Identity, Otherness, and the Trinity

This article offers a tentative interpretation and reconstruction of John D. Zizioulas’s difficult handwritten notes on divine identity and the Trinity. The notes argue that the identity of created beings is bound up with otherness and negation, whereas God’s identity cannot be grounded in non-identity with anything else and therefore requires a positive account. I first clarify this argument and suggest a way of formulating it within the setting of classical theism. I then interpret Zizioulas’s positive account as proceeding in two stages: divine identity is related specifically to the Person of the Father, while the identities of the divine Persons are understood through their mutual affirmation. Because the notes express this relation through apparently contradictory formulas such as 1 = 2 and 1 = 3, I propose a reconstruction using the distinction between identity and numerical sameness developed by Jeffrey Brower and Michael Rea. This distinction permits the Persons to remain genuinely distinct while being numerically the same God and clarifies Zizioulas’s non-additive account of Trinitarian enumeration.