The Logic of Identity

Abstract

These previously unpublished handwritten notes by John D. Zizioulas, four leaves among his papers in the Archives of Metropolitan John, are closer to a draft of working notes than to a finished essay. Fragmentary as they are, they record a sustained attempt to state the problem of identity in relation to the Triune God. In them readers may recognize an affinity, at least in outward form, with certain procedures of analytic philosophy: conceptual economy, schematic notation, and an attempt to expose the consequences of competing accounts of identity. Zizioulas had long regarded the bare logic of identity as theologically sterile, and in Communion and Otherness he wrote out the alternative as an equation: not “man = man” but “man = man-in-communion-with-God.” The present leaves extend that operation from the human being to God. These are archival working notes, not a treatise that Zizioulas published or is known to have prepared for publication, and their survival warrants neither the assumption that he endorsed every inference nor the reconstruction of a final position from unfinished material. The notes break off; they may be read as an attempt to place conceptual reasoning in the service of a theological vision that exceeds it.