What Is Man? Theology Encountering Biology and the Physical Sciences

For more than sixty years, Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon carried on a single, patient conversation with the natural sciences, always returning to one deceptively simple question: what does it mean to be a human person? What Is Man? gathers eleven of his essays and lectures, composed between 1999 and 2019 and now brought together for the first time by Bishop Maxim Vasiljević, into a single sustained argument about the human being in an age of biology, genetics, and artificial intelligence.

Beginning with a meditation on wisdom and information, Metropolitan John moves through patristic anthropology, the theology of creation, and the human being as “priest” rather than mere steward of the natural world, before turning to some of the most urgent questions of our time: the ontological claims made by modern psychiatry, the meaning of death and euthanasia, the ethics of genetic intervention, and the promise and peril of artificial intelligence. Throughout, he refuses every reductive account of the human being, biological or spiritual, developing instead a rich, patristic theology of the person as constituted by freedom, otherness, and communion.

Learned without being remote, and urgent without ever abandoning theological seriousness, What Is Man? stands as one of the clearest introductions to Metropolitan John’s thought on the human person, and a fitting summation of a lifetime spent holding science and theology to a single standard of truth.

John D. Zizioulas (1931–2023) was a modern theologian and Metropolitan of Pergamon in the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Born in Greece on January 10, 1931, he began his studies at the University of Thessaloniki and received his undergraduate degree in theology from the University of Athens in 1955, later earning a Doctor of Theology degree there as well.

His education included a period of study under the Orthodox theologian Fr. Georges Florovsky at Harvard Divinity School, where he received his M.T.S. in 1956 and was a Fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. He received a doctorate in theology from the University of Athens in 1965; his doctoral thesis on the bishop in the early Church was published in English as Eucharist, Bishop, Church: The Unity of the Church in the Divine Eucharist and the Bishop During the First Three Centuries (Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001).

He later taught theology at the University of Edinburgh before becoming Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Glasgow, where he held a personal chair for some fourteen years. He was also a Visiting Professor at the University of Geneva, King’s College London, and the Gregorian University in Rome, and a part-time professor at the University of Thessaloniki. He became a regular member of the Academy of Athens in 1993 and its president in 2002–2003.

Consecrated as a bishop on June 22, 1986, and named Metropolitan of Pergamon, he represented the Ecumenical Patriarchate on international Church bodies for many years, served on the committees for dialogue with the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, and was Secretary of Faith and Order at the World Council of Churches in Geneva.

His books include L’Être ecclésial (1981), Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), Communion and Otherness (T&T Clark, 2006), Lectures in Christian Dogmatics (T&T Clark, 2009), The One and the Many (Sebastian Press, 2011), The Eucharistic Communion and the World (T&T Clark, 2011), Priests of Creation (T&T Clark, 2021), and several further volumes published by Sebastian Press between 2023 and 2026.