D SPERRY FINLAYSON

• An underlying coherence in Nature. • Logos in Western Christian tradition: the Word. • Lao Tzu and Nature’s laws. • Human search for the Way in which Nature is, in order to live in harmony with it. • Romanticizing Nature and the misunderstanding of Beauty. • David Bohm and the “Flowing Wholeness.” • Words and theories separate us from experience. • Our Conquest of Nature. Wreck Planet Earth? Move to Mars! • “Artificial intelligence” and human adaptation to it. • We are both in Nature and of it. Paradise is always a garden: nature as we like it. • An Irish stone quarry: religion and nature. • Nature and contemporary politics; “conservatism” and “environmentalism.” • Emperor Constantine and the Church of Rome. Saint Augustine and Original Sin. • Christ as the Logos. Confluence of Judaism and Greek thought in Christianity. • Heraclitus: strife and violence as fundamental to the Logos. • Nature in myths and legends. The Cosmic Tree. • Heidegger and the distortion of experience by the structure of language. • Gardens and the Logos. Sacred places in Nature. “Tao… arrives but does not abide.” • It is in the world, in reality, that < >’ is available. • Relationship between categorically different qualities can only be experienced, here and now, and by the unconscious mind.

His followers said to him, ‘When will the Kingdom come?’ ‘It will not come by watching for it. It will not be said, Look, here it is, or Look, there it is. Rather the Father’s Kingdom is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.’

[The Gospel of Thomas, Saying 113]

[Nature]…an inflexible, if benign, speaker of an alien tongue: Nature pronounced a round firm word, over and over, but no translation was ever offered as to what the word might be.

[John Updike, Self Consciousness, p 57]

Do not even listen, simply wait.

The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked.

It has no choice.

It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

[Franz Kafka, The Great Wall of China: Stories and Reflections]

When we pay attention, an experience of Nature can provide an intimation of deep meaning, of an overall and underlying coherence of which we are, ecstatically, a part. This should not be surprising, since each and all of us are manifestations of Nature, just as are the other animals, the rocks, the clouds, the insects, the wind. We belong to it all, from the moment when we are, and both before and after that. Nature is essential to us; we are not essential and probably not even important to Nature. And Nature has power for us and over us far beyond our physical dependence on her.

For hundreds of thousands of years, as Nature pronounced its “round firm word” again and again, human beings were acutely aware of it—for the sake of survival, if nothing more—though that “word” was spoken in a wordless language.

In the Western Christian tradition, “Word” is the accepted verbal symbol for an experienced reality which, five centuries before the Christian era, Heraclitus called the Divine Logos. In the quotation above, John Updike is referring to the customary translation of the Greek Logos as “the Word,” as Wendell Berry appears to do in his poem The Silence, but like every metaphor, this ought not to be taken literally.[1] To understand it literally would be an anthropomorphic limitation of the idea of God, as would any literal understanding of God as “making.” The fact that the word “Word” is used this way— words being elements of human language, however capitalized—puzzled me when I first heard it as a child, since words cannot make anything. I now see it as both reductive and unnecessarily, even harmfully, confusing. Words can have astonishing power, a power sometimes augmented by the power of art—but they are human inventions, human tools. They are aural and visual symbols for things and for ideas about things. “The Divine Logos” of Heraclitus was in the world and not separated from it, the human soul being part of it.[2] Logos is the apparently logical system of relationship among all parts of the living Wholeness; it is the fabulously nuanced reasonableness evident in these mutual influences and effects on every level of subtlety, from the quantum to the cosmic level and beyond, in every direction. It is not speech or word, and it cannot be expressed or identified in words, let alone caused by them. It is the “God’s thought,” manifest in the universe, sometimes apparent, but usually only partially comprehensible to us.

The Chinese sage Lao Tsu, living far from Heraclitus but at more or less the same time, wrote:

He who knows Nature’s laws is enlightened. He who does not know the constant law of Nature acts foolishly and brings calamity.

