Natural Communions

i
Natural
Communions
The academic treatment of the environment and nature, since the 1980s, has
been formalized in sub-disciplines like environmental history, environmental
philosophy, ecocriticism, and eco-spirituality. Within these disciplines the con-
cept of nature has been variously employed to reorient humanity to a holistic
moral standard. In each case there is general consensus that inquiry ought to
turn on moral considerations of the interaction of humans and the environment;
with implied admonitions to live sustainably. Lending credence to the Earth
as a superorganism in its own right, these modern ecological expressions can
be traced to Rachel Carson’s revelations in Silent Spring. However, they have
a long pre-history which appears in monistic philosophy, the spirit of Deism,
in both Romanticism and the Enlightenment, and in political expressions of
the idea of Nature’s God, designed to promote a secular vision of the state
and to overturn predatory religious rivalries. With this literary momentum,
Natural Communions, volume 40 of Religion and Public Life, gathers inter-
disciplinary essays which reconfigure humanity within an ecotheological
anthropology and which treat the idea of the sacred from the perspective of an
Earth-centered spirituality, thus redefining humanity’s response to ecological
challenges and initiating a new status within a more expansive cosmology
complete with a naturalized conception of Divine Reality.
Gabriel R. Ricci is Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, where

he teaches applied ethics and political philosophy in the Politics, Philosophy
and Legal Studies Department. His research interests are in phenomen-
ology and time consciousness; his latest work appears in The Reception of
Husserlian Phenomenology in North America (Springer, 2019). He has been
the editor of Religion and Public Life since 1999.
ii
Religion and
Public Life
Edited by Gabriel R. Ricci
Religion and Public Life promotes topical interdisciplinary research and dis-
cussion on wide-ranging ethical and philosophical issues at the intersection
of religion and civil society. The series provides a platform for international
scholarly discussion through the publication of thematic issues that cut across
disciplines. Recent issues have addressed Politics in Theology, Faith, War, and
Violence, Faith in Science, and Justice and the Politics of Memory. This issue,
Natural Communions, addresses eco-spirituality and theological naturalism.
Faith, War, and Violence, Volume 39

edited by Gabriel R. Ricci (2014)
Politics in Theology, Volume 38

Values and Technology, Volume 37

Morality and the Literary Imagination, Volume 36

edited by Gabriel R. Ricci (2009)
Cultural Landscapes, Volume 35

Faith in Science, Volume 34

Justice and the Politics of Memory, Volume 33

iii
Natural
Communions
Religion and Public Life
Volume
40
Edited by
Gabriel R. Ricci
iv
First published 2019
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 Taylor & Francis
The right of Gabriel R. Ricci to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested
ISBN: 978-0-367-23180-4  (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-23181-1  (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-27868-6  (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman PSMT
by Newgen Publishing UK
Volumes 1 through 28 were originally published under the title This World: An
Annual of Religion and Public Life.
Cover image: Frederic Edwin Church. American, 1826–1900. The Natural
Bridge, Virginia 1852. Oil on Canvas, 38 x 33 in. Gift of Thomas Fortune
Ryan, 1912. Courtesy of The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of
Virginia.
v
Contents
Introduction vii
Gabriel R. Ricci
1. The Five Ways of the Cosmos: Stoicism and

Eco-Spirituality in the Perennial Tradition 1
Christopher S. Morrissey
2. A Functional Cosmology for the Crisis of the

Anthropocene 14
Caroline Smith
3. Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place: A Prolegomenon

to an Akimel O’odham Environmental Ethics 33
David Martínez
4. Ecological Conversions in American Religious and

Literary Culture 58
Brian Yothers
5. Green Calvinism: Reformed Protestant Origins of Western

Environmentalism 75
Mark Stoll
6. The Symbolic Garden and the Spiritual Understanding

of Nature in Byzantium 92
Kirsty Stewart
7. Eco-Spirituality in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina 106

Anastassiya Adrianova
newgenprepdf
vi
vi Contents
8. A Sustainable City Upon a Hill? A Berryite Perspective

on US Cultural Examples and American Innocence 139
Christopher Hrynkow
9. Reinventing Humanity with an Eco-Spirituality Informed

by a Cosmology of Cosmogenesis 160
Dennis O’Hara
10. Big Miracle and Religious Naturalism: Rescuing Myriad

Nature from Popular Fantasies of Nature Rescue 176
Carol Wayne White
11. Faith, Nature, and Politics: Developing a Non-Reductive

Naturalism 193
Whitney A. Bauman
12. The Paradox of God in Nature 209

Martin O. Yalcin
vii
Introduction
Gabriel R. Ricci
Lynn White ignited an academic firestorm with the publication of his 1967
essay “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis”. With the bold assertion
that Christianity was the source of modern-day environmental degradation,
he dismayed historians and theologians alike. Historians challenged him for
his unconvincing link between invasive technological advancements and the
medieval Christian worldview and theologians were certain that his reading
of Genesis was superficial and etymologically apathetic. However, historians
granted him grace when they acknowledged the tacit weight of his arguments
in his earlier work, Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) and
many theologians took the opportunity to more adequately interpret Scripture
to reveal an environmentally friendly text that White glossed over, one that
provided explicit guidelines for stewardship.
Though White was sure that the Christian worldview imported a conquering
attitude toward Nature, his condemnation was not wholesale. For White there
was one Christian figure that presaged the modern environmental movement,
Francis of Assisi. Francis’s hagiography included reports of direct commu-
nication with God, the stigmata, diplomatic engagements with man-eating
wolves and homiletic moments with birds of the air. For Francis, the call he
received to restore the Church meant a life imitating the poverty of Christ,
service to the poor and a dedication to humility; dispositions which present a
beneficent ecological profile. Francis was speedily canonized by the Church
only two years after his death in 1228; Lynn White would canonize him as
the patron saint of ecology in 1967.
viii
viii Natural Communions
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped spark the environmental movement

in the 1960s and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac had already
resuscitated the spiritually infused natural philosophy that had been part of
the American literary and artistic imagination, but the flurry of responses
after White’s article appeared continues to provoke re-evaluation fifty years
later. Immediate responses still stand out: Arnold Toynbee’s challenge to
monotheistic Christianity matched John Macquarrie’s more historically flex-
ible view of Christianity. Both found in Christianity pantheistic and deistic
elements that could readily respond to ecological crisis. Yet another response
from René Dubos redeemed Christianity by displacing Francis with the more
pragmatically inclined St. Benedict. Francis’s devotional response to nature
provided no real plans for stewardship, it was in the spirit of labor as prayer
that the Benedictine monks defined a more realistic relationship between
humanity and nature, one which embodied a pragmatic approach reminiscent
of early conservationism during the Progressive Era in the United States.
These authors recognized the inescapability of the interface of culture and
nature, but theirs was first an effort to redeem Christianity.
In the context of religion in American history, Mark Stoll, a contributor
to this volume, has taken note of Christianity’s ambiguous record. While
the received message that the earth has been provided to humanity seems
undeniable, there is the twin belief that uncultivated wilderness provides the
opportunity to create a new Eden. Since White’s historical argument was
restricted to the Middle Ages, he ignored historical moments when Christian
ideology and science merged to produce a worldview in which observation
of natural facts had spiritual connotations, when exploration of the natural
world evoked spiritual ecology and stirred geographic hierophanies. In the
United States such a legacy of naturalism stretches from a religiously charged
Colonial America to the twentieth century. This lineage can be traced to
William Bartram’s Travels from 1791, in which Bartram fashioned a natural
philosophy grounded in Quaker theology, scientific observation laced with
Linnaean nomenclature, and a literary style sustained by his classical educa-
tion. In Bartram’s writing the continuity and unity of life identified with St.
Francis is informed by an ecological imagination. Bartram not only credited
plant life with consciousness and will, his fellowship with other creatures
is vividly recounted in Travels, where he shares meals with various animal
communities who seem to invite him to join them, as he describes, “in the
participation of the bountiful repast presented to us from the lap of nature”
(Travels, ed. Thomas Slaughter, The Library of America, 1996, 284–285).
Bartram also elicited pragmatic intentions to make some contribution to his
culture from his discoveries in the wild. But it is Bartram’s ecological spirit
that will permeate John Muir’s ecstatic meanderings through the High Sierras
ix
Introduction ix
and Yosemite Valley and infuse Annie Dillard’s poetic musings on the sacred
in nature.
The spiritualized nature in Bartram was encouraged by his Quaker the-
ology and extended by his scientific outlook. But, if his theology tested
the limitations of monotheism and a belief in a transcendent God, this was
inspired by his classical education at The Philadelphia Academy, the original
incarnation of the University of Pennsylvania. His exposure to translations
of ancient texts explains why Travels was permeated with visions of Elysian
fields in which indigenous peoples roamed a terrestrial paradise. He was cer-
tain that an areopagus was once centrally located in an ancient Apalachucla
town whose ruins he explored, and his description of a valley landscape in
South Carolina, which is likened to the Fields of Pharsalia and the Vale of
Tempe, where he spots Cherokee maidens who gather like the spirits of the
hamadryades, suggests that these young women were likewise linked to
the fate of trees in sacred precincts. The classical narrative that animated
Bartram’s Travels evoked the proto-ecological animism that was displaced
by the Judeo-Christian tradition. This ancient animism was imported into
the New World through the classical curriculum, informed Colonial deism,
and can be traced to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. In hindsight
we can see that Lynn White did not exploit the animistic heritage that was
imported along with liberal political thinking, revolutionary zeal, and reli-
gious self-determination; after all, he was a medieval historian. Now com-
monly connected to indigenous peoples, animism’s legacy was imprinted on
the American consciousness and thrived in natural philosophy and nature
writing. Leopold’s use of the travails of Odysseus to establish a baseline ethos
in his Land Ethic is evidence of this lingering legacy, but it is in the section
titled “Odyssey” in A Sand County Almanac that the template of Odysseus
is used to enliven the evolutionary history of a single nitrogen atom whose
biotic trip began in the Paleozoic seas and coursed through the ages in mul-
tiple life forms, animate and inanimate, until a week of freshet returned the
atom to the sea.
The spirit of deism can be traced to ancient Greek sources, but early
American naturalism had more immediate Enlightenment roots. Certainly,
this was the outlook which more directly informed Thomas Jefferson’s deistic
inclinations, which can be read into the first paragraph of the Declaration of
Independence. While the reference to “nature’s God” has received competing
interpretations, when coupled with his romantic sensibility Jefferson’s deism
seems uncontroversial. His disposition to read the sublime into natural settings
was evidenced in his spiritual enthusiasm for the Natural Bridge in Virginia,
which upon discovery he quickly purchased from George III to preserve and
serve as a religious retreat. This was a site that the indigenous Monacan tribe
x
x Natural Communions
had already declared sacred. Proclaimed the Bridge of God after facilitating
a retreat from enemies, this site would also attract the attention of Frederic
Edwin Church in 1852, when he transformed the setting into an iconic sub-
lime image (see front cover image). Together with American transcenden-
talism and nineteenth-century nature writing, Church and the Hudson River
Valley School embodied the deistic sentiments expressed in Jefferson’s con-
cept of “nature’s God”; collectively they enlivened the newly emerging cul-
ture with an eco-spiritual aspect that endures in contemporary ecological
consciousness.
When Aldo Leopold promoted the idea that history can only be defined
as the mutual influence between the environment and humanity, he also
intended that humans no longer be conquerors of the land but mere citizens
alongside all other living things. Thoreau who also gave nature a voice simi-
larly acknowledged that we were first part of nature before we were members
of a society. Beyond this, Thoreau placed great store in the salvific value of
Wildness; in fact, it was not so much through the efforts of virtuous men
that a town is saved than through the land that surrounds it, as he reported
in Walking, which began its literary life as a lecture in 1851 at the Concorde
Lyceum and was first published in the June 1862 issue of The Atlantic maga-
zine. This would be where Thoreau himself would have found a sanctum
sanctorum, a bog in which “the same soil is good for men and for trees,”
where nearby on a late fall walk he would have encountered a sunset that
lit the meadow and ground like the edge of Elysium. He imagined this as
a great awakening light that would set our hearts and mind aglow as we
saunter to the Holy Land (Walking). Thoreau’s instructions on how to walk
the landscape were fortified with religious imagery, but in order to find a
poetry that properly represented his longing for the wild he appealed to the
ancient world, where, he imagined, mythology thrived in a primeval soil that
had not been soured by the more immediate cultures of the Old World that he
instructs us to walk away from. Thoreau may have been afflicted by a Golden
Age syndrome, as some commentators argue, but his guidelines for walking,
he hoped, would someday yield an indigenous mythology that would give
expression to Nature.
Today, many environmental and ecological threads have come together
to create an eco-spiritual worldview, the subject of this volume of the series
Religion and Public Life, Natural Communions. However this spiritual
connection between humanity and the environment is expressed, in deep
ecology, ecofeminism, eco-activism, ecocriticism, or natural theology, it
recognizes that the natural world not only has more than instrumental value
but is the source of a vital spirituality and that we risk a planetary crisis
if we do not heal the rupture between nature and culture. We did not need
xi
Introduction xi
White’s warning to make us aware of our alienation from the natural world,
on which Leopold, Thoreau et al. had already sounded the alarm. They had
already given witness to the instinctive idea that Spirit dwells in the Earth
and that humans inhabit a spiritual world. Leopold advised us to split our
own wood for fuel and Thoreau provided directions on how best to traverse
the landscape in order to mitigate our alienation. Through her travels, Annie
Dillard advised us to maintain the habit of keeping our eyes open so that
between the dialectic of revealing and concealing we can see the spiritual
ephemera that materialize out of thin air. Dillard is expert at making these
natural observations, but the practice ultimately eludes perfection since these
observations are evanescent and always seem to be ahead of us. Thus, though
they can’t be sought, they can be found; what is required, she advised, is a
patient waiting and finding the opportunity, in a fleeting moment, to align
ourselves in the path of a beam of light which will offer an unrepeatable sub-
lime tableau.
If we regard eco-spirituality as a modern discovery, we might ignore
earlier intellectual foundations which have perennially conceived our exist-
ence as part of a larger whole. Christopher S. Morrisey’s examination of the
Stoic tradition demonstrates this ancient holistic vision that was imagined
as the unifying force of the soul of the world. This idea is familiar to us in
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s vison of the Over-Soul, which similarly conceived
that every part and particle of the universe was related and that everyone’s
particular being is intertwined with all others. Morrissey’s examination of
the primary source texts of Stoicism and their representation in Aquinas’s
Five Ways, which model a cosmos as a living organism in which all parts
are integrated with one another, reveals Emerson’s direct link to Stoic cos-
mology. To recall the Stoic tradition and its perennial philosophy is not just
an exercise in reviewing the Five Ways of Aquinas, it is an affirmation of
the need to orient our understanding of ourselves as part of a larger nat-
ural whole, an orientation that will restore Nature to its proper character as
ordered and providential, a unifying experience of the world, as Emerson
imagined, in which the act of seeing and the thing seen, the subject and the
object, become one.
In the onset of the Anthropocene, humanity faces an identity crisis.
By technological fiat we have presumed Nature’s design but we have not
cultivated the necessary responsibility for its care. Part of a solution, Caroline
Smith argues, requires the decentering of the sovereign human subject, giving
up the conquering role Leopold railed against, and similarly moving from a
selfish anthropocentrism to a more inclusive bio-centrism. A functional cos-
mology for the Anthropocene, according to Smith, requires going beyond
traditional Earth-based eco-spirituality to one that Thomas Berry extended to
xii
xii Natural Communions
the universe. The fact that the modern world has cut off cultures from their
founding myths accounts for the domination of and disenchantment from
Nature. To restore the balance a functional cosmology in which humans are
conceived as part of a larger evolutionary scheme intertwined with the sub-
stance and patterns of the universe is needed, one that Berry described as a
communion of subjects, rather than a mere collection of subjects. In an effort
to frame this new cosmology Berry offered his idea of “moments of grace”
that Smith describes in terms reminiscent of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shifts.
They are equivalent to intellectual upheavals after which we must recalibrate
our relation to a new world. Together, Berry’s moments of grace affirm an I–
Thou relationship with Nature and are enabled by scientific revelations which
confirm that we are part of a web of life combining a material bio-ecological
world and a social world. The findings of scientists like Ursula Goodenough
and Brian Swimme in relational sciences encourage a shift in consciousness
toward a participatory rather than a domineering relationship with Nature.
David Martínez provides a close examination of the Origin Story of an
Indigenous culture that makes Caroline Smith’s point; that a culture and
society gains social and physical orientation to the cosmos through cosmo-
gonic narratives. In the case of Native American origin stories, there is first
the burden of overcoming Western prejudices that conceived of tribal peoples
as savages and lacking philosophical inclination, thus portending their future
demise. Martínez presents the philosophical values described in the Origin
Story of the Akimel O’odham or Gila River Pima who claim southern
Arizona as their homeland. This is a cosmogonic tale derived from an earlier
Huhugam civilization renowned for constructing an irrigation network cap-
able of watering up to 400 square miles and sustaining large settlements.
These indigenous populations have attracted the attention of anthropologists
and ethnographers, but Martínez is intent on extracting an implicit philosoph-
ical tradition, one that goes beyond the worldview that the land is inhabited
by spirits, revealing a body of knowledge about the land and their environ-
ment. Harnessing the power of local rivers is integral to the Creation Story
for this indigenous tribe, as is the knowledge of the technology used to
carve out a canal system. Repeated crises in this account also emphasize the
importance of balance as a fundamental principle of existence and how to be
human in a specific environment. Instructions on how to conduct Himthag or
the appropriate way of doing things are embedded in the text and are evident
to this day in projects like controlled burning in order to enhance soil quality
before tilling and to encourage the growth of the riparian Gooddings Willow
used in basket making. Other details in the Origin Story reported by Martínez
may seem like superstition or a simplified explanation for a more mechanical
causality, but the import of these messages is to avoid attitudes and habits
xiii
Introduction xiii
that lead to imbalance in nature. These are stories, then, that are not restricted
to the past, they are living myths which reveal themselves in modern-day
struggles to maintain water rights and to defend against the encroachment of
modern development. The contemporary struggle for environmental justice
is informed by Himthag or the way of doing things which, above all else,
makes you a good relative defined by respect for family, land animals, plants,
and the spirits who animate the world.
Aside from the anthropological accounts of Native American culture there
have been sympathetic voices that bore witness to the simultaneous deci-
mation of Indian culture and the environment of the western plains. George
Catlin, who has left a pictorial record of this culture, was the first to call
for the creation of National Parks, not for amusement and the protection of
wilderness, but for the perpetuation of Indigenous people and their culture.
Catlin’s sensitive portraiture of Indian chiefs and empathic paintings of the
struggle of buffalo were a reflection of his ambition to preserve a people
and their intimate ties with the environment. There were literary voices in
nineteenth-century America which also identified with the plight of Native
Americans and their vanishing culture. Brian Yothers’s essay discusses the
extent to which nineteenth-century Americans discovered spiritual renewal
in Nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who petitioned the government on behalf
of the Cherokee Nation, heads the list of authors who linked ecological con-
sciousness and spiritual awakening. The spiritual encounters with Nature that
Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Fuller, Dickinson and others infused into their
work present a record of a reorientation to the world of one’s own commu-
nity which was not a detached contemplation but a deeply tactile experi-
ence in which the social and the ecological merge. Yothers includes the
revivalist Charles Grandison Finney among the literary luminaries because
the romantic prose he uses to describe his religious ecstasy focuses on the
details of the natural world and at the same time is a complete immersion
experience that unconsciously re-orders his perception. Finney’s psycho-
logical description of experiencing the divine in Nature caught the attention
of William James, since the description of his conversion experience took on
a scientific tone; for Finney the presence of the divine resembled a “wave of
electricity” and “waves of liquid love.” Religious conversion and ecological
awareness come into contact with each other repeatedly in nineteenth-century
American literature. If conversion in Protestant Christianity involves a sense
of one’s smallness and sinfulness next to a transcendent deity, nineteenth-
century American literary and religious figures show how the natural world
can provide both an impetus to an interior conversion through its sublimity
and a means of grace leading to such conversion, whether understood in theo-
logical or secular terms.
xiv
xiv Natural Communions
Finney had a diverse religious background, including an early grounding

in Calvinism, and he was in his youth a third-degree Master Mason. He would
reject some of the tenets of Calvinism as anti-Christian, but Mark Stoll’s
essay on Green Calvinism presents a side of Calvinism that is obscured by
its severe theology and reputation for grim somberness. Stoll mines an envir-
onmental activism that geographically coincides with Calvinist territory in
Europe and New England and reveals that through a deep suspicion of human
nature a passionate preference for nature shines through.
Given the customary pantheon of environmentalist icons, Stoll finds the
common thread of Reformed Protestantism which imagined God’s cre-
ation as the backdrop for a religiously reformed society. More than other
Christian traditions, Stoll uncovers a high regard for the divine presence in
nature which ought to be revered in order to be restored by God’s presence.
Thus, there is implied the doctrine of the two books, with the book of Nature
complementing revelation. John Muir falls squarely in this tradition: after
all, he called his geological studies a reading of God’s “glacial manuscripts.”
Muir’s accounts of his ecstatic treks into the woods are typically experienced
alone. Stoll regards this as the psychology of preference for solitude that is
depicted in Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818),
with the figure’s back turned to the viewer and clearly contemplating the
majesty of Nature. This was Protestantism’s way of emphasizing the indi-
vidual alone before God. The Reformed movement also produced a strong
longing for an Eden that humanity had foreclosed through concupiscence.
With this desire there came a keen interest in gardening and a new natur-
alist style of garden in contrast to the geometric rigor of the French design.
Gardening books appeared with titles referring to Eden and some advocated
the moral rewards of planting and cultivating orchards. Here the books of
Nature and Scripture came together. The Protestant legacy would persist
in American conservationism in proponents like Frederick Law Olmstead,
Gifford Pinchot, and George Perkins Marsh, whose observations of world-
wide desertification produced a global movement. In Europe the Green
movement has been inspired by Protestantism since 1930, when Catholic
communitarian personalism vied with a Protestant effort to invigorate the
community through reconnecting with nature; and it has been sustained
by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, who promoted a political plat-
form around Deep Ecology which entailed a biocentric egalitarianism. Even
as the religious foundations for this environmental moralism recede, Stoll
concludes, nature remains a cultural orientation on our moral compass and
our language remains shaped by ecological holism.
When John Muir made his pilgrimage to Florida in 1867 he brought with
him a flower press, a book on botany, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and a Bible.
xv
Introduction xv
His expectation of a floral paradise was not satisfied and he would soon make
his way to California, where his expectations were met. As he tended flocks
of sheep in the Sierras he would lose all sense of time and space; his sep-
arate existence mixed with the landscape. His journals reflect this rapture
and every natural thing became a link to the divine. Muir would become an
advocate for wilderness preservation, but the poetic accounts he left of his
wanderings in the High Sierras were a record of a landscape which opened
onto the holy at every turn. Understanding the value of the natural world
through its connection with the Creator has a long history. Kirsty Stewart’s
chapter examines an ancient Byzantine text, The Symbolic Garden, to dem-
onstrate how the Byzantine world understood the garden landscape in
connection with one’s faith.
Stewart’s treatment of the Orthodox Christian tradition presents an alter-
native attitude to Nature from the spirit of dominion that Lynn White found in
Christianity. The Symbolic Garden was probably written in the tenth or elev-
enth century but it was preceded by a tradition of Hexaemeral literature which
had already carved out a place for gardens and nature in religious writing.
Patristic authors had written extensively on how nature could be used to
understand and glorify God and The Symbolic Garden perpetuated the trad-
ition. Whether the garden was perceived as imaginary or real, both approaches
present a spiritual understanding of nature and a means of connecting to God.
The description of these gardens is not restricted to allegorical ekphrasis;
they were designed to produce the requisite sensory response necessary for
confronting the awe and wonder of God. The monastic garden, then, would
be a place that one could enter to achieve a heightened awareness, a protected
space that would promote introspection; a progressive movement through a
gate, into the center of an enclosed garden, not unlike the sensory atmosphere
of a majestic church replete with song and incense and illuminated by candle-
light. The sensory spirituality in The Symbolic Garden did not obscure the
moral virtues imbued in plants and trees; together they were aids to spiritual
development and early evidence of the doctrine of the two books, Nature and
Revelation.
Tolstoy is renowned for his spiritual quest and his personal struggle to
attain an ethical existence. The trajectory of this pursuit is written into his
novels, and the extent to which he achieved success is represented in his
relationship with the earth, the soil, and the agrarian lifestyle of the peasant.
That his religious quest included turning away from the logical methods and
privileged class which had sustained him most of his life have made some
critics skeptical of his motivations. Anastassiya Adrianova’s in-depth ana-
lysis of the parallel course of Tolstoy’s real life and the character Levin in
Anna Karenina adds an ecocritical element to the reading of Tolstoy’s work.
xvi
xvi Natural Communions
Adrianova argues that Tolstoy’s Christianity is inconceivable without exam-

ining his connection to earth and nature. Tolstoy’s last novel, Resurrection,
which challenged the hypocrisy of conventional religion and advocated
Henry George’s economic worldview, also privileged the agrarian world
over the industrial world, which idolized progress. Tolstoy’s religious con-
version, which included a vegetarian lifestyle, was guided by a deep asceti-
cism and the imperative to grow one’s own food. Adrianova views Tolstoy
as anticipating the ecojustice of Thomas Berry and Rosemary Ruether. Like
Tolstoy’s turn, Berry’s prescription to return to a native place requires more
than academic understanding or mere aesthetic appreciation; the difference is
that Berry imagines a postindustrial world in which we become one with the
earth and Tolstoy imagined redemption from the onslaught of a mechanized
world that was, at the time, turning over old relations. Both challenge the
misguided worship of progress. Just as Berry acknowledges our remarkable
scientific knowledge which adds nothing to our rapport with the universe that
earlier humans had, so too did Tolstoy, through the character of Levin, recog-
nize the uselessness of his book-learning in the face of a peasant’s intimacy
with natural processes. Neither science nor Christianity provided answers for
Tolstoy’s alter ego, according to Adrianova, a grounding in the Earth and a
theory of knowledge privileging instincts over reason was required to tran-
scend the limitations of rationality. Levin’s salvation and the faith of Tolstoy
is embodied in the freshly plowed earth; only this communion enables them
to act morally. In the thirteen years that Tolstoy was occupied with Anna
Karenina, he placed aside his lifelong diary keeping; this is sufficient evi-
dence for Adrianova to read the novel as autobiographical, even though,
as some critics charge, the conversions were labored and not spontaneous.
Whatever the motivation, Tolstoy’s very public transformation was rewarded
with excommunication, a sure sign his was a serious conversion.
Both Christopher Hrynkow and Dennis O’Hara address the evolutionary
cosmology of Thomas Berry and show that the Catholic tradition in the
modern era, at least since the cosmological vision of Teilhard de Chardin,
has proposed an ecotheological anthropology that is consistent with the his-
tory of the cosmos. Otherwise conceived, the tendency for humans to sep-
arate themselves from nature inflicts planetary harm which in the end is
self-destructive. For Berry the alignment with the unfolding story of cosmo-
genesis results in a single community, Leopold’s biocentric community writ
large. Berry’s universe is a communion of subjects, much in the same way
that Leopold pleaded for humans to transform from conquerors to mere citi-
zens of the biotic community; it is a cosmogenesis that from the beginning
incorporates a spiritual dimension and a cosmos which is a hierophany. This
is a religious tradition that also has its version of the two books of revelation;
xvi
Introduction xvii
for Berry Teilhard’s The Divine Milieu presents a Christology that is iden-
tified with the story of the universe. For him, this link is made obvious in
the most philosophical of the Gospels, John, where the Logos, or Christ (the
Word), is linked to the creation story in Genesis.
The cultural transformation at the heart of Berry’s vision for a functional
cosmology requires taking cues from the history of the universe and to over-
come the cultural limitations of progress conceived in economic terms.
Berry’s message is customized for an American cultural context in which
progress has become a product and the past is ignored at the peril of losing
a source for wisdom. The promise of a wonderworld, according to Berry, is
sold at the cost of an unsustainable consumerism which is rooted in the delu-
sion that humanity is separate from and controls the natural world. Moreover,
American culture is burdened by a self-assigned exceptionalism and a dis-
ingenuous innocence. This image that America can still be a guiding light,
in spite of continued threats of ecological degradation, Hrynkow notes, has
achieved an absurd level in the cry for “beautiful clean coal” which ignores
the many wake-up calls we have received. While there remain impediments
to the United States fulfilling its historical status as a sustainable “city upon
a hill,” so to speak, the fact that rivers in New Zealand and India have been
granted legal status as persons, and the fact that the Ecuadoran constitution
acknowledges that nature, known as Pachamama in the Quichua and Aimara
indigenous languages, has rights is a sign that Berry’s vision of a community
of subjects is emerging.
Against the backdrop of the feel-good film Big Miracle, which dramatizes
a united effort to liberate trapped whales, Carol Wayne White questions the
divide between humanity and nature, which requires saving because it is at
risk. On the surface, the fact that disparate groups have come together to save
endangered whales as the other is refreshing, but it only conceals an attitude
which contributes to the degradation of the natural world and reinforces the
idea that it is humans’ distinct difference from nature that enables us to save
it. White’s aim is to outline a religious naturalism that would reframe humans
as natural processes in relationship with other forms of nature and to remove
the ontological arrogance that separates humans from other species and
nature in general. Invoking an array of nature poets, White offers an alter-
native ethical perspective from that represented in the film. In the end she
advances a planetary ethic entailing the biological and evolutionary insights
of Ursula Goodenough and Henri Bergson to inform an understanding of,
and commitment to, the importance of valuing and preserving ecosystems;
one that would celebrate the continual emergence of new modes of being and
which contests the false dualisms that ignore our mutual relatedness as nat-
ural entities. White identifies the ecological perspectivism in Annie Dillard’s
xvi
xviii Natural Communions
work that would enable this sort of dwelling; it is a point of view that activates
all imagined perspectives and deepens our awareness and connectedness to
other-than-human nature; it is the poetic celebration of Walt Whitman in
which the discrete self and the other is intertwined; it is the insight of Anna
Julia Cooper, the black feminist, who recognized an egalitarianism in nature,
one that was inimical to oppression and cultural imperialism.
Whitney A. Bauman’s essay also takes aim at the ontological split between
nature and culture that has been perpetrated by Enlightenment thinking. This
is a worldview that has conceived Nature as full of dead stuff to be mechan-
ically manipulated by humans. Placing humans in an evolutionary perspec-
tive and imagining them as citizens among other earthly citizens, as Leopold
argued, is the antidote for this arrogance. Bauman finds resources for this
effort in the work of Ernst Haeckel, who popularized Darwin’s theory and
promoted a naturalist worldview. Haeckel’s keen insights from comparative
morphology, especially, provided a scientific grounding for humanity’s deep
connections to the natural world; all of Nature comprised the same basic
elements and constituted an evolving living community. Thus, Nature is by
definition political and to simply manage it and to control it is to exclude
Nature from the planetary community.
Finally, Martin O. Yalcin offers a theological meditation on our
assumptions about God and nature, how they have been encouraged by bib-
lical descriptions of God and that what may be considered religious violence
is not resolved by making God just another object in nature but by asserting
that God’s transcendence is complementary to a radical immanence. The
ontological parity that Yalcin argues for establishes a religious naturalism
in which all things are equally real. Wary of reductive philosophies, onto-
logical parity guarantees the embeddedness of the human order with all its
conceptual constructs within the more encompassing order of nature. There
are numerous virtues which fall out from this approach, in particular a mind-
fulness or charity that is open to the other as other. Yalcin frames the tension
between transcendence and immanence with the philosophical debates
between medieval philosophers, the debut of the Cartesian interior self which
separated the mind from Nature and subsumed God to an idea in the mind.
These familiar historical moments are enhanced and summarized in a discus-
sion of Charles Taylor’s distinction between the pre-modern “porous self”
and the contemporary “buffered self” in A Secular Age. For the porous self
the world is an enchanted place where there is no place to retreat from the
world and disengage from the environment. The modern buffered self has
dispensed with the idea of an ordered cosmos through which it can align its
life and admits to no objective meaning external to itself. The buffered self
has created a homogeneous world where enchantment with the supernatural
xix
Introduction xix
is muffled, while the porous self dwells in a world illuminated by sacred

and profane spaces. By inhabiting sacred spaces, the porous self is able to
transcend the limitations of linear time, capable of finding meaning and
value in ontological and axiological superior sources, such as God. Taylor’s
contribution may have been presaged by the conflict between the “theory
of representation” proposed by Protestant Reformers and the “doctrine of
presence” maintained by the Catholic Church. The embodied spirituality for
Catholicism agrees that God’s presence can be manifest through the body and
the senses, while Protestant reformers transferred the presence of God from
the body to the mind, to the Word of God. Nature, in the first instance, is the
locus of God’s creative presence, and with the latter there is an emphasis that
the body is utterly fallen, creating a divide between God and creation. That
these lines are strictly drawn may be debatable, but it seems clear that when
the mind is conceived as independent and disembodied, Nature is devalued.
The Cartesian alternative of experiencing the idea of God in the mind cannot
admit to the sublime presence of the holy, this is the tangible presence of God
in and through Nature. To ignore the embodied presence of God’s sacrality
and to deny the strangeness of God is to invite a God in competition with
nature.
xx
1
The Five Ways of the Cosmos: Stoicism and

Eco-Spirituality in the Perennial Tradition
Christopher S. Morrissey
Despite the richly diverse histories of philosophy and religion, a constant

unifying thread may perhaps be found. This constant thread, which is argu-
ably always present because it identifies features of universal human con-
cern, is sometimes referred to as the “Perennial Tradition.”1 It is “perennial”
because it “encompasses the recurring themes in all of the world’s religions
and philosophies,” thereby forming a human wisdom tradition that embraces
five key ideas: There is a Divine Reality (1) inhabiting and (2) sustaining the
innermost core of the world of animate and inanimate things; there is in the
human soul (3) something similar to and (4) even identical with this Divine
Reality that finds itself expressing a longing for it; and the ultimate purpose
of existence is attained by (5) a mindful union with this immanent and tran-
scendent Divine Reality.2
By following the pathway opened up by this perennially recurring wisdom
tradition, it is possible to discern five persistent ideas within the tradition of
Stoic philosophy. Since these five ideas identify the core of the “Perennial
Tradition,” they may be used to trace how Stoic thought has influenced other
schools, by propagating the perennial teaching in the distinctively Stoic his-
torical form. In particular, the five ideas attain their metaphysical culmin-
ation in the eco-spirituality that is most characteristic of the Stoic view of
the cosmos: namely, the teaching in which Stoic tradition speaks of “the soul
of the world.”3 Accordingly, the meaning of this holistic vision may be fruit-
fully investigated by studying the earliest primary source texts of Stoicism
in which this vision of “the soul of the world” is expressed, a study that we
shall undertake below.
2
2 Natural Communions
Furthermore, our approach here will be organized in its exposition by

identifying the five distinctive and recurring ideas of the Stoic vision as
the unacknowledged Stoic inheritance preserved in the “Five Ways” of
Thomas Aquinas. Even though the five ideas acquire a famously distinctive
form within Aquinas’ own exposition,4 it is still possible to regard them as
variations upon the core themes of a universal wisdom tradition. Accordingly,
it is also possible to better understand the “Five Ways” of Aquinas, with
their strictly preliminary status within his Summa Theologiae, as the voice
of the Perennial Tradition of eco-spirituality, which they faithfully preserve.
Therefore, we may turn to the “Five Ways” of Thomas Aquinas as paths
of access into five ways that Stoic tradition conceived of “the soul of the
world.” By better appreciating this Stoic inheritance, an unexpected oppor-
tunity arises to provide eco-spirituality with an alternative metaphysics, one
that preserves features of universal value.
The Five Ways of Zeno
For Zeno of Citium, founder of the Stoic school, “God was identified with
fire” in the heavens.5 We also know that Chrysippus, the third head of the Stoic
school, found God’s earthly presence in “pneuma, breath or spirit, a fiery form
of air”; moreover, “God is present in the whole universe.” Overall, the char-
acteristic Stoic view is that the cosmos “is a living organism in which all parts
are connected with one another,” and thus “everything that happens, being
the consequence of antecedent factors, happens necessarily” in accordance
with reason.6 To see how these ideas may be connected with the seemingly
very different conceptions of Thomas Aquinas, we need to piece the Stoic
arguments together by reviewing the fragmentary evidence.7 We will consider
the relevant arguments of Zeno and Chrysippus, as well as those of Cleanthes,
the second head of the Stoic school, but we begin with Zeno.
Five ways of contemplating divine reality are discernible in Zeno the
founder, and we may enumerate them according to the order found in Aquinas’
Five Ways. First, because of “the universal agreement of mankind,”8 Zeno
considers it reasonable to infer that there is a divine reality inhabiting the
innermost core of the world of animate and inanimate things. This “universal
agreement” may be connected with the First Way of Aquinas, which proceeds
from the manifest empirical fact of motion to infer the existence of the divine.9
In other words, by the cosmos itself, humans are “moved” to acknowledge the
divine that inhabits that cosmos as its innermost moving principle.
Another way to see this connected to Aquinas’ proof from motion is to
identify the missing premise in Zeno’s following argument: “One may rea-
sonably honour the gods, however, those who are non-existent one may not
reasonably honour, therefore gods exist.”10 The missing premise has to do
3
The Five Ways of the Cosmos 3
with motion: i.e., if a human being is “moved” to honour a non-existent divine

reality, then that is an unreasonable way of being moved, since the honour
corresponds to no actually existing moving principle; but if the actual exist-
ence of a divine moving principle in fact animates the cosmos, then it is rea-
sonable to honour it, since one cannot be actually moved to do so other than
by that very moving principle itself. Once this missing premise is understood,
then the probability of the argument approaches certainty, at least when one
considers how universally humans are moved to honour the divine reality.
Presumably, the cosmos does not fool all of the people all of the time. Rather,
the manifest actuality of the movement bears witness to the Divine Reality as
the truly prime mover.
With the necessary modifications being made, this argument of Zeno’s is
also adaptable to assume the form of Aquinas’ Third Way, which argues from
contingency to relative necessity, and then to the absolute necessity of Divine
Reality as inhabiting the cosmos.11 That is, the “honour” paid to the divine
reality is a contingent reality, since it occurs on the human level, among con-
tingent beings; furthermore, it is only reasonable if it is actually necessitated by
a higher necessity inhabiting the cosmos, which would be the actual cause of
the “being moved” of the contingent beings into the posture of “honouring the
divine.” In fact, it could only strictly be considered reasonable if the movement
was prompted by the action of absolute necessity within the cosmos, namely,
the activity of the “world soul” that inhabits the innermost dimension of the
cosmos as its highest reality of divine reason and absolute necessity. In other
words, Zeno’s appeal to “the universal agreement of mankind”12 may be
considered reasonable only insofar as it corresponds to the reality of an abso-
lute necessity, and yet for the Stoics that degree of absolute necessity is in fact
present within the cosmos itself, as nature’s self-manifesting witness to human
reason. Thus, within human reason itself is something similar (viz., reason)
to the Divine Reality of absolute necessity within the cosmos (viz., absolute
necessity, as the highest rational principle of the cosmos).
Aquinas’ Fifth Way, famously controversial because of the difficulty of
interpreting it in light of modern science,13 since it argues from the teleo-
logical order of the cosmos to the Reason governing wisely over that order,14
is perhaps best appreciated as expressing the human desire for a mindful
union with the immanent and transcendent Divine Reality of the cosmos.
Zeno’s appeal to “the orderly arrangement of the universe”15 as proof the
existence of the Divine Reality takes the following form: “The logical is
better than the non-logical, nothing is better than the cosmos, therefore the
cosmos is a logical thing.”16 The teleology of the cosmos, then, is the self-
witness of the cosmos to the highest and most beautiful reality that inhabits it.
But notice how the appeal to “the logical” implicitly commends the pathway
4
for humans to unite themselves with this Divine Reality of the cosmos: i.e.,
by contemplating the precise logic of the ordering to which cosmos bears
self-witness. This mindful union is also implied in Aquinas’ Fifth Way,
insofar as it recognizes that things with cognition and intelligence are higher
than those without such mindfulness. The implication is that any “logic,” by
which mind discerns the presence of teleonomy, is itself akin to the supreme
Logic that itself governs the entire cosmos.
Aquinas’ Fourth Way,17 which contemplates the gradations of being
within the cosmos, may be glimpsed in Zeno’s argument about “the absurd
consequences for those who eliminate the divine.”18 Zeno’s appeal is like-
wise to the gradations of being. He says: “The thinking is better than the non-
thinking and the animate than the non-animate, but nothing is better than the
cosmos, therefore the cosmos is thinking and animate.”19 In similar fashion, the
transcendental attributes of the highest degrees of reality apply to the Divine
Reality in Aquinas’ own argument: namely, goodness, truth, nobility, being, etc.
What is characteristic of this path, in both Zeno and Aquinas, is that the tran-
scendental attribute becomes a real feature that is transcendentally identical in
both the creature (the thing within of the cosmos) and the Divine Reality (tran-
scendent and yet also immanent within the cosmos as the absolute necessity or
Reason governing the cosmos itself by moving it and animating it).
Finally, Aquinas’ Second Way may be discerned in the following argument
of Zeno:
That which produces the seed of the logical is itself logical, too,

the cosmos produces the seed of the logical,
therefore the cosmos is something logical.20
Although the contemplation of gradations of “the logical” is reminiscent

of the Fourth Way, and also of the Fifth Way (in the manner that both were
considered above), the emphasis here on the “production” of “the logical”
as a “seed” within the cosmos, by the cosmos itself, is recognizable as most
akin to the Second Way of Aquinas, which argues for the existence of Divine
Reality on the basis of the networked order of efficient (i.e., moving agent)
causality within the cosmos.21 The core insight of this way of contemplating
the cosmos is that it considers the Divine Reality as what is always sustaining
the world of animate and inanimate things. In Stoic thought, the sustaining
activity is eminently rational, since it operates through the “seeds” of “the
logical,” disseminated throughout the cosmos as its inner order. Likewise in
Aquinas, there can be no such order without the transcendent Divine Reality
that is the primary cause of the immanently ordering logic of cause and effect.
In other words, “causality” is the technical metaphysical doctrine of logical
5
ordering that corresponds precisely to the Stoic metaphor of “seeds” (since a

seed is externally implanted: i.e., it is the efficient cause of the effects which
it brings to fruition within the environment).
The Five Ways of Cleanthes
Cleanthes, as the second head of the school, introduced his own variations
upon these five basic ideas of contemplating Divine Reality. In the following
argument of his, we may glimpse the First, Second, and Third Ways, but
perhaps the First Way most of all, since the “heat” that it speaks of is a meta-
phor for being, which is intrinsically constituted by the primary causality of
Divine Actuality that inhabits the innermost core of the cosmos:
Every living thing therefore, whether animal or plants, lives because of the heat contained
within it; from this it must be inferred that the nature of heat has within it a vital force
which pervades the whole world.22
Cleanthes also gives voice to an argumentum e gradibus entium that is

reminiscent of Aquinas’ own formulation of the Fourth Way:
If one nature is better than another, there will be some best nature.
If one soul is better than another, there will be some best soul and if there is one animal
better than another, there will be some best animal, for such things are not of a nature to
proceed ad infinitum.
So then, as nature is not capable of increasing to infinity in goodness nor soul, neither
is the animal capable. …
Yet man cannot really be the best animal … but [is] imperfect and far removed from
the perfect.
But that which is perfect and the best will be better than man and fulfilled with all the
virtues and not receptive of any evil.
This animal will not differ from god. God therefore exists.23
Again, the point of identity between God and the creature is the transcen-
dental attribute that increases in the gradations of perfection, establishing a
precise contact point between the immanent (creature) and the transcendent
(divinity of the cosmos).
Finally, Cleanthes also gives an argument that is practically identical to the
logical structure of Aquinas’ own brief Fifth Way:
If anyone entered a house, a gymnasium or a forum and he would realise the logical order,
the regularity and the discipline, he cannot possibly suppose that these things come about
without a cause and he realises that someone is in charge and who is obeyed. Far more
therefore with so great movements and phases of the heavenly bodies, and the order of so
much and so great things, in which in spite of their immeasurable and infinite age never a
thing has gone wrong, is it necessary that he establishes that so great motions of nature are
regulated by a mind.24
6
Again, the spiritual significance of the argument is that it seeks to invoke

a mindful union with the simultaneously immanent and transcendent Divine
Reality, since in order to contemplate the reality of such a mind, one must
make use of one’s own mind in order to appreciate the activity of Mind in
the cosmos. In this way, it resembles the contemplation of gradations in
the Fourth Way, but it extends them into a further consideration of one’s
own mind as a participant within the higher teleonomic order established
by Divine Mind, which is, in effect, a recursive participation that mindfully
contemplates mindfulness.
There is also a further contemplation in Cleanthes of causality, which
might be able to be linked to the Five Ways of Aquinas, but its reconstruc-
tion must remain speculative, due to the extremely fragmentary evidence.
Yet perhaps it is not too much to see a spiritual impetus as driving Cleanthes’
concern when he considers how the following list of natural effects within
the cosmos are all evidence of an ultimate Divine Cause: “the foreknowledge
of future events”25 points to a Divine Reality (since it uses efficient causality
in a manner based on the order established in the Second Way, whereby the
Divine Reality is the ordering sustainer of the world); “the temperate climate,
the fertility of the earth and the abundance of commodities”26 all point to an
absolutely Divine Necessity (as the Third Way does, since these things are all
examples of relatively higher necessities within the world, all of which con-
dition the contingent realities of lesser contingent creatures like ourselves);
“terrifying phenomena (earthquakes, raindrops with the colour of blood,
etc.)”27 bear witness to gradations of being (much as the Fourth Way does,
and thus establish, by way of negative contrast, the reality of higher degrees
of perfection that are also part of the self-witness of the cosmos); and finally,
“the uniform and beautifully ordered motion and revolution of the heavens”28
points to the Divine Mind (just as the Fifth Way does, i.e., in a fashion that
only a cognitive being can appreciate, and which could thereby be a spiritual
path for union of that creaturely mind with the mind of the Divine Reality).
The Five Ways of Chrysippus
The affirmation of a Divine Reality in the manner of the First and Second
Ways lies in the background of the meditations offered by the third head
of the Stoic school, Chrysippus. It seems to be taken as established by his
predecessors that a Divine Reality (“the soul of the world”) inhabits the inner-
most core of the world of animate and inanimate things (as shown in the First
Way), sustaining that innermost core of the world (as shown in the Second
Way). Instead, Chrysippus gives more developed versions of the argumenta-
tion characteristic of the spiritual approaches of the Third, Fourth, and Fifth
7
Ways. Here is his variation on the contemplation of necessity characteristic

of the Third Way:
There is something in the nature of things, that man’s mind, human reason, strength and
power are incapable of producing, that what produces it must necessarily be superior
to man.
Now the heavenly bodies and all the things of which there is an eternal order cannot be
created by man.
Therefore that by which they are created is better than man. Yet, what better could you
call this god?29
Note again the point of contact is “mind,” which is the “something similar”
between human and divine. There is of course an appeal to gradation (Fourth
Way) and order (Fifth Way) here as well, but the argument’s form coalesces
around its contemplation of necessity: namely, what “must necessarily be
superior to man.”
Consider now this other argument of Chrysippus, which is more akin to
the approach of the Fourth Way:
Indeed, if gods do not exist, what can be better in the nature of things than man. For he
alone possesses reason, better than which nothing can be.
If there would be a man who would think that nothing in the world is better than him-
self, this would be a sign of stupid arrogance.
Therefore there is something superior than man.
Therefore god definitely exists.30
Here the point of contact between the human and the divine is not mind as
merely similar to the divine, in the way that contingency is similar to neces-
sity (as a hierarchically lesser degree of rational order), but rather as iden-
tical to the divine, insofar as “reason” is considered an attribute according to
which the human is the same as the most divine, since reason is “better than
which nothing can be.”
Chrysippus also offers the following formulation, which we may recog-
nize as yet another version of the Fourth Way approach to the divine that is
made via gradations of being:
In the horse the mature is better than the imperfect in a foal, in the dog than in a puppy, in
a man than in a boy.
What is best in the cosmos must be fully developed in an absolute form, nothing is
better than the world, nothing better than virtue.
Therefore virtue is an essential property of the world.
Although man’s nature is not perfect, nevertheless virtue may arise in man, how much
more readily then in the world.
Therefore in the world there is virtue.
Therefore it (the world) is wise and consequently god.31
8
Note how “the soul of the world” is invoked here as the highest Divine
Reality, whose highest transcendental attributes (wisdom and virtue) estab-
lish transcendent points of identity with human souls.
Finally, Chrysippus explicitly formulates an argument contemplating a
mindful union with the immanent and transcendent Divine Reality, in this
variation of his on the Fifth Way style of proof:
The cosmos is perfect in every respect.

… just as a shield-case is made for the sake of a shield, and a sheath for the sake of a
sword, so everything else except the world was created for the sake of some other thing,
just as corn and fruits are produced by the earth for the sake of animals, and the animals
for the sake of men (the horse for riding, the ox for ploughing, the dog for hunting and
keeping guard, etc.).
Man, however, came into existence for contemplating and imitating the world, man is
in no way perfect, but he is a small fragment of what is perfect.
But the cosmos, since it embraces all things, and since nothing exists what is not within
it, is entirely perfect.
How then can it fail to possess that which is best?
There is nothing better than mind and reason,
therefore the world cannot fail to possess them.32
Chrysippus also speaks of the proof of the divine as being able to be

established upon the basis of “the unity in this world.”33 While this phrase
could seem reminiscent of the Second Way, which contemplates the ordered
nexus of efficient causality (i.e., the cosmic network of external causes and
effects) operating in the world, it seems to be more of an appeal along the
lines of the Fifth Way. Shorter than his version of the Fifth Way just quoted
above, here is Chrysippus’ most pithy invocation of Divine Reality by way of
its supreme attribute of Mind:
But if the nature that governs the cosmos is the best, this nature will be thinking, morally
good and immortal. And being such this nature will be god. Therefore gods exist.34
This Fifth Way vision, of the thinking “soul of the world,” which is cer-
tainly characteristic of Chrysippus, is also found in Cicero’s paraphrase of his
idea of breath or spirit (pneuma) that we invoked at the outset:
These processes and this harmony of all the parts of the world certainly could not go on
were they not maintained by one divine and uninterrupted breath.35
The Five Ways in Stoic Natural Theology

Other extant examples of Stoic arguments about Divine Reality further
confirm the patterns we noticed above. We conclude with a few more, in order
to illustrate how, after the three founders of the school, the Stoic tradition
9
continues, in perennial fashion, to elucidate and develop the core themes and
ideas. For example, here is another fragment giving a version of the Fifth
Way’s contemplation of mindful union via teleonomic patterns:
The cosmos is moved by nature or by will, or by vortex and necessity. … [I]‌t would not
move the whole in an orderly and conserving way if it was not intelligent and divine …
of necessity, therefore it must itself have a thinking nature (by which it is moved in an
orderly way).
This must be just like that of a god.36
The following version of the Second Way contemplates the logic of effi-
cient causality (with an appeal to “the causes of motion”), as that logic creates
an ordered whole of causality that sustains the cosmos:
The moving cause of a horse is more marvelous than that of a plant. … The cause of the
whole is more marvelous than the cause of the parts. Since the nature of the universe is the
cause of the ordering of the whole cosmos it will be the cause of the parts (of the universe).
If so, it is the best. If it is the best, it is logical, and thinking and besides it will be
eternal.
But such a nature is identical with god.
Therefore god is something (existent).37
The following version of the Third Way contemplates the similarity

between Divine Reality and the world, because it discerns an ordered hier-
archy of relative necessity within the world, which can only have its ultimate
origin in the absolute necessity of the cosmos:
In every multipartite body which is regulated by nature, there is a ruling part, even as in
our case it is assumed to be located either in the heart or in the brain or in some other part
of the body.
This part functions not in the same way in the case of plants, but in some cases in the
roots, in others in the leaves, in others again in the central core.
Consequently, since the cosmos also is multipartite and regulated by nature, there will
exist in it a part which rules and originates its motions.
And this can be nothing else than the nature of beings, which is god.
God therefore exists.38
Finally, the following Stoic argument considers “the orderly arrangement

of the ‘embracing’, meaning the world,”39 where “the embracing” (to
periechon) refers to the Divine Reality inhabiting and sustaining the inner-
most core of the world of animate and inanimate things; it may thus be seen
as giving voice to the vision of the First and Second Ways, which are in fact
foundational to understanding the themes of all Five Ways:
The matter of beings … which is of itself motionless and shapeless must be put in motion
and shaped by some cause.
10
And it is probable that this is nothing else than some power which pervades it, even as
our soul pervades ourselves.
This power is either self-moving or moved by some other power. And if it is moved by
another power it will be impossible for that other power to be moved unless it is moved by
another power, which is absurd.
There exists, therefore, a power which is of itself self-moving, and this will be divine
and eternal. For either it will be in motion from eternity or from some point of time.
But it will not be in motion from a point of time; for there will exist no cause of its
motion from a point in time.
Thus then, the power which moves matter and subjects it to ordered forms of generation
and change is eternal. Consequently, this power will be god.
Conclusion
The Five Ways of Aquinas, within a wider historical view that makes room
for the Stoics, may thus be considered as alternative expressions of constant
themes within a perennial wisdom tradition of eco-spirituality. They are argu-
ably variations upon five key ideas that recur as the core of a vision of the
world that glimpses a Divine Reality in the cosmos that is both immanent and
transcendent.
Does this perennial tradition have any lessons for the world today, and can
its vision of eco-spirituality be of service in addressing the planetary eco-
logical crisis we now face? Answers to those questions like beyond the scope
of our inquiry here, but we may nonetheless conclude with an affirmation of
the nobility of this perennial vision, which insists upon orienting a proper
understanding of the world within a holistic vision. Furthermore, in contem-
porary Stoic practice, this vision of ancient wisdom is even being brought
into harmony with the additional technical knowledge of the cosmos that is
made available by a modern scientific understanding of the world:
Can we moderns share this view of nature and derive anything useful from it? Of course,
the modern scientific world-view is very different from the Stoic one. On the other hand,
at the very general (and by our standards non-scientific) level at which the Stoics thought
about nature as a whole, it may still be possible for us too to see nature as ordered and
providential. We moderns have reasons the Stoics did not have that make it rather urgent
for us to think about ourselves as part of a larger natural whole. Since the 19th century,
human beings have done great damage to the environment and the ecology of the planet,
which we are now belatedly trying to repair. We have also put at risk the survival of many
species of animals and plants with which we share this planet. We have very forceful
reasons to want to recover a view of ourselves as parts of a larger whole and to try to enable
nature to regain its proper character as ordered and providential. Reflecting on the Stoic
view of humanity as part of a larger cosmic whole may help us to do this in addition to the
reasons that the Stoics themselves had for taking this view.40
In other words, an eco-spirituality with a holistic metaphysical foundation

is a perennial need, but sometimes it is an even more pressing need.
11
Notes
1 Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy (Chatto & Windus, 1947); cf. Richard Rohr,
“Introduction,” Oneing, 1, 1 (Spring 2013), 13–14.
2 Richard Rohr, Center for Action and Contemplation: https://cac.org/living-school/
program-details/the-perennial-tradition/, accessed April 30, 2018. Cf. Huxley, Perennial
Philosophy, 1. The enumeration of the themes is my own effort at tabulating them.
3 Seneca, Epistulae 65.23–24. Cf. Christopher S. Morrissey, “ ‘Grace That Shimmers on
the Surface of Beauty’: Beyond Platonic-Aristotelian Form, a Stoic Vision of Primary
Causality,” Quaestiones Disputatae: A Journal of Philosophical Inquiry and Discussion
6.2 (Spring 2016): 10–25, at 21.
4 Cf. John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to
Uncreated Being (Catholic University of America Press, 2000), ch. 12; Timothy J. Pawl,
“The Five Ways”, in Brian Davies and Eleonore Stump (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of
Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2014), 115–134; and Timothy J. Pawl, “Aquinas’ Five
Ways”, in Michael Bruce and Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most
Important Arguments in Western Philosophy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 9–17, also online
at: http://ir.stthomas.edu/cas_phil_pub/1.
5 R. W. Sharples, Stoics, Epicureans, and Sceptics (Routledge, 1996), 45.
6 Gerard Verbeke, The Presence of Stoicism in Medieval Thought (Catholic University of
America Press, 1983), 91.
7 In the notes that follow, the following abbreviations are used in order to refer to the
ancient sources: ND = Cicero, De natura deorum; SE = Sextus Empiricus, Against the
Physicists; SVF = Hans von Arnim, Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (Teubner, 1964),
available online at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicorum_Veterum_Fragmenta; and
ST = P. A. Meijer, Stoic Theology: Proofs for the Existence of the Cosmic God and of
the Traditional Gods: Including a Commentary on Cleanthes’ Hymn on Zeus (Eburon,
2007). Note that ND and SE are cited throughout the notes according to the manner of
their occurrence in ST, from which all of their quotations are taken.
8 ST 2; cf. Cicero, ND II 21: ST 8 n.45, and also SE I 61: ST 117.
9 Aquinas’ First Way, as translated by Alfred J. Freddoso: “It is certain, and obvious to the
senses, that in this world some things are moved. But everything that is moved is moved
by another. For nothing is moved except insofar as it is in potentiality with respect to that
actuality toward which it is moved, whereas something effects motion insofar as it is in
actuality in a relevant respect. After all, to effect motion is just to lead something from
potentiality into actuality. But a thing cannot be led from potentiality into actuality except
through some being that is in actuality in a relevant respect; for example, something that
is hot in actuality –say, a fire –makes a piece of wood, which is hot in potentiality, to be
hot in actuality, and it thereby moves and alters the piece of wood. But it is impossible for
something to be simultaneously in potentiality and in actuality with respect to same thing;
rather, it can be in potentiality and in actuality only with respect to different things. For
what is hot in actuality cannot simultaneously be hot in potentiality; rather, it is cold in
potentiality. Therefore, it is impossible that something should be both mover and moved
in the same way and with respect to the same thing, or, in other words, that something
should move itself. Therefore, everything that is moved must be moved by another. If,
then, that by which something is moved is itself moved, then it, too, must be moved by
another, and that other by still another. But this does not go on to infinity. For if it did,
then there would not be any first mover and, as a result, none of the others would effect
motion, either. For secondary movers effect motion only because they are being moved
by a first mover, just as a stick does not effect motion except because it is being moved by
a hand. Therefore, one has to arrive at some first mover that is not being moved by any-
thing. And this is what everyone takes to be God” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q2, a3,
12
response; all Freddoso translations quoted in these notes are from his website at: www3.
nd.edu/~afreddos/summa-translation/Part%201/st1-ques02.pdf).
10 SE, I 133: ST, 1–2.
11 Aquinas’ Third Way: “Certain of the things we find in the world are able to exist and able
not to exist; for some things are found to be generated and corrupted and, as a result,
they are able to exist and able not to exist. But it is impossible that everything should
be like this; for that which is able not to exist is such that at some time it does not exist.
Therefore, if everything is such that it is able not to exist, then at some time nothing
existed in the world. But if this were true, then nothing would exist even now. For what
does not exist begins to exist only through something that does exist; therefore, if there
were no beings, then it was impossible that anything should have begun to exist, and so
nothing would exist now –which is obviously false. Therefore, not all beings are able
to exist [and able not to exist]; rather, it must be that there is something necessary in the
world. Now every necessary being either has a cause of its necessity from outside itself
or it does not. But it is impossible to go on to infinity among necessary beings that have
a cause of their necessity –in the same way, as was proved above, that it is impossible
to go on to infinity among efficient causes. Therefore, one must posit something that is
necessary per se, which does not have a cause of its necessity from outside itself but is
instead a cause of necessity for the other [necessary] things. But this everyone calls God”
(Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q2, a3, response; trans. Freddoso).
12 ST 2; cf. ND II 21: ST 8 n.45, and also SE I 61: ST 117.
13 Cf. Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways: St. Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence
(Routledge, 1969); Christopher F. J. Martin, Thomas Aquinas: God and Explanations
(Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 132–206; Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A
Refutation of the New Atheism (St. Augustine’s Press, 2008); and Edward Feser,
Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld Publications, 2009).
14 Aquinas’ Fifth Way: “We see that some things lacking cognition, viz., natural bodies, act
for the sake of an end. This is apparent from the fact that they always or very frequently
act in the same way in order to bring about that which is best, and from this it is clear
that it is not by chance, but by design, that they attain the end. But things lacking cog-
nition tend toward an end only if they are directed by something that has cognition and
intelligence, in the way that an arrow is directed by an archer. Therefore, there is some-
thing intelligent by which all natural things are ordered to an end –and this we call God”
(Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q2, a3, response; trans. Freddoso).
15 ST 2.
16 SE, I 104: ST 2.
17 Aquinas’ Fourth Way: “In the world some things are found to be more and less good,
more and less true, more and less noble, etc. But more and less are predicated of diverse
things insofar as they approach in diverse ways that which is maximal in a given respect.
For instance, the hotter something is, the closer it approaches that which is maximally
hot. Therefore, there is something that is maximally true, maximally good, and max-
imally noble, and, as a result, is a maximal being; for according to the Philosopher in
Metaphysics 2, things that are maximally true are maximally beings. But, as is claimed
in the same book, that which is maximal in a given genus is a cause of all the things that
belong to that genus; for instance, fire, which is maximally hot, is a cause of all hot things.
Therefore, there is something that is a cause for all beings of their esse [act of existence],
their goodness, and each of their perfections –and this we call God” (Aquinas, Summa
Theologiae I, q2, a3, response; trans. Freddoso).
18 ST 2.
19 SE I 104; SVF 1 110: ST 3.
20 SE I 101: ST 3.
21 Aquinas’ Second Way: “We find that among sensible things there is an ordering of effi-
cient causes, and yet we do not find – nor is it possible to find – anything that is an
13
efficient cause of its own self. For if something were an efficient cause of itself, then it
would be prior to itself –which is impossible.
But it is impossible to go on to infinity among efficient causes. For in every case of ordered
efficient causes, the first is a cause of the intermediate and the intermediate is a cause of
the last –and this regardless of whether the intermediate is constituted by many causes or
by just one. But when a cause is removed, its effect is removed. Therefore, if there were
no first among the efficient causes, then neither would there be a last or an intermediate.
But if the efficient causes went on to infinity, there would not be a first efficient cause,
and so there would not be a last effect or any intermediate efficient causes, either –which
is obviously false. Therefore, one must posit some first efficient cause –which everyone
calls God” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q2, a3, response; trans. Freddoso).
22 ND II 24, SVF I 513: ST 65. Cf. “Cleanthes autem tum ipsum mundum deum dicit esse,
tum totius naturae menti et animo tribuit hoc nomen, tum ultimum … ardorem, qui aether
nominetur …” (ND I 37, SVF I 530: ST 69).
23 SE I 88–91: ST 52–53; cf. ND 33–36: ST 59–60.
24 ND II 15: ST 46.
25 ND II 13: ST 37.
26 ND II 13: ST 37.
27 ND II 13: ST 37.
28 ND II 13: ST 37.
29 ND II 16: ST 78; cf. SVF II 1011, ND III 25: ST 79.
30 ND II 16: ST 78.
31 ND II 38–39: ST 83.
32 ND II 37–38, SVF 1153: ST 81–82; cf. ND II 18: ST 84–85 (“there is a surpassing
mind”).
33 SE I 78, cf. ND II 19: ST 85–88.
34 SE I 78: ST 88.
35 ND II 19: ST 88.
36 SE I 111–114, SVF II 1016: ST 110–111.
37 SE I 115–119: ST 112–113.
38 SE I 119–120: ST 113–114.
39 SE I 75–77, SVF II 311: ST 122–123.
40 Stoic Week 2016 Handbook, “Sunday: Nature”: http://modernstoicism.com/wp-content/
uploads/2016/10/Stoic-Week-2016-Handbook-Stoicism-Today.pdf.
14
A Functional Cosmology for the Crisis

of the Anthropocene
Caroline Smith
The Anthropocene: An Existential Crisis

Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the
free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of the clouds by day and the stars at
night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.1
It is clear that the world is facing a tsunami of severe crises on a series of

fronts. One of the most critical is the catastrophic climatic and environmental
degradation that is now posing an existential threat to the future of humanity
and the more-than-human world.2 Earth3 is indisputably in the midst of a
global ecological crisis as the human species enters the Anthropocene, radic-
ally altering the conditions of Earth’s great ecosystems, unravelling the web
of life itself and presiding over the sixth great extinction of life.4
Much of humanity is left bewildered, confused and fearful as the old cer-
tainties fall away. The future looks increasingly dark as we seem locked in a
cascading planetary phase shift. These crises are emerging with the onset of
the geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. Scientists now agree that
Earth has left the relatively stable Holocene period and entered a new geo-
logical epoch where the impact of human actions has radically altered the
biophysical systems of the planet. As Zalasiewicz et al. put it, natural and
human forces have “become intertwined, so that the fate of one determines
the fate of the other.”5
There is much debate over when the Anthropocene actually started. Some
commentators argue that it was initiated by the increased burning of fossil
fuels during the period of the Industrial Revolution, which saw increased
15
A Functional Cosmology for the Anthropocene 15
carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, a major cause of climate change.

