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Mapping the Sacred Landscape: Spirituality and the Contemporary Literature of Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Douglas Burton-Christie
Douglas Burton-Christie*
Affiliation:
Jesuit School of Theology, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley
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Abstract

This essay is an attempt to sketch a preliminary map of the emerging dialogue between spirituality and the contemporary literature of nature. This includes: (1) a consideration of their distinctive approaches to the mapping of the sacred landscape; (2) an exploration of some of the ambiguities and tensions within the literature of nature toward matters of religion; (3) an outline of recent developments within the discipline of spirituality that enable scholars in that field to respond more thoughtfully to questions raised by nature writers; (4) a description of the genres found in the burgeoning literature of nature writing and the themes that make it a useful resource and conversation partner for spirituality; (5) an evaluation of three prominent themes of contemporary nature writing—relationship, mystery, and moral responsibility—of particular importance for developing a contemporary spirituality of nature.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , Spring 1994 , pp. 22 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1994

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References

1 The literature on this question is vast and growing rapidly. What follows is meant only to indicate some of the main dimensions of the current discussion. For a recent bibliographical survey on Christianity's diverse responses to the ecological crisis, see Sheldon, Joseph, Rediscovery of Creation: A Bibliographical Study of the Church's Response to the Environmental Crisis (Metuchen, NJ: American Theological Library Association/Scarecrow Press, 1992).Google Scholar

On the relationship between spirituality and the natural world, see Lane, Belden C., Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 1988);Google ScholarCummings, Charles, Eco-Spirituality: Toward a Reverent Life (New York: Paulist, 1991);Google ScholarFox, Matthew, Creation Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper, 1991);Google ScholarMcDaniel, Jay, Earth, Sky, Gods and Mortals: Developing an Ecological Spirituality (Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third, 1990)Google Scholar: and Bowman, Douglas, Beyond the Modern Mind: The Spiritual and Ethical Challenge of the Environmental Crisis (New York: Pilgrim, 1990).Google Scholar

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2 For a sense of the diversity and richness of contemporary nature writing, one may consult the numerous anthologies that have appeared in recent years. See, e.g., Lyon, Thomas J., ed., This Incomperahle Lande: A Book of American Nature Writing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989);Google ScholarWitness: New Nature Writing III:4 (1989);Google ScholarHalpern, Daniel, ed., On Nature: Nature, Landscape, and Natural History (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987);Google ScholarTrimble, Stephen, ed., Words from the Land: Encounters with Natural History Writing (Salt Lake City, UT: Peregrine Smith, 1989);Google ScholarFinch, Robert and Elder, John, eds., The Norton Book of Nature Writing (New York: Norton, 1990);Google ScholarMurray, John A., ed., Nature's New Voices (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1992);Google Scholar and Sauer, Peter, ed., Finding Home (Boston: Beacon, 1992).Google Scholar

For initial attempts to explore the religious implications of this literature, see Ross-Bryant, Lynn, “Of Nature and Texts: Nature and Religion in American Ecological Literature,” Anglican Theological Review 73 (Winter 1991): 38–50;Google Scholar“The Land in American Religious Experience,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 58 (Fall 1990):333–55;Google ScholarBurton-Christie, Douglas, “A Feeling for the Natural World: Spirituality and the Heart in Contemporary Nature Writing,” Continuum 2/2–3 (Spring 1992): 154–80;Google Scholar and Albanese, Catherine, Nature Religion in America from the Algonkian Indians to the New Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. 163–71.Google Scholar

3 Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Scribner's, 1986).Google Scholar

4 Athanasius of Alexandria, The Life of Antony and the Letter to Marcellinus, trans. and intro. Gregg, Robert C. (New York: Paulist, 1980).Google Scholar The Life of Antony is a complex document, containing numerous spiritual, doctrinal, and theological arguments. See “Claims on the Life of St. Antony” in Early Arianism—A View of Salvation, ed. Gregg, Robert C. and Groh, Dennis E. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981), 131–59.Google Scholar On early monastic attitudes toward the desert, see Guillaumont, A., “La conception du désert chez les moines d'Egypt” in Aux origines du monachisme chrétien (Bégrolles-en-Mauges: Bellefontaine, 1979), 69–87.Google Scholar