[Lao Tsu, in D. Howard Smith, The Wisdom of the Taoists, p 58]

We sometimes refer to the universal pattern of relation as “the scheme of things,” that is, the ultimate plan or pattern appearing to be intrinsic to all things and events forming this vast but seemingly coherent unity. And—suddenly and unpredictably—we have experience of it. Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun writes of a young man, at the end of a summer day, watching a pair of migratory birds floating on the river not far from his farmhouse:

Sivert stands looking at the birds, looking past them, far into a dream. A sound had floated through him, a sweetness, and left him standing there with a delicate, thin recollection of something wild and splendid, something he had known before, and forgotten again. He walks home in silence, says no word of it, makes no boast of it, ‘twas not for worldly speech. And it was but Sivert from Sellanraa, went out one evening, young and ordinary as he was, and met with this.

[Knut Hamsun, Growth of the Soil, trans. W.W. Foster, p 376]

“This,” as we all know, is the profound and glorious mystery of Being. It is interesting to look at this quotation with another from the twentieth century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose writings, like the fragments we have from Heraclitus, are often described as “difficult”:

[B]eyond what is, not away from it but before it, there is still something else

that happens. In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is

a clearing, a lighting...not surrounded by what is; rather, the lighting center itself encircles all that is....Only this clearing grants and guarantees to human beings a passage to those entities that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are.

[Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns eds, Philosophies of Art and Beauty, p 678]

The English word “form” still provides a hint of this “open place,” this “lighting” or “clearing.” As the primary contemporary meaning of the word form, Webster gives: “the shape and structure of something as distinguished from the material of which it is composed.”[3] Our constant task, identified in human philosophies since before Heraclitus, is to try to live in awareness of that all-pervading pattern, that “shape and structure” of reality, so as to live in harmony with it.

Human beings have always striven to discover the Way or ways in which Nature is, so as to discern the actions that will allow us to live and prosper within that great, nurturing, and dangerous body.[4] All human culture—all of our science, religion, art, political theory and so on—is founded in our attempts to accomplish this. At the same time we are irresistibly moved to investigate, celebrate and emulate that which we may find there every day. Investigation leads to science, celebration becomes religion, and emulation produces art, but they are at base the same impulse, fed by our fascination with the unending intricacy, variability, and sublimity which Curtis White has called “…that supreme ‘given’ that we call the world of nature.”[5] All of these fundamental impulses can give rise to religion, which is essentially recognition, awe, and gratitude in an awareness of ultimate Mystery.

I do not mean to romanticize Nature. To believe that love of nature is love of beauty as merely something pretty, pleasant, attractive, involving a great sunset or lots of flowers—is simply wrong. It is one of the consequences of our degraded understanding of the word “beauty.” R.H. Blyth provides a clear example of this fallacy. He quotes a poem by the earthy British poet George Crabbe (1754-1832),

Here on its wiry stem, in rigid bloom,

Grows the salt lavender that lacks perfume.

Here the dwarf sallows creep, the sept-foil harsh,

And the soft slimy mallow of the marsh.

[R.H. Blyth, A History of Haiku, p 18]

Blyth then declares that with the words wiry, rigid, salt, lacks, dwarf, creep, harsh, soft, slimy, Crabbe “teaches us something never taught before.” Just as Wordsworth’s poetry has “no thought,” he says, and the Zen poet Basho’s haiku “no emotion,” Crabbe’s poems lack beauty…all three have “only poetry, only nature.”[6] Blyth provides a haiku by Shiki as a further example of poetry that he judges to be “not beautiful:”

In the fisherman’s hut

The smell of dried fish,—

Ah, the heat!

[Ibid. p 22]

The assumption is that it is the subject, the content that makes a poem beautiful, and that the beautiful must be pleasant. Yet earlier, Blyth quotes the last two lines of a work by the great classical Chinese poet Toenmei, whom Blyth calls “perhaps the greatest of them all,”

In these things (of Nature) there is a deep meaning,

But when we try to express it, we forget the words.

[Ibid. p 18]

In the West, as we have seen, that deep meaning is commonly called “the Word,” as in John Updike’s “nature spoke a round firm word.”

