Image courtesy of Eric AhoI have lately been driven spiritually to celebrate nature and God as triune, once again. I sometimes think of this as a higher synthesis of the worldviews of Henry David Thoreau and Karl Barth, two visionaries who would have been utterly mystified by my own theo-mystical vision. In my book, Before Nature: A Christian Spirituality (2014), I suggest that, insightfully interpreted, the historic faith of the Church can rightfully be read as disclosing a trinitarian vision of the grand world of nature. I even go as far as attempting to reclaim the historically controversial theological idea about contemplating images of the Trinity in the world of nature – the vestigia Trinitatis.
The occasion for this recent return to this longstanding conviction of my own? I was reading an essay, “Source,” by the contemporary American painter, Eric Aho. I have followed his paintings and his writings for many years. Indeed, with his gracious consent I was able to reproduce one of his works as the cover of my book, EcoActivist Testament: Explorations of Faith and Nature for Fellow Travelers (2022). This is Aho, describing his own creative process:
I’m physical with the paint. Always have been. I push it around; I handle it. There remains something necessary and insistent about expressing the muscularity of the paint that curiously, isn’t about strength or the heroic. It’s more awkward and protean than that, unguarded, even vulnerable. One can’t help but see the fragility of the landscape on close reading of its spaces and forms while wrestling them into place on the canvas. Although this space is invisible, it oddly registers as familiar—imbued with human-like physical qualities. After all, seeing humanizes the landscape. Looking closely humanizes everything. The closer we look and respond with the paint the more we, the landscape, and the painting coalesce. A spellbound trinity rooted in nature — at least in our imaginations — attached by the fatty, sinuous properties of the viscous oil color. (https://ericaho.com/biography/essays/source/)
It occurs to me that this statement might insightfully be read as a kind of commentary on the creative processes of the God depicted calling the world into being in Genesis 1. Over the years a number of biblical interpreters have thought of that text as depicting artistic creativity. That Aho himself envisions his own artistic works, then, as “a spellbound trinity rooted in nature,” appears to me to be more than coincidental, if not intentional. For me, indeed, some of Aho’s most striking paintings of nature are revelatory. As I contemplate them, I sometimes can catch sight of emergent vestigia Trinitatis.
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