Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and Ecological Thought

doi:10.1017/9781108860666.013

12 - Romanticism, Transcendentalism, and Ecological Thought

from Part II - Histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2022

Laura Dassow Walls

Edited by

Alexander J. B. Hampton and

Douglas Hedley

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Alexander J. B. Hampton: Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Douglas Hedley: Affiliation:
University of Cambridge

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Summary

Given that “Nature” is historically imbricated in the history of Christianity, the secularizing movement of modernity puts nature under intense pressure. The resulting conflicts are modeled by the United States, which authorized political revolution by invoking “the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The American Transcendentalists extended nature as divine order and transcendent arbiter to authorize intellectual revolution, consolidating liberal Protestantism, European Romanticism, and modern science into a template for the meaning of nature in modernity; humans became not humble creatures in God’s creation but God’s avatars commanding all merely material beings. Today, as the resulting ecological collapse destabilizes inherited concepts of nature, “ecology” is offered as a replacement, even though ecology as a science cannot offer moral value or spiritual meaning. This intellectual history is traced through the founding work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who offered idealism as the engine of modernity, and three followers, Orestes Brownson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, who variously pluralized nature into the plenitude of material forms and beings seen as vulnerable incarnations of a higher or divine life force, prefiguring the science and ethics of ecology as an aspect of, rather than replacement for, nature.

Keywords

Nature ecology idealism life by communion Emerson Thoreau Brownson Fuller Transcendentalism Catholicism

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to Christianity and the Environment , pp. 181 - 196

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108860666.013 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

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