German film-maker Werner Herzog has spent long periods of his life on location in various inhospitable landscapes. In a short film from 1981, recorded in the Brazilian jungle, he searches for a satisfactory way to express his experience of that alien place:

[The actor] Kinski always says it’s full of erotic elements. I don't see it so much erotic….I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and...growing and...just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they—they sing. They just screech in pain.

But then,

Taking a close look at—at what's around us there—there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of...overwhelming and collective murder.… We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication...overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the—the stars up here in the—in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment.

[Werner Herzog, in a filmed interview: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIks7ELlBZ0&feature=related, 11/30/14]

In our Western tradition, harmony is thought of as reassuring, something settled nicely into balance, unthreatening. But in the real world, Mr. Herzog, like Heraclitus, experiences the divine Logos as being at times very much other than that.[7] He can see that for him, Nature here is not lovely: it is destructive, fornicating, miserable, obscene. And yet he loves it. The Logos is the apparent though inscrutable rationale, the “thought,” behind and intrinsic to the totality of what David Bohm called “The Flowing Wholeness,” which includes everything. Sometimes human experience of it is ecstatic, sometimes terrifying, sometimes disgusting, but nevertheless we may, like Mr. Herzog, love it, and humble ourselves before it.

A vital question here, now, in the urban and technological 21st century, must be: Have you, the reader, experienced this “unnameable thing?” Or have your own encounters with nature and art been so filtered through a mesh of preconceived ideas and expectations (words, words, words) that—you’ve missed it? (The young man saddened by his inability to “get” the great work of art which is the stone and sand garden at Ryoan-ji was crippled in just this way by his expectations and interior commentary.[8]) At the same time, we can feel the sickly absence of the full Logos, as when we stand in a sparse and dusty remnant of forest left behind in the bulldozing of land for “development.” There are trees and spindly undergrowth, but no sense of life.

In 2005, a New York Times art critic recounted his experience in climbing Mt. Sainte Victoire, the mountain so often painted by Cézanne:

I sat down on the peak and surveyed the territory below. I am aware that ecstatic accounts of mountain vistas have become hopelessly clichéd at least since Samuel Butler made fun of poor George Pontifex in The Way of All Flesh for gasping in knee-jerk rapture at Mont Blanc. So let me simply say that the panorama was pleasant—not more, not less.

[Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece, p 60]

Later, Mr. Kimmelman tells us, he made his way to the top of Mont Ventoux, the mountain Petrarch had climbed in the 1330s. The poet warned himself that he must not be seduced by the beauty of the view, since St. Augustine and even “the pagan Greek philosophers” taught that nothing is wonderful but the human soul. Petrarch described his experience this way:

“I stood like one dazed…I beheld the clouds under our feet, and what I had read of Athos or Olympus seemed less incredible as I myself witnessed the same things from a mountain of less fame.”

[Petrarch, quoted Ibid. p 64-6]

Petrarch’s mind is furnished with classical allusions, but he connects them to what he sees: “I beheld the clouds under our feet.” Not so Michael Kimmelman, who is properly certain that “our modern attitude toward mountains—to what we consider their natural beauty—is a matter of conditioned learning, inherited through literature and theology, which has evolved during the last few centuries to encompass a notion of the sublime in nature: we have been trained what to see and how to feel.”[9] Mr. Kimmelman agrees, it would seem, with Frederic Tuten’s irritable PWK, Professor Settembrini: that what we experience depends on what theories we support in argument.[10] Mr. Kimmelman continues:

From the peak…I wondered if anything had replaced the mountain as a new paradigm of sublimity. It almost seems odd to talk about the sublime today. We are programmed to expect awe in certain circumstances, and are therefore doomed to disappointment when, inevitably, we don’t feel it.…because when nothing is strange or foreign any longer, everything having been pre-digested, we then demand to be shocked, shock being an experience that still seems genuine to us.

