not answer why it is, just that the meaning of temporality is care.[13] Zizioulas rather uses theo-ontology to answer the 'why' question that the phenomenologist not dare—God as the source of being.

Heidegger contrasts ecstatic temporality in Being and Time with the infinite inauthentic mode of temporality.[14] In Christian theology, the finite and infinite times can be (incorrectly) interpreted as the reverse—infinite as authentic, finite as inauthentic. However, we have two types of 'infinite'—the ecstatic time-space of the Church Fathers introduces a third temporality—the eternal and divine. Taken by itself, Heidegger's temporality does not contradict theological temporality because the eternal is not an indifferent flatline extending into the infinite but the Son as the basis of and intrusion into history—a history bursting with kairotic moments of creation, descent, ascent, and salvation.[15] An eternal time beyond our finitude is not impossible in the Heideggerean phenomenology, but inaccessible to the philosopher, insofar as philosophy defines itself by an abysmal gulf between philosophy and faith. However, Dasein's care as sein-zum-tode may by all rights include, even prioritize, a concern for being-beyond-death. Zizioulas claimed that only theology can treat of the authentic person, for God's free being as a person gives us our possibility of authentic personhood (freedom).[16] From the access point of Dasein, we move from the infinite, to finite, to eternal. From the top-down theoria of theology, the eternal is ontological starting point. The human person, ontologically granted personhood by God's being as person, in communion moves from the inauthentic oblivion to authentic participation in the eternal. Faith may emerge as a possibility of Dasein in its authentic finitude. Whether or not faith is to be shunned or set aside by the philosopher depends on her hermeneutic motivation.

While Zizioulas does not elaborate on "ekstasis as an ontological category is found in the mystical Greek Fathers," we can glean the meaning by looking at God and temporality in the early mystical Maximus. As Hans Urs von Balthasar says of the difficult Centuries on Knowledge:

[T]he Logos appears in the world here only by way of being outside of himself, in a guise that is deceptive, but meant for the world's instruction; he is 'Logos in essence, flesh in external appearance.' (2, 60). The human Christ appears hardly at all.[17]

He also states that for early Maximus:

God is simply above time and the ages, above the movement of the world, above beginning, middle, and end, and therefore God inconceivable, only to be approached through faith (I, 1-10)...[18]

Balthasar is concerned that this ontology presents God as ecstatic to world and time creates a "groundless abyss that separates the absolutely transcendent 'essence' of God from the world" and does not account for the Trinitarian entrance of God into time and history. Whether or not he is correct in his interpretation, this example illustrates a perennial problem in Orthodox theology as reflected in the different ontological (and existential) accounts among the church fathers and even within a single thinker such as early and later Maximus. As E. Moore has shown, how the theologian conceives of human freedom, either as "a series of fumbles and false starts" attempting to reach the external God within worldly temporality, or as the "unfolding of an indeterminate history that is the result of free acts of human souls,"[19] is the issue at the heart. The ontological must at some point reach the existential if the questions of Being are to have any meaning for us.

A meeting point may be proposed as such: For Zizioulas' in his interpretation of the Orthodox faith, God is no Being apart from communion (the ecclesial union of beings-toward-God); for Heidegger in his existential ontology, Being is no Being apart from Dasein, which has the structure of Being-with-others. These statements are not equivalent, but complimentary. Notions that Being is equated with God for Heidegger are convincingly dispelled by Hemming,[20] and we need only quote his 1951 Zurich seminar to ward off any doubt:

Being and God are not identical, and I would never attempt to think the essence of God through being. Some of you perhaps know that I came out of theology, and that I harbor an old love for it and that I have a certain understanding of it. If I were yet to write a theology—to which I sometimes feel inclined—then the word 'being' would not be allowed to occur in it.[21]

Unlike the theologian, the philosopher does not have the theoretical commitment to God as the source of Being. However, the philosopher has the advantage of phenomenological access to our relation to and striving toward God through our Being.

We cannot say with any biographical certainty to what extent Heidegger's phenomenological concepts in Being and Time are derived from his early research in theology (comparisons such as the notion of the Fallenness of Dasein with the primordial Fall of Adam and Eve are made and disputed). We can be sure that the question of God and the divine was in the background of his thought and philosophical career.[22] Regardless of his often silent struggle with theology, Zizioulas' next statement in his footnote points to a core weakness in Heidegger's thought in Being and Time for theology. The notion of personhood may have been prematurely shunned due to his (mis)understanding of Person as having the trapping of a static metaphysics and a Cartesian subjectivity. We, however, cannot dismiss the dynamic ontology of Personhood as found in works such as Being as Communion, and are challenged to face the difficulties personalism creates for the philosopher faced with questions about Subject and subjectivity in contemporary Continental philosophy.