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6 For some, the answer to this question is negative. Thomas Berry speaks of the need for a “new story,” by which he means the story emerging from our contemporary scientific understanding of the universe, to supplant the deeply flawed and ecologically harmful story of Christianity. Calvin Luther Martin has mounted a sharp critique of human-centered historical consciousness, suggesting that our attachment to notions of order and progress, of a chosen people and linear time, have fueled our sense that the world is ours to improve, exploit, and even destroy. Both of these thinkers implicitly call into question the possibility or advisability of contemporary retrieval of ancient spiritual sensibilities. See Berry, Thomas, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988)Google Scholar, and Martin, Calvin Luther, In the Spirit of the Earth: Rethinking History and Time (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

7 There is, however, a tension between place and placelessness that runs through the heart of Western spirituality See Lane, Belden C, “Landscape and Spirituality A Tension between Place and Placelessness in Christian Thought,” The Way Supplement 78 (Spring 1992) 4–13Google Scholar

8 On the historical development of the term and discipline of spirituality, see Principe, Walter, “Toward Defining Spirituality,” Sciences Rehgieuses/Studies m Religion 12/2 (1983) 127–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Christian Spirituality” in The New Dictionary of Catholic Spirituality, ed Downey, Michael (Collegeville, MNLiturgical Press, 1993), 931–38Google Scholar, Schneiders, Sandra, “Theology and Spirituality Strangers, Rivals or Partners,” Horizons 13/2 (Fall 1986) 253–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, “Spirituality in the Academy,” Theological Studies 50 (12 1989) 676–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Sheldrake, Philip, Spirituality and History Questions of interpretation and Method (New YorkCrossroad, 1992), 34–47Google Scholar, and McGinn, Bernard, “The Letter and the Spirit Spirituality as an Academic Discipline,” Christian Spirituality Bulletin 1/1 (Fall 1993) 1–4Google Scholar (originally published in The Cresset 56 7B [06 1993] 13–22)Google Scholar

What I am describing here is a tendency within the history of Christian spirituality A careful reading of the history of Christian spirituality reveals a tremendous variation and complexity regarding how the physical world was viewed See for example the ambiguous and often conflicting attitudes toward the body in early and medieval Brown, Christianity Peter, The Body and Society Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New YorkColumbia University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, and Bynum, Caroline Walker, Holy Feast and Holy Fast The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley and Los AngelesUniversity of California Press, 1987)Google Scholar

9 Schneiders, , “Theology and Spirituality,” 254Google Scholar

10 Schneiders, , “Spirituality in the Academy,” 678.Google Scholar This ambiguity is significant, reflecting an important shift in our understanding of the discipline and an expanded notion of spirituality itself. In particular it represents a rejection of the choice to use the term “spirituality” to refer only to spiritual experience and to use the term “spiritual theology” to refer to the discipline that studies the experience. For a discussion of spiritual theology, see Bradley Hanson, “Christian Spirituality and Spiritual Theology,” Dialog 21 (1982): 207–12;Google ScholarCousins, Ewert, “Spirituality: A Resource for Theology,” Catholic Theological Society of America Proceedings 35 (1980): 124–37;Google Scholar and Megyer, Eugene, “Theological Trends: Spiritual Theology Today,” The Way 21 (1981): 55–67.Google Scholar For a rebuttal of this position, see Schneiders, , “Spirituality in the Academy,” 687–90.Google Scholar

11 While I intend to show that both the term and the field can be understood as inclusive of the widest possible range of human experience, I will focus here on the current discussions about the meaning of Christian spirituality. This is in part because there has been more concentrated attention devoted to the definition of spirituality within the Christian tradition than anywhere else. Also, it is only by seeing how the idea of spirituality has taken root and developed within a particular tradition that we can begin to think about what it might mean to talk about spirituality in other traditions of thought and practice.

