Like some others in my generation, I was slow to encounter the world of modern painting, but at some point my inner vision was radically transformed by all that amazing cultural creativity. I arrived at that experience, as I recall, by following what was probably an all-American way, by first contemplating landscape paintings. And more. Early on, especially under the influence of theologian Paul Tillich, I realized that my encounter with such paintings was what Tillich called a matter of “ultimate concern.” Rightly contemplated, many of those great cultural artifacts tell a story of what Tillich called experiencing “the dimension of depth.” They were not just pretty pictures.
More particularly, as a typical American encountering the visual arts for the first time, early in my life I was as a matter of course overwhelmed by the works of the Hudson River School. See in many of these paintings the vast and spacious beauties of God’s good creation, portrayed, in my view, as a kind of aesthetic commentary on the vision of a world-coming-into-being announced in the Book of Genesis, chapter one. That kind of brilliant aesthetic achievement has often been called “romantic” by students of the arts.
Undergirding these early American visions of nature, however, was an excruciating social construction of reality, the colonialist worldview. Note the comment of comedian Dick Gregory: “ ‘Columbus discovered America’? Who, then, were those people waving at Columbus when he got off his ship?” Historic American adoration of nature, then, took for granted the removal or, minimally, the cultural degradation of native peoples. Hence the beautiful wilderness paintings of early American history are never just nature paintings.
One of those works that teaches us for the better, I believe, is Paul Cezanne’s (1839-1906) “Le lac d’Annecy.” There you see a subtly fragmented vision of what apparently is a medieval monastic chapel on an island in the middle of a small, placid lake, etched against the beauties of towering mountains and framed, in the foreground, by the quietude of the waters of the lake, where the image of that monastery is refracted.
I cannot resist reading that vision of Cezanne in terms of the biblical images of the “new heavens and the new earth in which righteousness dwells.” For the Bible, what St. Augustine called “the City of God” is deeply embedded in the vibrant reality of what St. Irenaeus called the coming “new heavens and new earth,” a vision of the glorious End Times of the whole cosmos. Cezanne has in Le Lac D’Annecy offered us incomparable testimony to that biblical vision of the whole creation, both human and the natural, charged, as it one day will be, I believe, with divinity.
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