Restoring this Christian unitive vision of creation as a cosmic sacrament points us to the Iconic Tree.
The Iconic Tree
The mystery of life is that even the life of fallen nature partakes somehow of the Life beyond life, even though without redemption access to the Tree of Life remains blocked by separation, sin and death. As a great saint of the early Church, Dionysios the Areopagite wrote in his enormously influential work, The Divine Names, “Life” is one of the names of God:
The Divine Life beyond life is the giver and creator of life itself. All life and living movement comes from a Life which is above every life and beyond the source of life. From this Life souls have their indestructibility, and every living being and plant, down to the last echo of life, has life.
St. Maximos the Confessor (580-662), a profound student of Dionysios and a great theologian in his own right, sums up the whole tradition in a few words:
Death in the true sense is separation from God, and ‘the sting of death is sin’ (1 Cor. 15:56). Adam, who received the sting, became at the same time an exile from the tree of life, from paradise and from God; and this was necessarily followed by the body’s death. Life, in the true sense, is He who said, ‘I am the Life’ (Jn 11:25), and who, having entered into death, led back to life him who had died.
With his allusion to John 11:25 (“Jesus said to her, I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die”), St. Maximos gives us the link to the Iconic Tree to which the symbol of the tree is finally pointing. For with the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection and glorious Ascension of Christ, the glory of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ (Gal. 6:14) has transformed the image of the tree from symbol to icon.
In order to understand how the symbol of the tree becomes an icon, we need to touch on the meaning of icons in the Orthodox Church. The icon is not merely religious “art” or pious decoration. Iconography is sacred art with a primarily liturgical function, which is to manifest the unity of creation with heaven in the liturgy.
According to the Orthodox understanding of icons, icons make present that which they re-present. Therefore, the icon is a “symbol” as we have tried to present it, but a symbol in the highest possible sense. An icon is the apex of symbolism in which the visible reveals the invisible in an essentially sacramental manner. As we have seen, a symbol, contrary to a widely held opinion, both popular and scholarly, is not necessarily opposed to “reality,” and can signify much more than mere “representation.” In fact, the essence of the symbol is precisely to make known by reflecting or manifesting a reality beyond itself. According to the Bible, the natural world was created by God so that He might be made known:
because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead (Rom.1:19-20).
As Orthodox theologian Fr. Alexander Schmemann writes: “the world is symbolical in virtue of its being created by God”; to be “symbolical” thus belongs to its ontology, the symbol being not only the way to perceive and understand reality, but also a means of participation. It is this natural symbolism of the world that is reflected in the understanding of the early Church that the universe is itself a Book, the Liber Mundi, or “Book of Nature” through which the wisdom, power and glory of God might be known.
Philip Sherrard, one of the foremost theologians of this century and a contemporary exponent of the sacred cosmology of the Greek Fathers of the Church, says that it is crucial that we learn to:
“read the book of nature, the Liber Mundi, in a way totally different from that in which we have been taught to read it. It demands that we read it in a way similar to that in which the great spiritual expositors tell that we should read the Bible—we have to learn to look on the world of natural forms as the apparent, exterior expression of a hidden, interior world, a spiritual world: all the phenomena of the world of nature represent or symbolize with things celestial and divine.”
Or, as the same author says in another place:
“a true reading of the book of nature, the Liber Mundi, leads to the recognition that these realities constitute the immaterial, spiritual and uncreated realities of the forms of the natural and physical world; they embrace the archetypes of which these forms are the exterior, apparent expression. This in turn means that we are able to perceive through our physical eyes the symbolic function that natural things possess by virtue of their correspondence and interpenetration with spiritual things.”
The Book of Job says the same thing more directly:
“But ask the beasts, and they will teach you; and the birds of the air and they will tell you. Or speak to the earth and it will teach you; and the fish of the sea will explain to you. Who among all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this, in whose hand is the life of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind?” (Job 12: 7-10).
To perceive the living symbolism of natural things—to read the Book of Nature—is to perceive the spiritual presence of which each natural form is the image—or icon. There is an inherent “sacramentality” to creation because the Divine presence in and through and beyond each created thing gives each its uniqueness, immediacy, transparency and meaning. Thus to learn to read the Book of Nature is to move from creation to symbol to sacrament. That movement from symbol to sacrament is, as it were, an “iconic” movement. For the tree, its iconic movement came as the God-Man Christ Jesus was crucified on the cross at Golgotha. At that moment, and irreversibly, the image of the tree, source of the wood that formed the instrument upon which our salvation was wrought, became forever a symbol of the cross.
~Adapted from Vincent Rossi, Seeing the Forest for the Trees: The Meaning and Message of Forests and Trees in the Christian Tradition, RELIGION and the FORESTS magazine, June, 1999. Vincent Rossi is executive director of the Religious Education and Environment Project (REEP), London, England.
