When we speak of compassion we think of human relationships. But the Cosmic Christ includes compassion for all of creation. In this essay, published in The Curator, I focus on a famous nineteenth-century landscape painting by Frederic Edwin Church, The Heart of the Andes. In it, I explore the artist's vision of the land as the interconnectedness which characterizes paradise and includes the flow of compassion through all of nature.
The complete version of my original essay was published in Edge of Faith Magazine for the June 2021 issue on the theme Environment. It included an introduction to the nature of the Cosmic Christ and ideas about the application of this understanding to our current environmental crisis.
Since Edge of Faith Magazine is no longer active, I am sharing that version here to ensure it remains available to readers.
Frederic Edwin Church
Heart of the Andes
1859
For I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity, / Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power / To chasten and subdue. And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light / of setting suns, / And the round ocean and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; / A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things.
― William Wordsworth
I’ve often wondered about the limits of compassion. I don’t mean that compassion itself has built-in limits, but that we commonly limit its scope. In Christian belief, we talk about compassion as an active love directed towards others, and we frame it in the context of human relationships. But then I think about Buddhist tales, like the one that tells of how, in a previous life, the Buddha met a starving tigress who was ready to eat her newborn cubs. Out of infinite compassion, the Buddha offered his body as food. I’ve always felt drawn to such displays of compassion for non-human life, and what our fellow creatures can teach us. When Eckhart Tolle said that he has lived with several Zen masters, and that all of them were cats, it was easy to relate his comment to my own experience. And though I’ve never owned a dog, I began to rethink the benefits when I heard an interview with Richard Rohr, in which he spoke about his beloved dog Venus. Venus had passed away, and Rohr had dedicated his book The Universal Christ to this animal which he said had helped teach him about the flow of love.
Rohr’s book, as well as the Buddhist view of compassion, have caused me to reimagine what a specifically Christian compassion can mean. In the practice of Metta meditation, the Buddhist begins with an attitude of loving-kindness towards themselves and gradually extends the wish for well-being and happiness to the rest of creation: all sentient beings. Buddhist philosophy emphasizes interbeing, and our relationship to non-human life.
Compassion is born in the understanding that we are all deeply interconnected. Interconnection in the flow of love is basic to the nature of the Universal Christ that Rohr writes about. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called this same essential oneness the Cosmic Christ. Its place in Christian tradition and its potential for reimagining a more just society have been more recently explored by Matthew Fox and others. Like the Buddha Nature, the Cosmic Christ is a way of describing the holy consciousness of the created world. The historical Jesus represents this divine force embodied in an individual. When we connect with this force, we are putting on the mind of Christ and our compassion for the world expands. Then when we look outward, we find ourselves contemplating paradise.
A Holy Place
Whether we think of paradise as a place or a state of being, it is fundamentally unitive in nature, characterized by the harmonious interrelationship of all creation. By 1859, inspired by his travels to South America, the American artist Frederic Edwin Church had painted The Heart of the Andes. It was a landscape in which the interconnectedness of the created world became a metaphor for God’s Kingdom.
The painting is Church’s largest and most ambitious work, and a tribute to the naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. It was inspired by Humboldt’s Naturgemalde, or plant geography map, which recorded data relating plants to the environment of Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador. Like the map Humboldt created and which served as a template for Church, the painting depicts a totality rather than a single place at a specific time. As a visualization of Humboldt’s scientific study, The Heart of the Andes possesses qualities that make it unique in landscape painting, while it also speaks to a deeper understanding of the interdependence of all beings.
The influence of landscape painting runs deep, conditioning how we look at nature. We seek beauty in the environment, creating our own landscapes every time we point a cell phone camera at a breathtaking view. On more occasions than I could possibly count, I have pushed myself just a little bit farther on a remote trail, in order to reach a spot where the view would reward me with the aesthetic joy that a great painted landscape provides.
Whether hiking through the mountains near where I live, or setting off on a journey far from home, the deep peace I experience when immersed in nature provides balance. The beauty of silence in a remote place gently envelops me. And when I have scaled a great height, and the land opens out in front of me, the natural state of interconnectedness is restored. I will take the time to marvel at the rich green, rolling depths of a canyon and to project myself across great distances, to the overlapping layers of far off mountains on the other side of a wide valley.
In Los Angeles, where I live, when the day is clear enough, the cool shimmer of the Pacific Ocean may be just visible beyond the city. I will breathe deeply, drawing in the surrounding air as my attention becomes centered. Depending on the season or place, the path I climb may be covered by a blanket of matted leaves, gently thudding underfoot, or dry as a bone pressing through the soles of my shoes.
Though I feel small in the immensity of my surroundings, I will sense an intimate attachment to all of it. If I am with someone else, I don’t feel the need to speak in between the puffing of my lungs, and anyway I don’t want to interrupt the communion I’m experiencing with nature. Oftentimes, when passing someone on a trail, I sense a shared reverence for the place we are traversing. Like walking into a great cathedral, there is peace and a quiet respect for the sacredness of the place.
