Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism - Softcover

Berry, Evan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520285735 ISBN 13: 9780520285736

Publisher: University of California Press, 2015

Synopsis

Devoted to Nature explores the religious underpinnings of American environmentalism, tracing the theological character of American environmental thought from its Romantic foundations to contemporary nature spirituality. During the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, religious sources were central to the formation of the American environmental imagination, shaping ideas about the natural world, establishing practices of engagement with environments and landscapes, and generating new modes of social and political interaction. Building on the work of seminal environmental historians who acknowledge the environmental movement's religious roots, Evan Berry offers a potent theoretical corrective to the narrative that explained the presence of religious elements in the movement well into the twentieth century. In particular, Berry argues that an explicitly Christian understanding of salvation underlies the movement's orientation toward the natural world. Theologically derived concepts of salvation, redemption, and spiritual progress have not only provided the basic context for Americans' passion for nature but have also established the horizons of possibility within the national environmental imagination.

About this title

About the Author

Evan Berry is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at American University and Codirector of its Ethics, Peace, and Global Affairs master's program.

From the Back Cover

"This pathbreaking work changes the way we think about American environmentalism and its religious history. In particular, it challenges us to think about why we are 'devoted to nature' and how we are entangled with its processes. Berry has made a valuable contribution--clarifying our history so as to see a path forward." --Mary Evelyn Tucker, Director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University and coauthor of Journey of the Universe

"In this fascinating study that fuses environmental history and religious studies, Evan Berry has profitably illuminated the religious roots of environmentalism in the early twentieth century. His provocative interpretations and claims deserve a robust pondering and will engender debate, no doubt."--Bron Taylor, Professor of Religion and Nature at the University of Florida and author of Dark Green Religion

From the Inside Flap

This pathbreaking work changes the way we think about American environmentalism and its religious history. In particular, it challenges us to think about why we are devoted to nature and how we are entangled with its processes. Berry has made a valuable contribution clarifying our history so as to see a path forward. Mary Evelyn Tucker, Director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale University and coauthor of Journey of the Universe

In this fascinating study that fuses environmental history and religious studies, Evan Berry has profitably illuminated the religious roots of environmentalism in the early twentieth century. His provocative interpretations and claims deserve a robust pondering and will engender debate, no doubt. Bron Taylor, Professor of Religion and Nature at the University of Florida and author of Dark Green Religion

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Devoted to Nature

The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism

By Evan Berry

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-520-28573-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii, 
Introduction: Whither Religion?, 1, 
1. Recreation and Soteriology, 25, 
2. Congregating around Nature, 60, 
3. Sacred Space and the American Environmental Imagination, 102, 
4. Recreation and Spiritual Experience, 148, 
Conclusion: The Mechanics of Religious Change, 177, 
Notes, 191, 
For Further Reading and Research, 241, 
Index, 255, 

CHAPTER 1

Recreation and Soteriology

Nature-Worship is assumed to be an essentially pagan characteristic, and Christianity ... aiming at things that appear not, seems to centre its efforts on drawing man away from the contact and tangle of matter, that he may rise to a life supernal.

— Rev. Joseph McSorley

To seek the cool breeze of a remote alpine meadow or to spend an afternoon scrambling up a mountainside in hopes of a commanding view are undoubtedly modern desires. Such leisurely pursuits would not have appealed to Europeans of the Middle Ages but might already have been intriguing to early American settlers. Between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries, ideas about the natural world in Christian societies changed dramatically: this historical shift is but one element of a broader historical revolution, the advent of modernity, which included simultaneous changes in human self-understanding, scientific curiosity, technological capacity, anthropological awareness, and sociopolitical organization. Gradually, outdoor recreation entered the cultural mainstream, and by the middle of the twentieth century the family camping trip had become an utterly unsurprising image of domesticity. To the medieval mind, however, venturing into the forest with women and children in tow would have seemed akin to the beginning of a morbid folk story and would certainly have provoked great anxiety. The modern American enthusiasm for vigorous movement in pristine environments — mountain biking, rock climbing, camping, hiking, geocaching, kayaking, surfing, and the like — does not square with the seriousness of antiquity. Recreational enthusiasts themselves have long been aware of this historical convolution: "Why is it that we camp and hike and ski and climb cliff s and scale peaks? Until the last two hundred years such things were simply not done. What brought about the change? What is its significance? [Why] among the peoples we are accustom to call 'the Ancients' were there apparently no activities resembling those of the modern hiking or mountaineering club?" How is it that Western ideas about nature and the activities appropriate for its enjoyment have shifted so dramatically during the past several centuries? Precisely when and how did these changes come about?

