Sacred Nature: The Dark Enigma Gate

In her latest book, Sacred Nature: Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World, the religious historian Karen Armstrong has taken up the question of whether we might succeed in averting environmental catastrophe by modifying our attitude toward the environment—coming to view it as sacred, rather than merely useful. She argues that Christianity devotes less attention, and affords less respect to living things beyond the human realm than do other religions. I'm not sure this is true, but  Armstrong does a good job of highlighting attractive elements of Buddhist, Hindu, Confucian, Moslem, and even Jewish religious thought and practice that Westerners in general, and Christians in particular, might benefit from exploring. She writes:

In the Middle East ilam, meaning "divinity" in Akkadian, was a radiant power that transcended any singular diety. In India, the Braham, the ultimate reality, was indefinable; it was a sacred energy that was deeper, higher, and more fundamental than the "devas," the gods who were present in nature but had no control over the natural order. In China, the ultimate reality was the "Dao," the fundamental "Way" of the cosmos; nothing could be said about it, because it transcended all normal categories."

Armstrong explores these various sacred traditions, mostly dating from the Axial Age (900-200 BCE) and along the way relates a string of telling, and sometimes amusing, anecdotes. For example, the seventeenth-century Confucian scholar Fang Yizhi, after engaging in theological discussion with the Jesuits, concluded that the West was "detailed in material investigation," but deficient in "comprehending seminal forces."

In another chapter she informs us that the medieval Jewish mystics who developed the tradition of the Kabbalah were, in part, "responding to a popular demand for a more immanent notion of the sacred." These thinkers argued, contra the Biblical view, that God hadn't created the world “out of nothing.” Rather, "creation had proceeded stage by stage 'out of God.' " It followed, by their way of thinking, that what we take to be the original, primal "nothing," is always present, and more "real" than the things right  in front of our eyes. We can't perceive it only because  "the core of divinity is forever unknowable."

This kind of lore really tickles my fancy, notwithstanding the fact  that the subject is beyond words and basically unknowable. It seems to me that we may catch glimpses of the sacred out of the corner of our eye, but if we turn our head for a better look it's gone. We always want more, though we probably wouldn't know what to do with it if we met it face to face.  

On the other hand, though I haven't read the book cover to cover, it strikes me that Armstrong tends to give Christianity short shrift in her effort to make her point. She mentions St. Thomas Aquinas's argument that God wrote two books—the Bible and the Book of Creation—but goes on to suggest that such notions were crushed underfoot by the critical and investigative spirit that culminated in Newton's mathematically based conception of the universe. This is true enough. Yet Aquinas was never a source of popular understanding of natural processes, which was far more often derived from the alchemical and magical practices espoused by healers and proto-scientists of whom Paracelsus was perhaps the most famous.Newton himself spent a great deal of time investigating such things, when he wasn't tracking the planets.  

Armstrong is on firmer ground with St. Francis of Assisi, and she reproduces a lengthy passage from one of his poems. But in order to bend it to her thesis, she counsels us to consider that the "Lord" to whom the poem is addressed, and who appears in almost every line, is the "transcendent force that imbues the whole natural order," rather than the more conventional celestial father of Biblical tradition.

Really? I doubt it. To my ears, it sounds as if St. Francis were address a specific person or presence. And isn't that simply another way of drawing our attention to the third "person" of the Trinity—the Holy Spirit? But such a reference actually proves her point. Whereas several Eastern traditions enshrine a natural energy or flow, nameless and elusive, the Judeo-Christian tradition has developed largely as a dialog between "the people" and their God, who is basically a transcendental vision of themselves. In the process, the wonder and mystery of the natural world is devalued. And that's a bad thing. 

Armstrong spends little time describing her own connection with nature. It isn't that kind of a book. Her purpose is to bring us to a wider and deeper awareness of the sacred element in nature as it manifests itself in a variety of "classical" traditions. And along these lines her thoughts and erudition are welcome.

But the fundamental question remains to be answered: Is nature really sacred? For that matter, does the word "nature" refer to anything real?

A Zoroastrian temple

It strikes me that sacred things—or places—tend to be unusual or remote, set off in one way or another from day-to-day experience. For example, few are allowed to visit the inner sanctum of a temple. Not only would they be likely to despoil it due to inexperience or "uncleanliness," but it would begin to lose its hallowed character were we to become too familiar with it. By the same token, a sacred bundle in the care of a Native American elder is not a thing for young children to play with. Rather, tribal members approach it with ceremony and call upon its energy only on rare occasions. In the presence of such objects or locales, we are often gripped by a feeling, difficult to describe but compounded of beauty, pleasure, preciousness, and latent energy or power.

But everyone doesn't feel the same way about such things. I'm thinking here of all the churches and monasteries that were used as stables and munitions dumps during the French Revolution, or the scene in the film Ladybird during which Saoirse Ronan and her friend lie on the floor in a hallway of a church munching down a few communion wafers as an afternoon snack. Shame on them! 

Many of us were brought up under the injunction to "fear the Lord," which was an old-fashioned way of advising us to revere him, I think. But I find it hard to see how nature broadly considered can be placed in the rarefied category of the sacred. Most of us can recall specific times when, in the presence of awesome or pristine natural phenomena, we were gripped with that feeling of reverence, or ecstasy even. Depending on how much time you spend outdoors, this can become almost a common experience.

If I read her right, Emily Dickinson had such feelings, though they didn't last long.

