a theology of creation

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A Theology of Creation

by Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon

The present article is another presentation by the reverend Metropolitan of Pergamon fr. John

Zizioulas, on the topic of Creation and Man's stance towards it. The presentation was ahomily delivered in Zurich on the 10th March 1989.

"Man is an animal called to become God," said one of the Fathers of the Church. And that iswhy the Word became flesh: to open to us, through the holy flesh of the earth transformedinto a eucharist, the path to deification. But there is also another, terrible path man haswanted -- and still wants to make of the world his prey, to be its tyrant and not its king andpriest. He has made for himself, out of the potential transparency of all things when restoredin Christ, the mirror of Narcissus.

Today that mirror is breaking up; the maternal sea is polluted, the heavens are rent, theforests are being destroyed and the desert areas are increasing. We must protect creation;better yet we must embellish it, render it spiritual, transfigure it. (...) But nothing will be doneunless there is a general conversion of men's minds and hearts (in the Bible, the mind and theheart are the same thing). Nothing will happen unless our personal and liturgical prayer, oursacramental life, our asceticism regain their cosmic dimension. Today I wish to sketch out atheology of creation.

Reuniting the whole universe under one Master, Christ.

Cosmology is a form of knowledge which is given to us in Christ by the Holy Spirit.

"The mystery of the Incarnation of the Word," wrote St. Maximus the Confessor, "containswithin itself the whole meaning of the created world. He who understands the mystery of theCross and of the Tomb knows the meaning of all things, and he who is initiated into thehidden meaning of the Resurrection understands the goal for which God created everythingfrom the very beginning."

If this is so, it means in effect that everything has been created by and for the Word, as theApostle says (Col. 1:16-17), and that the meaning of this creation is revealed to us in the re-creation effected by this same Word taking flesh, by the Son of God becoming the son of theearth. (...) The Word is the archetype of all things, and all things find in him theirconsummation, their "recapitulation". (...) such is indeed the "mystery of the Father's will"which the apostle announces to the Ephesians: "That he might unite all things in Christ, boththings in heaven and things on earth" (Eph. 1:10).

Thus, it is the Church as eucharistic mystery which gives us knowledge of a universe whichwas created to become a eucharist. The eucharist as spirituality and as action corresponds tothe eucharist as sacrament. "Make eucharist (i.e. give thanks) in all things," as Paul says (1 Th.5:18). In this perspective the Fathers maintain that the historical Bible gives us the key to thecosmic Bible. In this they are faithful to the Hebrew notion of the Word, which not only

speaks, but creates: God is "true" in the sense that his word is the source of all reality, notonly historical but also cosmic reality. In the priestly account of the creation, things exist onlythrough a divine word, which raises them up and maintains them in their being. (...). Therelationship between Scripture and the world corresponds to that of the soul and the body: he


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and offers it up in an attitude which is constantly eucharistic; he makes of it a body of unity,the language and flesh of communion.

In him fallen matter no longer imposes its limitations and determinisms; in him the world,frozen by our downfall, melts in the fire of the spirit and rediscovers its vocation oftransparency. And so we have the miracles of the Gospel; in no way are they "wonders" toimpress us, but "signs", anticipations of the ultimate re-creation of the world. A world

without death comes into sight, where things are presences and men, at last, are faces. (...)

The metamorphosis of the cosmos

At the same time this transfiguration remains a secret, hidden under the veil of thesacraments, out of respect for our freedom. Though illuminated in Christ, the worldnevertheless remains darkened by us, fixed in its opacity by our own spiritual opacity,delivered over to the forces of chaos by our own inner chaos. "The desert is growing", saidNietzche a century ago, speaking of man's heart. And today we can see it growing in nature.

(...)

The metamorphosis of the cosmos requires not only that God should become man in Christ,but also that man should become God in the Holy Spirit, that is, should become fully man,capable of the gentleness of the strong and of the love which knows how to submit itself toall that lives, in order to make it grow. Christ has made men capable of receiving the Spirit,that is, of collaborating with the cosmic coming of the Kingdom.

In Christ, in His divine-human body, in His divine-cosmic body where the Spirit blows, theultimate stage of the "cosmogenesis" has begun, with its upheavals and its promises. "Thefire hidden and stifled under the cinders of this world will burst forth and divinely set alight

the crust of death," said St. Gregory of Nyssa. And no doubt this ultimate conflagration will bean irruption, a breaking-open, but it is for man to prepare for it by sweeping away thecinders, by bringing the secret incandescence to the surface of the world.

Such is, such should be, the role of the Church. Between the first and the second coming ofthe Lord, there is the Church, whose cosmic history is that of giving birth, the giving birth tothe universe as the glorious body of a deified humanity. The Church is the womb in which isbeing woven the universal body of the new Man, of renewed men.

This theme of giving birth runs through the whole of the Bible, from Genesis to theApocalypse, from Eve to the land "flowing with milk and honey" (Ex. 3:8), from Mary at thefoot of the Cross to the woman "clothed with the sun", "who was with child and cried out inher pangs of birth in anguish for delivery" (Rev. 12:2). In the Epistle to the Romans Paulwrites: "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail ... until the time of itsregeneration ... with the hope that it will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain theglorious liberty of the children of God" (Rom. 8:20-22).

a theology of creation

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