The being of God is relative being; without the concept of communication, it would be impossible to talk about the existence of God. The tautology "God is God" says nothing about ontology, just as the logical statement A = A is dead logic and, consequently, the negation of being, which is life. It would be inconceivable to speak of "one God" without speaking of the God who is "communion," that is, of the Holy Trinity. The Holy Trinity is a primordial ontological concept, not a concept that is added to the divine essence or rather follows it, as follows from the dogmatic teachings of the West, and as it is, alas, manifested in some textbooks of the East in our time. Outside of communion, the substance of God, the Essence of God — "God" — has no ontological content, no true being.

In this way, communication in patristic thinking becomes an ontological concept. Nothing in existence is in itself comprehensible as an individual, such as tТde t... Aristotle, since even God exists thanks to the fact of communication. Thus, the ancient world heard for the first time that it is communication that makes beings "exist"; nothing exists without it, not even God.

But this communication is not a relationship understood for its own sake, an existential structure that replaces "nature" or "substance" in its primordial ontological role, something reminiscent of the structure of existence found in Martin Buber's thought. Like "substance," "communication" does not exist in itself; The father is the "cause" of this. This thesis of the Cappadocians, which introduces the concept of "cause" into the concept of the existence of God, acquires great importance and significance. For this meant that the finite ontological category that makes something really exist is neither an impersonal and uncommunicative "substance," nor a structure of communication that exists in itself or is imposed by necessity, but rather a person. The fact that God owes His existence to the Father, i.e., to the Person, means (a) that His "substance," His being, does not limit Him (God does not exist because He cannot but exist), and (b) that communion is not a restraining structure for His existence (God does not love in fellowship, for it cannot but be in fellowship and love). The fact that God exists because the Father shows that His existence, His being, is the consequence of a free person, which ultimately means that not only communion but also freedom, a free person, constitute true being. True being comes only from a free person, from a person who loves freely, that is, who freely asserts his being, his identity through the act of communication with other people.

In this way, the discussion of the existence of God leads patristic thought to the following theses, which are fundamentally related to both ecclesiology and ontology.

a) Outside of communion there is no true being. Nothing exists as a "separate individual" comprehensible in itself. Communication is an ontological category.

(b) Communion which does not proceed from the "hypostasis," that is, from the concrete and free person, and which does not lead to the "hypostases," that is, from concrete and free persons, is not the "image" of God's being. A person cannot exist without communication, but any form of communication that denies or suppresses a person is inadmissible.

This theology of the person, which for the first time in history appeared through a patristic vision of the existence of God, without the mystery of the Church could never become a living experience for man. Humanity or sociology could fight as long as they wanted to confirm the importance and significance of man. However, existentialist philosophers show in our day, with an intellectual honesty that makes them worthy of the name of philosopher, that, humanly speaking, the self as absolute ontological freedom remains a quest without completion. Between the existence of God and the existence of man there remains an abyss of creation, and creation, creation, means precisely that the existence of each human person is given to him; Consequently, man himself is absolutely incapable of freeing himself from his "nature" or from his "essence," because biological laws dictate to him without destroying himself. And even when he lives in the event of communion or in the form of love or social and political life, he is ultimately obliged, if he wants to continue to live, to make his freedom relative, that is, to submit to certain natural and social "givens." The individual's striving for absolute freedom implies a "new birth," a "new birth," baptism. And it is precisely the Church's existence that "hypostasizes" the person according to God's mode of being.

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But patristic theology from the very beginning insisted on something very significant: man can attain, draw near to God only through the Son and in the Holy Spirit. An ecclesiology that uses the concept of the "image of God" cannot be based simply on triadology. The fact that man in the Church is "the image of God" is due to the oikonomia of the Holy Trinity, that is, to the works of Christ and the Spirit in history. This oikonomia is the basis of ecclesiology, but it is not its goal. The Church is built by the historical work of divine oikonomia, but ultimately leads to a vision of God "as He is," to a vision of the Triune God in His eternal existence.