The central differences between modern and premodern ideas about nature are theological. For its first fifteen centuries, Christianity took nature as profane and juxtaposed it with a radically transcendent God. Human beings were the point of connection between two ontological extremes: the human body is material but animated by an immaterial, immortal soul. Medieval theology destabilized this arrangement, and as modern habits of mind evolved from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth, new ideas about nature and its theological significance flourished. These ideas celebrated the beauty and ingenuity of the created world and represented a major divergence from centuries of theological tradition. Yet no matter how far modern ideas of nature strayed from their sources, the trajectory they followed was charted by their theological histories.

The disjuncture between modern and premodern ideas about physical nature, generally, and mountain and forest landscapes, in particular, is nowhere more eloquently treated than in Marjorie Hope Nicolson's Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. Nicolson derives the terms gloom and glory from John Ruskin and uses them to distinguish between a premodern sentiment about rugged landscapes primarily characterized by apprehension and disdain and a modern celebration of the sublime in nature. In her view "mountain gloom" dominated the Western aesthetic from the Hellenistic period until the eighteenth century, when it was gradually displaced by the ascendency of "mountain glory." Although Nicolson gives ample attention to the theological origins of this massive shift in European perceptions of nature, her narrative is premised on the view that the romantic aesthetic was a radical break with the Western intellectual heritage. She claims that the various "literary, theological, and philosophical conventions and traditions" that underwrote the European disregard for mountains and forests necessarily had to "disappear before the attitudes we take for granted [could] emerge." While it is clear that the onset of modernity was accompanied by radically new ideas about nature, Nicolson's insistence that such newness requires old ideas to disappear falsely posits modernity as an absolutely secular epoch. In fact, the realization of modernity cannot be reduced to a rejection of theological tradition in favor of reason and empiricism. The new sensibilities that emerged from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, the period with which Nicolson is most concerned, were not divorced from Christian thought; rather, they were born of it, produced in response to it, and perpetually indebted to it. Accounting for these debts is the primary work of this chapter.

A deeper look into theological history helps us to map the role of certain elements of religious thought as they conditioned the emergence of modern environmental consciousness, what some have called the contemporary "environmental milieu." Of chief importance among these theological elements were the soteriological ramifications of the human position within the natural world. The material world had long been understood as the backdrop for the divine drama of the Creation, Fall, and redemption. The appearance of modern environmental sensibilities, evident in the aesthetics of "mountain glory" and in the proliferating enthusiasm for the natural sciences, brought nature into the foreground of this divine drama. Nature became a potential agent of salvation rather than its obstacle. This chapter charts the core features of this theological transmutation and recounts the emergence of outdoor recreation as a distinctively modern form of leisure, characterized by its potential to "re-create" persons.

For recreation to attain its contemporary cultural position, the theologically conservative view of nature, that is, the idea that nature is no more than brute material, eroded in three significant areas. First, notions of "mountain gloom" were superseded by a distinction between human depravity and the positive moral status of the natural world. This was a resolution of a long-standing debate about whether persons and nature shared equally in the consequences of the fall from grace. Second, Christian anthropology needed to warm to the idea that human beings could be powerful agents in their own redemption, capable of achieving progress toward their own salvation. A theology premised on a God who was the sole possessor of redemptive capacities was limited in its ability to develop soteriological rituals rooted in worldly, physical practices. Such concerns were among the central contestations of the Protestant Reformation but had been active ingredients of theological dispute since antiquity; the rise of recreation tells a story of Pelagianism's modern resurgence. Finally, specific bodily practices had to be invested with salvific possibility. Although a variety of practices, including running, yoga, and tattooing, might now be described in such a way, walking developed as the original form of recreational salvation. Modern thinkers articulated a renewed commitment to peripatetic practice, and walking was generally associated with the capacity for self-transformation. In particular, walking in unpeopled landscapes (variously understood as countryside, wilderness, or, more simply, nature) was taken to be the most soteriologically potent activity. These three general changes were not the cause or result of an explicit rejection of theological tradition; rather, the broad arc of medieval and early modern Christianity bears evidence of gradual transmutations through which the possibility of "mountain glory" arose. An inquisitive rereading of the Western theological treatment of nature suggests some of the threads that connect our modern ideas about recreation to their theological roots.

