Identity Without Enmity

This essay reconstructs the metaphysical intention of John D. Zizioulas’s unpublished notes, The Logic of Identity. Although the manuscript’s formal reasoning is not always valid, it identifies a significant problem: identity cannot be grounded solely in self-sameness or in the negation of another. In Trinitarian theology, the divine persons are distinguished through positive relations that establish both otherness and communion. The notes therefore suggest a relational ontology in which the other is not a threat to identity but a condition of it.