Page 374 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

O r t h o d o x y
It is true that literature still exists, and that people still go to
the cinema. This is comforting. Some say the book will not disap-
pear—and this may indeed be the case. But this cannot be stated
with certainty. Increasingly, such media risk becoming means of
entertainment rather than formation.
One may still affirm that something deeply human cannot be
entirely uprooted. Yet the movement is in that direction. Imagi-
nation is fading. There is no longer space to create inwardly. And
yet the imaginative faculty is fundamental to being human.
This is something that Yuval Noah Harari emphasizes in Sa-
piens: A Brief History of Humankind. Homo sapiens prevailed
because it developed the capacity for the imaginary—the ability
to create shared meanings. Nations, societies, identities—these
are imaginative realities. And yet upon them rests the survival of
the human race.
One could extend this further, even to religion. Religion also
belongs to this realm. When early human beings buried their
dead with objects, it was a sign of belief in something beyond
what is visible—something not empirically given, yet real.
To those who dismiss religion as “mere imagination,” one
might respond: why reject religion and not everything else? Why
not say that personal identity itself is unreal? The fact that one is
a person is not reducible to biology. It belongs to this same di-
mension. And yet this does not make it false. On the contrary, if
this is denied, the very basis of human existence is undermined.
Thus, we cannot reject God simply because He belongs to this
dimension.
The symbolic world has been the great driving force of civili-
zation. There can be no culture without symbols. But within the
civilization shaped by the internet, does this symbolic dimension
still truly exist?
We are living in a technological age defined by digital and
374