Others, e.g. Turney et al.,6 identify the onset of the Anthropocene epoch as
around 1965, coinciding with the ‘great acceleration’7 of resource and energy
use and population increase after the Second World War, mediated by acceler-
ating advances in science, technology and medicine. To make matters worse,
since the 1970s, the world has seen the further sharpening of modernity
into the economic and political framing of neoliberalism. In this worldview,
values such as consumption, efficiency, winning, freedom, productivity,
competitiveness, risk taking and power over others through the mechanisms
of a free market are the hallmarks of progress and success in late stage cap-
italism8 in its rapacious global stage. Neoliberalism is now so entrenched
globally that, for many, it is almost impossible to envision a different world.9
It has become, as George Monbiot puts it, “the prevailing common sense.”10
In its vision, as Bauman argues, growth is constructed as the central good, the
organizing goal and value that drives ethics and morality.11
Writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben12 now uses the term ‘Eaarth’
to indicate how profoundly Earth has changed. For McKibben, “Our old
familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, flooding and burning in ways that
no human ever has seen. We’ve created, in very short order, a new planet,
still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth”
(par. 1).
Many of the changes to Earth’s systems that characterize the Anthropocene
are geologically long lasting and irreversible in the short term, and a number
of the biophysical boundaries that need to be maintained for sustainable
planetary futures have already been breached. These include biochem-
ical overflows into the environment through agriculture; dangerously low
levels of genetic, species and ecosystem biodiversity (and hence reduced
resilience), especially in food cropping systems; acceleration in the rates of
soil erosion and sedimentation;13 large-scale chemical perturbations in the
carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycles;14 significant disruption of the global
climate; sea level rise and ocean acidification;15 as well as unprecedented
levels of alien species invasions16 and land clearing leading to biodiversity
decline across the planet. Changes in land systems and accelerated climate
change are an increasing risk, but there may still be a chance for reversal if
appropriate steps are taken.17
Clearly, science and technology have given some sections of humanity
high standards of living and other benefits, particularly those living in the
global North. Few would want to return to widespread poverty and lack of
access to education, shelter and health care. However, the looming ecological
crisis suggests that this may well become the case for everyone if urgent
steps are not taken to repair the damage and seriously engage in a global
16
transition to a sustainable future. The transition to sustainability will clearly

need to include appropriate uses of science and technology, but at the same
time rejecting those that impact on the ability for life to flourish.18
It is indeed ironic that, at the very moment we recognize the onset of the
Anthropocene, we seem to have lost any coherent sense of what it means
for humans to live within the ecological limits of the planet. Further,
we have also lost a sense of our relationship with the more-than-human
world.19 Stein goes as far as believing that humanity is now not capable
of fully understanding its place in the biosphere. As he puts it, “our iden-
tity crisis is coinciding with the climax of the Anthropocene,” and that “it
appears the Earth is in our hands, and we are not prepared for the respon-
sibility” (par. 3).20
In identifying the Anthropocene, we are now recognizing that the
worldview that has spawned it is built on shaky foundations. We are seeing a
reduction of both optimal individual and collective wellbeing as well as the
capacity for life-giving ecosystems to flourish. Eckersley argues that there
is a clear trend towards decreasing individual wellbeing, noting that each
generation experiences increased negative stress levels so that cumulative
stress levels are increasing.21 Modern Western culture is increasingly failing
to meet the basic requirements expected of any culture, that is, to provide a
sense of meaning, belonging and purpose through a sense of personal iden-
tity, worth and security; a measure of confidence or certainty about what the
future holds and a framework of moral values to guide their conduct.22
Many would leave the story here, lamenting the end of certainty and
replacing it with a sense of ennui and hopelessness in the face of our multiple
challenges in a dystopian future. Others see the opportunity afforded by the
crisis of the Anthropocene to accelerate into a hyper-technical future, where
a brave new world can be built on the foundations of the smart new tech-
nologies of artificial machine intelligence, robotics and quantum computing.
For example, the concept of Ecomodernism advanced by the Breakthrough
Institute claims that “a good Anthropocene demands that humans use their
growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better
for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.”23 While
such hi-tech solutions appear attractive, critics believe this approach will
alienate humans further from Nature.24 Still others argue for a back-to-basics
localism, where collectivism, cooperation and frugal living become the norm
to reduce the human footprint on the environment, and to rekindle our sense
of community.25
These responses may not be enough to give us the deep sense of belonging
that materialism has stripped away. In spite of our situation, questioning
and yearning for meaning, connection and belonging are deeply spiritual
17
human needs which even in the face of hyper-materialism, have not quite
disappeared. Ecopsychologists Roszak, Gomes and Kanner contend that an
empathetic orientation towards Nature is something humans are born with,
and forms the ground for the emergence of an eco-spirituality.26 This orienta-
tion explains why Nature is a common trigger for peak, inspirational insight
experiences, and, for many, an essential and absorbing part of childhood.
Is it coincidence that Jesus went to the wilderness for deep contemplation?
The healing power of the more-than-human is well known, as shown by the
role of gardens and animals in speeding recovery rates in hospital. Recent
research from groups such as the Scandinavian Forest Schools Initiative is
now confirming what many educators have long believed – that positive
experiences in Nature enhance human flourishing through physical, intel-
lectual, psychological, social, emotional, moral and aesthetic development
as well as providing spiritual nourishment and a sense of meaning, con-
nectedness and belonging. Connection to Nature through outdoor play and
communal activities enhances community values, deepens and strengthens
relationships and provides stronger support networks. These same values and
benefits are experienced in families if parents and children take the time to
foster their connections through shared play and engagement with Nature.
The great Catholic geologian Thomas Berry, whose contribution is
discussed below, puts it thus:
We have an absolute need of the natural world for activation of our inner world … For it
is from the stars, the planets and the moon in the heavens as well as from the flowers and
birds and forests and woodland creatures of Earth that some of the more profound inner
experiences take place in children.27
It becomes clear that deep, urgent and critical questions must be asked
about the relationship between humanity and the natural world if there is any
hope of reversing decline and forging a flourishing future. For Malafouris,
our salvation lies in nothing less than the decentring of the sovereign human
subject, in other words, a shift from anthropocentricism towards a more inclu-
sive eco-centrism where the more-than-human-world that is our ultimate life
support system is taken account of and nurtured rather than destroyed.28
How Did We Get Here? I–It: The Domination of Nature

As Morton suggests, without any clear point of reference between Nature
and culture we lose the concept of our ‘world’, which for most people is
that familiar, comfortable and predictable place where the questions of the
present were able to be answered by the solutions of the past, sculpting our
values and our history.29
18
While it is clear that most humans have a long history of some exploitation
of Nature for sustenance reasons,30 the pre-rational organic worldview, still
the dominant worldview of many indigenous peoples today, was mediated
as Martin Buber’s I–Thou,31 a participatory ecological consciousness where
Nature was sacred, humans and the other-than-human world were kin, and
identity was found through active relationships with the land.32 Buber himself
talks of relating to Nature as I–Thou when he says, “but it can also happen,
if will and grace are joined, that as I contemplate the tree I am drawn into a
relation, and the tree ceases to be an It.”33 Humans participated directly in the
natural world; it was their spiritual source of knowledge, law and wisdom as
well as sustenance and healing. It was, in Thomas Berry’s words, “our native
place.”34
For the people of the West, this world began to unravel as the upheaval
of the Enlightenment took hold, beginning in the seventeenth century. Now,
accelerated by a powerful science and technology, the dominant worldview is
one of increasingly materialistic and individualistic notions of desire, success
and progress tied to continued economic growth. In order for this to succeed,
catastrophic and accelerating exploitation of Nature needed to take place,
which exacerbated the disconnection of humans from Nature. In this world,
Nature has merely become the backdrop that provides for human needs and
desires. As Berry observes:
We can break the mountains apart; we can drain the rivers and flood the valleys. We can
turn the most luxuriant forests into throw-away paper products. We can tear apart the great
grass cover of the western plains and pour toxic chemicals into the soil and pesticides onto
the fields until the soil is dead and blows away in the wind. We can pollute the air with
acids, the rivers with sewage, the seas with oil –all this in a kind of intoxication with our
power for devastation at an order of magnitude beyond all reckoning.35
For the people of the Western world, the past 300 years of the Enlightenment
brought about a profound shift in worldview. This now clear understanding
of the magnitude of the disruptions to natural ecosystems is recasting recent
centuries of ‘progress and advancement’ as a consumer- obsessed world
increasingly devoid of spirit. Human meaning, belief and action are no longer
located in the cornerstone of a coherent view of the world that was available to
previous eras. This is the legacy of the dualism of the philosopher Descartes
(in his Discourse on method, 1631), the radical idea (at that time) that mind
and body are mutually exclusive. Mind became associated with the rational,
with the very essence of being (cogito ergo sum). Zimmerman36 argues that
“Descartes’ quest for absolutely clear and certain truths” arose from the high
degree of uncertainty and insecurity of the times, as Europe emerged from
another of its devastating plagues. The plague’s awful and lingering legacy
19
was that the physical body became associated with the seeming irrationality
of Nature, which needed to be conquered. Such thinking gave permission for
Nature to become ‘disenchanted’, in other words, no longer hold any spiritual
significance. The way was cleared for Nature to be disconnected, to be seen
merely as a resource rather than intimately connected with humanity.
This same impetus drove Francis Bacon (1571–1626) to develop the ana-
lytical/reductionist scientific method. Bacon determined that pervasive and
rational methods needed to be applied to Nature to begin the understandings
of how it might be controlled and manipulated. This was a radical, violent
and reductionist recasting of humanity’s relationship with Nature from I–
Thou to the either–or dualism of I–It. Sheldrake quotes Bacon’s approach to
Nature, which was to be
bound into “service” and made a “slave” … she would be “dissected”, and by the mechan-
ical arts and the hand of man, she could be “forced out of her natural state and squeezed and
moulded”, so that “human knowledge and human power meet as one.”37
Descartes’ powerful dualism coupled with Francis Bacon’s development

of the reductionist scientific method, later supported by Newton’s deter-
mination of the mathematical basis of physical phenomena such as gravity
(1666) and Kant’s philosophy of reason (1788), among others, challenged
the very worldview and mythical ground of pre-modern humanity. They
provided the underpinning of the shift from an enchanted Nature to the
powerful reductionist, mechanistic and deterministic worldview that has
become the dominant epistemology for the last 300 years. Gradually, and
with many detractors and critics, the rise of a scientific rationality, untem-
pered by a spiritual dimension, has imposed the most profound impact on the
world, leading directly to the development of the technologies and mindsets
that have enabled massive exploitation of the world’s ecosystems. This mod-
ernist metanarrative of the rise of human progress through the domination
and exploitation of Nature by means of science and technology, remains the
dominant worldview that has birthed the onset of the Anthropocene even as
humanity enters the twenty-first century.38
A number of writers have linked the impoverishment of Earth’s ecosystems
and the desacralization of Nature to a concurrent impoverishment of the inner
world of the human spirit. Humanity is of Earth, so Earth’s decline becomes
ours. Al Gore puts it thus in his lament: “the more deeply I search for the
roots of the global environmental crisis, the more I am convinced that it is an
outer manifestation of an inner crisis that is … spiritual.”39
Integral Theorist Ken Wilber argues that something has been pro-
foundly lost in the process of objectification through the ascendancy of base
20
materialism. Wilber calls our era ‘Flatland’, devoid of enchantment, interior

depth and spirit.40 In O’Sullivan’s view, “the story of the modern epic … will
be a story of progressive disenchantment from the natural world and all that
this entails”41 (author’s italics). Or as the British philosopher Stephen Toulmin
sees it, there is a loss of the view of the whole.42 For Thomas Berry, the insights
gained by delving into the natural world through the tools and procedures of
reductionist science have led to a kind of autism, where humanity is no longer
enchanted by Nature’s magic. Indeed, the very idea of magic or enchantment
belongs to a mediaeval age, of unenlightenment, of irrationality. As Berry
poignantly tells us, the only interpretation of recent Western history now left
is one of irony, where “our supposed progress towards an ever improving
human situation is bringing us to wasteworld instead of wonderworld.”43 The
splendour of Nature has been killed, replaced by instrumental utilitarianism.
In Slaughter’s summary, the legacy of the Enlightenment is the metaproblem
of our time; a world characterized by the principles of the dominance of
instrumental rationality, reductionism and the loss of the transcendent, the
use of science and technology for irrational ends and the desacralization or
disenchantment of Nature.44
Nature and Christianity
The exploitation of the natural world for human ends, writ large through the
Enlightenment period, has itself deeper underpinnings in the Abrahamic reli-
gious traditions. One dimension of this is that the divine is characterized by
transcendence rather than immanence. Long argues that Abrahamic creation
stories firmly place ‘Man’ at the centre of creation. Earth has received the
created order from God that culminates in the emergence of the human, thus
ending the creative process.45 Within Christianity, the key I–Thou relation-
ship is between the human and the divine, and, with some notable exceptions
such as in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and Hildegard of Bingen, is pro-
foundly anthropocentric and patriarchal. The duty of the human is to popu-
late, subdue and conquer Earth. It is as if the material world of Nature, of
the universe, is somehow part of humanity’s earthly burden, only able to
be transcended to Paradise at the end of the earthly journey, that is, through
death. For Long, Paradise is outside of the earthly, material sphere. God is
outside creation and the natural and divine are separated in different spheres.
This privileging of the human and the seeking for perfection through tran-
scendence rests on a profound human/rest-of-creation dualism, and remains a
foundational tenet of the Abrahamic religions. The other-than-human world,
i.e. Nature, is relegated to the instrumental, the backdrop that provides for
human needs, but which is not sacred in its own right and possesses no
inherent rights. Descartes’ philosophy of body/mind is entirely consistent
21
with this view; indeed he notoriously declared animals to be no more than

machines, possessed of no sentient feeling.
This I–It perspective was taken to task by the American historian Lynn
White Jr. in his famous address to the 1966 American Association for the
Advancement of Science. There, White put the view that Christianity was
uniquely responsible for the environmental crisis:
Christianity in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions (except, perhaps,
Zoroastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and Nature but also insisted that it
is God’s will that man exploit Nature for his proper ends … By destroying pagan animism,
Christianity made it possible to exploit Nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of
natural objects.46
White’s view has received some criticism and challenge.47 However, his
work remains important in that it foregrounded the debate about the relation-
ship between science, religion, Nature and spirituality, and paved the way for
the reworking of the I–Thou relationship with Nature within the Abrahamic
religions and beyond, through the evolution of a post- Enlightenment
eco-spirituality.
Towards a New Eco-Spirituality
As a relatively new perspective, eco-spirituality is subject to many and
various interpretations, and challenges. Some conservative Christians are
deeply suspicious of eco-spirituality, seeing it as a post-Christian heresy; a
threat to traditional theocentric and anthropocentric understandings of the
created order.48 However, deep debate continues about the position of humans
in the scheme of things. For example, the eco-centric field of deep ecology
sees humanity as but one species in the great web of life, no more important
than a flea or a blade of grass. For deep ecologists, ‘Spirit’ resides in all
aspects of the universe. In contrast, the anthropocentric Abrahamic religions
see humanity as a special species of a God that was created in His image and,
for Christians, a God who chose to be incarnated in the human form.
For others, including agnostics and some atheists, recasting humanity’s
relationship with Nature as a spiritual one brings a sense of renewal, an
awakening as if from a dysfunctional slumber, a coming home, of a deep
belonging and sense of meaning. Nature is re- enchanted, resacralized.
Long49 believes that this reinterpretation is both new and ancient, and may
indeed mark the dawn of a post-religious phase. New, because it is post-
Enlightenment, drawing on insights from rationalist modern cosmology and
ecology which enable a new synthesis; and ancient, because it pre-dates the
monotheistic religions, harking back to the beginnings of humanity’s evolu-
tion. As the Irish ecotheologian Diarmid O’Murchu observes:
22
Our spiritual identity is inescapable … Religion is one aspect of our spiritual unfolding, but
only one. Our spiritual evolution as a species took place for at least 70,000 years without
formal religion and there are many indications that we are, once more, evolving spiritually
into a nonreligious ambience.50
Even as some Christians see eco-spirituality as heretical, others are increas-

ingly embracing the need for reconciliation between Nature, science and God
(see for example the work of the EarthSong project;51 Diarmid O’Murchu;
Dennis Edwards;52 Evelyn Tucker;53 Miriam McGillis;54 and Berry himself).
Edwards argues that from the Christian perspective, since humanity is made in
the image and likeness of God, humans are mandated to act as God would act,
that is, not to harm any part of the universe. Nature is God’s creation and humans
are to be its stewards. Tucker believes that religions have the power to transform
themselves to take account of the global ecological crisis. Key avenues for these
discussions have been the Harvard conferences on Religions of the World and
Ecology which promoted interfaith dialogue to support the creation of a sustain-
able future, the Teheran Seminar on Environment, Culture and Religion held in
2001 and the continuing Yale forums on Religion and Ecology.55
Within the Catholic tradition, the writings of both the late popes John
Paul II and Benedict XVI as well the current pope, Francis, have called for
a profound change in the way humans relate to Earth. John Paul II passion-
ately articulated the need for an ‘ecological conversion’, a reawakening of an
appreciation of planet Earth as the gift of God, humanity’s home and boun-
tiful provider of all its needs:
We must therefore encourage and support the “ecological conversion” which in recent
decades has made humanity more sensitive to the catastrophe to which it has been heading.
Man is no longer the Creator’s “steward”, but an autonomous despot, who is finally begin-
ning to understand that he must stop at the edge of the abyss.56
In his January 2007 message for the celebration of the World Day of Peace,
Pope Benedict XVI clearly recognized the interdependence of human well-
being and the wellbeing of Nature, and that this recognition forms the ground
for a multifaceted ecology of peace:
Alongside the ecology of nature, there exists what can be called a “human” ecology, which
in turn demands a “social” ecology. All this means that humanity, if it truly desires peace,
must be increasingly conscious of the links between natural ecology, or respect for nature,
and human ecology. Experience shows that disregard for the environment always harms
human coexistence, and vice versa. It becomes more and more evident that there is an
inseparable link between peace with creation and peace among men.57
Perhaps the strongest message from the Catholic tradition is that of Pope
Francis in his encyclical letter Laudato Si’: On care for our common home.
23
Francis announces his “concern to bring the whole human family together to
seek a sustainable and integral development” (#13); to do so he declares, “we
urgently need a humanism capable of bringing together the different fields of
knowledge, including economics, in the service of a more integral and inte-
grating vision” (#141); then he proceeds to present his vision of an “integral
ecology.”58
A Functional Cosmology for the Anthropocene: The
Contribution of Thomas Berry
Thomas Berry, a Passionist priest who describes himself as a cultural historian,
ecotheologian, cosmologist and geologian, that is, a scholar of Earth, has brought
uniquely profound insights and influence to the way humans see themselves in
relation to the world. For Berry, an Earth-based eco-spirituality is important but
does not go far enough. Berry extends the concept to embrace not just Earth
but the very universe itself in all its breadth, depth and deep time as home, as
our place, in order to heal the great rift and re-orientate us towards a thriveable
future. His major works –The Dream of the Earth; The Universe Story: From the
Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era (with Brian Swimme);59 The Great
Work: Our Way into the Future;60 and Evening Thoughts: Reflection on the Earth
as Sacred Community,61 as well as many other writings –have inspired what
Berry has called ‘the great work’ –the transformation of humanity’s priorities.
Berry’s great contribution has been to reinterpret and reframe cosmology
as an integration of science and spirit, manifested in a new creation story
for our times. Thomas Berry’s insight is that modern Western culture and
increasingly other cultures, around the world, have been stripped of their
deep cultural guiding stories, what Berry calls “a functional cosmology.”
It is this absence of a functional cosmology that has profoundly influenced
the Western mindset in its relationship to and treatment of Nature, towards
one of domination, disconnection, distancing and disenchantment.62 Berry
wants us to embrace a story in which humanity is cast as profoundly at home
in the universe. Seen not from outside as disinterested observers, but as an
intimate part of its creation and evolution, this new cosmology teaches us
that the universe story is humanity’s story, that we are intimately intertwined
with the substance, patterns, processes and splendour of the universe. In
Berry’s evocative words, “we are a communion of subjects, not a collection
of objects.”63 Interpreted and recast this way, science reveals the human as
deeply embedded within the magnificent story of a numinous, participatory
and interrelated universe. Berry coined the term ‘the Ecozoic’,64 referring to
what he hoped would be the new era for humanity as the new story became
embedded in human consciousness, in contrast with the Anthropocene, a
term that recognizes the reality of where we have come to.
24
Physicist and cosmologist Brian Swimme,65 who has worked closely with
Berry, places human consciousness not just within the evolution of life on Earth,
but within the nearly 14-billion-year-old cosmic creation process, in order to
highlight the directions in which human consciousness is evolving today and
into the future. For Swimme and Berry, human consciousness is the con-
sciousness of the universe reflecting on itself. With this knowledge, humanity
stands in wonder at its magnificence; it is a profound, awe-inspiring and deeply
comforting thought. If re-imagined through the epic story of the universe, this
cosmology is available to all, able to be interpreted through all faith traditions as
well as by those professing no faith. Indeed this is what self-styled arch-atheist
Richard Dawkins means by his term ‘the God of Einstein’. Einstein had said: “I
don’t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of
the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.”66
Berry’s great contribution to the framing of a new functional cosmology
for the Anthropocene is his notion of ‘moments of grace’.67 Moments of
grace are those profound moments which have the power and potential to
change radically the course of the future by compelling us to see ourselves
in an intensely different light. These moments are privileged moments, when
the great transformations of the universe occur. They are no less than psychic
‘mindquakes’, upending all we think we know to be true and forcing us to
drastically reframe ourselves in relation to our world. Galileo’s insight that
shifted our sense of ourselves from the centre of the universe to a mere speck
orbiting the sun was such a moment of grace, even if it caused severe angst
to the Catholic church, let alone to Galileo himself.
Berry’s three moments of grace provide the foundation for a new func-
tional cosmology as a new consciousness of the human–Nature relationship
as I–Thou, interconnected not only with the web of life, but into the very
beginnings and evolution of the universe itself. This new consciousness is
now manifesting as a global eco-spirituality, emerging in response to three
deep realizations about humanity’s relationship with universe.
Moments of Grace
The first moment of grace emerges from learning across four cen-
turies of cosmological science, which has opened up a deep and profound
understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe and humanity’s
place within it. From the mechanistic Newtonian view of the universe as a
collection of objects, merely following the dictates of the laws of classical
physics, the twentieth-and twenty-first-century sciences of quantum physics,
cosmology, systems theory, chaos and complexity have changed the way in
which the organizational principles of the universe are understood. This new
view of the universe is one of an evolving, dynamic, ever-changing dance
25
of destruction and creation, a cosmogenesis. This understanding is radically

reshaping the human–Nature relationship towards an ecological worldview
which sees humans as an intimate part of Nature, part of the narrative of
cosmogenesis. As Tucker puts it, we are “not only part of humankind but of
Earthkind; we are not simply human beings but universe beings.”68 Humanity
is literally stardust, the child of the stars. No longer cold and mechanistic,
this understanding of the universe is one of participation, of relationship,
of adaptability and interconnectedness, where there is no such thing as an
impartial or disinterested observer.
This recasting is critical to reframe the new cosmology of humanity’s
place in creation and its future. For Berry, “the future can exist only when
we understand the universe as composed of subjects to be communed with,
not as objects to be exploited.”69 Human consciousness is a manifestation of
the very consciousness of the universe, and with this knowledge, humanity
stands in awe and wonder at its magnificence; human consciousness is the
universe reflecting on itself.70 The realization is that Nature and the human
are one, the inner and outer dimensions of existence. Without it, human cre-
ativity, joy, wonder and imagining are nothing. As Berry reminds us:
We see quite clearly that what happens to the nonhuman happens to the human. What
happens to the outer world happens to the inner world. If the outer world is diminished in
its grandeur then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is
diminished or extinguished.71
The second moment of grace comes through the relational sciences of

the twentieth and twenty-first century – ecology, systems theory, evolution,
quantum mechanics, cosmology, chaos and complexity theories and neuro-
science –which together teach us that human health, wellbeing and our
very survival as a species are intimately entwined with the health, wellbeing
and survival of Earth’s dynamic ecosystems. The nature and quality of the
relationships between objects in a system are as important as the objects them-
selves. Humanity’s material evolutionary history and biological being mean
that Homo sapiens is an integral part of the web of life, the same material as
the plants, the other animals, Earth, the very universe itself.72 The evolutionary
and relational sciences of cosmology and ecology have given humans a great
gift, the ability to see ourselves as part of the web of life, as ecological uni-
verse beings, born into a material bio-ecological world as much as into a social
world. Scientists such as Ursula Goodenough73 and Brian Swimme74 teach that
the relational sciences are critical to help us experience a deep appreciation
of our place in the universe. These sciences reveal the intricate interconnected
networks and patterns that give rise to galaxies, ecosystems and life itself, and
it is through this understanding that we can renew our sense of the sacred.
26
This is the moment of grace that is part of the great shift in consciousness
that is now occurring in the hearts and minds of many, towards a participa-
tory rather than a dominator relationship with Nature, towards an ecological
worldview. This shift signals a profound move from the exploitative, objecti-
fying I–It relationship to Nature to an I–Thou spiritual relationship, that is,
an eco-spirituality.
The third moment, perhaps of crisis as well as grace, is the shock of the
Anthropocene itself, of humanity’s increasingly destructive and potentially
all-life-threatening impact on the very ecosystems on which it so profoundly
depends and of which it forms an intimate part.
These three profound moments of grace, enabled by the insights of science,
situate the human deep within the magnificent story of a numinous, partici-
patory and interrelated universe. When the story is told this way, humanity
is intensely at home in the universe. If we see it not from outside as disinter-
ested observers, but as an imitate part of its evolution, this new story, this cos-
mology, teaches that the universe story is humanity’s story, and the universe,
and especially Earth, are our primary teachers.
If we are to thrive or even survive into the future, if we are to mend our
broken relationship with Earth and the more-than-human world, Thomas
Berry’s functional cosmology, informed by moments of grace, gives us a
profound new story with which to reframe ourselves. It is through this that
hope and action spring. The last words rest with Berry:
The natural world is the larger sacred community to which we belong, and we are to
be its stewards and custodians. To be alienated from this community is to become des-
titute in all that makes us human. To damage this community is to diminish our own
existence.75
Notes
1 Berry, T. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990.
2 This term was first used by David Abram in his book The Spell of the Sensuous:
Perception and Language in a more- than-
human World. New York: Vintage
Books, 1997, as a way of referring to Nature as greater than and encompassing
humanity.
3 The terms ‘Nature’ and ‘Earth’ are capitalized throughout to reflect their centrality and
importance in considering a functional cosmology.
4 Glikson, A. The atmosphere and mass extinctions through time. Paper delivered at the con-
ference Imagining the real: Life on a greenhouse earth. Manning Clark House, Australian
National University, Canberra, June 2008; McDonagh, S. The Death of Life: The Horror
of Extinction. Dublin: Columba Press, 2004.
5 Zalasiewicz, J. et al. The New World of the Anthropocene. Environmental Science and
Technology 44(7) (2010), 2228–2231.
6 Turney, C. S. et al. Global Peak in Atmospheric Radiocarbon Provides a Potential Def-
inition for the Onset of the Anthropocene Epoch in 1965. Scientific Reports 8 (2018).
DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-20970-5.
27
7 Steffen, W. et al. The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.

Anthropocene Review 2(1) (2015), 81–98. DOI: 10.1177/2053019614564785.
8 Mandel, E. Late Capitalism. London: Humanities Press, 1975.
9 Smith, C. Education and Society: The Case for Ecoliteracy. Education and Society
25(1) (2007), 25–37; Smith, C., & Watson, J. STEM and Education for Sustainability
(EfS): Finding Common Ground for a Flourishing Future. In M. Baguley (Ed.),
Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Educational
Research. Melbourne: AARE, 2016. www.aare.edu.au/data/2016_Conference/Full_
papers/547_Caroline_Smith.pdf.
10 Monbiot, G. Out of the Wreckage – A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. Gaia Foundation,
2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE63Y7srr_Y.
11 Bauman, Z. Postmodern ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993; Bauman, Z. Life in Fragments:
Essays in Postmodern Morality. New York: Wiley, 1995.
12 McKibben, B. Eaarth. Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. New York: Times Books/
Henry Holt & Company, 2010.
13 Nearing, M. A. et al. Natural and Anthropogenic Rates of Soil Erosion. International Soil
and Water Conservation Research 5(2) (2017), 77–84.
14 Galloway, J. N., & Schlesinger, W. H. Biogeochemical Cycles. Washington, DC: National
Climate Assessment. US Global Change Research Program, 2014. https://nca2014.
globalchange.gov/report/sectors/biogeochemical-cycles.
15 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate Change 2014: Synthesis
Report. Contribution of working groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, R. K. Pachauri and
L. A. Meyer (Eds.)]. Geneva: Author, 2014. www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr.
16 This is somewhat ironic given that the biggest invading species is Homo sapiens!
17 Regan, E. et al. Global Threats from Invasive Alien Species in the Twenty-First Century
and National Response Capacities. Nature Communications 7 (2016), Article number
12485. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms12485.
18 Smith, C., & Watson, J. STEM: Silver Bullet for a Viable Future or Just More Flatland?
Journal of Futures Studies 22(4) (2018), 25–44.
19 Morton, T. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
20 Stein, Z. Education in the Anthropocene: Re-imagining Schools in the Midst of Planetary
Transformation, 2016. www.zakstein.org/education-in-the-anthropocene-re-imagining-
schools-in-the-midst-of-planetary-transformation/.
21 Eckersley, R. M. Is the West Really the Best? Modernisation and the Psychosocial Dynamics
of Human Progress and Development. Oxford: Oxford Development Studies, 2016.
22 Eckersley, R. The Challenge of Post-Materialism. Australian Financial Review March
2005, 24–28; Krabbe, R. Fostering Social Norms for Sustainability: A Comparison of
Two Socioeconomic Initiatives. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Tasmania, 2016.
23 Asafu-Adjaye, J. et al. An Ecomodernist Manifesto. Oaklands, CA: Breakthrough
Institute, 2015. www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto-english/.
24 Hamilton, C. The Technofix is in: A Critique of “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” [Latest
news] Earth Island Journal April 21, 2015. http://clivehamilton.com/the-technofix-is-in-
a-critique-of-an-ecomodernist-manifesto/.
25 Holmgren, D. RetroSuburbia: The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future. Hepburn,
Aus.: Melliodora, 2018; Krabbe, Fostering Social Norms; Trainer, T. Sustainability –
The Simpler Way Perspective, 2016. www.resilience.org/wp-content/uploads/articles/
General/2016/07_July/Sustainability%20The%20Simpler%20Way%20Perspective.pdf.
26 Roszak, T. et al. Ecopsychology. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995.
27 Berry, The Dream of the Earth.
28 Malafouris, L. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013.
28
29 Morton, Hyperobjects.
30 See, for example, Diamond, J. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
New York: Viking Press, 2005.
31 Swanson, J. I– It vs. I– Thou relationships, 2008. www.ecopsychology.org/journal/
gatherings7/Treesjnhf.htm.
32 Broomfield, J. Other Ways of Knowing. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1997.
33 Quoted in Swanson, I–It vs. I–Thou.
34 Berry, The Dream of the Earth.
35 Ibid.
36 Zimmerman, M. E. Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
37 Sheldrake, R. The Rebirth of Nature. London: Rider, 1990.
38 Smith, C. Reconnecting with Earth: Ecospirituality as the Missing Dimension in Spir-
ituality and Sustainability Education. In M. de Souza et al. (Eds.), International
Handbook of Education for Spirituality, Care and Wellbeing. 2 volumes. Dordrecht,
The Netherlands: Springer Academic Publishers, 2010; Smith & Watson, STEM and
Education for Sustainability.
39 Gore, A. An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What
We Can Do about It. New York: Rodale Books, 2016.
40 Wilber, K. A brief history of everything. Boston & London: Shambhala, 1996.
41 O’Sullivan, E. Transformative Learning: Educational Vision for the 21st Century.
London: Zed Books, 2001.
42 Toulmin, S. The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
44 Slaughter, R. Mapping the Infinite. Futures 28(8) (1996), 793–797.
45 Long, P. Re-awakening our connectedness: An Earth-based Spirituality for Young People.
Miami, FL: St. Thomas University, 1997.
46 White, L. Jr. “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Science 155 (1967), 1203–1207.
47 See, for example, Minteer, B. A., & Manning, R. E. An Appraisal of the Critique of
Anthropocentrism and Three Lesser Known Themes in Lynn White’s “The Historical
Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” Organization & Environment 8(2) (2005), 163–176.
48 See, for example, Sirico, R. A. The New Spirituality. Acton Institute, 1997. https://acton.
org/node/6426.
49 Long, Re-awakening Our Connectedness.
50 O’Murchu, D. Quantum Theology. New York: Crossroad Publications, 1997.
51 Earthsong Project. www.earthsong.org.
52 Edwards, D. The God of Evolution. New York: Paulist Press, 1999.
53 Tucker, M. E. Worldly Wonder. Religions Enter an Ecological phase. E: The Environmental
Magazine, November/December 2002, 12–14.
54 McGillis, M. Genesis Farm Vision, 2008. www.genesisfarm.org/.
55 Yale Forums on Religion and Ecology. http://fore.yale.edu/.
56 John Paul II. World Day of Peace Message. The Ecological Crisis: A Common Responsi-
bility, 2002. http://conservation.catholic.org/background.htm.
57 Benedict XVI. Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, 2007. www.
vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/peace/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_
20061208_xl-world-day-peace_en.html (italics in original).
58 Francis. Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of The Holy Father Francis on Care for Our
Common Home, 2015. http://w2.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/encyclicals/
documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si_en.pdf.
59 Swimme, B., & Berry, T. The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth
to the Ecozoic Era – A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos. San Francisco:
HarperOne, 1992.
29
60 Berry, T. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York: Bell Tower, 1999.
61 Berry, T. Evening Thoughts: Reflection on the Earth as Sacred Community. M. E. Tucker
(Ed.). Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2015.
62 Smith, Reconnecting with Earth.
64 Swimme & Berry, The Universe Story.
65 Swimme, B. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. New York: Orbis Books, 1999.
66 Dawkins, R. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press, 2006.
67 Berry, T. Moments of grace. Yes Magazine, March 2000. www.yesmagazine.org/issues/
new-stories/moments-of-grace.
68 Tucker, Worldly Wonder.
69 Berry, The Great Work.
70 Smith, Reconnecting with Earth.
71 Berry, Moments of Grace.
72 Capra, F. The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter. London: HarperCollins,
1996; Capra, F. How Nature Sustains the Web of Life. In M. Stone & Z. Barlow (Eds.),
Ecological literacy. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005.
73 Goodenough, U. The Sacred Depths of Nature. Oxford & New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998.
74 Swimme, Hidden Heart of the Cosmos.
75 Berry, T. Thomas Berry on the natural world as our sacred community, July 26, 2015.
https://wordsforabetterworld.com/2015/07/26/thomas-berry-on-the-natural-world-as-
our-sacred-community/.
Bibliography
Abram, D. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human
World. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.
Asafu-Adjaye, J., Blomqvist, S., Brand, S., Brook, B., Defries, R., Ellis, E., Foreman, C.,
Keith, D., Lewis, M., Lynas, M., Nordhaus, T., Pielke, R. Jnr., Pritzker, R., Roy, J., Sagoff,
M., Shellenberger, M., Stone, R., & Teague, P. An Ecomodernist Manifesto. Oaklands,
CA: Breakthrough Institute, 2015. www.ecomodernism.org/manifesto-english/.
Bauman, Z. Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.
Bauman, Z. Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality. New York: Wiley, 1995.
Benedict XVI. Message for the Celebration of the World Day of Peace, 2007. www.vatican.
va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/peace/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20061208_xl-
world-day-peace_en.html.
Berry, T. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1990.
Berry, T. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future. New York: Bell Tower, 1999.
Berry, T. Moments of Grace. Yes Magazine, March 2000. www.yesmagazine.org/issues/new-
stories/moments-of-grace.
Berry. T. Evening thoughts: Reflection on the Earth as Sacred Community. M. E. Tucker (Ed.).
Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2015.
Broomfield, J. Other Ways of Knowing. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 1997.
Capra, F. The Web of Life: A New Synthesis of Mind and Matter. London: HarperCollins, 1996.
Capra, F. How Nature Sustains the Web of Life. In M. Stone & Z. Barlow (Eds.), Ecological
literacy. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2005.
Dawkins, R. The God Delusion. London: Bantam Press, 2006.
Diamond, J. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking Press, 2005.
Earthsong Project. www.earthsong.org.
30
Eckersley, R. The Challenge of Post-Materialism. Australian Financial Review March

2005,  24–28.
Eckersley, R. M. Is the West Really the Best? Modernisation and the Psychosocial Dynamics
of Human Progress and Development. Oxford: Oxford Development Studies, 2016.
Edwards, D. The God of Evolution. New York: Paulist Press, 1999.
Forest Schools. http://forestschools.com/course-material/forest-schools-general/.
Francis. Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of The Holy Father Francis on Care for Our Common
Home, 2015. http://w2.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/encyclicals/documents/papa-
francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si_en.pdf.
Galloway, J. N., & Schlesinger, W. H. Biogeochemical Cycles. Washington, DC: National
Climate Assessment. US Global Change Research Program, 2014. https://nca2014.
globalchange.gov/report/sectors/biogeochemical-cycles.
Glikson, A. The Atmosphere and Mass Extinctions Through Time. Paper delivered at the
Conference Imagining the Real: Life on a Greenhouse Earth. Canberra: Manning Clark
House, Australian National University, June 2008.
Goodenough, U. The Sacred Depths of Nature. Oxford & New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998.
Gore, A. An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We
Can Do about It. New York: Rodale Books, 2006.
Hamilton, C. The Technofix is in: A Critique of “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.” [Latest news]
Earth Island Journal, April 21, 2015. http://clivehamilton.com/the-technofix-is-in-a-
critique-of-an-ecomodernist-manifesto/.
Holmgren, D. RetroSuburbia: The Downshifter’s Guide to a Resilient Future. Hepburn,
Aus.: Melliodora, 2018.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Climate Change 2014: Synthesis
Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [Core Writing Team, R. K. Pachauri and L. A.
Meyer (Eds.)]. Geneva: Author, 2014. www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr.
John Paul II. General Audience, January 17, 2001. www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/
audiences/2001/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_20010117_en.html.
John Paul II. World Day of Peace Message. The Ecological Crisis: a Common Responsibility,
2002. http://conservation.catholic.org/background.htm.
Krabbe, R. Fostering Social Norms for Sustainability: A Comparison of Two Socioeconomic
Initiatives. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Tasmania, 2016.
Long, P. Re-awakening Our Connectedness: An Earth-based Spirituality for Young People.
Miami, FL: St. Thomas University, 1997.
Malafouris, L. How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2013.
Mandel, E. Late Capitalism. London: Humanities Press, 1975.
McDonagh, S. The Death of Life: The Horror of Extinction. Dublin: Columba Press, 2004.
McGillis, M. Genesis Farm vision, 2008. www.genesisfarm.org/.
McKibben, B. Eaarth. Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. New York: Times Books/Henry
Holt & Company, 2010.
Minteer, B. A., & Manning, R. E. An Appraisal of the Critique of Anthropocentrism and Three
Lesser Known Themes in Lynn White’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis”.
Organization & Environment 8(2) (2005), 163–176.
Monbiot, G. Out of the Wreckage – A New Politics for an Age of Crisis. Gaia Foundation,
2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE63Y7srr_Y.
31
Morton, T. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.
Nearing, M. A., Yun, X., Baoyuan, L., & Yu, Y. Natural and Anthropogenic Rates of Soil
Erosion. International Soil and Water Conservation Research 5(2) (2017), 77–84.
O’Murchu, D. Quantum Theology. New York: Crossroad Publications, 1997.
O’Sullivan, E. (2001). Transformative Learning: Educational Vision for the 21st Century.
London: Zed Books, 2001.
Regan, E., Bradley, B. A., Dukes, J. S., Lawler, J. J., Olden, J. D., Blumenthal, D.M ., Gonzalez,
P., Grosholz, E. D., Ibañez, I., Miller, L. P., Sorte, C. J. B., & Tatem, A. J. Global Threats
from Invasive Alien Species in the Twenty-First Century and National Response Capaci-
ties. Nature Communications 7 (2016), Article number 12485. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/
ncomms12485.
Roszak, T., Gomes, M. E., & Kanner, A. D. Ecopsychology. San Francisco: Sierra Club
Books, 1995.
Sheldrake, R. The Rebirth of Nature. London: Rider, 1990.
Sirico, R. A. The New Spirituality. Acton Institute, 1997. https://acton.org/node/6426.
Slaughter, R. Mapping the infinite. Futures 28(8) (1996), 793–797.
Smith, C. Education and Society: The Case for Ecoliteracy. Education and Society 25(1)
(2007),  25–37.
Smith, C. Education for Sustainability and the Role of Future-Focused Pedagogy. In J. Zajda
(Ed.), Globalisation and Comparative Education in Schooling for the Future: Comparative
Education Policy for the 21st Century. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Academic
Publishers, 2009.
Smith, C. Reconnecting with Earth: Ecospirituality as the Missing Dimension in Spiritu-
ality and Sustainability Education. In M. de Souza, L. Francis, J. O’Higgins-Norman, &
D. Scott (Eds.), International Handbook of Education for Spirituality, Care and Wellbeing.
2 volumes. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Academic Publishers, 2010.
Smith, C., & Watson, J. (2016). STEM and Education for Sustainability (EfS): Finding
Common Ground for a Flourishing Future. In M. Baguley (Ed.), Proceedings of the Annual
Conference of the Australian Association for Educational Research. Melbourne: AARE,
2016. www.aare.edu.au/data/2016.
Smith, C., & Watson, J. STEM: Silver Bullet for a Viable Future or Just More Flatland?
Journal of Futures Studies 22(4) (2018), 25–44.
Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O., & Ludwig, C. The Trajectory of the
Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. Anthropocene Review 2(1) (2015), 81– 98.
DOI: 10.1177/2053019614564785.
Stein, Z. Education in the Anthropocene: Re-imagining Schools in the Midst of Planetary
Transformation, 2016. www.zakstein.org/education-in-the-anthropocene-re-imagining-
schools-in-the-midst-of-planetary-transformation/.
Swanson, J. I–It vs. I–Thou Relationships, 2008. www.ecopsychology.org/journal/gatherings7/
Treesjnhf.htm.
Swimme, B. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. New York: Orbis Books, 1999.
Swimme, B. & Berry, T. The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth
to the Ecozoic Era – A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos. San Francisco:
HarperOne, 1992.
Toulmin, S. The Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Theology of Nature.
Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 1985.
Trainer, T. Towards a Sustainable Economy. Sydney: Envirobook, 1996.
32
Trainer, T. Sustainability –The Simpler Way Perspective, 2016. www.resilience.org/wp-

content/uploads/articles/General/2016/07_July/Sustainability%20The%20Simpler%20
Way%20Perspective.pdf.
Tucker, M. E. Worldly Wonder. Religions Enter an Ecological Phase. E: The Environmental
Magazine, November/December 2002, 12–14.
Turney, C. S., Palmer, J., Maslin, M., Hogg, A., Fogwill, C. J., Southon, J., Fenwick, P.,
Helle, G., Wilmshurst, J. M., McGlone, M., Bronk Ramsey, C., Thomas, Z., Lipson, M.,
Beaven, B., Jones, R. T., Andrews, O., & Hua, Q. Global Peak in Atmospheric Radio-
carbon Provides a Potential Definition for the Onset of the Anthropocene Epoch in 1965.
Scientific Reports 8 (2018). DOI:10.1038/s41598-018-20970-5.
White, L. Jr. The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis. Science 155 (1967), 1203–1207.
Wilber, K. A Brief History of Everything. Boston & London: Shambhala, 1996.
Yale Forums on Religion and Ecology. http://fore.yale.edu/.
Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Steffen, W., & Crutzen, P. The New World of the Anthropocene.
Environmental Science and Technology 44(7) (2010), 2228–2231.
Zimmerman, M. E. Contesting Earth’s Future: Radical Ecology and Postmodernity. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994.
33
Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place:

A Prolegomenon to an Akimel O’odham
Environmental Ethics
David Martínez
There is very little that can be regarded as the intersection between Western
philosophy and non-Western Indigenous traditions beyond the references to a
mythologized primitive people in the works of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.
By turns, in the Leviathan (1651), the Second Treatise on Government (1689),
and The Social Contract (1762), each work evoked a “state of nature” that
was less about portraying Indigenous peoples accurately and more about cre-
ating a philosophical fiction. Consequently, Hobbes saw in tribal people a
propensity for savagery; Locke saw the origin of property; and Rousseau
saw an Edenic form of natural equality.1 None of these philosophers ever
traveled to the Americas, let alone learned anything from any Indigenous per-
sons. Thus, the spurious references to tribal people –in spite of recognizing
there were nations very different from the Christian European civilizations
that otherwise dominated their discourses –was for the purpose of arguing
on behalf of a particular type of political organization, be it an ecclesiastical
commonwealth, a democratic republic, or a social contract. Indeed, no matter
the philosophical objective, the state of nature and the people who inhabited
it must ultimately give way to a higher form of thinking. The implication for
the discourse on, say, American Indians is that what one sees in the Western
philosophical tradition is the intellectual premises on which the notion of the
“vanishing Indian” will arise, which also signified a radically different atti-
tude toward the environment. This essay is about the philosophical values
34
expressed in the Origin Story of one of these Indigenous peoples, the Akimel
O’odham, or Gila River Pima, who claim what is today southern Arizona as
their homeland. More specifically, this essay reflects on the environmental
values derived from the story of the Huhugam civilization –the O’odham’s
ancestors –who built “14 irrigation networks with an estimated aggre-
gate length of 300 miles watered 400 square miles of agricultural land and
settlements,” which sustained a population in the tens of thousands.2 The
collapse of this civilization –which is not dated in the Akimel O’odham
Origin Story, but which is estimated, based on the archeological evidence,
to be c. 1450–1500 –happened abruptly. Thin Leather, or Komalk Hok, was
a ma:kai, or medicine man, who relayed the Akimel O’odham Origin Story
during the early decades of the twentieth century, which has been recorded
for posterity and forms the basis of my discourse on O’odham environmental
values. I should acknowledge, before proceeding, that the simple reason I call
what follows a “prolegomenon” is that the most I can hope to accomplish in
this brief chapter is to introduce some of the key ideas and issues defining
any analysis of O’odham environmental ethics, which ultimately must be
addressed in a more expansive work.
From the Western perspective, because Indians were destined for extinc-
tion –at least as a distinct moment in the history of mankind –their unlet-
tered beliefs, customs, and knowledge about the world has been left to the
work of anthropologists –namely, ethnographers and archeologists –as
opposed to philosophers, who largely valorized their own history and civ-
ilization.3 One need only examine Hegel’s swift disregard for the Americas
in his Philosophy of History (1858), in which the Mesoamerican and Incan
empires are mentioned succinctly before being vastly overshadowed by the
ancient Greeks and Romans.4 Even when a philosophical tradition developed
in America, Indians have been largely absent, both as topics and as thinkers.
Fleeting exceptions were Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1836 letter to President
Martin Van Buren on behalf of Cherokee Nation, which was being unjustly
forced out of its historical homeland by the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and
Henry Thoreau’s 1842 Indian journals, which did little more than conjure a
Longfellow-like image of the Indian’s demise in New England.5 Indeed, the
only meaningful references to Indigenous thought were written by American
Indian authors, such as Dakota writer and activist Charles Alexander Eastman,
who published The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation in 1911.6
Most of the anthropological literature – where the bulk of the nonfiction
work on Indigenous peoples is found –has been driven by an interest in how
the so-called primitive mind thinks differently from its Western counterpart.
In fact, ever since Sigmund Freud equated “savages” and “neurotics” in Totem
and Taboo (1913), anthropologists have been fixated on the “deviant” thinking
35
Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 35
of tribal people.7 However, like much of what Freud wrote, he was criticized
as much as he was influential. In the case of Totem and Taboo, Freud’s trea-
tise on the primitive mind appeared at a time when anthropology was taking
a turn toward cultural relativism, consequently moving away from the evolu-
tionary ladder articulated by Lewis Henry Morgan in Ancient Society (1877)
for the more nuanced theories initiated in the work of Franz Boas, most import-
antly The Mind of Primitive Man (1911) and the Handbook of American Indian
Languages (1911). Furthermore, cultural relativism by and large rejected
the scientific racism of its predecessors, which postulated a hierarchy of
civilizations based on race, and instead asserted the phenomenon of culture
as something that arose organically as a product of a given people adapting
to a given place or, more specifically, a given environment. In which case,
Indigenous peoples, as members of the human species, were just as intellec-
tually sophisticated as their Western counterparts, each having conditioned
themselves to fit the locations and conditions in which they dwelled. It is within
this historical context, then, that the Akimel O’odham, or the Pima (as they are
called in the historical record), entered the Western intellectual tradition.
More specifically, the Akimel O’odham’s, or Pima’s, first extended
appearance was in Harvard anthropologist Frank Russell’s 1904–1905 report
for the Bureau of American Ethnology, which was published in book form
in 1908 as The Pima Indians. Russell’s work was a standard field report for
his generation of anthropologists, which consisted of making an inventory
of cultural traits, divided into major categories, namely Technology, Esthetic
Arts, and Sophiology. In turn, the major categories were further divided into
an array of subcategories. For example, in the case of Sophiology, which is
where the “Creation Myth” is located, Russell also inserted sections on medi-
cine men, types of disease, and a host of songs about various animals. In 1911,
J. G. Frazer, of Golden Bough fame, cited Russell’s report at length in his
book Taboo and the Perils of the Soul. Of particular interest to Frazer was the
ritual purification of a Pima warrior after slaying an enemy in combat. Then,
in 1913, Freud quoted Frazer on this topic, along with Taboo’s references to
other comparable tribal traditions, in Totem and Taboo, thus initiating the dis-
course on the “primitive mind” that has appeared recurrently in the anthropo-
logical literature.8
With respect to the philosophical project of engaging the world through
an analysis of language and ideas for the purpose of understanding the
nature of the array of beings perceived by the senses, intellect, or intuition –
be it eidetic, phenomenal, or pragmatic – insofar as the reflective mind is
conditioned by the social environment in which it developed, it does make a
difference if the resulting discourses are limited to a particular social insti-
tution –such as the Western philosophical community –to the exclusion of
36
others, such as the Indigenous communities of North America. In the case

of Indigenous peoples’ philosophical traditions, because they are nonliterate
cultures, their respective concepts of the world around them are expressed
through narrative and ritual teachings, such as Origin (or Creation) Stories
and oral histories. Such autochthonous expressions not only include legends
and folklore, but also prayers and songs, all of which commonly form the
basis of a given people’s ceremonial customs. The latter is the case with the
Akimel O’odham, as documented in Russell’s The Pima Indians, in add-
ition to a range of ethnographic treatises, such as work by Ruth M. Underhill
and Donald M. Bahr.9 As such, this raises a question about philosophical
expression, specifically, must philosophy be written by an individual thinker
in a discourse that is aware of itself as “doing philosophy” in order for that
expression to be accepted as philosophical? While an adequate answer to
this question is beyond the scope of this essay, it is nonetheless important to
introduce this issue. For one cannot appreciate the Indigenous philosophical
tradition unless one is able to dispense with the ethnocentric assumption that
philosophy must be the singularly written product of the Western abstract
intellect. Only then will a space open up for non-written expressions, which
are the creation of collective wisdom and experience. Moreover, one does not
need to even privilege the Western philosophical tradition in the first place in
order for Indigenous philosophy to be philosophy.
At its most simplistic, philosophy, as a discrete form of thinking, signifies
the communication of wisdom from teacher to student, as exemplified by
Plato’s accounts of the Socratic dialogs or Aristotle’s peripatetic lectures, in
which topics like justice, metaphysics, and the good were discussed. In this
respect, Indigenous oral traditions are also teachings, which are handed down
from elders to youth, and which teach one how the world was formed, how the
first people were made, and, among other things, how to sustain a balanced
relationship between a people and their homeland. However, insofar as phil-
osophizing entails a certain level of critical thinking, meaning doubt or skep-
ticism, Western philosophers and Indigenous thinkers begin to part ways.
More specifically, whereas the radical break with tradition that Socrates
initiated –in which his questions cast doubt on the political and religious
orthodoxy of his times –would lead to Descartes’ skepticism and Nietzsche’s
atheism –not to mention the existential crisis of modern European man –in
the case of American Indians, they were more focused on maintaining their
world in balance, as did their ancestors. They did not doubt the wisdom of
their oral traditions, they respected it.10 The latter included their knowledge
about the natural world in which they lived intimately.
With reference to the Akimel O’odham, their respect for the desert land-
scape in which they sustained their lives is more than a belief that the land
37
is inhabited by spirits whose names are invoked in their oral tradition and
ceremonial customs, it is a body of knowledge about the land derived from
countless generations of intimate interaction. In the case of Russell’s BAE
report, cited above, in the part covering Technology, there are subsections
on “Plants used for food,” “Medicinal plants,” and “Animals used for
food.” More recently, Gary Paul Nabhan has published books and articles
on O’odham plant knowledge, such as Gathering the Desert (1986) and
Enduring Seeds: Native American Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation
(2002). With respect to O’odham biological knowledge, Amadeo Rea has
compiled this into three very interesting volumes: At the Desert’s Green
Edge (1997), Folk Mammalogy of the Northern Pimans (1998), and Wings in
the Desert (2007). What Nabhan’s and Rea’s research demonstrates, in par-
ticular, is that the O’odham, similar to other Indigenous peoples, possessed
copious knowledge of their environment, the depth of which is comparable
to –and sometimes exceeds –the Western scientific tradition.
With the above in mind, my objective as a scholar of the American Indian
intellectual tradition, who is also educated in Western philosophy, not to
mention a member of an Indigenous nation, the Akimel O’odham, is to inter-
vene into the discourse on environmental ethics –which is dominated by
non-Indigenous thinkers, some of whom, such as Rachel Carson and Aldo
Leopold, are of great historical importance –and assert an Indigenous agenda
for reflection and analysis. While I readily acknowledge that I am far from
the first to do this, the fact remains that because there are so few Indigenous
thinkers present in the philosophical community, such work is still neces-
sary. Furthermore, although environmental ethics is still a minor subfield of
Western philosophical ethics, the topic of the environment, or the land, has
always been of major importance to Indigenous communities. What one can
learn, then, from Indigenous values with respect to the environment is how
to critique the environmental impact wrought by industrialization –of which
climate change is critical –from a local, which is to say tribal, perspective.
Indeed, it is only from the tribal perspective that one can begin to see the
challenges confronting tribal communities as their relationship with their
homelands is disrupted by the upheaval of colonization –not just in the his-
toric past, but also as part of their current affairs. For example, the Gila River
Indian Community, which is the modern name of the Akimel O’odham reser-
vation –the other is the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community –has
long battled local, state, and federal authorities over environmental justice
issues pertaining to freeway expansions, urban development, and water rights.
All of which is the consequence of illegal land and resource loss due to the
encroachment of settlers onto O’odham lands, which the American govern-
ment pursued under the pretense of holding title to Arizona –including Indian
38
lands –in light of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.11 In light of this

unfortunate history, I would argue that colonization is not just an Indigenous
peoples’ issue, it is also an issue for all of humanity. More to the point, the
same land that settler-colonial nations like the United States has seized from
Indigenous nations and exploited for national aggrandizement is the same
industrially assaulted land that must somehow sustain the non-Indigenous
populations now occupying these lands. For Indigenous nations, then, such
as the Akimel O’odham, the environmental crisis that Lynn Townsend White
Jr. alerted his readers to in “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis”
(1967), has long been a state of crisis for the people who depended on the
riverine environment along the Akimel (Gila River) and Onk Akimel (Salt
River) for the sustenance of their villages.12
Although changes to the Akimel O’odham environment began with the
introduction of Spanish trade goods, namely wheat and cattle, during the
eighteenth century, it would not be until after the Americans took political
control of the New Mexico Territory after its war with Mexico (1846–1848)
that substantial and devastating changes occurred. First, in 1859, the Gila
River Indian Community –the reservation –was established through presi-
dential executive order, the boundaries of which would be curtailed under
pressure from settlers in 1879.13 In the interim, specifically in 1868, the Gila
River –the life blood of the community –was dammed upriver at Adamsville,
instigating a water crisis that would endure until the turn of the current cen-
tury.14 Arizona, moreover, which entered the union on February 14, 1912,
steadily depleted its water table as its population grew and its agribusi-
ness expanded, thereby putting the state in competition with California and
Nevada over the Colorado River.15 Throughout it all, the Akimel O’odham
on the reservation barely eked out a living.16 Consequently, it is within this
historical context that one must understand the Akimel O’odham values
regarding their environment, which, on the one hand, are reaffirmed in their
oral tradition and their ceremonial customs; while, on the other hand, they
have been impacted by the political, economic, and even religious forces of
the American settler-colonial state.
At this juncture, I ought to acknowledge that the foregoing discourse on
the Akimel O’odham is more of a political critique of Indian–white relations
than it is a philosophical discourse on the O’odham worldview, or what
is more accurately called the O’odham Himthag, which is defined below.
While it is conceivable to present O’odham concepts of the origin of the
universe, as derived from their Origin Story, complete with explaining how
these concepts inform O’odham ideas about world-renewal, as expressed,
for example, in the Wi:gida or Rain Ceremony, and the responsibility that
the O’odham have for fulfilling these metaphysical obligations, it would
39
nonetheless be inconceivable –at least from an O’odham perspective –to

talk about these traditions without honoring what generations of O’odham
have endured in order to preserve these values, ideas, and customs in the
modern non-Indigenous world. For everything in the tribal world is based
on kinship and respect, including the people’s kinship with the earth, replete
with the animals and spirits that inhabit it, all of which, for the O’odham,
dwells within the phenomenal world of the living desert.
As indicated, the O’odham Himthag has undergone waves of colonization,
which they have resisted, adapted to, and (sometimes) been overwhelmed by.
In light of which, the literature that informs the discourse on the O’odham
Himthag as a form of environmental ethics is a product of historical forces,
many of which are beyond the O’odham’s control. At the same time, this is
not to say that only a bastardized version of the O’odham Himthag endures
in the present era, but rather that it bears the scars of its endurance from
its timeless origins to modern times. As such, the knowledge that various
O’odham have shared with the anthropologists and other researchers who
sought to learn about the people and culture indigenous to what is today
the Phoenix Valley, located in southern Arizona, which rests at the northern
boundary of the Sonoran Desert, exhibits a conscientious choice, on the
part of the contributors, to retain this knowledge as part of their community,
including the O’odham language in which it is remembered.
Thin Leather, noted above, was one of the earliest teachers of the O’odham
Himthag preserved in the historical record.17 Moreover, Thin Leather’s most
substantial contribution was to Russell’s BAE report, where he recounted
the Akimel O’odham Creation Story –a more expansive version of which
he shared a few years later with J. William Lloyd. In both instances, Jewed
Ma:kai (Earth Medicine Man), Bán (Coyote), and I’itoi (Elder Brother)
created the desert world where the first people would live and eventually build
their adobe villages, farm their fields, and install an impressive canal system,
which harnessed the Akimel and Onk Akimel, the two rivers that nourished
their valley home.18 Ultimately, the Creation Story is about the rise and fall
of that ancient civilization and the way –meaning the Himthag –in which
their descendants resettled their homeland. As such, the Huhugam –the name
which the O’odham call their ancestors –are to the Akimel O’odham what
ancient Greece and Rome are to their European descendants.
Because the Akimel O’odham, similar to other Indigenous peoples,
do not have a scientific tradition – at least, not in the sense recognized by
Western intellectuals as science –their Origin Story has been relegated to
fable, folklore, and fantasy, which is to say it is regarded as a cultural relic
of a premodern, prescientific civilization. In which case, the O’odham Flood
Story is no more historically accurate than the one found in Gilgamesh, and
40
the ceremonies based on that “myth” are no more effective than relying on
a rabbit’s foot for luck.19 At which point, one might raise the age-old debate
between faith and reason, in which rational thought, as defined by Western
intellectuals, is based on the principles of Aristotelian logic, thereby pre-
cluding one from referring to anything that defies the rules of that logic,
one of the most important of which was the rule of the excluded middle. Of
course, Aristotle and the logical tradition he initiated in the Organon and the
Metaphysics were the products of their time and place, namely fourth-century
BC Macedonia. In respect to which, what Aristotle sought to achieve, beyond
articulating the rules for a correct syllogism, was a form of argument that was
axiomatic and far less rhetorical than what characterized the thinking of the
Sophists, which appealed more to the emotions and the senses. Such formu-
laic reasoning and analysis interestingly became the basis of both the medi-
eval arguments for the existence of God and the scientific thinking initiated
during the Renaissance by Descartes in his Discourse on Method (1637) and
Galileo Galilei’s Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to
Two New Sciences (1638). Indeed, the first rule of thought stipulated in the
Cartesian tradition is that the aim “should be to direct the mind with a view
to forming true and sound judgements about whatever comes before it.”20
Thus inaugurating a tradition of skepticism with regard to Christian religious
orthodoxy, in which Galileo stands a hero of free thinking. However, whereas
Galileo’s scientific challenge to Church teachings over the nature of the uni-
verse is celebrated as a profound act of resistance to religious dogma and
oppression, the same is not true when the scientific attitude, if you will, is
applied against Indigenous customs and values. In the latter case, the derision
of Indigenous knowledge traditions as “primitive” has instead been a part of
the colonization and oppression of Indigenous peoples.
With respect, then, to what the above references to Aristotle, Descartes,
and Galileo mean to the discourse on the Akimel O’odham Origin Story, it
is not to say that what Thin Leather recounts is based on invalid or illogical
premises, but instead that Western thinkers were pursuing a particular type
of knowledge, for which they developed an effective practice that became
known as “the scientific method.” In the case of the O’odham Origin Story, it
too is a way of seeking knowledge. However, rather than reducing the object
of inquiry down to its component parts, complete with analyzing their nature
and function, which is done typically, not just to satisfy one’s understanding,
but also to in some manner control the object in question, an Origin Story
takes a holistic and noninvasive approach to understanding the created
world. More to the point, in the narrative that Thin Leather shared with Frank
Russell, before the first people are made “Earth Medicine Man” or “Earth
Doctor” (as Russell translates the O’odham name Jewed Ma:kai) must, true
41
to his name, first make the earth, which he does by rubbing his chest with his
fingers, then forming the “dust” into a flattened “cake.”21 More specifically,
in the version of this story that Thin Leather shared with J. William Lloyd,
what the “Doctor of the Earth” rubbed off his chest was “moah-haht-tack,”
which is “perspiration, or greasy earth.”22 Once that foundation was made,
Earth Medicine Man could plant the creosote or greasewood bush (shegoi)
he had made, which, as a desert plant, indicated the landscape that was taking
shape.23 From there, insects were made, namely “some black insects,” “the
termite,” and “a gray spider.” Together, they helped Earth Medicine Man
make the “water, mountains, trees, grass, and weeds,” above which, covering
it all, was the sky, “shaped like the round house [ki] of the Pima.” However,
it would not be until after the sun and the moon, along with the stars, were
made “when the earth was thus prepared for habitation.” At which point,
Earth Medicine Man made, as Thin Leather recounted in what sounds like
biblically influenced language, “all manner of birds and creeping things.”24
Before continuing with the creation of the first humans, it is important to
observe that what Thin Leather’s story teaches is that before there can be life,
be it plant, insect or animal, there has to be a place, an environment, in which
it can thrive. In the case of the first humans, because they must learn how to
live in balance with their environment –unlike their nonhuman relatives –
their adaptation to the environment is characterized by profound moments of
learning and equally epic episodes of calamity. In this sense, humans bear the
traits of their Creator, who, in the Akimel O’odham oral tradition, tried and
failed at creating the sun and the moon, in which each was placed in what
turned out to be the wrong directions, until the right one, the east, was tried,
thereby generating the days and nights that persist to today.25 Similarly with
humans, Earth Medicine Man will go through trial and error. In the case,
then, of the first people Earth Medicine Man made out of clay, which he
gathered from the Akimel, or Gila River, they multiplied until they overran
the land, leaving themselves with a scarcity of food and water. Tragically,
“they began to kill one another and to eat human flesh.” Out of pity for their
distress, Earth Medicine Man determined that he had to “destroy all.” So,
he grabbed the sky with his staff and pulled it down, “crushing to death the
people and all other living beings.” Because of the destruction, everything
that was created before had to be created anew, including the people, whom
Thin Leather identified as “Rsâsanatc,” or “S*os*anac/j,” which is a noun
that may be translated as either “the beginning of something” or “the base of
something.” For the sake of clarity, the S*os*anac/j may be regarded as the
true First People, if you will, who, more specifically, will learn the O’odham
Himthag.26 Nonetheless, the S*os*anac/j will be the people whom their
descendants, the Akimel O’odham, will refer to as Huhugam (or Hohokam,
42
as the name is spelled in Russell’s report and in the subsequent archeo-

logical research). In fact, Thin Leather refers to where these ancient people
lived as “the Pima nation,” unequivocally implying a kinship between the
generations.27 At the same time, the S*os*anac/j, according to the story, are
fated to be destroyed by “Itany,” or “I’itoi,” Elder Brother, who is later called
“Siuuhû,” “S-e’ehe.”28
Unlike the people that Earth Medicine Man made, Elder Brother sprung
from the earth, appearing not long after Coyote, who came from the Moon as
it was setting behind “the toahafs bush,” or tohavs, the White Brittlebush.29
With respect to Elder Brother, his power challenged that of Earth Medicine
Man. In fact, as the S*os*anac/j increased their numbers, Elder Brother
shortened their lifespan, so that they would not overrun the earth as before. As
for the S*os*anac/j’s destruction, “Elder Brother created a handsome youth,
whom he directed to go among the Pimas, where he should wed whomsoever
he wished.” As the youth proceeded with his philandering, the girls he wed
gave birth to children, each one taking fewer months than the previous to
appear, until one was born from the youth himself at the “time of marriage.”30
This child, more specifically, would bring about the flood that will destroy the
S*os*anac/j homeland. In preparation for this calamity, Elder Brother slowly
fashioned a large olla, a pot, out of “either bush or gum.” All the while, the
people grew restless and alarmed by Elder Brother’s power, in addition to the
distress and resentment instigated by the youth’s behavior. In response, “South
Doctor,” Vakolo Ma:kai, determined to bring Elder Brother’s design against
the people to an end. More specifically, he instructed his daughter to accept the
youth when he came to wed her like the others. The daughter was reluctant, but
her father explained that she needed to do this so that “a divine plan might be
accomplished.” As foretold, the youth came to wed South Doctor’s daughter.
Before too long, South Doctor and his wife were suddenly stirred by the cries
of an infant. Assuming that their daughter had given birth, they rushed to see
their grandchild. However, what they encountered was their daughter telling
them she was “not the mother,” but rather they should give the child to the
father, for it came from him, not from her. So, away with his child the youth
went, returning to Elder Brother, who was just finishing his olla. Because he
felt ashamed of himself, though, the youth abandoned his child on the path to
see Elder Brother. Nonetheless, Elder Brother knew what had happened and
so asked the youth about his child, saying that they had been outwitted and
that their plan had been foiled. Nonetheless, the child’s cries “shook the earth,”
which compelled Earth Medicine Man to assemble the people and warn them
that a great flood was approaching. Earth Medicine Man then took his staff
and struck the ground, which opened a tunnel to the other side of the earth.
Only some of the people, though, followed Earth Medicine Man to safety.31
43
As for what this narrative teaches about the S*os*anac/j’s relationship

with the homeland that Earth Medicine Man created for them, it should
be acknowledged straightaway that the people in each of the above worlds
were victims of forces beyond their control. In the first world, the people
did not know disease or death, consequently, they multiplied to the point of
exhausting their food and water, thus becoming cannibals due to a state of
desperation. In the second world, it was Elder Brother who deliberately sent
his creation, “the youth,” among the people to sow distress by corrupting
the birth process. In each case, the world was destroyed because natural
forces knocked the world out of balance, causing its destruction. In the first
instance, overpopulation due to a lack of natural controls, namely illness and
death, was inevitably unsustainable. In the second instance, a mutation in the
reproductive cycle led to the freakish result of the youth birthing a child from
himself, eliminating the role of the woman. One can of course take these
interpretations further, in addition to finding other meanings to the stories
than what is being proposed here. Nonetheless, what is being emphasized is
the importance of understanding the value of balance as a fundamental prin-
ciple of existence. As for the people, the S*os*anac/j, their fate is to learn
about the Himthag. In fact, when Earth Medicine Man opened up a tunnel
into which the people could seek safety, he sang a lament as they left their
old world behind:
Weep, my unfortunate people!

All this you will see take place.
Weep, my unfortunate people!
For the waters will overwhelm the land.
Weep, my unhappy relatives!
You will learn all.
Weep, my unfortunate relatives!
You will learn all.
The waters will overwhelm the mountains.32 [My emphasis]
Indeed, one of the purposes of recounting the Origin Story is to remind

the descendants of these First People what their ancestors went through in
order to earn their Himthag and live in balance with the earth, the Jewed, that
Earth Medicine Man (Jewed Ma:kai) made for them. Furthermore, because
the Origin Story is about the environment in which the people live today,
there are reminders in the landmarks, animals, and other natural phenomena
of what happened here. For example, among the birds that survived the flood
was the “Vipisimal,” the hummingbird. According to Thin Leather, “If anyone
harms the little Vipisimal to this day the flood may come again. Accidental
injuries to the bird must be atoned for; if it be killed, its tail feathers must be
kept for a time to avert disaster; if it is found lying dead, it must be buried and
44
appropriate gifts must be placed upon its grave.”33 From the scientific per-
spective, the O’odham hummingbird tradition is nothing but an ungrounded
superstition, a naïve belief that harming or disrespecting a hummingbird
may literally cause a flood. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, as the logicians say.
However, from the point of view of a people who have to sustain themselves
in their homeland, what would it mean if they became a society in which
deliberately harming hummingbirds was acceptable? The O’odham custom
about the hummingbird is not about a childlike belief in magic, it is about the
very real and delicate balance between people and place, which is a lesson
that becomes all the more important as primal people develop their cultures
into sophisticated civilizations.
In the world that Elder Brother created in the aftermath of the flood, the
people learned how to build canals and harness the power of fire, which led to
the establishment of “vahkihs,” adobe villages along the Gila and Salt rivers.
The canals in particular –which distinguished the Huhugam, Elder Brother’s
creation, from their peers throughout the Southwest and Northern Mexico –
according to Thin Leather, were the product of a powerful medicine woman
who assisted the people living along the Onk Akimel, the Salt River. In the
version for Russell, Thin Leather calls the woman “Toa-koa-atam Âts,” or
“White-eater-old-woman.” In the Lloyd version, which is much longer, she is
called “Taw-quah-dawm-ahks,” or “The Wampum Eater.”34 In both instances,
the names refer to the same woman. What is interesting is the fact that the
story indicates that the O’odham had earlier begun their canal-building trad-
ition. In light of which, although some villages had begun irrigation farming,
not all were successful. Depending on where they lived and grew their crops,
the terrain along the river may be level and the earth comparatively easy to
build on. For the people at what is today “Papago Park,” which straddles the
cities of Scottsdale and Tempe, one can still see what is left of the distinctive
red rock hills. In that area along the Salt River, the Akimel O’odham and Pee
Posh who lived there “tried to build canals, but were not successful, because
of the hard rocks and soil.” Naturally, the people turned to Elder Brother
for help, who did his best to make the land soft enough for them to dig their
canal. He also taught them how to make digging sticks out of ironwood.
Unfortunately, his efforts failed. So, Elder Brother advised the people to see
his “sister, who also had great power.” When White-eater-old-woman offered
her abilities to the people, “she finished all the work in a single night.”35 More
elaborately, in the Aw-aw-tam Nights version, The Wampum Eater brought a
fog with her, which she left at the mouth of the desired canal, adjacent to the
river bank. She then blew a “seev-hur-whirl,” a bitter wind, from the mouth
of the canal up through the rocky hill. As the wind “tore up the bed of the
canal,” the still hovering fog “dammed up the river and the water ran thru the
45
canal.” In this way did the people of this village acquire their canal, thereby
becoming as prosperous as their relatives. After this, The Wampum Eater
went back home without speaking with the people.36 Also, Elder Brother did
nothing further for any of his people. Instead, he once again became a har-
binger of impending doom for the land and its inhabitants. “From that time
on,” as Thin Leather recalls for Russell, Elder Brother, similar to the youth he
set upon the people before the flood, “began to do mischief, such as marrying
the young women and then deserting them for others. The people began to
be jealous of him and planned to destroy him.” Elder Brother’s destruction
would hasten the end of the S*os*anac/j, the builders of the canal system that
sustained their civilization.
What at first appears, though, to be a story of civil unrest is really a story
about a dramatic upheaval in the environment, one that hastened the demise
of the S*os*anac/j, transforming them into Huhugam –the remains of which
have become the focus of much archeological work. This part of the story
begins unexpectedly when a rattlesnake bites and kills a rabbit. The rabbit’s
death shocked the people and they blamed Elder Brother, for it was he who
gave the rattlesnake its dangerous fangs. However, it was because the snake
could not defend itself that Elder Brother did this.37 Still, the rabbit’s death
marked a change in the way of things for the O’odham, not just as a people
(who cremated the rabbit at the behest of the Pee-Posh38 and inaugurated this
funerary tradition), but also in the land. During the rabbit’s cremation, Coyote
stole and ran away with the rabbit’s heart. As the people pursued him for
his violation, Coyote left a trail of his misdeed across the Akimel O’odham
homeland. Thin Leather mentions the Estrella (or Komatke) Mountain range,
where Coyote stopped at “Anûkam Tcukwoanyik, Place of the Uprooted An
Bush,” then Kihâtoak, or Gray Mountain, which got its name when Coyote
dusted off the ashes covering the rabbit’s cremated heart. Lastly, and most
importantly, Coyote stopped at Mo’hatûk, Muhadag, or Greasy Mountain,
which was thus called after Coyote spilled grease from the rabbit’s heart as he
consumed it, wandering the mountain, hiding from the people.39 These places
mark the boundaries of the O’odham homeland, which Earth Medicine Man
made for the Akimel O’odham, but which are now empowered with new
meaning because of what Coyote did there.
Thin Leather then proceeds to recount tales of mischief, some involving
Coyote, who returns to the Akimel O’odham, other stories involving people
with unique powers that they misuse. In the case of Coyote, he takes advan-
tage of a girl from another tribe, whose kinsmen possess powerful medicine,
which they use to take away all of the animals that the O’odham hunt. The
animals are hidden in a cave northeast of Baboquivari Mountain, and it is left
to Coyote to use his cunning to liberate them. Another story is about a boy
46
who grew up misbehaving around his grandmother, yet gains renown as a

hunter because of the enchanted bow that he uses. When the boy later married,
he was approached by a gambler of ill repute. Because of the gambler’s
medicine, ordinary people were unable to defeat him at any of the games
played. However, one man, in exchange for sending his son and daughter
to work for Elder Brother, obtained the latter’s assistance in sabotaging the
gambler’s power. Unfortunately, what Elder Brother unleashed on the people
was a greater menace. More specifically, Elder Brother instructed the man’s
daughter on how to lure the gambler into imbibing a concoction that looked
and smelled like pinole, but which was actually a potion that turned the gam-
bler into a man-eagle, Vandaih, who was known to hunt people whenever
game became scarce.40
What is emerging out of these legends of monsters and misbehaving
people is the O’odham Himthag, which is not an Edenic state of innocence, in
which harmony exists without the taint of evil. Rather, in the spirit of Coyote,
Elder Brother is broadening through experience the people’s knowledge of
human nature, which is as morally weak as it is spiritually strong. More to the
point, the O’odham Himthag is more than the set of customs that Russell and
others, such as Underhill, inventoried in their reports, it is also the knowledge
that emerges as humans, which is to say the O’odham, adapted to their desert
environment. So, just as the birds that survived the flood did so because of
the nests that they built, so too do the O’odham survive the elements of the
desert because of the round houses, or ollas ki, they build, in which the homes
created are symbolic of the culture that each has made in order live in balance
with their environment. Moreover, the term “way” is signified in Himthag’s
root, which is “him,” the O’odham word meaning “to walk.” While the stem,
“–thag,” signifies “belonging to” or “being related to” a group. Most often,
Himthag is translated as “a way of life,” “culture,” or “traditions.” However, in
the case of O’odham Himthag, the concept becomes more specific to a people
and place. While it is beyond the scope of this essay to engage in a linguistic
analysis of Himthag and how this word may relate to other O’odham words
and values, such as the word for mountain, tho’ag, let alone how O’odham
syntax shapes the way in which the O’odham see and experience their envir-
onment, what can be derived from the foregoing examination of the Akimel
O’odham Origin Story is the manner in which human folly, as instigated by
Coyote and Elder Brother, becomes essential for establishing the Himthag as
uniquely O’odham. For the stories that Thin Leather recounts for Russell –
and Lloyd –are not about a concept of human nature that is applicable to
members of other tribes –and certainly not to all of humanity –but rather is
an account of how to be human in a particular environment, the landmarks of
which are named throughout Thin Leather’s narrative. With that in mind, it is
47
meaningful that the O’odham learned how to build their canals after the gam-
bler was transformed into Vandaih, who was followed by the story of Ho’ok,
or Hawawk, a witch who claimed Elder Brother as her uncle.
Although she possessed strong hunting power, Ho’ok was incapable of
living among humans. Similar to Vandaih, Ho’ok exhibited an appetite for
human flesh. She thus became notorious for snatching children and absconding
with them to her cave in Taht-kum, north of Picacho.41 As is typical of Elder
Brother’s creations, at the same time that he is responsible for perpetrating
these abominations, he is also responsible for teaching the people how to pro-
tect themselves. With respect to Ho’ok, she was lured to a dance where she
was put to sleep with the enchanted cigarettes that Elder Brother made for
her. While under the tobacco’s spell, the people dragged her back to her cave,
where they burned her alive. Unexpectedly, when the fire shocked Ho’ok out
of her comatose state, she smashed into the ceiling of her cave, which opened
a crack that allowed her to escape. After which, she became a giant hawk who
remembered what the people did to her, so she killed them whenever she had
the chance, although she did not eat them as before. The menace that Ho’ok
posed metamorphosed again when she attacked a woman making pottery. In
the attempt to kill the potter, the woman evaded the hawk, which crashed into
the fire that the woman was using to make her pots. The people thought the
hawk had been destroyed until one day when that pot was in use it began to
boil over, killing people with scalding water. In fact, the pot continued to boil
all day, ceasing at night, only to resume its boiling at sunrise. Once again,
the people sought help. This time, instead of heading to Elder Brother, the
people recruited two men, Toehahvs and Geeahduk Seeven, who took their
clubs and shields and smashed the pot. But as the contents, which consisted
of choohookyuh, spilled, an old man and his orphaned grandson, who were
there to watch the battle, ate up the food and turned into bears –one black,
the other brown. So now the people had to figure out on their own how to
kill these bears, which they did by distracting them with balls made from
the o-nook palm tree, then shooting them with arrows.42 All of these things
happened in places that are well known to the O’odham. Far from being
fairytales, these stories instruct the people on the nature of the land around
them, especially those dangerous places where hawks and bears live.
As noted earlier, the O’odham built their canal system in light of the
aforementioned events, which was also when Elder Brother instigated social
unrest by taking various women who had just completed their coming-of-age
ceremony, leaving them, and inciting a lot of jealousy and resentment. Elder
Brother also developed a habit of shooting arrows through the people’s crops,
causing them to wither. These things happened near Salt River Mountain,
Awawtam Moehahdheck, or Brown Mountain, which is where Elder Brother
48
lived.43 Because of his infractions, the people conspired to kill him. However,
each time that they killed him – first with their clubs, secondly with fire,
thirdly by boiling him, and fourthly by pushing him off a high cliff –he was
seen the next day walking among the people making mischief. Then, after
another unsuccessful attempt at killing Elder Brother, this time by drowning,
Nooee, or Buzzard, called the people together. Nooee reminded the people
of the immense powers that Elder Brother possessed, explaining why he was
too powerful for ordinary people to kill. Nooee then demonstrated that he
possessed these powers because Earth Medicine Man made him this way. As
such, it was Nooee who killed Elder Brother, which he did with the help of
the Sun, which lent Nooee his “vi-no-me-gaht,” or gun.44 Because it was the
Sun’s weapon, each time that Nooee shot at Elder Brother the heat engulfing
the land became increasingly hotter. As Elder Brother ran around looking
for a place to escape the heat, he found to his dismay that each of these
places had no respite to offer, as every cool place he knew of became devas-
tatingly hot. Exhausted, Elder Brother had no place left to hide, eventually
succumbing to Nooee’s assault.45 And for anyone who has ever experienced
this Valley during the summer, Nooee’s story explains why the summer heat
dominates the land during this time.
As expected, Elder Brother eventually returned –he would return with
the rain –and when he did the canal-based civilization that the O’odham
created along the banks of the Akimel and Onk Akimel crumbled. However,
first, Elder Brother gathered his strength, and as he did so the land and the
waters that were completely dry at his death began to come back to life. Elder
Brother then gathered medicine, including items from which to fashion a bow
and arrows. Once he found these, he began looking for the Sun, following
the path it travels. Eventually, he sought out Earth Medicine Man, who still
lived with the people that followed him into the tunnel he opened for them
before the flood swept away everything. Upon finding Earth Medicine Man,
Elder Brother began reciting all that had transpired, which was foretold,
including the powers he would assemble now to overcome “the enemy to
my people and to the earth.” Earth Medicine Man offered his help, complete
with pledging the support of the people who stayed with him. Indeed, so
many people assembled on behalf of Elder Brother that, when they began
their march back to the Gila and Salt River valley, not all made it out of the
tunnel before the earth sealed up, leaving many behind. Among these was
Earth Medicine Man.46
As Elder Brother led the people to their destination it took them many
years to find their way. Along the way, Elder Brother created the deer because
there were none before and the people needed something to eat. Because of
this the people learned how to hunt deer, which did not always go very well
49
and the people became hungry again. So, they found a medicine man who
knew deer medicine and whose power could hide the deer just as effectively
as it could help them with the hunt. Consequently, although the medicine man
with the deer medicine had mischievously hidden the deer from the people,
he agreed to help the hunters and they found game. Another medicine man,
in turn, helped the people when a pestilence broke out, which was treated by
killing a doe and having a dance that worked against the sickness. Only after
this do Elder Brother and his “army” arrive in the Gila River Valley, where
they begin conquering the villages, or vahkih. From what is today the Casa
Grande Ruins to Komatke, Elder Brother led his people up the Gila River.
What is remarkable about this part of Thin Leather’s narrative is the display
of extraordinary powers exhibited by various medicine men on both sides of
the conflict. While the conquest is replete with images of warriors, weapons,
and slayings, the episodes are punctuated with natural catastrophes, such as
an earthquake, thunder, and fog, occurring at the behest of powerful medicine
men possessing powers derived from these phenomena. Just as the medicine
man described above could control the deer because of his deer medicine,
so too were there medicine men with earthquake, thunder, and fog powers.
Taken altogether, Elder Brother’s conquest of the Huhugam vahkih evokes
a dual narrative in which great social strife is occurring along with tremen-
dous environmental upheaval. Underscoring this is the special attention that
Elder Brother gave to personally slaying Noee, or Buzzard, who was the one
responsible for killing him earlier. More specifically, Elder Brother sent Eagle
and Chicken-Hawk to find his nemesis, which they did. They then brought
Nooee back to Elder Brother, who scalped him –which one can see today.
However, as expected, given the precedent set by previous killings, eventu-
ally Buzzard returns to life. Thin Leather’s conquest narrative continues up
into what is today Fort McDowell, then westward toward the Colorado River
and beyond, where the ability to conquer any more villages meets its end.
In time, the people return to the Phoenix Valley, and as they do so different
bands will claim different lands along the way as their home. Most of the
people, of course, will reclaim their O’odham homelands throughout what is
today southern Arizona. A few, however, will continue up into the Rio Grande
valley, where they will become the Rio Grande Pueblo communities.47
Archeologists, unsurprisingly, have largely ignored the O’odham narrative
on the rise and fall of the Gila River villages, whose ruins and artifacts have
long been uncovered since the first excavations were done at the turn of the
twentieth century, when Jesse Walters Fewkes conducted a survey at Casa
Grande (1912). Equally unsurprising is the tenacity with which the O’odham
have held to their oral histories, including their account of the Huhugam,
regardless of what the latest archeological research may have to say about
50
it. Superficially, one might regard this dispute as another instance of the
confrontation of science and folklore. However, the O’odham, namely the
elders and tribal historians, such as Thin Leather, who have spoken about
the Huhugam and are recorded in the scholarly literature do not neces-
sarily reject the analyses, theories, and conjectures of their archeological
counterparts, except at those points where the kinship relations between
Huhugam and contemporary O’odham are questioned. Since the O’odham do
not abide by the Western notion of history, in which a linear timeline is used
to assemble data into a narrative documenting origins, developments, and
declines, such that each item is indexed according to a specific point in time –
hence archeologists’ reliance on dendrochronology and stratigraphy –their
Origin Story, which is ultimately timeless, does not shed light on the historio-
graphical elements of the scientific perspective, because that is not its purpose.
On the contrary, insofar as the Origin Story is about the First People,
the ones that Elder Brother taught the Himthag, then more important than
explaining the historicity of pottery shards and ruins is the story’s account of
who the O’odham are, their relation to the Huhugam, and how the Himthag
defines their kinship with Earth Medicine Man, Elder Brother, Coyote, the
First People, and the Jewed –the land and environment –that they created,
in which the Himthag is the appropriate way, the O’odham way of doing
things. With respect to the decline and fall of the Huhugam, as recounted
above, rather than evidence of how Indigenous people were as ecologically
destructive as their Euro-American counterparts, Elder Brother’s conquest
of Huhugam civilization demonstrates what the O’odham have learned from
the traumatic experience of a severe social crisis induced by an imbalance in
their relationship with the land –the people, allying with Nooee, Buzzard,
wanted to kill Elder Brother, who is identified with examples of fertility and
creativity.48 At one level, what happened between Elder Brother and the First
People was due to his deliberate mischievousness, as he violated the trust and
virginity of various young women who had just been through their coming-
of-age ceremony, transgressing their integrity and bringing shame and resent-
ment to their families. Yet, what did Elder Brother represent as a sacred being
among the O’odham? Over the generations, he shaped them into who they
are as O’odham, from shortening their lifespans to teaching them how to
make digging sticks from ironwood. Elder Brother also sent the people to
his sister when they needed a canal built across difficult terrain. At the same
time, he introduced the challenges that forged them into a strong nation, from
the flood that wiped out the First People’s ancestral village to giving snake
the fangs that killed rabbit, not to mention the array of monsters that preyed
on them from time to time. With each thing that Elder Brother gave to the
O’odham, it generated an opposite –one might say complementary –effect.
51
The latter included the gift of technology, the ironwood digging stick and
the knowledge to construct canals and adobe villages, enabling the Phoenix
Valley to become home to tens of thousands.
In the story of White-eater-old-woman, because of the canal that she dug
for the people they were able to become as prosperous as the other Huhugam
villages. Such a leap in civil engineering gave the people control over the
Akimel and Onk Akimel – signified by the digging stick – which led to an
increase in material wealth. The more miles of canals that the Huhugam
constructed, the vaster the fields that the farmers irrigated, which led to
greater crop yields. The increase in food supply led to a population growth,
which during times of drought may have resulted in social distress.49 While
not all of the known Huhugam villages are named in Thin Leather’s story,
their expanse between two distant points along the Gila River, then outward
across the Phoenix Valley and up into Fort McDowell, indicates a hitherto
unheard-of civilization. In the wake of the collapse of the Huhugam, the
Akimel O’odham established a culture that still relied on agriculture –even
utilizing several of the old canals –but on a scale much smaller than that
of their predecessors.50 The Akimel O’odham, in sense, were the Yin to the
Huhugam’s Yang.
Before concluding this all too brief discourse, the events recounted in the
Akimel O’odham Origin Story –which continue much further than the sum-
mary provided above –established the Himthag, which is less about having
“faith” in nature and more about respecting its power. As such, when the
O’odham exhibit respect for the hummingbird, it is not a naïve belief or super-
stition that such a tiny creature can cause a flood in some simplified mech-
anical definition of causality. As observed above, the concern is more about
developing in oneself an attitude toward nature, which can lead to the kind of
environmental imbalance symbolized by the flood narrative, not to mention
the Huhugam conquest narrative. What is unfortunately beyond the scope of
this essay, among other things, is how the Himthag informed other aspects of
O’odham culture, beginning with its ceremonial customs, such as the Wi:gida,
or Rain Ceremony, which takes place ahead of the summer monsoon season.
Indeed, in spite of being a riverine culture, the Akimel O’odham possess an
abundance of rain songs, in which the bounty of the desert is renewed, along
with the people and animals that depend on its fruits.51 In turn, the Himthag is
at the base of the O’odham medicine tradition, which encompasses a theory
of disease that is derived from the Origin Story, a knowledge of plants as both
medicinal and spiritual beings, and curing rituals that restore the patient to
health by re-establishing a healthy balance with their relatives, human and
nonhuman.52 Indeed, the Himthag infuses the purification ceremony (which
began this discourse on the O’odham) with its meaning, whereby returning
52
warriors who had slain an enemy must undergo it before being assimilated
back into their village.53 In Thin Leather’s narrative for Russell, the stories of
the Akimel O’odham’s origins concluded with the legend of a boy who went
on the warpath against the Apache to avenge the death of his father. Upon
returning from his heroic deed, the boy underwent the purification ceremony,
in which rain songs were sung.54
Finally, because the O’odham Himthag is about maintaining healthy
kinship ties with land and community, the values expressed in the O’odham
Origin Story are as pertinent today as they were for the First People. While the
Akimel O’odham have been subjected to the intense forces of colonization –
as American settlers occupied land they presumed to own by right of conquest,
thereby usurping political and economic control from the Indigenous villages
dwelling along the Akimel and Onk Akimel –succeeding generations have
preserved their knowledge of these ancient teachings.55 In fact, the O’odham
regard for their Himthag can be seen in their historic struggle for their water
rights and their current concern over a freeway expansion that will cut into
Muhadag Du’ag, or Greasy Mountain.56 Unlike a religious credo or ortho-
doxy, the O’odham Himthag is not a set of beliefs that one must abide by
in order to be O’odham. Rather, the Himthag, as noted, is a way of doing
things, which is focused above all else on being a good relative, in which
a good relative is defined by showing due respect for one’s family, land,
and the animals, plants and spirits who dwell there. In light of which, one
can without contradiction be, say, a Christian and still follow the Himthag.
The latter is significant, not only for the contemporary O’odham community,
which counts many Christians among its members, but also the surrounding
non-Indigenous community, which still has much to learn about this land
beyond what its science and engineering tell them.
Notes
1 See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994),
74–100; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London: Printed for Thomas Tegg,
1823), 106– 111; and Jean- Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses
(Rutland, VT: Everyman’s Library, 1973), 182–184.
2 David E. Doyel, “Irrigation, Production, and Power in Phoenix Basin Hohokam Society,”
in The Hohokam Millennium, Suzanne K. Fish and Paul R. Fish (eds.) (Santa Fe,
NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 83, 87.
3 An interesting subgenre of the anthropological literature is the tradition of what one
might call philosophical anthropology, in which the observations and theories that had
developed as an integral part of ethnographic field research formed the basis of dis-
course on some of the major themes that anthropologists identified as a meaningful
aspect of so-called primitive communities. Noteworthy examples of such works are Paul
Radin’s Primitive Man as Philosopher (1927), Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s The “Soul” of the
Primitive (1928), Marcel Mauss’ The Gift (1950), Paul Radin’s The Trickster (1956), and
Claude Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind (1962). In addition, one of the more intriguing
53
developments in philosophical anthropology was Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology

(1967), which was about much more than its references to Rousseau and Lévi-Strauss,
yet is still significant for how much it dignified the presence of Indigenous people within
the work of philosophy.
4 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover
Publications, 1956), 79–102.
5 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Annotated Emerson, David Mikics (ed.) (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 93–99; Henry David Thoreau, Extracts Relating
to the Indians: Notebook 1 (New York: Upstart Crow Publishing, 2008).
6 In spite of their absence from the formative years of the American intellectual trad-
ition, specifically the eighteenth through the early twentieth century, American Indians
nonetheless created an intellectual tradition in their own right. See, for example, Bernd
C. Peyer (ed.), American Indian Nonfiction: An Anthology of Writings, 1760s–1930s
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2005) and David Martínez (ed.), The American
Indian Intellectual Tradition: An Anthology of Writings from 1772 to 1972 (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). For more on Eastman as an American Indian writer
and thinker, see David Martínez, Dakota Philosopher: Charles Eastman and American
Indian Thought (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2009).
7 In the philosophical anthropological tradition outlined above, one of the most important
themes was the relationship between totem and totemism, in which the concept of the
taboo arises as a controlling mechanism in a primitive world defined by fear and magic.
The French tradition, from Lévy-Bruhl to Lévi-Strauss, has been especially intrigued by
this supposed connection. Fortunately, the racist assumptions endemic to Freud’s psy-
choanalytical approach have been curtailed over the years to a greater respect for non-
Western modes of thinking as effective adaptations to a given environment, as opposed to
a primitive fear of the natural world. Alfred L. Kroeber, in particular, known for his work
with California Indigenous peoples –whose most famous subject was Ishi –was a major
critic of Freud’s theory.
8 With respect to the Akimel O’odham intellectual tradition, in terms of published writings,
it has largely been limited to collaborating with anthropologists on their field research.
Noteworthy among these was Thin Leather, who was one of Russell’s most important
resources in his BAE report, cited above. Thin Leather, an Akimel O’odham ma:kai, or
Pima medicine man, further distinguished himself when he shared a variety of traditional
stories with J. William Lloyd in his 1911 book Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights: Being the Myths
and Legends of the Pimas of Arizona (Westfield, NJ: The Lloyd Group). Subsequent
contributions to the Akimel O’odham literary tradition include George Webb’s A Pima
Remembers (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1959) and Anna Moore Shaw’s A Pima
Past (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974). For more on Akimel O’odham intellectual
history, see David Martínez, “Pulling Down the Clouds: The O’odham Intellectual Tradition
during the ‘Time of Famine’,” American Indian Quarterly 34(1) (Winter, 2010), 1–32.
9 For an assortment of the sources available on the Akimel O’odham, including their
cousins in the Tohono O’odham community, see Bernard L. Fontana, “Pima and
Papago: An Introduction,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol. 10: Southwest,
Alfonso Ortiz (ed.) (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1983), 135–136. For
those unacquainted with the O’odham communities, Fontana’s introduction gives the
reader the cultural and geographical differences between the Akimel O’odham, Tohono
O’odham, Hia Ced O’odham, and the Sobaipuris. Each group inhabited a different part
of the Sonoran Desert –additional groups extended into the Mexican state of Sonora –
complete with their own dialect. Because all of the O’odham communities spoke mutu-
ally intelligible dialects of O’odham, there is much that these groups have in common.
Consequently, it is commonplace to see resources referring to the Akimel and Tohono
O’odham (or Pima and Papago) as virtually the same people. They are closely related,
though with regional differences.
54
10 Historically, the American Indian encounter with European and American missionaries
and politicians has often produced rather robust debates over values and ideas regarding
the land, religion, and government. In the case of American Indian relationships with
Christian churches and missionaries, a great deal of research and historical documenta-
tion has been amassed, which demonstrates the vibrant, not to mention violent, encounter
between institutional Christianity and a diverse number of American Indian nations,
their leaders, holy people, and scholars, from Seneca leader Red Jacket to Standing
Rock Sioux activist-intellectual Vine Deloria Jr. While the scholarship and archival
material is too vast to summarize here, one helpful resource for someone new to the
topic is The Pluralism Project of Harvard University, which maintains the page “First
Encounters: Native Americans and Christians”: http://pluralism.org/encounter/historical-
perspectives/first-encounters-native-americans-and-christians/.
11 President James E. Polk signed and proclaimed the treaty, titled “Treaty of Peace and
Friendship, Limits, and Settlement with the Republic of Mexico,” the law of the land on July
4, 1848. See Unnumbered Executive Orders, Directives, and Proclamations, Stat 9; pp. 922–
943. However, the area of Arizona that existed between the Gila River and the international
boundary –which included the Akimel O’odham homeland –was not added until the 1853
Gadsden Purchase. See Office of the Historian, “Gadsden Purchase, 1853–1854”: https://
history.state.gov/milestones/1830–1860/gadsden-purchase (accessed on July 10, 2017).
12 Lynn Townsend White Jr., “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” Science
155(3767) (March 10, 1967), 1203–1207.
13 For a history of the Akimel O’odham during the American period that began in 1853,
see Paul H. Ezell, “History of the Pima,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol.
10: Southwest, Alfonso Ortiz (ed.) (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1983),
156–160.
14 For more on the role of Adamsville in Akimel O’odham history, see David H. DeJong,
Stealing the Gila: The Pima Agricultural Economy and Water Deprivation, 1848–1921
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 57–70.
15 Edward Abbey famously brought the water crisis in the American Southwest to a national
audience in 1968 when he published his influential memoir Desert Solitaire: A Season in
the Wilderness (New York: McGraw-Hill).
16 The decades of struggle that the Gila River Indian Community endured in pursuit of its
water rights is recounted in DeJong, Stealing the Gila.
17 When Russell provided an account of each one of the Akimel O’odham informants who
assisted him with his field research for The Pima Indians, he said of Thin Leather: “an
old man, is said to be the most popular of the few remaining narrators of myths and
speeches, or ‘speakers.’ He is an intimate friend of the head chief, Antonio Azul, and has
always occupied a prominent place in the councils of the tribe. In his prime he exceeded
6 feet in stature and was strong and sturdy of frame. Indeed, his hand grasp is yet vig-
orous enough to make his silent and friendly greeting somewhat formidable. Intelligent,
patient, dignified, his influence must have been helpful to those youths who formerly
came to him for of material pertaining to the Pimas” (Frank Russell, The Pima Indians
[Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1908], 17na). For a historical analysis of
Thin Leather’s contribution to the Akimel O’odham intellectual tradition, see Martínez,
“Pulling Down the Clouds.” From him was obtained the cosmogonical myth of the tribe,
many speeches, songs, and much general information. He also made a model of a loom
and a few other specimens for the collection.
18 Whereas for archeologists, such as Harold S. Gladwin, Emil W. Haury, and Paul H. Ezell,
there was a question about what they called “the Hohokam-Pima continuum,” for the
Akimel O’odham, as recounted in their Origin Story, there is no question that the
ancient ones, or Huhugam, who built the canal system and the extensive ruins along
the Gila and Salt rivers, were their ancestors. For more, see Paul H. Ezell, “Is There a
Hohokam-Pima Culture Continuum?” American Antiquity 29(1) (July, 1963), 61–66 and
55
Julian D. Hayden, “Of Hohokam Origins and Other Matters,” American Antiquity 35(1)
(January, 1970), 87–93.
19 It was commonplace for missionaries and Indian agents to refer to American Indian medi-
cine people, regardless of tribe, as “jugglers,” which was meant to imply that these indi-
viduals were little more than charlatans, conning people with sleight-of-hand tricks.
20 This is the first rule for Descartes’ universal science, posthumously published as Regulae
directionem ingenii, CSM I 9/AT X, 359.
21 Russell, The Pima Indians, 206.
22 Lloyd, Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights, 27.
23 For more on the cultural value of the creosote bush, see Amadeo M. Rea, At the Desert’s
Green Edge: An Ethnobotany of the Gila River Pima (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1997), 139–142.
24 Russell, The Pima Indians, 206–208. The black insects that Thin Leather claims were the
first creatures that Earth Medicine Man made were likely Tachardiella larreae, a scale
insect that is found on the branches of the creosote bush. I am grateful to Sharon Suzuki-
Martinez, author of The Way of All Flux (Moorhead, MN: New Rivers Press, 2012) and
insectophile, for helping me identify this. With respect to Thin Leather’s recounting of
how the earth was made, see also Lloyd, Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights,  27–35.
25 Russell, The Pima Indians, 207–208.
26 Russell, The Pima Indians, 208. I am grateful to Mizuki Miyashita, Professor of
Linguistics, University of Montana, for assisting me with deciphering Russell’s arcane
O’odham orthography, which resulted in the use of “S*os*anac/j.” I am grateful also to
Ofelia Zepeda (Tohono O’odham), Professor of Linguistics and American Indian Studies,
University of Arizona, for providing me a meaningful translation of S*os*anac/j. For the
narrative on how Elder Brother created the S*os*anac/j, see Russell, The Pima Indians,
213–215. See also, Lloyd, Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights, 47–50; and Anna Moore Shaw,
Pima Indian Legends (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1968), 4–7.
28 Elder Brother’s O’odham names are clouded in mystery, which may be the result of a
number of factors. The names quoted in the text above may be of such ancient origin
that their definitions into contemporary O’odham is impossible. Or it may be the case
that the O’odham persons who served as resources for the anthropologists researching
O’odham oral traditions, such as Russell, may have been reluctant to divulge any except
the vaguest of knowledge about this sacred being’s name. For an ethnohistorical sum-
mary of Elder Brother’s names, see Donald M. Bahr, The Short, Swift Time of Gods
on Earth: The Hohokam Chronicles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994),
298–299.
29 Russell, The Pima Indians, 209. For more on the cultural meaning of the White
Brittlebush, see Rea, At the Desert’s Green Edge, 131–132.
31 Russell, The Pima Indians, 209–210. See also, Lloyd, Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights, 38–61.
For contemporary interpretation of the flood narrative, see Webb, A Pima Remembers,
69–70; and Shaw, Pima Indian Legends,  1–3.
33 Russell, The Pima Indians, 211. For more on the cultural meaning of the hummingbird,
see Amadeo M. Rea, Wings in the Desert: A Folk Ornithology of the Northern Pimans
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2007), 192–195.
34 Donald M. Bahr uses Russell’s translation, rendering it with an updated orthography
as “Towa Kuadam Oks, ‘White Eater Old-Woman.’ ” According to Bahr, Jesse Walters
Fewkes sees a connection between this O’odham female sacred being and the Navajo
references to “White Shell Woman.” Bahr questions Fewkes’ interpretation and instead
proposes an influence from the Yuman communities. For more, see Bahr, The Short Swift
Time of Gods on Earth, 310–311n6. With respect to Lloyd’s translation, “The Wampum
56
Eater,” while a completely erroneous translation, nonetheless the reference to wampum

is suggestive of how the name was explained to him by his O’odham collaborators.
More to the point, insofar as wampum is a type of seashell, the name Wampum Eater
implies that this sacred woman was identified with white seashells, which in turn may be
a reference to the Gulf of California, a place of great cultural significance in O’odham
mythology and religion. In light of which, Towa Kuadam Oks likely possessed Ocean
Power, as evidenced in her ability to control the river’s strong current in her work in
assisting the O’odham with their canal. For more on the O’odham regard for the Ocean,
see Ruth M. Underhill et al., Rainhouse and Ocean: Speeches for the Papago Year
(Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona Press, 1979) and Ruth M. Underhill, Singing for
Power: The Song Magic of the Papago Indians of Southern Arizona (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 1993).
36 Lloyd, Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights, 120–124.
37 For another version of the story of how snake got its fangs, see Shaw, Pima Indian
Legends,  17–19.
38 The Pee-Posh, or Maricopa (as they are called in the historical record), have long been a dis-
tinct yet integral part of the Akimel O’odham community. For more, see Henry O. Harwell
and Marsha C. S. Kelly, “Maricopa,” in Handbook of North American Indians, vol.
10: Southwest, Alfonso Ortiz ( ed.) (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1983), 71–85.
39 Russell, The Pima Indians, 216–217.
40 Russell, The Pima Indians, 218–221. For a longer version of the Eagle-Man story, see
Lloyd, Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights, 72–95. See also, Webb, A Pima Remembers, 99–103;
and Shaw, Pima Indian Legends,  20–26.
42 Russell, The Pima Indians, 221–223. For a longer version of the Ho’ok story, see Lloyd,
Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights, 106–119. See also, Webb, A Pima Remembers,  95–98.
43 Lloyd, Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights, 125. Bahr indicates that the name “Moehahdheck” is
the same as “Muhadag, ‘Greasy.’ ” However, the story’s reference to Salt River Mountain
points away from the landmark now called South Mountain. See Bahr, The Short Swift
Time of Gods on Earth, 190nd.
44 Lloyd, Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights, 128–129. With respect to the enigmatic reference
to the Sun’s gun, Bahr interprets the O’odham term that Thin Leather uses in this
way: “Wainom Ga:t, ‘Iron [or perhaps any metal except gold] Gun.’ Ga:t means either
‘bow’ or ‘gun’ (= lethal shooting device).” See Bahr, The Short Swift Time of Gods on
Earth, 194nf.
45 Lloyd, Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights, 129–130.
46 Lloyd, Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights, 133–144, 147–148.
47 Lloyd, Aw-aw-tam Indian Nights, 149– 153, 154– 165; Russell, The Pima Indians,
228–229.
48 For a less than favorable appraisal of Huhugam, or Hohokam, history, see Shepherd
Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
1999),  45–72.
49 For more, see John C. Ravesloot, “Changing Views of Snaketown in a Larger Landscape,”
in The Hohokam Millennium, Suzanne K. Fish and Paul R. Fish (eds.) (Santa Fe,
NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 91–97 and Jeffrey J. Clark, “A San
Pedro Valley Perspective on Ancestral Pueblo Migration in the Hohokam World,” in The
Hohokam Millennium, Suzanne K. Fish and Paul R. Fish (eds.) (Santa Fe, NM: School
for Advanced Research Press, 2007), 99–107.
50 For more on the post-Huhugam adaptation to the Gila and Salt river environment, see
Robert A. Hackenberg, “Pima and Papago Ecological Adaptations,” in Handbook of North
American Indians, vol. 10: Southwest, Alfonso Ortiz (ed.) (Washington, DC: Smithsonian
Institution, 1983), 161–177.
57
51 For more, see Russell, The Pima Indians, 270–338. See also, Underhill, Singing for
Power,  1–158.
52 For more, see Donald M. Bahr et al., Piman Shamanism and Staying Sickness (Ká:cim
Múmkidag) (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974).
53 Russell, The Pima Indians, 204–205. For a brief but poignant account of the warrior puri-
fication ritual, see Webb, A Pima Remembers,  32–33.
54 Russell, The Pima Indians, 230, 353–356.
55 For a comprehensive account of the epochs of colonization in the American Southwest,
including its impact on the Akimel O’odham, see Edward H. Spicer, Cycles of Conquest:
The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest,
1533–1960 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1962).
56 For more on both the environmental and cultural issues associated with the 202 Freeway
expansion, see Elizabeth Stuart, “Gila River Indian Community Asks U.S. Judge to Block
South Mountain Freeway,” New Times, May 13, 2016: www.phoenixnewtimes.com/
news/gila-river-indian-community-asks-us-judge-to-block-south-mountain-freeway-
8292346 (accessed on July 12, 2017); also BrieAnna J. Frank, “Gila River tribe to appeal
South Mountain Freeway decision,” azcentral.com, August 30, 2016: www.azcentral.
com/story/news/local/ahwatukee/2016/08/30/phoenix-gila-river-tribe-appeal-south-
mountain-freeway-decision/89609440/ (accessed on July 12, 2017). For more on the
potential environmental impact of the 202 Freeway expansion, see J. Andrew Darling, “A
Class III Cultural Resource Survey of Five Alternative Alignments in the South Mountain
Freeway Corridor Study Area, Maricopa County, Arizona,” Arizona Department of
Transportation, February 2005: https://apps.azdot.gov/files/projects/south-mtn-final-eis/
2005-02-15-class-iii-survey-gric-crmpredacted.pdf (accessed on July 12, 2017).
58
Ecological Conversions in American

Religious and Literary Culture
Brian Yothers
Whether they defined themselves as individualistic “transparent eyeball[s]‌”

like Ralph Waldo Emerson or Margaret Fuller, or as prophetic voices for a
religious community like Charles Grandison Finney (whose “waves of liquid
love” would be analyzed by William James in The Varieties of Religious
Experience) or Joseph Smith, nineteenth-century Americans tended to find
spiritual renewal in nature. This essay explores the ways in which nineteenth-
century Americans like Emerson, Fuller, Thoreau, Whitman, Dickinson,
Melville, Smith, and Finney all present encounters in the natural world as
fundamental to the experience of religious conversion or transcendent insight
into the meaning and nature of existence. The experience of conversion
requires, not just a detached contemplation of the natural world, but a tactile
experience of it, from the “blithe air” that bathes Emerson’s head in Nature to
the “soft, gentle globules” of spermaceti that Ishmael kneads in “A Squeeze
of the Hand” in Moby-Dick. Moreover, this tactile experience, whether in
a mystical woodland experience like Finney’s and Smith’s conversions, or
in Emily Dickinson’s poems of the sea, or Thoreau’s Walden, has the effect
of reorienting one’s relationship to the world of one’s human community
as well. It is easy enough to find an opposition between an individualistic
impulse toward lonely contemplation of the natural world and a communal
impulse toward the ties represented by religious community in nineteenth-
century American literature; what this essay suggests is that these impulses
are never so easily separable as we might suppose, and that nineteenth-
century America’s finest writers and most influential religious thinkers made
this ineluctable immersion of the social in the ecological manifest.
59
Ecological Conversions in America 59
Ecology and Evangelical Conversion: The Case of

Charles Grandison Finney
Unlike Jonathan Edwards, who has been a staple in the American lit-
erary canon for decades through such texts as “Sinners in the Hands of an
Angry God” and “Images or Shadows of Divine Things,” the most influen-
tial evangelist in the nineteenth-century United States has languished in rela-
tive obscurity, at least in the literature classroom. Charles Grandison Finney
deserves more attention than he often receives, both because of the signifi-
cance of his cultural impact and because of the quality of his prose.
Finney’s narrative of his conversion shows a close relationship between the
language of Romantic transcendence and the language of religious ecstasy.
Notably, when Finney describes his encounter with the divine that led to his
conversion and his career as an evangelist, he focuses on the concrete details
of the natural world. Finney begins his narration of his conversion experience
with an account of his walk into the woods:
North of the village, and over a hill, lay a piece of woods in which I was in the almost daily
habit of walking, more or less, when it was pleasant weather. It was now October, and the
time was past for my frequent walks there. Nevertheless, instead of going to the office,
I turned and bent my course toward the woods, feeling that I must be alone, and away from
all human eyes and ears, so that I could pour out my prayer to God.
I walked quietly toward the village; and so perfectly quiet was my mind that it seemed
as if all nature listened. It was on the 10th of October, and a very pleasant day. I had gone
into the woods immediately after an early breakfast; and when I returned to the village
I found it was dinner time. Yet I had been wholly unconscious of the time that had passed;
it appeared to me that I had been gone from the village but a short time.
(14)
Finney’s description of his walk into the woods is suggestive of an

immersion in the natural world, as his unconsciousness of time suggests that
his experience of the ecological sublimity of the woodlands has re-ordered
his perceptions. Notably, Finney records the time of year, the direction in
which he was walking, the fact that he was in the habit of visiting the woods
on a daily basis, dependent on ecological factors (the weather) that he could
not control, and that he found an escape from the human world to be neces-
sary for his spiritual quest.
Finney’s account continues with a description of the peace that he
experienced in the sylvan context of his walk, worrying about his lack of
guilt, even as he delights in the most profound spiritual tranquility that he
was experiencing. He concludes:
I must have continued in this state for a good while; but my mind was too much absorbed
with the interview to recollect anything that I said. But I know, as soon as my mind became
calm enough to break off from the interview, I returned to the front office, and found that
60
the fire that I had made of large wood was nearly burned out. But as I turned and was
about to take a seat by the fire, I received a mighty baptism of the Holy Ghost. Without any
expectation of it, without ever having the thought in my mind that there was any such thing
for me, without any recollection that I had ever heard the thing mentioned by any person in
the world, the Holy Spirit descended upon me in a manner that seemed to go through me,
body and soul. I could feel the impression, like a wave of electricity, going through and
through me. Indeed it seemed to come in waves and waves of liquid love; for I could not
express it in any other way. It seemed like the very breath of God. I can recollect distinctly
that it seemed to fan me, like immense wings.
(20)
In Finney’s description of his conversion, the air of the forest and the
breath of God, the sanctity of a space that remained free of excessive human
interference and the descending Holy Spirit, become so thoroughly blended
as to seem indistinguishable. Moreover, Finney’s psychological analysis
of his experience is also shaped by the natural sciences: he finds the present
of the divine to resemble a “wave of electricity,” meaning that the “waves of
liquid love” that so impressed William James when he wrote The Varieties
of Religious Experience were also framed by Finney’s engagement with the
natural sciences (James 255). The immense wings at the end of his reflection
suggest both traditional Christian iconography for the Holy Spirit and the
birds that he would encounter in his prolonged walks in the woods. To be
sure, Finney uses his ecological context as a metaphor here, but without his
physical connection to an ecologically defined locale, the spiritual metaphor
that he calls up would not be available to him.
Finney was far from the only young religious enthusiast to find God
in nature, and if Finney could boast a following across a wide range of
denominations, a near contemporary could boast a corresponding depth
to his influence on one particular tradition. Joseph Smith is remembered
today as the foundational leader and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ
of the Latter-Day Saints, popularly known as the LDS or Mormon Church.
Before he was a central figure in a creed that his visions defined, Smith was
a spiritual seeker with a great deal in common with many of his contempor-
aries in the era of the Second Great Awakening. As Michael Robertson has
pointed out, Smith emerged from the same “burned over district” of Western
New York where Finney preached (Robertson 143). Perhaps not surprisingly,
then, Smith’s account of his earliest spiritual vision echoes both the earnest
self-examination and the ecological contexts that appear in Finney’s auto-
biography. Reflecting on an initial experience of illumination, Smith writes:
So, in accordance with this, my determination to ask of God, I retired to the woods to make
the attempt. It was on the morning of a beautiful, clear day, early in the spring of eighteen
hundred and twenty. It was the first time in my life that I had made such an attempt, for
amidst all my anxieties I had never as yet made the attempt to pray vocally.
61
Thick darkness gathered around me, and it seemed to me for a time as if I were doomed
to sudden destruction.
But, exerting all my powers to call upon God to deliver me out of the power of this enemy
which had seized upon me, and at the very moment when I was ready to sink into despair
and abandon myself to destruction –not to an imaginary ruin, but to the power of some
actual being from the unseen world, who had such marvelous power as I had never before
felt in any being –just at this moment of great alarm, I saw a pillar of light exactly over
my head, above the brightness of the sun, which descended gradually until it fell upon me.
(4–5)
Smith’s experience is related in terms that are at once biblical and eco-
logical, and they reflect the ways in which the distinction between the eco-
logical and the spiritual that we assume today did not necessarily obtain for
nineteenth-century religious figures. The congruity between Finney’s scene
of conversion and Smith’s, despite significant differences in their theological
beliefs and their relationship to the American Protestant mainstream is sug-
gestive of the way in which ecological impulses were shaping the most super-
naturally oriented portions of American religious culture, from central figures
in the Second Great Awakening to foundational figures in religious traditions
that lacked precedent in earlier Protestant denominations. Like Finney, Smith
“retired to the woods” at a time of profound spiritual crisis, and like Finney,
he found an experience in his natural surroundings that he describes in bib-
lical terms and that offered him a sense of consolation and insight.
Transcendental Ecology and Religious

Conversion: Emerson, Fuller, and Thoreau
If Finney’s “waves of liquid love” and Smith’s “pillar of light” can sound
quite specifically evangelical in their tone, the shape of Finney’s and Smith’s
conversion experiences closely resembles the experiences of illumination in
nature recorded by the leading figures of Transcendentalism. Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau all weave spiritual illu-
mination and ecological consciousness together in a pattern so seamless as
to allow us to forget to think of them as either spiritual or ecological writers,
when of course they are both, and when, notably, their accounts of tran-
scendent ecstasy in nature mirror the language of religious conversion.
Transcendentalism’s urtext, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, sets the
pattern for this sort of transformation of consciousness by engagement with
the natural world. One of Emerson’s most frequently quoted, and indeed most
frequently ridiculed, lines in his entire body of work is his self-description in
Nature as a “transparent eye-ball”:
Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without
having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect
62
exhilaration. Almost I fear I think how glad I am. In the woods, too, a man casts off his
years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child. In the
woods, is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and a sanctity
reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in
a thousand years. In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can
befal me in life, –no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot
repair. Standing on the bare ground, –my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into
infinite space, –all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing.
I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle
of God.
(29)
The ecological and the spiritual are as tightly interwoven in this most famous
of Emerson’s early reflections as we could imagine possible. Emerson’s
“perfect exhilaration” derives from the particularity of the puddles, the light
from the sky as refracted by clouds and twilight, and like Charles Finney and
Joseph Smith, he finds regeneration in the woods. Moreover, the feeling of
security that Emerson experiences resembles Finney’s affective reaction to
the woods: “Within these plantations of God,” Emerson feels safe from the
threats to “reason and faith” that he encounters within human society.
Margaret Fuller was both one of Emerson’s closest associates and one
of the most influential female intellectuals in the nineteenth-century United
States. As such, it is striking that the spiritual experience that she records in
her letters bears a similar ecological freight to the conversion experiences of
Finney and Smith and Emerson’s own moment of bliss as a “transparent eye-
ball.” In a letter to Emerson from 1840, Fuller wrote about her earlier experi-
ence at the age of 21 of a sense of an internal experience of religious ecstasy
that draws heavily on the language of natural processes:
I paused beside a little stream, which I had envied in the merry fullness of its spring life. It
was shrunken, voiceless, choked with withered leaves. I marveled that it did not quite lose
itself in the earth. There was no stay for me, and I went on and on, till I came to where the
trees were thick about a little pool, dark and silent. I sat down there. I did not think; all was
dark, and cold, and still. Suddenly the sun shone out with transparent sweetness, like the
last smile of a dying lover, which it will use when it has been unkind all a cold autumn day.
And, even then, passed into my thought a beam from its true sun, from its native sphere,
which has never since departed from me. I remembered how, a little child, I had stopped
myself one day on the stairs, and asked, how came I here? How is it that I seem to be this
Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it? I remembered all the times
and ways in which the same thought had returned. I saw how long it must be before the
soul can learn to act under these limitations of time and space, and human nature; but I saw,
also, that it must do it, –that it must make all this false true, –and sow new and eternal
plants in this garden of God before it return again.
(168)
Fuller here highlights what is by now a familiar trajectory: seeking insight

into the nature of things, she goes into the woods, carefully observes the
63
concrete physical details of what she sees there, and then expresses the
resulting insight in terms (“this garden of God”) that draw their metaphorical
pattern from natural phenomena.
Perhaps no transcendentalist writer was more immersed in the concrete
phenomena of nature than Henry David Thoreau, and he has been widely
recognized as an inspirational figure in American ecological writing, in
studies ranging from Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination to
Laura Dassow Walls’s superb recent biography, Henry David Thoreau: A
Life. Regarding the ponds he observed near Concord, Massachusetts, most
particularly Walden Pond itself, Thoreau wrote:
A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye; looking
into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next to
the shore are the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and cliffs around
are its overhanging brows.
(128)
Notably, Thoreau’s reading of the pond reflects Emerson’s emphasis on the

eye as the conduit to spiritual enlightenment and conversion. For Thoreau, how-
ever, ecology becomes still more important than it is for Emerson: Emerson’s
“transparent eye-ball” looks out upon the world, whereas Thoreau imagines the
lake gazing back upon us. His sense of the spiritual significance of natural phe-
nomena becomes still more evident in the lines that follow:
A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and
motion from above. It is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On land only the
grass and trees wave, but the water itself is rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze
dashes across it by the streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that we can look down
on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look down thus on the surface of air at length, and mark
where a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.
(129–30)
Here Thoreau brings the language of the spirit and the language of the
material world into still closer connection than had appeared in either
Emerson’s transcendental ecstasy or Finney’s evangelical conversion.
Finally, Thoreau reflects at length on the ways in which our perceptions
might be changed by an authentic confrontation with the landscape:
White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light.
If they were permanently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, per-
chance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but
being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them,
and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they
contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent
than our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than
64
the pool before the farmer’s door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks
come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage
and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with
the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where
they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.
(136–37)
Thoreau’s reverence for White Pond and Walden Pond are matched by his
indignant conclusion that humans, even when well intentioned, fail to com-
prehend nature adequately. He finds spiritual power in the ponds’ ecological
resistance to being monetized (even as he recognizes elsewhere that both
the Concord economy and the global economy have incorporated the ponds
into their networks). The ponds become a kind of material rebuke to human
avarice: “too pure to have a market value,” they teach us scorn for any way of
life that depends solely on the market. Thoreau’s scathing conclusion: “Talk
of heaven! ye disgrace earth,” becomes the climax of an ecological sermon
to his readers, calling for conversion like the preacher in a Puritan jeremiad.
In this sense, Thoreau’s call for an ecological conversion is much more sub-
stantial than Emerson’s or Fuller’s.
Thoreau finds many of his most potent images of ecological spirituality
in the water of the ponds. Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson expand
on this connection between spirituality and water through their treatment
of the earth’s oceans in Melville’s Moby-Dick and his later poetry and in
Dickinson’s poetry across her career. This distinction of scale will become
important for the heterodox ecological spiritualities of both Melville and
Dickinson, as we shall see.
Reading Ecological Conversion with Herman Melville
and Emily Dickinson
Herman Melville could boast deep roots in evangelicalism and transcen-
dentalism alike. Melville grew up in the Dutch Reformed Church, of which
his mother, Maria Gansevoort Melville, was a member. This Calvinist back-
ground was one of many traits that he shared with his younger contemporary
Emily Dickinson. The traits that I trace in the following paragraphs are those
that combine the rigor of Melville’s and Dickinson’s Calvinist upbringing
with an impulse toward ecological spirituality that goes beyond that of their
transcendentalist peers.
Throughout Melville’s most influential novel, Moby-Dick, he seems
determined to put human society in dry land in its place. A notable instance
of this tendency appears in a chapter entitled “A Squeeze of the Hand,” where
Melville’s narrator, Ishmael, describes the process of squeezing oil from the
solidified sperm from the head of a whale that has just been hunted and killed:
65
As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass;
under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as
I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost
within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like
fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma, –literally and
truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky
meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my
hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm
is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free
from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.
Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself
almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and
I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers’ hands in it, mistaking their hands for
the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avo-
cation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands and looking up into their
eyes sentimentally; as much as to say, –Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer
cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze
hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves
universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.
(322–23)
Notably, Melville here presents the physical act of squeezing sperm as the
source of spiritual renewal, even as this spiritual renewal is enabled by an act
of violence: if the crew of the Pequod had not killed a whale, Ishmael could
not have experienced a sense of spiritual connection with his shipmates by
squeezing the sperm extracted from the whale. And yet there is a powerful
affirmation of the ecological sources of spirituality here as well. The tactile
feel of the spermaceti in the men’s hands is precisely what leads Ishmael to
his overarching picture of human unity and his sense of the spiritual signifi-
cance of shared labor.
A still more powerful statement on the relationship between the eco-
logical and the spiritual appears in a chapter entitled “The Grand Armada,”
where Melville reverses the metaphorical direction of earlier transcenden-
talist treatments of nature. In this chapter, Ishmael is observing a large herd
of sperm whales, and he is discovering that the world of the sperm whales
beneath the surface of the water both mirrors and transcends what he knows
of human society on land. In a tone of wonder, Ishmael relates what he sees
in the depths of the ocean:
But far beneath this wondrous world upon the surface, another and still stranger world met
our eyes as we gazed over the side. For, suspended in those watery vaults, floated the forms
of the nursing mothers of the whales, and those that by their enormous girth seemed shortly
to become mothers. The lake, as I have hinted, was to a considerable depth exceedingly
transparent; and as human infants while suckling will calmly and fixedly gaze away from
the breast, as if leading two different lives at the time; and while yet drawing mortal nour-
ishment, be still spiritually feasting upon some unearthly reminiscence; –even so did the
young of these whales seem looking up towards us, but not at us, as if we were but a bit of
66
Gulfweed in their new-born sight. Floating on their sides, the mothers also seemed quietly
eyeing us. One of these little infants, that from certain queer tokens seemed hardly a day
old, might have measured some fourteen feet in length, and some six feet in girth. He was a
little frisky; though as yet his body seemed scarce yet recovered from that irksome position
it had so lately occupied in the maternal reticule; where, tail to head, and all ready for the
final spring, the unborn whale lies bent like a Tartar’s bow. The delicate side-fins, and the
palms of his flukes, still freshly retained the plaited crumpled appearance of a baby’s ears
newly arrived from foreign parts.
(302–3)
Melville’s treatment of the “Grand Armada” of whales here exemplifies

his ability to expand the realm of sympathy beyond the human world. The
suggestion that baby whales could be entertaining reflections of a previous
world “even as” Melville suggests human infants do draws upon Melville’s
reading of William Wordsworth, and it emphasizes the potential of the natural
world to reshape the values and perceptions of human beings. Wordsworth’s
“Ode, On Intimations of Immortality from Early Childhood” argues that
humans carry with them knowledge of a previous existence, a knowledge
that can be awakened by contact with the natural world:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
(388; 5.1–19)
For Wordsworth, a connection to one’s ecological surroundings is a funda-

mental part of human spirituality, and nature affects us in such profound ways
because it is part of the fabric of our being as humans, and we only lose our
piety toward nature as a result of the corruptions of adulthood. That Melville
alludes to Wordsworth in relation to the nursing whales shows both his own
devotion to natural piety and his sense that Wordsworth’s and Emerson’s
versions of natural piety need to be extended: limiting one’s reverence for the
67
natural world to that which can easily be made into a metaphor for the human
mind is not enough, in ecological terms, for Melville.
Melville makes use of the transcendentalist ideal of a correspondence
between the natural world and the human soul, but he moves beyond this cor-
respondence as well, showing that the material and social life of whales does
not depend on human wishes to provide scenes of beauty and love. Indeed,
it is the intrusion of the human desire for wealth and power on the scene that
brings destruction to the beautiful scene that Ishmael observes when a whale
that has become entangled in the line of a cutting spade begins to unintention-
ally injure and slaughter his fellow whales.
Although Moby-Dick may be Melville’s most famous engagement with the
intersection of the spiritual and the ecological, it also inaugurates a pattern that
continues throughout his career. Melville’s late poetry provides an especially
powerful example of the way in which he continues to interrogate the interior
meanings of natural phenomena. In his poetry, Melville amplifies a tendency
that appears in Moby-Dick for him to use the sea to re-center the spiritual world
in nature rather than making nature a metaphor for human longings and desires.
If Ishmael comprehends his ecological surroundings more profoundly and
empathetically than many of his fellow sailors, and than many of Melville’s
contemporaries, his ecological spirituality is still closely tied to the individual
Emersonian eye in a way that the ecological spirituality of Melville’s speakers
in his later poems is not. In this sort of increasingly radical decentering of the
human self-relative to the natural world, Melville bears a close resemblance to
his poetic contemporary Emily Dickinson, especially when she writes about
the sea, which provides a much more common backdrop for her work than we
might expect from someone whom we usually think of as an inland poet.
Once we remind ourselves that Melville was a poet as well as a writer of
prose fiction, it does not come as a surprise that the sea is at the center of
much of his verse, or that he uses the sea and the threat to human life and
consciousness that it entails to extend some of his more famous observations
on the relationship between the human and the sublimity of the sea from his
prose works under a new form. There’s much to be said about Melville’s
obsession with naval warfare in Battle-Pieces and his constant invocations
of sailors (including a figure based on the Essex’s George Pollard, a man who
experienced the decentering power of the sea in as bodily a way as anyone
can and still survive, as Nathaniel Philbrick has pointed out in In the Heart
of the Sea) and menacing metaphysical reefs in Clarel. To that point, I want
to consider several moments from Melville’s last two books of poetry, John
Marr and Other Sailors and Timoleon, however. In the sequence of seven
brief epigrams entitled “Pebbles,” as referenced above, Melville shifts the per-
spective from the “Clerk of the weather” to a sea that is both “implacable”
68
and inhuman. As Wyn Kelley and Edgar Dryden have separately noted, these
poems “emphasize the priority of the natural or phenomenal over the human
… by emphasizing the power and force of language,” in Dryden’s words
(164), and they invoke a “post-human perspective,” as Kelley has put it (134).
John Bryant has suggested that “the sea, like his writing, was an alien thing,
into which Melville plunged his pain, and continually found redemption”
(xliii). Timoleon provides further suggestions of what Melville’s invocation of
human limits might portend: in the short poem “Buddha,” drowning at sea and
Nirvana appear as mutually illuminating metaphors for each other, as Melville
writes “Swooning swim to less and less, /Aspirant to nothingness! /Sob of
the worlds and dole of kinds/That dumb endurers be –/Nirvana absorb us
in your skies/Annul us into thee” (Published Poems 281). The swooning
swimmer who drowns becomes a double for the soul who experiences non-
attachment and is thus freed from the “sob of the worlds and dole of kinds.”
In both cases, human consciousness is necessarily destabilized. To take a third
example, in the poem “Venice” from “Fruits of Travel Long Ago,” likely the
earliest portion of Timoleon to be composed, Melville reverses the metaphoric
tendency to show a correlation between the human mind and nature, not so
much presenting a coral reef as an analogy for the city of Venice, as presenting
Venice as a flawed analogy for the reef and humans as inferior architects to the
coral polyp: the “little craftsman of the Coral Sea” “Up-builds his marvelous
gallery /And long arcade” while the human architects of Venice are “laborious
in a shallower wave, Advanced in kindred art.” Art begins with the coral polyp,
and appears in the human world as an attenuated analogy, under a “shallower
wave” (Published Poems 291). These moments in Melville’s poetry connect
closely with his images of ecological conversion in Moby-Dick, as in each
case, Melville uses humans’ ecological surroundings to suggest the limitations
of human power and human desires to hint toward a new way of life.
Dickinson’s ecological poetry might be associated by many of her readers
with her garden rather than with the ocean, but images of the sea capture
something particularly powerful about Dickinson’s version of eco-spirituality.
The poems have attracted some critical attention to date: Cristanne Miller
emphasizes Dickinson’s treatment of the “turban’d seas” as an example of
the cross-cultural dimensions in her poetry. I would hope to complement
this insight with a sense of how the sea also provides us with a Dickinson
who decenters human subjectivity through her use of images of the tides,
drowning, and the immensity of the sea. A briefer treatment of Dickinson’s
sea poetry appears in Francis V. Madigan’s “Mermaids in the Basement.” The
fact that the sea or ocean appear only rarely in Dickinson criticism should
not, however, obscure the powerfully generative role that this massive eco-
system plays in her work.
69
Dickinson’s own poetry provides many instances of how Dickinson can

find multiple resonances for the sea even in the briefest of her lyric poems,
and it is in these poems we come closest to the experience of conversion as
someone like Finney, or, before him, Jonathan Edwards would imagine it. It is
the size and power of the sea, its sheer sublimity and transcendence of human
needs, wishes, and desires, that reorient human perceptions in Dickinson’s
sea poetry. The sea can seem to be marginal, or perhaps circumferential, to
Dickinson, aside from “greatest hits”-type moments like “rowing in Eden –
ah, the Sea!” until one starts deliberately reading through her poetry looking
for references to the sea and/or drowning, at which point they appear at every
turn. What draws these numerous references together is a sense that Dickinson
is looking beyond the boundaries of the human world –beyond that which
we have the power to express, even metaphorically –to what David Francis
has described as “moving from the false necessity of naming something com-
patible with humanity … to the accurate necessity of letting no thing inhabit
language” (272), pressing up against what Sharon Cameron called in Lyric
Time the “human limit” of language (191). So, to point to two examples that
can stand for many more, in F 1446, Dickinson writes of “undulating Rooms
/Whose amplitude no end invades /Whose Axis never comes,” and in F
1689, she invokes “a syllable-less Sea /Of which it is the sign /My will
endeavors for its word/And fails …” In both cases, the metaphor evokes
more than it can contain: rooms have walls, but Dickinson’s waves have,
like St. Augustine’s deity, neither boundaries nor limitable centers, while the
syllable-less nature of the sea means that speech always falls short of identi-
fying “its word.” Here the sea’s vastness and its indefiniteness come together
to suggest the ways in which nature exceeds human cognition. In a third
poem, F 1542, the human is effaced in these waves altogether:
Drowning is not so pitiful
As the attempt to rise.
Three times, ’tis said, a sinking man
Comes up to face the skies,
And then declines forever
To that abhorred abode,
Where hope and heart part company –
For he is grasped of God.
The Maker’s cordial visage,
However good to see,
Is shunned, we must admit it,
Like an adversity.
Drowning, the sea, God, and the acknowledgment of the limits of the human
all coalesce superbly in this poem, much as Melville’s would-be Buddhist courts
nirvana through the image of the sea in Timoleon. Indeed, F 1542 provides
70
a window into how Dickinson’s religious thought and her prioritizing of the
material world come together powerfully in her poetry. “The attempt to rise”
suggests the Christian hope of a bodily resurrection, and it is juxtaposed against
the idea that drowning –death itself –has its own sort of cosmic dignity, which
accounts of human existence that seek to elide or triumph over death leave
out. Notably, the “maker’s cordial visage,” which is “shunned” by humans, is
associated directly with the abyss of the ocean, with the physical implacability
of the sea and the implacability of mortality seamlessly joined.
Even after noting the power with which Dickinson writes about the sea in
the later years of her career, we might still be surprised to note that Dickinson’s
references to the sea are present from the very earliest poems that she wrote
that are available to us. Her earliest poem dedicated to the sea appears as
number 3 in R. W. Franklin’s numbering of her poems, and it illustrates the
way in which Dickinson can take the treatment of the sea in popular forms and
extend it. Calling to mind the New England tradition of hymnody that draws
on the wind and the wave as a metaphor, Dickinson writes in her first stanza:
On this wondrous sea –sailing silently –

Ho! Pilot! Ho!
Knowest thou the shore
Where no breakers roar –
Where the storm is o’er?
This poem echoes the commonplace image of God as the Pilot upon
whom the wandering soul relies, and readers of Moby-Dick will recognize
the treatment of the sea in Father Mapple’s sermon and the psalm that his
congregants sing at the start of the service in the whaleman’s chapel. A poem
like this one sets the stage for the later moments in Dickinson’s career when
the image of a divine protector leading sailors across a hostile sea becomes
replaced by images of the sea in which the divine and the terrifyingly inhuman
become merged, and in which neither the sea nor the deity can convincingly
be anthropomorphized.
Dickinson’s invocations of the sea grow in their complexity across her
career. In the early poems, she seems primarily invested in noting the sea’s
power and status as a central instance of the sublime (including as both an obs-
tacle for the aspiring soul to overcome and as a model for that aspiring soul);
later in her career, she tends towards subtler psychological shading on the one
hand and more physical detail on the other. In F 143, Dickinson writes:
Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the Houses –past the headlands –
Into deep Eternity –
71
Bred as we, among the mountains,

Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?
Here, the sea becomes something other than an obstacle for a divine
“Pilot” to overcome: rather it stands in for the experience in which a human
consciousness becomes lost in something more powerful than itself. The
“inland soul” resembles the greenhorn sailor so common in both fictional and
non-fictional accounts of first voyages at sea (Melville’s Redburn, and, to a
lesser degree, Typee partake of this tradition), and it moves steadily from the
experiences that orient it to the world to the disorienting “divine intoxication
/ Of the first league out from land.” Here the sea is essential to Dickinson’s
vision precisely because of its capacity to reorganize and decenter human
perceptions, and if this decentering is unsettling, it is also exhilarating.
Similarly, a poem like F 152 reminds readers that not every craft is brought
safely to port by its pilot’s ministrations.
The diversity of Dickinson’s treatment of the sea in the middle portion
of her career is exemplified in several poems written, according to Franklin,
in 1863. In F 598, one of Dickinson’s most frequently anthologized poems,
she inverts the relationship between human consciousness and the sea on
display in F 143, suggesting that “The Brain is deeper than the sea –/For –
hold them –Blue to Blue –/The one the other will absorb –/As sponges –
buckets –do.” Dickinson invokes the size and power of the sea in this poem,
but here it is in service of what might initially seem to be an idealist con-
ceit: the entire cosmos, even the unfathomable leagues of the sea, can be
absorbed into human consciousness. And yet, the metaphor is more complex
than it initially appears. The human brain (not mind), may be able to absorb
the sea “As sponges –buckets –do,” thus suggesting the enormous power
of human consciousness, but the fact that consciousness is located in a part
of the human physical anatomy in this poem also reminds us of how tenuous
this power is: the sea contains, as Dickinson knew well from her earliest
poems, an ample quantity of human bodies and brains, and thus we can seem
ample human fragility hidden behind the audacious claims for the human
brain’s absorptive powers.
Precisely this capacity of the sea to engulf the human body and brain
appears in another poem from 1863, F 631. In this poem, Dickinson traces in
agonizing detail the process of drowning, concluding:
The River reaches to my Mouth –
Remember –when the Sea
Swept by my searching eyes –the last –
Themselves were quick –with Thee!
72
Here love and death come together in the image of drowning, with the con-
clusion suggesting that love persists in the moment of death, even as the sea
illustrates the inevitability of mortality and loss.
Both tendencies are on display in a third poem from 1863, F 656, a
whimsical poem that playfully captures both the sea’s power and the cap-
acity for mastery in human consciousness. In this poem, longer than most of
Dickinson’s works, she moves between lighthearted images of a walk with
her dog on the shore and “Mermaids in the Basement” and the grimmer pos-
sibility of being drowned by the incoming tide. Strikingly, the speaker avoids
drowning only because the sea, figured here as a courtly suitor, makes the
choice to release her: “And bowing –with a Mighty look –/At me –The Sea
withdrew.” The sea’s withdrawal is not a matter of human desire, but of its
own motion: the tides decide, not the speaker.
Dickinson’s use of the sea intensifies in her later poems, as she finds the
sorts of connections with mortality and the ways in which the sea provides a
rebuke to human egotism to be particularly compelling. In this, Dickinson’s
later poems on the sea resemble Melville’s pieces from John Marr and Other
Sailors. For Melville, the sea increasingly rebukes human pretensions, and
the voice in his late epigrams in “Pebbles” becomes increasingly detached
from human emotions and wishes. Dickinson provides a parallel, but dis-
tinct, experience in her late poems on the sea. In the period running from
1877 to 1880, Dickinson considers the sea and drowning in F 1446, F 1456,
F 1469, F 1503, and F 1542. The sense of threat to human autonomy is palp-
able in these verses: in 1446, the “undulating rooms” of the “Water” provide
a kind of hellscape in which “Rest” is “abhorrent”; in 1456, the “Pillage of
the Sea” becomes an apt means of describing the barriers to the expression of
“a delivered Syllable.” F 1469 pleads for deliverance from “whatsoever sea”
and 1503 proposes that “the only Vessel that is shunned /Is safe –Simplicity,”
when considering the “Shoal of Thought” that threatens to drown a soul at
sea. In each of these cases, the sea presents not just an obstacle to human
wishes, but the potential that humanity itself may be absorbed into a larger
whole. F 1542, as discussed above, provides one of Dickinson’s last extended
treatments of the sea, and her conclusion here is that sea reveals that the after-
life itself may be “abhorred” by human consciousness, “shunned, we must
admit it, /Like an adversity.” For Dickinson then, the sea remains, up until
her last years, a reminder of the limits of human desire and potential and of
the necessity of confronting and acknowledging these limits, which not even
a benevolent deity offers the possibility of easily transcending by this stage
in Dickinson’s career.
From Finney to Dickinson, then, religious conversion and ecological
awareness come into contact with each other repeatedly in nineteenth-century
73
American literature. If conversion in Protestant Christianity involves a sense

of one’s smallness and sinfulness next to a transcendent deity, nineteenth-
century American literary and religious figures show how the natural world
can provide both an impetus to an interior conversion through its sublimity
and a means of grace leading to such conversion, whether understood in theo-
logical or secular terms. For Finney and Emerson, an encounter with the nat-
ural world provides an amplification of what they already believe they know.
For Smith and Fuller, the experience seems to be more emphatically trans-
formative, and in Thoreau’s case, his reflections on ecology seem like the
preaching of the long converted. Melville and Dickinson, meanwhile, position
themselves at some analytic distance, finding ways to express the complex
effects of an encounter with the sublimity of nature upon the human brain. In
each case, the ecological and the spiritual prove to be necessary partners in
the religious and literary imagination of the nineteenth-century United States.
Note: Portions of the discussion of Dickinson above have appeared in a
different form in “Going to Sea in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Decentered
Humanism and Poetic Ecology,” published online in the “Lyrical Ecologies”
cluster at the Dickinson Electronic Archive.
Bibliography
Bryant, John, ed. Herman Melville: Tales, Poems and Other Writings. Modern Library, 2001.
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the
Formation of American Culture. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995.
Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1981.
Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition. Edited by R. W. Franklin.
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998.
Dryden, Edgar. Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career. Stanford
University Press, 2004.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson’s Prose and Poetry: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by
Joel Porte and Saundra Morris. W. W. Norton, 2001.
Finney, Charles Grandison. Memoirs of Charles G. Finney: An Autobiography. Trustees of
Oberlin College, 1876.
Francis, David. “The Giant at the Other Side: Emily Dickinson and the Inhuman.” Emily
Dickinson Journal vol. 5, no. 2, 1996, pp. 267–72.
Fuller, Margaret. “On Mystical Experience at 21.” 1840. In The Woman and the Myth: Margaret
Fuller’s Life and Writings. Feminist Press, 1976.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience. Longmans, 1905.
Kelley, Wyn. “Lauding the Inhuman Sea.” Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies vol. 17,
no.1, 2015, pp. 133–35.
Madigan, Francis V., Jr. “Mermaids in the Basement: Emily Dickinson’s Sea Imagery.” Greyfriar:
Siena Studies in Literature vol. 23, 1982, pp. 39–56.
Melville, Herman. Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Edited by Harrison
Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Northwestern
University Press and the Newberry Library, 1991.
74
——. Moby-Dick, Or The Whale: A Norton Critical Edition. 2nd edition. Edited by Hershel
Parker and Harrison Hayford. W. W. Norton, 2002.
——. Published Poems. Edited by Robert C. Ryan, Harrison Hayford, Alma MacDougall
Reising, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Northwestern University Press and the Newberry
Library, 2009.
Miller, Christanne. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. University
of Massachusetts Press, 2012.
Philbrick, Nathaniel. In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex. Penguin
Books, 2001.
Robertson, Michael. “‘Newborn Bard[s]‌of the Holy Ghost’: The American Bibles of Walt
Whitman and Joseph Smith.” In Above the American Renaissance: David S. Reynolds and
the Spiritual Imagination in American Literary Studies. Edited by Harold K. Bush and
Brian Yothers. University of Massachusetts Press, 2018.
Smith, Joseph. History of Joseph Smith, the Prophet, by Himself. Deseret News, 1902.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings: A Norton Critical
Edition. 3rd edition. Edited by William Rossi. W. W. Norton, 2008.
Walls, Laura Dassow. Henry David Thoreau: A Life. University of Chicago Press, 2017.
Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. James Kay, 1839.
Yothers, Brian. “Going to Sea in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry: Decentered Humanism and Poetic
Ecology.” In Lyrical Ecologies. Dickinson Electronic Archive. www.emilydickinson.org/
emily-dickinson-lyrical-ecologies-forays-into-the-field.
75
Green Calvinism: Reformed Protestant

Origins of Western Environmentalism
Mark Stoll
Any history of Western environmentalism, in any Western press, would

certainly list among its most prominent forerunners and founders the names
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,
George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Theodore Roosevelt, and Rachel Carson,
just to name the best known.1 There is a curious linkage between these dis-
parate figures. They were all raised in the Reformed Protestant tradition.
Reformed Protestants, often called Calvinists, have for centuries sought
spiritual inspiration in nature. More recently, they fundamentally shaped the
Western environmental movement. They have a rather well-deserved reputa-
tion for dour humorlessness, severe theology, and hypermoralism. Few really
would ascribe to them a love of nature like that of Rousseau or Muir.2 Yet
Reformed theologians like John Calvin expressed in their writings a passionate
preference for nature and a thoroughgoing suspicion of human nature that
blossomed in later centuries in Romanticism and environmentalism.
The “dark green” heartland of environmental activism coincides with
the historic “Calvinist Crescent” that stretches from Switzerland through
the Netherlands and Britain across the Atlantic to New England, New York,
and Pennsylvania.3 A map charting what has been called Light Green and
Dark Green mirrors a map of the Reformation division of Europe between
Catholics and Protestants. Similarly, the roots of American environmentalism
lie in the Congregational and Presbyterian traditions, which from eighteenth-
century origins along a Boston–Philadelphia axis spread westward across the
upper Midwest and on to northern California. Environmentalism has always
drawn its strength from this region.4
76
The house of Reformed Protestantism has many mansions. The largest

and most significant traditions descended from Puritanism in Britain and
America: Congregationalism of New England, Presbyterianism of Scotland
and Northern Ireland, and Nonconformism (Dissent) of England and Wales.
On the Continent, surviving Reformed churches concentrate in a swath from
Switzerland to the Netherlands, with important groups scattered throughout
Germany and France. The Church of England also absorbed much Reformed
influence. Dissidents preserved fragments of Reformed culture when they
established Unitarian, Universalist, Baptist and Anabaptist, and Campbellite
(Churches of Christ and Disciples of Christ) churches and the heterodox
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormonism).
In themselves, Calvinist tenets regarding the relationship of God, humanity,
and nature were unexceptional and shared by other Christian traditions.
However, Calvinists incorporated them into a zealous, all-encompassing
vision of a return to biblical religion. To Calvinists, true Christianity required
the reformation according to biblical design of the church, of course, but also
individuals, the family, society, government, intellectual life, and culture. As
they wrote the script for their godly society, Calvinists imagined nature, the
splendid theater of God’s glory, for its setting. Future generations kept the
theater but changed the script.
From the beginning, Protestantism firmly emphasized God’s presence
in nature. Martin Luther did so without deviating much from Christian
predecessors. Their humanist training seems to have pushed other Reformation
thinkers further. Balancing the Bible with Aristotle and Plato, Lutheran
theologian Philip Melanchthon argued that one studied God in nature but
experienced God in the heart.5 Reformed Protestantism developed a higher
regard for divine presence in creation than any other major Christian trad-
ition. Swiss Reformed leader Ulrich Zwingli’s “On Providence” cited clas-
sical authors more than the Bible when it ascribed everything that happened
in the universe to the power of God’s providence. Zwingli formulated this
radical doctrine of providence, which foreshadowed Calvin’s, as the founda-
tion of an argument for predestination.6
Calvin, Reformed Protestantism’s theological heavyweight, stressed that
nature was the most important source of knowledge of God outside the Bible.
Because Adam’s Fall had radically clouded human reason, Calvin specific-
ally rejected ancient and medieval proofs of God and the “empty specula-
tion” of natural philosophy.7 “Consequently,” he wrote, “we know the most
perfect way of seeking God … is not for us to attempt with bold curiosity
to penetrate to the investigation of his essence, … but for us to contem-
plate him in his works whereby he rendered himself near and familiar to
us, and in some manner communicates himself …. Because, disheartened
77
Green Calvinism 77
by his greatness, we cannot grasp him, we ought to gaze upon his works,
that we may be restored by his goodness.”8 Calvin confessed “that it can
be said reverently, provided it proceeds from a reverent mind, that nature is
God.”9 Calvin repeatedly characterized the universe “as a spectacle for God’s
glory”10 or as a “dazzling theater” of his glory.11 In descriptions of the Lord’s
glory in nature, Calvin waxed as poetic as he ever got:
It is evident that all creatures, from those in the firmament to those which are in the center
of the earth, are able to act as witnesses and messengers of his glory to all men; to draw
them to seek God, and after having found him, to meditate upon him and to render him the
homage befitting his dignity as so good, so mighty, so wise a Lord who is eternal; yea, they
are even capable of aiding every man wherever he is in this quest. For the little birds that
sing, sing of God; the beasts clamor for him; the elements dread him, the mountains echo
him, the fountains and flowing waters cast their glances at him, and the grass and flowers
laugh before him.12
Reformed Protestants again and again talked of God’s “book of nature,”

which complemented the book of revelation, the Bible. The invention of the
printing press and the proliferation of books may have been partly respon-
sible for the new popularity of the ancient metaphor of nature’s book, but the
term’s long and vigorous life points to the Protestant tenet of “sola scriptura,”
the Bible alone, as the predominant factor.13 Having rejected the authority
of the Roman Catholic Church for that of Scripture alone, Protestants now
added the book of nature as a supplementary authority.
Calvin himself never referred to the doctrine of the two books, but he
implied it when he warned that fallen man needed the Bible to interpret
nature correctly just as the aged needed “spectacles” to read clearly.14 The
Calvinist Belgic Confession of 1561 opened with a declaration of belief in
the existence of God and a list of his attributes. It went on to say, “We know
him … first, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe;
which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great
and small, are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible
things of God, namely, his eternal power and Godhead, as the Apostle Paul
saith (Rom. i. 20).”15
Disseminated and endlessly repeated in sermons, hymns, and books, the
metaphor became an inescapable cliché among Reformed Protestants until the
end of the nineteenth century. Guillaume du Bartas’s Devine Weekes, which
created an enormous sensation when it appeared in Joshua Sylvester’s 1604
English translation, proclaimed, “The World’s a Booke in Folio, printed all /
With God’s great Workes in Letters Capitall: /Each Creature, is a Page, and
each effect, /A faire Caracter, void of all defect.” In a nod to Calvin, he added
that “he that weares the spectacles of Faith” could easily read them.16 A century
later, in John Milton’s even more beloved Paradise Lost, the angel Rafael told
78
Adam that “Heav’n /Is as the book of God before thee set, /wherein to read
his wondrous works.”17 Early eighteenth-century Dissenter Isaac Watts put into
many of his popular hymns references to the book of nature as well as to the
presence in creation of God and his attributes, which Reformed congregations
sang on Sunday mornings for centuries to come.18 Countless books of religion,
poetry, and science from the early nineteenth on into the early twentieth cen-
tury referred to nature’s book. In 1857, New England poet Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow wrote a famous birthday tribute to noted Reformed scientist Louis
Agassiz in which Nature invited the infant Agassiz to “read what is still unread
/In the manuscripts of God.”19 A dozen years later young Muir wrote to thank
a professor “who first laid before me the book of Nature.” Muir would call his
geological researches reading God’s “glacial manuscripts.”20
If contemplation of nature inspired Calvinists to lyricism, consideration of
humanity moved them to dour censoriousness, another characteristic element
in Calvinism’s legacy for environmentalism. The goodness and beauty that
Calvin found in nature he was quite unable to see in humans, who by nature
were “vicious, perverse, corrupt, void, and deprived of all good, rich and
abundant in evil.”21 In contrast to the works of God, the works of man bore
imperfections and pollutions that mirrored the vanity and corruption of
depraved human nature.22 God’s word and his creation alone contained all
things pure and godly, while anything adverse or unpleasant in nature derived
from effects of human action or from God’s curse to punish Adam.23
Reformed theologians followed suit as they scorned the works of men in
nature and man’s inventions, or unscriptural innovations, in worship. Puritan
theologian William Ames published A Fresh Suit Against Human Ceremonies
in God’s Worship (1633) to push the point. Reformed jurist and theologian
Hugo Grotius stated in On the Truth of the Christian Religion (1627): “In
a word, That is in every particularly truly the Christian Religion, which
without any Mixture of human Invention, may be wholly ascribed to Christ
as Author.”24 After the Fall, wrote Milton in Paradise Lost (3.446–447), “…
Sin /With vanity had fill’d the works of men.” Watts, in his often-reprinted
Improvement of Mind of 1741, both echoed Calvin and foreshadowed the
Romantics and Transcendentalists:
When we are in the House or the City, wheresoever we turn our Eyes, we see the Works of
Men; when we are abroad in the Country, we behold more of the Works of God …. Fetch
down some Knowledge from the Clouds, the Stars, the Sun, the Moon, and the Revolutions
of all the Planets: Dig and draw up some valuable Meditations from the Depths of the Earth,
and search them through the vast Oceans of Water: Extract some intellectual Improvements
from the Minerals and Metals; from the Wonders of Nature among the Vegetables, and
Herbs, Trees, and Flowers … from the Birds and the Beasts, and the meanest Insect. Read
the Wisdom of God, and his admirable Contrivance in them all: Read his Almighty Power,
his rich and various Goodness, in all the Works of his Hands.25
79
Green Calvinism 79
In 1853, Theodore Parker, the great Boston Unitarian preacher, likewise

proclaimed,
Nature is man’s religious book, with lessons for every day. In cities men tread on an arti-
ficial ground of brick or stone, breathe an unnatural air, see the heavens only a handful at
a time, think the gas-lights better than the stars, and know little how the stars themselves
keep the police of the sky. Ladies and gentlemen in towns see Nature only at second-
hand. It is hard to deduce God from a brick pavement …. In the country men and women
are always in the presence of Nature, and feel its impulse to reverence and trust …. The
material world is the element of communion between man and God. To heedful men God
preaches on every mount, utters beatitudes in each little flower of spring.26
American Puritans retired to nature often for solitary prayer and medita-
tion. Ministers and devotional manuals encouraged “secret” meditation and
prayer. Small houses and large families made solitude difficult to find, so
men, women, and even children, often sought it in fields and the wilder-
ness.27 Roger Clap instructed his children to “Pray in Secret, though you
have not a Closet or Door to shut; you need none: You may Pray alone in
the Woods, as Christ did in the Mountain: You may Pray as you walk in
the Field, as Isaac did.”28 Poet Anne Bradstreet recounted a solitary medi-
tative autumn walk in her greatest poem, “Contemplations,” in which she
described the glories of sunset among the colorful trees “richly clad, yet void
of pride” and the religious lessons she drew.29 Jonathan Edwards recalled
that as a boy he “used to pray five times a day in secret …. I with some of
my school-mates joined together, and built a booth in a swamp, in a very
retired spot, for a place of prayer. And besides, I had particular secret places
of my own in the woods, where I used to retire by myself.”30 Edwards as a
young minister in New York City walked, meditated, and prayed at “a soli-
tary place, on the banks of Hudson’s River.”31 When he took a position as
pastor to the church in Northampton, Massachusetts, he would ride into the
woods to reflect, pray, meditate, and sometimes see visions.32 Born to poor
Calvinist farmers in Royalston, Massachusetts, in 1772 and raised in frontier
Bridgewater, Vermont, Abner Jones remembered that as a boy “I used fre-
quently to resort to secret prayer. The place which I chose for this purpose,
was at the foot of a rock, where it seemed there was a place carved out on
purpose for me to kneel down in.”33 From the very first days of settlement,
New Englanders from all stations sought solitary spots in nature to mediate
and communicate with God.
Puritans on both sides of the Atlantic not only contemplated creation for
knowledge of the Creator. Puritan divines placed the knowledge of God from
creation in the very first line of the Westminster Confession of 1647: “The
Light of Nature, and the works of Creation and Providence do so far manifest
the Goodness, Wisdom, and Power of God, as to leave men inexcusable.”34
80
One Westminster divine, Edmund Staunton, when traveling habitually

“entertained his Company with Heavenly discourse: And as variety of
objects did present themselves to him, he always drew excellent matter out of
them; glorifying God for the Wisdom, Power and Goodness which appeared
in the works of Creation, and Providence.”35 Bradstreet’s “Contemplations”
of nature’s beauty concluded, “Sure he is goodness, wisdom, glory, light, /
That hath this under world so richly dight.”36 Massachusetts minister Cotton
Mather similarly recorded of the pious young Nathaniel Mather (1669–1688),
“Hе considered that the whole creation was full of God; and that there was
not a leaf of grass in the field, which might not make an observer to be sens-
ible of the Lord.”37 In the afterglow of a religious experience, Edwards saw
“divine glory” in everything:
God’s excellency, his wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in the
sun, moon and stars; in the clouds, and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water,
and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. I often used to sit and view the moon,
for a long time; and so in the daytime, spent much time in viewing the clouds and sky, to
behold the sweet glory of God in these things: in the meantime, singing forth with a low
voice, my contemplations of the Creator and Redeemer.38
Ebenezer Hazard, a Presbyterian elder, member of the American

Philosophical Society, and Fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences,
wrote a friend in 1780 that “I never critically contemplate any of the works
of Nature without such views of the wisdom, the power, and the majesty of
God, as are rapturous and transporting.”39
From creation religious doubters generally reasoned the existence of God
as well as the truth of Christianity, Protestantism, and (usually) Calvinism.
Bradstreet described how nature soothed her religious doubts:
Many times hath Satan troubled me concerning the verity of the scriptures, many times by
Atheisme how I could know whether there was a God …. That there is a God my Reason
would soon tell me by the wondrous workes that I see, the vast frame of the Heaven and
the Earth, the order of all things, night and day, Summer and Winter, Spring and Autumne,
the dayly providing for this great houshold upon the Earth, the preserving and directing of
All to its proper end. The consideration of these things would with amazement certainly
resolve me that there is an Eternall Being.
From the existence of God, Bradstreet could reason her way to the truth
of the Bible and Protestantism.40 Similarly, Joseph Smith, Jr., an unlettered
farmer’s son and descendant of New England Puritans, recalled his troubled
mind as a teenager in the early spring of 1820. After searching the Bible,
I looked upon the sun the glorious luminary of the earth and also the moon rolling in their
magesty through the heavens and also the stars shining in their courses and the earth also
81
Green Calvinism 81
upon which I stood and the beast of the field and the fowls of heaven and the fish of the
waters and also man walking forth upon the face of the earth in magesty and in the strength
of beauty whose power and intiligence in governing the things which are so exceding great
and marvilous even in the likeness of him who created him [them] and when I considered
upon these things my heart exclaimed well hath the wise man said the [it is a] fool [that]
saith in his heart there is no God.41
This conception of nature as an avenue to knowledge of the divine has

virtually no social implications. German Lutheran Caspar David Friedrich’s
famous painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) portrays a solitary
figure, back to the viewer, contemplating the mysteries of untamed nature and
implies that mystical communion with the Spirit is best experienced alone.
Although corporate worship and hearing the preaching of the God’s Word
remained central to Protestantism, salvation itself was a lonely business. The
Catholic Church offered many aids to salvation, among them the mass, vener-
ation of Mary and the saints and their relics, miraculous events, pilgrimages,
and confession. In a doctrine both liberating and terrifying, Protestantism
stripped them all away and left the individual alone before God.42
Among Calvinists and their descendants, a psychology of preference for
solitude developed. The dark Reformed view of depraved human nature
shaped patterns of childrearing, along with Calvin’s teaching, developed at
length in the Institutes, that the sum of Christian life is the denial of our-
selves, to a degree never before required of lay Christians outside monas-
tery walls.43 A Christian life was a controlled and orderly life. “The gloomy
doctrine of Calvinism,” as Max Weber noted, gave “the motive to constant
self-control and thus to a deliberate regulation of one’s own life.” In the pro-
cess it suppressed “the spontaneous vitality of impulsive action and naïve
emotion.”44 Reformed parents sought to suppress pride in children as the root
of all other sin and to break their wills, that they might submit to God’s will
instead. Parents regarded it their duty to suppress children’s pride and sinful
deeds through fault-finding, scolding, and punishment.45
Especially in the relatively open landscape of America, nature offered
an escape from carping parents and society and solace among the unfallen
creatures of creation. Wilderness comforted young Hosea Ballou, born in
1771 to strict Calvinists in the frontier town of Richmond, New Hampshire.
Noting the area’s natural beauty, his biographer commented, “Nature smiled
an early benediction on [Ballou] …. It was impossible for even Calvinism
to make him in his early years altogether unhappy.” Years later, while riding
on a beautiful New England October day, Ballou paused to admire the view
and remarked, “What a mild and holy religion is breathed by Nature in such
a scene as this! It teaches no terror, no gloom; it rouses no fierce passions in
the heart; it is calm, it is forgiving.”46 Muir remembered nature also as a safe
82
haven and kind teacher, as “those terrible [religious] lessons quickly faded
away in the blithe wilderness air.”47 “On Sundays, after or before chores and
sermons and Bible-lessons,” he and his siblings played in the fields and woods
and on a lake, “getting finest lessons and sermons from the water and flowers,
ducks, fishes, and muskrats.”48 Raised Congregationalist, Thoreau got similar
satisfaction from nature, living alone at Walden Pond: “Yet I experienced
sometimes that the most sweet and tender, the most innocent and encour-
aging society may be found in any natural object, even for the poor misan-
thrope and most melancholy man. There can be no very black melancholy to
him who lives in the midst of nature and has his senses still.”49
The Reformed search for God in nature engendered a powerful yearning for
Eden, where humankind lost closeness to God; harmony with and dominion
over animals; beautiful and fruitful plants all around; pleasant labor; and
blissful happiness. Into the world Adam’s sin brought pain and sorrow, sweat
and labor, sin and death and imbued descendants with a depraved nature
deserving damnation. Fascination with Eden originated among French
Calvinists in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Answering the
Calvinist call to Christianize all aspects of life, poetry and the arts among
them, Du Bartas pioneered the adaptation of classical forms of poetry, espe-
cially the epic, for other than pagan or secular themes. His renowned 1578
poem La première semaine (“The First Week”) was enormously popular and
appeared in at least forty-two editions in many languages.50 Milton had Du
Bartas close at hand in the 1650s and 1660s while writing his own perennially
popular Christian epic, Paradise Lost.51 Paradise Lost attained astonishing
influence, a second Scripture that replaced the Genesis account in the minds
of Puritans and Reformed Protestants.
Reformed Protestant use of the Bible as universal template affected
gardening as well. French Calvinists developed an early interest in gardens
based on Eden or the Bible. Christians had always linked gardens and Eden,
but the Calvinist distrust of pleasure without purpose and desire for biblical
sanction for every aspect of life gave Calvinists an especially strong interest
in Edenic gardens. They created a new style of garden design and dominated
landscape gardening in Catholic France during the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries.52 Protestants wrote all the great French agricultural
and gardening manuals of the era. Gardening manuals included agricultural
advice, possibly due to an unstated goal of restoring the earth’s fertility to its
state before the Fall, a theme that emerged explicitly in English agricultural
manuals of the next century, but certainly due to the overriding Calvinist
search for order –in the self, in society, in creation and man’s relation to it,
and in heaven itself.53 The 1572 L’agriculture et maison rustique of Charles
Estienne and Jean Liébault began with Estienne’s remark that nothing more
83
Green Calvinism 83
aroused the human spirit, delighted the senses, or engendered a great admir-
ation of the effects of God and nature, than agriculture, which showed in the
works of nature the incomprehensible power and greatness of God.54 Olivier
de Serres’s Le theatre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (“Theater of
Agriculture”) of 1600 was perhaps the very first agricultural manual based
on scientific experimentation and a founding work of agronomy.55 Royal
gardener Jacques Boyceau de la Barauderie, author of the classic Traité du
jardinage selon les raisons de la nature et de l’art of 1638, designed the gar-
dens of the Louvre, the Tuileries, the Luxembourg, Versailles, and even the
Château de Richelieu.56
In the sixteenth century English garden books began to appear. English
authors quite noticeably referred to Eden even in the titles of their gardening
manuals, beginning with Sir Hugh Plat’s Floraes Paradise in 1608,
republished as The Garden of Eden in 1653 to greater success and in sev-
eral editions. Ralph Austen, in The Spirituall Use, of an Orchard; or Garden
of Fruit-Trees of 1653, meditated on Adam’s original labor and the moral
benefits of planting and working orchards and vineyards, where the teachings
of the books of nature and scripture closely harmonized. “Fruit-trees and
other Creatures doe truely … Preach Attributes and perfections of God to
us,” he wrote.57
Paradise Lost dramatically changed English formal gardens. Milton’s
Christian epic described the Garden of Eden in exquisite detail. Milton
envisioned a garden shaped by the hand of God and not the hand of man,
where grew “Flours worthy of Paradise which not nice Art /In Beds and
curious Knots [i.e., an intricately designed flowerbed], but Nature boon /
Powrd forth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plaine” (4.241–243). The poet
explicitly rejected artificial order for a more natural beauty. By 1720,
English owners repeatedly cited Milton as their authority as they tore out
their geometric French gardens for the more naturalistic beauty of the new
English garden. Milton’s taste remained a Protestant taste until Geneva-born
Rousseau popularized the English garden to the French in his Julie, ou la
nouvelle Heloïse of 1771, the bestselling book of the century. Rousseau’s
personal religious journey ended in a deism in which God remained present
in creation, very much in the Calvinist sense. His works, more than those of
any other author, spread appreciation of wild nature throughout Europe and
laid the groundwork for the Green movement.58
By the eighteenth century, behind the gates of Reformed Protestantism
thronged a crowd of ideas about nature, as a place to find and come close
to God, as a source of solace and comfort, as an unfallen Eden free of
man’s corrupt works, and as a garden for meditation. English Calvinism
had begun to rot and crumble, liberating these notions of nature from the
84
stern, dark theology that had long held and sustained them. Calvinism of the
periphery and provinces –in France and Switzerland, in the Netherlands,
in Scotland, and in America –maintained its strength, although in the
United States doubters and apostates were already preparing the ground
for Transcendentalism. The first two centuries of English colonization in
America had been planting time, when the Reformed ideals of nature and
landscapes had taken root and matured. In the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies they burst forth in profuse flower, amidst other Reformed elements of
Calvinism’s legacy to American environmentalism: a well-developed doc-
trine of stewardship, a motivation to defend Edenic nature, a moralistic sus-
picion of human motives and works, and an often somewhat self-righteous
drive to convert others to the cause.
These ideals shaped the history and principles of environmental movements
in the areas dominated by the Protestant Reformation, with the central eth-
ical and moral principles emanating particularly strongly from the Calvinist
Crescent. In nations with substantial Catholic populations, such as America,
Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, environmentalism has been
almost entirely a Protestant enterprise. In regions where they are a minority,
such as France, they make up an outsized proportion of Green leadership.
Descendants of Congregationalists and Presbyterians nearly completely
dominated the American conservation and parks movements and the later
environmental movement. Congregationalists came first. People like
Frederick Law Olmsted created the city parks movement, with state parks
created to preserve places of natural beauty not far behind. New Englanders
led the way in creating the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, in 1872.
The Anglophone world enthusiastically welcomed the idea and parks sprang
up quickly in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the British Empire.59 With
the expansion of the national parks in 1890, Presbyterian-and Disciples-
raised Muir became the parks’ spokesman. George Perkins Marsh’s sem-
inal Man and Nature of 1864 set off the global conservation and American
forestry movements. Presbyterian-raised Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford
Pinchot promoted conservation and organized the National Forest system.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the writings and activism of Rachel Carson, David
Brower, and Edward Abbey, all former Presbyterians, propelled the environ-
mental movement to the peak of its influence.60
The “darkest” Green movements, as measured by love of wild, uninhabited
nature and a moral or spiritual tinge, are in historically Calvinist states. The
Green movement of Switzerland is largely a product of the Protestant north,
where there is a strong interest in nature. Geneva has continued to produce
major figures ranging from Rousseau to the late naturalist and painter Robert
Hainard. Switzerland established Europe’s first national park in 1914.61
85
Green Calvinism 85
In the Netherlands, an influential and long-lived Vereniging tot Behoud

van Natuurmonumenten (Society for Preservation of Nature Monuments)
appeared in 1905 among numerous other nature organizations. But along-
side protection of cultural monuments existed a Calvinist-style preference
for wild, unpeopled landscapes in the American style. The Dutch run some
nature preserves with an eye to recreating a pre-human landscape, a goal
nearly unique in Europe. The Dutch actually removed inhabitants to create
a park on the island of Tiengemeten. Dutch conservationists and scientists
for many decades have shown a global environmental consciousness and
awareness of the interconnectedness of life, often expressed in romantic
or spiritual terms. They valued Nature as a source for human inspiration.
Dutch conservationists, such as Egbert de Vries in his influential De aarde
betaalt: de rijkdommen der aarde en hun betekenis voor wereldhuishouding
en politiek (1948), for many decades have charged humans with a moral
responsibility to respect the earth’s living things, tinged with a Calvinistic
sense of stewardship of the earth. Amoral capitalism must be restrained. The
Dutch Green Party, formed in 1985, adopted a platform that was holistic
and ecologistic, describing humankind, earth, and the universe as one inter-
dependent whole. The need to convert each individual to the proper attitude
towards nature, which would lead to the adoption of a more environmentally
attuned lifestyle, is a basic principle of Kleine Aarde (Small Earth), founded
1971 to change people’s lifestyles.62
In France, where Protestants form a tiny minority of the population, the
Green movement has been shaped by Protestants throughout its history. In
the 1930s in Bordeaux, a group of Protestants rejected Catholic communi-
tarian personalism for a spiritual version based on reconnecting with nature.
Its leaders Jacques Ellul and Bernard Charbonneau, would write many of
the basic texts of the French Greens, while members Denis de Rougemont
founded ECOROPA and Claude Chevalley led Survivre et Vivre.63 In 1969
in Alsace, the one Protestant region of France, Jeunes Femmes, a Protestant
feminist group led by Solange Fernex, convened a meeting to discuss pol-
itical environmentalism that helped some radicals make the transition from
May 1968 to environmental radicalism in the 1970s. One who attended
was Antoine Waechter, an Alsatian Catholic active in the Student Christian
movement in 1963 who was later co-founder in 1984 and Presidential
candidate in 1988 of Les Verts and continued to work with Fernex. Brice
Lalonde, son of an Alsatian Jew and a Scottish mother, who he recalls gave
him his love of nature, founded the French Friends of the Earth in 1970
and the party Generation Écologie in 1990 and served as Minister of the
Environment from 1988 to 1991.64 Green parties moreover have always
done well in Alsace.
86
In historically Protestant Britain, the established Church of England

moderated Calvinist Dissenter influence, leaving a religiously informed
love of nature with less Calvinistic moralism. Nature poetry like William
Wordsworth’s retains perennial popularity and popular poets high and low
formerly wrote religiously of nature. The middle-class British poet John
Clare, for example, in the early nineteenth century lamented the loss of
oaks “to the axe of the spoiler and self interest” and compared the lost old
trees to “pulpits I shall never see again.” Gilbert White’s Natural History
and Antiquities of Selbourne of 1789 has gone through numerous editions
for over two centuries. The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or
Natural Beauty was founded as early as 1895 (although a Commons, Open
Spaces and Footpaths Preservation Society appeared even earlier, in 1865).
In the last century, the overtly religious view usually evolved into references
to the inspiring qualities of natural beauty. The 1945 Dower Report, which
led to the creation of Britain’s first national parks in 1949, for example,
declared that the two “dominant purposes” of the parks were preservation
of “the characteristic beauty of the landscape” and access for “open-air rec-
reation and enjoyment of beauty,” without a mention of social or economic
utility. Studies show that British Greens tend to believe strongly in a Deep-
Ecology-style biocentrism and aim to convince individuals to guide their
lives by environmental principles. Due to British political structure, a sep-
arate Green Party has struggled, achieving little success, yet the mainstream
parties have not hesitated to adopt “green” principles. While the German idea
of nature monuments has clearly been at work in Britain, the English in add-
ition continue to refer to the spiritual and moral aspects of nature.65
The other Protestant nations of Europe have also been deeply Green, albeit
less affected by Romantic nature religion of the Reformed variety. Since
the 1980s, the German Green movement has been the envy of European
Greens, attaining respectable returns and winning local and national govern-
ment offices.66 Lutheran clergy played significant roles in the environmental
movement in both East and West Germany.67 The largest solidly Protestant
region of the world, Lutheran Scandinavia, furnishes many examples of a
strong love of nature and environmental protection. In 1973, Norwegian
Arne Naess originated the doctrine of natural organic holism known as
Deep Ecology, in which he preached a holistic view of man-in-nature and a
“biospherical egalitarianism.”68 As in Germany, Lutherans in Denmark have
been active, drawing on their tradition of Christian existentialism to empha-
size the ecological responsibility of every individual, leading to a focus on
personal commitment and activism.69
There are many similarities between environmentalism and Green parties
in Protestant and Catholic Europe and between Reformed and non-Reformed
87
Green Calvinism 87
environmentalists in the United States, where non-Reformed figures have

dominated the wilderness movement from the beginning and everywhere
since the 1970s. The timing of the foundation of the major conservation
organizations –during the periods 1890 to 1918, the 1950s to 1970s, and the
rise of Greens in the 1970s and 1980s –is nearly identical, although Catholic
organizations lagged in timing and achievement. The impact of 1960s radic-
alism and the 1970s anti-nuclear movement is a story common to nearly all
European Green movements. Green emphases on direct democracy, decen-
tralization, and various progressive social goals are fairly universal. Yet
Protestants speak in a language of ecological holism and moralism that can
be traced to moral perspectives characteristic of and propagated by Protestant
churches and perpetuated by education, parents, and culture. This moral
viewpoint has transitioned from a religious to a cultural element that persists
after lapse of faith or practice. Like a compass, it guides us no matter which
destination we fix upon. For Protestants, and most especially for Reformed
Protestants, nature has a prominent point on the moral compass and has
guided the formative history of conservation, parks, and environmentalism.
Notes
1 Browsing through American and European general histories of environmentalism and
nature protection, I have consistently come across these names. Other figures dominate
local and national histories. See below.
2 For example, Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 5th edn. (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 23–26.
3 In 1973, Der Spiegel identified a “Protestant Belt” as the source of a new European envir-
onmental morality, a region identical with the historical core of Reformed Protestantism.
Together with the historical Reformed heartland of the United States, the regions form
a trans-Atlantic crescent. “Untergang durch Wohlstand?” Der Spiegel 27(2) (8 January
1973): 40.
4 Mark R. Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American
Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), chs. 1–5. See also Jean
Viard, Le tiers espace: Essai sur la nature (Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 1990); and
David J. Vogel, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Environmentalism: The Cultural
Roots of Green Politics and Polities,” Zeitschrift für Umweltpolitik und Umweltrecht 3
(2002): 297–322.
5 Ralph Keen, “Naturwissenschaft und Frömmigkeit bei Melanchthon,” in Melanchthon
und die Naturwissenschaften seiner Zeit, Günter Frank and Stefan Rhein, eds.
(Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1998), 76. See also Günter Frank, “Gott und Natur: zur
Transformation der Naturphilosophie in Melanchthons humanisticher Philosophie,”
and Dino Bellucci, “Gott als Mens: die ‘aliqua physica definitio’ Gottes bei Philipp
Melanchthon,” in the same collection.
6 Ulrich Zwingli, “Reproduction from Memory of a Sermon on the Providence of God,
Dedicated to His Highness, Philip of Hesse, August 20, 1530,” in On Providence and
Other Essays, William John Hinke, ed. (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1983 [1922]). For
a comparison of Luther’s, Zwingli’s, Melanchthon’s, and Calvin’s doctrine of God and
nature, see Susan Schreiner, The Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in
the Thought of John Calvin (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1991), 115–122.
88
7 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., Ford Lewis Battles, trans., John
T. McNeill, ed. (London: SCM Press, 1960), 1.5.9; 1.5.11–12 (hereafter cited as Calvin
with relevant reference).
8 Calvin, 1.5.9.
9 Calvin, 1.5.5.
10 Calvin, 1.5.5.
11 Calvin, 1.5.8; 1.6.2; 1.14.20; 2.6.1; 3.9.2; and frequently throughout his other works.
12 John Calvin, “Preface to Olivétan’s New Testament,” in Jean Calvin and Joseph Haroutunian,
Calvin: Commentaries, Joseph Haroutunian, trans. (Philadelphia: Westminster Press,
1958), 59–60. On Calvin and nature, see Schreiner; William Bouwsma, John Calvin: A
Sixteenth-Century Portrait (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 33–34, 102–
109, 163–166; and Bernard Cottret, Calvin: A Biography, M. Wallace McDonald, trans.
(Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 312–313.
13 Klaas van Berkel and Arjo Vanderjagt, “Introduction,” in Klaas van Berkel and Arjo
Vanderjagt, eds., The Book of Nature in Early Modern and Modern History (Leuven:
Peeters, 2006), ix.
14 Calvin, 1.6.1. Cf. 1.14.20–22. Instead of the Book of Nature, Calvin had preferred the
popular medieval metaphor of the “mirror” of nature. Peter Harrison, “The ‘Book of
Nature’ and Early Modern Science,” in van Berkel and Vanderjagt, 2–7. See, for example,
Calvin, 1.5.1.
15 Authorized translation of the Reformed (Dutch) Church in America.
16 Guillaume Salluste du Bartas, The Divine Weeks and Works of Guillaume de Saluste Sieur
du Bartas, vol. 1, Joshua Sylvester, trans., Susan Snyder, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1979), 173–176, 193.
17 John Milton, Paradise Lost, 8.66–68.
18 Isaac Watts, The Psalms of David, Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, 12th
edn. (London: R. Hett and J. Brackston, 1740), see Psalm 19 (all versions), 111, 148.
19 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “The Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz, May 28, 1857,” widely
anthologized.
20 William Frederic Badè, The Life and Letters of John Muir, vol. 1 (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1924), 143, 306 (hereafter Muir).
21 Calvin, “Preface,” 59.
22 Calvin, 1.4.3. See also 1.11–12; 4.8.3, 4, 8, 9, 11, 13; 4.9.8; 4.10.8, 16–18.
23 Calvin, 2.1.5; 2.6.1.
24 Hugo Grotius, The Truth of the Christian Religion, vol. 1, John Clarke, trans., 2nd edn.
(London: J. Knapton, 1719), 298.
25 Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind: or, a Supplement to the Art of Logick
(London: J. Brackstone, 1741), 50–51.
26 Theodore Parker, “Of Conscious Religion and the Soul,” in Ten Sermons of Religion
(Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Co., 1853), 154–155.
27 Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in
Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1982), 156–194.
28 Roger Clap, Memoirs of Capt. Roger Clap (Boston: David Clap, 1844 [originally
published 1731]), 49.
29 Anne Bradstreet, “Contemplations,” verse 1, in The Works of Anne Bradstreet in Prose
and Verse, John Harvard Ellis, ed. (Charleston, MA: Cutter, 1867), 370.
30 Jonathan Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Harry
S. Stout, ed., vol. 16: Letters and Personal Writings, George S. Claghorn, ed. (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 790–791.
31 Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” 797.
32 Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” 801.
33 Abner Dumont Jones, Memoir of Elder Abner Jones (Boston: Crosby, 1842), 1, 10, 12–13.
89
Green Calvinism 89
34 The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines, Now by Authority of Parliament sitting at
Westminster, Concerning a Confession of Faith (London: E. Tyler, 1647), 1.
35 Samuel Clarke and Richard Baxter, “The Life and Death of Dr. Edmund Staunton,” in The
Lives of Sundry Eminent Persons in This Later Age (London: T. Simmons, 1683), 175.
36 Bradstreet, “Contemplations,” verse 2, in Ellis, 370.
37 Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, vol. 2 (Hartford, CT: Andrus, 1953), 169.
38 Edwards, “Personal Narrative,” 793–794.
39 Ebenezer Hazard to Jeremy Belknap, June 27, 1780, in Collections of the Massachusetts
Historical Society, fifth series, vol. 2 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society,
1877), 59.
40 Bradstreet, “To my Dear Children,” in Ellis, 8.
41 Joseph Smith, Jr., “A History of the Life of Joseph Smith,” in Personal Writings of Joseph
Smith, Dean Jessee, ed. (Salt Lake City, UT: Deseret, 1984), 2–3. The spelling is Smith’s.
42 Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner’s, 1971), 25–176.
43 Calvin, 3.3.8, 3.7 entire.
44 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Talcott Parsons, trans.
(New York: Dover, 2003), 126.
45 Philip J. Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-Rearing, Religious
Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977), 3–150; Leigh
Eric Schmidt, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 63–100.
46 Oscar Fitzalan Safford, Hosea Ballou: A Marvellous Life-Story (Boston: Universalist
Publishing House, 1890), 15, 18, 21, 36–37, 247–248.
47 Muir, 77.
48 Muir, 118.
49 Henry D. Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854), 142.
50 Arthur Tilley, The Literature of the French Renaissance, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1904), 36– 37; Bruno Braunrot, L’imagination poétique chez Du
Bartas: Éléments de sensibilité baroque dans la création du monde (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina, Department of Romance Languages, 1973), 11–13.
51 George Coffin Taylor, Milton’s Use of Du Bartas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1934).
52 Catharine Randall, Building Codes: The Aesthetics of Calvinism in Early Modern Europe
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), ch. 3; Leonard N. Amico,
Bernard Palissy: In Search of Earthly Paradise (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), ch. 5.
53 Jim Bennett and Scott Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, and the Temple:
Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Museum of the
History of Science, 1998), 42–71.
54 Dedication to Charles Estienne and Jean Liebault, L’agriculture, et maison rustique; plus
un Bref recueil des chasses … et de la fauconnerie (Lyon: Jaques du Puys, 1583).
55 Olivier de Serres, Theatre d’agriculture et mesnage des champs (Paris: J. Métayer, 1600).
56 Jacques Boyceau, Traité du jardinage, selon les raisons de la nature et de l’art (Paris: M.
Vanlochom, 1638); discussion of Eden and God’s presence in His works, 1–5; Chandra
Mukerji, “Material Practices of Domination: Christian Humanism, the Built Environment,
and Techniques of Western Power,” Theory and Society 31(1) (2002): 1–34.
57 Quoted in Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–
1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), 508; see also 477–483; Bennett and Mandelbrote,
50–51.
58 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a
Small Town at the Foot of the Alps, Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché, trans., vol. 6 of The
Collected Writings of Rousseau, Roger D. Masters and Christopher Kelly, eds. (Hanover,
NH: University Press of New England, 1997); Robert Darnton, “Readers Respond to
Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity,” in The Great Cat Massacre and
90
Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 215–

256; Mavis Batey, “Two Romantic Picturesque Flower Gardens,” Garden History
22(2) (1994): 198–199. See also Dora Wiebenson, The Picturesque Garden in France
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), ch. 2; Gilbert F. LaFreniere, “Rousseau
and the European Roots of Environmentalism,” Environmental History Review 14(4)
(1990): 41–72.
59 See Jean-Paul Harvey, “National Parks: A 100-Year Appraisal”; Harold J. Coolidge,
“Evolution of the Concept, Role and Early History of National Parks”; and Herbert
Offner, “Western Europe,” all in World National Parks: Progress and Opportunities,
Richard van Osten, ed. (Brussels: Hayez, 1972).
60 Many books chronicle the American environmental movement; only Stoll, Inherit the
Holy Mountain, gives attention to religious background.
61 Patrick Kupper, Creating Wilderness: A Transnational History of the Swiss National
Park (New York: Berghahn, 2014).
62 See Henny van der Windt, En dan: wat is natuur nog in dit land? Natuurbescherming in
Nederland 1880–1990 (Amsterdam: Boom, 1995); H. P. Gorter, Ruimte voor natuur: 80
jaar bezig voor de natuur van de toekomst (’s-Graveland: Vereniging tot Behoud
van Natuurmonumenten in Nederland, 1986); Benoît Rihoux, “Belgium: Greens in a
Divided Society” and Gerrit Voerfman, “The Netherlands: Losing Colours, Turning
Green,” both in The Green Challenge: The Development of Green Parties in Europe,
Dick Richardson and Chris Rootes, eds. (London: Routledge, 1995); Andrew Jamison,
Ron Eyerman, Jacqueline Cramer, with Jeppe Læssøe, The Making of the New
Environmental Consciousness: A Comparative Study of the Environmental Movements
in Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1990), 121–166; Paul Lucardie, Jelle van der Knoop, Wijbrandt van Schuur, and Gerrit
Voerman, “Greening the Reds or Reddening the Greens? The Case of the Green Left
in the Netherlands,” in Wolfgang Rüdig, Green Politics Three (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1995).
63 Christian Roy, “Ecological Personalism: The Bordeaux School of Bernard Charbonneau
and Jacques Ellul,” Ethical Perspectives 6(1) (1999): 33–44. See also Christian Roy, “Entre
pensée et nature: le personnalisme gascon,” in Bernard Charbonneau: Une vie entière à
dénoncer la grande imposture, Jacques Prades, ed. (Ramonville Saint-Agne: Erès, 1997.
64 Jean Jacob, “L’homme et la nature: Un débat de 1969 …,” Histoire & Anthropologie 25(2)
(2002): 181–191; and Brice Lalonde, Sur la vague verte (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1981).
See also Jean-Paul Ribes, Pourquoi les écologistes font-ils de la politique? Entretiens de
Jean-Paul Ribes avec Brice Lalonde, Serge Moscovici, René Dumont (Paris: Éditions du
Seuil, 1978).
65 See John Sheail, An Environmental History of Twentieth- Century Britain
(New York: Palgrave, 2002), ch. 5, and p. 263; Mike Robinson, The Greening of British
Party Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), ch. 1; Lynn G. Bennie,
Mark N. Franklin, and Wolfgang Rüdig, “Green Dimensions: The Ideology of the British
Greens,” in Rüdig; I. G. Simmons, An Environmental History of Great Britain: From
10,000 Years Ago to the Present (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001); and
T. C. Smout, Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern
England since 1600 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
66 See, for Germany, Anna Bramwell, Ecology and the 20th Century: A History (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Raymond H. Dominick III, The Environmental
Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871– 1971 (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992); E. Gene Franklin, “Germany: The Rise, Fall and Recovery
of Die Grünen,” in Richardson and Rootes; and Margit Mayer and John Ely, eds.,
The German Greens: Paradox between Movement and Party (Philadelphia: Temple
91
Green Calvinism 91
67 Dominick, 207–208; Nathan Stoltzfus, “Public Space and the Dynamics of Environmental
Action: Green Protest in the German Democratic Republic,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte
43 (2003): 385–403; Scott Moranda, People’s Own Landscape: Nature, Tourism, and
Dictatorship in East Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014), 156–
159, 166–175.
68 Arne Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, David Rothenberg, trans. and ed.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
69 Jamison et al., 66–114.
92
The Symbolic Garden and the Spiritual

Understanding of Nature in Byzantium
Kirsty Stewart
Since Lynn White’s assertion that the current ecological crisis directly
relates to the Western Christian attitudes towards nature, discussion on reli-
gion and nature has tended to present the Eastern religions as examples of
positive engagement with the environment in contrast to Christianity.1 More
recently, a number of articles have addressed the Orthodox Christian engage-
ment with the natural world, particularly in relation to Byzantine theologians,
highlighting a more positive approach to nature within the medieval Christian
world.2
One text which has not yet benefitted from such a study is the Θεορετικος
παραδεισος or The Symbolic Garden.3 This text was written in Byzantium,
probably during the tenth or eleventh century, and can be found in two
manuscripts: Laurentianus GR. Plut. 10. 3, dateable to the twelfth century,
and Clarkianus 11, a fourteenth-century manuscript in the Bodleian Library,
Oxford.4 It presents a garden, whether real or imagined is unclear, and
discusses each element of it with a religious interpretation.
The culture which produced this work, the Byzantine Empire, existed for
around a thousand years (c. 330–1453), perceiving itself as the Eastern Roman
Empire, the successor to Greek knowledge, and, as the seat of the Ecumenical
Patriarch, as the heart of the Christian Orthodox faith. The Orthodox religion
pervaded most, if not all, aspects of daily life in Byzantium, including ideas on
food and clothing, interactions between people, and human interactions with
the world around them. Looking at the natural world through Byzantine eyes
thus gives us a view coloured by classical ideas and informed by Orthodox
93
The Symbolic Garden and Nature in Byzantium 93
Christianity, distinct from Western theological concepts of Creation, but

nevertheless familiar and connected to these.
The Symbolic Garden
The Symbolic Garden indicates in its preface that it has two authors, the
one continuing the work of the other.5 Although the text is anonymous, the
two translators of this text, Thomson and Rigo, agree that at least the later
author came from a monastic background and was writing for a monastic
audience. Margaret Thomson describes the second author as more ‘effusive’
than the first and considers the preface and most of folios 18v to 34v of the
Laurentianus manuscript to have been written by the later author.6 Folios
9v to 18v of the manuscript thus form the ‘original’ text. Rigo agrees that
only the first seven plants discussed in the text were included in the original
work.7 Five plants have therefore been added by the later author, as well as
the preface and apparently a lengthy passage on the serpent, found only in
the Laurentianus manuscript. Rigo and Thomson offer somewhat different
readings of this work, partly due to the two extant manuscript versions. The
Bodleian manuscript Clarkianus 11 is damaged, the folios are confused, and
at least one section of The Symbolic Garden is apparently missing. Rigo has
rearranged its folios as follows: folios 17, 19, 18, 6–13, 20–25.8 The passage
on the serpent is not present in the Bodleian manuscript, and the discussion
of the cedar, pine and cypress, which forms one group in the Laurentianus
version, is also missing.
The text, in Thomson’s reading, emerges as a spiritual exposition on a real
garden, the characteristics of the trees and plants within the garden being
given a religious interpretation, some of it allegorical. Such allegories are
also attached to the elements needed to maintain the garden and to the gar-
dener himself. However, the literal aspects of the garden are never entirely
overtaken by the spiritual.9 This gives the text a degree of realism and what
Thomson calls a ‘sense of closeness to and enjoyment of nature’, which
she considers lacking in other allegories of nature.10 Rigo sees the text as
discussing an imaginary garden, using it as an image of Paradise that contains
diverse virtues and with the mind itself as the gardener.11 Both readings
present a spiritual understanding of nature, valuing nature as a means of
connecting with God, whether the garden itself was understood as real or fic-
tional by any individual reader.
In both renderings of The Symbolic Garden, the text begins by asserting
that the name garden, or meadow, has been borrowed from the literal
sense and been applied to this metaphorical book of virtues. The author(s)
then describes the key elements needed to maintain a good garden, before
94
discussing each in turn, including good soil, water, sun, temperate breezes
which cause the plants to move melodically and a diligent gardener, indi-
cating the orthodox faith, Scripture, the Lord, the Holy Spirit and the intellect
respectively. The enclosing fence, a common feature of later Byzantine gar-
dens, as opposed to the more open Roman gardens, is allegorised as the fear
of God, as a means of fortifying what is inside, and defending it from external
wickedness. The gate through which you enter the garden is Jesus, ‘for it is
not really possible to attain virtue and to have a life based on asceticism if
we do not proceed through the conduct of our Lord Jesus Christ’.12 In these
aspects of the garden the symbolism is suggested outright and then Scripture
is used to back up these interpretations.
By enclosing this space, the garden becomes identifiable as a cultivated
spot, marking a boundary between the urban space and wilderness, safety and
danger, or good and evil. The enclosing fence marks this piece of nature out as
being an area in which a person could ‘cultivate’ themselves, connecting with
the academic gardens of the classical period, as well as very real monastic
gardens.
Once through the gate, each part of the garden is introduced in turn, as
though the author is slowly walking from the entrance to the centre of the
garden. A descriptive piece of information regarding the plant, perhaps its
fruit, leaves or height, is followed by an interpretation of this feature and
the passage ends with a quotation from the Scriptures. Sometimes more than
one fact is given for a plant, and the structure can become a little confused,
with all the facts given before any interpretation is offered. Little time is
spent on the factual description of the physical plant but the allegories are
closely connected and understandable. The first passage on plants, as found
in Clarkianus 11, considers the cedar, pine and cypress together as symbols of
moderation due to their lack of ‘attractive’ fruit.13 The other plants discussed
are the lemon tree as a symbol of purity and wisdom; the lily as a symbol of
poverty; the fig tree for gentleness; the vine for spiritual joy; the pomegranate
for courage; peach for moderation; the palm tree symbolising justice, ‘armed
with points like fearful weapons’;14 the styrax as prayer; the olive tree for
pity; the smilax for knowledge; and the bramble for submission. Of these
plants the olive tree receives the most consideration. It is one of the most
familiar of the plants, its products being used daily for a number of purposes.
All the plants are recognisable from their descriptions but the scientific infor-
mation given for them is not directly quoted, and neither is it particularly
easy to identify as coming from a particular source, unlike the Physiologus.
This information largely centres on the medical usage of the plants, but also
mentions their use as food, where relevant. Overall it seems that at least some
of the information presented in The Symbolic Garden is from observation and
95
experience, rather than simply from book learning. Nevertheless, the reli-
gious aspect of the text is still its main concern.
Many of the plants mentioned, and indeed the garden itself, are often
found in literature as symbols. However, the symbolism is frequently more
erotic than religious by the later Byzantine period. This is one reason why an
oriental derivation seems unlikely to me. Religious poetry of Persian origin,
such as Persian love lyrics, utilised the erotic sense of plants, but for spiritual
reasons. In Islam as in Christianity nature could be read as a divine message,
so we find in Koranic verse 3:189, ‘Surely in the creation of the heavens and
the earth there are signs for people of understanding.’15 Allegorical gardens
such as we find in The Symbolic Garden can also be identified eleventh-
and twelfth-century Persian material. Meisami and Arberry both refer to
Sohravardi’s story of the peacock in the king’s garden as a metaphor of
the soul longing for its spiritual home.16 The mystical gardens of medieval
Persian poetry, like their secular counterparts, were closely connected with
the experience of love. Thus ‘Spring is the Beloved’s messenger’ and the rose
is ‘the earthly manifestation of Divine beauty’ in Rūmī’s thirteenth-century
poetry.17 In Hāfez’s fourteenth-century ghazal (QG 486) we find the night-
ingale acting as a teacher and guide, providing spiritual lessons in a courtly
garden of love.18 While such allegorical use of sensual garden imagery in
Persian mystical literature seems to have been particularly prevalent in the
late medieval period, it extended back into much earlier material. Such usage
can also be found in the Song of Songs and the garden as an erotic symbol
was always prevalent in secular Greek literature, particularly the romances.
The authors of The Symbolic Garden seem unaware of, or possibly just not
interested in, in such connections, though the sensual nature of the garden,
its sweet smells and musical breezes, is mentioned. However, this may owe
more to the Song of Songs than to any other secular literary influence. One
can also read into The Symbolic Garden the connection between the garden
and renewal, a common theme in imperial rhetoric, although here it is spir-
itual renewal that is considered.19
The medical virtues of each plant often seem to be stressed beyond their
physical features. However, the medical lore feeds directly into the allegories
of the plants. Thus cedar resin, described as a tear, δάκρυον, is thought to
treat itching and similar ailments ‘and thus to symbolize the tear of self-
restraint “born of a burning disquietude from the fear of the Lord, [which]
by its nature heals the pleasure that is itchy and irritating to the flesh” ’.20
This use of medicine for allegory may further strengthen the argument for
monastic authorship, as both the ailments and the treatments seem to reflect
the role of the monastery garden. While such information may reflect the
knowledge of works by Galen and other medical writers, it is equally likely
96
to reflect a more practical, direct knowledge obtained through work in such

a monastic context.
The Symbolic Garden presents us with an obviously spiritual interpret-
ation of a garden and its plants, arguably presenting these as ‘loci memoriae
for a moral treatise’.21 In the process, the text not only encourages the reader
to look inwards in contemplation, but to appreciate the lessons contained
in Creation, and to appreciate each element of it as proceeding from God.
The references to the appearance of the plants, to the temperate breezes
which cause the plants to utter melodies and to the pleasant sun, are to be
appreciated, rather than shunned. The realism of the text is part of the virtue
of the garden as it reflects God’s own work, rather than an overly rhetorical
presentation of physical pleasures.
The Hexaemeral Tradition
In order to understand why a monk might have wished to write The
Symbolic Garden, and another chose to continue the work, it is necessary to
look more broadly at the presentation of gardens and the natural in religious
material within Byzantium. After all, a ‘lack of interest … in the productive
landscape’ is a charge levelled at Christian theologians which seems to be
contradicted by The Symbolic Garden, and which cannot stand if that work is
not an anomaly but part of a tradition of thought.22
While it is clear that nature was often allegorised, this was not the only
way in which Creation was represented, nor the only means through which
nature was believed to offer instruction on God and Scripture. For many
patristic writers, the use of allegory to interpret Scripture was somewhat
controversial. Origen had been a major exponent of the allegorical inter-
pretation of the world. For him ‘everything in Scripture has a spiritual
meaning but not necessarily a literal one’.23 His work was heavily censored
on account of this, even during his own lifetime.24 That is not to say that his
work did not remain influential, but later authors were aware of the dangers
of being misunderstood in their use of allegory. Nature as described in
Genesis had, therefore, to be presented in a literal way, to stress the actuality
of the Scriptures, so that it reflected, rather than allegorised the glory of
God. Thus, although biblical exegesis still used allegory, Creation became
valued for its material nature, rather than as a metaphor. But Creation was
still the product of the Creator, a fact stressed particularly in hexaemeral
literature, material concerned specifically with the creation of the universe
in six days as recounted in Genesis. Hexaemeral literature can itself be seen
to fall into two types, one concerned more with the philosophical or theo-
logical aspects, the other more interested in the wonder of Creation and
meditation on its deeper meanings.25
97
The homilies of Basil the Great, bishop of Caesarea, on the Hexaemeron,

apparently preached around AD 378, form the earliest Christian work
dedicated solely to the six days of creation, and were highly influential. The
homilies are deeply concerned with both the nature of God and with nature
itself. Indeed, Basil specifically uses nature in order to understand and glorify
God, taking the Genesis narrative at face value and employing ‘Scripture in
the literal words to reach the spiritual’:26
Let us glorify the supreme Artificer for all that was wisely and skilfully made; by the
beauty of visible things let us raise ourselves to Him who is above all beauty; by the
grandeur of bodies, sensible and limited in their nature, let us conceive of the infinite Being
whose immensity and omnipotence surpass all the efforts of the imagination. Because,
although we ignore the nature of created things, the objects which on all sides attract our
notice are so marvellous, that the most penetrating mind cannot attain to the knowledge
of the least of the phenomena of the world, either to give a suitable explanation of it or to
render due praise to the Creator.27
Where elsewhere Basil does use allegory to interpret Scripture, in his work
on Genesis he is clear in his presentation of Creation, preferring to use ana-
logy to show his flock the wonder of the world itself rather than to allegor-
ically embellish it.28 His preoccupation is first to show the simplicity and
richness of the biblical creation of the world in contrast to the contradictions
of the philosophers; and second to use the text to inspire his listeners with a
love of their Creator and their faith and to educate them regarding their duty
and Christian life.29 In part, Basil’s non-allegorical presentation of nature as
a material guide towards the spiritual life is probably due to his audience.
Those present to hear his sermons would have included artisans, labourers,
women and children, in short, the uneducated members of the population, as
well as the more erudite.30 Such a diverse audience demands the use of clear
language, even if Basil still shows his own education throughout.
In his Apology for the Hexaemeron, St Gregory of Nyssa shares Basil’s
view of creation as a means of knowing the Creator, ‘evoking God’s “will,
wisdom and power” (τὸ θέλημα, τὴν σοφίαν, τὴν δύναμιν) as the vantage
point for the consideration of everything that is’.31 Costache believes the
Apology ‘was meant as a framework for the consideration of the cosmos –the
way it was depicted by the available sciences –through a spiritual lens. Only
when perused with the eyes of faith, as shaped by the wisdom of Genesis,
could the world be seen as a divine symbol and/or theophany.’32
The third of the Cappadocian fathers, Gregory, bishop of Nazianzus
(382–384), was a friend of Basil the Great, with whom he had studied in
Cappadocian Caesarea and Athens.33 His literary output was prodigious,
influential and incredibly popular, his homilies being transmitted in more
than 1,500 manuscripts dated before 1500.34 Although, like Gregory of
98
Nyssa, he did not write a Hexaemeron per se, he did discuss the natural
world in several of his writings. He believed the observable world to be
‘praiseworthy, surely, for the natural excellence of each of its parts, but
still more praiseworthy for the proportion and harmony of all of them
together’.35 For example, in his Second Theological Homily (Oration 28),
Nazianzus stresses the variety of living things and their artistry, as well as
the wonder of the clouds, stars, sea, earth and snow, all as interconnected
and astonishing constructions of the Creator.36 Reflecting the taste and tech-
nique of the Second Sophistic, Gregory’s orations as we have them today
are highly stylised ‘exquisitely self-conscious works of art’.37 These are nei-
ther the simple, explanatory exegesis of Basil, nor the scientific discourse of
Gregory of Nyssa.
The most notable of Nazianzus’ descriptions of nature appear in his New
Sunday Sermon (Oration 44). This homily was to be read on the first Sunday
of Easter, which apparently coincided with a spring festival in Caesarea for
the local martyr, St Mamas, at whose shrine it was supposedly delivered.38 It
uses the imagery of spring to describe the rebirth of man through Christ.39 In
this the homily is somewhat allegorical, but Nazianzus’ ekphrasis of nature,
as the verbal praise of non-verbal art, in this case Creation, still values its
physical aspect and is highly sensory:
For everything is conspiring together, rejoicing together, for the beauty of this feast. Look
at all that meets your eyes! … Now heaven shines more brightly, the sun stands higher and
glows more golden …. Now the meadow is fragrant, the shoots burst forth, the grass is
ready for mowing, and the lambs skip through rich green fields.40
Nazianzus’ depiction of spring would be highly influential and imitated by

many other authors, such as the tenth-century John Geometres.41 Through the
ekphrasis Nazianzus lets his audience ‘see’ springtime, stressing its beauty,
pleasure and peacefulness. While Byzantine scholars often distrusted the use
of rhetoric as a form of trickery, they nevertheless utilised it heavily. Though
it could at times display the transience and corruptibility of nature, or lead
the faithful astray, highlighting earthly pleasures over spiritual benefits, the
presentation of nature in the hexaemeral literature clearly remained a popular
and important means of presenting and understanding Creation as valuable
in its connection to God
Theodore Hyrtakenos’ Description of the Garden of St Anna
Following in the tradition of Gregory of Nazianzus and his sensory expos-
ition of spring, pleasure and nature, Theodore Hyrtakenos, a writer and
teacher in Constantinople in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century,
wrote an ekphrasis of the garden of St Anna.42
99
In his ekphrasis it is the garden description rather than the spiritual story
which forms the longest section of the text, as it functions as the setting
for Anna’s contemplation of her childlessness and her prayers to God. The
description of the garden itself highlights key features already familiar to us
from The Symbolic Garden. It begins with a discussion of the enclosed nature
of the garden, separating it from the rest of the estate through a stone wall
in the shape of a ring.43 Hyrtakenos stresses that the enclosure protects the
garden from thieves and ensures that ‘the one who enslaves his eyes to love’
could not ‘burn into carnal fire because of curious looks <into the garden>’.44
The author plays with the ideas of fertility and sexuality so that Anna is
described in an incredibly beautiful and fertile garden whose fruitfulness she
compares with her own barrenness. In that enclosed space Anna essentially
becomes a virgin again and is blessed with pregnancy. The concept of the
garden as a representation of sexuality is present in earlier material such as
the Song of Songs with its abundant floral imagery, and this sensory depiction
is visible in The Symbolic Garden and ekphraseis of spring. The ekphrasis of
a garden seems, based on the research of Dolezal and Mavroudi, to have had
a fairly clear format by the thirteenth century, beginning with the enclosing
wall, discussing the various trees and plants in full, paradisiacal bloom and
often containing a long description of a fountain or other statuary.45 Indeed
the placement of the plants in set areas, by type, is also a trope, appearing
in practical texts as well as romances and allegorical poetry.46 It does not
appear to have mattered whether the text related to a love story or a spiritual
one. The similarities between Hyrtakenos’ work and the Byzantine romances
have been highlighted by Dolezal and Mavroudi, but similarities with The
Symbolic Garden are also apparent, and I have mentioned some parallels
with the sometimes erotic elements of Persian spiritual texts. Clearly, this
presentation of the garden remained popular throughout the Byzantine period
and allowed for a more sensual appreciation of the natural world.
Sensory Nature and Worship
As mentioned above, the rhetorical descriptions of the earthly pleasure
of the garden, or the natural world more generally, found in The Symbolic
Garden and texts such as the New Sunday Sermon, could be presented as
leading the faithful astray, tying them to a physical as opposed to spiritual
level. However, the religious experience in Byzantium was in large part a
sensory one. Indeed, respected theologians praise church buildings for their
aesthetic value and the ability of the building to create a sense of awe and
wonder, suitable emotions when faced with the glory of God.47 Worship in
a Byzantine church, whether the Hagia Sophia, a monastery or rural chapel,
involved ‘taking in the interior décor and division of space, smelling the
100
odour inside, hearing clerics and singers, sometimes responding, lighting

lamps and tapers, approaching and touching sacred objects or elements of
the church’.48 Flickering candlelight and heavy incense are not a dissimilar
experience to dappled sunlight through trees and strongly scented flowers.
Entry into parts of a church, as with entry into the garden, meant entering
a place of raised awareness, somewhere enclosed, whether by a fence or by
curtains. This sense of looking inward, developed in The Symbolic Garden
by the presence of the fence and the gradual progression to the centre of
the garden, also encouraged a sense of looking into oneself, and addressing
internal, spiritual needs.
Church décor in the Late Antique period featured detailed mosaics on
walls and floors, often depicting animals and plants in scenes of hunting,
gardens or as a reflection of Eden.49 Iconoclasm replaced the Edenic imagery
with portraits of saints and coloured marble floors, so that by the time The
Symbolic Garden was written, natural imagery played a limited role as dec-
oration for a church.50 However, the ekphraseis of churches still utilised such
imagery in describing these later churches, in particular describing the colours
of the marble flowers as flowering meadows.51 Church décor remained opu-
lent and awe-inspiring, a treat for the eyes, even if pictorial imagery became
restricted.
Touch was another important feature of Byzantine Orthodoxy, with the
kissing or touching of icons, and the Eucharist added the sense of taste to this.
The healing aspect, both spiritual and physical, associated with sacred objects
such as icons and reliquaries is also reflected in the medicinal roles of some
of the plants within The Symbolic Garden, many of which may well have
been grown in monastic gardens and used in the treatment of sick monks.
It can be understood from this brief summary of the sensory aspect of
Byzantine worship that the senses were seen as aids in bringing the mind to
the contemplation of higher things, not simply as distracting the faithful and
tying them to their earthly presence. The soft breeze, warm sun and running
water of The Symbolic Garden, alongside the plants themselves, replicate
the sensations of worship within a church, Creation also worshipping the
Creator.
The Physiologus
In format, the text which most closely resembles The Symbolic Garden
is the Physiologus. One of the most popular works of the middle ages, the
Physiologus, in its various forms, presents certain information about animals,
as well as some plants and stones, and then provides a Christian allegory of
them. While there is some debate as to the date and origin of the Physiologus,
it is generally considered to belong to the third century AD and to be of
101
Egyptian, likely Alexandrian, origin.52 There is considerable debate on the

aim of this text, and therefore on its depiction of the natural world.53 At the
most obvious, literary level, the presentation is clearly allegorical, and thus
in direct contrast with hexaemeral literature. Like the hexaemeral material,
and The Symbolic Garden, the Physiologus provides apparently observable
characteristics for each animal, plant or stone. For example, Basil refers in his
Hexaemeron to vipers being born by ‘gnawing through the womb’ and to the
elephant’s lack of joints, and we find the same stories in the Physiologus.54
Layers of interpretation were obviously familiar to Byzantine audiences from
other religious texts; mystagogical works, for example, presented a number
of different typological and symbolic meanings for different passages.55
The characteristics of the animals, plants and stones are rarely praised in
the manner of the hexaemeral literature. Instead, their value lies not in their
reflection of the glory of God, but in their interpretation. They are, after all,
divinely designed and created with an inherent message for mankind to read.56
The audience for the text, at least for the Western bestiary derived from it,
also suggests a religious aim, as it appears to be largely monastic, though
not exclusively so.57 The Greek versions are often found in manuscripts that
contain both religious and scientific works, such as the Christian Topography
of Cosmas Indicopleustes, fables and lapidaries.58 It is important to bear in
mind that the distinction between secular and sacred, scientific and spiritual,
was not as clear cut during the medieval period as it seems to be in our own
time.59 A text could easily appeal to both a monastic and a courtly audience
simultaneously.
Despite the fact that this material was copied and rewritten many times,
the basic format and depiction of nature in the text ultimately remained the
same. On occasion, the Physiologus was attributed to respected fathers of the
Church, such as St Basil or St John Chrysostom, but this did not prevent its
adaptors from freely varying which animals they included, and sometimes
even the interpretations, to suit such an attribution or their own tastes. The
first animal discussed is invariably the king of beasts, the lion. Often the
chapter will open with a quotation from the Old Testament, and then pro-
vide information on the animals, plants and stones, which is followed by the
Christian allegory and supported by a New Testament quotation:
Jacob blessing his son Judah, said, ‘Judah is a lion’s whelp’ [Gen. 49:9]. Physiologus, who
wrote about the nature of these words, said that the lion has three natures. His first nature is
that when he walks following a scent in the mountains, the odour of a hunter reaches him,
he covers his tracks with his tail wherever he has walked so that the hunter may not follow
them and find his den and capture him. Thus also, our Saviour, the spiritual lion of the tribe
of Judah, the root of David … having been sent down by his coeternal Father, hid his intel-
ligible tracks (that is, his divine nature) from the unbelieving Jews … ‘And the word was
made flesh and dwelt among us’ [John 1:14].60
102
Nature is not presented here as reflecting the glory of its Creator, but rather
as having a definite connection to Scripture. As a result, nature is presented
as representing the Devil, Christ, sinners and the pious. By combining largely
classical, scientific information with a religious interpretation, the Physiologus
ultimately presents knowledge of the natural world as leading to a higher,
spiritual, knowledge. Here it is the inner meaning, rather than the surface
detail, that has been deemed most useful to the audience. The allegories used
are not always clearly connected to the legends they purport to elucidate.
Sometimes the allegorical passages twist the traditional story to fit the bib-
lical imagery and moral message, as is the case in the passage on the serpent,
where specific details, such as the forty days and nights of fasting, are added
to link the passage clearly with Christ.61 Sometimes the connections made
may simply have been clear to a medieval or Byzantine audience in a way
they are not to the modern reader. The text was to be thought about in depth
and could have multiple meanings. This act of interpretation and continued
rumination on a text was thought to increase understanding of both the text
and the spiritual world; contemplation of the possible meanings in creation
could be an act of devotion in itself.62 Nature is in this context meant to be
read as a collection of exempla, to provide a link between the divine truth of
the Scriptures and the human reality.63 Hence the material level is solely a
means of presenting this spiritual information. The allegories provided are
not simply morals drawn from an anecdote by a religious scholar. Rather, the
symbolism found in nature was designed as such at the moment of Creation.64
This work was incredibly popular and continued to be copied and edited
throughout the Byzantine period, so it is highly likely that the authors and
readers of The Symbolic Garden would have read that text in a similar way,
using nature as a devotional guide.
Conclusion
The Symbolic Garden presents us with a piece of rhetoric which never-
theless glorifies Creation in non-rhetorical terms. Being in a garden mimics
entering a church in the range of sensory engagements, and, if treated appro-
priately, can aid the observer in attaining spiritual development. In linking the
garden with spiritual knowledge and well-being, this work draws on earlier
and contemporary material, and that the text seems to have been copied after
the twelfth century, even if only once, indicates that this way of thinking
about the world remained popular, or even useful, even though new ideas,
and a new interest in science, were developing. Such a means of viewing
the world and everything in it seems to have enjoyed a resurgence from the
eleventh century and was applied as much to classical materials as it was
to religious works, though it arguably became more subtle in Palaiologan
103
literature.65 Regardless, the sensory spirituality of The Symbolic Garden,

with its interest in plants as a moral guide, indicates that Creation could be
appreciated in Byzantine literature without misleading the faithful, instead
providing aid and a connection to God that was to be valued.
Notes
1 Lynn White Jr., ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis’, Science 155 (1967),
1203–7.
2 See for example Radu Bordeianu, ‘Maximus and Ecology: The Relevance of Maximus the
Confessor’s Theology of Creation for the Present Ecological Crisis’, Downside Review 127,
no. 447 (April 2009), 103–26, and John Chryssavgis, ‘The Earth as Sacrament: Insights
from Orthodox Christian Theology and Spirituality’, in The Oxford Handbook of Religion
and Ecology, ed. Roger S. Gottlieb (Oxford, 2006), www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/
10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195178722.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780195178722-e-4.
3 The Symbolic Garden: Reflections Drawn from a Garden of Virtues, a XIIth Century
Greek Manuscript, ed. M. Thomson (Ontario, 1989) and Mistici Bizantini, ed. A. Rigo
(Turin, 2008), 287–319.
4 Regarding the dating of this text see Rigo, Mistici Bizantini,  287–9.
5 Thomson, Symbolic Garden, 3.
6 Ibid.
7 Rigo, Mistici Bizantini,  287–8.
8 See ibid., 289.
9 A. P. Booth, ‘The Symbolic Garden, a Practical Guide for the Care of the Soul’, Cahiers
des études anciennes 34 (1989), 16.
11 Rigo, Mistici Bizantini, 289.
12 Ibid., 295.
13 Ibid., 32 (Laurentianus GR. Plut. 10, 3, fol. 13r).
15 J. Meisami, ‘Allegorical Gardens in the Persian Poetic Tradition: Nezami, Rumi, Hafez’,
International Journal of Middle East Studies 17 (1985), 230.
16 Ibid., 232, and A. J. Arberry, Classical Persian Literature (London, 1958), 107–9.
17 Meisami, ‘Allegorical Gardens’, 242–3.
18 Ibid.,  246–7.
19 H. Maguire, ‘Imperial Gardens and the Rhetoric of Renewal’, in New Constantines: The
Rhythm of Imperial Renewal in Byzantium, 4th–13th Centuries: Papers from the Twenty-
Sixth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, St Andrews, March 1992, ed. P. Magdalino
(Aldershot, 1992), 181–97.
20 Booth, ‘The Symbolic Garden’, 17.
21 V. Della Dora, Landscape, Nature and the Sacred in Byzantium (Cambridge, 2016), 95.
22 J. H. S. McGregor, Back to the Garden: Nature and the Mediterranean World from
Prehistory to the Present (New Haven, CT, 2015), 174.
23 L. Zhang, Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Ithaca, NY, 2005).
24 P. C. Bouteneff, Beginnings: Ancient Christian Readings of the Biblical Creation
Narratives (Grand Rapids, MI, 2008), 95.
25 P. M. Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian
Theology and Piety (Oxford, 2012), 109.
26 Ibid., 117.
27 St Basil the Great, Letters and Select Works: The Treatise de Spiritu Sancto. The Nine
Homilies of the Hexæmeron and the Letters of Saint Basil the Great, Archbishop of
Cæsaria, trans. Rev. B. Jackson, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers,
104
2nd Series, 8, ed. P. Schaff and H. Wace (New York, 1895), 58; PG 29 Hexaemeron
1.11; Basil of Caesarea, Homélies sur l’Hexaéméron, ed. S. Giet (Paris: Éditions du Cerf,
1968),  134–7.
28 Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy,  127–8.
29 Homélies sur l’Hexaéméron, ed. Giet, 18.
30 Gregory of Nyssa, On the Hexaemeron (PG 44, 66), cited in Bouteneff, Beginnings, 130.
31 D. Costache, ‘Approaching An Apology for the Hexaemeron: Its Aims, Method and
Discourse’, Phronema 27:2 (2012), 67, citing Apology 7 (PG 44, 68D–69A).
32 Ibid., 68.
33 J. McGuckin, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus; An Intellectual Biography (Crestwood, NY,
2001),  46–56.
34 Selected Poems of Gregory of Nazianzus: I.2.17; II.1.10, 19, 32: A Critical Edition with
Introduction and Commentary, ed. C. Simelidis (Göttingen, 2009), 59.
35 Gregory of Nazianzus, ed. B. E. Daley (London, 2006), Oration 38, section 10, 121;
Discours 38– 41: Grégoire de Nazianze. Introduction, texte critique et notes, ed.
C. Moreschini, Sources chrétiennes 358 (Paris, 1990), 122–3.
36 Gregory of Nazianzus, Five Theological Orations, trans. S. Reynolds (2011), 13–44, esp.
33–44, https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/36303/1/Gregory%20of%20
Nazianzus%20Theological%20Orations.pdf.
37 Ibid., 28.
38 Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, 155.
39 H. Maguire, Nectar and Illusion: Nature in Byzantine Art and Literature (Oxford, 2012),
64.
40 Daley, Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 44, section 10 160; PG 36, 608–21.
41 Maguire, Nectar and Illusion, 64.
42 An edition of the text appears as ‘Ἕκφρασις εὶς τὸν παράδεισον τῆς ἁγίας Ἄννης τῆς
μητρὸς τῆς Θεοτόκου’, in J. F. Boissonade, Anecdota Graeca, 5 vols. (Paris, 1829–33;
repr. Hildesheim, 1962), vol. 3, 59–70.
43 Ibid., trans. in M.-L. Dolezal and M. Mavroudi, ‘Theodore Hyrtakenos’ Description of
the Garden of St Anna and the Ekphraseis of Gardens’, in Byzantine Garden Culture, ed.
Antony Littlewood, Henry Maguire and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washington, DC,
2002), 143.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid., 109–17.
46 Ibid., 115–20.
47 Many examples of this can praise can be found including the Late Antique account of
Choricius of Gaza, Procopius and Paul the Silentiary, as well as later descriptions by
Photius among others. See C. Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empires 312–1453:
Sources and Documents (Toronto, 2009).
48 B. Caseau, ‘Experiencing the Sacred’, in Experiencing Byzantium, ed. C. Nesbitt and
M. Jackson (London, 2013), 59.
49 Maguire, Nectar and Illusion,  10–22.
50 Ibid., 110.
51 Ibid.,  122–4.
52 With regard to the dating of the Physiologus, see Physiologus, ed. F. Sbordone
(Hildesheim, 1991); H. Woodruff, ‘The Physiologus of Bern: A Survival of Alexandrian
Style in a Ninth Century Manuscript’, Art Bulletin 12 (1930), 226–53; A. Scott, ‘Date of
the Physiologus’, Vigiliae Christianea 52:4 (1998), 430–41. Sbordone identified three
main redactions of the text but more manuscripts have since been found. References
to the text of the Physiologus are found in Epiphanius’ Panarion and De Gemmis, both
written in the second half of the fourth century. It is also among the forbidden texts
listed in the so-called Decretum Gelasianum. Certain terminology and the particular use
of the Christian canon lead Woodruff to suggest the Physiologus could not have been
105
written before the third century and the fourth century citations give us a rough terminus
ante quem.
53 See D. Faraci, ‘Pour une étude plus large de la réception médiévale des bestiaires’,
in Bestiaires médiévaux: Nouvelles perspectives sur les manuscrits et les traditions
textuelles (Louvain-la-Neuve, 2005) 111–25, for a summary of recent scholarship.
54 St Basil, Letters and Select Works, Homily 9, section 5, p. 105, and Der Physiologus nach
den Handschriften G und M., ed. D. Offermanns (Cologne, 1966), 46 and 139.
55 On the Divine Liturgy: St. Germanus of Constantinople; the Greek Text with Translation,
Introduction, and Commentary, ed. P. Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY, 1984), 23–54.
56 Book of Beasts: A Facsimile of MS Bodley 764, intro. C. de Hamel (Oxford, 2008), 17.
57 See the discussion in R. Baxter, Bestiaries and Their Users in the Middle Ages (Stroud,
1998), 145–209.
58 M. Avery, ‘Miniatures of the Fables of Bidpai and of the Life of Aesop in the Pierpont
Morgan Library’, Art Bulletin 23:2 (1941), 103; M. Bernabò, Il Fisiologo di Smirne: le
miniature del perduto codice B. 8 della Biblioteca della Scuola evangelica di Smirne
(Tavarnuzze-Firenze, 1998),  9–12.
59 A. Walker and A. Luyster (eds), Negotiating Secular and Sacred in Medieval Art
(Farnham, 2009).
60 Physiologus, trans. M. J. Curley (London, 1979), 3–4. The Greek text as published by
Offermanns presents different versions of this passage, none of which exactly match the
above translation, see 14–17.
61 Offermanns, Der Physiologus, 50: ‘ἐὰν γηράσῃ, ἐμποδίζεται τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν· ἐὰν δὲ θέλῃ
πάλιν νέος γενέσθαι, πολιτεύεται τεσσαράκοντα ἡμέρας καὶ τεσσαράκοντα νύκτας, ἓως
οὗ τὸ δέρμα αὐτοῦ χαυνωθῇ· καὶ ζητεῖ πέτραν ἢ ῥαγάδα στενήν, καὶ ἐκεῖθεν ἑαυτὸν
εἰσπέμψας θλίβει τὸ σῶμα καὶ ἀποβαλὼν τὸ γῆρας νέος πάλιν γίνεται.
Τοῦτον οὖν τὸν τρόπον καὶ σύ, ὦ ἄνθρωπε, ἐὰν θέλῃς τὸ παλαιὸν γῆρας τοῦ κόσμου ἀπ
οβαλέσθαι, διὰ τῆς στενῆς καὶ τεθλιμμένης ὁδοῦ, ἤγουν διὰ νηστείας καὶ ἐγκρατείας, τὸ
σῶμα σου τῆξον καὶ θλῖψον’.
62 Book of Beasts, 17.
63 P. Cox, ‘The Physiologus: A Poiēsis of Nature’, Church History 52:4 (1983), 434.
64 Book of Beasts, 17.
65 P. Roilos, Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel
(Washington, DC, 2005), 120–38.
106
Eco-Spirituality in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina
Anastassiya Adrianova
Anna Karenina (1875– 1877) has been read as an expression of Leo

Tolstoy’s spiritual quest with the main hero, Konstantin Levin, embodying the
author’s own questions and doubts about religion, spirituality, and the rele-
vance of metaphysics to one’s pursuit of the ethical life.1 Levin is the geni-
tive form of Lev, Tolstoy’s own name. R. F. Christian, the editor of Tolstoy’s
works in English, suggests that we read Anna Karenina and War and Peace
as “surrogate diaries.”2 Indeed, we see much of Tolstoy’s own intellectual
and spiritual struggles in Levin, so much so that, given the many and pro-
found parallels, Thomas Cain admits that at times Tolstoy’s autobiograph-
ical narrative A Confession (Ispoved’, 1884) reads like “the kind of book that
Levin might have written had he been able.”3 Although Levin is initially said
to be a “nonbeliever,” he shares the author’s dissatisfaction with philosophy as
well as his urgent need for faith, even as he himself struggles to believe.4 In a
pivotal moment in the novel, it is while plowing a field that Levin overcomes
the spiritual crisis that had brought him to the brink of suicide earlier: he is
described as “cutting more and more deeply into the earth, like a plow, so that
he could no longer get out without turning the furrow.”5 Levin thus regains his
love of life through his closeness to the soil. Whereas such proximity to nature
revitalizes, alienation from the Earth is symbolically equated with death, as is
evident in the titular heroine’s suicide on the train tracks, arguably meant as a
critique of industrialization tied to the destruction of the natural environment.
This chapter analyzes the spiritual quest in Anna Karenina in the con-
text of eco- spirituality and creative energy; thus, it adds to the more
107
Eco-Spirituality in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina 107
traditional readings of the novel an ecocritical element by stressing the

intimate connection between humanity and the environment, a connection
that is, moreover, mediated through intuition and instinct rather than egotis-
tical, androcentric reason. Although Donna Tussing Orwin and others have
written extensively about nature in Tolstoy, to date little has been published
on Tolstoy and ecocriticism, with the exception of Rebecca Gould’s dis-
cussion of “the ecopoetical sublime” in Tolstoy’s Caucasus works, which
brings together ecocriticism and postcolonialism. Most references to Tolstoy
and ecology are made in passing, frequently in connection with Mahatma
Ghandi and Tolstoy’s ideas on nonviolence.6 Similarly, although many
have commented on Tolstoy’s religion and spirituality (Nicholas Rzhevsky,
George Steiner, Margaret Ziolkowski, Pål Kolstø), no scholarship has expli-
citly engaged with eco-spirituality. By bridging religion and ecology and by
arguing that Tolstoy’s spirituality should be seen as interconnected with, even
inconceivable without, his environmental awareness, this chapter will be of
interest to students and scholars of Tolstoy and those of ecocriticism and
Christian theology. To this end, it will draw on the work of Thomas Berry
and Rosemary Radford Ruether, who emphasize human–Earth concerns by
linking Christianity with ecojustice.
Finally, while some work has been done on Tolstoy and animal studies,
particularly the novella Strider: The Story of a Horse (Ronald D. LeBlanc,
Josephine Donovan, Andrea Rossing McDowell), more has yet to be said
about other prominent nonhumans in Tolstoy’s fiction as well as their role
in forging an eco-spiritual bond. In Anna Karenina specifically, the pregnant
cow Pava, Levin’s dog Laska, and Vronsky’s horse Frou Frou merit critical
attention, and are another way in which ecocriticism can bring a fresh per-
spective on this material given the overlapping, though not uncontentious,7
environmental and animal concerns. These, in turn, expose the androcentric
aspects of the rational egoism Tolstoy’s hero struggles with throughout the
novel, thereby inviting an ecofeminist critique.
Not long after the publication of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy converted to
Christianity, and in the so-called post-conversion period (after 1879), he also
became a vegetarian and published “The First Step” (1892), an essay in which
he called for self-restraint and moderation, including abstaining from animal
flesh, and insisted that the killing of animals was immoral and incompatible
with a good Christian life. Tolstoy’s environmental awareness, his thinking
about humanity’s relationship to other living beings and to the Earth, evolved
alongside his thinking about spirituality, as he forged his own, however idio-
syncratic, Christianity because of which he was excommunicated by the
Russian Orthodox Church in 1901.
108
All the Reasons Why He Cannot Believe: Tolstoy and Religion

Despite Gordon William Spence’s claim in Tolstoy the Ascetic (1967) that
Tolstoy’s thoughts on religion are too confused to provide a clear summary
of his views,8 scholars have not shied away from investigating the subject of
Tolstoy and religion. Some have charged him with being too enmeshed in
Enlightenment rationalism to be capable of deep religious feeling, describing
his conversion as deliberate rather than spontaneous; others, however, see
in his love of Rousseau in particular, a recognition of religion’s power as an
ethical guide.
Eastern Orthodox theologian Father Georges Florovsky (1893–1979) saw
Tolstoy’s sympathies aligning with Christianity as much as with Stoicism,
claiming that his was “not a religion of soul, but a religion of syllogisms,” and
his vision and experience were limited by “the total absence of transcensus.”9
Russian existentialist philosopher Lev Shestov (1866– 1938) argued that
Tolstoy replaced God with “the good” and “fraternal love,” which made his
doctrine neither Christian nor incompatible with atheism.10 R. F. Christian
has provocatively suggested that Tolstoy was not a Christian at all because
he did not subscribe to Christian dogma and was more invested in how a man
lived than in Christ’s Godhood or the mystery of resurrection: “Religion for
him was not Christianity in any normally accepted sense, but a moral code
of practice summed up by the five commandments which he deduced from
Christ’s teaching as he understood it.”11 E. B. Greenwood objects to seeing
Tolstoy as too narrow an Enlightenment rationalist to be considered a deep
religious thinker, as argued by Father Florovsky and Shestov, and shows that
it was, rather, the anti-Enlightenment recognition of the importance of reli-
gion and ethics that Tolstoy found most meaningful in Rousseau’s work.12
His Christianity was further evident in his literal reading of the Sermon on
the Mount, specifically about turning the other cheek and giving up one’s
cloak.13
Although scholars have noted the role of German philosophy and the trad-
ition of Bildung in Tolstoy’s formation,14 it is to Rousseau that he turned
most often in pursuit of the ethical life. Tolstoy, like Rousseau, believed that
“religion must be ‘natural,’ in the peculiar sense that it must be apprehensible
without the need for specialist intellectual knowledge.” From the French
Enlightenment thinkers whose influence on Tolstoy’s intellectual devel-
opment is well documented (B. M. Eikhenbaum, Renato Poggioli, Isaiah
Berlin), he inherited not atheism but skepticism about “Christianity with its
authoritarian clericalism and its metaphysics and mysteries.”15 Isaiah Berlin
notes that Tolstoy “liked and admired Rousseau’s views more than those of
any other modern writer” and shared his distrust of the doctrine of original
109
sin, believing instead that humanity was ruined by social institutions and
misguided education –“the self-appointed élites of experts, sophisticated
coteries, remote from common humanity, self-estranged from natural life.”16
Tolstoy was influenced by Rousseau’s notion of “immanentism,” moreover,
which is “concern[ed] with the solution of problems as they present themselves
in this world, and its rejection of the ‘spirit world’ of traditional Christian
metaphysics.” As he wrote in the 1880s, in an unpublished fragment, “We
only know life in this world and this is because if there is a meaning in our
life, then it is here in this world.”17 Similarly, a few years earlier, he argued in
“On the Meaning of Christian Religion” (“O znachenii khristianskoĭ religii,”
1875–1876), that what he called the religion of death merely prepared us for
our passing, whereas that of life enabled us to act morally, and was therefore
just as vital “as air is to our physical life.”18
Underscoring Tolstoy’s intellectual approach to spirituality, that is, his
often-frustrated efforts to develop faith by reading and reflecting on phil-
osophy, other scholars see his eventual conversion as premeditated rather
than spontaneous. “What was unusual about his conversion,” Tolstoy’s friend
and biographer Aylmer Maude wrote in Life of Tolstoy, was that “it came so
late in life and so gradually, and that the intellect played so great a part in
it.”19 Janko Lavrin insists on the lack of spontaneity in Tolstoy’s religious
conversion; due to this rational, premeditated approach, in which all articles
of faith were highly scrutinized, Lavrin charges, Tolstoy “reduced religion
itself to a system of moral rules, based on his own interpretation of … the
Sermon on the Mount. It was a static and uninspiring system. Even his con-
version –in so far as it was a conscious process –showed no spontaneity,
nothing of God’s Grace. On the surface, at any rate, it was the outcome not of
religious élan, but of a protracted logical travail.” By approaching religious
symbolism through reasoning and logic, Tolstoy “turned Christ himself into a
Tolstoyan,” and “[h]‌is moral system soon became a straight-jacket which he
wanted to impose upon the whole of life.”20 Tolstoy’s guide was not Jesus but
his own daimonion, Lavrin asserts repeatedly.21 While his conversion lacked
spontaneity, his post-conversion thinking turned dogmatic and moralizing, as
Tolstoy preached “his own version of the Sermon on the Mount … without
ceasing.”22
A brief summary of this critical debate cannot possibly do it justice, but
it does suggest certain patterns: an intellectual, rather than spontaneous,
connection to religion, yet also a need for faith despite difficulty to believe;
and the importance of religion as a guide to ethical life to such a degree
that religion is reduced to a moral system, concerned primarily with the here
and the now. In February 1877, while writing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy him-
self acknowledged the urgency to have faith as well as “all the reasons why
110
[he] cannot believe,” seeing others as “floating in the little boat that does not
carry [him].” He admits that philosophy cannot help him and that he cannot
live without religion, but also cannot bring himself to believe. So moved,
he intends to go to the Optino Monastery and “explain to the monks all the
reasons why I cannot believe.”23 As Christian explains:
For an answer to his problems and to save himself from suicide, [Tolstoy] turned first to
the philosophers, then to the educated people of his own class and finally to the unedu-
cated masses who for the most part were believers. Their faith made it possible for them
to go on living –but it was inseparable from Orthodox ritual and dogma which he, from
a rational point of view, found repugnant … Having looked back over his past life, a life
without faith, and found it evil, he looks forward to the good life of the believer –if only
he can once believe.24
The latter connection to the peasants –“the uneducated masses” whose

views the author found intellectually “repugnant” but also compelling on a
deeper existential level –ultimately enables him to find faith; this faith, how-
ever, is less in the peasants’ traditional Christianity than, as I will demon-
strate below, in an eco-spirituality grounded in the Earth.
Perpetual Seekers: Doubt and Dogma in Anna Karenina
Tolstoy’s need, while writing the novel, to travel to Optino to “explain to
the monks all the reasons why [he] cannot believe”25 is one we could imagine
Levin expressing. According to Cain:
To read A Confession [Tolstoy’s autobiography] is to realise just how close Tolstoy’s

experience could be to that of his central characters. The religious crisis which we
see Levin undergo in Anna Karenina corresponds very closely to that which Tolstoy
describes in A Confession: the sense of an absence, and of a ‘want of clearness’ in the
soul, the clash between reason and an instinctive faith, the periods of acute despair,
even the removal of the potential instruments of suicide, are all common to Tolstoy and
Levin.26
While some of his characters, like Katerina (Kitty) Shcherbatskaia, rely on

intuition and innate moral knowledge, and others, like Levin, are “thinkers”
who seek rational explanations for everything, Tolstoy himself “was too
much of a rationalist” and needed a more rigorous foundation: “only when
his belief had a firm ground of reason could he feel secure in it, and A
Confession was the first and most important step in that direction.”27 In his
Confession, Tolstoy criticizes the Bible for containing both falsehoods and
truths; he rejects miracles, mysteries, and rites, and cannot come to terms
with every religion’s individual claim to truth, since truth to him is universal.
Never, however, except perhaps in his tumultuous youth, did he reject faith
altogether; he kept searching.28
111
Levin is described early on as an “nonbeliever” [chelovek neveruiushchiĭ],

“someone who himself did not believe but respected the beliefs of others,”
and when confessing, admits to “doubting everything … even the existence
of God.”29 Parallel to Tolstoy’s autobiographical account, Levin initially turns
to religion for answers, and he is impressed with the theological writings of
Aleksei S. Khomiakov, the Russian philosopher, theologian, and member
of the Slavophile movement in nineteenth-century Russia that glorified dis-
tinctly Russian traditions and Orthodox Christianity. After Levin realizes that
Catholicism and Orthodoxy deny each other, however, he grows dissatisfied
with both.30 Greenwood sees Tolstoy’s portrait of Levin as exemplifying the
experience of many at the time, who, brought up with Christian precepts, had
become disillusioned in these doctrines later in life, finding them “unsustain-
able in the light of the progress of natural science, the historical study of the
Bible, the claims of rival faiths and the assault of the post-Kantian critical
philosophy on the proofs for the existence of God afforded by rational the-
ology.” Levin therefore finds himself “unable to live with religion as it is, and
yet unable to live without any religion at all,” as the kind of moral guidance
he needs “seems to require religious beliefs.”31 Yet he is more agnostic than
atheist. Greenwood finds much of the novel’s “unique power” in Tolstoy’s
portrayal of Levin “with much more emphasis on the search for a ‘uni-
versal and eternal teaching’ than on the possession of one.”32 In his analysis
of Tolstoy’s novels, Russian historical Vitalist Konstantin Leontiev (1831–
1891), Tolstoy’s contemporary and friend who later converted to Christianity
and died as a monk, describes Levin as one of the “perpetual ‘seekers’ ”
[vechnye ‘iskateli’]. Leontiev juxtaposes the species of “Levins” to someone
like Count Alekseiĭ Vronsky, Anna’s lover, who “do[es] not change opinions
and points of view almost every day” and is, rather, “determined, brave,
[and] decisive.”33 Indeed, the very qualities Princess Shcherbatskaia (Kitty’s
mother) dislikes in Levin when he starts courting her daughter, and which
render him Vronsky’s foil, also make him a more suitable suitor: namely, his
incessant speculations, social awkwardness, and “wild” life in the country,
among animals and peasants.
It is in the pursuit of guidance in life that Levin first turns to science and
empiricism, only to find such inquiries insufficient. Levin is an “estestvennik,”
or natural scientist, by training, but he soon learns not to associate scien-
tific questions (concerning human origins, reflexes, and behavior), which he
reads about in scientific journals, with questions about the meaning of life
and death, which frequently plague his mind. When, in the opening chapters
of Anna Karenina, he arrives at his half-brother Sergeĭ Koznyshev’s house in
Moscow, he walks in on an academic discussion of a “fashionable topic,” the
difference between psychological and physiological traits –a conversation
112
which one critic describes as “a parody” with “[t]‌he dice … heavily loaded
against the intellectuals, who ostensibly have no thoughts of their own, but
fall back on quoting and disagreeing with a motley crew of fictitious German
and Russian philosophers with such crudely suggestive names as Käse,
Wurst and Pripasov (‘Cheese,’ ‘Sausage’ and ‘Provisions’).” Tolstoy’s own
distrust of such “professional practitioners of wisdom” is clear.34 This discus-
sion opens with Koznyshev’s remark that the Professor has surrendered to the
materialists, claiming that our consciousness of being is a compound of sense
perceptions, which suggests that once the body ceases to experience, we are
no more.35 The professor confirms that an empirical inquiry into our state
after death offers nothing conclusive, since, he insists, “We have no data.”36
Levin finds this debate utterly frustrating: the two men digress, dissimulate,
and hide behind clever banter to avoid speaking openly about real issues.
Although from age twenty to thirty-four Levin was under the spell of physics,
he never failed to see the limitations of scientific knowledge: these notions
“were fine for rational inquiries; but for those of life –they gave nothing.”37
More broadly, the type of anxiety experienced by Levin has been described as
“the crisis of faith of the age,”38 the sense of chaos felt by Tolstoy’s contem-
poraries across the Atlantic, as well, who, disenchanted with religion, looked
to science for answers but found that, being materialist and buttressed by the
logic of positivism, it could not provide them with moral guidance: “Science
could only furnish a picture of the world as it actually was. It could never
formulate a notion of how it ought to be.”39
It is worth noting that Levin intervenes in the parodic academic discus-
sion by asking what happens to the body after death, to which the Professor,
being both materialist and empiricist, offers no objective answer. Levin’s
attempts to reason through and explain death, however, prove less effective
than the actual experience of losing his sibling. Levin is disillusioned even
with those philosophers who tried to explain “life in non-materialist terms”
(Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Schelling, Schopenhauer), because they all failed to
explain what happens to the body after death, the question that keeps pla-
guing him. He is able to follow the philosophers’ definitions of spirit, will,
and substance; yet, he finds the artificial construction of such metaphysical
arguments unstable because predicated on mere semantics, not something
higher than reason.40 We find the same kind of questioning in A Confession,
where Tolstoy reflects on whether life’s meaning is negated by the inevit-
ability of death. Tolstoy confirms that science gives an answer but neglects
the question, while metaphysics addresses the question but gives no definite
answer. The experimental scientist claims that observing patterns of behavior
and physiological functions gives one wisdom, while what he calls the “semi-
sciences” (polunauki: juridical, social, and historical) pretend to solve the
113
problem of an individual life only at the general level of humanity.41 Cain

attributes this need for “an explanation in religious rather than materialist
terms” to Tolstoy’s “obsession with death” and struggle to answer the “why,
the problem of death.”42
It is through the combined impact of his brother Nikolaĭ’s death (which
parallels that of Nikolaĭ Tolstoy in 1860) and the love of his wife Kitty, along
with the eventual birth of their son, that Levin comes closest to believing
in something higher, an experience in which feeling and instinct challenge
and overwhelm his rational capacity. At the end of the only chapter in the
novel that bears a title –“Death” [Smert’] –Levin “feels the need to live and
to love”:
The sight of his brother and the proximity of death inspired in Levin’s soul that same
feeling of dread before the mysteriousness but, at the same time, the nearness and inevit-
ability of death, which had taken over him that fall evening when his brother visited him.
Now this feeling was even stronger than before; even less than before did he feel capable
of understanding the meaning of death, and even more dreadful did its inevitability seem
to him; but now, thanks to the proximity of his wife, this feeling did not lead him to the
edge of despair; death notwithstanding, he felt the need to live and to love. He felt that love
had saved him from despair and that, under the threat of despair, this love turned purer and
grew in strength.43
Leontiev argues that an author’s style (rhythm, word choice, devices)

expresses, sometimes involuntarily, that which is “unconscious and pro-
found”; style, Leontiev insists, is “the most prominent external expression of
the innermost life of the spirit.”44 When describing Levin’s state after Nikolaĭ’s
death, Tolstoy repeats the noun and verb forms for “feeling” [chuvstvo,
chuvstoval], rather than some form of rational “knowing” or judgment, in
order to express the feeling that, despite the frightening inevitability of death,
and due to the closeness of his wife, Levin could now love life. It is at this
point, too, that the hero learns of Kitty’s pregnancy, and so “one mystery,
which remained unsolved” leads to another, “equally unsolved,” but one that
“evokes love and life.”45 Levin himself draws the parallel between Nikolaĭ’s
death and Kitty’s labor pangs as she is about to give birth, remarking that
his soul then “flew to great heights, which it did not comprehend, and which
the mind [rassudok] could not reach” [ne pospeval] –literally, his mind kept
falling behind.46
Once death is no longer looming over his psyche, however, Levin cannot
bring himself to that state when he sincerely prayed for the first time upon
Nikolaĭ’s passing, and instead finds himself in “an agonizing disagreement
with himself.”47 This “agonizing disagreement” is due to Levin’s reliance on
reason, a reliance so strong that even his faith must be rationally explained,
and also his realization that while prompting doubt and perpetual reflection,
114
reason provides little in the way of moral guidance; rather, it promotes sheer
egoism: “Reason revealed the struggle for existence and the law, demanding
that you strangle everyone who interferes with the fulfillment of my desires.
That is the conclusion reason draws. And one’s love for another could not
open the mind, because that is unreasonable.”48 What Levin feels instinct-
ively towards his dying brother and his pregnant wife would, accordingly, be
unreasonable, unjustifiable, and in need of suppression. Indeed, to the organi-
cist critic and Tolstoy’s longtime friend Nikolaĭ N. Strakhov (1826–1896),
Anna Karenina seemed to depict a kind of neurosis, a society in which narrow
rationalism forced men to develop their conscious minds at the expense of
their instincts.49 Before Levin can find new meaning in the vitality of his child
and in the kind of work and innocence he admires in the peasants, who are as
yet uncompromised by social institutions and sterile knowledge, he turns to
empirical science and metaphysics, only to become disenchanted with both.
His experience with death brings him closer to faith, but what is decisive in
his spiritual quest is in fact his closeness with nature and the Earth.
Eco-Spirituality: Peasants and Agriculture in Anna Karenina
Tolstoy’s relationship to the Russian peasantry, like Levin’s, instantiates
the tension he experienced when it came to religion: here were believers
who lived a simple ethical life devoid of intellectually debilitating doubt;
however, for an aristocrat or landowner to espouse such a lifestyle was both
intellectually and socially dishonest –a crossdressing or travesty at best, no
matter how pure the intention. The impetus to go back to the people was
shared by Tolstoy’s contemporaries, the populists and the Slavophiles in the
second half of the nineteenth century, who, despite dressing like peasants, or
what they imagined peasants looked like, were largely misunderstood and
mocked by the masses. In the words of Berlin,
not only [Tolstoy], but all those populists and socialists, the doctors, engineers, agricultural
experts, painters and composers and idealistic students in Russia who ‘went to the people’
and could not decide whether they had gone to teach or to learn, whether the ‘good of the
people’ for which they were ready to sacrifice their lives, was what ‘the people’ in fact
desired, or something that the reformers and they alone knew to be good for it –some-
thing which the ‘people’ should desire –would desire if only they were as educated and
wise as their champions –but, in fact, in their benighted state, often spurned and violently
resisted.50
Tolstoy’s thought on peasants combines two conflicting strains: on the

one hand, inspired by his reading of Rousseau and the Romantics, Tolstoy
imagines that by observing the lives of simple peasants and by studying the
Gospels, he too can have faith and live a simple, satisfying life; on the other
hand, “Levin knows that if he tried to become a peasant this could only be a
115
grotesque farce, which the peasants would be the first to perceive and deride.”
The latter, though, does not remove the upper classes’ responsibility towards
the peasants, especially to educate them after Emancipation in 1861.51
And yet both in Tolstoy’s life and in Anna Karenina, we find efforts to
join the peasant community; while similarly intellectualized, this turn, more
so than his religious conversion, genuinely happens for Levin in the novel,
which, being semiautobiographical, must also reveal at the very least a
wishful projection on the author’s part. This, I would argue, has to do with
Tolstoy’s discovery, in the Earth and its laborers, of a version of spirituality –
an eco-spirituality –that (by)passed the test of reason and logic through
an appeal to religious feeling. In “On the Meaning of Christian Religion,”
Tolstoy writes that, whereas in the past, religion was “the foundation for
learning the meaning of life and death” for everyone, now it is only such
for the “uneducated masses, who are yet distinguished through their love of
children as well as their true instinct for love.”52 It was, indeed, to “the unedu-
cated masses” that Tolstoy looked because they had faith which enabled them
to go on living; the problem, however, was that this faith was “inseparable
from Orthodox ritual and dogma which [Tolstoy], from a rational point of
view, found repugnant.”53 In A Confession, he notes that peasants live without
ever contemplating life’s purpose or knowing how inorganic substances
function –something that an intellectual would surely find insufficient; yet to
deny their wisdom seems “nonsensical” [bessmyslitsa]. He concludes, there-
fore, that the (over)educated elite must be in the wrong.54
That true knowledge and life reside in the countryside, the abode of the
muzhiki who are physically close to the Earth, is the subject of Tolstoy’s
folk legend “The Grain” (“Zerno s kurinoe iaĭtso,” 1886), where he criticizes
modern institutions for having lost touch with ancient wisdom. In the tale,
the Tsar summons his simple folk to learn more about a mysterious grain of
corn discovered at his palace. The generative power of the Earth is evident
in the vitality of the oldest peasant, who is the healthiest among the three
generations summoned to solve this mystery, and old enough to recall the
time when people “live[d]‌by their bread [labor] alone” and felt no need
to commit the sacrilegious sale of bread –that is, the commercialization of
Earth’s products.55
Many have commented on Tolstoy’s perceived proximity to the peasantry,
as catalogued by his daughter Alexandra. Leon Trotsky claimed that Tolstoy’s
interest in the Russian peasant was not only “[a]‌esthetic,” but “based on deep
psychological understanding and love.” Writer Maxim Gorky described
Tolstoy as “a real moujik”: “he has a peasant’s voice and he thinks like a
peasant,” “show[ing] his capacity to feel, to think, to speak, and to work like
a peasant and to contemplate the world and the ruling classes with the eyes
116
of a peasant.”56 “For Tolstoy the peasants were the real people –those who
work with their hands and feed the world with what they produce; they are
close to nature and therefore closest to God.” “ ‘Though he was a Count,’ a
peasant would say, ‘he could work hard and always when we were mowing
he was first in a row, and we could hardly keep up with him’.”57 So great
was Tolstoy’s admiration for his peasants that he started dressing like one.
While visiting his friend Ivan Turgenev at Spasskoe in July 1881, Tolstoy
was nearly mistaken by the poet Polonski “for a peasant, for he was sunburnt
and dressed in a common blouse with a leather belt.” Recalling this, Polonski
wrote, “He appeared to me to be reborn, imbued with a different faith, a
different love … He did not impose his own views on us and quietly heard
out Ivan Sergeyevich’s [Turgenev’s] objections. In brief, he was no longer
the count as I knew him.”58 In his later years, at Yasnaya Polyana, Count
Tolstoy would drop his title and ask that his servants call him simply “Leo
Nikolayevich,” and while he had always enjoyed farm work, starting in the
mid-1880s, he engaged in it more adamantly, seeing physical exercise “as a
duty sanctified by Holy Scripture,” and partaking in various kinds of menial
labor, from mowing to carting manure and lugging timber.59
Lavrin attributes Tolstoy’s connection to the peasantry to his upbringing
on an aristocratic estate with serfs, his ties to Yasnaya Polyana and the cen-
tral Russian landscape, and his youth and adulthood developing contempor-
aneously with the Russian economy transitioning from agrarian feudalism
to capitalism, including the abolition of serfdom and the impoverishment
of the landed gentry.60 Himself a landed aristocrat whose existence was
threatened by encroaching capitalism and the emancipation (making land-
owners, among other things, dependent on paid labor), Tolstoy responds by
“go[ing] back to Nature,” “back to the soil”: “Let us all become primitive
peasants rather than be drowned in the swamp of modern capitalism which
spells nothing but ruin, universal egoism, and disintegration. Such was his
slogan.”61 Artist Ilya Repin’s famous portraits of Tolstoy in a peasant blouse,
surrounded by agricultural tools in his study, or even plowing in the fields
suggest as much. Lavrin is, however, skeptical of his posturing as a peasant,
seeing this as more of a crossdressing: “In June 1881 [Tolstoy] made a pil-
grimage to the famous Optino monastery, on foot and in bast-shoes, like a
peasant pilgrim. Whether he had the naïveté and spontaneity of a peasant’s
faith, is another question.”62 Cain is similarly skeptical of Tolstoy’s espousal
of faith through the common peasant. Reading the novels autobiographically,
Cain suggests that the role of the common people in alleviating the spiritual
crisis is intellectually dishonest as it goes against the author’s rigorous search
for truth: Tolstoy’s “exaltation of physical labor at the expense of his art is a
form of trahison des clercs [“betrayal of the intellectuals”] that grows out of
117
his strong, and largely unjustified, sense of social guilt, together with what
he himself calls his ‘strange physical love … for the real working people’;
but whatever its sources, we cannot help recognising it as a betrayal of that
clear-sighted search for truth to which he had dedicated himself.”63 Lavrin
confirms this tension when describing Tolstoy as “too much of an intellectual
to be able to embrace the moujiks’ faith uncritically and without the sanction
of logic,” claiming that Tolstoy thus had to adapt his version of spirituality to
“correspond to the Christianity of the masses and at the same time be com-
pletely acceptable to his logic and reason.”64
As Tolstoy in his later years at Yasnaya Polyana, Levin is depicted as
someone intimately connected to the Earth and its laborers: he lives in the
country, the domain of the peasants; both his activities and his studies are
tied to agriculture. He writes a treatise promoting agrarian life, arguing that,
in addition to climate and soil, the character of the individual worker must
be considered an important factor in farm management. He enjoys working
in the field; under the guidance of the old peasant Tit, Levin’s adopted field
“uncle” who helps him sharpen his scythe, the hero struggles to catch up with
the peasants, who are at first suspicious of their master’s interest and skeptical
of his capabilities, but soon learn to accept him nearly as their own despite the
obvious class difference.65 Levin loves harvesting hay as it touches “some-
thing alive in him,” and this “at once joyful and hard work leaves no time to
think.”66 Further, while observing the peasant Ivan Parmënov harvesting hay
with his young wife, Levin envies their robust, healthy love as well as their
simple existence, which he now finds neither as dreary nor as lonely as his
own. Lying on a haystack, surrounded by the gifts of the Earth, he yearns for
the simple life of a laborer, questions his earlier decision to remain single,
and even considers marrying a peasant girl [krest’ianka].67
There is something about this proximity to the Earth, nature, and soil that
offers more than solace to Levin’s restless mind –a will to live and to act.
“When Levin reflected on what he is and what he lived for, he could find
no answer and fell into despair; but when he stopped asking himself about
it, he seemed to know, both what he was and what he lived for, because he
firmly and definitively acted and lived … more firmly and definitively than
before.” He then found himself drawn to the Earth by instinct –involuntarily,
against his will –for only there could he discover purpose and the possi-
bility of real knowledge: “Now, as though against his will, he was cutting
[or, penetrating] more and more deeply into the earth, like a plow, so that
he could no longer get out without turning the furrow.”68 This agricultural
simile –“like a plow” –appears less than a page after Levin contemplated
hanging or shooting himself. Now Levin cannot move away; as the plow with
which he is compared, he functions best when in touch with the soil. Neither
118
scientific nor religious dogma gives him peace; only by working the soil does
he stop feeling restless. One simply knows how to act, Tolstoy suggests, as do
the muzhiki, who work the Earth: “Life itself gave me [Levin] an answer.”69
Without understanding what his new faith was, the hero believed, and his
life acquired meaning: it was no longer “meaningless, as it had been, but
had an undoubted sense of the good, which [he has] the power to invest in
it.”70 This is the only way to “live in the ways of God, the ways of the Spirit”
[zhit’ dlia boga, dlia dushi], an insight he gleans from the peasants rather
than his formal education and reading. When he looks at his own body, at
a blade of grass, or at a tiny insect as developing through some exchange
of matter, according to the laws of physics, chemistry, or physiology, none
of his deepest concerns are addressed nor the meaning of life revealed; but
when Levin imagines the grass and the insect more spiritually, conceiving
them in their “infinitude,” he recognizes “a force” that “gave him life in the
past, and now also gives him life.”71
Georg Lukàcs reads such scenes as Levin’s plowing as “[a]‌ll the more
admirable” because Tolstoy “let[s] them grow out of the problematic nature
of Levin’s relationship with his peasants and his sentimental attitude to phys-
ical labor.”72 Greenwood finds Tolstoy’s depiction of Levin’s relations with
the peasants as “presented in a realistic, sometimes humorous, way which
makes any accusation of an over-idealisation of the peasantry unsustainable.”
Contrary to those who dismiss the words coming from the peasants as uncon-
vincing “revelations” (unconvincing given Levin’s, as well as Tolstoy’s,
skepticism about revealed wisdom), Greenwood insists that such “words are
presented as a catalyst” for ethical reflection, which we find in the very next
chapter and which “could hardly have arisen without the complex pattern
of experience, reading and temperament the whole novel has shown as
having gone into Levin’s composition.”73 In 1908, Symbolist poet and critic
Aleksandr Blok wrote about the people’s “will to live” when contrasting the
vitality of the Russian people (narod) with the decadence of Westernized
intelligentsia. He found in this “will” the reason “why even the unbeliever
runs to the people to seek in it the life-force.”74 When Levin is contrasted
with Koznyshev, we learn of his attitude toward the narod: he can neither
love it nor hate it, because he lives with and among these people. For his
brother, however, the country is not a place to live or work, as it is for Levin,
but one to which he flees to escape the city; in Koznyshev’s view, narod is
to be loved and defended, polemically, against the upper classes.75 Unlike
his half-brother, Levin is not an urban populist trying to bridge the class rift
through reasoned arguments; his relationship to the peasants and the know-
ledge he receives from them is, however, complex: on the one hand, mediated
by serious reflection on ethics and, on the other, embraced spontaneously,
119
without over-intellectualizing. By depicting Levin as becoming one with the

Earth, nature, and soil, while digging deeply like a plow, Tolstoy arguably
projected onto Levin the spiritual connection he himself sought to establish –
an eco-spiritual connection, given his criticism of modern urban landscape
and longing for a simpler, preindustrial past in which humans and their envir-
onment merged through agricultural action.
Thomas Berry, religious thinker and theorist of eco-spirituality, insists on
our need to develop a deeper connection to the Earth, and also recognizes
our modern, postindustrial struggle to establish precisely such a connection,
a struggle both Tolstoy and Levin shared: “Our relationship with the earth,”
Berry says, “involves something more than pragmatic use, academic
understanding, or aesthetic appreciation.”76 Berry shares Rosemary Radford
Ruether’s understanding of environmental history and the ecological impact
of a worldview grounded in science and empiricism and the misguided
worship of progress. Berry blames the rise of the money economy and the
industrial revolution, buttressed by the false notion of “progress” through
scientific manipulation, for diverting humanity’s course away from the pro-
phetic visions of St. Augustine and Joachim of Flores, leading ultimately to
the degradation of the Earth.77 Berry’s vision is ecological, by which he means
“the relation of an organism to its environment” and “an indication of the
interdependence of all the living and nonliving systems of the earth,” a vision
meant to change Western history’s alleged progress toward “wasteworld
instead of wonderworld.”78 “We are returning to our native place after a
long absence, meeting once again with our kin in the earth community,”79
Berry asserts, inviting his followers to “dance anew to the rhythms of the
earth”: “This might be referred to in biology, but it has never meant that much
in real life. We must now do this deep reflection on ourselves. What earlier
peoples did immediately and intuitively in establishing human identity, we
must do deliberately.”80 The survival of human and other lifeforms depends
on such reflection, along with greater humility and spirituality, an abandon-
ment of mechanistic and positivist philosophy –namely, “the impulse to con-
trol, to command, to force, to oppress, and to begin quite humbly to follow
the guidance of the larger community on which all life depends.” Against
anthropocentric, that is to say human-centered, disregard for other species,
Berry proposes that we develop an “intimacy with the larger earth commu-
nity, for this is also the larger dimension of our being. Our human destiny is
integral with the destiny of the earth.”81 Berry’s ecological vision optimistic-
ally proposes that we return to our native place, tapping into “our primordial
capacity for language at the elementary level of song and dance, wherein we
share our existence with the animals and with all natural phenomena,” refer-
ring to shamanistic experience, like the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande
120
performing an eagle, buffalo, or deer dance; the Navajos’ dry-paintings and

chantway ceremonies; the Northwest peoples’ totem animals; or, in the West,
in Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, diurnal and seasonal liturgies, and
medieval bestiaries, where the animal world is brought into the human.82
According to Berry, to move away from the industrial order, we need “a
comprehensive change in the control and direction of the energies available
to us,” including “commitment to the earth as irreversible process, to the
ecological age as the only viable form of the millennial ideal, and to a sense
of progress that includes the natural as well as the human world. Only by ful-
filling these conditions can we evoke the energies that are needed for future
survival in a setting of mutually enhancing human-earth relationships.”83
While Tolstoy may not have agreed with Berry on the specifics, such as
the need to accept the universe “as a self-emergent evolutionary process”84
(he was skeptical of contemporary scientific thinking, famously condemning
Darwin’s view of evolution driven by the gory “struggle for existence”85),
both Tolstoy and Berry shared a belief in the spirit of the Earth; both, in
turn, associated this spirit with the preindustrial past now lost to utility and
consumerism. With Berry, Tolstoy thus shared a skeptical view of indus-
trial progress and lamented postindustrial humanity’s loss of intimacy with
nature and the Earth despite our seemingly superior scientific knowledge.
“Just now the human community has a remarkable scientific understanding
of the universe and of the planet Earth,” Berry writes; “yet, humans seem not
to have the intimate rapport with the universe that earlier humans once had
… Echoes of an ancient human-Earth relationship are evident among indi-
genous peoples, many of whose sustainable life ways have been significantly
altered by contacts with modern industrial cultures.”86 What indigenous
peoples (including the Omaha, Iroquois, Lakota, and others) represent for
Berry –the hope of recovering a more inclusive vision of the universe and a
more comprehensive, and thus responsible, notion of Earth community that
transcends the confines of anthropocentric concerns –the peasants, arguably,
represent for Levin and Tolstoy.
Ecofeminism: Women and Animals in Anna Karenina
Perhaps the most obvious way in which environmental concerns figure
in Anna Karenina is in the privileging of rural to urban space.87 This also
distinguishes earlier nature-writing and first-wave ecocriticism from more
recent critical interest in greening urban spaces and the “greater prioritiza-
tion of landscapes that are metropolitan and/or bear distinct marks of indus-
trial transformation.”88 More broadly, ecocriticism, according to Cheryll
Glotfelty’s landmark Ecocriticism Reader (1996), is “the study of the rela-
tionship between literature and the physical environment.”89 In the Romantic
121
idiom, the countryside typically represents life and freedom from care, while
the city is seen as a corrupting, deadly locus. Anna Karenina features this
conventional dichotomy: while Levin carries the potential for life, as he is in
favor of maintaining an agrarian state and opposed to the urban milieu with
its pretentious socialites, Vronsky and Anna, who inhabit urban space, come
to embody the way of death. At one point, the socially awkward Levin admits
that the city (Moscow) turned him mad; the debates, the drinking, and the
food all made his life there “devoid of purpose and meaning” [bestsel’naia,
bestolkovaia].90 The very place of Anna and Vronsky’s meeting, the railroad
station, is one of the century’s emblems for industrialization and urbaniza-
tion, as, for example, in Charles Dickens’ Dombey and Son (1848), where the
railroad is associated with death.91 Anna’s suicide, of course, solidifies this
symbolic association.
Levin opposes the development of industry, transportation infrastruc-
ture, and factories at the expense of the agrarian sector, which might work
for Europe but is “premature” for Russia. Specifically, he argues that “with
our improper use of land, railroads, caused not by economic but by polit-
ical necessity, were premature and, instead of promoting agriculture, as was
expected of them, having moved ahead of agriculture and caused the devel-
opment of industry and credit, stopped it”; further, “just as the one-sided
and premature development of an organ in an animal would interfere with
its overall development, so for the general development of wealth in Russia,
credit, communication routes, and the strengthening of manufacturing
activity, which are undoubtedly necessary in Europe, where they are timely,
here [in our country] [railroads] have only done harm, having made the main
question of the utility of agriculture moot.”92 The organic simile comparing
railroads to individual organs, surely the mark of an “estestvennik,” fur-
ther underscores the unnaturalness of industrial grafting. Lost in translation
is the etymological connection between land or earth [zemlia] and agricul-
ture [zemledelie], that further contrasts agrarian labor grounded in the earth
with the railroads superimposed upon it. First-wave ecocriticism assumes
that “the prototypical human figure is a solitary human and the experience
in question activates a primordial link between human and nonhuman.”93
We saw this “primordial link” “activate[d]‌” through Levin’s physical labor,
his mowing and plowing of the field, which confirmed for him a sense of
belonging to a larger spiritual community. The “primordial link” is present,
too, in Levin’s defense of the preindustrial landscape against so-called “pro-
gress” which is yet premature for Russia –a stance which, again, defines his
identity through an association with the rural, anticipates Berry’s skepticism
about “progress” that ushers in “a wasteworld,” and, additionally, aligns
with Ruether’s ideas.
122
An awareness of crisis brought about by modern industrialization lies at

the core of this feminist theologian’s notion of ecojustice, and along with
other theological and religious thinkers, Ruether looks to Christianity, “the
dominant religion of western industrial countries,” to find in the biblical
traditions “precious resources for an ecological spirituality and ethic, or what
[she] would call an ecojustice ethic” (“Biblical Vision”). Opposing the view
of nature as “dead matter” which took over Western science in the seven-
teenth century –the shift which Carolyn Merchant calls “the death of nature”
(in The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution,
1982) –Ruether insists that in the Hebrew as well as the preindustrial
Christian worldview, nature is seen as “alive, filled with soul or spirit”: “We
interact with this animate spirit in nature. Nature is responsive to God as
living creatures who relate to God in their own right,” citing, for example,
Psalm 65:9–13, as evidence of God’s joy in his creation of Earth and its
inhabitants.94 In Ruether’s environmental reading of Scripture, humanity,
nature, and God engage in a holistic covenantal relationship the breaking of
which results in ecological devastation: “The land is itself an integral part
of the covenantal relation between humanity and God. In this covenantal
view nature’s responses to human use or abuse itself becomes an ethical
sign. The erosion of the soil, drought, the drying up of the springs of water
and the pollution of the earth are themselves judgments of God upon unjust
ways of living between humans with each other and with nature.” Harmony
and renewal require collaboration among humans, God, and nature and not
a “stewardship model of human relation to the earth,” which, predicated on
Genesis 1:28 (that humanity should “fill the earth and subdue it and have
dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every
living thing that moves upon the earth”), promotes human domination over
the environment and its nonhuman inhabitants.95
While redefining the covenantal relation, Ruether offers a vision of a
revitalized Earth while also challenging the masculinist anthropomorphic
notion of God: “He/she/it (I prefer ‘she’) is what I feel in myself, in other
people, in all things,” she notes when describing her personal vision of the
divine as creative energy.96 “This creative energy isn’t a human being, male
or female,” Ruether explains; “rather, it is within and underlying all beings
(animals and plants), earth, air, and water. It is personal and transpersonal. It is
the energy of renewal and transformation that was the basis of all creation.”97
This “divine power of creativity and renewal underlies what is and gives it
continual new potential.”98 In Gaia and God (1992/1994), Ruether reiterates
her distrust of industrialization as panacea, arguing that “[r]‌ebuilding human
society for a sustainable earth will require far more than a plethora of techno-
logical ‘fixes’ within the present paradigm of relations of domination”; she
123
proceeds to detail the incremental steps in her holistic vision for a healed
earth, from phasing out petroleum to “build[ing] strong base communities of
celebration and resistance.”99
Turning now to Anna Karenina, when we examine the privileging of nat-
ural to constructed urban landscape from an ecofeminist perspective, we find
that these respective loci are associated with women and, specifically, with
women’s roles as mothers, caretakers, and wives. Sexuality is productive and
rewarded when channeled through marriage; outside of marriage, however,
it is thwarted symbolically and/or physically. This is evident in Levin’s pref-
erence for the fertile Kitty over the passionate, but ultimately death-bearing
Anna, who is denied custody over her son Serëzha and, after nearly dying in
labor, gives up Annie, the little girl she bears to Vronsky, the product of their
adultery. Whereas Kitty bears Levin a healthy son at the end of the novel,
Anna leaves her children motherless orphans. The fact that Vronsky, although
a painter himself, cannot finish Anna’s portrait and has to commission one
from another artist (Mikhaĭlov), is a significant clue, as well, to his spiritual
infertility. Despite his charm, he can never marry the fertile Kitty, whose
selflessness and readiness to care for others –most poignant when caring for
Levin’s dying brother Nikolaĭ while being ill herself – may be marked by
nineteenth-century gender essentialism, but also, and more important given
the novel’s thematics, celebrates Kitty’s power as a caretaker, her ability to
symbolically mitigate the death of one relative with the creation of another,
her and Levin’s son Mitia.
Since earth/nature is conventionally gendered as female and subjected to
analogous patriarchal control, ecofeminism adds a gender dimension to the
work of ecocriticism. Observing the conventional identification of women
with the natural world, “[e]‌cofeminist discourse generally argues that the
exploitation of nature and that of women are intimately linked,” drawing
attention to and resisting the various ways in which women are essentialized,
exploring the affinities and tensions in examinations of relationships between
gender and the nonhuman, while at the same reexamining the discourse of
environmental degradation. In an effort to combat gender essentialism –
earth/nature conventionally gendered as female and women as caregivers –
Carolyn Merchant proposes an “ethics of earthcare,” which “emerges
from women’s experiences and connections to the earth and from cultural
constructions of nature as unpredictable and chaotic” without reinforcing
the nature–woman association.100 Stacy Alaimo, in contrast, sees efforts to
avoid such “essentialism” as “one of feminist theory’s most notable attempts
to escape nature. She stresses that banishing nature from culture ‘risks the
return of the repressed and forecloses the possibilities for subversive feminist
rearticulations of the term’.”101 Indeed, like deep ecology, ecofeminism shares
124
a similar skepticism about “ecological denial,” philosopher Val Plumwood’s

term for “the reality of our embeddedness in nature.”102
By focusing on gender, ecofeminism allows us to see what Lawrence Buell
calls the double paradox of “nature”: “One of the most significant insights for
literary studies afforded by approaching the general problem of ecological
denial or alienation through the lens of gender is its exposure of the double
paradox of ‘nature’ having been androcentrically constructed as a domain for
males, in contradistinction to female-coded domestic space, yet at the same
time symbolically coded as female –an arena of potential domination analo-
gous to the female body.” The symbolic association of female with nature and
male with culture, which Sherry Ortner says is ubiquitous, can be corrected
only by the “institutional base of the society” such that women can “be seen
as aligned with culture”; however, the same division of labor that relegates
women to the position of caregivers, the division that is “patriarchially
mandated,” also gives them an (either inherent or conditioned) advantage in
a feminist ethics of “care.”103
From an ecofeminist perspective, then, Kitty’s domesticity, which
makes her a foil to Anna, as well as her intuitive espousal of faith, which
distinguishes her from the perpetually seeking, reason- and-logic-
bound
Levin, may be recast in terms of Merchant’s feminist “ethics of earthcare” –
with Tolstoy’s portrayal of Kitty as a caregiver, wife, and mother seen as
powerful manifestations of her femininity as well as her rootedness in the
rural and the natural. It is precisely this earth connection that draws Levin to
Kitty. While visiting Kitty’s older sister Dolly in the country, he is described
as frequently having a childlike, joyful disposition, especially when around
children,104 another way in which womanhood, and especially motherhood,
and nature are linked. In Levin’s imagination, moreover, fertility and woman-
hood find meaningful expression in the nonhuman.105 When a cow named
Pava gives birth, he is so overjoyed that he imagines his future wife saying, as
they greet guests at their manor, that the couple helped rear Pava’s daughter
“as though she were our child.”106 Levin is drawn to rural space symbolically
coded as female, and rather than establishing his domination over his wife
as well as the land, thereby affirming natural and nonhuman space as having
been “androcentrically constructed as a domain for males” in Buell’s words,
Levin gives up his overly intellectualized ties to an androcentric, logocentric
philosophical tradition and surrenders to life. Short of seeing his “cutting
more and more deeply into the earth” in terms of sexual violence against
nature, I contend that Levin yields his impetus to control here while affirming
the experience of others: intuitive, feminine, agrarian, peasant, rural; this,
I would further argue, effectively challenges gender, class, and spatial bound-
aries rather than reinforcing them.
125
Nor is it a coincidence that Pava, the cow, figures prominently in Levin’s

spiritual quest and search for community in the country, similar to the role
his hunting dog Laska, also a female animal, plays elsewhere. As Andrea
Rossing McDowell argues:
Although Tolstoy employs the animal theme as a literary device to reflect the external
devaluation of humans, he also denounces human domination over living animals … as
well as human abuse and destruction of living animals (through hunting or the slaughter-
house). These beliefs resonate with his larger social concerns, such as his opposition to
serfdom, the role of women in society, the devolution of sexual mores, and the destruction
of rural life through modernization.107
For this reason, McDowell concludes, we should not take his renunciation
of hunting, aestheticism and vegetarian lifestyle, criticism of animal subjects
for medical or scientific purposes, and overall stance on nonviolence as clear
indication of Tolstoy’s animal activism. His relationship to the animal world
is, in a word, complex: at once attuned to animal difference, as my own dis-
cussion of Strider (Kholstomer, 1885/1886) demonstrates,108 and heavily
invested in human ethics, with animal welfare being a factor in the human
pursuit of a good life.
In her brief discussion of Anna Karenina, McDowell zooms in on the
hunting scene featuring Levin and his dog Laska, where, she maintains,
Tolstoy highlights the hunter’s reliance on his dog’s keen sense of smell. But in
describing the scene from the dog’s perspective, he also demonstrates Laska’s ability
to rationalize. José Ortega y Gasset suggests that the domesticated animal, such as the
dog, represents an “intermediate reality between the pure animal and man,” in that
human training partly subsumes natural instincts, thereby partially de-animalizing and
humanizing the animal. Accordingly, domesticated animals possess “something like
reason.”109
McDowell also analyzes the connection between Vronsky’s horse Frou

Frou and Tolstoy’s titular heroine, a correlation examined by several
scholars (Sarah Wintle, David M. Bethea, R. P. Blackmur), including Amy
Mandelker’s discussion of the abuse of horses traditionally read “as a meta-
phor for the abuse of women” also found in Lermontov and Dostoevsky.110
Vronsky’s abuse of Frou Frou evidences his broader disregard for the needs
of others, human and nonhuman, and is therefore part of Tolstoy’s critique of
egoism, embodied by Anna, and promotion of self-control, better represented
by Levin. R. P. Blackmur, who reads Anna Karenina through the lens of
Jungian psychology, correlates Vronsky’s desire for Frou Frou with that for
Anna: “What Vronsky wanted was Anna like the horse. But like the horse,
Anna must be used in reckless pastime, or not at all. Take away the pastime,
and the recklessness becomes uncontrollable and all the beautiful anarchy in
126
the animal –all the unknown order under orders known –is lost. So, as with
Anna, Vronsky failed to keep pace with Frou Frou and broke her back.”111
The Frou Frou/Anna connection can be gleaned, moreover, through the
narrator’s use of the epithet “energetic.” Vronsky’s horse is described as
having “a certain energetic but, at the same time, tender expression. She was
one of those animals that does not seem to speak only because the mech-
anism of their mouths does not allow them to do so.”112 By highlighting
Frou Frou’s inability to speak, the narrator suggests a biophilic corrective
to anthropo-and logocentric bias, which Tolstoy later developed in the pie-
bald gelding’s autobiography in Strider. The adjective “energetic” is almost
exclusively used in the novel to describe Anna, and like Frou Frou’s descrip-
tion, it is often focalized through Vronsky. The latter is surprised by Anna’s
“energetic handshake” after he notices an “excess of something in her being
… expressed at times in the sparkle of her eyes, at times in her smile,” and
the same sparkle seems to illuminate her dark room; her petite hand is once
again described as “energetic” a few pages later, and again upon her meeting
Levin.113 Vronsky’s passionate pursuit of Anna is driven by “frightening
energy”; his face is described at least once as “energetic,” as is his gesture of
refusal when speaking about Karenin’s legal rights to his and Anna’s child.114
What attracts Levin to Anna is, accordingly, this very energy. This must be,
in part, because Levin himself is, as his brother Koznyshev insists, “too
prime-sautière by nature, as the French say” (that is, inclined to act upon first
impulse), adding that he wants “passionate, energetic activity or nothing at
all.”115 Instantiated here is the conventional association between women and
animals and, more precisely, between women and horses that are dominated,
abused, and driven/ridden to death by men. Also implied is the path that
energy takes through different human vessels, for which Tolstoy outlines two
alternative courses: when rooted in the soil, in the spiritual union of Kitty
and Levin, the creative energy of the life force [sila zhizni] is fertile and pro-
ductive; when, on the other hand, associated with the city, its wealth, luxury,
and temptations, such energy turns magnetism into a literal train wreck.
The literary preference for creative energy in Tolstoy’s novel, which
is associated with nature, women, and animals, finds biographical echoes
in his eventual conversion to asceticism and a vegetarian lifestyle. In the
1880s, Tolstoy renounced meat-eating and hunting, a change that aligns with
Orthodox dogma concerning the treatment of animals and the consumption
of meat and dairy, fasting being a clear example of a broader asceticism, the
renunciation of alcohol and tobacco use, profanity, and sexual proclivity.116
“The decision to give up meat was not the only renunciation of Tolstoy
during this first vigorous attempt to live the new life at Yasnaya Polyana. He
gave up wine; and hunting –the sport that had provided him with so much
127
pleasure and with the material for some of the most brilliant passages of his
fiction –was firmly abandoned.”117 In a letter to his wife Sonia, he described
hunting as “a very agreeable habit for forty years,” but also one whose via-
bility he was starting to question: “But when a hare jumped out, I wished
him luck. Above all, I felt ashamed.”118 According to Maude, Tolstoy ini-
tially decided to give up meat after a visit, in 1885, by William Frey (born
Nikolaĭ Konstantinovich Geins),119 who made a convincing case for vege-
tarianism, an ethic which matched Tolstoy’s Christian values. As his private
secretary Valentin Bulgakov explains, Tolstoy saw humanity and other living
beings sharing the same “soul,” common to all life, which made it immoral
to hurt or slay others, human and animal; connected to this was Tolstoy’s
belief that individual perfection could be achieved through self-control and
moderation, and the first step to this was the forgoing of flesh-food, as the
author maintains in the aptly titled “The First Step” (1892).120 This essay, the
preface to the Russian translation of British vegetarian Howard Williams’
The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of
Flesh-Eating (1883), summarizes Tolstoy’s views on self-control and fasting
as a means to free oneself from desire, including gluttony, idleness, and lust.
Prior to documenting his famous visit to a slaughterhouse so as to censure
meat eaters who purport to oppose animal suffering, Tolstoy claims that con-
suming animal flesh is “simply immoral, as it involves the performance of an
act which is contrary to moral feeling –killing.”121
Tolstoy’s Resurrection (Voskresenie, 1899), written eighteen years after
Anna Karenina and after he had abandoned literature for being a distraction
from social and religious activism, features a character who is a vegetarian
and whose portrayal might actually be based on the historical personage of
V. K. Geins/William Frey.122 Compared to Anna Karenina, Resurrection is a
more dogmatic text with a heavy-handed message concerning the judgment of
others and the need for forgiveness. The plot centers on Dmitriĭ Nekhliudov’s
spiritual quest after Katiusha Maslova, the woman whom he seduces and
impregnates, undergoes trial and imprisonment; the novel seems to promote,
on the one hand, an ascetic lifestyle in the absence of which lust and desire
overwhelm and destroy people’s lives, and on the other, a greater humility
and forgiveness when dealing with the tragic consequences of indiscretion.
Unlike Nekhliudov, who maintains class difference despite his youthful flir-
tation with granting land to his peasants,123 the vegetarian Vladimir Simonson
prefers to walk alongside lower-class criminals while in prison. Born into
the nobility, Simonson insisted that his manor be given to the people, and
was later ridiculed and arrested for preaching about justice. According to
Simonson’s organicist worldview, things we might deem dead or inanimate
are actually part of a larger living whole, an organic body: “everything in the
128
world is alive, and there is nothing dead”; the phagocytes in our blood are
evidence of this dynamic interaction: single individuals [holostye liudi], like
phagocytes or small particles in a much greater whole, are meant to work
collectively towards the greater good of the community, helping the weaker
parts improve.124
Contrary to McDowell, who notes that Simonson’s “views have little
bearing on the novel in toto nor do they offer greater insights into Tolstoy’s
philosophy,”125 I see him playing a notable role that, in turn, reflects Tolstoy’s
interest in an organicist view of nature as well as in Scripture. His surname,
the son of Simon (Simeon), calls to mind St. Peter’s name prior to conver-
sion, and he is, appropriately, a righteous pagan whose spirit is not confined
by institutionalized Christianity. The epigraphs to Resurrection, drawn from
Matthew 18:21 and 7:3, provide a tropological gloss on the relationship
between the two characters, as Simonson focalizes the novel’s main cri-
tique of the judicial system that empowers a handful of humans to condemn
others, power that is often based on selfish concerns rhetorically strengthened
through an appeal to science: “Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, ‘Lord,
how many times shall I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to
seven times?’ ” (Matt. 18:21) and “Why do you look at the speck of saw-
dust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own
eye?” (Matt. 7:3). The former, spoken by Peter, highlights Simonson’s role in
helping to reform Katiusha and Nekhliudov, the moral sense here calling for
greater altruism; the latter comes from the Sermon on the Mount, a version of
which Tolstoy preached continually post-conversion.126 On the level of plot
and characterization, furthermore, Simonson comes closer to Tolstoy’s ideal
of the “dukhovnyĭ” (spiritual) man than does Resurrection’s main hero, and
therefore makes a better match for Katiusha, whom he loves platonically in
contrast to Nekhliudov’s short-lived physical infatuation. In the third part of
Resurrection, it is on Simonson’s account that Katiusha reforms, realizing
that Nekhliudov’s decision to marry her is driven by self-interest and meant
as a sacrifice to prevent him from falling into greater misery. That Simonson’s
character might be based on Geins/Frey further bridges Tolstoy’s interest in
vegetarianism with his spiritual values.
Tolstoy’s conversion to an ascetic, vegetarian lifestyle took place after the
completion of Anna Karenina, but the drive toward that simple, ethical life
is present throughout the novel. In this turn toward asceticism, including an
imperative to grow food for the famished and to practice non-violence against
human and nonhuman others, we can also see how Tolstoy anticipated the
eco-spiritual and ecojustice ideals of later theologians, namely Berry and
Ruether. For Tolstoy and his literary alter ego, neither science and empiri-
cism nor Orthodox Christianity provided the answer to life’s questions; both
129
sought a firmer foundation that they eventually found grounded in the Earth,
along with an epistemology that privileged instincts over reason, thereby
enabling them to transcend the confines of their rational selves. That this
“perpetual seeking” led them to merge with the soil like the peasant muzhiki
may be, as critics charge, intellectually dishonest given their class status
and level of education, and yet it gives Levin and Tolstoy himself, later in
his life, a spirituality less limiting than the Christian, along with communal
connectedness to the human and the nonhuman. For Levin, living life finds
its embodiment in the freshly plowed earth, the only paradigm that enables
him, as well as his creator, to act and live morally. The thirteen-year gap
in Tolstoy’s lifelong diary-keeping, from 1865 to 1878, was also the period
during which he wrote Anna Karenina; the novel can therefore be under-
stood not only as an expression of religious and existential crises experienced
by its protagonist Levin, whose name echoes Tolstoy’s own Christian name
Lev, but also as a glimpse of resolution to both men’s seeking –albeit one
that may not be spontaneous, as Lavrin charges, may still be too rational and
intellectualized, and would ultimately lead to the author’s excommunication.
Ecocriticism, Eco-Spirituality, and Resurrection
A few words could, finally, be said about Tolstoy’s eco-spirituality in his
last novel. Bookending Tolstoy’s own spiritual quest, Resurrection opens
with a description of vernal nature that lives on despite rampant urbanization
and human efforts to stifle it. Grass is ubiquitous, a symbol of undying vege-
tative power: “coming to life, it grew and turned green everywhere, where
it had not been scraped clean, not only on boulevard lawns but also between
cobblestones.”127 The point here, as the remainder of the novel confirms, is
to criticize society for taking itself too seriously, and choosing to manipu-
late and oppress one another rather than celebrate the “beauty of the world
created by God.” Through this eco-spiritual image of nature imbued with
spirit, which is physically taking over the human-made landscape (the lawns
and the cobblestones), Tolstoy privileges nature’s creative energy and power
over civilization –particularly urban and military realities. This is revealed
in the conflict between Nekhliudov’s “spiritual self” [dukhovnyĭ chelovek],
who does good only when it is good onto others and is also associated with
femininity and life in the country, and the morally corrupting “bestial self”
[zhivotnyĭ chelovek], who leads the hero into “egotistical madness” fueled
by “Petersburg and military life.”128 Similar to the privileging of the agrarian
over the industrial in Anna Karenina, in Resurrection the natural and the
feminine are privileged over the masculinist city and army. Nekhliudov spent
his childhood and adolescence surrounded by women, at his aunts’ residence,
and abandoning this feminine space meant also abandoning the peasant girl
130
Katiusha, with whom he had fallen in love, along with leaving behind his
former self, “an honest, self-sacrificing young man ready to give himself
for every good deed,” and growing into “a depraved, refined egoist, who
indulges in his own pleasures”:
Back then, it was necessary and crucial to have contact with nature and with people (phil-
osophy, poetry) who lived, thought, and felt before him; necessary and crucial now are
human institutions and socializing with chums. Back then, woman seemed a mysterious and
charming creature, and charming precisely due to this mysteriousness; now the meaning of
woman, any woman, except female relatives and friends’ wives, was quite definite: woman
was one of the best instruments of an already experienced pleasure.129
The hero’s “terrible change,” from “consider[ing] his true self to be his
spiritual being” [svoë dukhovnoe sushchestvo] to yielding to his “healthy,
vigorous, animal I” [svoë zdorovoe, bodroe, zhivotnoe ia],130 involves a re-
evaluation of his relation to nature and women, the gendered association that
ecofeminist Connie Bullis has famously described as “the womanizing of
nature and the naturizing of woman.”131 For the older, non-spiritual, base
Nekhliudov, both become distant, objectified, unnecessary, unimportant.
Although it is unclear, at the novel’s close, what course Nekhliudov’s “com-
pletely new life” would take,132 we can reasonably infer from the title –
Resurrection –that it would transport him back to nature, to his land, and the
feminine creative energy of his youth.
Notes
1 This chapter draws on my doctoral research, specifically ch.3, “The Soil, the Scythe, and
the Spirit: The Quest in Anna Karenina,” in “A Spirit of the Earth: Vitalism in Nineteenth-
Century Literature” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2011), 147–195; and “The
Soil, the Sickle, and the Spirit of the Earth: Vitalism in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina” (paper
presented at the 32nd Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference of the American Association for
the Advancement of Slavic Studies, New York, April 4, 2009).
2 R. F. Christian, introduction to Tolstoy’s Diaries (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1985), vii.
3 Thomas Grant Steven Cain, Tolstoy (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1977), 125.
4 Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Sobranie sochineniĭ, t. 9 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe iz-vo
hudozhestvennoĭ lit-ry, 1959), 8. When transliterating Russian, a simplified version of the
Library of Congress (LC) Romanization Tables is adapted here, with ligatures omitted.
Exceptions are made for established spellings, such as Tolstoy, Vronsky, and Yasnaya
Polyana (rather than Tolstoĭ, Vronskiĭ, and Iasnaia Poliana), and transliterations in quoted
text. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Russian are my own.
5 Ibid., t. 9, 391.
6 Anatolii A. Gorelov, Sozial’naia Ekologia [Social Ecology] (Moscow: IFRAN, 1998),
accessed February 1, 2017, https://books.google.com/books?id=nCJEuM9JNfsC&source
=gbs_ navlinks_s, 173–174. John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Ecology and Religion
(Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014), 16. Janko Lavrin, Tolstoy. An Approach
(New York: Macmillan, 1946), 132–139.
7 Lawrence Buell, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber, “Literature and Environment,”
Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011), 430–431, accessed July 1,
131
2017, doi:10.1146/annurev-environ-111109-144855. Critical issues include the privil-

eging of certain species over others (domestic animals, such as horses and dogs, for
example) and the metaphorical superimposition of relations between humans and animals
onto the social relations between socially unequal groups (women, ethnic minorities,
people of lower socioeconomic status).
8 Gordon William Spence, Tolstoy the Ascetic (Edinburgh and London: Oliver &
Boyd, 1967).
9 Edward Baker Greenwood, “Tolstoy and Religion,” in New Essays on Tolstoy, ed. Malcolm
Jones (London, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 150.
10 Ibid., 152.
11 R. F. Christian, introduction to New Essays on Tolstoy, ed. Malcolm Jones (London,
New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 10.
12 Greenwood, “Tolstoy and Religion,” 149.
13 Ibid., 151.
14 Lina Steiner argues that Tolstoy’s “entire cast of mind while he matured as a thinker and
a writer was shaped in dialogue with the German tradition of Bildung,” noting the many
references in his essays to German theorists of self-formation (Moses Mendelssohn,
Johann Gottfried Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and others). She particularly stresses
the “essentially nonpolitical” character of Tolstoy’s postconversion writings on religion,
society, and art. See: Lina Steiner, “The Russian Aufklärer: Tolstoi in Search of Truth,
Freedom, and Immortality,” Slavic Review 70.4 (2011), 776, 778–790, accessed March 1,
2017, JSTOR.
15 Greenwood, “Tolstoy and Religion,” 151–152.
16 Isaiah Berlin, “Tolstoy and Enlightenment,” in Tolstoy. A Collection of Critical Essays,
ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1967), 30.
18 Lev Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie sochineniĭ v 90 tomah, t. 17 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
“Hudozhestvennaia Literatura,” 1964), 353–356.
19 R. F. Christian, Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction (London: Cambridge University Press,
1969), 212.
20 Lavrin, Tolstoy, 94, 97.
21 Ibid., 93, 105, 75.
22 Ibid., 96.
23 Ibid., 95 (emphasis added).
24 Christian, Tolstoy, 215.
25 Lavrin, Tolstoy, 95.
26 Cain, Tolstoy, 124–125.
27 Ibid., 128.
28 Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie, t. 23, 51–57.
29 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, t. 9, 8.
30 Ibid., t. 9, 390.
32 Ibid., 155. The phrase “universal and eternal teaching” comes from Tolstoy’s diary for
November 1899: “There is neither a Tolstoyan sect nor a Tolstoyan teaching. There is
only one unique teaching, that of truth –that universal and eternal teaching so perfectly
expressed, for myself no less than for others, in the Gospels.”
33 Konstantin Leontiev, Polnoe sobranie sochineniĭ i pisem v dvenadtsati tomah, t. II
(St. Petersburg: Iz-vo “Vladimir Dal’,” 2000), 3, 5.
35 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, t. 8, 32–33.
36 Ibid., t. 8, 33–34.
37 Ibid., t. 9, 388.
132
39 Felicia Bonaparte, introduction to Middlemarch, by George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1997), xii, xv.
41 Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie, t. 23, 17–18.
42 Cain, Tolstoy, 128.
44 Leontiev, Polnoe sobranie, 102–103 (emphasis in the original).
45 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, t. 9, 82–84.
46 Ibid., t. 9, 308.
47 Ibid., t. 9, 389.
48 Ibid., t. 9, 400.
49 Boris Sorokin, Tolstoy in Prerevolutionary Russian Criticism (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press for Miami University, 1979), 116. For more on Strakhov’s anti-
materialist and anti-rationalist philosophy: ibid., 94–95; on organicist critics and their
connection to Slavophiles: ibid., 71–78, 289.
50 Berlin, “Tolstoy and Enlightenment,” 50.
51 Ibid.,  41–42.
52 Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie, t. 17, 353–356.
54 Tolstoy, Polnoe sobranie, t. 23, 31.
55 Ibid., t. 25, 64–66. Leo Tolstoy, The Works of Leo Tolstoy (Roslyn, NY: Black’s Readers
Service, 1928), 45.
56 Alexandra Tolstoy, “Tolstoy and the Russian Peasant,” Russian Review 19.2 (1960), 150,
accessed June 8, 2017, JSTOR.
57 Ibid., 151–152.
58 Ernest Joseph Simmons, Leo Tolstoy (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1946), 340.
59 Ibid., 381.
60 The relationship between landowner and peasant in pre-revolutionary Russian society
depicted in Anna Karenina has led Marxist critics to declare Tolstoy “ ‘the poet of
the peasant revolution that lasted from 1861 to 1905,’ not consciously understanding,
but faithfully reproducing the revolutionary process in its vital stages” (Christian,
Tolstoy, 186).
61 Lavrin, Tolstoy,  70–71.
62 Ibid., 79. These famous realist portraits include Leo Tolstoy in the Forest (1891), Leo
Tolstoy Working at the Round Table (1891), Leo Tolstoy Barefoot (1901), and others.
63 Cain, Tolstoy, 134.
64 Lavrin, Tolstoy, 95.
65 Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, t. 8, 275–277.
66 Ibid., t. 8, 268, 276.
67 Ibid., t. 8, 304–307.
68 Ibid., t. 9, 391–392.
69 Ibid., t. 9, 400.
70 Ibid., t. 9, 421.
71 Ibid., t. 9, 399.
72 Georg Lukàcs, “Tolstoy and the Development of Realism,” in Tolstoy. A Collection of
Critical Essays, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1967),
83. In Lukàcs’ view, the passage in which Levin is working the land is an example of
Tolstoy’s moving against the current of capitalism and the bourgeois novel, inventing a
new (we might say “postindustrial,” but really a wishful preindustrial) way to capture
the relationship between man and nature. By envisioning the world from the peasant’s
perspective, Tolstoy exposes the capitalist mechanization of labor and dehumanization of
humanity through increasingly more “rigid” and “dead” bureaucracy and other out-of-date
social formations supported by an autocratic state. In Anna Karenina such capitalization
133
and corresponding bureaucratization of the Russian nobility are evident in the character
of Oblonskiĭ, who personifies liberal tendencies; in Vronsky, the modern aristocrat who
gives up his military career for Anna and becomes a capitalist landowner; and Karenin,
“the bureaucratized, reactionary, obscurantist, hypocritical and empty administrative offi-
cial” (Lukàcs, “Tolstoy and the Development of Realism,” 89). Lukàcs’ reading of the
peasants as proto-revolutionaries, however, fails to take into account their patriarchal
beliefs and seems as optimistic as that of the populists and Slavophiles who, having
“gone to the people,” found them disappointingly unenlightened.
74 Aleksandr Blok, “The People and the Intelligentsia,” in Russian Intellectual History: An
Anthology, ed. Marc Raeff (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966), 363.
76 Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988), 13.
77 Ibid., xii.
78 Ibid., 41–42, 17.
79 Ibid., 9. Berry’s vision of a sustainable Earth echoes contemporary ecological thinking of
Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, who argue against doomsday thinking, on the one hand,
and overreliance on technological fixes on the other, urging rather that we collaborate
and think with and across species. Berry uses the term “kin,” also key to Haraway’s most
recent book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Experimental
Futures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), to designate a similarly compre-
hensive community, both human and nonhuman. Ruether shares with all three a suspicion
of technological fixes, though not of technology in general: there is nothing inherently
wrong with advanced technology, she says, so long as access to this technology is given
to all, regardless of socioeconomic standing.
80 Berry, Dream of the Earth, 21.
81 Ibid., xiv.
82 Ibid., 2–3. Such fascination may be seen as orientalizing the Native American, and Berry’s
insistence that our “postcritical naiveté” (5) will bring us back into the Earth’s fold, by
rendering us “capable once again of experiencing the immediacy of life, the entrancing
presence to the natural phenomena around us,” seems idealistic; unlike Ruether, who
“suggests, in practical ways, how we, as affluent Western people, can begin to move from
patterns of production, consumption, and waste that destroy the earth, to ecologically sus-
tainable ones” (Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of
Earth Healing [San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994], 9, 254–274), Berry’s vision is more
theoretical even as he appeals to physical means, “creative energy,” or “an all-pervading
mysterious energy articulated in the infinite variety of natural phenomena” (Berry, Dream
of the Earth, 24).
83 Berry, Dream of the Earth, 33, 29–30.
84 Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker
and John Grim (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009), 116, 194–195, 96–116.
85 A recent article shows that while Tolstoy denounced Darwin and natural selection in his
nonfiction as well as his novels, in which characters serve as mouthpieces for similar
critique, the structuring worldview of these novels, including Anna Karenina, reveals
the influence of and engagement with Darwinian ideas, such as the prevalence of chance
over telos. See: Anna A. Berman, “Darwin in the Novels: Tolstoy’s Evolving Literary
Response,” Russian Review, March 10, 2017, accessed July 30, 2017, doi:10.1111/
russ.12134.
86 Berry, The Christian Future,  96–97.
87 It is surprising that not more has been published on the subject of Tolstoy and ecocriticism
given the author’s admiration for Rousseau, the advocate of the “return to nature”;
what we know about Tolstoy’s later life on his estate in Yasnaya Polyana, his vegetar-
ianism and stance against hunting and abusing animals, should be enough to make him
134
ecocriticism’s long-bearded octogenarian posterchild. One reason for this dearth might
lie in ecocriticism’s Anglo-American origins, as the movement, which had started in
the 1990s with books such as Jonathan Bate’s Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the
Environmental Tradition (1991), has only recently turned its attention to nonwestern
literatures.
88 Buell et al., “Literature and Environment,” 421.
89 Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and
Literary Imagination (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 11. There are, as Buell
suggests, two “waves” of ecocritics to date: second-wave ecocritics and scholars of lit-
erature and the environment, who call for a more inclusive field that would accommo-
date both natural and constructed metropolitan and toxified urban environments, aiming
to develop a social ecocriticism with a pronounced element of environmental justice,
and first-wave ecocritics, who attempt to reconnect humans with the natural world, a
discourse that is ethical and environmentally aware, but largely blind to intersectional
influences of class or race. This analysis of Anna Karenina falls more in line with the
latter, though the element of class (landowners versus peasants) also comes into play.
91 See, for example, Herbert L. Sussman’s Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation,
and the Rise of the Machine (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009). Along with Dickens,
Ruskin, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold were among the most vocal opponents of the rail-
road in Britain.
93 Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 23.
94 Rosemary Radford Ruether, “The Biblical Vision of Ecojustice,” Feminism & Religion,
August 19, 2011, accessed July 10, 2017, https://feminismandreligion.com/2011/08/19/
the-biblical-vision-of-ecojustice-by-rosemary-radford-ruether/.
95 Ibid.
96 Rosemary Radford Ruether, “The Empty Throne: Reimagining God as Creative Energy,”
Tikkun 29.3 (Summer 2014), 28, accessed July 10, 2017, doi:10.1215/ 08879982-
2713322. Also see Rosemary Radford Ruether, “The Female Nature of God: A Problem
in Contemporary Religious Life,” in God as Father?, ed. Johannes-Baptist Metz and
Edward Schillebeeckx, 61–66 (New York: Seabury, 1981); Rosemary Radford Ruether,
Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983).
For a discussion of feminist theology, see Wioleta Polinska, “In Woman’s Image: An
Iconography for God,” Feminist Theology: The Journal of the Britain & Ireland School
of Feminist Theology 13.1 (2004): 40–61, accessed July 11, 2017, Academic Search
Premier (EBSCO).
97 Ruether, “The Empty Throne,” 28.
98 Ibid., 29.
99 Ruether, Gaia and God, 258, 258–269, 269.
100 Buell et al., “Literature and Environment,” 424–426.
101 Ibid., 425.
102 Buell, Future of Environmental Criticism, 108.
103 Ibid., 109–110.
105 On the connection between women’s studies and animal studies, see, for example, Lynda
Birke’s “Unnamed Others: How Can Thinking about ‘Animals’ Matter to Feminist
Theorizing?” Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research (NORA) 20.2 (2012): 148–
157; for a theorization of “animal difference” and questions raised by aligning animal
studies with women’s and ethnic studies, see Kari Weil’s “A Report on the Animal Turn,”
in differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 21.2 (2010): 1–23, accessed July
10, 2017, doi:10.1215/10407391-2010-001, also in Weil’s introduction to her Thinking
Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012).
135