I imagine climbing the terrain of Church’s landscape, where I stand on a height at a distance, consumed by the splendor as though watching a stage on which creation unfolds. This abundance of life includes over one hundred identifiable plants, part of a comprehensive topography representing every climate zone of the region. Lush vegetation in the foreground leads past sunlit plains towards the barren mountains. Mt. Chimborazo hovers in the far distance, it’s snow-capped peaks like a majestic crown of ice. Humboldt believed that everything in nature is connected. Church undertook the challenge to present this belief through the language of painting. He convincingly arranged the varied forms of nature into a cohesive whole, considering the place of human life in the unified fabric of creation.
As we scan this panoramic space, our eyes alight upon a winding path in the lower left portion of the canvas. It is a sign of human life imprinted on the land. Following it’s trail we are led to two tiny figures on a cliffside, situated at the foot of a wooden cross. These are the native people of the Andes, who share a harmonious existence with the larger environment in which they are embedded. Almost lost in their bountiful surroundings, the two figures are consumed in a sea of green. Human presence is no more significant than any tree or stone. In the far distance, their small village sits at the center of the picture, nestled along the river, and protected by dense foliage. The divine presence, arising through the rich tones of the earth, folds human life and environment into one.
Identification with the natural world is a product of contemplation, and the landscape is produced by the imaginative recollection that follows. Much more than a record of a place, Church’s landscape is an inspired reflection of the sanctity of the environment as he experienced it. It is true of the Romantic landscape in general, that as the artist goes outdoors and contemplates nature, he or she integrates with its source and projects themselves into the land. In the far left foreground of the painting, Church signed his name on a tree trunk, simulating carved letters and personalizing the landscape. It is as though he is reminding us that a landscape is always the artist’s subjective reconstruction of a place, born out of the experience of oneness with nature.
And then there is that tiny, humble cross at the end of the footpath. Church traveled to the Andes inspired by the work of Humboldt, whose ideas about the unity of nature served as a guiding principle for the painting. But the artist saw the environment through the eyes of his religious faith. Knowing that Church was a devout Protestant, we can imagine how he may have projected a vision of the garden of Eden onto the landscape. Like Church’s Andes, Eden represents the totality of the created world, including humankind, living harmoniously in one place. The cross in Church’s landscape serves to mark this locale as a cathedral of nature and a modern garden of Eden. Drawn into the verdant life pictured, we witness the interdependence of man and nature and their common source in God. The cross invites us to view the grandeur in front of us from the perspective of redemption.
One of the most famous artists of his time, Church was a leading figure among a group of American artists known as the Hudson River School. These artists carried on the Romantic tradition inherited from Europe, helping to shape an emerging national identity. Their landscapes presented a vision of America as a land where human life and nature coexist in pastoral settings that reflect the presence of God. Today, the Romantic landscape is commonly thought to be a cultural construct linked to the idea of land as a commodity, or a form of idealism, nostalgia or escapism from the anxieties provoked by the progress of industrialism. Visions of a pure land in which human life is part of the natural order have been seen as expressions of pantheism.
But I am compelled to view The Heart of the Andes in the light of panentheism, not the world as God, but as the world being in God. As a meditation on interconnectedness, it is both deeply personal and universal- a manifestation of the Cosmic Christ experience.
As the mystical side of Christianity, emphasizing the interconnection of the material and the spiritual, the Cosmic Christ encourages our compassionate nature when we find our own place in its flow. Church’s composite landscape is a visualization of this state of interconnectedness through the Cosmic Christ, and thus a meditation on compassion as directed towards the environment. It summons us to a compassionate engagement with all of life, and recognizing the sacred nature of place naturally leads us to care about the ecology that sustains us.
The spirit of Christ is resurrected when we contribute to and share in the blessings provided by the earth, with all its abundant life forms. Embracing oneness with all of creation, we share in the body of Christ and we are moved to act for the benefit of all life.
An Art of Consciousness
The artists of the Hudson River School leave us an important legacy with regard to raising consciousness about our relationship to the earth. Their paintings had a strong influence on the preservationist movement of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, and some of these artists were directly involved in science and environmental work. In the case of The Heart of the Andes, Church realized a vision of rich beauty built on scientific observation. The painting provides a bridge from aesthetics to environmental awareness.
Humboldt’s geography of plants was unique at the time because it was a study of relationships in the natural world, rather than a pure description of isolated parts. While other scientists looked at nature through the limits of classification, he saw the earth as a living organism. For Humboldt, the earth constituted a web of life in which all parts were interdependent. Church viewed the environment similarly, but the resplendence of his painting communicates these relationships in a way that a mapping of data cannot. His harmonious composite of the region’s climate, environmental features, and local people provides an emotional resonance proper to the role of art. His painting breathes life into Humboldt’s data.
