Monarchical Interdependence

A Zizioulian Reappraisal of Vulnerability

Abstract

This article examines the philosophical reappraisal of vulnerability through the lens of John Zizioulas’s theological anthropology. While Western thought, shaped by libertarian ideals, has habitually framed vulnerability as weakness, recent philosophers—especially Judith Butler and Erinn Gilson—have recast the concept as an openness to affect that enables both flourishing and harm. Yet, Butler and Gilson remain constrained by empiricism, and as such, struggle to reconcile human vulnerability with agency. Zizioulas’s anthropological hermeneutic provides a way forward by interpreting vulnerability in light of his trinitarian theology. Specifically, his account of the monarchy of the Father as “inconceivable” without the Son and the Spirit provides a divine model for human vulnerability as both interdependent and free. In light of this model, Zizioulas reframes Butler and Gilson’s reappraisal of vulnerability as a paradoxical tension between the “biological hypostasis” (the tragic inability to transcend our created nature subject to death), and free, loving interdependence with God in Christ through the eucharistic communion of the Church (the “ecclesial hypostasis” or “communion in otherness”). Zizioulas’s account also addresses the question of agency in vulnerability by proposing kenosis as a continual ascetic self-denial to receive the other and let the other truly be other.