Page 370 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

O r t h o d o x y
modern humanity combatively, but with sympathy and com-
passion. Western man is no longer “the other,” some outsider
beyond the Church. He is our neighbor, our parishioner, our
children and grandchildren. The Church’s response must
therefore arise not from hostility, but from philanthropic con-
descension and love.
The implications of digital technology go even deeper,
touching one of the most decisive ethical questions of our
time: the right to a future. If ontology is subjected entirely to
morality, if a person’s being is fixed by past actions, then the
past becomes tyrannical over the future. In such a world, there
can be no true repentance, no ontological change, no meta-
noia. Christian eschatology, however, proclaims a radically
different principle: everyone is entitled to a future.
This principle becomes urgent in the age of digital com-
munication. The internet gathers every trace we leave behind
and stores it indefinitely. “Google remembers everything.”
This endless collective memory not only exposes persons to
manipulation and misuse, but imprisons them in their past.
Every forgotten word, mistake, or action may be preserved
indefinitely, depriving human beings of the possibility of a
new beginning. In the name of the right to information, tech-
nology enslaves us to memory. It takes away from us the fu-
ture.
Yet the Christian understanding of the person resists this
captivity. The person is not reducible to accumulated data, nor
exhausted by past acts. In Christ, the human being is always
capable of beginning anew. Repentance means precisely that
the past does not possess ultimate authority over being. The
Church must therefore defend not only truth and commu-
nion, but also this right to a future—the right of every person
to transcend the determinism of memory and enter again into
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