The taxonomic accuracy with which the flora and fauna of his landscape were painted are in fact part of the work’s expressive impact. The play of light and shadow as it falls across the vegetation, the muscular beauty of rocky outcroppings, and the majesty of the rugged mountain range evoke feelings of delight. I can hear the rumble of the falls, breaking the glass surface of the tranquil lake. The wildflowers expel their aroma along the cliff sides. All sorts of creatures live amongst the dense foliage, their chatter carried on the breeze. A supreme example of the picturesque mode in landscape, Church’s image is guided by discovery, envisioned as a unity, and executed through the mastery of his craft.
The vivid detail and lush depth of the painting transform the mapping of scientific knowledge which underlies it into a vision of paradise, its spiritual substance confirmed by the cross. Despite its tiny size, this symbol of death and resurrection, or the cycle of the Cosmic Christ, serves to pin together the stuff of the material world, and acts as a key to its interpretation. Identifying the presence of Christ’s spirit as an animating force in the scene is essential to understanding the painting as a conceptual map of the divine incarnate.
Born from the experience of connectedness with the natural world, Church’s painting reconstructs a real place through a contemplative internalization. The painted landscape is the result of the artist having integrated nature into his self-awareness. As viewers we are impacted by the aesthetic power of his painting, which invites us to identify our own relationship to nature and to venerate the larger set of relations in which we play a part. This self-identification within a system of relations is what leads to spiritual maturity. Growing beyond our limited self and recognizing ourselves in the Cosmic Christ engenders compassion for the earth. And acting through compassion leads to healing.
Activating Compassion
The contemplative life, being both self-reflection and action for God, is uniquely suited to meet the greatest challenges of our day through compassionate engagement. The contemplative spends time in meditation and discernment, guided by the Holy Spirit, which directs their action in the world for the greater glory of God. The many forms of contemplative prayer and spiritual practice include the body as a means for sacred connectedness, interwoven with the rest of the physical world. This has direct implications for addressing our current global crisis.
Once we know the presence of the divine in ourselves and in the world as the essential unity of the microcosm and macrocosm, we change. The sacredness of life, nature and the universe become apparent, and this awareness promotes empathy. This deep understanding of the interconnectedness of life will provide the means for compassionate engagement. Tending to the earth no longer requires a sense of moral obligation. The contemplative already cherishes the environment as a physical and spiritual extension of themselves, and joins with it in loving union.
Mainstream environmentalism is guided by an anthropocentric view which places human values over all other forms of life. This approach promotes the “greening” of business and industry for the sake of monetary value or protection against the threats of climate change. Environmentalism in the United States began as a form of religion in the work of people like John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club. But in the face of global warming, the focus has shifted to complex economic policies like cap and trade, new technologies for harnessing wind and solar power, technology transfer and avoided deforestation.
None of this values the earth for its own sake or necessarily recognizes any intelligence in the universe. The most widely praised environmental action often lacks the necessary commitment that only a true sense of the greater picture can provide. Compassionate action is sustained and guided by love, not fear or the pursuit of profit.
An ecocentric view of nature emphasizes the inherent value of nature itself. For the last several decades we have witnessed the birth of a wide array of organizations, institutions, and publications concerned with a spiritual environmentalism that supports this view. The recognition that our overdependence on technology and economics have brought about the environmental crisis has led many to embrace a reconnection with nature as a healing force. In fact, many of the current movements presuppose the sacredness of life, nature, and the universe.
The reach of Church’s painting extends to our current ecological plight. Humboldt’s mapping of the distribution of plant species, which ultimately laid the foundation for biogeography, has allowed scientists to study vegetation shifts in response to climate change. It has provided conclusive evidence for the human-induced harm he in fact predicted.
The painting is also prescient regarding the people of the Andes, and South America more generally. Today in Ecuador, the descendants of the same people populating the land in Church's painting are among those indigenous communities leading the way in confronting our environmental crisis. In past decades, given no titled ownership of their homeland, they have fallen prey to oil exploitation, deforestation, pipeline leaks and oil spills. More recently, through successful partnerships with the government and conservation organizations, native activists have led the way in establishing the rights of the planet. Compassion for our fellow humans in the context of environmental issues means supporting indigenous people in their stand against the abuses of corporate exploitation.
Guided by the mind of Christ, one can participate in solidarity with traditional societies around the world with the same compassionate mindset brought to the suffering of the planet. The vision of God’s incarnation through the earth is a mysticism that emphasizes the relationship between interconnectedness and inspired compassion found in the example of Jesus. When we know Christ through our interconnectedness with all of life, we can reimagine compassion. Beginning with ourselves, we enlarge the circle to include human relationships, but continue outward to encompass the biosphere.
This all-inclusive compassion is a force for justice, which we must apply to the needs of the earth. Indeed, any serious form of eco-justice must have love at its core and resurrection as its goal. Any map to paradise unfolds through compassion reimagined without boundaries.
© 2021 Arthur Aghajanian
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