This metahistorical, eschatological and iconological aspect of the Church is characteristic of the Eastern tradition, which lives and teaches its theology liturgically; it contemplates the existence of God and the existence of the Church through the eyes of divine services, mainly Eucharistic worship, the image of "eschata par excellence". It is for this reason that Orthodoxy is often thought of or portrayed by its representatives as a kind of Christian Platonism, as a vision of the future or the heavenly without regard to history and its problems. In contrast, Western theology tends to limit ecclesiology (and indeed even all theology) to the historical content of faith—oikonomia—and to project the realities of history and time into the eternal existence of God. In this way, the dialectic of God and the world, the uncreated and the created, of history and "eschat" is lost. The Church ends, becoming completely "historical": it ceases to be a manifestation of the eschata and becomes an image of this world and historical realities. The existence of the Church and the existence of God are no longer organically connected; Ecclesiology no longer needs "theology" to function. Orthodox theology is faced with the danger of the historical "disincarnation" of the Church, that is, of depriving it of all earthly things, and, conversely, the West runs the risk of tying it primarily to history, either in the form of extreme Christocentrism – imitatio Christi – which lacks the essential impact of pneumatology, or in the form of social activism or moralism, which tries to play the role of the image of God in the Church. Consequently, the two systems of theology, Eastern and Western, must meet somewhere deep in order to reconstruct a genuine patristic synthesis that will protect them from the above dangers. The being of the Church should never be separated from the absolute requirements of the Being of God, that is, from her eschatological nature, just as it should not be separated from history. The institutional aspect of the Church must always embody its eschatological nature, without destroying the dialectic of this age and the age to come, uncreated and created, of the existence of God and the existence of man and the world.

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But how can we bring together the existence of the Church and the existence of God, history and eschatology, without destroying their dialectical relationship? In order to achieve this, we need to rediscover the lost awareness of the primitive Church regarding the decisive importance in the ecclesiology of the Eucharist.

The new discovery of this understanding, established on the painful paths of the development of medieval scholasticism and the "Babylonian captivity" of modern Orthodoxy, suggests that we refuse to consider the Eucharist as one of the many sacraments, as an objective act or "means of grace" "used" or "performed" by the Church. The ancient understanding of the Eucharist, common in its main features before the twelfth century for both East and West, was completely different. The celebration of the Eucharist by the primitive Church was, first of all, the gathering of the people of God ™p€ tХ ©uto, that is, the manifestation and realization of the Church. Its celebration on Sunday, the day of the eschata, as well as its entire liturgical content, confirmed that during the liturgy the Church lived not only in remembrance of a historical fact – the Last Supper and the earthly life of Christ, including the cross and resurrection – but she performed an eschatological act. It was in the Eucharist that the Church could contemplate her eschatological nature, she could taste the very life of the Holy Trinity; in other words, it could realize the true existence of man as the image of God's own being. All the fundamental elements that made up its historical existence and structure had to pass through the Eucharistic community in order to be "certain" (according to Ignatius of Antioch) or "valid" and "canonical" (according to the terminology of modern canon law), that is, to be ecclesiologically true. No consecration to the fundamental and structural ministries of the Church took place outside the Eucharistic community. It was there, in the presence of all the people of God and all the ranks, in an act of free communion, that the Holy Spirit distributed the gifts, "constituting, building up the whole structure of the Church." Thus, the Eucharist was not an act of some pre-existing Church; it was an event that constitutionalized the existence of the Church, giving the Church the opportunity to be. The Eucharist constituted the existence of the Church.

Consequently, the Eucharist had the unique privilege or advantage of uniting both the works of Christ and the works of the Holy Spirit into one unique experience. It expressed an eschatological vision through historical realities by combining institutional elements with charismatic elements in church life. For only in the Eucharist has the dialectical relationship between God and the world, between the "eschate" and history, been preserved, without creating dangerous polarization and dichotomy. This is because: