Page 254 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

O r t h o d o x y
not from within this world, nor from natural surroundings
with their shadows, but from the future, from the eschato-
logical world free from shadow and death. The icon therefore
is not imitation of earthly appearance, but revelation of trans-
figured existence.
This understanding of the icon opens the way to a deeper
theological truth: God Himself is iconically portrayed in cre-
ation and in the Church. The divine essence cannot be de-
picted in any way. God remains unknowable and incompre-
hensible in His essence, and the mystery of His Trinitarian
being transcends every created representation. Yet the fact of
God’s Trinitarian existence—the fact that God is Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit—is represented in creation in an iconic way.
As Saint Maximus teaches, by the wise contemplation of cre-
ation we apprehend the principle concerning the Holy Trinity,
for “the invisible things of God are perceived through under-
standing from the creation of the world.”
Creation therefore bears symbolic and iconic traces of the
Trinity. Saint Maximus sees in the very structure of created
existence—origin, movement, and rest—an image of the Trin-
itarian mystery. This does not mean that creation contains the
divine essence, nor that God is absorbed into nature. Rather,
the Holy Trinity, though beyond creation in essence, is not
absent from it. The world is able to bear this iconic presence
because from the beginning the Logos of God, one of the Per-
sons of the Trinity, is present in the being of creation itself.
This is decisive: the possibility of representing God in cre-
ation arises from the presence of the Son and Logos in the
world. The Logos gathers within Himself all the logoi of cre-
ated beings; through Him creation becomes capable of bear-
ing the image of God. Without the hypostasis of Christ, there
could be no image of God within the world. Wherever the Son
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