Subjectivity, Person, Other

Papanikolaou is correct to identify a conscious influence of Emmanuel Levinas on Zizioulas.[23] He is also correct to point out that Zizioulas' interpretation of the Cappadocians as developing a "relational ontology of trinitarian personhood" is not far-fetched. If existentialism and personalism for theology happens to be compatible with patristic thinking, then so it is. Therefore, I believe Zizioulas's next critical statement in the footnote of Heidegger, borrowed directly from Levinas, is motivated by a concern for the preservation of a dynamic and existential ontology, a concern of which Being and Time ontology falls short. Zizioulas acknowledges that:

Heidegger represents an important stage in the progress of Western thought, especially in the liberation of ontology from an absolute “ontism” and from philosophical rationalism, though not in fact from the concept of consciousness and of the subject. (See the critique of Heidegger by the important contemporary philosopher, E. Levinas, in his brilliant work, Totalité et Infini. Essai sur l’Exteriorité [1971], p. 15: "Sein und Zeit n’a peut-être soutenu qu’une seule thèse: l’être est inséparable de la compréhension de l’être [que se déroule comme temps], l’être est déjà appel à la subjectivité.")[24]

The first statement about the inability of Being and Time to shake off the 'subjectivity' is not only Levinas' critique from reading Sein und Zeit, but is a self-criticism that Heidegger himself offered; the work was in danger of unwillingly "becoming only a new strengthening of subjectivity."[25] The goal of liberating ontology from the subjectivity meant, for Heidegger at least, to come to a language in which the mystery of Being is left open for rare glimpses, rather than to attempt to capture it as a subject grasps and dominates an object, as is the case in the calculative thinking and its resulting technologies. As he wrote, "the essential worth of man does not consist in his being the substance of beings, as the 'Subject' among them, so that as the tyrant of Being he may deign to release the beingness of beings into an all too loudly bruited 'objectivity.'"[26] Levinas, Zizioulas, and Heidegger criticize the phenomenological language of 'horizon' for the comprehension of beings that appear on horizon appear for the sake of manipulation, consumption, and appropriation, thereby totalizing, and (I would argue in spite of all vehement claims otherwise, that this is true of Heidegger as well) subsuming Otherness. All three thinkers, however, may have different reasons for wishing to not lapse into subjectivity. For Zizioulas, subjects as merely independent individuals are not Persons capable of entering into the liturgical communion with God.[27] For Heidegger, any metaphysical discussion of the 'essence' of man (as body, soul, spirit or some composite), and any talk of objectivity, etc, lapses into a broader 'subjectivism', although it is questionable whether or not in his later works he really intended to overcome subjectivity rather than uncover its means in an essential way.[28]

Zizioulas makes another statement in his footnote that shows why Levinas' criticisms of Heidegger's ontology are of importance to Trinitarian theology:

With our insistence here on the thesis that God is ecstatic, that is, that He exists on account of being the Father, we deny simultaneously not only the ontological priority of the substance over the person, but also a “panoramic” ontology (the term belongs to the critique of Heidegger by E. Levinas, op. cit. p. 270 ff.; cf. p. 16 ff.), which would view the Trinity as a parallel co-existence of the three persons, a kind of multiple manifestation of the being of God.

The type of panoramic ontology that Levinas accuses Heidegger of espousing is further expressed in "Is Ontology Fundamental?,"[29] an essay in which he claims that Heidegger's contribution of Dasein, the philosophy of existence, is 'effaced' by his ontology as comprehension. Levinas strongly differentiated his philosophy from that in Heidegger by placing what he called 'metaphysics' as prior to ontology, and by introducing an absolute Other as the source of ethical relations to others. Because Zizioulas deals with the meaning of ecclesiastical communion as a relating based on persons, it is not difficult to see the appeal in Levinasian ideas for him and the rejection of Heidegger based on Levinas' critique.

It is true, and self-admitted, that Heidegger did not overcome subject and horizon in Being and Time, however, while he does not use the word Other in the same manner as Levinas, his preservation of the mystery of Being has the connotation of Other—never fully within our reach—always more than we can comprehend. I put forth that his struggle with question of Being was in fact a struggle with Otherness—an otherness that continues to reappear at the margin between the languages of philosophy and theology. This notion of grasping Being, subsuming the Other is one that occurs in the fundamental history of metaphysics that Heidegger intended to uncover through his works. Heidegger's Being is ultimately incomprehensible to thinking, uncontainable by language, but not nothing. All originary concepts of Being, including Moira, Phusis, One, etc, tell a history of an inadequate ontology (the forgetting of the 'ontological difference' between beings and Being) that cannot encompass or fully know the mystery of the meaning of Being. Heidegger's motivation to break free of metaphysical language, to establish a new mood and path for thinking is to break through the nihilism of metaphysics by first bringing it forth and undergoing it. His real incentive to push ontology to the limits may have been based on what he understood to be the result of metaphysical ontology—an increasingly nihilistic and meaningless way of living on earth.