[Ibid. p 68]

Obviously, many things can influence our experience of a vista. Did we arrive on a noisy tour bus, or climb to it on our own? Are we afraid of heights? I suspect that Mr. Kimmelman’s indoctrination in contemporary theory interferes with his seeing—and feeling a natural human response to—the vistas to be seen from the summits of Petrarch’s Mt. Ventoux or Cézanne’s Mt. Ste. Victoire.[11] We all tend to view the world through a screen of ideas of many kinds. However even an unrewarded attempt at pure experience is entirely preferable to theory and talk about theory; a regained capacity for such uncompromised response to the world is one goal of meditation. Who would wish to arrive at a point where everything is “pre-digested,” where only shock is experienced as genuine?

The advances of the Industrial Revolution—gradually but relentlessly consuming the lives and landscapes of all the peoples of the world—have more and more restricted human opportunities for intimacy with the natural world of which we are a part. But of course the separation began much earlier. At some defining moment in our history we developed tools and language, which in time allowed us to modify the natural environment in radical ways, to analyze and discuss it, and to pass on our methods and information to following generations. We have made ourselves increasingly independent of Nature over many thousands of years. Until very recently we believed that we can control and destroy her at will and without fear of punishment; as if, thanks to science, we could even manage without her.

In 2004 a statistically significant number of schoolchildren in the American Midwest were asked what human beings would do if the Earth became a poisonous garbage dump too polluted to support human life. “Move to Mars,” most of them said.[12] It was a solution suggested earlier that year by the President of the United States, in what came to be known as his “moon-Mars vision” speech.[13]

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Act established the new federal government agency known as NASA in 1958. Its first objective was “the expansion of human knowledge of the earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space.” In 1972 the first Landsat satellite was launched to track changes on the earth’s surface, and since then NASA has been more and more involved in monitoring the environment. The agency has therefore inevitably found itself embroiled in political disputes over government environmental policy and spending. In 2002, after an open process of discussion with scientists and employees across the agency, a mission statement was prepared, and was prominently featured in official documents from then on. It stated that the agency’s aim was “To understand and protect our home planet; to explore the universe and search for life; to inspire the next generation of explorers…as only NASA can.” Four years later, in February of 2006, the “understand and protect our home planet” phrase was deleted in a revised mission statement. The shift in language followed a shift in budget monies—away from earth missions and toward space projects—partly in response to the President’s “moon-Mars vision” speech.[14] For more than thirty years, the worldwide effects of chemical pollution and global warming had been increasingly evident in the data gathered by NASA’s Landsat satellites. The second Bush Administration and its supporters in the oil and other industries would naturally want to deflect public attention away from such data.

During the same period when these political moves were being made, gift shops in the United States were selling pretty little books filled with inspirational quotations such as this one, from the profound religious thinker Thomas Merton:

There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out of me from unseen roots of all created being.

[Thomas Merton, quoted in “…And Wisdom Comes Quietly,” a Helen Exley Gift Book]

Governments and institutions come and go; the Logos, the discernible spirit and way of being common to all natural things, remains. However we now damage and deform that Logos with increasing efficiency and force while living in service to machines and corporations. Curtis White writes:

[Our time] is a medium of exchange. We trade our time for money.… The true cost of a thing, Thoreau shrewdly observes, condensing hundreds of pages of Marxist analysis to an epigram, is “the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

[Curtis White, “The Spirit of Disobedience,” Harper’s Magazine, April 2006 p 36]

We spend our days more and more in relation to computers of one kind or another. In the world of these machines, only questions with simple yes-or-no answers are meaningful, since for each pixel they offer only two options: power on and power off. Yet experts and enthusiasts in Artificial Intelligence routinely predict that computers will inevitably, one day soon, be more complex, subtle, and capable in their “thinking” than we are.[15]

Beginning in 1985, the human chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov played a series of games against increasingly sophisticated computers. Initially, he took on four top models and won every game. Twelve years later, in 1997, he won the first match against a supercomputer known as Deep Blue, by a narrow margin—and then lost the rematch, to the delight of some and the chagrin of others. However, writing in 2010, Mr. Kasparov pointed out that what he called the “AI [Artificial Intelligence] crowd” had originally hoped that a computer able to win against a human master player would think and play chess like a human being, that is with human creativity and intuition, but in fact the machine that won did so with a completely mechanistic “brutal number-crunching force.”[16] Deep Blue, wrote Mr. Kasparov, was only intelligent “the way your programmable alarm clock is intelligent.” In general, he observed,

[W]e have discarded innovation and creativity in exchange for a steady supply of marketable products. The dreams of creating an artificial intelligence that would engage in an ancient game symbolic of human thought have been abandoned…. Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market.

