Following Paul Valéry, Zizioulas held that genuine art is not a copy of reality but the creation of an entirely new “being,” “the beginning of a world.” The artist aims at creatio ex nihilo but stumbles on the pre-existing matter. On the other hand, an icon is future-oriented. Zizioulas suggests that an icon represents things as they will be in the future without death. For this reason, he coined the term “iconic ontology,” by which he meant precisely the filling of the present with reality borrowed or drawn from the future. “Iconic existence is an ontologically dependent existence, an existence caused by a prototype,” says Zizioulas in his post-humous grand opus Remembering the Future.

“I will try to see the icon with the eye of a theologian rather than as a specialist in art.” And his eye was very penetrating, a “questioning gaze,” a gaze that examines. When Zizioulas says that something is eschatological, what he has in mind is that we represent in art visually the reality of things not as they have been or as they are, but as they will be—as they will be in the Kingdom, as they will be when the world is transformed into the Kingdom of God.

For Metropolitan John, the question of iconic symbolism is decided in the Divine Eucharist as the epicenter of all worship. Iconic symbolism in the Liturgy is a matter of personal presence and not of natural presence; nature participates in it only in a secondary way and to the degree that it is hypostatized in the person. Iconic ontology is predicated upon relatedness and the way one thing refers to another, transcending individualism and making the person the ontological category. 

For him, place, time, matter, colors, speech, smell, hearing, etc.—everything in the Liturgy witnesses an iconic symbolism that is not a static tableau but a movement in time, containing the historical time of salvation. For this reason, he wanted to see the Church during the Eucharist as bathed in light and adorned with all available splendor. A Eucharist in dimly lit churches, ostensibly for the sake of devout concentration, is antithetical to its very nature.

As Metropolitan John explained, the resurrectional and eschatological character of the Eucharist has influenced the entire liturgical space. He did not treat the liturgical space (the architectural formation and internal organization) as scenery for an individual’s search for metaphysical security. To reawaken within the Orthodox a true sense of the Eucharistic offering as something authentic, genuine, and truthful—a chaste fruit of a community experiencing Resurrection—he was deeply interested in seeing liturgical “dramaturgy” as an iconic representation of the Kingdom. To achieve this iconic ideal, he kept reminding the hierarchy of the correct understanding of the liturgical event and all aesthetic expressions embellishing the worship: melody, iconography, hymnography, lighting, reading and chanting, and sermon. Liturgical typicon does not aim to captivate the individual with psychological appeals or to subordinate it emotionally. Rather, it seeks to include people in a liberated space-time where they will acquire freedom from individualistic priorities and become acquainted with the resurrected Christ through communion with the Spirit.

A return to the Fathers without recovering the meaning of liturgical symbolism will get us nowhere; for in the Orthodox Church, the lex credendi has no meaning without the lex orandi. Only the rediscovery of iconic ontology will save us from both the paganism and the rationalism that lurk in our midst, each in its own way threatening the iconological symbolism of our Liturgy. Zizioulas once said that not many years ago, at the beginning of the 20th century, Greece, a return to Byzantine art was made through the teaching of the artistic work mainly of Photis Kontoglou. But this return to the Byzantine has led us to a situation in which Byzantine art does not relate at all to our present Western culture. So we have to find ways of not making an icon simply an exotic thing that has to do with certain crazy people but of relating it to the culture of our times. Zizioulas believed that the great achievement of iconographer Fr. Stamatis Skliris is that he has contributed precisely to this marriage—if I may so call it—of Byzantine art with our times. “We need that very much in the Orthodox Church. And I hope there will be disciples and successors of Fr. Stamatis who will continue his work.”

A thorough exploration of “iconic ontology” is found in Zizioulas book Remembering the Future (Los Angeles: Sebastian Press, 2023)