The power of metaphysics that hinders a meaningful existence, for Heidegger and other 'prophets of technological nihilism',[30] is the same force that depersonalizes—although it is not expressed in his works in terms of person. Heidegger's unfortunate failure to link his fundamental ontology to any theological explorations (in spite of his undying interest in theology) may be primarily due to his rejection of explorations of what a person means in Dilthey, Bergson, Husserl and Scheler.[31] He illustrates the problem with a rejection of Scheler's definition of the person as the performer of intentional acts. He thought of his predecessor's notions of person as "thoroughly coloured by the anthropology of Christianity and the ancient world, whose inadequate ontological foundations have been overlooked by both philosophy of life and personalism."[32] His identifies these foundations as 1) man as a rational animal; and 2) man as the image and likeness of God. What he says of the latter is that the "Being of God gets Interpreted ontologically by means of the ancient ontology" [an interpretation as the "Being-present-at-hand of other created thing"], and the Being of the human more so. Heidegger makes a fundamental mistake in assuming that all ancient ontology is alike, betraying an ignorance of Origen, the Cappadocians, Maximus, and all thinkers that comprise the diverse history of Eastern ontology, one that may be conceived of as a tension between the existential and metaphysical. In this light, Levinas' criticism, while crudely placing Heidegger's efforts in light of the same comprehensive ontology that he battles, is well-considered by Zizioulas for a theology of Persons. However, it remains to be seen whether Levinasian theology of absolute Other is in fact compatible with Trinitarian theology, or whether it can only be one of God as Father alone who is called out every relation with others.

Heidegger's major shortcoming, the same that has spawned not only criticisms but rejection of his whole philosophical work, is that ethical relations with others (in philosophy and in life) and the meaning of the person were postponed in his question of Being. The theologically-minded post-Heideggerean need not be restricted by this same deficiency, and would do well to consider the Orthodox notion of theosis,[33] for instance, to open the relating of Being to God, our being to God through Christ and Spirit.


Conclusion

Zizioulas' note on the use of Heideggerean philosophy for Orthodox theology leaves more questions than answers. While I have argued that Heidegger's concepts of ecstatic temporality is not discovered 'totally independently' of the eternal temporality of the Church Father, the differences between these notions of ekstasis provide an example of a phenomenological approach to our being that is not a supplement to theology, but a path out of inauthentic thinking that can meet in the middle ground of our modern and post-modern experiences and our decisions to hold and practice spiritual faith.

Zizioulas does not claim to have the all answers to the challenging questions he asks, but does appear to take the position that the 'philosophy' of Heidegger is incompatible with the Orthodox faith. His mistake, I believe, is in the treatment of the work of a philosopher, any philosopher, as a whole, without loose ends and without unanswered problems. Karl Jaspers had a simple but elegant definition or understanding of philosophy as a continual dynamic of questioning that he called 'philosophizing'.[34] My reason for drawing attention to this highly-charged footnote is not to argue that Heidegger, as a philosopher, was always (or even sometimes) correct in his thinking or consistently useful for Trinitarian theology, but to 1) destabilize the notion held by some theologians that the term Being in Heidegger can be replaced with God – that the mystery of Being and of God are identical; 2) acknowledge (for the sake of contemporary Orthodox thinking) the debt to this highly influential 20th century thinker, not just for contemporary non-analytical philosophy but in the 21st century turn of philosophy toward theology. For the theologically-minded philosopher, perhaps Orthodox thinking will provide some content to the relation of the divine that emerges in the opening of Being. For both philosophizing theologians and theologizing philosophers who attempt to think upon these difficulties, I leave the following questions by Zizioulas for further thought:

(a) Is it possible to conceive of an ontology outside time in Heidegger, or of an ontology within time predicated of God in the Greek Fathers? (b) Is it possible for death to be an ontological concept in the Fathers, who regard it as the last enemy of being? (c) Is it possible to regard the concept of truth (alêtheia), in the sense of a manifestation of or outgrowth from oblivion (lêthê), as an inevitable attribute of the ontology predicated of God?[35]