If I were to select a single spiritual statement in modern times for us to claim in our quest to celebrate nature in its rich abundance, I would nominate the vision of Vincent Van Gogh. Never mind his personal struggles, for now. Such things go with the human condition. Rather, think of his paintings and the theological vistas they announce. Many know about Van Gogh’s glorious paintings of wheat fields, sunflowers, and that one overwhelmingly beautiful Starry Night. But Van Gogh’s own deeper religious convictions are often overlooked. The son of a Christian Pastor, Vincent dedicated himself to missionary work among the poor early in his adulthood and also kept returning to biblical motifs, such as the Bread of Life, throughout his life. Many of his paintings passionately, if subliminally, also celebrate the biblical theme of God’s glorious works throughout the whole earth.
Such paintings announce that God is to be encountered here and now, in, with, and under this brilliantly translucent creation, not in some other spiritual realm, whether high above the material world or deep within the human soul. Van Gogh was, indeed, a celebrant of the whole world of matter, not of some other allegedly higher or deeper spiritual world. For Van Gogh, passionately, matter mattered and humans in the midst of it all mattered all the more.
I see this dramatically in a number of his earliest works, particularly those rooted in his identification with the downtrodden peasants of his time, like “The Potato Eaters.” Witness in these works his passionate empathy for impoverished coal miners, in particular, in whose midst he once struggled as a lay minister of the Christian Gospel of good news for the poor.
“We humans are of the good earth,” I hear Van Gogh saying, again and again, in those early works. For him, from the very beginnings of his artistic creativity, human identity is rooted in materiality, not in some ethereal realm somewhere else, accessible only by an earth-demeaning spiritual ascent or by some earth-abandoning, mystical descent into the depths of one’s own interiority, drug-induced or not.
For Van Gogh, peasants working in sun-drenched wheat fields are telling an eternal truth, even though those peasants may in fact be succumbing to early deaths due to their poverty. Van Gogh was always a faithful celebrant of the earth, even in the darkest of times. Witness his early drawing of peasant shoes, which in their stark black hues tell a story of what’s real in human life, in particular as the poor experience it. I, for one, contemplating those shoes, can hear the groaning of the whole creation.
We can laud Van Gogh’s artistic gifts for many reasons, but in our time, when the ruling classes are so scandalously indifferent both to nature and to those who at best can only eke out a pittance from nature to survive, his passionate love for the earth and for the poor of the earth is perhaps the most important of them all.
Later in his life, Van Gogh never lost touch with the world of The Potato Eaters, even after he had been overcome by the invitation of his Savior, who had ministered to the poor, Jesus, to “Behold the lilies of the field…” Notwithstanding all of Van Gogh’s personal struggles, this man of the earth was to become perhaps the greatest witness in the modern West to – beholding the glories of the earth: as he celebrated the gorgeous flowers of the fields and the glorious sun-drenched wheat fields which he considered to be gifts of the very God who first called him to minister to the coal miners of this world.
Whether Van Gogh ever consciously thought about the correspondence of the motifs of The Potato Eaters, on the one hand, and the brilliant wheat fields, on the other, to the biblical themes of death and resurrection, can be left as an open question. But, subliminally, those death and resurrection motifs appear to have moved him deeply. Remarkably, those very – opposed – motifs came together organically for him in what is now widely regarded as his greatest – and in fact his last – painting, “Wheat Field with Crows” (1890). Numer0us interpreters, particularly those of a secular persuasion, consider that painting to have been one horrendous, final expression of despair, signified by the dramatic presence of the crows, traditionally the archetypical symbols of death. After all, was not Van Gogh about to commit suicide? Why wouldn’t he foreshadow that kind of wrenching death in his last painting, unconsciously if not consciously?
But a more generous reading of that painting is also possible and, I believe, more resonant with Van Gogh’s lifelong spiritual pilgrimage, which began with the dark images of the Potato eaters and then carried him to and through the bright hopes of his wheat field paintings. Wheat Field With Crows, it appears to me, gives sober but brilliant testimony to the classical faith of Van Gogh’s own theological tradition – to death and resurrection – however subliminally such themes might have stirred in his unconscious mind.
The black hues etched into that painting’s sky and the images of the many black crows in flight themselves announce the powers of death, of the Cross – or so that painting speaks to me. Van Gogh had been pondering death deeply for some time before the Wheat Field with Crows painting. Death, indeed, had become a kind of fixation for him as he created his series of cypress paintings. Those trees, surely for him and also for many of his contemporaries, stood as harbingers of death and were often associated with cemeteries. The dark images of the crows in his last great painting likewise gave expression to the same themes of death and dying.
On the other hand, in that very painting, the image of the central country lane, running through a golden wheat field, from the foreground to the horizon, depicts, it appears to me, the way to eternal life. All this is embraced by that pervasive motif of Van Gogh, the aforementioned glorious wheat field, which, surely, for him – the preacher’s son and the witness who had spent many of his early years as a freelance evangelist and preacher – proclaim the Bread of Life, the sacrament of salvation.
Wheat Field With Crows. Could this extraordinary 19th century painting of death and resurrection be the word of promise for nature that our 21st century world of all too pervasive indifference to nature by the powerful should encounter and celebrate all over again? Could this wrenching yet profoundly hopeful visual testimony to the ultimate redemption of matter help us today to triumph over any so-called way of life that’s indifferent to the desecration and pollution of the earth and the poor of the earth?
Contemplating Wheat Field With Crows, I, for one, am always left with hope for the whole world of nature, both in its terrestrial and its cosmic expressions, and, still more, hope for this earth’s Potato Eaters, whom Van Gogh never forgot. The way to salvation for the earth is intended first and foremost for the forlorn of the earth, according to Van Gogh’s angle of vision. Yet it is a way that at once brings with it blessings of a gloriously renewed natural world. It offers the Bread of Life to all in a luminously charged world of nature, beyond the ravages of what might judiciously be called the rape of nature. That was Van Gogh’s final vision of natural glory.
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*This essay is a revised excerpt from my book, The Earth and the Fullness Thereof: A Down-Home Reader in Ecological Theology (Cascade, 2024), chap. XVI, in response to my encounter with the Van Gogh exhibit at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, the week before Easter, 2025.