12 McGinn provides an approximate quantification of this diversity: “without by any means making an exhaustive search, I recently turned up some thirty-five different definitions of spirituality …” (“The Letter and the Spirit,” 4).

13 Eire, Carlos M. N., “Major Problems in the Definition of Spirituality as an Academic Discipline” in Modern Christian Spirituality: Methodological and Historical Essays, ed. Hanson, Bradley (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1990), 36.Google Scholar

14 Schneiders, , “Theology and Spirituality,” 269.Google Scholar

15 Note the wide acceptance of the term spirituality by scholars from a variety of religious traditions in the “World Spirituality” series (Cousins, Ewert, ed., World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest [New York: Crossroad, 1985-]).Google Scholar Of the first twenty-five volumes in that series, only three are devoted to Christianity. The series even includes a volume on nonreligious spirituality entitled Spirituality and the Secular Quest.

16 Carr, Anne E., Transforming Grace (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), 210–12.Google Scholar

17 Schneiders, , “Spirituality in the Academy,” 692.Google Scholar

18 See Van Harvey, , The Historian and the Believer (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1966), 54–59Google Scholar

19 The expansion of spirituality's meaning and the refinement of its method have had a strong impact on the contemporary study of religious experience. Two of the most prominent examples of this are Liberation Spirituality and Feminist Spirituality. As Gustavo Gutierrez has noted, in Latin America the shift in focus from dogma to experience has had two major effects. First, it has given voice to the spiritual experience of the poor majorities, rather than simply assuming the privileged elites could speak for all. Secondly, with the attention to widespread experience of poverty, much greater emphasis has been placed on the material basis of religious experience. See Gutierrez, Gustavo, We Drink from Our Own Wells (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984)Google Scholar, and Sobrino, Jon, Spirituality of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988).Google Scholar In a similar way, the focus on experience has dramatically transformed our understanding of women's characteristic sense of the transcendent. See Conn, Joann Wolski, ed., Women's Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development (New York: Paulist, 1986).Google Scholar

20 For a cogent discussion of the historical roots of spirituality, see Sheldrake, , Spirituality and History, 57–79.Google Scholar

21 Beebe, William, The Book of Naturalists: An Anthology of the Best Natural History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 87.Google Scholar On the distinction between “nature writing” and “natural history writing,” see also Scheese, Don, “Nature Writing: A Wilderness of Books,” Forest and Conservation History (10 1990): 204–08;Google ScholarWallace, David Rains, “The Nature of Nature Writing” in his The Untamed Garden & Other Personal Essays (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 112–18;Google Scholar and Finch, Robert, “Being at Two with Nature,” Georgia Review 45/1 (Spring 1991): 97–104.Google Scholar

22 Sharp, Dallas Lore, “The Nature Writer,” New Outlook 94 (04 16, 1910): 94–100.Google Scholar Cf. also Halsey, Francis W., “The Rise of Nature Writers,” American Monthly Review of Reviews 26 (11 1902): 56–71.Google Scholar For a more detailed description, see Scheese, , “Nature Writing,” 205.Google Scholar

23 Ibid.

24 Lyon, , This Incomperable Lande, 3.Google Scholar

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26 For a more complete description of these categories, and an extensive bibliography of significant primary and secondary works, see Lyon, , This Incomperable Lande, 3–7.Google Scholar

27 The “annotated booklist” compiled by the advisory editors of Daniel Halpern's On Nature (Annie Dillard, Gretel Ehrlich, Barry Lopez, Edward Hoagland, Robert Finch, and John Hay) vividly illustrates the difficulty of neatly demarcating this literature (see 283-301).

28 Oates, Joyce Carol, “Against Nature” in On Nature, ed. Halpern, D., 236.Google Scholar

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31 Dillard, , Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 9.Google Scholar

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34 Quoted in Trimble, , Words from the Land, 23.Google Scholar

35 Ibid., 5.

36 Quoted in Lyon, , This Incomperable Lande, xv.Google Scholar

37 Quoted in Trimble, , Words from the Land, 29.Google Scholar

38 Wilson, E. O., Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1.Google Scholar