rain and the rhinoceros

In his provocative article, “Communion and Otherness,”1 Zizioulas states not without a tone of lament, “The world at this moment is dominated by Western culture.”2 In a time when Western political and economic systems dominate and exert themselves on the world, Orthodoxy cannot afford to become merely another “‘exotic’ religion offering refuge to those seeking mystical and other extraordinary experiences.”3 Instead, following the ancient church as a model, Orthodoxy, especially those members living in the West, must engage and strive to transform culture. Zizioulas urges the Orthodox church “to relate tradition to the problems of modern Western man, which are rapidly becoming the problems of humanity in its global dimension.”4 The individualism that is rooted in the “very foundations of this culture” regrettably views the happiness and rights of the individual so highly that it makes “protection from the other. . . a fundamental necessity.”5 As a result, “we are forced and even encouraged to consider the other as our enemy before we can treat him or her as our friend.”6 Acceptance of the other is always conditional on the basis that this other does not “threaten our privacy or insofar as he is useful for our individual happiness.”7In Zizioulas’ assessment the values and ideals of Western culture, heralded by the United States in particular, actually perpetuate fear of the other.

This essay is broken up into two parts. In the first section, we will make the case that the Bush administration with the help of the media8 has constructed a depersonalized and stereotyped Arab/Muslim other9 to justify a seemingly unending “war on terrorism.” In the second section, we will undertake a study of Zizioulas’ theology of the Eucharist to support our thesis that the Eucharist enacts a vision that resists all methods of depersonalization and stereotyping by opening up a set of human relations in which the other is affirmed as particular and unique. Our hope in this paper is to offer a small contribution to the recent retrieval of the social meaning of Christian worship.10

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1. The article first appeared in John Zizioulas, “Communion and Otherness,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 38.04, pp. 347-361. A revised form of the essay appears as the introduction of Zizioulas’ recent publication Communion & Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 1-12.
2. Zizioulas, “Communion and Otherness,” 348.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid
5..Ibid., 349.
6. Ibid., 349.
7. Ibid., 349.
8. I am fully aware that the term, “the media,” carries some ambiguity. By media, I mean to refer specifically to mainstream corporate news outlets, such as CNN or The New York Times. Analysis of other forms of media, such as the portrayal of Arab/Muslims in film, literature, theatre, photography, and art is beyond the scope of this paper and has been discussed elsewhere. See, for instance, Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar eds., Visions of the East: Orientalism in film (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997).
9. Of course, the Western construction of an Arab/Muslim other is hardly a recent phenomenon. Here, I take Edward Said’s basic thesis for granted. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon books, 1978. See also, Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001). Said’s basic thesis is that knowledge of the East in Western imagination has been generated primarily by constructs that juxtapose the East as the antithesis of the West.
10. See especially William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination (New York: T&T Clark, 2003) and Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998); Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells eds., The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Bernd Wannenwetsch, Political Worship: Ethics for Christian Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

Over the next couple of weeks I will be posting an essay that I recently wrote in the form of a series. The full title of the paper is “The Eucharist and the ‘War on Terrorism’: John Zizioulas’ theology of the Eucharist and the refusal to reject the Other.” This is my first blogging attempt at posting a “series,” so bare with me. The following is the first post of the series and the beginning of the essay.

The tragic events of September 11, 2001, coupled with the President’s rhetoric about the shadowy nature of the enemy, played into people’s fear of the other. The Bush administration, with the help of the media, constructed a larger-than-life “terrorist enemy” and promised to rid the entire world of evil forever through the deployment of massive military force. By exploiting this fear of the other, the Bush administration gained wide support from the nation’s citizens, including many Christians, to justify the invasion of Afghanistan and later, under a related pretext, the invasion of Iraq for the second time in just over a decade.

Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas directly identifies the fear of the other with the fall of humanity. He writes, “There is a pathology built into the very roots of our existence, inherited through our birth, and that is the fear of the other.”1 Adam’s sin was the “rejection of the Other par excellence, our Creator.”2 Any hope for reconciliation with the other, therefore, relies on our first being reconciled to God. Our fear of the other is, however, reflective of a much deeper and universal fear of all otherness.3 The fear of all otherness is the fear that difference poses a threat to our individual security. Even when fear of the other is apparently overcome, when we begin to accept a particular other, for instance, Zizioulas argues that we do so only on the condition that this other is similar to ourselves. In other words, we are resistant, and indeed cannot even bare to accept, much less affirm radical difference or absolute otherness.

When we gather together in the mystery of the Holy Eucharist we enter into communion with the triune God, with one another, and with the whole of creation. At the same time, in the Eucharistic celebration otherness is radically affirmed and difference no longer leads to division. In Zizioulas’ words, in the Eucharist “difference ceases to be divisive and becomes good. . . unity or communion does not destroy but rather affirms diversity and otherness.”4 The Eucharist is thus the act in which “communion and otherness is realized par excellence.”5 This series of posts will explore John Zizioulas’ notion that communion and otherness is fully realized in the Eucharistic celebration. Building on the work of Zizioulas we will argue that the Eucharist enacts a vision or an “ethos” that resists all methods of depersonalization and stereotyping of the other by positively affirming the absolute uniqueness and particularity of each and every human person. We will show that Zizioulas’ theology of the Eucharist has a cosmic and profoundly social dimension which has implications for how the church should respond to the distorted construction of an “Arab/Muslim” other in the United States led “war on terrorism.”

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1John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 1.
2 Communion & Otherness, 1.
3 Ibid., 2.
4 Ibid., 7.
5 Ibid., 7.

There is no doubt that the Church cannot abandon or betray or distort the Gospel, and present to society an ethos different from the one emerging from Christ’s life. If this is inapplicable to social life; that simply means that the Church can never coincide with society; she lives in the world but she is not of the world (Jn 15.16). The ethos she preaches cannot take the form of a rationality or practically sustainable ethic. The optimism of a ’social gospel’ which might transform history into the kingdom of God simply cannot be sustained theologically. Society will never become the Church, and history will have to wait for the eschaton to redeem it from its antinomies.   

 Meanwhile the Church, as the sign and image of the eschatological community, continues to portray in history the genuine ethos of otherness, not only in her preaching and teaching, but also and above all in her sacramental life and in her saints. As a sacramental and eucharistic community, the Church is the place where the ‘old man’ of servitude to nature and selfhood dies in Baptism, and where the fear of the Other is replaced in the Eucharist and in the ascetic ethos by the acceptance of the Other qua Other: this is the meaning of catholicity. And in the persons of her saints (martyrs, ascetics, and innumerable anonymous Christian faithful) who in one way or another, though always imperfectly, sacrifice themselves for the sake of the Other, she manifests in history the holiness of the only truly holy one, Jesus Christ. 

John Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness (New York: T&T Clark, 2006), 87-88.