THE NATURE OF HUMAN DEPRAVITY

Already by the era of Augustine (AD 354–430), Christianity had developed into what Lynn White Jr. proclaimed as "the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen." The charge of anthropocentrism asserts that Christian theology is so preoccupied with its gaze toward heaven that it turned away from the material world and repudiated bodily pleasures. Augustine's Confessions exemplifies this dualistic cosmology, describing God as the ontological source for the physical world but cautioning those who might be tempted to seek his presence in material terms. For example, Augustine treats the five senses as insufficient means to pursue knowledge of God and argues that our hunger for food, our desire for music, our aesthetic sensibilities, and even our curiosity to learn are as much temptations as necessities. In a moment of clear frustration with the tendency of his compatriots to revel in experiential knowledge of the physical world, he goes so far as to compare our longing to see and understand the world around us to finding pleasure "in the sight of a lacerated corpse." Augustine's notion of Christian duty requires the individual to devote his entire attention to God's holy grace and to avoid mere curiosities and the distraction of material desires. This theological rendering imagines the natural world as a kind of spiritual wilderness through which human souls wander during life before being reconciled to God in the ever after. In fact, Augustine refers to mortal life as an "immensa silva," an enormous forest, "full of snares and dangers." Commentators on the Confessions have variously translated this term as wilderness, forest, and jungle to capture Augustine's view of human life as a demanding sojourn made heavier by the burden of alienation from God. The metaphor of life as a journey through an inhospitable landscape directly invokes a biblical tradition brimming with images of triumph over barren places as a precondition for salvation. Our lives are but a wandering through a wasteland of sensory temptations, and we are called to enjoy only what is necessary for sustenance.

With this image of homo viator — the human as traveler — at the heart of the Confessions, Augustine's work can be read as a formative literary expression of the spiritual journey. Although this narrative technique would have been familiar throughout Mediterranean antiquity (it was, after all, also employed by Homer and Virgil), Augustine's journey is distinctive both because it is written in the first person and because it describes the movement of a person through life as dictated by the magnetism of God's grace. Homo viator, the trope of wandering toward salvation, was tremendously influential for subsequent Christian apologetics as diverse as Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Unlike his literary successors, though, Augustine cannot fully lay claim to his own journey, which is initiated and impelled by God. Human beings are but wishful wanderers drawn toward God's immovability. Our movement toward God is hampered, however, by our propensity to be distracted from the eternal by the material and mundane. Augustine's homo viator is premised on a tension, more readily apparent in medieval theology, between a good and all-powerful God working to reconcile humankind to himself and a created world that threatens to disrupt the redemptive order. In Augustine there is a delicate balance between the capacity of free will to accept God's grace and the human tendency to gravitate toward material pleasures.

This brittle arrangement attenuated the theological conflicts of Augustine's era, though it proved difficult for subsequent Christian thinkers to maintain. Augustine was compelled to find this balance because of the potential for heresy on either side. On the one hand orthodoxy was threatened by Pelagianism, which overestimated the capacity of human beings to affect their own salvation. On the other hand Manichaeism too strongly repudiated the natural world as corrupt and mistook evil as a coequal force in the universe. Augustine devoted a significant portion of his intellectual energy to combating these two philosophical views, and his effort to fend off the dual hazard they presented established a lasting set of boundaries for the contours of orthodoxy. In short, a theology that simultaneously defends against Pelagianism and Manichaeism necessarily articulates a view of the material world as good but not so good that it lacks the need for redemption.