[Gary Kasparov, The New York Review of Books, Feb 11, 2010 p 19]

We congratulate ourselves on the capabilities of our computing machines, while we have begun, simultaneously, to shape and limit our own human thinking to forms and strategies that can be managed within their mechanical and relatively limited capacity, as the Canadian philosopher Jan Zwicky has pointed out.[17] Although intuition and logic are still required to play chess well, Gary Kasparov reports that “humans today are starting to play more and more like computers.”[18]

One ubiquitous example of our eager surrender to the machine is the enervating public presentation of data and opinion in Powerpoint form, in which the organization of facts and ideas is regularized by computer software. The product is both reductionist and mind-numbingly predictable: no mistakes, nothing forgotten, and no life. In many business exchanges, the “mind” of the computer is already relied on as more dependable and authoritative than our own. “I can’t get you that information; it’s not in my computer.” Or even “It didn’t happen. My computer doesn’t show it.” Broader and more ominous effects begin to be evident: as Jan Zwicky writes, “Increasingly there is less call for analogic, dimensional, material thought, because it is not computer modellable.”[19]

There are many other distortions in our contemporary experience of the real. The distinguished art critic Robert Hughes observed that

Within twenty years of the birth of Pop[art], television had produced a common culture from which first-hand experience of nature was virtually obliterated except (through the ecology movement) as a subject of political concern.

[Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, p 411]

By 2015, American children were spending more than seven hours a day, on average, looking at electronic screens, and an hour or much less outdoors. At the same time, the average child could recognize more than 1000 corporate logos, but less than ten of the plants native to their region.[20]

Henry Thoreau, living within the farming economy of mid-nineteenth century Concord, Massachusetts, observed: “Men have become the tools of their tools…and have no time to be anything but a machine.”[21] Nowadays, people attending to their cell phones or other electronic paraphernalia miss great chunks of those portions of their daily lives over which they have some control. Our roads, neighborhoods, public buildings, shopping malls are all designed for the accommodation of the automobile. In the United States today, earth, the topsoil—the substance from which we come, from which we are fed, and to which we will return—is commonly referred to as “dirt.”

All of this can be traced back and back, through the long gathering of people from fields and villages into the dark and noise of factories and cities, back far beyond that to the beginning of farming and animal husbandry—and at last to the unknown moment of our becoming human: different from the other animals, with our upright stance, our developing language and use of tools, our enlarging brain. The history of this process of differentiation and separation from Nature is the whole of human history, but the separation widens and accelerates exponentially now.

+

Let us remind ourselves that despite the ever-more-invasive technological context in which we live our lives, it is in Nature that beauty, truth, meaning, and life itself are to be found. The subtlety and ingenuity of the natural world is perhaps infinite, though at our scale of space-time it is seen to operate within definite boundaries of pattern and structure, and of time. Nature is all in all to us; it is both essential to and destructive of what we consider our best interests. We are both of it and in it, though that entirely obvious fact is usually overlooked now. D.H. Lawrence wrote, in 1920:

As the train ran on…Birkin looked at the land…at the evening, and was thinking, "Well, if mankind is destroyed, if our race is destroyed like Sodom, and there is this beautiful evening, with the luminous land and trees, I am satisfied. That which informs it all is there, and can never be lost. After all, what is mankind but just one expression of the incomprehensible. And if mankind passes away, it will only mean that this particular expression is completed and done. That which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished. There it is in the shining evening. Let mankind pass away—…the creative utterances will not cease…there will be a new embodiment, in a new way…. "

[D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love, p 52]

Here again, the “utterances” of creation, the “Word.”