Did Our Best Moment last —

'Twould supersede the Heaven —

A few — and they by Risk — procure —

So this Sort — are not given —

 

Except as stimulants — in

Cases of Despair —

Or Stupor — The Reserve —

These Heavenly moments are —

 

A Grant of the Divine —

That Certain as it Comes —

Withdraws — and leaves the dazzled Soul

In her unfurnished Rooms –

 

I suppose it's a matter of temperament and circumstances, but I receive such grants of the divine fairly often, and there are times when I see evidence of beauty and order almost everywhere I look. 

I often get that feeling when I turn on my computer.

No, I don't worship technology. But my computer has a very large screen, and over the years I've accumulated quite a few exquisite screen-savers—photographs I've taken myself. Some of them are classically picturesque images of mountain peaks and crashing surf, almost worthy of a Sierra Club calendar, but the ones that fill me with the greatest awe are photographs of random vegetation. There is no point of focus. The eye wanders from one flower, leaf, or twig to the next, admiring the harmony and intricacy of an exquisite but obviously unplanned arrangement.

Unplanned, yes. Random? No. These plants have followed divergent evolutionary paths to their present shape and dimensions, each one different, but guided by the same need for sunlight and nutrients. They share a chunk of soil, a plot of ground, perhaps uneasily, but often beautifully, as they scramble for a place in the sun. As my eye roams here and there amid the vegetation vividly illuminated on my screen, I pause to take the measure of, and appreciate, a particular leaf or plant that I would certainly never have noticed on a tramp through the fields, and it fills my heart with awe and affection.

But we ought to acknowledge that the "nature" I'm describing here is a thing I chose and framed myself. Not every rotten log and weedy roadside produces the same effect. So perhaps their sacred character is the result of both natural processes and my own aesthetic sense. But isn't this the connection—this communion—we're looking for?

It all ties in, I think, with a fundamental but, as Armstrong admits, all but inexpressible logic that poets and thinkers have been attempting to describe for millennia. 

Another route to sacred nature, I think, lies in cooking. It's easy to enjoy the flavors we concoct in the kitchen, many of them natural enough. But how often do we take to time to pay homage to the living things we're making use of to sustain us. Here again, it might be simply that I have the good fortune to see the vegetables I'm chopping up for a carrot-based pot of chili in a spectacular slant of light coming into the kitchen through the dining room windows.

It's a temple--and a sacrifice--right in front of my eyes.

Taoists use the phrase "the ten-thousand things" to denote the diversity of stuff in the universe. In the introduction to his translations of the Tang poet Po Chu-i, David Hinton writes that Po "came to realize that the self was also one of those ten thousand things that are utterly themselves and sufficient." This was an important step, because it bridged the chasm between individual and environment, allowing them to settle into one another.

On the next page, Hinton introduces us to a few Chinese concepts: hsien—profound serenity and quietness; lan—the heart-mind of trust; wu-wei—the practice of tzu-jan, which he describes as "occurrence happening of itself." 

For Po, Hinton writes, idleness was "a kind of meditative revel in tzu-jan, a state in which daily life becomes the essence of spiritual practice."

  

Our garden path to the compost pile.

 In such an environment the tea bowl and the flagstone path through the moss become sacred entities—though perhaps little that's worthwhile ever gets done. 

Here's a piece by Chui-I, chosen almost at random.

OVERNIGHT AT BAMBOO PAVILION

Sit through dusk beneath eaves of pine
at Bamboo Pavilion, sleep night away:

it’s such empty clarity, like some drug,
isolate mystery deep as a mountain home.

No cleverness can rival a simple mind,
and industry never outshines idleness.

Done struggling, done cultivating Tao:
here it is, this remote DarkEnigma gate.

You won't find much of this quietistic appreciation in the lyric poetry of the Greeks, but the broader notion of a cosmic order appears in the concept of logos. Armstrong misses a trick here, I think, her vast erudition notwithstanding, when she writes, "The logos deals with facts." Not so.

Nowadays we translate logos as “word,” but consulting an on-line dictionary at random, I am confirmed in my understanding that “logos” carried a wealth of meanings in ancient times. To the pre-Socratics, it was the principle governing the cosmos, the source of this principle, and the human reasoning that struggled to come to grips with it more fully on a personal level. The Stoics held a similar view, though they more explicitly associated it with God as the source of all activity and generation, and with “mind” (nous), which, through the power of reason, develops the wherewithal to illuminate the order in experience and even, on occasion, make a leap to the divine.

In short, “logos” is not merely “the word” or language, and it has nothing to do with facts. It's a logic that unites the cosmos and the individual in some sort of quivering harmony. I am reminded here of the quivering mosquito twins in the Book of the Hopi that sustain the universe, and the musical meters which, in the Satapatha Brahmana, are the cattle of the gods.

I think Armstrong would approve of such associations. Her intention is to familiarize us with them through her acute descriptions of the rituals, myths, and metaphors of ancient times and foreign traditions. The hope is that they will allow us to embrace nature's sacred dimension more fully.

I have neglected to mention one important and illuminating aspect of the sacred: it's political dimension. In his farewell address of 1796, George Washington refers to it when he writes:

“The basis of our political systems is the right of the people to make and to alter their constitutions of government. But the constitution which at any time exists, until changed by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all."

Yes, the agreements that preserve and protect our individual and social freedoms are sacrosanct. But what about the birds, the eels, and the mountain springs?