107 Andrea Rossing McDowell, “Lev Tolstoy and the Freedom to Choose One’s Own
Path,” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5.2 (2007), 1, accessed July 15, 2017, www.
animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/mcdowell-tolstoy.pdf.
108 Anastassiya Andrianova, “Narrating Animal Trauma in Bulgakov and Tolstoy,”
Humanities 5.4 (2016), accessed July 15, 2017, doi:10.3390/h5040084.
109 McDowell, “Lev Tolstoy,” 6.
110 Ibid., 8.
111 R. P. Blackmur, “The Dialectic of Incarnation: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,” in Tolstoy.
A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, Inc., 1967), 134.
113 Ibid., t. 8, 75, 73, 167, 80; t. 9, 290.
114 Ibid., t. 8, 120; t. 9, 214.
115 Ibid., t. 8, 256.
116 McDowell, “Lev Tolstoy,” 2.
117 Simmons, Leo Tolstoy, 385.
118 Ibid.
119 William Frey was a mathematician versed in science, “a Russian by birth, but a cosmopol-
itan by nature” who, after a successful military career, went to America in hopes of setting
up an agricultural colony (at which he failed), and finally returned to Russia in 1885 and
requested a meeting with Tolstoy. The latter was eager to learn from Frey about the mor-
ally pure and physically demanding lives in Russian communal colonies in America and
about the theory and practice of vegetarianism –which he had by then “wholeheartedly
embraced” and would follow “for the rest of his life.” This friendship was, however,
short-lived, as the two ultimately disagreed over Positivism, the philosophy of Auguste
Comte, of whom Frey was a staunch devotee; Tolstoy, on the other hand, argued in What
Then Must We Do? (1886/1889) that positivism was “a scientific system that … usurped
the place of religion and abolished the control that moral principles should exercise”
(Simmons, Leo Tolstoy, 385–386).
120 Valentin Bulgakov, “Leo Tolstoy and Vegetarianism,” Vegetarian News (September
1932), accessed July 16, 2017, www.ivu.org/congress/wvc32/bulgakov.html.
121 Leo Tolstoy, “The First Step,” in I Cannot Be Silent: Writings on Politics, Art, and
Religion, ed. W. Gareth Jones (Bristol: Bristol University Press, 1989), 123. McDowell,
“Lev Tolstoy,” 2.
122 McDowell, “Lev Tolstoy,” 14n.
123 As a young man, Nekhliudov admired Henry George and believed that everyone had
equal rights to land and that private ownership was unjust. He even contemplated renoun-
cing his rights to his father’s estate and giving it to the peasants; however, when this land
became his only source of income, and this was no longer enough to cover his expenses,
he tried to work out a deal to rent it out.
124 Lev Tolstoy, Voskresenie [Resurrection], Sobranie sochineniĭ, t. 11 (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe iz-vo hudozhestvennoĭ lit-ry, 1959), 391.
125 McDowell, “Lev Tolstoy,” 13n.
126 Greenwood, “Tolstoy and Religion,” 151. Lavrin, Tolstoy, 94, 96.
127 Tolstoy, Voskresenie, 7.
128 Ibid., 60.
129 Ibid., 54.
130 Ibid.
131 Connie Bullis, “Retalking Environmental Discourses from a Feminist Perspective: Radical
Potential of Ecofeminism,” in The Symbolic Earth, ed. James G. Cantrill and Christine
L. Oravec (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 125.
132 Tolstoy, Voskresenie, 470.
136
Bibliography
Andrianova, Anastassiya. “Narrating Animal Trauma in Bulgakov and Tolstoy,” Humanities
5.4 (2016). Accessed July 15, 2017. doi:10.3390/h5040084.
——. “The Soil, the Sickle, and the Spirit of the Earth: Vitalism in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.”
Paper presented at the 32nd Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference of the American Association
for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, New York, April 4, 2009.
——. “A Spirit of the Earth: Vitalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature.” PhD diss., City
University of New York, 2011.
Bate, Jonathan. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London and
New York: Routledge, 1991.
Berlin, Isaiah. “Tolstoy and Enlightenment.” In Tolstoy. A Collection of Critical Essays, edited
by Ralph E. Matlaw, 28–51. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.
Berman, Anna A. “Darwin in the Novels: Tolstoy’s Evolving Literary Response.” Russian
Review, March 10, 2017. Accessed July 30, 2017. doi:10.1111/russ.12134.
Berry, Thomas. The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth. Edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker
and John Grim. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009.
——. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988.
Birke, Lynda. “Unnamed Others: How Can Thinking about ‘Animals’ Matter to Feminist
Theorizing?” Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research (NORA) 20.2 (2012):
148–157.
Blackmur, Richard Palmer. “The Dialectic of Incarnation: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.” In
Tolstoy. A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Ralph E. Matlaw, 127–145. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.
Blok, Aleksandr. “The People and the Intelligentsia.” In Russian Intellectual History: An
Anthology, edited by Marc Raeff. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1966.
Bonaparte, Felicia. Introduction to Middlemarch, by George Eliot, vii–xxxviii. Oxford: Oxford
Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary
Imagination. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Buell, Lawrence, Ursula K. Heise, and Karen Thornber. “Literature and Environment.”
Annual Review of Environment and Resources 36 (2011): 417–440. Accessed July 1, 2017.
doi:10.1146/annurev-environ-111109-144855.
Bulgakov, Valentin. “Leo Tolstoy and Vegetarianism.” Vegetarian News (September 1932).
Accessed July 16, 2017. www.ivu.org/congress/wvc32/bulgakov.html.
Bullis, Connie. “Retalking Environmental Discourses from a Feminist Perspective: Radical
Potential of Ecofeminism.” In The Symbolic Earth, edited by James G. Cantrill and
Christine L. Oravec, 123–148. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.
Cain, Thomas Grant Steven. Tolstoy. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1977.
Christian, Reginald Frank. Introduction to New Essays on Tolstoy, edited by Malcolm Jones,
1–13. London, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1978.
——. Tolstoy: A Critical Introduction. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
——. Tolstoy’s Diaries. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985.
Donovan, Josephine. “Tolstoy’s Animals.” Society and Animals 17 (2009): 38–52. Accessed July
21, 2017. www.animalsandsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Tolstoys_Animals.pdf.
Gorelov, Anatolii A. Sozial’naia Ekologia [Social Ecology]. Moscow: IFRAN, 1998.
Accessed February 1, 2017. https://books.google.com/books?id=nCJEuM9JNfsC&sourc
e=gbs_navlinks_s.
137
Gould, Rebecca. “Topographies of Anticolonialism: The Ecopoetical Sublime in the Caucasus

from Tolstoy to Mamakaev.” Comparative Literature Studies 50.1 (2013): 87– 107.
Accessed February 1, 2017. Project MUSE.
Greenwood, Edward Baker. “Tolstoy and Religion.” In New Essays on Tolstoy, edited by
Malcolm Jones, 149–174. London, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University
Press, 1978.
Grim, John, and Mary Evelyn Tucker. Ecology and Religion. Washington, DC: Island
Press, 2014.
Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
Kolstø, Pål. “The Demonized Double: The Image of Lev Tolstoi in Russian Orthodox
Polemics.” Slavic Review 65.2 (2006): 304–324. Accessed March 5, 2017. JSTOR.
Lavrin, Janko. Tolstoy. An Approach. New York: Macmillan, 1946.
LeBlanc, Ronald D. “Tolstoy’s Way of No Flesh: Abstinence, Vegetarianism, and Christian
Psychology.” In Food in Russian History and Culture, edited by Musya Glants and Joyce
Toomre. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997.
Leontiev, Konstantin. Polnoe sobranie sochineniĭ i pisem v dvenadtsati tomah. T. II.
St. Petersburg: Iz-vo “Vladimir Dal’,” 2000.
Lukàcs, Georg. “Tolstoy and the Development of Realism.” In Tolstoy. A Collection of Critical
Essays, edited by Ralph E. Matlaw, 78–94. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.
McDowell, Andrea Rossing. “Lev Tolstoy and the Freedom to Choose One’s Own Path.”
Journal for Critical Animal Studies 5.2 (2007): 1–18. Accessed July 15, 2017. www.
animalliberationfront.com/Philosophy/mcdowell-tolstoy.pdf.
Orwin, Donna Tussing. Tolstoy’s Art and Thought, 1847–1880. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
Polinska, Wioleta. “In Woman’s Image: An Iconography for God.” Feminist Theology: The
Journal of the Britain & Ireland School of Feminist Theology 13.1 (2004): 40–61. Accessed
July 11, 2017. Academic Search Premier (EBSCO).
Ruether, Rosemary Radford. “The Biblical Vision of Ecojustice.” Feminism & Religion.
August 19, 2011. Accessed July 10, 2017. https://feminismandreligion.com/2011/08/19/
the-biblical-vision-of-ecojustice-by-rosemary-radford-ruether/.
——. “The Empty Throne: Reimagining God as Creative Energy.” Tikkun 29.3 (Summer
2014): 28–29. Accessed July 10, 2017. doi:10.1215/08879982-2713322.
——. “The Female Nature of God: A Problem in Contemporary Religious Life.” In God as
Father?, edited by Johannes-Baptist Metz and Edward Schillebeeckx, 61–66. New York:
Seabury, 1981.
——.Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. San Francisco:
HarperCollins, 1994.
——. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983.
Rzhevsky, Nicholas. Russian Literature and Ideology: Herzen, Dostoevsky, Leontiev, Tolstoy,
Fadeyev. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1983.
Simmons, Ernest Joseph. Leo Tolstoy. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1946.
Sorokin, Boris. Tolstoy in Prerevolutionary Russian Criticism. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press for Miami University, 1979.
Spence, Gordon William. Tolstoy the Ascetic. Edinburgh and London: Oliver & Boyd, 1967.
Steiner, Lina. “The Russian Aufklärer: Tolstoi in Search of Truth, Freedom, and Immortality.”
Slavic Review 70.4 (2011): 773–794. Accessed March 1, 2017. JSTOR.
138
Sussman, Herbert L. Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine.
Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009.
Tolstoy, Alexandra. “Tolstoy and the Russian Peasant.” Russian Review 19.2 (1960): 150–156.
Accessed June 8, 2017. JSTOR.
Tolstoy, Leo [Lev]. Anna Karenina. Sobranie sochineniĭ. T. 8, 9. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe
iz-vo hudozhestvennoĭ lit-ry, 1959.
——. “The First Step.” In I Cannot Be Silent: Writings on Politics, Art, and Religion, edited
by W. Gareth Jones. Bristol: Bristol University Press, 1989.
——. Polnoe sobranie sochineniĭ v 90 tomah. T. 17, 23, 25. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo
“Hudozhestvennaia Literatura,” 1964.
——. Voskresenie. [Resurrection.] Sobranie sochineniĭ. T. 11. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe iz-
vo hudozhestvennoĭ lit-ry, 1959.
——. The Works of Leo Tolstoy. Roslyn, NY: Black’s Readers Service, 1928.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in
Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.
Weil, Kari. “A Report on the Animal Turn.” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies
21.2 (2010): 1–23. Accessed July 10, 2017. doi:10.1215/10407391-2010-001.
——. Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? New York: Columbia University
Press, 2012.
Ziolkowski, Margaret. “Anti-Hagiography: Tolstoy’s Assault on Orthodoxy.” In Hagiography
and Modern Russian Literature, 218–245. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Accessed March 1, 2017. JSTOR.
139
A Sustainable City Upon a Hill? A Berryite

Perspective on US Cultural Examples
and American Innocence
Christopher Hrynkow
Introduction
The land is the appointed remedy for whatever is false and fantastic in our culture.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1844: 122)
The Emerson quotation above and the lyrics of Don Henley’s “The End
of the Innocence” highlight moral sentiments integral to the worldview
of Thomas Berry. Representing an impetus for cultural transformation,
Henley’s song associates the end of innocence with the concentration of pol-
itical power, inter-human violence, a litigious society, and the prevalence of
poisonous narratives underpinning key elements of US cultures. Henley’s
gripping voice thus provides something of a background soundtrack for this
chapter. Henley and Hornsby (1989) further suggest that contact with the
ground and tall grass is a location of redemption. Comparably and more
clearly, Ralph Waldo Emerson posits that the land will always serve as a
touchstone of renewal for American cultures. The thought of Thomas Berry
(1914–2009) falls in an interesting place in relation to these broad issues
connecting cultural transformation with the land that frequently reoccur in
American history.
Thomas Berry constructed his analysis of US cultures with frequent
reference to historical examples and currents of intellectual thought. For
instance, he critiqued the exclusion of rights for the natural world from the
American constitution (Berry 2002). He also provided a biting commentary
on the American cultural example in the aftermath of September 11, 2001,
140
through his short essay, “An Historical Moment” (Berry 2001). Additionally,
he deeply resented the impact of an unquestioned imperative for narrowly
framed economic development in the US South, particularly in the areas
surrounding his birthplace near Greensboro, North Carolina.
Building upon Berry’s contributions, while acknowledges that Berry’s
thought should be taken with a grain of salt (see Sideris 2015; Northcott
1996), this chapter supports the premise that a Berryite understanding of US
cultural examples can add an important green dimension, coupling social
justice and ecological health, to the literature on American innocence.
Conceived in this manner, a Berryite approach denotes a person or a line of
thinking that takes a measure of inspiration from Berry’s work as a starting
point, without appropriating his whole system in a fundamentalist manner.
As employed below it activates some of the most cogent aspects of Berry’s
thought and explanatory power in order to allow access to a too frequently
unmentioned, obscured, and systematically harmful socio-ecological dimen-
sion to US cultures’ cumulative impact in the world.
A Berryite Imperative for Cultural Transformation
Berry (1988) argues passionately that the present ecological crisis points
to an urgent need to foster mutually enhancing human–Earth relationships.
In articulating his arguments, Berry is frequently selective in his treatment of
sources and often essentialist in his characterization of cultural phenomena.
Berry confessed as much himself (O’Hara 2009), citing an overwhelming
concern to muster arguments that would motivate effective responses to
the ecological crisis in a manner reminiscent of the proof-texting method-
ology problematized by critical biblical scholars (e.g., Berry 2009a: 17–18).
A self-styled ‘geologian’, or Earth-thinker, Berry urged that all “human
establishments,” such as education, religion, law, politics, culture, and eco-
nomics, actively participate in the transition to what he considers both a
necessary and dawning ecological age (see Berry 2009a: 48–49).
Within this expanded cultural context of an ‘Ecozoic age’, human affairs
gain their meaning through the deep relationships signified by the term
‘intercommunion.’ For Berry, when humanity lives out this intercommunion
in ways that are mutually enhancing for it and the rest of the natural world,
then value and worth will mark all human activities, precisely to the degree
that they augment and contribute to the larger life community. This shift
away from a “deep cultural pathology” (Berry 2004: 18), is necessary in
Berry’s (1988) estimation, because it is only when we take our cues “from
the very structure and functioning of the universe [that] we can have confi-
dence in the future that awaits the human venture” (136–137). Although not
his primary focus, Berry also wrote about the imperative for social justice
in this cultural transformation as early as 1972 (Berry 2009b: 13) and for
141
A Sustainable City Upon a Hill? 141
ecojustice, specifically, at least as early as 1988 (Berry 2009a: 40). From

a Berryite perspective set on enhancing the underdeveloped social justice
dimension of his system, the establishment of cultures of mutually enhan-
cing relationships among all members of the Earth community is not an
abstract proposition but a necessary adaptation of the human venture in rec-
ognition of the seriousness of the situation of the ecological crisis and how
its effects marginalized people. Accordingly, the support for and recovery of
integral ways of being that recognize the inherent dignity of peoples, men,
women and the more-than-human members of the Earth is an increasingly
urgent moral imperative. Moreover, in so much as this integral worldview
is incarnated in deeply sustainable cultures they offer a path for ‘progress’
to be decoupled from its associations with narrowly conceived economic
growth.
Berry’s normative moral commitments and his training, teaching and
research as a cultural historian inform his approach to the problem of sustain-
ability. Berry is perhaps most prescient when he emphasizes that humanity
now finds itself at what is perhaps the most significant crossroads in its cul-
tural history. For the geologian, this statement rings true because:
[T]‌he issue now is of a much greater order of magnitude, for we have changed in a dele-
terious manner not simply the structure and functioning of human society: we have changed
the very chemistry of the planet … structures and functions that have taken hundreds of
millions and even billions of years to bring into existence. Such an order of change in its
nature and in its order of magnitude has never before entered either into earth history or
into human consciousness.
(Berry 1988: xiii)
Berry is, of course, not alone in identifying the precarious character of

the real and present dangers inherent in this state of affairs, even though the
planet would certainly recover from ecological collapse and perhaps even be
healthier without humanity. In Berryite ethical terms what is at issue here is
that, for the first time in geological history, the whole Earth community faces
the prospect of ecological collapse because of the cumulative effects of the
actions of one species, homo sapiens, which has the almost unique ability to
express itself on a cultural level in ways that model overconsumption and
exploitation, inclusive of intra-human exploitation, and thus represents a
moral crisis with tangible consequences for a vital future.
Even accepting the more anthropocentric point that responding to the eco-
logical crisis is less about saving the Earth than it is about saving ourselves
(Amster 2015: 40), these realities represent a major set of challenges, the full
implications of which have only begun emerging over the past half-century.
A key moment in this emergence for the US cultural context is marked by
the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Carson’s (1962/ 2002)
142
landmark monograph and its serialization in the New Yorker helped to raise

Americans’ awareness about the effects of anthropogenic pollution on both
the natural world and human health (Cherry 1998: 317). This connection
accepts the logic inherent in Berryite Heather Eaton’s (2013a) use of the
term “socio-ecological crisis” (105), a terminology that helps to situate the
ecological crisis as a problem for those striving toward the fuller incarnation
of social justice principles. Thus, from a Berryite perspective addressing the
cultural roots of the socio-ecological crisis becomes an important moral act at
the present juncture in human history. Associated efforts to heal this malaise
through the fostering of cultures of socio-ecological flourishing are highly
significant when viewed through a Berryite lens, particularly the cumulative
impact of American cultures on the Earth community.
This focus does not represent a claim that Western or US cultures are
solely responsible for the socio-ecological crisis, indeed it is undeniable that
there are other roots to the crisis now before the planetary community and
that other hegemonic cultures have modeled unsustainable practice (see Tuan
1968; Diamond 2005). Nonetheless, it remains important to consider dom-
inant Occidental cultures’ responsibility for a modernist story of progress that
is complicit in supporting a “violent assault by Western intelligence on the
world about it … an assault, rather than a communion” (Swimme and Berry
1992: 226). From a Berryite perspective it follows that truly sustainable
cultures foster communion relationships with the more-than-human members
of the natural world, rather than a destructive violence that too easily ensues
from objectification of marginalized members of the Earth community. For
example, US-born and raised Berryite Edmund O’Sullivan (1999) associates
a community-destroying progress with “a type of manifest destiny,” which
marks American cultural history. He sees this feature of US cultures as ampli-
fied by a “technozoic vision,” wherein, as per the discourse captured in much
commercial advertising, progress becomes a product (O’Sullivan 1999: 52).
As a part of this technocentric vision, the past is presented not as a wellspring
of renewing wisdom but rather as an enemy of the future.
Considering comparable issues, Berry is emphatic that the story of pro-
gress has now been found to be faulty in its larger cultural dimensions (Berry
1988: 123–124). Furthermore, a Berryite perspective adds that the concomi-
tant technocentric worldview downplays the potential for the past to act as
a vital source of inspiration for contemporary cultural transformation. For
instance, a modernist story of progress tacitly assumes that more ecologically
friendly practices like canning and slow food are ‘primitive’ with little value
to currently dominant expressions of American cultures. At the same time,
accepting this myth of progress involves a certain alienation from a concomi-
tantly commodified natural world.
143
A particularly problematic outcome here from a Berryite perspective

seeking to help incarnate socio-ecological justice is that Americans are con-
suming on a level that, if adopted by the rest of the world’s human popula-
tion, would almost certainly result in the destruction of the very biosphere
that supports all life (see the next section). O’Sullivan emphasizes that
advertising is an agent spreading this attitude globally. Further, he asserts
that American companies and advertising firms are complicit in magni-
fying an unsustainable cultural example with global reach (O’Sullivan
1999). Another example active in the Global South is the cultural power
of Hollywood, which leaves many people with the impression that all
Americans are wealthy in a narrow, economic sense. The author person-
ally witnessed this phenomenon when on a Jesuit intercommunity pro-
gramme in India during the summer of 2008. At the time, a popular movie
was Transformers (2007). Several of the students at the school where he
spent some time teaching were mesmerized by the film, despite the fact that
these young people were from an economically marginalized cultural group
engaged in organic tea production as a form of community development
motivated in large part by Gandhian ideals. Transformers contains a scene
with an urban house property so large that an entire team of the Autobots
(who transform from alien robots into American-style carbon-burning road
vehicles) are able to hide on an irrigated lawn. Although Indians have no
shortage of their own corporations and a film industry providing cultural
stories based on consumption, the reach of saccharine-style Hollywood
films into even remote villages, such as the Himalayan one that provided
this example, can be taken as representative of a problematic cultural export
from a Berryite perspective.
Substantive change in terms of the projecting of such a globally unsustain-
able model will require a painful re-imaging of the very ways Western society
and, in particular, American cultural examples have come to express them-
selves. In line with his above-mentioned rhetorical style, Berry is emphatic
on this point, naming Western cultures as the principal source of the socio-
ecological crisis:
That our Western civilization should be the principal cause of such extensive damage to
the planet is so difficult a truth for us to absorb that our society in general is presently in a
state of shock and denial, of disbelief that such can possibly be the real situation. We are
unable to move from a conviction that as humans we are the crown and glory of the Earth
community to a realization that we are the most destructive and the most dangerous com-
ponent of that community. Such denial is the first attitude of persons grasped by any form
of addiction. Our Western addiction to commercial-industrial progress as our basic referent
for reality and value is becoming an all-pervasive attitude throughout the various peoples
and cultures of the Earth.
(Swimme and Berry 1992: 254)
144
Swimme and Berry may fall prey to a critique of hyperbole and reformulated
anthropocentricism in this passage. However, from a Berryite perspective
concerned with socio-ecological flourishing, the core of their treatment of
culture here remains significant. The notion of an addictive, ruinous influence
spreading like a disease through cultures around the world remains cogent.
Significant subsets of these tensions come into being via American cultures’
cumulative example. A Berryite perspective serves to highlight how such
mimetic models of unsustainability spawn from problems on the level of cul-
ture and therefore require integral cultural transformations to be adequately
addressed. Particularly relevant here is when Berry (1988) writes about what
may be named as an alternative on the level of culture. Within such an alter-
native framing, vision takes on a role of driving the action of what a Berryite
perspective could term socio-ecological community building.
It follows that cultural transformation for the whole Earth community
will involve the recovery of integral understandings of deep relationality
within human consciousness. It is crucial that such a recovery of integrated
consciousness foster action in support of socio-ecological flourishing. In
juxtaposition to normative associations among American culture, the envir-
onment, and rugged individualism (see Stoll 2015; Turner and Faragher 1999)
a Berryite anthropology moves people to see themselves as intertwined in
social and ecological relationships.
Following from a Berryite advocacy for integrated cultural examples,
the form of recovery that is necessary here is not representative of a
fundamentalist-style appropriation of the past. Rather, Berryite program-
ming for green cultural transformation becomes oriented toward a better
tomorrow –a future set on fostering communion within the Earth commu-
nity in a fresh, vital, and contextually appropriate manner, which deeply
respects cultural diversity and is supportive of socio-ecological flourishing.
As such, a Berryite approach to waking up from socio-ecologically problem-
atic innocence can be viewed as an attempt to establish a more nourishing
set of cultural stories, which challenge the cultural underpinnings for a
scientific-industrial myth that Berry (2006) presents as inauthentic in relation
to both the human and the larger life communities. In that light, a Berryite
approach to fostering socio-ecological flourishing is representative of an
aspirational methodology for cultural transformation that holds the potential
to bridge a notoriously slippery insight–action gap and support deep sus-
tainability. Here, it is important to emphasize that the goal is not the erasure
of difference that accompanies colonialist or totalitarian narratives. Rather,
from the Berryite perspective developed in this chapter, it is to help foster
multiple paths towards deep sustainability; a diversity of ways for people to
transform the socially and ecologically problematic elements of particular
145
cultures so that they retain and develop their essential features in the service
of mutually enhancing and just intra-human and human–Earth relationships.
To more fully participate in fostering such deeply sustainable cultures,
many more Americans would have to give up their desire for what Berry
(2006) names as “WonderWorld” (28). It follows from a Berryite perspec-
tive, a critical mass of expressions of US cultures must stop supporting the
manufacture of a sanitized worldview wherein people are understood to be
apart from, and in full control of, the natural world. Indeed, Berry (1999)
emphasizes that attempts to manufacture this saccharine reality have “created
our toxic world. Our quest for wonderworld is making wasteworld. Our quest
for energy is creating entropy on a scale never before witnessed in the his-
torical process” (68). In a related manner, overconsumption accelerates
such processes. Drifting along with the myth of progress (and continuing to
overconsume) is tempting for many US citizens and, as evidenced above, is fre-
quently encouraged by currently dominant expressions of American cultures.
This problem is only compounded by other manifestations of unsustainable
practices being modeled in particular ways by a variety of cultures: Chinese,
Indian, and European cultures among them. While not wanting to discount the
real challenges for global sustainability posed by that modeling, a Berryite
perspective remains well positioned to propose that ‘waking-up’ from the
anaesthetic of WonderWorld can be achieved in the USA via a departure from
socio-ecologically problematic manifestations of American innocence.
A Berryite Perspective on American Innocence

According to the analysis of a number of political, historical and cul-
tural theorists, innocence is a theme that lies close to the heart of normative
American self-understanding. For example, J. William Fulbright (1966/1998)
noted the phenomenon whereby American “innocents abroad” projected an
arrogance of power through their attitude, the volume of their conversations,
and general appearance (332–333). Some deeper implications of this inno-
cence are summed up by Robert Strassfeld in a manner that is prescient for a
Berryite perspective on US cultures:
The predominant theme in our thinking about our place in the world has been one of
American exceptionalism and American innocence. To be sure, this image is not an
altogether flattering one … “innocence” connotes both blamelessness and naiveté. Yet,
I believe it is the more positive version of this image that we usually adopt, and in so doing,
we cloud our self-perception, sometimes to the point of self-delusion.
(Strassfeld 2006: 281–282)
Capturing such insight, what came to be called “American civil religion”

(see Bellah 1967), expressed as a form of “practical idealism,” this innocence
146
represented the central tenets of a US national faith (1) based on uncondi-

tional (and a Berryite perspective would add un-geological) grasp of moral
truth, and (2) founded upon a belief that it was America’s destiny to provide
ethically exemplary leadership. In this context, “words like truth, justice, pat-
riotism, unselfishness, and decency, were used constantly, without embar-
rassment, and ordinarily without any suggestion that their meaning might be
only of a time and place” (May 1959: 6). In light of the Berryite perspective
unfolded above, the consequences of such innocence on the cultural level are
multi-fold.
Indeed, despite the efforts of some analysts to pin it down, American inno-
cence is a fluctuating and recurring theme throughout US history. Surveying
the relevant scholarship brings multiple American innocences into view.
In the opinion of some cultural analysts, the end of the age of innocence
comes with the US entry into World War I. For example, Alan Price (1997)
reads the shift of the novelist Edith Wharton from a socially critical writer
to a patriotic propagandist as indicative of a general end of innocence in
American society. For his part, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1952) critiques
a form of intra-world-war innocence. Alternatively, Lawrence Samuel (2007)
suggests, despite the efforts at a counter narrative evidenced in the 1964–
1965 World’s Fair site’s design on a Disneyesque model, that the end of a
pervasive post-Depression and post-World War II innocence accompanies
events like the civil rights struggles, the escalation of hostilities in Vietnam,
and the beginnings of the sexual revolution in the mid-1960s. Another likely
candidate for the loss of innocence sourced later in the 1960s is the media’s
illustration of America’s ability to commit atrocities, including the My Lai
massacre, which precipitated a questioning of the faith Americans had in the
goodness and morality of their nation. Moreover, it is important to empha-
size from a Berryite perspective that the US involvement in the conflict in
Southeast Asia, in addition to providing examples of intra-human violence,
also resulted in a bombardment of the natural world with the defoliant Agent
Orange, other chemicals, and incendiaries whose effects are still being felt
in terms of human and ecosystem health across the region (Amster 2015). In
that light, Carson’s (1962/2002) Silent Spring and the establishment of the
first Earth Day by Senator Gaylord Nelson in 1970 can also be read through
a Berryite lens as largely missed wakeup calls from a problematic American
innocence. Indeed, this fragmentary list is enough to demonstrate that the
loss of innocence is a fluctuating and recurring theme in American history.
In summative terms, many cultural manifestations of innocence are formed
and then lost.
To help describe the phenomenon of American innocence in general terms,
a working definition is offered by William Halsey:
147
As understood by historians of American intellectual history the structure of values

which characterized nineteenth-century intellectual and cultural life has increasingly been
challenged by currents of thought and the flow of events in the twentieth century. In sum-
mary, these values include the belief in a rational and predictable cosmos; the belief in a
moral structure inherent in the universe; the belief in progress; and a didactic or genteel
rendering of cultural forms
(Halsey 1980: 2)
Berryite thought addresses all these areas in common with many critiques
of American innocence from the Cold War period (e.g., Stevens 2010: 10).
Furthermore, a Berryite approach, inclusive of its understanding that too
many contemporary expressions of Western and American cultures are
centered on a deep pathology, views these issues as continuing and acceler-
ating problems in the twenty-first century that have an ecological dimension.
As such, it is a contention of this chapter that a legitimate way to understand
Berry’s (2006) project, through a Berryite lens, is as identifying a deeply
problematic innocence that comes about as American culture constructs and
fosters a WonderWorld, which is harmful to socio-ecological flourishing.
In Berryite terms, this would be an innocence born from intra-human and
ecological alienation; a problematic innocence that can only continue when
American cultures, and other supporting forces in this regard, serve to blind
people to their essential location within webs of cultural, social, and eco-
logical relationships. An examination of the terrorist attacks on September
11, 2001 through a Berryite lens offers a telling case study to ground
this point.
9/11 as Another Missed Wakeup Call from Socio-Ecologically
Problematic Manifestations of American Innocence
Most US citizens were deeply affected by the events of September 11,
2001, on both the personal and cultural levels (e.g., Denzin and Lincoln 2003).
At the time of writing, this effect continues to linger almost two decades
after the rupture in American cultures that occurred that day in New York,
Washington, and Pennsylvania. As might be expected, many Americans who
care about the ecological world were also given pause for thought by 9/11.
For example, reflecting on an existential experience of innocence lost in the
November 1, 2001 issue of Environmental Science & Technology, editor
William Glaze wrote:
I do feel, however, that many issues that I thought were important are not so important
to me now … When the crumbling towers stabbed massive pieces of steel superstructure
through the streets at the base of the World Trade Center, was it in fact our hearts that were
stabbed? Did we lose that day some of the innocence and humanity that was the font of the
environmental movement? Only time will tell.
(Glaze 2001: 433A)
148
For Berry, however, there was no doubt about the significance of the event.
It was not the people who were at the forefront of the environmental movement
at the turn of the millennium who pointed to a misdirected innocence. Rather,
it was the entire system of domination, sadly supported by American cultures
of the variety that had provided the cultural-symbolic foundation for the Twin
Towers, which represented a highly problematic innocence. This reaction was
evident during a speech about the contemporary American example at his
Passionist order’s sesquicentennial celebration in Philadelphia (September
2002), when Berry threw away his speaking notes and lectured for two hours
on the symbolism of the World Trade Center in New York, giving multiple
reasons why those buildings equated with a contextually untenable cultural
example. He ended his speech by expressing the sentiment that if the sui-
cide bombers had not toppled the towers he would have (O’Hara 2009). In
December 2001, Berry crafted a more measured reflection, “An Historic
Moment,” that was published in an on-line journal. Read through a Berryite
lens, this essay remains a sharp critique of a socially and ecologically prob-
lematic form of innocence that has permeated American cultures.
“An Historic Moment” problematizes the cultural foundations underpin-
ning the very existence of the World Trade Center in New York. The Twin
Towers were dear to many Americans and New Yorkers because of their
place on the iconic Manhattan skyline. Nonetheless, they represented some-
thing quite different in terms of the cultural-symbolic world of other peoples
on the planet. As Berry asserted in the aftermath of 9/11:
In the opening year of the 21st century we entered a new all-pervasive anxiety originating
in the terrorist destruction of the twin [sic] Towers of the World Trade Center –a building
that, at least symbolically, might be considered as the central expression of Western eco-
nomic dominance over the nations, the peoples, and the natural resources of the Earth.
It might even symbolize American arrogance as its supermarkets spread throughout the
nations of the world. To some, these towers might even symbolize the oppression of the
impoverished nations by the most affluent nations of the world.
(Berry 2001)
In Berryite terms, the attack on the Twin Towers can be read as an anxiety-
creating response to an anxiety-creating system. In that light, the World Trade
Center in New York was symbolic of the role American cultures played in
“Western economic dominance over the nations, the peoples, and the natural
resources of the earth” (Berry 2001).
As such and from a Berryite perspective on American innocence, 9/11
might have served as an impetus for socio-ecological awakening. Such an
awakening could, in turn, allow those anaesthetized by certain manifestations
of American cultural innocence and living in splendid isolation behind the wall
of accumulation and excess they built for themselves to pause for thought,
149
take stock, and examine their impact upon the world around them. Any
international demographic survey conducted in 2001 would have revealed
a global reality of human inequality. The disparity in the human family is
related to the stress on the planet. As Berryite Heather Eaton demonstrates,
often the forces that oppress the non-human members of the larger life com-
munity also negatively affect people living in poverty (Eaton 2005). Yet,
Americans were told by political, business, and cultural leaders that if they
stopped shopping or traveling by airplane the terrorists would have won. In
so much as that counsel was taken, it not only blocked critical reflection, it
also further buttressed the link between American innocence, US cultural
examples, and overconsumption.
From this situation and its comparable manifestations in other dominant
cultures, it follows that humanity is in a condition of ecological overdraft,
which implicates US cultures for the way they too often benefit from socially
and ecologically problematic practices that have disproportionally advantaged
a core group of economically powerful nation-states. The additional facts
concerning human distributive justice are telling regarding the nature of
this human selfishness. Currently, a segmented few in the human family are
taking more than their fair share. If the entire Earth’s population consumed
at the same level as the average citizen in the United States, humanity would
need over five Earths just to meet its energy needs (Myers and Spoolman
2014). A Berryite perspective recognizes that people need energy to survive
and flourish. However, the amount of planetary resources the economic elite
of the human population is using goes far beyond what is biologically neces-
sary for the flourishing of life. In so far as any particular US culture supports
such unsustainably it become a legitimate focus for efforts at a fuller, green
cultural transformation because overconsumption marks “a throwaway cul-
ture which affects the excluded just as it quickly reduces things to rubbish”
(Francis 2015: #22), which wastes both life and food, and treats marginalized
people as the “leftovers” (Francis 2013: #53). From a Berryite perspective,
such morally dubious cultural outcomes represent problems that extend into
many areas of human endeavor in ways that amplify several unsustainably.
To ‘flesh out’ this point, it should be said that the stereotypical ‘American
dream’ –a house in the suburbs, with a manicured lawn and large carbon-
burning vehicles (a cultural outcome far beyond the current average con-
sumption rates in the US, which is still marked by many citizens who have
not realized this ‘dream’) –if applied globally to over 7 billion people, would
mean the termination of the prospects for socio-ecological flourishing on this
planet. The carrying capacity of Earth simply cannot bring everyone ‘up’
to that level. As part of its commitment to achieving integral sustainability
marked by a respect for social justice and the common good, a Berryite
150
perspective on global solidarity thus leaves those who influence American

cultures with a certain moral duty to repent from socially and ecological
ruinous overconsumption buttressed by a shallow innocence. In a cultural con-
text marked by similarly high levels of consumption, reflecting on this mal-
aise of inequality, the Social Affairs Committee of the Canadian Conference
of Catholic Bishops (2003) spoke of the need for an ascetic response to the
ecological crisis (##15–17). Without such voluntary asceticism, the presently
dominant expression of the American dream needs some people to be ‘unsuc-
cessful.’ Despite the tensions associated with upholding a chosen simplicity
as a path to socio-ecological flourishing, a Berryite perspective cannot accept
the premise articulated by Garret Hardin (1968; 1974) in his formulation of
the tragedy of the commons or lifeboat ethics, which allow for the propos-
ition that injustice is preferable to ruin in support of status quo socio-cultural
outcomes. Moreover, it would represent a misinformed innocence or willful
ignorance on the part of US citizens to say the contemporary American dream
does not create misery and death around the world. In this sense, Jeffrey
Sachs’ (2005) research identifying human inequality and cycles of debt as
key ingredients in incubating global strife is cogent. The solution, however,
cannot be to work toward giving everyone a real chance at the consumerist
version of the American dream. The planet simply cannot bear the cost of
such a contagion of US cultures. Indeed, from a Berryite perspective, a con-
sumerist developmental discourse is representative of a pathology that leads
to exploitation. Berry (2001) himself made a comparable point with his char-
acteristic vigor when commenting on the American experience in the after-
math of 9/11:
Then there is the question of industrial “development” of the more land-based peoples.
To disturb the village life of a people living in harmony with the ever-renewing sequence
of the seasons by teaching them a non-renewing commercial-industrial way of life, is to
impoverish rather than to enrich them. When we loan money to the politically competent
commercial-entrepreneurial members of a society entering its modern phase by developing
their natural resources, we open the way not only to an oppressive class in the local society
but also to the accumulation of the enormous debt owed to the industrialized nation by the
so-called “third world.”
(Berry 2001)
If it is accepted that the effort to export commercial-industrial ways of

being to all peoples of the world is a mistake buttressed by American inno-
cence with problematic global implications, then a Berryite perspective
must further question any efforts to do so by employing destructive force.
In terms of the immediate issues at stake after 9/11, it is noteworthy that the
Taliban government in Afghanistan offered to extradite individuals linked to
al-Qaeda to the United States for trial. As Noam Chomsky (2001) pointed
151
out during the same period that Berry published his essay on 9/11 as a histor-
ical moment, whether the offer was genuine or not will never be fully known
because the Bush administration only reinforced a problematic innocence,
which encouraged a faith-infused culture of sacrifice (Denton-Borhaug
2011: 56–91), by focusing on forming a ‘coalition of the willing’ to engage
a nation-state that became synonymous with the ‘axis of evil’ in ‘the war on
terror.’ Moreover, the Iraqi invasion that was justified by similar rhetoric can
be read from a Berryite perspective as partly underpinned by a hunger for oil
to keep an ‘innocent’ American dream alive.
While such interventions are undoubtedly also buttressed by an innocent
desire to do good, they nonetheless can make the USA appear more of a world
dictator than a global partner. As Berry wrote, explicitly connecting “violated
innocence” with a weak involvement in equity initiatives when reflecting on
the experience of the nation in which he was a citizen:
While here in America we have taken an attitude of violated innocence with a flaming
assertion of vengeance against the perpetrators of the assault on the Towers, we might
reflect somewhat on the larger context of what is happening. We might be under extensive
illusions as regards our efforts to “help” the less developed nations. While we are indeed a
“good-hearted” people we must begin to recognize that “doing good” is not the simplistic
thing we sometimes think it to be. We seem not to realize that, of the industrialized nations
of the world, we give the least percentage of our national income to assist these nations in
need. We have consistently refused to join with the other nations of the world in bringing
about a greater harmony of peoples and more equitable distribution of wealth.
(Berry 2001)
It is noteworthy that this feeling was not fully dissipated during the Obama
administration. The ambiguity about the role of the USA in the international
community persisted despite the related, yet largely unrealized, deep hope
for transformative change associated with his perceived potential to shift the
American cultural examples, that saw Barack Obama awarded the Nobel
peace prize at the beginning of his tenure as President. The moral tensions
identified above by Berry are only further compounded as a result of Donald
Trump being elected President through employing rhetoric about “making
America great again” via the morally problematic yet disquietingly culturally
erudite invocations of (1) building a wall (to protect American innocence?)
for which he promised to bill Mexico, (2) othering Muslims to the point
of questioning their suitability as potential US citizens, and (3) employing
his frequently invoked mastery of the ‘art’ of negotiation to recast myriad
treaties and arrangements with the USA’s international partners in order to
‘get a better deal’ for his country. Indeed, Trump has explicitly promoted an
outlook onto world and national issues that ignores their socio-ecological
implications as suggested by a number of Trump’s (2018) policy stances,
152
including his elevation of “beautiful clean coal” as a path to the future and
his dedication of over a trillion dollars to “modernize and rebuild” the US
nuclear arsenal as reaffirmed in his first State of the Union Address, wherein
he also stated:
A new tide of optimism was already sweeping across our land …. [W]‌e have gone for-
ward with a clear vision and a righteous mission –to make America great again for all
Americans.
We have advanced on a righteous mission …. This is the New American moment.
There has never been a better time to start living the American Dream. So to every citizen
watching at home tonight –no matter where you have been, or where you’ve come from –
this is your time. If you work hard, if you believe in yourself, if you believe in America,
then you can dream anything, you can be anything, and together, we can achieve absolutely
anything.
(Trump 2018)
Read through a Berryite lens, these sentiments are related to how the US
President tries to invoke the desirability of an ‘America first’ policy, pro-
moting a saccharine innocence that Trump offers both literally and figura-
tively as a model, claiming innocence for all of America, wealthy citizens
(an exceptionalism that justifies deplorable income inequalities in the USA),
and himself. In this regard, consider, for instance, how, when asked about
the role of faith and repentance in his life, Trump, tellingly in terms of the
themes of this chapter, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he tried to do the
right thing so he did not have to ask for forgiveness and asked “why do I have
to, you know, repent, why do I have to ask for forgiveness, if you are not
making mistakes? I work hard, I’m an honorable person. I have thousands
of people who work for me”, shortly before going to re-emphasize how he
would revive the American Dream to make “bigger, better, and stronger than
ever before” (Trump 2015).
In sharp contrast, the solution to the associated challenges suggested from
a Berryite perspective, which certainly does not discount the complex nature
social and ecological issues, is a relatively simple one supportive of both
social justice and ecological health: that a critical mass of Americans over-
come a problematic innocence of WonderWorld by intentionally building
integral cultures. Here, socio- ecologically problematic utopian thinking,
what Berry (1988) in part labels the “fictional context” of economics (105),
is countered by integral utopian thinking that, countering exploitive real-
ities, imagines alternatives characterized by socio-ecological flourishing. In
so much as more Americans learn to use their political and cultural power
to effectively and collectively share, they can be said to be simultaneously
moving towards an integral distributive justice. Indeed, given the realities
of the socio-ecological crisis, for all those who overconsume, regardless of
153
their socio-political locations, learning to do with less and share more of what
they have is emerging as a contextual imperative that requires expression on
a number of levels, including cultural ones.
Along similar lines, as part of a larger effort to overcome the disconnect
between an unsustainable ideal of a consumerist expression of the American
Dream and the realities facing the Earth community today, a Berryite
approach highlights the need for a critical mass of US cultures to rediscover
the reality of humanity’s essential location within webs of socio-ecological
relationships. From a Berryite perspective, this rediscovery can only come
about when a certain form of military-industrial-consumerist American inno-
cence is lost and replaced with integral cultural examples. Here, the accom-
panying hope for the future is that such an insight can lead to a sustainable
American cultural example, which could, in turn, influence substantive posi-
tive transformation in intra-human and human–Earth relationships both at
home and abroad.
The City Upon a Hill: Winthrop and American Innocence
from a Berryite Perspective
At its founding, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, so important to American
cultural identity, represented a comparable type of hope for the future. John
Winthrop (1630/1998) was an influential figure in the establishment of the
colony, serving multiple terms as governor. In 1630, he delivered a sermon
reframing Jesus of Nazareth’s invocation of the image of “a city upon a
hill” (Matt. 5:14). Winthrop’s reflection served to define the purpose and
mission of many New England settlements. Since that time, the phrase and its
variants have become recurring and influential images in American cultures
and politics. The genealogy of the phrase is worth unfolding in the context of
a Berryite treatment of US cultures and their unsustainable intersections with
American innocence. The phrase will also help ground the synthesis in the
conclusion that follows.
In 1630, Winthrop boarded the Arbella on the Isle of Wight for a passage
that would end in Salem, MA. It was most likely during the voyage across the
Atlantic Ocean that he delivered his sermon, now titled “A Model of Christian
Charity,” where he set out a foundational vision for the colony (Winthrop
1630/1998). He supported the division of society into the wealthy and poor.
Nonetheless, Winthrop (1630/1998) framed settling in the new world as a
chance to do better than in England. He continued that the Massachusetts
Bay Colony was meant to represent a renewed Covenant with God and a
divine Commission. His famous invocation of the ‘city upon the hill’ image
is not only a notion of power to resist enemies –power generated by keeping
the Covenant and following the Commission –but, crucially when viewed
154
through a Berryite lens, also one of surveillance, a notion related to the

judgement of the opposition back in Europe. This second sense is often lost
when invoked in contemporary times, when “the eies [sic] of all people
are upon us” is reformulated and quoted without context (Winthrop 1630/
1998: 48). For Winthrop, European critics of Puritan culture could only be
silenced by the settlers’ faithfulness, which was properly ascetic in applica-
tion, purging what was superfluous in order to meet other needs. Further, he
declared that such faithfulness would be returned with blessing from God,
while its absence would mean perishing out of “the Good land” (Winthrop
1630/1998: 41).
Bringing a Berryite perspective to bear on not only ‘the Good land’ but
upon the entire good Earth, it is easily concluded that, after learning from a
variety of integral cultures, American cultures have a real role to play eco-
logically in setting an example that will allow humanity to continue within
a diverse life community. While the shift of a critical mass of US citizens to
sustainable lifestyle would engender tangible results in and of itself, with
so much cultural and geo-political influence, it is undeniable that the eyes
of the world are now often upon the USA. Though certainly not the only
requirement for global sustainability, a deep green city upon the hill, wherein
a large majority of US cultures model socio-ecological flourishing, would
be precisely the type of beacon the Earth community needs so desperately.
The potential here can be previewed in the excitement of Berryite thinkers
concerning the invocation of Pachamama in the Ecuadoran constitution,
marking a notable contemporary development in Earth jurisprudence as that
document enshrines legal rights for nature (Cullinan 2011: 185). Given US
cultures’ much greater global influence, a deep green America as a city upon
a hill holds proportionally greater transformative promise.
Moving beyond “the early puritan horror of the wild” (Brennan and Lo
2010: 134) such a transformation of US cultural and political power to a
green example and influence would represent a more contextually appro-
priate projection of American cultures than the one represented by Sarah
Palin’s (2010) invocation of a “shining city on a hill, a beacon for all those
who seek freedom and prosperity” (266), which, in her rendering, reinforces
US exceptionalism in the mode of Ronald Reagan rather than reframing the
great attractors of prosperity and freedom in a manner that support socio-
ecological flourishing. As such, a Berryite approach to the form and the con-
tent of American cultural examples is more promising for a vital future than
the corresponding formulation that is offered by Palin either in his writing
or in her related embrace of the chant, “Drill, baby, drill! Drill, baby, drill!,”
encouraging the extension of extractive industry into national parks and
wildlife refuges (Palin 2009: 243).
155
Returning to the above discussion of US cultural power as manifest in

the film industry, perhaps an imperfect glimpse at what might be possible
here is offered by the successes of James Cameron’s award-winning Avatar
(2014) and The Revenant (2015). Both these films propose other-consumerist
orientations to the natural world. Further, when DiCaprio won best actor at
the 2016 Academy Awards, his speech, an admittedly flawed but nonethe-
less significant effort to raise ecological consciousness, became a news story
that was peppered all over the Internet. As internet access can be taken as an
indicator of involvement in the outward push of American cultures in their
technological and consumerist manifestations, such ‘viral’ events may serve
to encourage integrative reflection about proper relationships among people
and with a larger Earth community in peril, which is the implied subject
matter of both films.
Conclusion
Although some Berryite scholars in the United States have tended to con-
centrate on the implications of ecological consciousness in relation to studies
of issues like personal spirituality and psychology or concentrate on Berry’s
relevance for mythical science and big history in potentially problematic
ways, this chapter has demonstrated how a Berryite perspective is relevant
for (smaller) history and cultural studies. As the examples of Berryites like
Heather Eaton (2013b), Kathleen Deignan (2009), and Gail Worcelo (of
the Green Mountain Monastery) serve to underline, Berryite thought can
be fruitfully applied to praxis-based work for social and ecological justice.
The present chapter highlights a cultural dimension to that aspect of Berry’s
contributions by emphasizing how his thought carries implications beyond
personal spirituality, psychology, and big history into the realm of culture.
In this regard, a Berryite view of culture is crucially relational. As such, it
strives to highlight the importance of past practices supportive of integrated
human–Earth relationships and to bring them forward into the present with
the goal of fostering cultural transformation. Such transformative cultural
practice represents a necessary piece of the puzzle if humanity is going to
carry itself forward as part of a diverse Earth community. From a Berryite
perspective drawing on Leopold’s (1949/1997) work, humanity’s ability to
participate in mutually enhancing human–Earth and socially just intra-human
relationships will be how the cumulative effects of our cultures are ultim-
ately judged via “the derisive silence of history” (642). It follows that all
cultures must foster a profound reinvigoration of human–Earth and intra-
human relationships in an integral manner. Otherwise, unsustainable cultures
will disappear and be judged as maladaptive failures over the long arc of
geological history.
156
In the case of American cultures and their influential example, the socio-
ecological crisis points to the need to ‘wake up’ and repent from an inno-
cence that supports a consumerist WonderWorld that, in turn, encourages a
disregard for other humans and members of the larger life community. Only
then, to adapt Berry’s rather uncompromising terms, can we have a legitimate
excitement about the prospects of the human endeavor both in the US and
elsewhere on the planet. It follows that American cultures wishing to more
positively contribute to a verdant future must abandon socio-ecologically
problematic manifestations of innocence in favor of a conscious and inten-
tional embrace of the larger human and ecological communities. However,
it is also important to emphasize, from a Berryite perspective, that this lead-
ership can only be transitory, working toward a communion relationship
that will nullify the necessity of hierarchical leadership or indeed the excep-
tionalism inherent in the concept of a city upon a hill, even in its original
accountably oriented sense. The challenge is that such an embrace of com-
munion relationships within US cultures must be widely integrated on the
level of both insight and action. Mitigating factors against that integration
abound. Indeed, such difficulties were especially apparent in March 2018,
when the new US President was evidently committed to a vision of putting
America first in a manner that scapegoats Muslims and immigrants while
also eroding both human rights and environmental protection. However, if
integration along Berryite lines is achieved by a critical mass of American
cultures, it will facilitate US cultural creativity, substantively contributing
to the flourishing of all life on this planet. Under that alternative scenario,
America’s body politic undertakes a moral project of transforming into a
critical mass of diverse, green cultures supportive of integral global citizen-
ship. When projecting that example out onto the world, this critical mass of
US green cultures will then constitute a sustainable city on a hill. Further,
with the “eyes of the world upon [us],” these American cultures will be well
poised to dovetail with other integral cultural examples in nourishing the fur-
ther contagion of cultures supportive of socio-ecological flourishing. Therein
lies a vital path of dialogue and action upon which an increasing number of
US cultural examples can positively contribute to a verdant future that is
accessible to all people within the Earth community.
Bibliography
Amster, Randall. 2015. Peace Ecology: Deep Solutions in an Age of Water Scarcity and War
(Boulder, CO: Paradigm).
Bellah, Robert N. 1967. “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96.1 (Winter): 1–21.
Berry, Thomas. 1988. The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books).
——. 1999. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower).
157
—— . 2001. “An Historical Moment” (December). Online: www.earthlight.org/essay43_

berry.htmal.
——. 2002. Speaking in Thomas Berry: The Great Story, VHS, produced by Nancy Stetson
and Penny Morrell (Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films).
——. 2004. “Alienation in a Universe of Presence,” Teilhard Studies 48 (Spring):1–22.
——. 2006. Evening Thoughts: Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community, Mary Evelyn
Tucker (ed.) (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books).
——. 2009a. The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John
Grim (eds.) (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books).
——. 2009b. The Sacred Universe: Earth, Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First
Century, Mary Evelyn Tucker (ed.) (New York: Columbia University Press).
Brennan, Andrew and Y. S. Lo. 2010. Understanding Environmental Philosophy
(Durham: Acumen).
Carson, Rachel. 1962/2002. Silent Spring (Boston, MA: Mariner Books).
Chomsky, Noam. 2001. “The World after September 11” (December 20). www.medialens.
org/index. php?option=com_content&view=article&id=149:the-world-after-september-
11-by-noam-chomsky&catid=15:alerts-2001&Itemid=44.
Cullinan, Cormac. 2011. Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice, 2nd edn. (Totnes,
Devon: Chelsea Green Publishing).
Dalton, Anne Marie and Henry C. Simmons. 2010. Ecotheology and the Practice of Hope
(Albany: State University of New York Press).
Deignan, Kathleen. 2009. “Founder of a School of Wisdom,” The Ecozoic: Reflections on Life
in an Ecological Age 2: 74–75.
Denton-Borhaug, Kelly. 2011. U.S. War-Culture, Sacrifice and Salvation (Oakville, CT:
Equinox).
Denzin, Norman K. and Yvonna S. Lincoln (eds.). 2003. 9–11 in American Culture (Walnut
Creek, CA: AltaMira Press).
Diamond, Jared F. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Toronto: Viking).
Dunn, Stephen. 2009. “A Passion of Earth,” The Ecozoic: Reflections on Life in an Ecological
Age 2: 85–87.
Eaton, Heather. 2005. Introducing Ecofeminist Theologies (London: T&T Clark).
——. 2013a. “Forces of Nature: Aesthetics and Ethics,” in Sigurd Bergmann, Irmgard
Blindow, and Konrad Ott (eds.), Aesth/ Ethics in Environmental Change: Hiking
through the Arts, Ecology, Religion and Ethics of the Environment (Berlin: LIT Verlag):
109–126.
——. 2013b. “Water and the World Council of Churches,” The Ecumenist: A Journal of
Theology, Culture and Society 50.3 (Summer): 10–15.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1983. “The Young American: A Lecture Before the Mercantile Library
Association, Boston, February 7, 1844,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essay and Lectures
(New York: Library Classics of the United States): 210–230.
Francis. 2013. “Evangelii Gaudium: Apostolic Exhortation of the Holy Father to the Bishops,
Clergy, Consecrated Persons and the Lay Faithfull on the Proclamation of the Gospel in
Today’s World” (November 24). http://w2.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/apost_
exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium_
en.pdf.
——. 2015. “Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ of the Holy Father Francis on Care for our Common
Home” (June 18). http://w2.vatican.va/content/dam/francesco/pdf/encyclicals/documents/
papa-francesco_20150524_ enciclica-laudato-si_en.pdf.
158
Fulbright, J. William. 1966/1998. “The Arrogance of Power,” in Conrad Cherry (ed.), God’s
New Israel: Religious Interpretations of America’s Destiny (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press): 328–342.
Glaze, William. 2001. “The Loss of Innocence,” Environmental Science & Technology 35.21:
433A.
Halsey, William. 1980. The Survival of American Innocence: Catholicism in an Era of
Disillusionment, 1920–1940 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press).
Hardin, Garret. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162.3859: 1243–1248.
——. 1974. “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case against Helping the Poor,” Psychology Today 8
(September): 38–43; 124–126.
Henley, Don and Bruce Hornsby. 1989. “The End of the Innocence” (June 1). https://genius.
com/Don-henley-the-end-of-the-innocence-lyrics.
Kollmuss, Anja and Julian Agyeman. 2002. “Mind the Gap: Why do People Act Environmentally
and What are the Barriers to Pro-Environmental Behavior?” Environmental Education
Research 8.3: 239–260.
Lake, Osprey Orielle. 2010. Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature
(Ashland, OR: White Cloud Press).
Laszlo, Ervin and Allan Combs (eds.). 2011. Thomas Berry, Dreamer of the Earth: The
Spiritual Ecology of the Father of Environmentalism (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions).
Leopold, Aldo. 1949/1997. “The Land Ethic,” in E. H. LaFollete (ed.), Ethics in Practice: An
Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell): 634–643.
May, Henry Farnham. 1959. The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our
Own Time, 1912–1917 (New York: Knopf).
Myers, Norman and Scott Spoolman. 2014. Environmental Issues and Solutions: A Modular
Approach (Belmont, CA: Books/Cole).
Niebuhr, Reinhold. 1952. The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons).
Northcott, Michael S. 1996. The Environment and Christian Ethics (New York: Cambridge
University Press).
O’Sullivan, Edmund. 1999. Transformative Learning: Educational Vision for the 21st Century
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press).
Palin, Sarah. 2009. Going Rogue: An American Life (New York: HarperCollins).
——. 2010. America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag (New York: HarperCollins).
Price, Alan. 1997. The End of the Age of Innocence: Edith Wharton and the First World War
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin).
Sachs, Jeffrey. 2005. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
(New York: Penguin Books).
Samuel, Lawrence R. 2007. The End of the Innocence: The 1964–1965 New York World’s Fair
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press).
Sideris, Lisa H. 2015. “The Problems with Big History and Turning Science into Myth”
(October 26). http://theconversation.com/the-problems-with-big-history-and-turning-
science-into-myth-48225.
Simms, Andrew. 2009. Ecological Debt: Global Warming and the Wealth of Nations, 2nd edn.
(London: Pluto Books).
Social Affairs Commission of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. 2003. “You
Love All that Exists … All Thing are Yours, God Lover of Life: A Pastoral Letter on the
Christian Ecological Imperative” (October 4) (Ottawa: Canadian Conference of Catholic
Bishops).
Stevens, Jason W. 2010. God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
159
Stoll, Mark. 2015. Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American
Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press).
Strassfeld, Robert N. 2006. “American Innocence,” Case Western Reserve Journal of
International Law 37: 277–308.
Swimme, Brian and Thomas Berry. 1992. The Universe Story: From the Primordial
Flaring Fourth to the Ecozoic Era. A Celebration of the Unfolding Cosmos (New York:
HarperCollins).
Trump, Donald. 2015. Quoted in “Donald Trump Full Interview Part 2 (CNN Interview with
Anderson Cooper)” (July 22). CNN. www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1xKYFcCKOA.
——. 2018. “President Donald J. Trump’s State of the Union Address” (January 30). www.
whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trumps-state-union-address/.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1968. “Discrepancies between Environmental Attitude and Behaviour: Examples
from Europe and China,” Canadian Geographer 12.4: 176–191.
Turner, Frederick Jackson and John Mack Faragher. 1999. Rereading Frederick Jackson
Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press).
Winthrop, John. 1630/1998. “A Model of Christian Charity,” in Conrad Cherry (ed.), God’s
New Israel: Religious Interpretations of America’s Destiny (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press): 277–308.
160
Reinventing Humanity with an

Eco-Spirituality Informed by a Cosmology
of Cosmogenesis
Dennis O’Hara
In 1988, Pope John Paul II sent a letter to the Director of the Vatican
Observatory, Fr. George Coyne, in which he speculated:
If the cosmologies of the ancient Near Eastern world could be purified and assimilated
into the first chapters of Genesis, might not contemporary cosmology have something to
offer to our reflections upon creation? Does an evolutionary perspective bring any light to
bear upon theological anthropology … and even upon the development of doctrine itself?1
Despite his conjecture that the evolutionary cosmology that has emerged
from modern science might inform our understanding of theological anthro-
pology and have implications for the reimagining of doctrine, Pope John
Paul II did not move significantly beyond this speculation. Even though his
concern for the ecological crisis would prompt him to call for an ecological
conversion2 to address ecological sin,3 he would not concurrently call for
theological conversion of a comparable nature, nor an updated theological
anthropology.4
Similarly, while Pope Benedict would note “that there was no opposition
between faith’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical
sciences” on evolution,5 and while he would admonish that “obedience to
the voice of the earth is more important for our future happiness than the
voices of the moment, the desires of the moment [since] … existence itself,
our earth, speaks to us, and we have to learn to listen,”6 his theologizing on
questions of evolution, ecology, and theological anthropology merely echoed
earlier teachings and did not seem to be advanced by new scientific insights.
161
Humanity, Eco-Spirituality, and Cosmogenesis 161
While both pontiffs accepted that we live in a universe described by an

evolutionary cosmology, they continued to espouse a theological anthro-
pology that was essentially formulated when humanity declared that we
lived in a heliocentric or even a geocentric universe. With the promulga-
tion of Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home in 2015, Pope Francis
would more deeply consider the implications of shifting to a cosmology of
cosmogenesis and its concurrent impacts on our understanding of theological
anthropology and justice for all who inhabit Earth.7 His encyclical was an
impressive development in Magisterial teaching.
Cosmology matters. Every human culture constructs a cosmological vision
to describe its understanding of the origins of the universe usually framed
within a creation story, to explain the order that endures and maintains life
including why there is strife in the world, and to speculate on the purpose
of existence and humanity’s role in it. Cosmologies help us discern how to
order our lives within the order of creation so that we prosper rather than
perish through ill-informed decisions that are contrary to that order.8 When
empirical data provides us with a revised creation story or when a cosmo-
logical perspective now appears dysfunctional because humanity is no longer
flourishing under its direction, then cultures revise their cosmology. A seven-
day creation story based on literal readings of the creation stories in the Book
of Genesis is beginning to be supplanted by a 13.8-billion-year story of evo-
lutionary creation.9 The cataclysmic reality that we are living in the midst of
a “Mass Extinction” event, manufactured by humans, unambiguously and
emphatically judges that our cosmology is woefully dysfunctional. We must
not only discern what this new cosmology of cosmogenesis can teach us
about the proper place of humanity within creation, we must act quickly in
accordance with these insights as we reinvent humanity at the species level
so that we once again behave in ways that promote our flourishing and the
flourishing of Earth rather than the demise of both. For people of faith, this
rearticulation of our anthropology to be more Earth-centered must include
the development of a new ecotheological anthropology. To do so, we need
both a functional cosmology and a functional spirituality.
Time for a Change
When Thomas Berry would summarize how humanity created the eco-
logical crisis that imperils our future, he would note that especially in Western
cultures that have dominated the planet at an unprecedented level in the past
several hundred years, humans envisioned themselves as separate from and
superior to the rest of creation. Additionally, they lost an appreciation for the
sacredness of creation. By imagining themselves as separate from the rest of
creation, humans did not recognize that harm inflicted on the planet was harm
162
inflicted on themselves. The false notion that they were superior to the rest
of creation since they were made in the image of God and alone were graced
with souls and rational minds, and therefore subjectivity, reinforced their
right to lord their dominion over the mere objects of creation which supplied
the resources for humanity’s story. The absence of a sacred dimension in this
fallen creation further verified that Earth could be used with impunity. Sacred
objects and sites are to be respected and even revered; profane objects and
systems lack such intrinsic worth and can be used according to the agent’s
inclinations and ability. With this mindset, the plundering of the planet was
perhaps inevitable.
Lessons from a Cosmology of Cosmogenesis
The emergent processes of this evolutionary universe can be seen as a
single, irreversible, unrepeatable, ever-unfolding story of cosmogenesis that
has continued for the past 13.8 billion years. Every player in this story –i.e.,
every element, organism, system and event –has contributed to that evolving
history in a meaningful way. Change any stage or player in that story, and
the subsequent storyline is altered irrevocably. The present state of the uni-
verse is the sum of each of the prior contributions to the progress of that
story. A retrospective examination of this epic of evolution reveals that, in
the longer arc of time, it is characterized by increasing levels of differenti-
ation as the complexity of the universe grows with the evolutionary emer-
gence of ever-more complex and diverse players. Concurrently, each of these
players can be recognized as a unique individual responding to the particular
interior spontaneities of its being and the external attractors of its environs.
Furthermore, the entire epic is one continuous story originating from a primal
singularity resulting in a single community on a cosmic scale.
Since every player in this epic contributes to the unfolding storyline,
informing how the next moment of the story will unfold, each player is a
subject rather than an indifferent spectator of no consequence. Unlike the old
cosmology where humans were the only subjects and the rest of creation was
merely the stage for its unfolding history, now we
understand that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. Every
being has its own inner form, its own spontaneity, its own voice, its ability to declare itself
and to be present to other components of the universe in a subject-to-subject relationship.
Whereas this is true of every being in the universe, it is especially true of each component
member of the Earth community. Each component of the Earth is integral with every other
component. This is also true of the living beings of the Earth in their relations with one
another.10
Humanity emerged from within Earth’s creative timeline when the

conditions had become sufficiently complex and evolved for its advent.11
163
Prior to our arrival, the prokaryotes would have stabilized atmospheric

levels of oxygen, the plants would have developed photosynthesis to store
solar energy within their cells, annelids and other soil creatures would have
cultivated fertile soils, and mammals would have gained a particular ascend-
ancy among the terrestrial animals. Now, rather than claiming that humanity
resides triumphantly on the summit of the pyramid of life or above other
inhabitants of Earth on the “great chain of being,” we realize that we are one of
the most vulnerable creatures on Earth, wholly dependent on the subjects and
systems that not only fostered the conditions for our emergence but continue
to support our existence. To the extent that they flourish, we can flourish.12
When humanity harms these subjects and systems, it is a suicidal act.
Since Earth can flourish without humans while humans cannot flourish
without Earth, Earth is primary while humans are derivative. Similarly,
since it is simply not possible to have healthy people on a sick planet, Earth
health is primary while human health is derivative.13 In the same way, Earth’s
economy is primary while the human economy is derivative. Accordingly,
the decisions made by human cultures –whether through our technologies,
our food production, our economic systems, or our built environments –must
be harmonious with the integral functioning of Earth’s life systems that sus-
tain us. Humans must live in ways that are deeply integrated within Earth’s
systems and mutually enhancing for both humanity and the planet, if we wish
to flourish. Rather than structuring human cultures as if they were separate
from Earth, they must now function symbiotically with Earth.14 Due to the
ecological devastation that humanity has caused, a healing of the Earth in all
its systems is now a prerequisite for the healing of humanity. As Berry notes,
now “the human community and the natural world will go into the future as
a single sacred community or we will both perish …. We have been trying to
go into the future as a human community in an exploitative relationship with
the natural community without any sense of being integral with this natural
world as a sacred community.”15
To develop a deeper appreciation for the integral ecology of the Earth
community and our place within this complex system of relationships on
both a temporal and spatial level, the wisdom of indigenous peoples can be
instructive. This fundamental interrelationship has been a vital tenet of other
cultures, including the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Jack D. Forbes
(January 7, 1934–February 23, 2011), who was born in Long Beach, California
of Powhatan-Renapé and Lenape descent, says of indigenous peoples:
For us, truly, there are no ‘surroundings.’ I can lose my hands and still live. I can lose my
legs and still live. I can lose my eyes and still live …. But if I lose the air I die. If I lose the
sun I die. If I lose the earth I die. If I lose the water I die. If I lose the plants and animals
I die. All of these things are more a part of me, more essential to my every breath, than is
164
my so-called body. What is my real body? We are not autonomous, self-sufficient beings as
European mythology teaches …. We are rooted just like the trees. But our roots come out of
our nose and mouth, like an umbilical cord, forever connected with the rest of the world.16
Forbes’ words remind us that our bodies are not limited to what Allan
Watts has described as our “skin-encapsulated egos”; our bodies are not
strictly demarcated from the environs we inhabit, but instead are in a con-
tinuous discourse with the same.17
The wisdom of indigenous cultures not only recognizes that the other parts
of creation are our relations –i.e., our sisters and our brothers –with whom
we were bonded in deeply integrated relationships, that wisdom also reminds
us that creation has a numinous dimension, as well.
Lessons from a Functional Spirituality
Historically, most human cultures recognized that there was a numinous
dimension within the universe in which they resided, whether in the mys-
tery of life, the spectacle of the stars, the power of storms and seas, or the
splendor of sunsets.18 Earlier cultures considered the cosmos to be sacred
because it was created by the gods and was therefore revelatory of the divine.
The entire cosmos could become a hierophany –i.e., a revelation or a mani-
festation of the sacred.19 As creations of the gods and residents in this sacred
cosmos, humans necessarily shared in this sacredness although they could
choose to act in ways other than what were ordained by that sacred order.
The divine forces that ordered the universe out of chaos were the same forces
that ordered the person. Accordingly, the order of the universe was rightly the
order to which each person should adhere.20 To live one’s life outside the har-
mony of these forces would be to invite disharmony into one’s being which
could manifest as disease and could even lead to death.
Spending time within the grandeur of creation can increase our sense
of wonder and awe for its numinous dimension and develop feelings of
connection with other humans, the rest of creation and the divine.21 But while
a spiritual appreciation for the rest of creation on an individual basis can have
positive benefits for our personal health, to develop a deep appreciation and
respect for the spiritual dimension of creation on a species level will require
that we reawaken to the functional spirituality that previously guided human
cultures –i.e., a spirituality that embeds humanity within creation with a
horizon of meaning that is mutually enhancing for both.
Sandra Schneiders has argued that spirituality deals “with the integra-
tion of all aspects of human life and experience”; that it is “affective as
well as cognitive, social as well as personal”; and “that whatever enters
into the actual living of this ongoing integrating self-transcendence is rele-
vant, whether it be mystical, theological, ethical, psychological, political,
165
or physical.”22 She defines spirituality as “the experience of consciously

striving to integrate one’s life in terms not of isolation and self-absorption
but of self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives.” She
concludes that spirituality is “by definition, determined by the particular
ultimate value within the horizon of which the life project is pursued.”23 The
context or worldview within which one formulates such “ultimate value”
becomes an influential dimension of one’s spirituality. Such a worldview
in its broadest expression reflects one’s cosmological understanding of
creation.
As noted above, the notion that the universe has had from its beginning
a spiritual dimension associated with its physical dimension is not entirely
new.24 What paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin proposed,25 and what
Thomas Berry advanced, was an understanding of this notion aligned with
the recent scientific description of an irreversibly evolutionary universe that
began 13.8 billion years ago from a miniscule primal singularity.26 No other
culture in human history has understood our cosmic origins and evolution in
the way discovered by modern science within the last 150 years. Admittedly,
even if one can use the methods of contemporary science to calculate and
describe the particular physical steps in that evolutionary cosmic story, the
same methods will not discern and verify the spiritual contributions; the latter
can only be inferred through experience of and reflection on creation and
sacred texts.27 Still, in an epic of evolution of such expansive magnitude,
unfolding with an apparent intentionality and direction, it is not surprising
that humans have perceived a numinous dimension that is deemed sacred.
The numinous dimension of the universe impressed itself upon the mind through the
vastness of the heavens and the power revealed in the thunder and lightning, as well as
through the springtime renewal of life after the desolation of winter. Then too the general
helplessness of the human before all the threats to survival revealed the intimate depend-
ence of the human on the integral functioning of things. That the human had such intimate
rapport with the surrounding universe was possible only because the universe itself had a
prior intimate rapport with the human as the maternal source from whence humans come
into being and are sustained in existence.28
Berry describes spirit as that which brings form to matter. The spiritual
dimension is the unifying, attractive force that causes a distinctive identity to
manifest by holding its particular physical elements in unique communion.
Thus, subjectivity results from each being’s spiritual dimension organizing
and maintaining its physical dimension as a recognizable and dynamically
stable entity within an ordered whole.29 This can be said of distinct beings
as well as ecosystems and galaxies.30 Accordingly, we come to recognize
that each participant in the story of the universe plays a significant role in
advancing the storyline. A functional spirituality reminds us that we are part
166
of a functional cosmology with the other participants in Earth’s continually

unfolding story.
The more we subdue and even extinguish the spontaneities of the other-
than-human world through our plundering and reshaping of Earth’s systems,
the more we diminish our own experience and appreciation of the numinous
and the aesthetic in the world about us. While our obsession with limitless
progress must be significantly curtailed in the midst of a mass extinction, our
innate draw to aesthetic appreciation and spiritual experience can be concur-
rently nurtured in order to support the healthy flourishing of our imagination,
intellect and spiritual life.31 An impoverishment of the rest of creation neces-
sarily is an impoverishment of the human, whose spirituality and very being
is shaped and supported by that creation.32 Furthermore, it is in the rich diver-
sity of creation that we come to a fuller appreciation of the divine Creator. As
Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) notes in his Summa Theologica:
For [God] brought things into being in order that His goodness might be communicated to
creatures and be represented by them; and because His goodness could not be adequately
represented by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures, that what was
wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another.
For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided
and hence the whole universe together participates the divine goodness more perfectly and
represents it better than any single creature whatever.33
The diminishment or extinction of any part of creation, whether element

or system, results in the loss of a manifestation of the divine. It reduces our
ability to experience the divine in the world about us and it silences a voice of
creation that speaks of the wonder, glory and order of the numinous mystery.
As Augustine of Hippo (354–430) proclaimed:
Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book: the very
appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Note it. Read it. God,
whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead He set before your
eyes the things that He had made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that? Why, heaven
and earth shout to you: “God made me!”34
Christians recognize that there are two books of revelation: scripture and

creation. To best comprehend the divine, both books must be read. With a
growing interest to understand this evolutionary universe in which we reside,
undoubtedly spurred on by the ecological crises that punctuate the daily
news, Christians have developed an increased desire to appreciate the rela-
tionship of the divine with creation. In The Divine Milieu, Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin asked, “Is the Christ of the Gospels, imagined and loved within the
dimensions of a Mediterranean world, capable of still embracing and still
forming the centre of our prodigiously expanded universe?”35 Seemingly in
167
response, Thomas Berry writes, “We must understand developmental times

as sacred time, as having a Christ dimension from the beginning. The Christ
story, for Christians, is identified with the story of the universe, not simply
the story of an individual at a particular historical time.”36
The Prologue of the Fourth Gospel proclaims, “In the beginning was the
Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the
beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without
him not one thing came into being. … And the Word [Christ] became flesh
and lived among us.”37 Linking the book of scripture with the book of cre-
ation, Berry notes that the Word, the Logos, through whom all that is has been
made, “by its own spontaneities brought forth the universe …. This spontan-
eity as the guiding force of the universe can be thought of as the mysterious
impulse whereby the primordial fireball flared forth in its enormous energy,
a fireball that contained in itself all that would ever emerge into being.”38 “If
in the future, stars would blaze and lizards would blink in their light, these
actions would be powered by the same numinous energy that flared forth at
the dawn of time.”39 Not only is Christ, in an act of Trinitarian perichoresis, a
creator of the phenomenal world, but he guides and sustains all things, both
humans and the rest of creation.40
When the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel notes that Christ, who existed
before time and created all things, “became flesh and lived among us,”41 it
identifies the dual natures of Christ –i.e., the divine and the human natures.
But it says more than that; it says that Christ became flesh – i.e., sarx –not
just human. With the advantage of our knowledge of the cosmology of
cosmogenesis, we can read this scripture passage and understand that just as
we are the products of 13.8 billion years of evolutionary creativity, and just
as we are made of the evolved energy-material of that exploding primal sin-
gularity, Christ, as a human, is likewise composed.42 As humans, our flesh is
inseparable from the space-time continuum of the epic of evolution. This is
our universal dimension, just as every player in the universe story has a uni-
versal dimension which must be recognized to grasp the full identity of any
being. Thus, the Incarnation of Christ is not limited to a brief appearance in
the Middle East two millennia ago. His fleshiness means that his immanence
in creation takes on another dimension.43 “By becoming ‘flesh’ in Jesus, the
eternal Logos of God entered into all dimensions of God’s world of creation.
… Indeed, the Logos of God became Earth in Jesus.”44 The scope of salvation
subsequently extends to all of creation.45
Scripture also testifies to the role of the Spirit in creation. “In the begin-
ning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless
void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept
over the face of the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was
168
light.”46 The breath of God, the Rûaħ, brings order from chaos. Thus, “when
you hide your face, they are dismayed; when you take away their breath, they
die and return to their dust. When you send forth your spirit, they are created;
and you renew the face of the earth.”47 Should the breath of God exit from
any part of creation, chaos would return and the intelligibility of that part
dissolves; for creation to endure, the Spirit must be present. In this reading
of scripture,
we can think of the Spirit or breath of God breathing life into the universe at all its stages,
into its physical laws, its origins and its evolution. The creator Spirit empowers and
energises the multiplicity of processes at every stage, directing them by optimising the
chances that are a natural part of the evolutionary process from within so that creation
achieves its God-given purposes. … It is the creative breath of the Spirit that enables what
is new to emerge and creatures to transcend themselves. … [T]‌he Spirit also draws all
things towards the future and enables more to come from less.48
Reading from both books of revelation, we encounter a Spirit who accom-