According to much informed opinion today, what is called the “sentimental” regard for nature is a sort of affectation, adopted in the West only since the Renaissance. This seems a gassy claim, given Greek mythology, Greek and Roman bucolic poetry, Celtic iconography, medieval Christian symbolism, and Roman wall paintings. We see the landscapes lovingly rendered in medieval Books of Hours, the gardens built by great and ancient cultures —Chinese, Mughal, Babylonian, Egyptian, Japanese—and so on and on. In human cosmology generally, paradise is imagined not as the most impossibly lavish of royal palaces, but as a garden, or a “blessed land,” a “pure land,” a place in nature in which human beings delight.[22] Classic Chinese painting depicts the landscape as the subject, not merely the setting: people and the shelters they build are small and relatively insignificant.[23]

Of course some Chinese painters specialize in family portraits and paint very formal paintings of ancestors on their thrones, but the Taoist- and Zen-inspired painters view man as an integral part of nature. Man is something in nature, just as everything else is, including mountains and streams, trees, flowers, and birds. He is not commissioned by some sort of supernatural being to farm or dominate nature. The Taoists see nature as a self-regulating, self-governing, and indeed, democratic organism, with a totality. It all goes together, and this totality is the Tao.

[Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman]

Jaime de Angulo, a Paris-educated Spanish doctor, cowboy, and anthropologist, lived with the Pit River Indians of California off and on for more than forty years. He wrote,

…[I]f the Pit River Indians have no religious ceremonies, no priesthood, no ritual of any kind, and not the slightest approach to any conception of Godhead, how can one speak of their having any spiritual or religious values? I grant that it may sound somewhat paradoxical, but I must answer on the contrary, the life of these Indians is nothing but a continuous religious experience….The spirit of wonder, the recognition of life as power, as a mysterious, ubiquitous, concentrated form of nonmaterial energy, of something loose about the world and contained in more or less condensed degree by every object—this is the credo of the Pit River Indians. Of course they would not put it in precisely this way. The phraseology is mine, but it is not far from their own.

[Jaime de Angulo, “Indians in Overalls,” Turtle Island Foundation, San Francisco]

Many indigenous languages neither have nor need a word for “Nature;” their speakers don’t see themselves as separate from it. As a Buddhist proverb points out, the fish is not aware of the water in which it swims.

+

On an island in Ireland, at the end of a rising unmarked road offering broad views of the sea below, there is a quarry where rock is brought out of a green hillside in battered tumbrels rolling on a track. The entrance to the mine is a gaping stone mouth, vast and dark. Just inside it, and protected by a white balustrade, one sees a broad, shallow white marble basin, into which clear water drips from a source high at the top of the cave mouth. It is only when we follow the brilliant intermittent silver line of the water up and up that we see the statue of the Virgin, hands raised in blessing, standing on a small ledge above the opening. Beyond the gleaming drawn-out line of falling water, in the darkness of the great cave and dwarfed by it, stone-dusted men in drab clothes work unloading rock. The hand-lettered sign beside the narrow road says only “Quarry,” with an arrow.

This is the real thing, far from theorists and analysts and experts: the connection between religion and Nature plainly enacted.

Birkin, D.H. Lawrence’s protagonist in his novel Women in Love, is confident that if the human race passes away, “that which is expressed, and that which is to be expressed, cannot be diminished.”[24] The terror now, among those who care, is that in destroying ourselves we are taking down with us the wonders of our own particular world, the only world we can fully imagine: the two sunlit yellow butterflies, suddenly, in this precise moment, fluttering, dipping, chasing, across the space framed by my open window, above the orange daylilies and against the dark shadowy wall of the woods.

The well-known biologist Richard Dawkins, though a convinced and militant atheist, can nevertheless appreciate the beauties of the Earth, a planet “exactly right” for us.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest festival of a planet. Yes and alas, there are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random would have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculations would put it at less than one in a million.…

…Of course I am…putting the cart before the horse. It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here.

[Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow. pp 4-5]

And yet we are encouraged by other scientists and some politicians to imagine fleeing to Mars!

The northern habitat of migrating songbirds is bulldozed for shopping malls and housing; their southern habitat is bulldozed for local subsistence farming and the monocultural production of commodities like coffee and beef for foreign fast food chains. The earth and all that it supports is destroyed by exploration and mining for fossil fuels and minerals—all for the benefit of the exploding human population.[25] Information on the deadly effects of human activity are easy to find, and all credible scientific predictions are dire.

