Page 345 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

A R T A N D T H E T R U T H O F P E R S O N H O O D
Art and the Truth of Personhood
This understanding of creation is revealed most profoundly
in the Church’s artistic witness. Among the many ways in
which the Church bears witness to the Kingdom, art occupies
a unique and sacred place. In the Orthodox tradition, art is
never merely decoration, nor simply the cultivation of beauty
for its own sake. It belongs to the very mystery of creation and
revelation, for through art the Church confesses that the world
is called not merely to exist, but to be transfigured.
God creates like an artist rather than a scientist. The language
of Scripture and the Fathers, when speaking of creation, is not
the language of mechanics but of art: God builds, orders, and
furnishes the world so that it may become κόσμος—a well-
ordered and beautiful whole. Only in modern times, under the
influence of science, did the world come to be seen chiefly as a
mathematically calculable machine, and God as a kind of
supreme mathematician in whose mind all the laws of nature are
contained. In such a view creation becomes a system of
determinism, and eschatology itself is reduced to prediction. But
this is far from the biblical and patristic vision.
If we are to speak rightly of God as artist, we must purify the
image of art itself. Art cannot mean merely handicraft, nor the
production of objects for utility, nor aesthetic achievements
meant only to provoke admiration or pleasure. Nor can it be
reduced to the expression of subjective emotion or the depiction
of human fragmentation. The Christian idea of creation can only
be expressed by the image of an artist who brings about an
entirely new world. True art is, as Paul Valéry said of music, “the
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