Page 106 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

O r t h o d o x y
stood as mere movement, energy, or biological vitality. Life is
relationship. Life is communion. Even in God, life is the com-
munion of the Persons of the Holy Trinity. How much more,
then, in the case of creation, which receives its existence from
another.
The world lives only insofar as it exists in communion with
God. Death, therefore, is the rupture of this communion. And
wherever communion is broken, life is lost. Death is not sim-
ply the end of biological function; it is the severing of relation-
ship with God, and thus the dissolution of true existence.
The death of the particular cell or organism affects exclu-
sively the body: it is in the body that the conflict between
person and nature takes place. What perishes is the somatic
part of ourselves—the body whose destruction and decompo-
sition we lament when a beloved person dies—while the ge-
netic part is transmitted to the next generation, securing the
continuity of nature. Why then does the loss of the body mat-
ter so deeply, if life still goes on? Not simply because the mind
reflects on death, but because particularity is built into ontol-
ogy in such a way that it becomes existentially unacceptable
for any body with which we are related, and through which
our own particular being is established, to die and disappear.
The death of a body may be nature’s way of surviving, but the
survival of the particular being is equally decisive for exis-
tence: we strive to preserve the life of the particular being
because our very being seems to depend on its existence.
For the human being, the resolution of this conflict cannot
be found outside the body itself: there is no escape from the
body, for any such escape—through, for example, the immor-
tality of the soul—would amount to the loss of the human
being itself. The body is constituted by the Creator as the very
locus both of the conflict and of its resolution, for it is para-
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