The toll on our own species is already apparent. Obese, junk-food-eating, slothful— what is worth getting up for?—and separated from any real experience of the natural world. Why live? Live to eat, to get, to shop, to be distracted/entertained, to throw away. At every level of income, live to consume what capitalism manufactures and advertises. Such mindless consumption is good for the “Economy” on which we believe we depend, the engine which “creates jobs.” Drugs of various kinds can ease the pain of our physical and psychic alienation from our natural Being, from any experience of that “round firm word,” that unnameable thing for which we yearn.

+

Christianity, one of the great roots of Western culture, has followed a somewhat erratic course in its relationship to the natural world. For many people today, the Christian story of sacrifice and redemption provides an escape from meaninglessness into an arena where human life is significant; everything can be seen to exist in relation to God as the Christ, and Christians as the chosen ones, like the Jews especially beloved of God. In American fundamentalist Protestantism this refuge has been smoothly—though entirely illogically—linked with a patriotic nationalism and the consumerism that supports it under our current system of virtually unregulated capitalism. It might be expected that to conserve and cherish the life and health and beauty of God’s Creation would be seen as foundational to an ethical life by both Christians and political “conservatives,” but in general that is not the case. Environmentalism, the current name for a reverence for the world of Nature—and the desire to honor and protect it—has somehow been relegated to the political territory of the Left, and to the “crazy tree-huggers.”

Christianity’s relation to Nature is now two thousand years old. The Christian religion began as a radical sect within Judaism, a culture that was tribal and pastoral, and devoted to a transcendent and singular God, far beyond, and radically other than, the world, though continually active in it. Judaism was characterized by an elaborate system of religious laws and prohibitions, a strong taboo against the visual arts (“graven images”), and a deep and explicit reverence for its own carefully preserved verbal texts. However Christ charged his disciples to carry his teachings to all people, and after his crucifixion the new faith inspired by those teachings began to spread beyond Judea. At that time, the dominant Mediterranean culture was Greek: that is, pantheistic, based in a perception of God or the gods as immanent in Nature. Greek culture was dazzlingly artistic, and profoundly philosophical. Jews of the time lived in many Mediterranean cities, and many spoke Greek as their primary language. Of these some—like the philosopher Philo of Alexandria and, it is believed, St. John, author of the Fourth Gospel—were well versed in Greek philosophy.

In early times some Christians saw the allure of Nature as a trap laid by the devil, set to distract them from the true God and their religious duties. The Gospel of John instructs: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.”[26] However this passage is not in fact a warning against love of the world of Nature: it alludes specifically to human “lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” Women could be seen to be both dangerous and guilty: after all, it was Eve who persuaded poor simple Adam to eat of the apple, to sin against God. The idea that this first great sin was sexual, that “knowledge of good and evil,” the God-forbidden fruit of Eden, was carnal knowledge, is generally assumed today, though an examination of the text makes that interpretation seem arbitrary. Early on, North African theologian Tertullian (160-220 C.E.) thundered:

Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age; the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law; you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You so carelessly destroyed man, God’s image. On account of your desert, even the Son of God had to die.

[Tertullian, On Female Dress I, quoted in Karen Armstrong, A History of God, p 124]

Princeton professor Elaine Pagels, an authority on early Christianity, tells us that during the earliest centuries of the Christian era, freedom was widely held by Christians to be the essential message of Genesis 1-3—freedom from unjust and arbitrary government, from the power of demons, from a pre-established fate, from the onerous Judaic laws and taboos, and from compulsory rituals like animal sacrifice. Self-mastery enabled by free will was seen as the source of this freedom, and its justification was found in the clear statement in Genesis that man and woman were created by God in his own image.[27] The promise of freedom from traditional social and political fetters strengthened Christians in their remarkable resistance to brutal persecution, to torture, and to death. [28]