panies creation. Mirroring the Spirit’s role within the Trinity, the Spirit, pre-
sent in all aspects of the space-time extension of creation, joins all of creation
into a single community, “the presence of the One in the many.”49 That is,
the immanent Breath of God mediates the divine communion of the Trinity,
draws all of Earth into a single God-loved community through a vinculum
caritatis, and at the same time, links that continuously evolving creation to
the Divine.50 Thus, “the Spirit indwells nature as its interanimating force in
order to lead all creation into a peaceable relationship with itself. Spirit and
earth internally condition and permeate one another; both modes of being
coinhere through and with one another without collapsing into undifferen-
tiated sameness or equivalence.”51 This vinculum caritatis heals and renews
creation, promoting its well-being and fecundity.52
Accordingly, because of the communion within creation supported by
the Spirit, harm inflicted on any part of the community becomes harm to
all of the community. Since this wounding is contrary to the peaceable love
of the Spirit, ecological destruction is an affront to the work of the Spirit.
Furthermore, Wallace will argue, just as God experienced death through Jesus’
godforsaken death on the cross, so too “the Spirit’s suffering from persistent
environmental trauma engenders chronic agony in the Godhead.”53 Christ
was not merely a spectator to human suffering but truly experienced human
suffering even to the point of that suffering extinguishing his life. Through
Christ, the communion of the Trinity experiences death. Similarly, through
the Spirit, the communion of the Trinity experiences injustice and ecological
strife. However, just as “Christ’s wounds become the eucharistic blood that
nourishes the believer, so also does the Spirit’s agony over damages to the
earth become a source of hope for communities facing seemingly hopeless
169
environmental destitution” since the Spirit resides in “solidarity with a broken

world” as “a token of divine forbearance and love.”54
An Ecotheological Anthropology in a Functional Cosmology
and a Functional Spirituality
We are currently transitioning from a cosmology that favored the human
at the center of creation to a cosmology of cosmogenesis, and we are experi-
encing the challenges that usually attend such change.55 Even when a cul-
ture adopts a new creation story –in this case moving from a biblically
inspired creation story to a scientifically framed creation story; from six days
of creation to 13.8 billion years of continuing evolution –that adoption is
neither instant nor universal;56 nor are the values associated with the prior
story, which are deeply embedded with the mores and practices of the earlier
culture, easily abandoned for a new set of norms. The transition to a new
cosmology often requires many generations for the new understanding to
become the horizon of meaning that guides decision-making. Unfortunately
for us, we do not have the luxury of slowly working our way into a new
cosmology since, at a species level, we are in the midst of an anthropogenic
mass extinction event. Indeed, millions of people are dying each year due to
preventable environmental causes; for them, time has already expired.57
It is critical that we develop an ecotheological anthropology, an
understanding of a viable human that reverses the perception that we are
separate from the rest of creation, especially a creation that lacks inherent
integrity and value and its own numinous dimension, and that requires
that we act in ways that are mutually enhancing for us and the rest of cre-
ation. As Thomas Berry admonishes, we need “to reinvent the human at
the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-
systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared
dream experience.”58 Anything less than a deep and sustained reinvention
of the human at the species level will be an inadequate response to the
magnitude of the challenges before us. “The problem is that we still lack
the culture needed to confront this crisis. We lack leadership capable of
striking out on new paths and meeting the needs of the present with concern
for all and without prejudice towards coming generations.”59 An adequate
response will require a reinvention of our economic, political, social and
religious systems where a commitment to the well-being of Earth matches
the commitment we have previously made to the prosperity of humanity.
During the transition to a more ecocentric approach, the most vulnerable
and marginalized humans and otherkind will require particular assistance
and protection. The more developed countries, which have benefited from
economic systems that have most harmed Earth, will be assigned a greater
170
portion of this ecological debt based on their differentiated responsibilities

and capabilities.60
This ecotheological anthropology must be informed by critical reflection
because we need our sciences and technologies, our economic and social
systems, our politics and jurisprudence, and our religions to be coherent
with Earth.61 Similarly, the human story must be coherent with Earth’s story.
Furthermore, the magnitude of the change that is required of us is enormous
and we need a mythic story of comparable proportions –i.e., the universe
story. Since the dream drives the action, we need to dream on the level of the
planet, not just the human; we need to tap into the numinous dimension that
sustains and inspires us on a cosmic scale; the human scale is inadequate to
the task.62
We need an ethic that functions not only at the personal level, but also
at the species level and the level of the larger Earth community. As a gen-
eral operating principle, the individual cannot be favored at the expense
of the larger Earth community. Since humans are derivative and Earth is
primary, decisions that are not enhancing for the latter on a systems level
will invariably be detrimental to the former on both the individual and
population levels, and must be eschewed.63 Similarly, since all of creation
was intended by God from its origin to return to God through a process of
divinization or theosis, humans must at the very least not interfere with this
transformation.64 Now, because of our tremendous power to adversely affect
the health of Earth, humans must make ethical choices that not only pro-
mote their own divinization but do not interfere with the divinization of the
rest of creation; harming Earth not only frustrates the theosis of otherkind,
but also frustrates the theosis of humans because it puts us at odds with
God’s desire for creation.65 Accordingly, we can accept the limits that Earth
places on our existence, not as confining but as liberating. Challenges to
our existence or obstacles to our flourishing can spur creative responses
that allow us to transcend those moments by exploring new solutions. If
this is done in ways that concurrently support both our viability and the
viability of the community of species, then another movement toward our
fuller divinization is realized.
Humanity is part of an integral ecology, a single sacred community and
story, on which we are inexorably dependent and interrelated.66 Relationality
has been intrinsic to cosmogenesis from its origin. This is not surprising for
Christians since the Trinity, which is relational by its perichoretic nature,
is the source of creation.67 Right relationship with God requires humans to
love both God and one’s neighbor, where “neighbor” includes both humans
and the rest of creation.68 Eschewing a rigid separation of humanity from
the rest of creation (or above the rest of creation), Pope Francis declares that
171
“thanks to our bodies, God has joined us so closely to the world around us
that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment,
and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement.”69 Asserting such
a deep interconnectivity with the rest of creation on a cosmic and spiritual
level aligns us with 13.8 billion years of cosmogenesis that are on our side –
i.e., 13.8 billion years of cosmic creativity that created the conditions for
our emergence, that ensured the systems and resources for our perdurance,
that provided the aesthetic nourishment for our imagination to overcome
hardships and envision new possibilities, and that now supplies the psychic
energy to confront the challenges of the ecological crisis. All of this can
support our recovery if we re-align ourselves and our cultures with the order
of creation as good neighbors.
The universe story recounts times when cosmogenesis confronted
seemingly unsurmountable obstacles with unexpected responses –what
might be called moments of grace –in order to initiate new levels of order
to transition through the crisis. Moments of grace occur when a part of
the universe story is pushed to its extreme with the most tension that it
can creatively engage causing it to reinvent itself to a new level of com-
plexity that was unimaginable in the prior state. The explosion of the first-
generation stars was a moment of grace; the invention of photosynthesis,
the introduction of sexuality, humanity’s capture of fire were moments
of grace. Humanity is living in a time of crisis. Readopting a functional
spirituality within a functional cosmology offers the opportunity and the
psychic energy to accept this moment of grace and undertake the difficult
task of transitioning to ways of being that are mutually enhancing for us
and the rest of creation.
Notes
1 Pope John Paul II, “Letter of His Holiness John Paul II to Reverend George V. Coyne,
S.J., Director of the Vatican Observatory,” Vatican, June 1, 1988. (http://w2.vatican.va/
content/john-paul-ii/en/letters/1988/documents/hf_jp-ii_let_19880601_padre-coyne.
html).
2 Pope John Paul II, “General Audience: God Made Man the Steward of Creation,”
Vatican, January 17, 2001, §4. (http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/audiences/
2001/documents/hf_jp-ii_aud_20010117.html).
3 Pope John Paul II, “Homily, Zamosc, Poland,” Vatican, June 12, 1999, §3.
(http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/homilies/1999/documents/hf_jp-ii_hom_
19990612_zamosc.html).
4 Donal Dorr, “ ‘The Fragile World’: Church Teaching on Ecology before and by Pope
Francis,” Thinking Faith (February 26, 2014), 3.
5 Pope Benedict XVI, “Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI to the Members of the
Pontifical Academy of Sciences on the Occasion of their Plenary Assembly,” Vatican,
October 31, 2008. (http://press.vatican.va/content/salastampa/it/bollettino/pubblico/
2008/10/31/0685/01691.html).
172
6 Pope Benedict XVI, “Meeting of the Holy Father Benedict XVI with the Clergy of the
Dioceses of Belluno-Feltre and Treviso,” Vatican, July 24, 2007. (http://w2.vatican.va/
content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2007/july/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20070724_
clero-cadore.html).
7 Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: Care for Our Common Home (Vatican City: Libreria
Editrice Vaticana, May 24, 2015). http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/
documents/papafrancesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.
8 David Tracy and Nicholas Lash, “Editorial,” in Cosmology and Theology, ed. David
Tracy and Nicholas Lash, Concilium: Religion in the Eighties (Edinburgh: T&T Clark,
1983), vii.
9 For an informed reading of the creation stories in the Bible, see: William P. Brown, The
Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder (New York,
NY: Oxford University Press, 2010).
10 Thomas Berry, “The Ecozoic Era,” The Eleventh Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures (Great
Barrington, MA, October 1991), 4. www.centerforneweconomics.org/publications/
lectures/berry/thomas/the-ecozoic-era.
11 Terrence L. Nichols, “Evolution: Journey or Random Walk?” Zygon 37, no. 1 (March
2002): 193–210.
12 For instance, while the phytoplankton who produce oxygen and are the foundation of life
on the planet, or the insects who pollinate plants, would not be harmed by the extinction
of humans at the species level (and arguably might flourish in such as scenario), humanity
could not survive the extinction of either of these lifeforms who developed a planet that
became compatible for human emergence and perdurance.
13 Thomas Berry, “A New Era: Healing the Injuries We have Inflicted on Our Planet,”
Health Progress 73, no. 2 (1992): 63.
14 Prescott and Logan have described this time when people would act in ways that are
mutually enhancing for them and the rest of the planet as the “symbiocene.” See: Susan L
Prescott and Alan C Logan, “Down to Earth: Planetary Health and Biophilosophy in the
Symbiocene Epoch,” Challenges 8, no. 2 (January 2017): 1–22. www.mdpi.com/2078-
1547/8/2/19.
15 Thomas Berry and Thomas Clarke, Befriending the Earth: A Theology of Reconciliation,
ed. Stephen Dunn and Anne Lonergan (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1991), 43.
16 Jack D. Forbes, “Indigenous Americans: Spirituality and Ecos,” Daedalus 130, no. 4
(2001): 291.
17 Joanna Macy, “The Greening of the Self,” in Dharma Gaia, ed. Allan H. Badiner
(Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1990), 53. Cf., Arthur J. Fabel, “Environmental Ethics and
the Question of Cosmic Purpose,” Environmental Ethics 16 (Fall 1994): 312. Michael
Zimmerman reminds us that “ego consciousness, which is necessarily dualistic, is a major
achievement in human evolution.” However, he also observes that ego consciousness
is characterized by its tendency to differentiate and dissociate itself from the body and
from nature. And while rationality and ego consciousness emerged together in the his-
tory of the human, the latter initially defined but now confines the former. See: Michael
E. Zimmerman, “Quantum Theory, Intrinsic Value, and Panentheism,” Environmental
Ethics 10, no. 1 (1988): 13, 15.
18 Ursula King, “One Planet, One Spirit,” Ecotheology 10, no. 1 (2005): 69. David Kinsley,
“Introduction,” in Ecology and Religion: Ecological Spirituality in Cross- Cultural
Perspective (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1995), 3–4.
19 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1957),
12. Cf., John Mizzoni, “Franciscan Biocentrism and the Franciscan Tradition,” Ethics &
the Environment 13, no. 1 (2008): 122.
20 Gerardus van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology,
2 vols., trans. J. E. Turner (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1963), 1: 191.
173
21 Paul Heintzman, “Nature-Based Recreation and Spirituality: A Complex Relationship,”

Leisure Sciences 32 (2010): 72–89; Mary Sweatman and Paul Heintzman, “The Perceived
Impact of Outdoor Residential Camp Experience on the Spirituality of Youth,” World
Leisure Journal 46 (2004): 23–31.
22 Sandra M. Schneiders, “Theology and Spirituality: Strangers, Rivals, or Partners?”
Horizons 13, no. 2 (1986): 264–265, 267.
23 Sandra M. Schneiders, “Spirituality in the Academy,” Theological Studies 50
(1989): 684.
24 For Christians, “the material creation has a spiritual dimension, because it is the work of
God who wants to indwell it. ‘God is restless in his spirit until he finds rest in us and in
his world’. … Matter has not only a Christological dignity due to the enfleshment of the
Logos but also a primordial dignity because of God’s vital inbreathing and an eschato-
logical dignity as the house of God.” Daniel Munteanu, “Cosmic Liturgy: The Geological
Dignity of Creation as a Basis of an Orthodox Ecotheology,” International Journal of
Public Theology 4 (2010): 336, 338, also quoting Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of
Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life (London: SCM Press, 1997), 41.
25 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks,
1961), 71.
26 For Berry, “the universe, the earth, the sequence of living forms, and the human mode
of consciousness have from the beginning had a psychic-spiritual as well as a physical-
material aspect.” See Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco, CA: Sierra
Club Books, 1988), 66.
27 “Spirit is known only by intuitive awareness, by disclosures, of self and of others, not by
inquiry into objects. This is one important reason for why scientific knowledge cannot
represent all we know: it leaves out the creative subject of science, the scientist, and thus
has only half the story.” Langdon Gilkey, Nature, Reality, and the Sacred: The Nexus of
Science and Religion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 41–42.
28 Thomas Berry, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York, NY: Bell Tower,
1999), 14.
29 Dennis Patrick O’Hara, “Thomas Berry’s Understanding of the Psychic- Spiritual
Dimension of Creation: Some Sources,” in To Live in a Cosmos: The Intellectual Roots
of Thomas Berry, ed. Heather Eaton (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 93.
30 Thomas Berry, “The Spirituality of the Earth,” in Liberating Life: Contemporary
Approaches in Ecological Theology, ed. Charles Birch, William Eaken and Jay
B. McDaniel (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 153.
31 Peter James, Rachel F. Banay, Jaime E. Hart, and Francine Laden, “A Review of the
Health Benefits of Greenness,” Current Epidemiology Reports 2, no. 2 (June 2015): 131–
142; Elizabeth K. Nisbet, John M. Zelenski, and Steven A. Murphy, “Happiness is in
our Nature: Exploring Nature Relatedness as a Contributor to Subjective Well-Being,”
Journal of Happiness Studies 12, no. 2 (April 2011): 303–322.
32 Thomas Berry, “An Ecologically Sensitive Spirituality,” in The Sacred Universe: Earth,
Spirituality, and Religion in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Mary Evelyn Tucker (New York,
NY: Columbia University Press), 132; Berry, “The Universe as Divine Manifestation, in
The Sacred Universe, 146; Berry, The Great Work, 200.
33 Thomas Aquinas, “Prima Pars, Question 47, Article 1,” Summa Theologica, Second and
Revised Edition, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns,
Oates & Washburne, 1920).
34 Augustine of Hippo, “Sermon 126,” in the Angelo Mai collection, Miscellanea
Agustiniana, ed. G. Moran (Rome, 1930), 1:355–68, quoted in Vernon Bourke, trans.,
The Essential Augustine (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1974), 123.
35 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1960), 46.
36 Berry and Clarke, Befriending the Earth, 73.
174
37 John 1:1–3, 14 (NRSV). Cf. Hebrews 1:2–3; 1 Corinthians 8:6.

38 Berry, The Dream of the Earth, 196–197.
39 Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring
Forth to the Ecozoic Era (San Francisco, CA: Harper, 1992), 17.
40 Colossians 1:15–17; Hebrews 1:2–3.
41 John 1:14.
42 Duncan Reid, “Enfleshing the Human: An Earth-Revealing, Earth-Healing Christology,”
in Earth Revealing–Earth Healing: Ecology and Christian Theology, ed. Denis Edwards
(Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2001), 69–84.
43 Ibid., 80.
44 Niels Henrik Gregersen, “Why Evolutionary Continuity Matters in Christology,” Toronto
Journal of Theology 26, no. 2 (2010): 176–177.
45 Ibid., 185.
46 Genesis  1:1–3.
47 Psalm 104:28–30. Cf. Genesis 6:3; Job 34:14–15.
48 Jeffrey G. Silcock, “The Role of the Spirit in Creation,” Lutheran Theological Journal
44, no. 1 (May 2010): 7.
49 Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 14.
Emphasis in the original. Cf., Psalm 139:7–12; Wisdom 1:7 and 11:22–12:1.
50 Denis Edwards, The God of Evolution: A Trinitarian Theology (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist
Press, 1999), 92–100.
51 Mark I. Wallace, “The Green Face of God: Christianity in the Age of Ecocide,” Cross
Currents 50, no. 3 (Fall 2000): 319.
52 Mark I. Wallace, “The Wounded Spirit as the Basis for Hope in an Age of Radical
Ecology,” in Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-Being of Earth and Humans, ed.
Dieter T. Hessel and Rosemary Radford Ruether (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000), 53, 56.
53 Ibid., 61. Wallace is drawing parallels with Moltmann’s serious study of the suffering
of Christ as both human and divine. See: Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The
Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (London: SCM
Press, 1973).
54 Wallace, “The Wounded Spirit,” 67.
55 “Public polls in a range of countries reveal that many people do not ‘believe’ in evo-
lution. These polls suggest that creationism is on the rise in many countries. … The
US has conducted polls over a 30-year period and the percentage of adults that reject
evolution has remained relatively stable, between 43% and 47% (Gallop 2014).” James
D. Williams, “Evolution versus Creationism: A Matter of Acceptance versus Belief,”
Journal of Biological Education 49, no. 3 (2015): 322–333.
56 The resistance to moving from creationism to evolution is not unique to North America.
See: Elise K. Burton, “Evolution and Creationism in Middle Eastern Education: A
New Perspective,” Evolution 65, no. 1 (2011): 301–304; Amy Unsworth and David
Voas, “Attitudes to Evolution among Christians, Muslims, and the Non-Religious in
Britain: Differential Effects of Religious and Educational Factors,” Public Understanding
of Science 27, no. 1 (2018): 76– 93; Salman Hameed, “Making Sense of Islamic
Creationism in Europe,” Public Understanding of Science 24, no. 4 (2015): 388–399.
57 For example, a recent report from the World Health Organization notes that at least
12.6 million people die each year due to preventable environmental causes. Furthermore,
“Globally, an estimated 24% of the disease burden (healthy life years lost) and an estimated
23% of all deaths (premature mortality) was attributable to environmental factors. Among
children 0–14 years of age, the proportion of deaths attributed to the environment was
as high as 36%.” See: A. Prüss-Ustün, J. Wolf, C. Corvalán, R. Bos, and M. Neira,
“Preventing Disease through Healthy Environments: A Global Assessment of the Burden
175
of Disease from Environmental Risks” (Geneva: World Health Organization, 2016),

9. http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/204585/1/.9789241565196_eng.pdf?ua=1.
58 Berry, The Great Work, 159.
59 Francis, Laudato Si’, #53.
60 Dennis Patrick O’Hara and Allan Abelsohn, “Ethics of Climate Change,” Ethics & the
Environment 16, no. 1 (2011): 32, 42; United Nations, “United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change” (New York, NY, 1992), article 3.1. http://unfccc.int/
resource/docs/convkp/conveng.pdf; Francis, Laudato Si’, #49, 51, 52, 170.
61 Thomas Berry notes that, “we have thought of the Earth as joining in the religious expres-
sion of the human rather than the human joining in the religious expression of the Earth.
… [I]‌n a cosmology of religions, we must understand that the Earth is primary and the
human is derivative. Only when the cosmos is acknowledged as the matrix of all value
will we be able to solve the ecological crisis and arrive at a more comprehensive view of
who we are in the community of the Earth.” Thomas Berry, “A Cosmology of Religions,”
in Pluralism and Oppression: Theology in a World Perspective, ed. Paul Knitter, 99–
113, College Theology Society, Annual Volume 34 (Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 1991), 113.
62 Thomas Berry and Edmund V. Sullivan, The Dream Drives the Action: Planetary
Education in the Ecozoic Era (Toronto, ON: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education,
1991); Berry, The Great Work, 164–166.
63 Berry, The Great Work, 58, 61.
64 Francis, Laudato Si’, #53, 92.
65 Munteanu, “Cosmic Liturgy.”
66 Hyun-Chul Cho, “Interconnectedness and Intrinsic Value as Ecological Principles: An
Appropriation of Karl Rahner’s Evolutionary Christology,” Theological Studies 70,
no. 3 (2009): 622–637; Sallie McFague, “Who Are We? Ecological Anthropology,”
in A New Climate for Theology: God, the World, and Global Warming (Minneapolis,
MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2008), 43–59.
67 Mizzoni, “Franciscan Biocentrism,” 126.
68 Matthew 22:35–40; Mark 12:28–34; Luke 10: 25–28; Francis, Laudato Si’, #9, 70.
69 Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, November
24, 2013), #56. http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/
papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html.
176
10
Big Miracle and Religious

Naturalism: Rescuing Myriad Nature
from Popular Fantasies of Nature Rescue
Carol Wayne White
After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on –
have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear – what remains? Nature
remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open
air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons –the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days
Introduction
The film Big Miracle (Director: Ken Kwapis, 2012) is one in a genre of
films, including Free Willy, Whale Rider, and A Dolphin’s Tale, in which
humans struggle to rescue cetaceans. Often popular with all age groups, these
family-oriented films offer contemporary audiences a sense of intimacy with
the more-than-human world and encourage young and old to adopt an ethic
of care for the “environment.” Big Miracle in particular features humans
surmounting greed and self-interest to save at-risk nature. It appears that the
“miracle” depicted in the film is that many people with widely divergent
interests come together to save whales trapped in the ice near the Alaskan
coast. A deeper implication is that these immense creatures –and perhaps
endangered nature itself –have the power to unite fractious humanity. But
what vision of nature constitutes this “miracle”? I contend that despite its
feel-good quality, the film presents a problematic treatment of nature that
re-inscribes popular attitudes toward myriad nature, which, paradoxically,
contribute to the degradation of the more-than-human worlds that constitute
our being here. In particular, the film reinforces the idea that it is humans’
177
Big Miracle and Religious Naturalism 177
distinct difference from nature that enables us to save it. While identifying
and assessing some of the troubling implications of such a view, I raise the
following questions: What expanded views of nature would help ground
human action and ethical reflections in the present, and in the future? How
might these expanded views of nature provoke an eco- spirituality that
motivates North Americans, in particular, to rethink and honor our connect-
edness to myriad nature? In this essay, I introduce religious naturalism as
a set of theoretical insights that respond adequately to these queries. As a
capacious ecological religious worldview, religious naturalism encourages
individuals and communities to view themselves as pulsating nature aware of
itself. Moreover, it helps reframe humans as natural processes in relationship
with other forms of nature. Religious naturalism also encourages us to reflect
meaningfully on the emergence of matter (and especially life) from the Big
Bang forward, promoting an understanding of myriad nature as complex
processes of becoming. Operating on the assumption that the natural order is
ultimately and finally real, I am thus essentially concerned about the human
in its most concrete, basic terms: as a material process of nature in relation-
ship with other forms of nature. As such, religious naturalism offers a deeper
level of ethical engagement that opposes the facile ethics we see depicted
in the film. This type of religious reflection encourages critical questioning
of our values, behaviors, and resource uses as we conceive and enact our
relationality with the more-than-human worlds that constitute our being here.
Drawing on key theoretical insights of religious naturalism, I advance an
emerging eco-spirituality as a fundamental orientation in life. This practice is
inspired by an aesthetic ethical vision that acknowledges the inherent worth
of everything alive, i.e., all sentient entities. This model of eco-spirituality
provides the grounds for a view of the sacred in nature that assesses, even
celebrates, the fullness (the “More”) of life as we reflect on processional
nature, challenging the ideological dualisms that deny our radical and mutual
relatedness as natural entities. While advancing the central themes of this
eco-spirituality, I also feature poetic, philosophic, and literary expressions
of its lived truths articulated by such iconic figures as Walt Whitman, Mary
Oliver, Annie Dillard, Henri Bergson, and Anna Julia Cooper.
The Seduction of Fantasy Narratives
Big Miracle is a family drama based upon the 1988 effort to save three grey
whales trapped in the ice near Point Barrow, Alaska. After a local TV reporter
(John Krasinski) discovers the trapped whales, the national media pick up the
story, and the whales become a cause célèbre. “Operation Breakthrough,” as
it came to be called, coordinates the efforts of a great number of agents: Inuit
whale hunters, Greenpeace activists, energy executives, global media, the
178
National Guard, various entrepreneurs, and politicians at the local, national

and international levels, including a US president and Soviet leaders. The
film depicts these agents, except for the neurotically empathetic Greenpeace
activist, Rachel Kramer (Drew Barrymore), as cynically participating in the
rescue out of self-interest. Nevertheless, the operation succeeds, the whales
are rescued and the film culminates in what NPR calls a “PG group-hug
finale.”1 In terms of the explicit film text, the “big miracle” of the film’s title
is the whales’ survival against terrible odds. Such an interpretation does not
hold up well to scrutiny, however, because the importance of the whales’
survival is superficially addressed. The film does not address the survival
of the Grey whale as a species, and “Operation Breakthrough” has no effect
on either the whaling industry or whale habitat. The film, as one would
expect, focuses exclusively upon the particular whales involved, failing to
address other factors limiting or threatening current population levels, such
as ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, or changes in sea-ice coverage
associated with climate change. It also does not deal with the long-term sur-
vival of these anthropomorphized individuals; after being freed from the
ice, the whales may well be harpooned by Soviet whalers. The implicit film
text indicates a different “miracle” at work in the film: not the survival of
the whales, but rather the galvanizing force of nature rescue on the diverse
human communities involved. What the film shows us is that the humans’
divergent interests are transcended –through the efforts of some invisible
hand –as they work to rescue the whales. It is this “miracle” that culminates
in the “group-hug finale.”2 Rescuing nature, it seems, somehow rescues
humans. Put succinctly, we humans are saved from ourselves in saving
“nature.” The fantasy of nature rescue at work in the film seems to be the
expression of a complex human desire to be transformed through an engage-
ment with nature. It seems to indicate deep longing for community with one
another and other natural processes, but operates with a conceptual model
that prevents the possibility of such. For example, the desire to recognize
other-than-human nature and our inability to do so meaningfully are evident
in the way that the film attempts to establish the subjectivity of the trapped
whales. In an important scene, Rachel Kramer enters the water and locks
eyes with an immense creature, whose animatronic gaze is rendered in close-
up as soulful and engaged. In my view, however, this powerful moment in
the film does not succeed. The exchange of looks tells us very little about
the whales and serves primarily to mirror human autonomy, subjectivity, and
deep feeling back to us as confirmation of human distinction. The whales
remain other –not kin –and the rest of nature is mere background noise to
our efforts. This popular view of nature positions human animals outside of
complex, myriad nature, rendering invisible our inextricable connection with
179
other natural processes. Non-human nature is granted value according to its

usefulness to humans, or if, as with the whales, it mirrors what we value in
ourselves. In essence, the fantasy of nature rescue makes humans’ ethical
relation to nature a matter of our generosity –and, indeed, as we see in the
film, this is a generosity cynically given when it serves our interests. Yes, the
fantasy allows for a moment of feel-good transcendence, but does so while
reinscribing the status quo. Occasionally, and miraculously, it seems, human
animals’ struggle for dominion over the earth yields a moment of grace –
a miracle that breaks with an otherwise reductively Darwinian struggle for
dominance. In response to these problematic perspectives, I explore an alter-
native conception of nature found in religious naturalism. In what follows,
I briefly describe religious naturalism and then outline a few of its key ideas
and strains of thought that underscore its ethical value for my discussion of
Big Miracle.
Religious Naturalism and a New Concept of the Human
Religious naturalism is an emergent set of varied perspectives that share a
basic conviction: nature is ultimate.3 Any truths we are ever going to dis-
cover, and meaning in life we are ever to uncover, are revealed to us through
nature. This view expressly rejects any suggestion of the supernatural.
Accordingly, religious naturalism does not affirm any ontologically distinct
and superior realm (God, soul, heaven) to ground, explain, or give meaning
to this world. Rather, attention is focused on the events and processes of this
world to provide what degree of explanation and meaning are possible to this
life. In short, there is nothing that transcends nature. The qualifier “religious”
in religious naturalism affirms the conviction that the natural world is the
center of humans’ most significant experiences and understandings. In this
context, nature becomes the ultimate value in assessing one’s being.
Moreover, science (widely understood to include the social and natural
sciences) becomes the primary interpretive tool for religious naturalism, in
that scientific methods currently provide the most reliable understanding of
the materiality of nature and the world, including human nature. In light of
these claims, the religious naturalism I advance in this essay is a worldview
that is scientifically credible and emotionally satisfying. Granted, it is not
common naturalism if that is understood as cold, heartless reductionism, as
expressed by such figures as Richard Dawkins and Peter Atkins. Whereas
these figures assume reality to be self-explanatory, and no further explanation
is needed, religious naturalists do not think the universe is reducible to the
categories of analysis used to explain it. In other words, the natural
explanations within the framework of science are not decisive with respect to
the explanation of that framework. At the same time, the approach I offer
180
here is not another form of natural religion, or a form of apologetics using

scientific and natural investigations to support established religious claims or
doctrines in traditional theology. At the heart of religious naturalism in all of
its variants is the idea of emergence. As an important new concept for thinking
about biological and cosmic evolution, emergence helps us challenge some
widely held paradigms about the nature of “nature” within the last two
decades. According to cell biologist and geneticist Ursula Goodenough, a
prominent representative of religious naturalism, emergent properties arise as
a consequence of relationships –for example, the relationships between
water molecules that generate a snowflake or the relationships between
neurons that generate a memory. Emergent properties also give rise to yet
more emergent properties, generating the vast complexity of our present-day
cosmic, biological, ecological, and cultural contexts.4 Religious naturalism
thus encourages humans to reflect meaningfully on the emergence of matter
(and especially life) from the Big Bang forward, promoting an understanding
of myriad nature as complex processes of becoming. Specifically, for my
purposes, part of religious naturalism’s theoretical appeal is its fundamental
conception of humans as natural processes intrinsically connected to other
natural processes. The advances of science, through both biology and physics,
have served to demonstrate not only how closely linked human animals are
with nature, but that we are simply one branch of a seemingly endless natural
cosmos. The general view of humanity I hold, on which I build a concept of
the human, presupposes this verity. Close attention to what religious
naturalists call the evolutionary epic of our planet, and all the organisms that
compose Earth, reveals “the flow of genes from the common ancestor has
been constant, diverted into countless culverts but moving steadily from the
beginning to the present. We are all, we creatures who are alive today, equally
old, or equally recent.”5 When taken seriously, Big Bang cosmology offers
sound reasoning for challenging explicit forms of anthropocentricism that
lurk in Big Miracle. It shows the world evolving naturally, based on the inter-
connection and interaction of all of its fundamental components. Big Bang
cosmology also provides a wonderful epic from which to understand humans’
rootedness in materiality. As Loyal Rue, another proponent of religious nat-
uralism, observes, human beings are star- born, earth- formed creatures
endowed by evolutionary processes to seek reproductive fitness under the
guidance of biological, psychological, and cultural systems that have been
selected for their utility in mediating adaptive behaviors. Humans maximize
their chances for reproductive fitness by managing the complexity of these
systems in ways that are conducive to the simultaneous achievement of
personal wholeness and social coherence.6 As essentially natural products of
other natural processes and intimate participants with them, humans are
181
material beings through and through. Consider, for example, Michael

W. Fox’s compelling account that “[o]‌ur bodies contain the mineral elements
of primordial rocks; our very cells share the same historically evolved
components as those of grasses and tress; our brains contain the basic neural
core of reptile, bird, and fellow mammal.”7 While celebrating human animals
as emergent life forms, I warn against a particular reading of this claim that
concludes human beings are the triumphant summit of natural development.
Rather, my position is best described by recent insights in ecological
studies: “Organisms of various types, including human beings, are inextric-
ably bound together in a web of mutual interdependence for their continual
flourishing and survival as they make common if varied use of the energy of
the sun.”8 Within each web, each species of animal has a niche for which it is
more or less adapted, and has attributes that others lack. This ecological bent
challenges those who would use evolutionary history as the basis for deciding
who is better than whom. Equally important, these ecological perspectives
lead us to interpret evolution in a much more expansive sense, shorn of the
distortions of conventional anthropocentric orientations. Rather than con-
struct evolution as the meta-narrative of an increasing capacity of human
nature to manipulate other forms of nature, we now emphasize the successive
emergence of new forms of opportunity, or the continual diversification of
new modes of being. Within this ecological context, evolution is associated
with new patterns of harmonious coexistence among bountiful nature rather
than the progressive development of increased specialization. All members
of an ecosystem are equally important, comprising it as a functional whole.
Aldo Leopold, who was among the first influential naturalists to remind us of
the distortions of deeply ingrained anthropocentricism, provided compelling
articulations of these ideas. In his later writings, specifically Sand County
Almanac (1949), Leopold emphasized the radical interdependence of plants
and animals in their natural environments, including the observation that
human organisms are intimate participants in ecological relations and belong
to a wider biotic community.9 In The Sacred Depths of Nature, Ursula
Goodenough offers a lucid account of humans as natural organisms, pro-
viding sound scientific data that supports our fundamental interconnected-
ness with other living beings –a fact that she often recognizes as sacred. As
she puts it: “And now we realize that we are connected to all creatures. Not
just in food chains or ecological equilibria. We share a common ancestor. We
share genes for receptors and cell cycles and signal-transduction cascades.
We share evolutionary constraints and possibilities. We are connected all the
way down.”10 Goodenough’s observations support my view that humans are,
by our very constitution, relational, and our wholeness occurs within a matrix
of complex interconnectedness –in ways of conjoining with others that
182
transform us. In a religious context, the notion of humans seeking, finding,

and experiencing community with others –an essential aspect of our
humanity –is evoked here. Exploring the tenets of religious naturalism in
conjunction with values discourse, I consider humans’ awareness and appre-
ciation of our connection to “all that is,” as an expression of the sacred, or of
what we perceive and value as ultimately important. Value in this sense refers
to an organism’s facility to sense whether events in its environment are more
or less desirable.11 Minimally, this facility evokes the notion of adaptive
value, which is the basic matrix of Darwinian theory.12 Within a larger eco-
logical framework, however, this truth takes on fuller meaning, as Holmes
Rolston suggests: “An organism is the loci of values defended; life is other-
wise unthinkable. Such organismic values are individually defended; but, as
ecologists insists, organisms occupy niches and are networked into biotic
communities.”13 Bearing in mind these theoretical and ecological insights
from religious naturalism, I return to the concept of miracle and ask whether
it offers any continued relevance to our engagement with myriad nature. As
suggested above, in the film it is humans’ autonomy, agency, and distinct
difference from nature that enable us to rescue it; moreover, in rescuing
nature, we can also transcend what is conceived to be our own “essential”
nature. Accordingly, the “big miracle” is the moment of transcendence at the
film’s finale –a beautiful aberration, or a break from the causality of nature.
In my reading, however, this type of miracle does not provide a compelling
vision for ethical action in relation to greater nature. A miracle in this limited
sense happens to us; it is never a basis for our action. This observation evokes
the traditional view of miracle in traditional Western religious thought, which
is often defined in terms of the supernatural, something that happens in vio-
lation of natural causes or natural law. Yet, there is another way of
understanding miracle if we take into account the root meaning of the word
“religious,” which is “to bind together,” or to make connection, as in a real
relationship. To the extent that one fundamental meaning of the term “reli-
gion” is a sense of connection to that which is ultimate, then religious
naturalism’s expression of our deep, inextricable homology with the rest of
the natural world suggests that the “miracle” the film seeks in transcendence
is already part of myriad nature. Accordingly, the miracle is not something
outside of humans that happens to us as much as it is a part of our reality, or
our inextricable entanglement with all that is. Humans become aware of the
miracle of human life when we are cognizant of that irreducible, constitutive
relationality from which humans’ ethical capacities and aspirations may
arise. As suggested above, humans are natural processes –nature made aware
of itself. As one form of life, humans also unfold in space and time as self-
aware organisms, both recognizing and aspiring to create different forms and
183
levels of community with others (and with otherness). In this context, the
appreciable miracle (or reality) is that human organisms are afforded oppor-
tunities to actualize and become more fully ourselves in honoring our consti-
tutive relationality –with each other and with other natural processes. Here,
evolving life itself is the miracle, and part of that miracle is that humans can
continually question our values, behaviors, and resource uses as we enact our
relationality with the more-than-human worlds. In the next section, I explore
further this expanded notion of miracle in a model of eco-spirituality that
challenges the outdated one found in Big Miracle. I also express key themes
of this eco-spirituality in the writings of select poets, writers, and visionaries
who have envisioned or foreshadowed its emergence.
Celebrating the More of Life: The Makings of an Eco-Spirituality
With an expansive sense of miraculous life, religious naturalism helps to
ground an eco-spirituality that celebrates the fullness (the “More”) of life. The
eco-spirituality that I envision bears in mind Peter Van Ness’s notion that “the
spiritual dimension of life is the embodied task of realizing one’s truest self in
the context of reality apprehended as a cosmic totality. It is the quest for attaining
an optimal relationship between what one truly is and everything that is.”14 As
a consequence, this model of spirituality is not centered in any traditional reli-
gious system; rather, it is a mode of being here, of seeing, thinking, and acting
in ways that bear witness to the relational, material human. As such, this eco-
spirituality evokes a sense of wonder to our consciousness when acknowledging
our constitutive relationality. There is an element of mystery, of not knowing
what may unfold in pondering our being here and of actualizing ourselves, as
Rilke intimated in the ninth of his Duino Elegies:
Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely

in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze) –: why then
have to be human –and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?15
Inspired by Rilke’s poetic vision, this new eco-spirituality suggests the

possibility of novelty in a fuller cosmological sense; it accentuates the pos-
sibility of becoming other than what we are at any moment when we are no
longer captivated by an influential modernist humanist project driven by the
desire for an Archimedean point or foundation. As an episteme of represen-
tation, this modernist project reduced the corporeal, relational, moral self to
a pure object of knowledge, thereby establishing the autonomous, bourgeois
individual. Moreover, and ironically, the scripts of this modern humanistic
184
text have been alarmingly violent. For instance, the same liberal humanism
that espoused the universal rights of humans also spawned a distinct set of dis-
cursive formations and cultural practices that justified unjust capitalist social
relations in the West and their extension, via colonialism and imperialism,
to other societies. As well, classic Enlightenment ideals –progress, univer-
salism, and guaranteed freedoms once privileged at the end of the eighteenth
century and throughout the nineteenth –now appear in contemporary cul-
ture as suspicious ideologies, masking special privileges and selfish materi-
alism. Scientific medicine, long viewed as the paradigmatic expression of
Enlightenment reason, has, through its financial ambitions, proven inadequate
in providing equitable healthcare. Furthermore, in denying our inescapable
relationality with other sentient life, this modernist spirit continues to pose a
threat to myriad natural systems. In the form of technical industrialism, which
expanded as the Enlightenment had hoped, modern humanism has accelerated
the processes by which we use up crucial natural resources on which we all
depend.16 The ecological spirituality I introduce in this essay has the potential
to move us through the shadowy residue of this humanist project. Confronting
a self-serving humanism that has posited itself as the new [A]‌uthor of life,
this eco-spirituality humbly inscripts the human as part of a complex web of
cultural and cosmic meanings. Celebrating humanity’s material, relational
nature, this eco-spirituality encourages humans to re-arrange established,
influential positionalities, accentuating new emphases in our enunciations of
desires, dreams, and possibilities. Here, Annie Dillard’s provocative passage
from For the Time Being is illuminative: “We live in all we seek. The hidden
shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious –the
people, events, and things of the day –to which we as sophisticated children
have long since become obvious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and
borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.”17 Mindful of Dillard’s
wisdom, eco-spiritualists consider how other life forces, bodies, modes of
being – infinitely multiplied – share in the capacious entangled web of life
and amid shifting, ontological orderings. Resting in our entangled materi-
ality, eco-spiritualists recognize an irreducible “thereness,” which is prior to
the objectifications of “I–it” dualisms created by our conceptual abstractions.
Simply put, humans are entangled in all that is even before we can begin to
conceptualize ourselves as human beings.
Eco-Spirituality as Seeing, Living, and Acting Differently
The eco-spirituality I am advancing alerts us to the powerful influence
of cultural memes that both harbor anthropocentric desires and valorize an
exceptional human nature. Inspired by ideas, images, and poetic visions
that declare humans, too, are natural creatures, this eco-spirituality invites
185
contemporary American citizens to seek alternatives to the popular images

of humans saving nature, as depicted in Big Miracle. Among the alternatives
available to us is the poetic vision of Mary Oliver, which has consistently
invited humans to look intimately at a world not of our making. Oliver often
represents intensely sensuous, bodily experiences of the human in the act of
recovering a truth: We are essentially natural creatures. This truth in manifest
in the popular poem, “Wild Geese,” where Oliver speaks of the soft animal
of our bodies loving what they love and finding their place within the family
of things.18
Inspired by Oliver’s poesy, eco-spiritualists inhabit subjectivities that do
not depend on an ontological separation from a purported world of objects –the
typical culture–nature divide that features largely in Big Miracle. Moreover,
remaining faithful to a vision of myriad nature as it is, eco-spiritualists do not
eschew loss. As natural creatures, we forsake an imaginative route to immor-
tality, immersing ourselves in what is here, mesmerized by its variegated
splendor. These sentiments are often thematized by Oliver, too, as suggested
in another poetic passage that speaks of enthusiastically embracing the world
and of “being married to amazement.”19
Aligned with this stunning wisdom, this emerging eco-spirituality ushers
in a contemplative life where one’s awareness and experience of materi-
ality is not overshadowed by theological and doctrinal abstractions. In
other words, without appealing to God or to some ultimate transcendence,
or even to traditional views of a human immortal soul, this eco-spirituality
unabashedly affirms life – and a life that does not go according to our own
human wishes and plans. Rather, there is the humbling awareness that life
unfolds and we with it. Life understood here evokes the deepest mysteries of
being here as natural entities: natural transformations occur all the time, and
part of that movement involves death. In other words, life’s natural cycles,
often symbolized as traps and prison houses for an older Romantic visionary,
remain strangely consoling for the contemporary eco-spiritualist.
This emerging eco-spirituality also embraces the splendor of possibly
achieving (or becoming) our humanity in infinite ways –a task that can never
be completed in an unfolding, mysterious universe. Dillard touches on this
theme in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, when describing her experiences of living
in a remote part of the Blue Ridge Mountains after surviving a near fatal bout
of pneumonia. When surveying the landscape, Dillard becomes attentive to
its texture, or to the “multiple, overlapping intricacies and forms that exist
in a given space at a moment in time.”20 Weaving together observations of
the surrounding landscape with personal longings and refreshing reflections,
Dillard speaks of dwelling differently because she sees differently –as the
mountainous landscape. She observes: “Intricacy is that which is given from
186
the beginning, the birthright, and in intricacy is the hardiness of complexity

that ensures against the failure of all life. This is our heritage, the piebald
landscape of time. We walk around; we see a shred of the infinite possible
combinations of an infinite variety of forms.”21 The enduring appeal and
importance of encountering and beholding such variegated texture also leads
Dillard to reflect on the possibilities it has for humans:
What do I make of all this texture? What does it mean about the kind of world in which
I have been set down. The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there
is the possibility of beauty here, a beauty inexhaustible in its complexity, which opens to
my knock, which answers in me a call I do not remember calling, and which trains me to
the wild and extravagant nature of the spirit I seek.22
As a pilgrim encountering the prolific sacrality of mountain life, Dillard

recognizes there are no easy or conventional answers, for “our life is a faint
tracing on the surface of mystery.”23 Such mystery destabilizes our sense of
knowing in the usual human pursuit of classifying and organizing the pro-
found mystery of nature’s profound alterity. Dillard’s reflections approach
what I identify as a profound ecological perspectivism, which suggests that
our limited human perspective is part of a multiplicity of perspectives. She
writes: “I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here,
alive on the intricate earth under the trees. But under me, directly under the
weight of my body on the grass, are other creatures, just as real, for whom
also this moment, this tree, is ‘it.’ ”24 As Dillard helps us to imagine, the pos-
sibility of dwelling differently, of experiencing the strange, relational worlds
of which we are constituted evokes the expansive sense of miracle endemic
to this eco-spirituality. There is an invitation to live out of a new vision of
life, to deepen our appreciation of other-than-human nature, exploring and
honoring our connectedness to all that is, as well as with each other.
In the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman offered a poetic rendering of this
grand sense of miracle in Leaves of Grass:
Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water,
Or stand under trees in the woods,
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night with any one I love,
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest,
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon,
Or animals feeding in the fields,
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet and bright,
187
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring;

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.
To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same,
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.
To me the sea is a continual miracle,
The fishes that swim –the rocks –the motion of the waves –the ships with men in them,
What stranger miracles are there?25
Whitman’s verse describes the rich sensateness of human materiality, and

it also celebrates our inextricable connectedness with the many worlds that
constitute our being here –realities that are always there waiting for us to
notice and acknowledge. The capacious miracle that Whitman draws us to –
and one that he invites us to experience –also invites the language of desire,
suggesting an erotic materiality, as found in his effusive affirmations of our
basic interconnectedness:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.26
As a site of illumination, Whitman alerts us to the dangers of replacing

what is fluid and porous with normalizing discourses. We are essentially
celebrating a relational self that can resist solipsistic tendencies and egoistic
impulses: there is no isolated self who stands over against the fields of inter-
action. Put another way, there is no private self or final line between inter-
iority and exteriority –we always include the other (even if by acting to
exclude it). As a natural entity, the human experience of selfhood is constitu-
tionally relational and inevitably entangled in temporal becoming.
To help illustrate this point of temporality, I turn to the work of French phil-
osopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), who wrote significantly of process and
temporality as crucial features of the natural world, and as central to our human
scheme. For Bergson, life and consciousness manifest change everywhere,
and he convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are
more significant than rationalism and reductionist scientism for understanding
and comprehending the fullness of reality.27 In Creative Evolution (1907),
Bergson argued that evolution, which he accepted as scientific fact, cannot
be reduced to mechanistic structure, but rather is driven by élan vital (or a
vital impulse).28 In developing his philosophy of life, Bergson critiqued those
philosophical interpretations of evolution theory that failed to see the import-
ance of duration, which bears upon the very uniqueness of life. When the
whole evolutionary process is seen as an enduring élan vital that is continually
188
developing and generating new forms, one recognizes that evolution is cre-
ative, not mechanistic. In his processional philosophy, Bergson continued to
explore the implications of positing intuition and duration as constitutive of
the innermost reality of everything. The Bergsonian system rejected static
values while embracing dynamic ones such as motion, change, and evolu-
tion. Accordingly, for Bergson, nature is constituted by a nisus or striving to
bring to realization something more, something over and above the existing
frame of things. Within this Bergsonian register, eco-spiritualists reject reduc-
tionism of any sort in the twenty-first century as we value a vitalist sense of
myriad nature’s movements, inclusive of scientific, philosophical, and reli-
gious concerns. More important, eco-spiritualists intuit myriad nature’s most
powerful expressions in terms of change, innovation, and creativity.29
To further illustrate this point, I introduce the Romanticist idiom of black
feminist Anna Julia Cooper, whose ideas, along with those of Bergson and
Whitman, connect contemporary eco-spiritualists ongoing explorations of
nature with earlier significant ones. In the late nineteenth and early twen-
tieth centuries, Cooper imbued her view of nature with aesthetic-ethical
inflections; in nature, she saw egalitarian principles at work.30 When speaking
out against various forms of oppression and cultural imperialism, Cooper
argued that such developments are not in keeping with nature’s design: “Now
I need not say that peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desir-
able. Despotism is not one of the ideas that [man] has copied from nature.”31
Equally important, Cooper re-envisioned the human as an important finite
realm (or, perhaps, as constituting a unique value-laden matrix) of potenti-
ality within the unfolding of cosmic infinite possibilities.32 Employing natur-
alistic metaphors alongside religious ones, she often characterized humans
as evolving beings with inner-determination.33 For our purposes, Cooper’s
major significance lies in the unique way she used organic, naturalist imagery
to accentuate the vital and inextricable intersections of racial, gender, com-
munal, and national progress. With such processual imagery, she depicted an
evolving, dynamic quality to human life that helps to dismantle problematic
constructions of the human aligned with racist and sexist ideologies.34 For
example, Cooper consequently suggested that various forms of inequality are
ill-informed social constructions that are not inherent to the natural strivings
and agential activities within all humans. She envisioned a nation of citi-
zens participating in mutually enhancing norms and conventions, where
each constituent part achieves self-fulfillment as the nation fulfills its des-
tiny. Moreover, with a keen sense of the interconnectedness of human life,
Cooper’s understanding of historical progress necessitated the interaction of
vital forces contending fairly with one another. In her worldview, what was
so deplorable about any form of discrimination was its systemic silencing
189
and tyrannical imposition upon natural forces and vital processes that inher-
ently desired to fulfill themselves.
Cooper’s historical example and her sensibilities anticipate and strengthen
the case for a model of eco-spirituality that addresses justice for myriad
nature. Her insights are crucial to eco-spiritualists who continue questioning
the idea of Enlightenment progress, as well as the ethics of unrestrained devel-
opment as a means of dominating nature in all its forms. From this critical
consciousness emerges the possibility of cultivating a moral imagination, or
the significance of grasping our constitutive relationality, as Wendell Berry
suggests with the term propriety. Propriety is a term Berry uses to describe the
fittingness of our conduct to our place or circumstances, even to our hopes.35
It affirms “the fact that we are not alone. It acknowledges the always-pressing
realities of context and of influence; we cannot speak or act or live out of
context. Our life inescapably affects other lives, which inescapably affect our
life.”36 Barry’s sense of propriety is an integral aspect of the eco-spirituality
I outline. A century after Cooper, in a wider cosmological context, this eco-
logical spirituality adamantly advocates kindness, empathy, and compassion
for all-natural processes, not just for human others. With the capacity to influ-
ence one another and other natural processes, humans also have a responsi-
bility to act in ways that promote the flourishing of all life, and to urge other
humans who may be less aware of our interconnectedness to do the same.
The Miracle Continues
In rejecting the fantasy of rescue in Big Miracle, the model of eco-
spirituality I outline urges contemporary Americans to ignore the major
assumptions we have learned about ourselves from earlier human-
istic models. (Here we acknowledge the truthfulness in the Nietzschean
adage: We knowers are unknown to ourselves.) The ongoing miracle,
echoing Oliver, Whitman, and Dillard, is that we can continue to see who we
are, and marvel at our endless connections. Moreover, inspired by Cooper,
accentuating our mutual interdependence compels us to postulate ethical
theories that provide as fully as possible inclusive and global analyses of
intersectional oppressions; here, eco-spiritualists insist that ethical solutions
to global problems will not be found if contemporaries ignore the inter-
connectedness of all life. The result may be a type of planetary ethics –as
coined by Goodenough –where the vital forces of love, or of élan vital,
promote an understanding of, and commitment to, the importance of valuing
and preserving ecosystems (whether understood as organisms, individuals,
populations, communities, and their interactions).
Conspicuously absent in this eco-spirituality’s vision of life is a guar-
anteed triumphalism. Rather, eco- spiritualists experience and embrace a
190
tentative uncertainty that pushes us towards “becoming the change we

desire.” We remember the expansive miracle articulated here: humans are
actually structured in our evolutionary capacities as biological organisms
to love, and to create alternative systems of interaction and forms of
relationality. The miracle of life happens on a daily basis, and if there is
anything for humans to save, it is an ecological perspectivism that compels
us to continue questioning our values, behaviors, and resource uses. Eco-
spiritualists bring this awareness to local forms of activism while protesting
the mountaintop mining for coal, drilling for oil/petroleum, and fracking for
gas and oil. It is manifest in our daily actions of aiming to know ourselves
differently when deciding on the food we eat, determining how it is produced
and transported, and considering ways of decreasing food waste in the USA.
These perspectives are, in the final analysis, endemic to an eco-spirituality
that demands human organisms embrace our relational, materiality, con-
tinually sharpening our awareness that how we act from minute to minute,
or how we achieve or become our human, does have significant effects on
humans, other animals, plants, and eco-systems. As Chet Raymo reminds
us, “Each of us is profoundly implicated in the functioning and fate of every
other being on the planet, and ultimately, perhaps, throughout the universe.”37
In this sense, then, this eco-spirituality reminds humans that we are part of
an interacting, evolving, and genetically related community of beings bound
together inseparably in space and time.
Notes
1 Ella Taylor, “ ‘Big Miracle’: A Whale Tale as the Cold War Wanes.” February 2, 2012.
www.npr.org/2012/02/02/146108194/big-miracle-a-whale-tale-as-the-cold-war-wanes
(accessed July 9, 2017).
2 Ibid.
3 For a sampling of current works, see Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Loyal Rue, Religion Is Not about God (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006); Chet Raymo, When God Is Gone,
Everything Is Holy (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2008); Jerome Stone, Religious
Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative (New York: State University of
New York Press, 2008); Donald Crosby, The Thou of Nature (New York: State University
of New York, 2013); Michael Hogue, The Promises of Religious Naturalism (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010); Carol Wayne White, Black Lives and Sacred
Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism (New York: Fordham
4 Ursula Goodenough and Deacon Terrence, “From Biology to Consciousness to Morality,”
Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science 38 (4): 801–19.
5 Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature, 85.
6 Rue, Religion Is Not About God, 77, 75.
7 Michael W. Fox, “What Future for Man and Earth? Toward a Biospiritual Ethic,” in
On the Fifth Day: Animal Rights and Human Ethics, ed. Richard Knowles Morris and
Michael W. Fox (Washington, DC: Acropolis Books, 1978), 227.
191
8 Crosby, The Thou of Nature, 16.

9 Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 204.
10 Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature, 73.
11 R. J. Dolan, “Emotion, Cognition, and Behaviour,” Science 298 (2002): 1191–4.
12 Stephen J. Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
13 Holmes Rolston III, “Environmental Ethics and Religion/ Science,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. P. Clayton and Z. Simpson (New York: Oxford
14 Peter Van Ness, Spirituality and the Secular Quest (New York: The Crossroad Publishing
Company, 1996), 5.
15 Rainer Marie Rilke, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Marie Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen
Mitchell (New York: Vintage International 1989), 199.
16 Carol Wayne White, “Stubborn Materiality: African American Religious Naturalism
and Becoming Our Humanity,” in Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New
Materialisms, ed. Catherine Keller and Mary-Jane Rubenstein (New York: Fordham
17 Annie Dillard, For the Time Being (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 175.
18 Mary Oliver, Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (New York: Penguin Press,
2017), 347.
19 Ibid., 286.
20 Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics,
2007; reissued in 2013), 139.
21 Ibid., 147.
22 Ibid., 141.
23 Ibid., 11.
24 Ibid., 95.
25 Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (Library of America College Editions) (New York:
Library of America, 1982), 513–14.
26 Ibid., 27.
27 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (New York: Henry Holt, 1911). See also H. W. Carr,
Henri Bergson: The Philosophy of Change (London: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1911); and
J. M. Stewart, A Critical Exposition of Bergson’s Philosophy (London; Macmillan, 1911).
28 Underlying Bergson’s system of thought is the assertion of two very distinct ways of
knowing: analytical and intuitive. The former understands reality in terms of stability,
predictability, and spatial location; intuition, on the other hand, experiences growth, nov-
elty, and temporal duration. According to Bergson, analytical knowledge is useful for
getting things done, for acting on the world, yet it fails to reach the essential reality of
things precisely because it leaves out duration and its perpetual flux, which is inexpress-
ible and grasped only by intuition.
29 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, trans. F. L. Pogson (London: Macmillan, 1913), 101.
According to Bergson, the original “life force” is passed down from one generation to
another in all living things; this necessary creative force produces growth, guides develop-
ment, and produces new adaptations in an organism. This means that both evolution and
élan vital –organic life’s driving force of creativity and innovation –are everywhere at
work. Within the human sphere, we experience instances of creativity and innovation in
our own activities, and, above all, in our own act of free will. Furthermore, for Bergson,
true duration is experienced only in the human person, and that duration is preserved in
memory. While being informed by sense impressions, memory is not absolutely dependent
upon the matter of the brain. Freedom is the personal event of self-creation.
30 Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988),
71,  177–8.
192
31 Ibid., 150.
32 Ibid., 244, 258, 297.
33 Ibid., 295.
34 White, Black Lives and Sacred Humanity, 60.
35 Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition (Berkeley:
Counterpoint, 2000), 13.
36 Ibid.
37 Raymo, When God Is Gone, 98.
193
11
Faith, Nature, and Politics: Developing

a Non-Reductive Naturalism
Whitney A. Bauman
According to the ruling of Modernity, the world can be encompassed

through conceptual pairings. Some familiar couplings are faith/ reason,
religion/science, subjective/
objective, female/ male, passive/active and so
forth. This type of thinking, of course, does not hold; it turns out the world
is much messier than these hypostasized categories will allow. Such sharp
distinctions merely serve to reify the world into the image of Moderns
understanding the world around them. It imposes a certain, culturally located
and constructed worldview onto the entire planetary community and calls
this view “objective.” Obviously, post-modern scholars have challenged the
Modern understanding of the world, and feminist, critical race theories, queer
theories, deconstructionisms and poststructuralisms have all done much to
blur the boundaries of these categories. However, one important categorical
binarism still seems to hold, even though it is one of the most important
to challenge: viz. that of culture and nature, or humans and the rest of the
natural world.
For many non-Moderns –those (past and present) who do not abide by the
binary rules of euro-western epistemology –nature is a place of agency, of
spirituality, of value, and humans are but a part of it. However, some cultures
housed in monotheism, or what I might call hyper-monotheism, began to
separate out God and nature into different, oppositional realms. This oppos-
itional structure helped to force a hierarchy between God and the world, and
subsequently between humans (who were the only creatures made in the
“image” of God) and the rest of the natural world.1 Furthermore, it helped
194
to forge distinctions among human beings based upon what types of human
beings were more “like nature” (women, children, slaves) and what types of
human beings were more “like God” (elite men). This familiar patriarchal
structure, though challenged by “post-” thought, still functions, and results in
sexism, racism, and, most of all, human exceptionalism.2
This chapter argues that nature has always been agential and political,3
and that uncovering the politics of mono-logical thinking (first in the form
of hyper-monotheism in religion, and then in the form of universal reason
in science) places the modern understanding of the world as just that: an
understanding of the world rather than the inevitable tail end of an inev-
itable progressive narrative of human beings struggles and triumph over
nature. Placing the narrative of Modernity alongside other narratives helps
to unravel the dimorphic categories of Modernity and in doing so, nature
becomes valuable again, and a partner in planetary politics.4 In other words,
nature becomes (overtly) once again the place of spirituality and politics. As
such, we might be able to think with the planetary community in formulating
a planetary polis, a planetary spirituality, and a planetary ethic.
I first examine the roots of the ontological split between nature/culture
and some of the basic technologies used to reinforce that split in mod-
ernity: namely progressive time and an understanding of humans as above
the rest of the natural world.5 I then move into a discussion of what happens
when humans are placed in an evolutionary context, using the non-reductive
naturalistic understanding of nature held by Ernst Haeckel and other romantic
scientists as an example. Finally, I discuss some of the implications of what
it might mean that nature has always been the space of both politics and
spirituality.
The Death of Nature and the Great Divide
In her now classic The Death of Nature, Carolyn Merchant describes the
process by which nature shifts from something that is vital/valuable in esse
to “dead stuff” valuable only for its use by human beings. In conjunction
with this process, also known as the “scientific revolution,” gender roles and
domains were also redefined. Women’s work in terms of agriculture (gar-
dens/animal husbandry around the home) and medicine (midwifery) were
slowly transformed into men’s work. The home and “home economics”
were more and more associated with a place of (feminine) refuge from the
male public world of work –economics, politics, and law. The “internal”
and subjective space of the home became the realm of the female; and the
external, objective, value-neutral space of the public became the realm of
the male. Religion became associated with the internal, subjective, private
sphere, while science became associated with the external, objective, public
195
Faith, Nature, and Politics 195
sphere. Aiding in the creation of the private/public divide was, of course, the
Protestant Reformation. As religious authorities began to disagree there had
to be neutral arbitrators to settle these arguments: first monarchs, but eventu-
ally the “neutral” space of the national government.
These divides effectively backgrounded the work of women, children,
and slaves and created the illusion of the liberal self (isolated, independent,
self-created individuals) in the form of elite European males. These elites
(scientists, priests, lawyers, doctors, politicians, businessmen, etc.) ignored
all the free labor on the part of women, children, and slaves, which made their
lives possible, thereby allowing them to live “as if” they were discrete indi-
viduals entirely responsible for their own success.6 Caught up in this division
of labor, then, are gender/sex roles, the division between public and private,
neutrality and value, objectivity and subjectivity, and science and religion.
These various divisions are all intertwined with the making of the natural
world as dead matter for human use, which, in turn, helps to maintain these
divisions.
Though natural philosophy, which eventually becomes “science,” is a
product of Indic, Chinese, Greek, Roman, Arabic, European, and Indigenous
cultures –drawing on ideas, intellectual developments, and knowledge of
flora and fauna from all these different cultures –the thing that makes science
“western” and the reason it developed into the reductive and productive
mode of science is that nature, during the European scientific revolution,
becomes dead stuff for human use. This means that nature has no value in
itself and that it can be done with as humans see fit. This very attitude which
fueled the visions of early scientists that science would transform the world
into paradise and bring continual progress, was, in fact, smuggled in from
theological presuppositions held by the early architects of western, reductive
science. Here I want to focus on three such presuppositions: the assumption
that humans are above the rest of the natural world; the assumption of pro-
gressive, linear time to the exclusion of cyclical time; and the assumption of
a single, objective truth.
Human Exceptionalism
It is not at all obvious that humans should be thought of as anything other
than a part of the rest of the natural world, just as it is not at all obvious that
human should be primarily thought of as hyper-individuals, or necessarily
male/female, straight/gay; yet, these are the assumptions that most (western)
Moderns hold. In 1967, the historian of science Lynn White Jr. argued that
the emerging environmental crisis was at heart a religious crisis based upon
the dominion clause in the first account of creation in Genesis.7 Humans,
unlike other animals in this story, are created in the “image of God” and are
196
made to have dominion over all other life on the planet. He also argued that
if the ecological crisis is at root religious, then the solution must also have a
religious component. Since the publication of this article, the academic fields
of “religion and ecology” and “religion and nature” have emerged and have
been searching for green religions, rituals, texts, and traditions both within
extant “world” religions and in new forms of religious naturalisms.8
This human exceptionalism found in monotheistic traditions (though not
only in these traditions) also influenced the theological interpretations of the
Ptolemaic cosmos, in which the world was ordered hierarchically in a “great
chain of being” from God (on top) to humans (elite men, then elite women,
then all others –poor and slaves) then animals and the earth. It also influenced
the Cartesian understanding of the “self” as the cogito: humans as the only
things that are “thinking things” are the only things vital and valuable. The
Cartesian great divide eventually aided in the making of the Lockean lib-
eral self that is still at the heart of our western economic, legal, and political
systems today.9 Human exceptionalism was also assumed by (or subsumed
into) western science (though not totally).
Early scientists depended on the idea that humans are somehow “in
charge” and different from the rest of the natural world rather than merely a
part of it. First of all, this enabled an objective view of nature: only humans
have the capacity to “discover” nature’s truths. Second, nature must be seen
as subordinate to the rest of the natural world if we humans are going to
go about experimenting on the world and transforming the world into the
human vision of the world. Just “who” was and was not a part of nature was
also problematic: people of color, women, and children were often seen as
“closer” to nature and therefore less valuable, if not mere resources for the
ends of elite males. Third and finally, this view enabled all value to be located
on the human side of the human–nature divide, meaning that whatever is
valued, humans make it so.
These assumptions are not obvious when looking at other cultures and
religious traditions. Most often people are at least interrelated with the rest
of the natural world, if not in deep kinship with the rest of the natural world.
Buddhism, Jainism, and most indigenous traditions, for instance, posit some
sort of relationality and/or kinship with the rest of the natural world. From
these perspectives, one cannot ignore the rest of the natural world and focus
only on the human world and human history. This brings me to my second
point about the understanding of history and time.
Progress and History
There are certain assumptions about time that were also smuggled into
western scientific narratives from their largely monotheistic backgrounds:
197
namely that time is linear and that there is some sort of progress throughout
time (even if punctuated with declines). The ideas that humans were created,
that there was some sort of fall, and that there will be a new paradise helped
to drive such linear and progressive understandings of time. History as told
from the perspectives of some humans is, for Moderns, the only important
story and the rest of the natural world is just background to this narrative. It’s
also important to note that many histories were covered over by dominant
histories: in the case of modern science, the narrative that moved from Greek/
Rome to the “dark ages”, to the Renaissance in Europe helped to cover over
the incredible history of the Golden Age of Islam.10
This progressive and linear notion of time was taken over by early
European natural philosophy and modern science. Bacon, in his New
Atlantis, imagined the utopia that scientists, the new priests, would bring
about. Other emerging scientists of the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies began to rank cultures, languages, races, and religions in ways that
projected primitivity onto “indigenous” peoples and other people of color,
and a highly civilized status onto (mostly) white Europeans. Words such
as “progress”, “development”, and “civilized” all serve to rank humans
and the rest of the natural world in a progressive hierarchy. Yet, there is
no reason to favor this progressive understanding of time over cyclical
understandings of time. The seasons come and go, the earth revolves again
and again, and makes its way around the sun, marking the year. The months
come and go again and again. We see the “cycles” of generations, of the
moon, of tides, of bodies. Forcing all of life into a progressive, linear
understanding of time does not pay deep attention to all of the cycles in
life that come, go, and then repeat again and again. Might enforcing linear
time over the planet in the name of one culture’s or people’s understanding
of “development” or “progress” harm many peoples and the rest of the
natural world?
The Problem with Objectivity
One problem with progress is that it assumes, or rather mistakes, one
people’s or group’s understanding of what “progress” is for some sort of
objective standard for the world. Elite European men (in the story of western
civilization, colonization, and continued globalization) have tended to dom-
inate the ideas of what progress and development are. Ideas of progress and
development at the heart of western economics, politics, and science –the
spread of human rights, the end of hunger, the end of disease, a better life –
have been subsumed by monetary gain, efficiency, and more power. The
sciences, in the form of technology transfer, are often subsumed under these
more reductive goals.
198
Regardless of what values are articulated, there is no single set of

understandings and values that would be able to gauge universal progress
and development: progress for whom, and for what, are questions that really
matter. One person’s progress might be to the detriment of another person,
people, place, or species. Some understandings of progress could mean
oppression for other earth bodies (including humans). The progress of the
twentieth century has resulted in greater global economic inequity, global
climate change, and mass extinction. Is this really what we want to identify
as progress? Rather than projecting progress onto a messy, entangled, fluc-
tuating and evolving planet, perhaps it is best to have some understanding of
different timescales within the planetary community. This is, I argue, what
placing humans into an evolutionary perspective requires.
Placing Humans into an Evolutionary Perspective
Perhaps one of the most radical shifts experienced in recent history –the
effects of which are still ongoing –is the shift from understanding humans
as created special vis-à-vis the rest of the natural world toward that of an
evolutionary perspective of human beings and life. In the old, western
understanding, all species and their forms are created stable by some type of
creator god “in the beginning.” The evolutionary shift in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries began to overturn that idea and suggest that we were
indeed a creature among creatures, and that we had evolved out of other
life-forms. An even stronger metaphor is Darwin’s “tangled bank” metaphor
for evolution, in which species are mere nomenclature for identifying the
interconnected, ever-evolving assemblages of life.11 In other words, the real
take-home of evolutionary theory is that there are no things that exist as sep-
arate “species” in the natural world, rather, “species” is just nomenclature
that we humans use to understand the natural world. Nature is “queerer” than
we humans have ordinarily thought.12
One of the things that placing humans within an evolutionary framework
means is that we are part of the rest of the natural world; some might even say
“plain citizens” among other types of earthly citizens within the rest of the
natural world.13 From within a framework of a more productive and reductive
understanding of science, this implies that humans too can be reduced to the
smallest building blocks –genes, chemicals, neurons –and thus can eventually
be engineered toward some sort of understanding of “progress.” Enter eugenics,
stem cell debates, and debates about designer babies. In part, it was a productive
and reductive model of science that fueled the now clearly (to most) uneth-
ical experimentation on human populations that we call eugenics. Eugenics,
of course, played a huge role in the Nazi attempt to eradicate about 20 million
“aberrant” peoples from the population (altogether) during the Second World
199
War. If humans are a part of nature, and nature is mechanical and reducible or
malleable toward certain ends, then humans must also be reducible, mechan-
ical, and malleable. Such a reductive and productive understanding of nature,
in other words, eventually ends up treating humans as objects.
Indeed, the reductive and productive model of nature is a relatively recent,
dominant model among the natural sciences. Though physics may have
adopted this model earlier, biology, chemistry, geology, ecology, and other
sciences had not yet come together into a full naturalistic (not to mention
reductive) worldview by the late nineteenth century. By that time, there
were many, non-reductive models for understanding the natural world (and
humans therein) being explored and argued for. One such model can be found
in the work of Ernst Haeckel.
Ernst Haeckel, Monism, and Non-Reductive Materialism
Ernst Haeckel, also known as the “German Darwin,” was a nineteenth-
century scientist, philosopher, and artist. He introduced Darwinian evolu-
tionary theory to a wider audience. At the end of the nineteenth century, if
you were reading about evolution and you were from Europe, the USA, or
even Japan, it was likely that you were reading Ernst Haeckel rather than
Darwin’s original work. Part of the reason for this is that he understood
that evolutionary theory changed everything and believed that it must be
translated to a wide audience. For him, evolutionary theory was the missing
piece for developing a full, naturalistic view of the world into which all the
sciences could fit: not just the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) but
also the human sciences as well (Geisteswissenschaften). In other words, for
him physics, chemistry, biology, evolution, ecology, psychology, religion,
and philosophy could all be placed in a single framework because humans
(and all things human) were now a part of the rest of the natural world. This
had some important implications for Haeckel scientifically, philosophically,
and aesthetically.
Science and the Queerness of Nature
One of the most important scientific/philosophical/anthropological aspects
of placing humans within the rest of the natural world in an evolutionary per-
spective was that the diverse nature of other life-forms, and the changing of
these forms over time –morphology –must also be true of human forms. In
other words, the idea that species were stable and formed somehow “in the
beginning” was dealt a deathblow by the emerging science of geology and
eventually evolution. It was discovered that species emerge and even become
extinct. It was also discovered that there were species much older than Homo
sapiens.
200
Haeckel came of age in the midst of these ongoing findings. One of his
scientific obsessions was comparative morphology. He loved to look at the
morphology of different species and show their similarities at different stages
of development. For him a prince and a dog are “the same” at a certain stage
of development.14 This meant, among other things, that humans were deeply
intertwined with the rest of the natural world. It also gave rise to his theory
of recapitulation: “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.”15 This meant simply
that an individual organism undergoes its own, individual evolution, going
through all of the stages its organismic ancestors went through to get to it.
This is now, of course, a debunked understanding of how evolution works,
but the gist of it –we are products of our evolutionary ancestors –still holds.
In addition to, or perhaps because of, these two insights about form and
morphology, Haeckel was able to really appreciate the aesthetic diversity of
forms of life: even within a single species. The sheer number of variations in
form, in function, and even in terms of traits like sex and sexuality. The latter
recognition led him to be an early supporter of the work of Max Hirschfield.
Haeckel recognized to some extent that nature was much queerer than we
humans once thought. It doesn’t hold to binary gender, sex, and sexuality
structures.16 For Haeckel, this meant that the same must be true of the human
community. Prior to the emergence of evolutionary thought, scientists such as
Linneaus had been interpreting nature through the lens of gender dimorphism
and heterosexuality, but this became harder and harder to justify.17 Indeed,
any one interpretation became hard to justify because with evolutionary
theory, the sciences stumbled into a bit of a hermeneutic problem.
Evolution and the Philosophical Problems of Hermeneutics
For Haeckel, placing humans within an evolutionary perspective meant
also that we are a part of the evolutionary process and not outside of it. There
are no longer any “bare facts,” but science too is a matter of interpretation.
The times when he put his philosopher’s hat on, he quibbled with the Kantian
idea that there was any a priori knowledge. For Haeckel all knowledge is a
posteriori and that which seems to be a priori is just a posteriori covered over
by time.18 Though he was still very much a scientist and believed that science
would solve all the world’s mysteries,19 he did have this understanding that
knowledge also involves hermeneutics. In this sense, we might now argue,
placing humans within an evolutionary perspective is the precursor to some-
thing like the post-modern problems of interpretation and critiques of naïve
objectivity. If we are indeed emergent creatures from a long process of geo-
evolution, then we do not observe nature from “outside,” but rather from
“inside.” As such, the objective, God’s eye view which is based upon the idea
that humans are in some way above or set apart from the rest of the natural
201
world, no longer makes sense. Whatever knowledge is, we learn it through

