Page 343 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

C R E AT I O N A N D T H E E C O L O G I C A L C R I S I S
one through whom the material world enters into communion
with God. This is why the Fathers call the human being both
microcosm and macrocosm: in humanity the whole world is
gathered and offered back to its Creator.
This centrality of humanity does not mean domination in
the modern sense. The Christian doctrine of creation is not
simply theocentric in abstraction, but Christocentric. Creation
finds its meaning in Christ, and therefore in the human being,
since Christ is the human being par excellence. In Him,
humanity’s place at the center of creation is neither tyrannical
nor accidental, but priestly.
This Christocentric vision reveals creation as an open
system. Creation cannot survive if it is closed within itself. If
nature is understood merely as self-existing substance, fixed
within its own laws, it remains trapped within its own limits.
Nature can transcend itself only when it enters into communion
beyond itself. This transcendence is possible only through
personhood, for only the person can modify nature and open
it to relation.
Creation therefore needs personhood in order to survive.
Personhood is a mode of being—τρόπος ὑπάρξεως—which
makes nature relational, dynamic, and capable of
transcendence. This is why the human being was introduced
into creation as imago Dei: so that creation might pass beyond
the limits of its own nature and reach communion with what
is beyond itself. Humanity alone within material creation
possesses this capacity to transcend nature and relate it to
God.
The tragedy of the first Adam was the refusal to exercise
this priestly vocation. Had creation remained bound only to
Adam’s failure, it would have been condemned to corruption
and death. But Christ, the new Adam, recapitulated creation
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