ABSTRACT
A renewed attention to the ‘iconic’ character of nature has over the last decades been re-emerging in Eastern Orthodox ecotheology. In different addresses by the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and in the writings of John Chryssavgis, the theme has been recurrent.1 According to Michel Quenot, the icon’s very materiality attests to its marked embeddedness in nature. The traditional form of icon painting employs only natural substances: wood, oil, egg yolk and pigments are brought together within the icon, relating the mineral, vegetal and animal (including the human in its being handled and joined by the iconographer). For Quenot, an icon brings one back ‘to an awareness of the divine presence in creation, along with what this implies for our relation to nature’.2 From a phenomenological viewpoint, Bruce Foltz, in his 2001 article ‘Nature Godly and Beautiful’, highlighted several similarities between a profound connection to nature, as found in the writings of figures such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir or Wendell Berry, and the contemplation of an icon in the Eastern Christian tradition.3 Rather than a form of aesthetic experience, the iconicity of nature is considered as an encounter with alterity in nature. Chryssavgis likens earth to a face, like the image of God – seen and yet also unseen, sketched but not completed.4
