Page 348 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

O r t h o d o x y
art reveals beings not merely as they are, but as they are called to
become in the Kingdom. Ecclesial art is therefore not imitation
of nature, but anticipation of transfigured existence.
The significance of art lies in this: it shows that man as person
is not content with beings as they are given in the world. In a
God-like fashion, he seeks to recognize beings not according to
their own compelling nature, but as results of free will, as idia
thelēmata, to recall Maximus the Confessor. In this he succeeds
only in the tragic paradox of presence-in-absence, and this is
decisive, for it means that personhood prefers to create its
presence as absence rather than be contained, comprehended,
described, and manipulated through the circumscribability
inherent in creaturehood. Thus personhood proves to be in this
world—through man—but not of this world. Human creativity
is therefore oriented toward the future, from which it receives the
confirmation of its ontological uniqueness: a work of art may not
be immediately recognized, and may require a long time before
it is validated as worthy of eternal survival and “immortality,”
awaiting, like all historical acts, its final hermeneutic and last
judgment, which alone can grant its ultimate ontological
confirmation.
Yet art, as a distinctive characteristic of human personhood,
can also deny or even destroy the given reality, as we see in many
forms of modern art. This too is genuine, though demonic,
personhood: genuine because personhood refuses to accept
beings as merely given realities, demonic because the world is
not man’s own idion thelēma, but exists independently of his
choice, and therefore human freedom proves itself in such a case
only through the annihilation of what exists. If personhood were
extrapolated as though it belonged naturally to this world, then
neither this world nor man himself, as given being, could
continue to exist.
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