“I Paint Infinity”: The Pictorial World of the Nicene Creed and the Healing Ecology of 'Transfiguration' in Van Gogh’s ‘Olive Trees’ (1889)

In this chapter, I undertake an ‘aesthetic’ reading of the Nicene Creed, examining it as a text of image, colour, movement, and light. What kind of insights might this yield? What perspectives might this amplify in the interplay between God in creation, Christ’s incarnation, and the Holy Spirit’s ‘transfiguration’ of Christian vision as we articulate hope and journey with a suffering world? Using the aesthetic features and language of the Eastern icon tradition (Lossky, Ouspensky, Rumpza), I explore Nicaea’s ‘pictorial’ world and its implications for the sacramental and eschatological dimensions of the natural world. To illustrate why this matters, I compare the depictions of Christ’s baptism and Christ’s Transfiguration in icon tradition (mediating finitude and the eternal, and dissolving the distance between matter and spirit) with Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘The Olive Trees’ (1889). The Orthodox icon helps me to make an argument that Van Gogh’s work invites viewers to something beyond its aesthetic principles. In particular, the artist’s use of the colour blue towards the end of his life redraws the map casting humanity and nature in terms of dual territories, and points instead to the healing ecology of the creative Spirit moving humanity and its embedding in the natural world towards a healing ecology of ‘transfiguration’. Overlaying this East-West perspective back over Nicene imagery, I conclude with a proposal that the creed, in its liturgical and communal function, is itself a type of church ‘icon’ holding together the paradox of “the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ” (2 Cor 4.6) and the decentering ‘counter-gaze’ of the creed as confession and prayer, and as window into nature’s final edification in divine life.