Pelagius (AD 354–420) had directly challenged one of the central tenets of Christian doctrine, namely the view that human depravity is essential to our natures and is inherited by all persons from Adam himself. If humans are not fundamentally sinful beings, then the soteriological project of Christianity looks rather different: the beliefs, behaviors, and will to be reconciled to God are within the reach of human mastery. Augustine's intellectual commitment to God's perfection and absolute omnipotence placed him foremost among Pelagius's critics, who collectively condemned the notion of self-perfectibility as heresy at the Council of Carthage. Augustine argued that because a good God would not have created moral agents doomed to sin and because no sinful creature could affect salvation without God's grace, theological orthodoxy required that free will was the sole cause of the Fall and that all persons share equally in the resulting depravity. He further insisted that the journey through life and toward God was necessarily divinely directed, for if human souls can achieve redemption of their own initiative, God's grace would be superfluous. This argument raises a complex set of theological questions that motivated Augustine's extensive work on the will and memory, all of which aimed to articulate a view of the human as a moral agent helpless without God's benefaction. This extreme skepticism about the spiritual capabilities of human souls would seem to risk a Manichean view of creation, another theologically fraught philosophical position.

If life is indeed a movement from a depraved material world to a divine spiritual realm, and if this journey is precipitated and guided solely by God, then it would seem that the world of bodies and things stands fundamentally apart from the divine. The idea of life as an ascent from matter to spirit risks collapsing into a Gnostic disdain for God's created world, a view that Augustine had rejected after his youthful Manichean encounter. Believing that a benevolent and loving God created the material world, Augustine refutes the Manichean view that matter is inherently and fundamentally corrupt. The world and human souls alike were created by God and are necessarily good. In the view of some contemporary readers Augustine's arguments along these lines indicate that he did not turn away from nature altogether and that his writings do include moments of natural veneration. For example, in City of God he describes at length the "wonderful qualities" of plants, the "manifold and various loveliness" of the landscape, the "grand spectacle of the sea," and the amazing "plumage and song" of various animals. His tempered vision of nature, however, was little more than a hedge against Gnosticism. It is clear that he believed that contemplation of things other than God and the human soul were of no soteriological benefit: the wonders of nature are only wondrous within a carefully delimited framework aimed at praising God's beautiful and useful gifts to humankind. Augustine codified Christian antiquity's view that the goodness of nature was to be defined exclusively in terms of its utility for our creaturely needs. When Augustine describes God's creation as a world particularly suited for spiritual development and human flourishing, modern readers might detect allusions to a naturalistic theology, but this interpretation is anachronistic.

In the Confessions Augustine regards bodily pleasures, social amusements, and natural beauty as distractions from a contemplative devotion to God. Worldly pleasures are sinful precisely because they alienate people from God, and, strikingly, Augustine holds that this is equally true of spectator sports, idle games, eating, and sexuality. The Christian should not deny the pleasure of eating nourishing food but should recognize that this form of pleasure is vain and impermanent. Augustine's theory of bodily existence is clearly indicated by his declaration that food is to be "taken as medicine" (10.31.43). We are by nature sick creatures and must endure the alienation of an earthly lifetime if we are to have any hope of salvation. This perspective was formative for generations of theologians who followed Augustine in seeking to understand the subtle distinction between asceticism and moderation. Various passages of the Confessions indicate Augustine's anxiety about how to care for the body without garnering undue pleasures: "[my body] is glad that it is not clear as to what is sufficient for the moderation of health, so that under the pretense of health it may conceal its projects for pleasure" (10.31.44). Imagine his disapproval at the modern American obsession with gourmet foods and exercise regimes! Healthful living in contemporary culture has become deeply intertwined with physical pleasure, but the belief that spiritual transcendence is at odds with materiality has not disappeared from our conceptual landscape.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Devoted to Nature by Evan Berry. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520285735
• ISBN 13: 9780520285736
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 282