zizioulas

“In the process of healing the abused victim is also moving toward personhood as a gifted event. In the same way that depersonalization, “nonpersonhood”, happens in and through a set of relations, albeit violent, destructive and oppressive, personalization, the coming to personhood, being a person happens in relations of love and freedom. It is only in such relations, which presuppose the kenotic, and hence, ekstatic movement toward the other, that the abused victim is rendered a unique, free and unrepeatable being, a person."

In 1991, Zizioulas introduces the phrase, “ethical apophaticism… with which to indicate that, exactly as the Greek fathers spoke of the divine persons, we cannot give a positive qualitative content to a hypostasis or persons, for this would result in the loss of his or her absolute uniqueness and turn a person into a classifiable entity.”