Levitan completed this painting of the Mediterranean Sea Coast in 1890 while traveling in the South of France. He takes delight in the sea's ranks of color and the wet beach covered with pebbles and shells. For his association with Levitan's work, the great Russian opera basso wrote:
"It has brought me to the realization that the most important thing in art is this feeling, this spirit, this prophetic word that sets people's hearts on fire and this prophetic word can be expressed not only in speech and gesture but also in line and color." Fyodor Shalyapin (1873-1938)
Shalyapin is bold in twice using the phrase prophetic word, which is a reference to God's active presence: standing before these paintings we might experience something of God.
The word "sea" appears for the first time in Genesis 1:9,10. It is day three of creation.
On day five, almost as a kind of creative after-thought, God filled the sea with living things. The original Greek has the birds, like the fish, being created out of the sea itself.
But it isn't long before the whole thing seems to have taken a wrong turn and the sea becomes a place of terror where, like the desert, monsters are encountered. By the end of the bible we see this negative "take" fully expressed:
Here, the word sea is no longer a geographical place but is now symbolic of all the chaotic energies and forces set against God. In the end, that sea of chaotic, anti-God energies will be no more. Jesus knows. Maybe he didn't use the word sea so to stress that evil isn't somewhere out there, but up close and personal:
And now God said, Let the waters below the vault collect into one place, to make dry land appear. And so it was done; the dry land God called Earth, and the water where it had collected, he called the Sea.
On day five, almost as a kind of creative after-thought, God filled the sea with living things. The original Greek has the birds, like the fish, being created out of the sea itself.
But it isn't long before the whole thing seems to have taken a wrong turn and the sea becomes a place of terror where, like the desert, monsters are encountered. By the end of the bible we see this negative "take" fully expressed:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, the first heaven and the first earth had disappeared now, and there was no longer any sea. Revelation 21:1
Here, the word sea is no longer a geographical place but is now symbolic of all the chaotic energies and forces set against God. In the end, that sea of chaotic, anti-God energies will be no more. Jesus knows. Maybe he didn't use the word sea so to stress that evil isn't somewhere out there, but up close and personal:
"Can't you see that nothing that goes into someone from outside can make that person unclean, because it goes not into he heart but into the stomach and passes into the sewer." And he went on "It is what comes out of someone that makes that person unclean. For it is from within, from the heart, that evil intentions emerge: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these evil things come from within and make a person unclean." Mark 7:21-23