our senses and it must be interpreted from our own contexts. The assurance
of a dualistic knowledge, where humans are above the natural world and can
have an objective view of it, and the assurance of reductionism, again, where
we can reduce the world to its constituent parts as if it were a machine, no
longer hold when humans (and their capacity for understanding and reason)
are part of the rest of the natural world. Thus, another critique Haeckel made
was that neither dualism nor reductionism could describe the natural world.
I argue that his aesthetic understanding of nature was an early version of non-
reductive naturalism.
Aesthetics and Non-Reductive Naturalism
For Haeckel’s understanding of triune monism, all of nature (biotic and abi-
otic) is made up of three irreducible elements: matter, energy, and “feeling”.20
He had a continuous understanding of nature from the smallest and simplest
of creatures to the most complex (human beings), and argued that whatever
consciousness is in human beings must be present in some form “all the way
down.” He even argued in his Kristallseelen that crystals have this “feeling”
component.21 The differences between abiotic and biotic life are that cells
and biotic life in general internalize this “feeling” and reproduce this feeling
over time and generations, whereas abiotic life does not have this interiority
or reproductive capacity.22
Haeckel’s aesthetics of nature are also beautifully evident in his many
sketches of sea, plant, microbiotic, and animal life forms.23 Through his
thousands of sketches, drawings, and paintings he traces the patterns
throughout nature, and also the morphology: the shifts in forms from earlier
to contemporary forms of life. In this sense we are all connected and bound
together in an evolving living community. This non-reductive naturalism was
not unique to Haeckel. It is also found in scientists such as Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, Alexander von Humboldt, Gustav Fechner, and Wilhelm Bölche.
For these scientists, nature, as something that is somehow alive and living,
also meant that nature provides the grounds for our politics, our religion, and
even our economics. By politics, I mean that the way “nature” gets coded is
always a political process of definition: coding nature as passive, feminine,
dead is useful for a patriarchal construction of society and for an extractive
and productive attitude toward the rest of the natural world, for example.
In this way, nature is “political” in that certain humans define what is and
is not “natural” and what counts as knowledge of nature. By calling nature
“political,” I also mean that some form of agency and causality is distributed
throughout the rest of the natural world. We humans are not the only actors in
the world: we depend on sunlight, oxygen, food, the history of evolutionary
202
adaptation that led to our opposable thumbs and the emergence of our con-
sciousness. We as individuals did not self-create ourselves out of nothing, but
we emerge out of a long line of symbiotic and competitive relationships with
the rest of the natural world. In this way, “nature” must be an agent in polit-
ical discussions about how we ought to live. It cannot be understood as mere
backdrop for the human political drama.
More relevant to Haeckel’s evolutionary understanding of the world was
the way in which some critics realized how placing humans in an evolutionary
structure affected the political class system. If all humans evolved out of the
same fertile mud, so to speak, then how could any class system, much less
aristocracy or monarchy, be supported? For this reason, some critics argued
that evolutionary theory led to Marxism.24 Haeckel, though not a Marxist,
did think that an evolutionary understanding of nature was politically revo-
lutionary. For him the theory of evolution should be the basis for reforming
the entire educational system, and should be the basis for a new religion to
replace all others (Monism).25 Toward this end, he helped found the German
Monistbund, which found against theological control over educational cur-
ricula and argued that the sciences should be the basis instead.
There were, during this time, tons of societies set up just to promote or
combat this new theory of evolution and the new authority the sciences were
gaining over theology. Evolutionary theory was political through and through
because it challenged the assumptions about what it means to be human
in the world, what our values are, what knowledge is, and how we ought
to become in the world. Not all the answers to these questions were good
ones: eugenic societies, racialized constructions of evolutionary trees, etc.26
But these questions that the new understanding of nature proposed could not
be ignored.
Nature is only thought to be de-politicized when, once again, it is seen as
mere resource for use by humans (who are the only valuable entities in the
world). However, this de-politicized understanding is itself very political: it
makes assumptions about human–nature relations and about the utility of the
rest of the natural world that promote certain forms of power over another.
The productive and reductive model of nature, I argue, happened through
the war production efforts of the Second World War and later advancements
in agricultural, transportation, and communication technologies. Despite the
efforts to make of nature mere stuff for human use and a backdrop for human
history and politics, nature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century
has begun to re-emerge as overtly agential and active. From the beginnings
of the contemporary environmental movement starting with Rachel Carson’s
Silent Spring in 1962, right up to our contemporary recognition of the problem
of global climate change, we have begun to understand again that nature is
203
agential through and through. It cannot be merely managed and controlled

but must be seen as a political participant in co-constructing the worlds in
which we live. It is with a brief discussion of nature recognized as a political
agent (again) that I now conclude.
Nature Re-Emerges as (Overtly) Political
Though nature is always political (in the sense of being made up of mul-
tiple agential actants),27 Moderns tend to code nature as something that is
apolitical: it is dictated to us by the sciences, and it is dead stuff that can be
used toward human ends without ethical concern. The contemporary envir-
onmental movement began to challenge these assumptions, but perhaps no
event has trumpeted the return of nature as a political force as that of cli-
mate change, or what some have called “climate weirding.”28 With this event,
more than any other in recent history, nature has returned as an active force
beyond human control and prediction. The climate is a chaotic system and
climate weirding is a wicked problem with no single solution.29 Perhaps most
importantly for the human world, it has led to a discussion of the politics of
science. Some deny climate change and suggest that scientists are on some
sort of liberal conspiracy train. Others march the streets with signs that read
“science is real.” In addition to the epistemological arguments over what
constitutes “real” and what constitutes “fake” or alternative “information,”
there is also a deeper clashing of worldviews between neo-liberal economics
as usual (or with some modification) or an economic and political system that
takes nature seriously as an actor and agent. Can we continue with neoliberal
capitalism as usual, which treats nature by default as material for human use,
or we must move toward a different economic and political system that takes
nature as an agent seriously? The latter would require a huge political, eco-
nomic, social, and even spiritual revolution, thus some prefer to hold on to
the pre-evolutionary vision of humans as separate from nature and nature as
mere “dead stuff.” As such, nature has become political in the modern human
mind, once again. There are three factors I would like to discuss, in a politics
of nature that takes the more-than-human world seriously: aesthetics, inten-
tional agnosticism, and a planetary spirituality.
Aesthetics and Ethics over Ontology and Metaphysics
With the Modern divide between mind and brain and humans and the rest
of the natural world, ontology and metaphysics became separated from epis-
temology, aesthetics, and ethics. In other words our knowledge and valuation
of the world became separated from the way that the world actually is, as if
we could actually know the world in esse. Nature re-emerging as political
critiques the notion that we are somehow separate from the world and our
204
knowledge therefore can (or can never) get “at” the really real. Instead, how
we know the world is itself part of the world, and is always tied up with the
way the world becomes. In other words, we should not be talking about epis-
temology and ontology separately, or culture and nature (for that matter),
but rather epistemontology and natureculture.30 From this immanent perspec-
tive, epistemology becomes more about aesthetics and ethics than ontology
and metaphysics. The question becomes about asking how our knowledge
(always tied up with power systems and struggles) co-creates the worlds
around us. How do our ideas and facts and observations about the world set
up the world in certain ways over others and affect bodies differently? The
knowledge produced by the medieval church, for instance, created a different
knowledge than the sciences producing the Industrial Revolution, which
created a different knowledge of the way the world works (mechanism) than
contemporary sciences of relationship (evolutionary theory, neurosciences,
ecology, quantum physics). There are truths to each knowledge system, but
the more interesting question might be how the various knowledge systems
affect earth bodies for better and worse. This means that we might develop
a type of experimental approach with our knowledge systems and meaning-
making practices. It also means we must remain a bit agnostic in our stance
toward the world.
Viable Agnosticism
Why a viable agnosticism?31 To put it simply, the only viable way for-
ward is one that remains open to the unknown. Our bodies are porous, they
are indeed micro-biomes, and require energy and materials to enter and
exit us all the time in order to continue living, as do all other living things,
ecosystems and the earth itself. Perhaps, then, our thinking must be porous as
well. Modern metaphors for thinking are that thinking should be “solid” and
“sealed tight,” for instance. These metaphors may work for a hermetically
sealed individual who is not open to the rest of the natural or human world,
but not for bodies that are porous, open, continually moving, and planetary.
The ecology of the self requires also an ecology of thinking.32 I would
argue that an ecological thought is one that is also open and porous: and
thus viable. The agnostic part comes from the phenomenology of embodied
experience, memory, and imagination. We can only think so far into our own
past, before things shade off into mystery, just as we can imagine ourselves
to be no more, which is also mystery. Furthermore, we can think with our
scientific and other tools only so far back into the past (perhaps to a singu-
larity) but not before that period, just as we can imagine so far into the future,
and even out to the edges of our universe, before we reach a horizon, and
all shades off into mystery. Rather than filling these mysterious places with
205
everything (as in full-blown theism or objective realism) or nothing (as in

atheism or nihilism), why not leave them open for the mysterious possibil-
ities of what is unknown to emerge at the horizons of our experience?
This type of ecological thinking helps us open onto the planetary commu-
nity and think with the planetary community rather than sealing ourselves
off from others or forcing all others into our closed systems of thought.
Furthermore, this thinking is always open to new mysteries: as we reach what
was once our thought horizon, there will always be another horizon at the
edges of what we know, and, thus, more mystery with the capacity to gen-
erate ever new possibilities for planetary becoming. This is a living thought
system open to the evolving planetary community, and also conducive to
what we might call a planetary spirituality.
A New Planetary Spirituality
If part of what spirituality means is drawing our world together into some
sort of meaningful context (we are meaning-making creatures), then from
this context in which knowledge is about ethics and aesthetics, and our
own contexts for knowing are only as possible as we are open to planetary
others, then understanding the world around us requires a deep openness and
commitment to listening to the voices of the rest of the planetary community,
and a hermeneutics of nature. In a phrase, this deep attention and process
of interpretation and arguing for various interpretations (politics) might be
called a planetary spirituality.
The importance of developing such a planetary spirituality cannot be
overestimated. If nature is indeed part of our context and community –a
living entity, not just dead stuff –then the rest of the natural world must have
voice in discerning what types of worlds we want to co-create. A politics
limited to nation, or to a single creed, does not necessarily meet the challenge
of what developing a planetary polis calls for. If we are going to address
problems on a planetary scale, then we must develop some sort of planetary
politics. Though the Earth Charter is a good start, it and the United Nations in
which it is housed have not succeeded in gaining much ground. Again, this is
the United Nations, after all. It is dependent on how much different national
bodies give it power, and, as I have argued, the unit of the nation is not the
proper one to address planetary politics.
Though for reasons of scale we can’t have a single planetary community
governed solely by a planetary body, perhaps something like bioregional gov-
ernance would be a good place to start. From this starting point other entities
than human are citizens and have political voices. The various bioregions
could then build up to a United Planetary Community: the concern of such a
body would be the thriving of the planetary community through the thriving
206
of bioregions. This is not to downplay the need for human rights and human
justice, but it is a refocusing on the planetary community and the more-than-
human community within that: human rights must be embedded within a
thriving planetary community. Such a refocusing may give humans the
connectedness and purpose they need to overcome selfish anthropocentric
desires that have landed us where we are today. This may sound far-fetched,
and indeed it is, but I am in agreement with Donna Haraway (among others)
when she argues that we must begin to write speculative fiction regarding our
future in order to generate new possibilities for future becoming.33 Speculative
fiction imagines beyond what Ernst Bloch identifies as the “future present.”34
The future of the present is projecting into the future from what is already: in
this way it is a continuation of the same, with modifications. What we need
is what Bloch identified as the “future future.” This is the not yet become and
not yet imagined possibilities for the future. Speculative fiction is one way of
thinking about the “future future”. Whatever planetary politics might emerge
must come from thinking about the unimagined possibilities of the unknown
future; this is the “to come” of deconstructionism that Derrida writes of;35 but
it is also the embracing of radically different possibilities for the world found
within many religious traditions. It is not certain that the planetary commu-
nity will heed the call toward a new way of becoming, but it is something we
can hope and work towards.
Notes
1 Lynn White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, 3767 (March
10, 1967): 1203–1207.
2 Anna Peterson, Being Human: Ethics, Environment and Our Place in the World (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2001).
3 This is following the work of Latour: Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
4 I’m thinking here of the “partnership ethic” outlined by Carolyn Merchant. See: Carolyn
Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York,
NY: Routledge, 2003).
5 I understand technology more along the lines of the Greek understanding of technē: it
includes art, idea, and language, all of which help shape the material world in certain
ways.
6 Val Plumwood refers to this as a process of “backgrounding.” See: Val Plumwood,
Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (New York, NY: Routledge,  2002).
7 White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis.”
8 Two organizations that promote this work are the Forum on Religion and Ecology (fore.
yale.edu), and the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture
(www.issrnc.org/).
9 This was the argument in my book Theology, Creation and Environmental Ethics: From
Creatio ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009).
10 On this process, see: Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy,
Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
207
11 For a good analysis of Darwin on this metaphor for evolution and its implication for
humans, see: Michael S. Hogue, The Tangled Bank: Toward an Ecotheological Ethics of
Responsible Participation (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2008).
12 There is a whole body of literature emerging on “queer theory” and nature. See, e.g.,
Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson, eds., Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature,
Politics, Desire (Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010).
13 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Other Writings on Conservation and Ecology
(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1949).
14 See, e.g., Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle
over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 451; see
also, Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe at the End of the Nineteenth Century
(North Charlesworth, SC: Pantianos Classics, 1905 edition), 41: “When we see that, at
a certain stage, the embryos of man and the ape, the dog and the rabbit, the pig and the
sheep, although recognizable as higher vertebrates, cannot be distinguished from each
other, the fact can only be elucidated by assuming a common parentage.”
15 Haeckel, Riddle of the Universe, 57.
16 See e.g.: Magnus Hirschfeld, “Ernst Haeckel und die Sexualwissenschaft,” in Was wir
Ernst Haeckel verdanken, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Verlag Unesma, 1914), vol. 2, 282–284.
17 Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston,
MA: Beacon Press, 1993).
18 Ernst Haeckel, The Wonders of Life: A Popular Study of Biological Philosophy (New York,
NY: Harper & Brothers, 1905), 317–319.
19 This was the basic assumption of Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe.
20 Ernst Haeckel, Gott-Natur (Theophysis), Kommentar Nachdruck von Olaf Breidbach und
Uwe Hoßfeld (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008 edition), 69: “In dem universalen
Begriffe der Substanz –als des wirklichen Weltwessens –vereinigt unser naturalistischer
Monismus drei untrennbare Attribute oder Grundeigenschaften: die raumerfüllende
Materie (= Stoff), die wirkende Energie (= Kraft) und die empfindende Weltseele (=
Psychom).”
21 Ernst Haeckel, Kristallseelen: Studien über das anorganische Leben (Leipzig: Alfred
Kroner Verlag, 1917).
22 This is his argument in Kristallseelen. Cf.: Olaf Breidbach, Visions of Nature: The Art
and Science of Ernst Haeckel (Munich: Prestel, 2006), 112.
23 See, e.g., Ernst Haeckel, Art Forms from the Ocean (Munich: Prestel, 1862); Ernst
Haeckel, Art Forms from the Abyss (Munich: Prestel, 2015 edition); and Ernst Haeckel,
Art Forms in Nature (Munich: Prestel, 2015 edition).
24 See, e.g., Jonathan Marks, “Why Were the First Anthropologists Creationists?”
Evolutionary Anthropology 19 (2010): 222–226.
25 Ernst Haeckel, Monism as Connecting Religion and Science: A Man of Science
(New York, NY: Dossier Press, 2015 edition), 24.
26 Haeckel was a part of the Eugenics Society, as were many biologists of his day, and his
infamous evolutionary trees of the races ranked races in a hierarchy that put Europeans
(and even Germans) on top. Though this is obviously egregious, I do not agree with the
assessment of Daniel Gasman and others that Haeckel is a proto-Nazi scientist. See,
e.g., Daniel Gasman, Haeckel’s Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (New York,
NY: Peter Lang, 1998).
27 Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
28 The term is widely attributed to Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute. It gained
more traction with an article by Thomas Friedman, “Global Weirding is Here,” New York
Times, February 17, 2010: www.nytimes.com/2010/02/17/opinion/17friedman.html.
There is now a regular YouTube series with popular climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe
called “Global Weirding”: www.youtube.com/channel/UCi6RkdaEqgRVKi3AzidF4ow.
208
29 On the concept of “wicked” problems see: Horst W. J. Rittel and Melvin Webber,
“Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning,” Policy Sciences 4 (1973): 160.
30 On epistemontology see: Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics
and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2007). On naturecultures, see: Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The
Reinvention of Nature (New York, NY: Routledge, 1991).
31 I expand more on what a “viable agnosticism” means in: Whitney A. Bauman, Religion
and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (New York, NY: Columbia University Press,
2014),  63–84.
32 Lisa Stenmark, “An Ecology of Knowledge: Feminism, Ecology and the Science and
Religion Discourse,” Metaviews 6 (February 5, 2001). From Metaviews Listserv:
metaviews@meta-list.org.
33 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Experimental
Futures (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
34 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 1986), vol. 1, 114–177.
35 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the
New International (New York, NY: Routledge, 1993).
209
12
The Paradox of God in Nature
Martin O. Yalcin
Introduction: The Naturalized God
An argument that is commonly leveled by atheists against the Christian
God is that this God is an omnipotent tyrant whose existence limits human
freedom and human flourishing. Atheists such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl
Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Daniel Dennett, Richard
Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens assume that the Christian God is one
among the innumerable objects populating the vast universe.1 God may be
the most powerful being, nevertheless, he is part of the furniture of our uni-
verse. If the atheists’ description is correct, God would then be in competition
with his creation. Where God is, we cannot be. We would be annihilated in
the presence of a such a supremely powerful being. This view would indeed
transform God into humanity’s greatest enemy. But this description of a God
whose being is conditioned by the nexus of causes and effects common to
everything in the universe, and whose existence poses a grave threat to us, is
not the God of Christianity. This God would represent the epitome of idol-
atry, and Christians who have a correct understanding of the biblical God
should applaud their fellow atheists for raising vehement objections to this
God. Idolatry is the worship of anything but God as God. Idolatry is the
valorization of something or other within the universe, or even the universe
itself, as if it had ultimate or unqualified value. Atheists and Christian theists
are on common ground in opposing such idolatry.
The belief that God is not a competitor to human flourishing is central
to Christian faith. Since the publication of my book entitled Naturalism’s
210
Philosophy of the Sacred, I have increasingly found this belief compelling. But
this belief contradicts the thesis of Naturalism’s Philosophy of the Sacred, in
which I argued that all theisms, including the monotheism of Christianity, are
driven by a metaphysics of ontological priority that is the source of religious
violence. Ontological priority is the view that there are degrees and grades
of reality, that some things are more real than others, and that those things
that are more real are also more valuable and more praiseworthy. In Christian
theology, God is the pre-eminent reality. His being is fundamentally distinct
from his creation. For this reason, God is incommensurably real, meaning that
he cannot be measured by any standard discoverable in his creation. In sum,
God is absolutely independent of his creation, and this total absolution from
the limitations of his creatures grants him absolute value, including, among
others, the perfections of omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence.
But if God’s being is radically distinct from his creation, then it seemed to me
that a defense of ontological priority led to religious violence.
I discovered the link between religious violence and ontological priority
in the experience of abjection.2 Abjection is a psychoanalytic term used to
describe the ambivalent experience of attraction and repulsion, a primal
loving and loathing, directed against the mother figure. As the source of one’s
being, she is the creator and preserver, however, she is also experienced as
the engulfing, devouring womb of dissolution and death. There is a dual
movement within abjection: first, the jettisoning of one’s maternal origin
through a primal repression, and, second, the idolization of a substitute
mother figure. The substituted mother is an idol because the ambiguities
and contradictions attached to the maternal origin have been jettisoned, so
that the idolized figure has been transfigured into the image of the perfectly
good mother. The bad mother is psychologically demonized and killed off,
to be replaced by the virginal mother. The demonized mother can be any-
thing which is experienced as threatening, other, different, or vagrant, and the
idolized mother can be anything which is purified and idealized.
I argued that in the context of Christianity, abjection occurs when nature’s
power and fecundity are grafted onto God, thereby rendering nature an impo-
tent womb, whose natural creativity has been usurped by a male God who
brings all things into being supernaturally through his Word alone. A reli-
gious metaphysics of ontological priority inevitably demonizes nature, which
is believed to be ontologically inferior, in order to idolize God, the onto-
logically superior being. What is more, the total absolution accorded to God
within a metaphysics of ontological priority also demonizes nonbelievers,
those who have been denied access to revealed supernatural knowledge.
In response to the violence associated with abjection and a defense of
ontological priority, I argued for ontological parity as the cornerstone of
211
The Paradox of God in Nature 211
a peaceful and compassionate religious metaphysics –a metaphysics of

religious naturalism for which all things are equally real, including God.
If God is leveled to the plane of nature as one of its innumerable orders,
then demonization of nature would be foreclosed. God would be one nat-
ural sacred order among other orders, some of which would be sacred in
different respects from God. Demonization of nonbelievers would also
be foreclosed because any sacred order, including God, would be equally
accessible to everyone. God would be a sacred order arising out of nature’s
fecund womb, nature’s groundless khora, the utterly mysterious, paradox-
ically groundless ground that is the encompassing horizon for all orders of
nature. In the absence of an epistemologically exclusive experience of God,
everyone would have the potential to experience God’s presence. The God
who arises out of nature is equally available to all who are attuned to his
presence in nature.
Paired with a defense of philosophical naturalism, a metaphysics of
ontological parity has many virtues.3 Philosophical naturalists are right to
be suspicious of philosophies which claim to have discovered an ultimate
metaphysical substance undergirding whatever is, whether that substance is
Parmenides’ Being, Plato’s Form of the Good, Aristotle’s Thought Thinking
Itself, Democritus’ Atoms, Leibniz’s Monads, Descartes’ Cogito, Freud’s
Libido, Heidegger’s Being, the physicists’ God-particle, or the Memes touted
by the gurus of information technology and virtual realities. We need to be
wary of reductive philosophies, which can easily turn violent in their desire
to whitewash irreducible natural complexity. Ontological parity reminds us
of the sheer embeddedness of the human order and its conceptual constructs
within more encompassing orders of nature. The chief virtue of ontological
parity is humility or forbearance in the presence of difference and otherness.
Embracing ontological parity limits the ego’s voracious tendency to self-
inflation – the unbridled desire to remake the world in one’s own image.
A second and complementary virtue of ontological parity is mindfulness or
charity. To be mindful of whatever is, in whatever way it is, is to experience
anything whatsoever in its sheer presence, its unique way of being. This is a
spiritual exercise in permitting oneself to be saturated by the irreducible other-
ness of the other as other. Our most accomplished poets, painters, sculptors,
musicians, and dancers –our geniuses –have often described moments of
exceptional achievement as a begetting. The English word “genius” has its
origin in the Latin word for begetting, and this begetting is experienced by the
genius as a giving birth to something that comes to the genius unannounced,
as if the genius is a mere receptacle for the work being accomplished through
the genius. To be possessed and worked over by the natural potency of one’s
genii or tutelary muse is the hallmark of a genius.
212
Humility and charity, forbearance and mindfulness, are commendable

virtues, but the question remains whether these virtues arise solely when God
is leveled to the plane of nature, when God becomes part of the furniture of
the universe. Is the Christian God who creates the universe ex nihilo a tyran-
nical God, and are his adherents prone to violence because their faith teaches
them that God is incommensurable with his creation? Is supernaturalism the
enemy of peace? Should we blame human viciousness on the mysterious
otherness of God experienced by Moses on Mount Sinai?
The Coincidence of Immanence and Transcendence in God
The Christian God becomes burdensome when God’s immanence is
undermined in favor of God’s transcendence. Valorization of this kind is
absent from the Bible. In the Scriptures, the transcendent and utterly mys-
terious biblical God, who is ontologically independent of his creation, is
simultaneously the immanent God of revelation, the “tremendous lover”
of Francis Thompson’s poem, “The Hound of Heaven,” who relentlessly
pursues his wayward creatures into the depths of creation to gather them unto
himself. These two aspects of the one God are inextricably linked throughout
the Bible, climaxing in the arrival of the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the
God-man, who is the perfect embodiment of transcendence and immanence.
As early as the Book of Genesis, transcendence and immanence intertwine in
God. Genesis offers two cosmogonic accounts, the Priestly and the Yahwist, each
of which stresses one of God’s dual aspects. The Priestly account describes God
as a cosmic figure, the unrivalled Lord of the universe, who brings all things into
being by speaking them into existence. Christian monotheism originates in this
first creation account, which declares the oneness of Elohim, whose opponents,
demoted to strictly natural objects created by God, have been stripped of their
divine status. Typically, in non-biblical cosmogonies, the cosmos arises through
a primordial act of violence that founds the universal order. No other gods,
goddesses, semi-divine beings, monsters, or giants to dismember, slay, enslave,
or to banish, the biblical Elohim alone creates the universe. The utter unity and
oneness of God, God’s holy otherness, his unfathomable transcendence, is the
source of a peaceful beginning of the world. In other words, God’s holiness
implies an otherness that cannot be differentiated or contrasted in any respect.
The concept of God as non-contrastive abounds in Christian thought.
Irenaeus of Lyons expressed this idea as God’s creation of the universe ex
nihilo (out of nothing) in Against the Heresies, a work devoted to countering
Gnostic Christianity. Augustine of Hippo formulated the same idea in his dec-
laration in the Confessions that God is interior intimo meo et superior summo
meo (closer to me than I am to myself, and higher than what is highest in
me). In the Middle Ages, the theologians Anselm of Canterbury and Thomas
213
Aquinas concurred with these two early Church Fathers. Anselm defined God
in the Proslogion as id quo maius cogitari nequit (that than which nothing
greater can be thought), while in the Summa Theologica, Aquinas addressed
God as ipsum esse subsistens (the sheer act of to-be itself or self-subsisting
being itself). And Nicholas of Cusa argued in the fifteenth century that God
is non aliud (Not-other) in a work entitled On the Not-Other.
How are these statements related to the idea of God as non-contrastive?
I advert to contemporary Christian theologians Robert Sokolowski, Kathryn
Tanner, Robert Barron, Henk J. M. Schoot, and Fleming Rutledge for some
answers. In The God of Faith and Reason, Sokolowski argues that the incar-
nation of God in Christ reveals to us that
God does not destroy the natural necessities of things he becomes involved with, even in
the intimate union of the incarnation. What is according to nature, and what reason can
disclose in nature, retains its integrity before the Christian God …. God is not himself a
competing part of nature or a part of the world.
(35–36)
Using similar language, Tanner speaks of a “non-competitive relation

between God and creatures” (4) in Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity. For
Tanner, the omnibenevolence or overflowing goodness of God is possible
only because of God’s radical transcendence. God’s gifting of himself in his
creative activity does not involve a “competitive either/or” (4) because God
is not one among other natural objects. A felicitous restatement of Tanner’s
position can be found in Christ the “Name” of God in Schoot’s pithy for-
mulation that “God differs differently from the world” (198). Affirming the
conclusions of Sokolowski and Tanner, Barron argues in Exploring Catholic
Theology that “God is so radically other than creation that he can enter into
what he has made in a nonintrusive manner” (xiii). And according to Rutledge
in The Crucifixion, it is through this nonintrusive way that “the God who is
able to create out of nothing is able to create faith where there is no faith,
righteousness where there is no righteousness, life where there is only the
finality of death” (599). She insists that God’s unqualified self-dependence
(aseity) is the answer to violence and evil, not its source. The through line
that connects all these discourses is that God’s utterly radical transcendence
is the basis of an equally utterly radical immanence through which God acts
nonviolently in the most intimate way for the good of his creation.
One of the most appropriate descriptions for this paradoxical union of
transcendence and immanence is Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et
fascinans expounded in his book entitled The Idea of the Holy. Otto suggests
in this Latin phrase that our experience of God is characterized by a dual
movement of repulsion and attraction: we are, on the one hand, awestruck,
214
dumbfounded, and terrified by the sheer mystery and ineffability of God, and,
on the other, we are mesmerized and enraptured by it. The biblical accounts
of creation testify to Otto’s insight. Whereas the first account presents a dis-
tant majestic God (called Elohim) who creates the heavens and the earth, the
second offers an intimate God (called YHWH) who lovingly creates man by
infusing him with God’s own life-giving breath, then places him in a verdant
divine garden teeming with life and fashions a woman to be his ideal com-
panion. It is instructive that these two accounts were preserved side by side
by biblical authors for their complementary descriptions of God.
The Mosaic theophany in the Book of Exodus also confirms Otto’s intu-
ition. As he is tending to his flock on Mount Sinai, “the mountain of God,”
Moses encounters God in a burning bush, and is surprised that the bush is not
being consumed by fire. God addresses Moses from the bush and instructs
him to remove his sandals for he is standing on “holy ground.” Moses then
hides his face because he is overtaken by dread. The uncanny God who has
overpowered Moses with his disturbing manifestation in nature tells Moses
that he has heard the suffering of his people under their Egyptian masters, and
that with Moses as his messenger, he will rescue the Israelites and lead them
to the promised land. Moses then asks for God’s name; God replies with the
elusive name YHWH, the tetragrammaton, rendered in the New American
Bible Revised Edition (NABRE) as “I am who I am.”
The first feature of this sacred manifestation that fits Otto’s model of the
numinous experience is the burning bush. The awful (used here in its archaic
form as full of awe) mystery of God in the burning bush both repulses and
attracts Moses, who is terrified and enraptured by the presence of the hallowed
bush. More to it, the burning bush illustrates that God’s activity in nature is
not destructive but rather uplifting and vivifying. The bush that is on fire with
God is not consumed. Moses is not annihilated in its presence. Through his
encounter with God, Moses is infused with the courage to confront boldly
Israel’s Egyptian oppressors, despite his evident misgivings. How different
is this theophany from that involving Semele, Zeus’ human lover, who bursts
into flames when Zeus unveils to her his divine identity.
That God’s profound mystery revitalizes and empowers is all the more evi-
dent in God’s holy name. When Moses asks for God’s name, the response “I
am who I am” both conceals and reveals. Aquinas suggests that this holds true
for any discourse about God because anything we say of God is analogical –
it applies to God in certain respects, but not in others. Although it unveils, the
holy name remains a mystery that circles in upon itself –the “I am” returns to
itself. This suggests that God refuses to be tamed and categorized according
to natural distinctions. Even as God speaks to Moses as to an intimate friend,
encouraging him to be bold in the face of danger, nevertheless, using Rudolf
215
Otto’s German designation, it is clear that God does not cease being das ganz
Andere, the wholly Other. Anselm’s definition of God as “that than which
nothing greater can be thought” and Aquinas’ description of God as “self-
subsistent being itself” are both abstract theological interpretations of this
idea. For Anselm, as for Aquinas, the sui generis character of God’s being –
his holy otherness –implies that God’s essence is no different from his exist-
ence. “I am who I am” means for both theologians that God must exist, that
he is not contingent or dependent in any respect, and that, therefore, God
owes his existence entirely to himself. To put it simply, God’s essence –what
God is –implies his necessary existence –that God is. “I am who I am”
is an apt designation for this coincidence of essence and existence in God.
Furthermore, God’s nonviolent and non-competitive presence in nature is
grounded in this coincidence, for this coincidence means that because God’s
essence is fully actualized in his existence –God cannot fail to be what he
is –God’s action in nature is always directed for the good of creation and not
for his benefit. As God lacks no perfection, God has no need to compete with
his creatures to satisfy an unrealized desire.
In the biblical story of Jacob, this coincidence is manifested in a most dra-
matic way when Jacob, who has wronged his twin brother Esau by cheating
him out of his birthright, is about to encounter his brother after many years
of estrangement. The night before the brothers meet, while Jacob is alone
and defenseless, Jacob is visited by a messenger of God, “some man,” who
is none other than God himself. Then an unusual event transpires: the mes-
senger of God wrestles with Jacob throughout the night. The Bible relates the
story in this way:
When the man saw that he could not prevail over him, he struck Jacob’s hip at its socket, so
that the hip socket was dislocated as he wrestled with him. The man then said, “Let me go,
for it is daybreak.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” “What is your
name?” the man asked. He answered, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You shall no longer be
named Jacob, but Israel, because you have contended with divine and human beings and
have prevailed.” Jacob then asked him, “Please tell me your name.” He answered, “Why do
you ask for my name?” With that, he blessed him. Jacob named the place Peniel, “because
I have seen God face to face,” he said, “yet my life has been spared.”
(Gen. 32:26–31, NABRE)
This story illustrates a theme common to all three Abrahamic religions,

namely, that divine grace is bestowed after an intimate and deeply personal
struggle with God, here represented as a wrestling match called Israel, which
means the one who strives or contends with God. The Qur’an, the Muslim
Holy Book, offers jihad as the path for this interior struggle of the self against
all those impediments that are barriers to the soul’s communion with God.
There is no more palpable and immediate experience of God’s immanent
216
presence in nature than a wrestling match with God. Before Jacob is ready
to reunite with his long-lost brother, Jacob must be deprived of his wits, his
selfish regard, so that he can approach his brother with humility. In this story,
the sign of this humility is the dislocated socket, a physical manifestation
of God’s sheer transcendence in the body of Jacob, which prepares him for
a peaceful meeting with Esau. To use Otto’s language once again, Jacob is
awestruck, decentered at his core, by the wholly other God who destabilizes
him. Note also that in this encounter between God and man, God is not a vio-
lent aggressor whose aim is to destroy Jacob; he is not like any other human
foe who can be named, and whose face poses a grave threat to Jacob’s exist-
ence. Rather, when one is properly aligned to God, so that neither the self nor
anything else is idolized, then this turning to God, this face-to-face experi-
ence of God, prepares the self to receive the blessings of God without hin-
drance, as Jacob has. Through his loving struggle with the mysterious divine
figure, Jacob is realigned with God and with his brother Esau. In a homily
for World Youth Day 2005, Pope Benedict XVI clarified the meaning of this
face-to-face encounter as a loving submission to the kiss of God.
The Disappearance of God’s Strange Holiness
Thus far I have argued that God is both radically transcendent and rad-
ically immanent; that this paradoxical coincidence is the foundation of the
non-competitive presence of God in nature; and that when this both/and con-
junction is jettisoned in favor of an either/or disjunctive choice between tran-
scendence and immanence, God turns violent because he has become either
another object in nature vying for supremacy, or another object pitted against
nature, menacingly hovering over it. The reason we find God burdensome,
overbearing, and (for some atheists) tyrannical, is that we have denied the
holiness of God. However, the Bible speaks of nothing else except the holi-
ness of God; a holiness which destabilizes and disturbs our ordinary projects,
in order to effect a profound realignment of our way of being and of our
values. Why are we in the West no longer attuned to this holiness?
The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor provides an intriguing clue to
this question in A Secular Age with his distinction between the pre-modern
“porous self” and the contemporary “buffered self.” The contemporary
self is defined by an impregnable boundary between mind and world. In
fact, that the contemporary self is aware of such a boundary at all is what
makes it modern. In his Meditations, the seventeenth-century French phil-
osopher René Descartes discovered an ultimate foundation upon which to
construct all his ideas about himself, other minds, and nature. Having sum-
marily rejected his previously held beliefs through a universal skepticism,
the only “clear and distinct” idea he retained was that he was a thinking
217
thing, a self that exists insofar as it thinks. From this place of deep interiority,
Descartes was able to prove to himself that God, other selves, and the world
existed. Using Descartes’ language, the self, an independently existing finite
substance, became the necessary bridge to other thinking things (minds),
to extended things (natural objects), and to the infinite thinking substance
(God). In this extraordinary move, Descartes subsumed God to the human
mind, and separated the mind from the body and nature, thereby rendering the
human self the unchallenged master of its house. Justice Kennedy expressed
the awesome power of this unrestricted autonomous self in the court deci-
sion in Casey vs. Planned Parenthood, 505 U.S. 833 (1992), in this way: “at
the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of
meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” This is, indeed,
the standpoint of the modern self, namely, that it admits no objectively dis-
coverable meanings external to itself in the universe. The buffered self has
jettisoned the idea of an ordered cosmos by which it can govern its life. What
remains is a vast, indifferent, and leveled universe, bereft of palpable ben-
evolent and malevolent beings and forces impinging upon the self, such as
saints, angels, demons, and God. According to Taylor, the “creation of a thick
emotional boundary between us and the cosmos” (38) defines our modern
buffered selves, as we operate in a world that has become disenchanted.
By contrast, the pre-modern porous self is embedded in a cosmos that is
ordered and hierarchical, permeated by higher and lower grades of being
and value, punctuated by events and spaces external to the self that are res-
onant with objective meanings, and saturated by the presence of beings
transcending nature. For this porous self, the world is an enchanted place
where the boundary between the self and nature is open to influence by external
powers and agents. Even more than this, as Taylor notes, “that there is a clear
boundary, allowing us to define an inner base area, grounded in which we can
disengage from the rest, has no sense” (38) for the porous self. It is not an
atomic unit that is master of its domain, as if it were entirely disengaged from
its environment; therefore, the porous self discovers its ultimate meaning and
ultimate value in ontologically and axiologically superior sources, such as
God. The round of daily life is punctuated for the porous self by what Taylor
labels “anti-structure.” These are recurrent celebrations of chaos, disorder,
and death, whereby all human and natural structures are dismantled, so that
the porous self can reunite with its rejuvenating sacred source. Taylor argues
that one of the defining features of the pre-modern world is this interplay
between structure and anti-structure. In sum, the porous self does not live in a
flattened, homogeneous universe; rather, its milieu consists of a thickly tiered
cosmos defined by sacred and profane spaces. By inhabiting sacred spaces,
the porous self is able to transcend the limitations of linear time through
218
its immersion in eternity. Rather than lauding its autonomy from external
influences, the porous self finds its fulfillment and joy in what exceeds it
infinitely.
Returning to the buffered self, it is evident that the buffered self erects a
screen that shields it from the impact of the holy. But there is a very particular
way in which this shielding occurs –the strangeness of God is attenuated in a
myriad of ways. The trajectory of this modern sensibility can be traced from
theologians in the later Middle Ages in the thirteenth century down to con-
temporary atheists.
Although the genesis of modernity is typically attributed to Descartes,
there is a controversial theory among theologians who espouse a movement
called radical orthodoxy that Christian theologians in the later Middle Ages
sowed the seeds of modernity.4 If this theory is correct, then the prevailing
view that modernity is the inevitable shedding of mythological and religious
thought in favor of the scientific method is flawed. For the prevailing view,
religion and science are intrinsically at odds, such that the rise of science
occurs as human reason frees itself from the tyranny of authoritarian religious
beliefs. But this prevailing view has its own mythology –a myth of origins
about men of great courage, such as Giordano Bruno and Galileo Galilei, who
threw off the shackles of domineering religious authority, thereby rendering
human beings free agents, now able to determine the course of their destinies
apart from superstitious revelation. The euphoric optimism of this myth of
origins is evident in Kant’s categorical rejection of heteronomous authority
for autonomous reason. The belief that science and religion are incompat-
ible was indeed espoused by those Christians who desired to return to the
“fundamentals” of the faith in early 1900s America. This conservative wing
of Protestantism sought to stem the rising tides of secularism and modernism
in American culture through a literalist reading of the Bible that was aimed
at Darwin’s theory of evolution. But this return to fundamentals was nei-
ther universally accepted by all Protestant Christians at the time, nor has
it been the dominant view among Christian theologians and philosophers.
Because many today believe that the scientific method is the sole arbiter of
truth, an idea about the opposition of religion to science that was circulating
within a fringe Christian movement has now become widely acceptable. We
ought to be skeptical of the scientism that would denigrate all other forms of
knowledge.
What scientism finds repellant in religion is the supposed moral grounding
of religious beliefs in a system of ethical values considered by scientism
to be irrational and utterly subjective, in contrast to the putatively rational,
impartial, and objective point of view of the sciences. I agree with Taylor
that this characterization of the difference is untenable, as it constructs a false
219
dichotomy between value and fact. The metaphysics of the buffered self is no
less embedded in an ethics than the porous self, an ethics that predetermines
the horizon of its metaphysics. According to Taylor, the buffered self’s myth
of origins tells the story of how we moderns transitioned, with great effort and
determination, from a state of dependent infancy –the Kantian “self-incurred
immaturity” –to one of independent adulthood, through a painful effort
of “subtraction,” of sloughing off the comforts of an illusory supernatural
moral order in order to independently face stark reality. Presumably, while
the porous self is governed by a moral point of view, the modern buffered
self has attained the view from nowhere, untainted by moral concerns. The
modern self is convinced that facing the demands of the natural order can-
didly required disengagement from its enchantment with the supernatural.
According to this narrative, it was inevitable and laudable for enchantment to
give way to disenchantment. Taylor deconstructs this narrative by unearthing
some of the moral ideals embraced by modernity’s buffered self, such as
“images of power, of untrammeled agency, of spiritual self-possession”
(563). That the buffered self is enamored of these virtues does not render
its metaphysics more natural, objective, impartial, or rational. What’s more,
disenchantment can arise within religion itself in defense of God. This was
the case in the later Middle Ages when two opposing traditions of God’s rela-
tionship to nature competed for supremacy among Christian theologians. On
the one hand, theologians such as Aquinas who embraced Aristotle’s natur-
alistic metaphysics emphasized God’s immanent presence in nature, while,
on the other, theologians such as John Duns Scotus who were influenced by
Augustine’s Platonism praised God’s absolute transcendence of nature. In
the polemic against their rivals, Augustinian theologians argued for nature’s
disenchantment in order to secure God’s primacy over nature.
The dispute between these theological schools regarding God’s relation-
ship to nature hinged on the status of discourse about God. Christians have
argued that God cannot be subsumed under the genus of being. There is no
overarching category that unites both creator and creature. Creatures are
entirely dependent on the creator for their being, while the creator is entirely
independent of his creation. Nothing stands above God as a third term uniting
the creator and his creation. Because God is not one being among many,
not one more creature among other created beings, assigning predication to
God becomes problematic. How do we speak about the God who cannot be
categorized according to our natural distinctions?
One way is through apophatic or negative theology, as it was originally
formulated by Pseudo-Dionysius in The Mystical Theology and then picked
up later by Aquinas and others. This tradition is aware of the impossibility of
grasping God’s essence, or what God is in himself, due to the limitations of
220
human reason. According to this tradition we can know that God is, but not
what he is. Nevertheless, we can approach God by proceeding thus: whatever
predicates are applied to creatures are denied of God; we begin with creatures
and work our way back to God. The result of this exercise is that we can come
to know that creatures exhibit as effects the pre-eminent perfections found
in God as their cause. Although apophatic theology has value, this negative
way ultimately leads to silence in the presence of the inscrutable God. This is
not necessarily a negative outcome, for it reminds the Christian faithful that
genuine blessedness is to be had when all self-assertive grasping is set aside,
including the desire to capture God through human reason. Aquinas learned
this lesson after having written thousands of pages on God, when, according
to tradition, Aquinas willingly fell silent at the end of his life, leaving his
Summa unfinished, insisting, “all that I have written seems like straw to me.”
Nevertheless, there is a second path complementary to apophatic the-
ology called cataphatic theology, which argues that positive predications
of God can be made. And it is to this tradition of cataphatic theology, as it
was developed in the later Middle Ages by John Duns Scotus, a near con-
temporary of Aquinas, that theologians of radical orthodoxy have traced the
beginnings of modernity. They have discovered in Scotus’ works germin-
ating what would later become seminal ideas in modern thought, especially
the belief in the primacy of the rational capacities of the subject to determine
for itself the nature of reality apart from God. Of course, as a Christian theo-
logian, Scotus did not set out to undermine the subject’s dependence upon
God, but the unintended consequence of his theology of univocal predication
seems to open the door to this self-grounding of human reason.
There are three possible ways in cataphatic theology that our predicates
refer to God. The first way is to argue that the common words we use to
speak of creatures and of God have entirely different senses when referred
to creatures than when referred to God. So, to say that God is wise is to
mean something altogether different than to say that Socrates is wise. This is
equivocal predication, which Scotus summarily rejects. For he argues that we
would be speaking nonsense, indeed we would be speaking falsehoods, if we
did not use common predicates in the same way when referred to creatures and
to God. The second way is to argue, as does Aquinas, that human discourse
about God is analogical, meaning that divine predicates are both affirmed and
denied of God in different respects. The predicates neither fall entirely off
the mark, as in equivocal predication, nor do they hit the mark with perfect
accuracy, as in univocal predication. For Aquinas, the reason we can predi-
cate anything of God is because nature manifests God’s handiwork. Human
perfections are derived from the creator God, upon whom creation depends
for its being at all. In other words, to exist at all is to participate in or to mirror
221
God’s creative activity. According to Aquinas, then, we can make positive

divine predications because we are existentially dependent upon God; never-
theless, because our discourse about God is derived from creatures, our
predicates apply to God only imperfectly. The third way of speaking about
God is univocal predication, and it is the one espoused by Scotus. He argues
that a predicate used both of God and of creatures, a third term that connects
creatures to God, must signify exactly the same thing whether referred to
God or to creatures. How do we arrive at such a univocal concept, according
to Scotus? Start with a human attribute, such as wisdom. Remove from it all
creaturely imperfections, so that what is left over is wisdom-in-itself. This
is a concept of wisdom that abstracts or prescinds from such disjunctive
distinctions as finite/infinite, created/uncreated, distinctions that would bar
us from univocally applying wisdom both to God and to creatures. Finally,
predicate this abstracted concept to God in the most perfect way.
According to Scotus, in predicating such a concept of God, we do not
thereby arrive at some privileged intuition into what God is in himself, God’s
essence. Our concepts do not, as it were, encompass God. The common
element that unites God to creatures is the being of anything, not God’s
being. An argument from God’s being would be an argument from analogy
that moves from derived and dependent beings to their source in the cre-
ator. Scotus’ univocal predication does not begin with creatures, but, rather,
with being as such or indeterminate being, with the fact that anything is at
all. The concept of being is the simplest and most common concept that is
the basis of all other concepts for Scotus. If the concept of being allows
for univocal predications between God and creatures, can we accuse Scotus
of what Martin Heidegger termed onto-theology, namely, of turning being
into a genus under which creatures and God are both subsumed? Has Scotus
elevated above God human reason and its attunement to being? Has he
demoted God to a being among other beings in nature? These questions raise
the issue whether Scotus’ doctrine of univocal predication opens up the door
to modernity. Scotus insists that univocity of predication is a semantic or
logical argument, rather than a metaphysical argument about ontology. The
mind’s ability to form a concept under which both God and creatures can be
understood univocally does not imply, according to Scotus, the real existence
of such a state of affairs outside the mind. Sameness of meaning only applies
to being as such, to the way things are when they have been abstracted from
any actual differences. But because Scotus’ writings are not entirely clear on
this point, he is open to the criticism that he is motivated by ontology rather
than semantics.
I would argue that the problem of univocal predication vis-à-vis mod-
ernity hinges on whether any experience of God, conceptual or otherwise,
222
is believed to originate in our participation in God’s life. The participation

metaphysics of Aquinas insists that we are existentially dependent upon
God, and that through this relationship we experience God’s presence in our
lives in a palpable way. God’s immanence is given as much equal weight
as his transcendence in participation metaphysics. It seems to me that the
univocal predication put forward by Scotus secures God’s transcendence by
minimizing God’s immanence. Consequently, the Christian believer’s dis-
course about God loses its grounding in the Word of God. Theology is no
longer practiced as spiritual elevation into the presence of the transcendent,
but rather as the practice of abstraction, through which the mind establishes
its experience of God in an abstract concept of being. This metaphysics of
univocal predication culminates in the theology of William of Ockham. For
Ockham, the concepts we use to speak of God are inadequate for grasping
God’s essence. We are, so to speak, imprisoned in our concepts, and all our
concepts are derived from creatures, therefore, human reason is confined to
the mind’s constructions in its discourse about God. We know God nominally,
as an abstract concept produced by us, but not the reality of God. Ockham
even denied that we can prove God’s existence with certainty through human
reason. Not only do we not have an immediate intuitive grasp of God, we also
lack a mediated grasp of God through natural theology, which seeks to prove
God’s existence by reflecting on nature as God’s creation.
Both of these ways of experiencing God require belief in the existence
of a real relationship between God and humanity. But Ockham insists that
individual things are truly real while relationships among things, like all
other universals, have no ontological reality. This means that when a toddler
recognizes that both Fido and Fluffy are dogs, he has not experienced an
actually existing dog-ness found in Fido and Fluffy that would relate one to
the other. What he does experience are common features in Fido and Fluffy,
which he subsumes under the word “dog.” However, according to Ockham,
because God cannot even be empirically experienced in our present natural
state, any knowledge of God that is not based on faith in God’s revelation, is
no more than knowledge of our own conceptual constructions. Ockham’s uni-
vocal predication desacralizes nature, so that the paradox that defines God’s
holiness, namely, the presence of the infinite in the finite, breaks down as
God recedes into his absolute transcendence. This is the reason why Ockham
criticizes natural theology’s efforts to prove God’s existence. The cosmological
and teleological arguments no longer work in a theology for which local and
distant natural causes are enough to explain natural events, and God’s exist-
ence is solely to be secured through faith in supernatural revelation.
Just two centuries after Ockham, European Protestant reformers such as
Martin Luther and John Calvin severed ties with the Roman Catholic Church
223
by upholding the “theory of representation” over the Catholic Church’s “doc-

trine of presence.” The core issue that separated these theological positions
concerned the meaning of the Incarnation, of God’s revelation to humanity
through the person of Jesus Christ. The Catholic Church believed that because
God revealed himself definitively in and through the body of a human being,
God’s presence can be made manifest through the body and the senses.
Catholics partake of the actual body and blood of Christ in the bread that
they eat and the wine that they drink. This is an embodied spirituality that
understands nature as the locus of God’s creative presence. For Catholics, the
Incarnation is palpable in the beauty, goodness, and truth evident in nature,
and is celebrated through the sacraments, referred to as “efficacious signs of
grace” by the Catholic Church, through which Catholics experience God’s
presence and power. The Protestant reformers transferred the presence of God
from the body to the mind, thereby also shifting the meaning of the Incarnation
from the Body of Christ to the Word of God. The immediate presence of God’s
holiness in sacred natural objects is now mediated through the representa-
tion of God’s presence in human language. Nature is desacralized and the
human body becomes utterly fallen, as the distance between God and his cre-
ation becomes all the more pronounced. Hence Luther’s belief in the futility of
human works, of what we can contribute as embodied beings, to our salvation,
and his insistence on faith alone as the path to salvation. Hence also the pri-
macy of Scripture as the Word of God, and the valorization of the individual’s
interior reflection on and interpretation of Scripture as the royal road to God.
About a century later, Descartes would offer his contemporaries the
ultimate consequence of the oblivion of God’s holiness: the mind’s absolute
self-dependence and its total separation from the body and from nature. God
is experienced by Descartes as the idea of the infinite in a finite mind. This
is far from the participation metaphysics of Aquinas and Catholicism’s doc-
trine of presence. The desire to remove God’s holiness from nature amounts
to a form of Gnosticism that devalues nature and matter by pitting it against
the purity of a disembodied mind, soul, or self, unsullied by a fallen creation.
It is the desire to dismiss the value of suffering by escaping imprisonment
in one’s body and in nature. In contrast, the radical strangeness of God that
elicits awe, dread, and fear in the presence of the holy is an embodied holi-
ness; it is the tangible presence of God in and through nature. And, as I have
argued earlier, it is this embodied presence of God’s holiness that is the basis
of a peaceful encounter with God –the noncompetitive God who does not
come to destroy but to uplift his creation. When the strangeness of God is
attenuated, violence is not far behind.
The novella by G. K. Chesterton entitled The Man Who Was Thursday: A
Nightmare symbolically represents the strangeness of God in the world as a
224
mysterious figure named Sunday, who is encountered by the characters in the

novel obliquely. They meet him in a pitch-black room with his back turned,
or they pursue him from behind, all the while experiencing him as a figure
that reason cannot surround and capture. Towards the end of the novella, the
protagonist named Syme says to his companions,
“Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of
the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the
back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything
is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front.”
(143)
And when Syme, along with his companions, does in fact see Sunday face-
to-face at the end of the novella, Sunday’s response to the question “ ‘Who
and what are you?’ ” (152) is this, “ ‘I am the Sabbath,’ ” (152) “ ‘I am the
peace of God’ ” (152).
Chesterton’s novella illustrates the message of the biblical Book of Job,
in which a righteous man of great faith named Job endures unimaginable
suffering at the hands of Satan, who has been given permission by God to
test Job’s faith.5 Job eventually rails against what he believes is God’s cruel
treatment. So long as God remains hidden, so long as Job is only privy to the
back side of God, from Job’s vantage point, God appears to be an almighty
tyrant who abuses Job capriciously. Of course, Job is closer to God than an
atheist, for whom there is neither a back nor a front side to God. Nevertheless,
Job’s faith must be tested because Job must realize that the only answer to
suffering and violence is to experience the front side of God, to see God
face-to-face. And this is precisely the dénouement to the Book of Job. Job’s
restless heart, full of rage against his sufferings, is stilled as Job encounters
“the Sabbath,” “the peace of God.” This peace comes to Job not because God
provides some logical, rational explanation for Job’s sufferings, but simply
because Job has experienced the love of God as the infinite in the finite, as
the front side of God in the back side of God, as the divine in the mundane,
as God in nature.
What happens when this paradoxical, strange, and disturbing holiness
of God disappears? God becomes nature itself, as in pantheism (Baruch
Spinoza6); or he turns into a supreme clockmaker, a first cause, who creates
the universe, winds it, and lets it tick away on its own, without revealing
himself to his creatures, except through nature’s rational design, as in deism
(Thomas Paine7); or he is reduced to a mere postulate, to some being that we
must assume exists for the sake of morality, in order to close the gap between
who we are and who we ought to be (Immanuel Kant8); or he is taken to be
the highest and best human qualities stripped of their limitations, and then
225
projected onto a supreme being, who contains all those qualities infinitely
(Ludwig Feuerbach9); or he is transformed into an illusion, a glorified father
figure, produced by the psyche in order to contend with the horrors and terrors
of existence (Sigmund Freud10); or he is derisively labeled a narcotic, the
opium of the people, that deadens our desire to change our real conditions,
by offering an escape from our economic miseries (Karl Marx11); or he is
declared an impediment to full human flourishing, because belief in him was
supposedly concocted by weaklings who unjustly sought to curb the joyful
and exuberant life of the powerful (Friedrich Nietzsche12); or he is lambasted
as a “permanent, unalterable celestial despotism that subjected us to con-
tinual surveillance and could convict us of thought-crime, and who regarded
us as its private property even after we died” (Christopher Hitchens, Portable
Atheist, xxii); or as a I have done in my own writings, he is naturalized as
another object arising out of nature’s fecundity.
But none of the foregoing descriptions of God makes sense in the context
of theism, because each one performs a reduction of God to something or
other in nature or to nature itself. The uniqueness of Christianity consists in
the orthodox declaration that arose in the early Christian ecumenical councils
that Jesus Christ was both fully divine and fully human. Just as the God of
the Jewish Scriptures has often been misunderstood because one pole of the
transcendent/immanent paradox has been favored over the other, so Jesus
Christ has been mischaracterized when one pole of the God/man paradox has
been unduly favored. Since the Enlightenment, there has been a movement
to found a universal religion of humanity based on reason alone. Thomas
Jefferson attempted to do just that for Christianity by cutting out the texts
in the Gospels which referred to the divinity of Jesus, including accounts
of Jesus’ virgin birth, his miracles, and his resurrection. Having excised the
very strangeness and the apparent irrational elements of the God-man, in
his heavily edited gospel entitled The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,
all that remained of Jesus was another great moral teacher palatable to the
mass of humanity. However, what disappeared in the process was the New
Testament Jesus handed down to us by the Gospel writers, according to
whom Jesus was fully God and fully man. Jesus does offer a new moral code
in his Sermon on the Mount, but the uniqueness of Jesus is not his ethical
demands. What was shocking to his Jewish contemporaries was Jesus’ blas-
phemous declaration that he was God. In John’s Gospel, Jesus said of him-
self, “ ‘before Abraham came to be, I AM’ ” (8:58), which Jewish tradition
understood as the name of God. Which is why John’s Gospel tells us that
the Jews who heard this “picked up stones to throw at him” (8:59). Stoning
to death was the punishment for claiming a prerogative solely belonging to
God. In yet another incident in Mark’s Gospel, Jesus incensed the Jewish
226
authorities when he forgave the sins of a paralyzed man. According to Mark’s

Gospel, they said to themselves, “ ‘Why does this man speak that way? He is
blaspheming. Who but God alone can forgive sins?’ ” (2:7).
Conclusion: God –The “Light Silent Sound”
This chapter on violence, God, and nature was intended as an exercise
in self-criticism. It seems to me that my initial desire to level God to the
plane of nature in order to undercut God’s violence was misguided, chiefly
because of my uncritical acceptance of modern conceptions of God and Jesus
Christ. I assumed that all theisms are founded on a defense of ontological pri-
ority, which is the view that God absolutely transcends his creation. This in
itself was not incorrect, but the further assumption that God’s absolute tran-
scendence is the source of violence within Christianity was inconsistent with
descriptions of God in the Jewish Scriptures and with New Testament Gospel
accounts of Jesus Christ.
What is missing from this picture of God’s absolute transcendence is the
paradoxical claim that God is simultaneously utterly transcendent and utterly
immanent. To insist that violence within Christianity originates in a defense
of ontological priority is to make two other moves made by modernity incon-
sistent with Christian theology: (1) that God’s absolute transcendence pits
God against his creation as a tyrant competing for power, and (2) that, there-
fore, God must be brought low or leveled to the plane of nature in order to
neutralize his despotic lordship. But with respect to the first move, one cannot
have it both ways –one cannot simultaneously accept that God absolutely
transcends his creation, and that he is in competition with his creation. To be
utterly transcendent is by definition to be outside of the nexus of causes and
effects that are the source of competitive relations among natural objects and
beings. And the second move does not fare any better. Turning God into an
object within nature does not neutralize God’s violence, but rather increases
it. The closer an omnipotent God approaches nature, the more destructive he
becomes, if one assumes, as does modernity, that God is the highest being
within the universe. The Bible tells us that God does indeed reveal himself
to us in the Jewish Scriptures and is incarnated in the person of Jesus of
Nazareth in the Christian Scriptures, but in both Scriptures God’s transcend-
ence is not lost in God’s immanence. In fact, as I have argued here, it is
because God is utterly transcendent that his immanent presence in nature
revitalizes humanity and lifts up creation, rather than destroying it.
A perception that God is violent arises when God’s strange holiness is
attenuated by dismissing one pole of the immanent/transcendent paradox, and
when Jesus’ strange holiness is attenuated by dismissing one pole of the God/
man paradox. Let us return to Charles Taylor’s distinction between the porous
227
self and the buffered self. From the perspective of the buffered self, God is
violent, but that is only because the buffered self has embraced modernity’s
edited version of the biblical God, a version that dispenses with his paradox-
ical holiness. The buffered self may wish to erect insurmountable barriers or
buffers between itself and God, but it only does so by misinterpreting and
misrepresenting the God of the Bible and his relationship to nature.
The Bible is not ambiguous about this relationship. God’s manifestation
to the prophet Elijah in 1 Kings describes God’s strange holiness as a “light
silent sound” in the midst of nature’s raw power. As Elijah waits for God to
“pass by,” the Bible tell us that
[t]‌here was a strong and violent wind rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the
LORD –but the LORD was not in the wind; after the wind, an earthquake –but the LORD
was not in the earthquake; after the earthquake, fire – but the LORD was not in the fire;
after the fire, a light silent sound.
(19:11–12)
And it was in this “light silent sound” that God appeared to Elijah as a
mysterious divine presence, a gentle whisper –the paradox of God in nature.
In his book entitled Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence,
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks interprets this gentle whisper as an invitation by God,
the archetypal stranger, to embrace the stranger, the outcast, the weak, and
the persecuted, to “search for the trace of God in the face of the Other”
(203). The Bible relates the story of the Israelites, who have been chosen
to redeem a fallen world. Their destiny is to wrestle with God, as the name
Israel suggests. They are strangers who must endure great suffering under
their Egyptian masters, so that being strangers, they can identify with the
stranger. Rabbi Sachs argues that the Jewish Scriptures contain a series of
stories revolving around sibling rivalry designed to elicit empathy for the
stranger. In one of these stories, God promises Abraham that he will be the
father of a great nation, despite the fact that his wife Sarah is barren. Before
Sarah discovers in old age that she is pregnant with their son Isaac, she gives
permission for Abraham to sleep with their household slave named Hagar.
To Hagar is born Isaac’s half-brother, Ishmael. The Bible tells us in the Book
of Genesis that when Hagar and Ishmael are driven from Abraham’s house-
hold, due to Sarah’s jealousy, God assures Abraham that, “ ‘As for the son
of the slave woman, I will make a great nation of him also, since he too is
your offspring’ ” (21:13). Abraham then reluctantly sends mother and child
into the wilderness to assuage his wife’s anger. Brimming with pathos, God’s
response to the hardships that befall Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness
illustrates God’s noncompetitive relationship with his creatures. God’s love
is not limited to Isaac, the chosen one, but also extends to Ishmael, the slave
228
who becomes an outcast, and whose cry of desperation engenders in God a

deeply emotional response to save the utterly helpless child. The Bible tells
us that when mother and child run out of water, Hagar cannot bear to see
Ishmael die, so she places him under a shrub, at which point Hagar begins to
cry, and the Book of Genesis continues the story thus:
God heard the boy’s cry, and God’s messenger called to Hagar from heaven: “What is the
matter, Hagar? Don’t be afraid; God has heard the boy’s cry in this plight of his. Arise, lift
up the boy and hold him by the hand; for I will make of him a great nation.” Then God
opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water, and
then let the boy drink.
(21:17–19)
This story demonstrates that God’s love extends equally to the naturally
gifted as to the weak, for although Isaac as the weaker of the two is made
spiritually powerful through God’s covenant with Abraham, Ishmael, who is
at home “in the wilderness” and is an “expert bowman,” is also loved by God.
In other words, what is given to Isaac by God is as lovable as what is given
to Ishmael by nature. God is not in competition with nature. God is, rather,
the divine stranger who embraces both the loved and the unloved, precisely
because he is the eternal stranger.
Notes
1 For their views on God see Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity; Marx’s Critique of
Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”; Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ; Freud’s The Future of an
Illusion; Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon; Dawkins’ The
God Delusion; and Hitchens’ God is Not Great and The Portable Atheist.
2 See Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror for the concept of abjection.
3 The philosophical naturalism I have in mind is the Columbia School of Naturalism,
which can be traced to the Spanish-born American philosopher George Santayana, and
later developed by John Dewey, John Herman Randall Jr., Frederick J. E. Woodbridge,
and Justus Buchler at Columbia University. I have especially found great inspiration from
Buchler’s seminal work entitled Metaphysics of Natural Complexes.
4 My discussion on the origins of modernity in late medieval Christianity borrows heavily
from the insights of contemporary Christian theologians of radical orthodoxy and their
opponents. See Burrell’s “John Duns Scotus”; Perrier’s “Duns Scotus Facing Reality”;
Pickstock’s “Duns Scotus”; Sokolowski’s The God of Faith and Reason; Vorster’s
“Milbank on Protestantism”; and Williams’ “The Doctrine of Univocity Is True and
Salutary.”
5 I owe the insight into the connection between Chesterton’s novella and the Book of Job
to Gardner’s The Annotated Thursday.
6 See Spinoza’s Ethics.
7 See Paine’s The Age of Reason.
8 See Kant’s Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
9 See Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity.
10 See Freud’s The Future of an Illusion.
11 See Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”.
12 See Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ.
229
Bibliography
Anselm. “Proslogion.” St. Anselm’s Proslogion with A Reply on Behalf of the Fool by
Gaunilo and The Author’s Reply to Gaunilo. Translated with an introduction and philo-
sophical commentary by M. J. Charlesworth. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 2003.
Aquinas, Thomas. Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas: The Summa Theologica, The Summa
Contra Gentiles. Edited with an introduction by Anton C. Pegis. New York: Random
House, 1948.
Augustine. Confessions. Translated with an introduction by R. S. Pine-Coffin. London: Penguin
Books, 1961.
Barron, Robert. Exploring Catholic Theology: Essays on God, Liturgy, and Evangelization.
Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 2015.
Benedict XVI. Homily for World Youth Day, Cologne, August 21, 2005. http://w2.vatican.
va/content/benedict-xvi/en/homilies/2005/documents/hf_ben-xvi_hom_20050821_20th-
world-youth-day.html.
Buchler, Justus. Metaphysics of Natural Complexes. Edited by Kathleen Wallace and Armen
Marsoobian with Robert S. Corrington. 2nd expanded edn. Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1990.
Burrell, David B. “John Duns Scotus: The Univocity of Analogous Terms.” The Monist 49,
no. 4 (October 1965): 639–658.
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. New York: Barnes and
Noble, 2004.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008.
Dennett, Daniel C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. New York: Penguin
Books, 2007.
Descartes, René. Discourses on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated by
Donald A. Cress. 4th edn. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1998.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Translated by George Eliot. New York:
Prometheus Books, 1989.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Future of an Illusion.” In The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay, 686–
722. New York: W. W. Norton, 1989.
Gardner, Martin. The Annotated Thursday: G. K. Chesterton’s Masterpiece, “The Man Who
Was Thursday”. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1999.
Hitchens, Christopher. God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve
Books, 2009.
——. The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. Philadelphia, PA: Da
Capo Press, 2007.
Irenaeus of Lyons. Against the Heresies. Book 1. Translated by Dominic J. Unger with further
revisions by John J. Dillon. Ancient Christian Writers 55. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1992.
Jefferson, Thomas. The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth
Extracted Textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French and English. Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2011.
Kant, Immanuel. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Translated by Theodore M.
Green and Hoyt H. Hudson. New York: Harper & Row, 1960.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Marx, Karl. Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”. Translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph
O’Malley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
230
Nicholas of Cusa. “On the Not-Other.” In Toward a New Council of Florence: “On the Peace
of Faith” and Other Works by Nicholas of Cusa, rev. edn., translated by William F. Wertz,
Jr., 397–461. Washington, DC: Schiller Institute, 1995.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. “The Anti-Christ.” In Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, translated
by R. J. Hollingdale, 123–199. London: Penguin Books, 2003.
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the
Divine and Its Relation to the Rational. Translated by John W. Harvey: New York: Oxford
Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984.
Perrier, Emmanuel. “Duns Scotus Facing Reality: Between Absolute Contingency and
Unquestionable Consistency.” Modern Theology 21, no. 4 (October 2005): 619–643.
Pickstock, Catherine. “Duns Scotus: His Historical and Contemporary Significance.” Modern
Theology 21, no. 4 (October 2005): 543–574.
Pseudo-Dionysius. “The Mystical Theology.” In Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works,
translated by Colm Luibheid, foreword, notes, and translation collaboration by Paul
Rorem, 133–142. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987.
Rutledge, Fleming. The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ. Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2015.
Sacks, Jonathan. Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. New York: Schocken
Books, 2015.
Schoot, Henk J. M. Christ the “Name” of God: Thomas Aquinas on Naming Christ. Thomas
Instituut Utrecht 1. Leuven, BE: Peeters Publishers, 1993.
Sokolowski, Robert. The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology.
Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995.
Spinoza, Baruch. Ethics. Translated by W. H. White, revised by A. H. Stirling. Ware,
UK: Wordsworth, 2001.
Tanner, Kathryn. Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity: A Brief Systematic Theology. Minneapolis,
MN: Fortress Press, 2001.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Vorster, Nico. “Milbank on Protestantism: A Critical Analysis.” Journal of Theology for
Southern Africa 144 (November 2012): 34–52.
Williams, Thomas. “The Doctrine of Univocity Is True and Salutary.” Modern Theology 21,
no. 4 (October 2005): 575–585.
Yalcin, Martin O. Naturalism’s Philosophy of the Sacred: Justus Buchler, Karl Jaspers, and
George Santayana. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013.

Natural Communions

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Natural Communions

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

i

Gabriel R. Ricci is Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College, where

Faith, War, and Violence, Volume 39

Politics in Theology, Volume 38

Values and Technology, Volume 37

Morality and the Literary Imagination, Volume 36

Cultural Landscapes, Volume 35

Faith in Science, Volume 34

Justice and the Politics of Memory, Volume 33

1. The Five Ways of the Cosmos: Stoicism and

2. A Functional Cosmology for the Crisis of the

3. Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place: A Prolegomenon

4. Ecological Conversions in American Religious and

5. Green Calvinism: Reformed Protestant Origins of Western

6. The Symbolic Garden and the Spiritual Understanding

7. Eco-​Spirituality in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina 106

8. A Sustainable City Upon a Hill? A Berryite Perspective

9. Reinventing Humanity with an Eco-​Spirituality Informed

10. Big Miracle and Religious Naturalism: Rescuing Myriad

11. Faith, Nature, and Politics: Developing a Non-​Reductive

12. The Paradox of God in Nature 209

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring helped spark the environmental movement

Finney had a diverse religious background, including an early grounding

Adrianova argues that Tolstoy’s Christianity is inconceivable without exam-

is muffled, while the porous self dwells in a world illuminated by sacred

The Five Ways of the Cosmos: Stoicism and

Despite the richly diverse histories of philosophy and religion, a constant

Furthermore, our approach here will be organized in its exposition by

The Five Ways of the Cosmos 3

with motion: i.e., if a human being is “moved” to honour a non-​existent divine

That which produces the seed of the logical is itself logical, too,

Although the contemplation of gradations of “the logical” is reminiscent

The Five Ways of the Cosmos 5

ordering that corresponds precisely to the Stoic metaphor of “seeds” (since a

Cleanthes also gives voice to an argumentum e gradibus entium that is

Again, the spiritual significance of the argument is that it seeks to invoke

The Five Ways of the Cosmos 7

Ways. Here is his variation on the contemplation of necessity characteristic

The cosmos is perfect in every respect.

Chrysippus also speaks of the proof of the divine as being able to be

The Five Ways in Stoic Natural Theology

The Five Ways of the Cosmos 9

The following version of the Third Way contemplates the similarity

Finally, the following Stoic argument considers “the orderly arrangement

In other words, an eco-​spirituality with a holistic metaphysical foundation

The Five Ways of the Cosmos 11

The Five Ways of the Cosmos 13

A Functional Cosmology for the Crisis

The Anthropocene: An Existential Crisis

It is clear that the world is facing a tsunami of severe crises on a series of

A Functional Cosmology for the Anthropocene 15

carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, a major cause of climate change.

transition to a sustainable future. The transition to sustainability will clearly

A Functional Cosmology for the Anthropocene 17

How Did We Get Here? I–​It: The Domination of Nature

A Functional Cosmology for the Anthropocene 19

Descartes’ powerful dualism coupled with Francis Bacon’s development

materialism. Wilber calls our era ‘Flatland’, devoid of enchantment, interior

A Functional Cosmology for the Anthropocene 21

with this view; indeed he notoriously declared animals to be no more than

Even as some Christians see eco-​spirituality as heretical, others are increas-

A Functional Cosmology for the Anthropocene 23

A Functional Cosmology for the Anthropocene 25

Morality and the Literary Imagination, Volume 36

Cultural Landscapes, Volume 35

Faith in Science, Volume 34

Justice and the Politics of Memory, Volume 33

7. Eco-Spirituality in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina 106

9. Reinventing Humanity with an Eco-Spirituality Informed

11. Faith, Nature, and Politics: Developing a Non-Reductive

The Five Ways of the Cosmos 3

with motion: i.e., if a human being is “moved” to honour a non-existent divine

That which produces the seed of the logical is itself logical, too,

The Five Ways of the Cosmos 5

The Five Ways of the Cosmos 7

The Five Ways of the Cosmos 9

In other words, an eco-spirituality with a holistic metaphysical foundation

The Five Ways of the Cosmos 11

The Five Ways of the Cosmos 13

The Anthropocene: An Existential Crisis

How Did We Get Here? I–It: The Domination of Nature

Even as some Christians see eco-spirituality as heretical, others are increas-

Eckersley, R. The Challenge of Post-Materialism. Australian Financial Review March

Trainer, T. Sustainability –The Simpler Way Perspective, 2016. www.resilience.org/wp-

Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 35

Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 37

lands –in light of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo.11 In light of this

Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 39

nonetheless be inconceivable –at least from an O’odham perspective –to

Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 41

Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 43

As for what this narrative teaches about the Sosanac/j’s relationship

Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 45

Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 47

Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 49

Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 51

Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 53

Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 55

Earth Medicine Man Makes This Place 57

On this wondrous sea –sailing silently –

In the Netherlands, an influential and long-lived Vereniging tot Behoud

environmentalists in the United States, where non-Reformed figures have

Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 215–