The Ecclesial Hypostasis

"The ascetic character of the ecclesial hypostasis does not come from a denial of the world of or the biological nature of existence itself. It implies a denial of the biological hypostasis. It accepts the biological nature but wishes to hypostasize it in a non-biological way, to endow it with real being, to give it a true ontology, that is, eternal life. It is for this reason that...neither eros nor the body must be abandoned, but must be hypostasized according to the 'mode of existence' of the ecclesial hypostasis. The ascetic character of the person, derived as it is from the eucharistic form of the ecclesial hypostasis, expresses the authentic person precisely when it does not deny eros and the body but hypostasizes them in an ecclesial manner. In...practice this means basically that eros as ecstatic movement of the human person drawing its hypostasis from the future as it is expressed in the eucharist...is freed from ontological necessity and does not lead any more to the exclusiveness which is dictated by nature...The body, for its part, as the hypostatic expression of the human person, is liberated from individualism and egocentricity and becomes a supreme expression of community--the Body of Christ, the body of the Church, the body of the Eucharist. Thus it is proved experientially that the body is not itself a negative or exclusive concept, but the reverse: a concept of communion and love...it does not draw its being from what it is now but is rooted ontologically in the future, the pledge and earnest of which is the resurrection of Christ."

John Zizioulas. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, p.63-64.