The situation changed when the Roman Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity in the year 313 CE. The new faith was gradually adopted as the official religion of the Empire, and what had been persecuted groups of Christians became the powerful Church of Rome. Accommodation of Christian beliefs to the authority of the Empire required new doctrines and new attitudes. Such accommodation was both justified and rationalized by the great thinker and teacher Saint Augustine (354—430 CE), Bishop of the city of Hippo in northern Africa. Human beings, Augustine wrote, are infected from conception onward by the blight of original sin, the sin of Adam, which tainted the whole of nature with sin.[29] Adam’s sin cost humanity its moral freedom, and therefore Christian men and women, being deeply flawed (sexual desire was itself a sin), must accept the guidance of the Church for their salvation, rather than depending on self-mastery enabled by free will. [30] Augustine also came to believe in predestination: human beings are chosen by God “before the foundation of the world,” either for damnation or for the elect company of the blessed.[31] Further, a proper Christian submission to the rule of the Church meant submission to the authority of the Empire—a submission to be achieved by force, if necessary.[32]

Many Christians among both the clergy and the laity strongly resisted such teachings, but in 529 CE Augustine’s views were finally endorsed by the Church of Rome at the Council of Orange. Those who continued to object were eventually banished or declared heretics and put to death.

Professor Pagels reminds us that Augustine’s teachings have been more influential in Christianity than those of any other church father. They were not, she writes, a matter of mere expedience, either for him or for most of his followers. However those concerned with political advantage were able to find justification in his works for an accommodation in which the Church and the State had become entirely intertwined and interdependent.[33] Today, Professor Pagels points out, “Even those who think of Genesis only as literature, and those who are not Christian, live in a culture indelibly shaped by such interpretations as [Augustine’s].”

During the same early period, the Greek Logos was woven into the tapestry of Christian dogma as an inextricable thread. The Gospel of John is thought to have been written around 90 CE. It begins, beautifully and familiarly, “In the beginning was the Word [Logos in St. John’s original Greek text] and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Jesus of Nazareth is the “Word,” that is, the human embodiment of the divine design, the way of being, of the Creation—of all that which God created. “And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us…full of grace and truth.” It is a claim that the man Jesus was the Ideal (in the Platonic sense) made manifest—the Logos as a human being—and that as the Christ, as God Incarnate, he was himself the life-giving pattern of all that is.[34] He is seen as the connection between God’s ongoing creative intent and action in Nature and the foundering human race, redeeming humanity from the sin of Adam. [35] Saint Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria (c. 296-373 CE) wrote,

For this purpose, then, the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for no part of creation had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are.

[Saint Athanasius, The Incarnation of the Word of God, chapter 2. worldinvisible.com/library/athanasius/incarnation/incarnation.2.htm. 7/10/11]

In Christianity the pagan understanding of a divine pattern of relationships throughout Nature, of God present in its every aspect (found in most traditions) could come into some degree of confluence with the Hebrew conception of a single, utterly transcendent Father God, the Creator. This “Yaweh” is usually seen as separate from the universe, although constantly active within it. Like the Egyptian sun god Aten, Yaweh spoke the world into being, he created by speaking. In Christianity, God is seen as somehow both transcendent and immanent, beyond and other than the world, and at the same time intrinsic to it and to human beings. Athanasius himself calls this “paradoxical.”

He became visible through His works and revealed Himself as the Word of the Father, the Ruler and King of the whole creation. There is a paradox in this last statement which we must now examine. The Word was not hedged in by His body, nor did His presence in the body prevent His being present elsewhere as well. When He moved His body He did not cease also to direct the universe by His Mind and might. No. The marvelous truth is, that being the Word, so far from being Himself contained by anything, He actually contained all things Himself. In creation He is present everywhere, yet is distinct in being from it; ordering, directing, giving life to all, containing all, yet is He Himself the Uncontained, existing solely in His Father. As with the whole, so also is it with the part. Existing in a human body, to which He Himself gives life, He is still Source of life to all the universe, present in every part of it, yet outside the whole…. [emphasis mine]

[Ibid. Chapter 3]

Heraclitus, convinced as he was of the constant interplay between opposites through time, saw violence—“strife”—as fundamental to the Logos. He stated that Homer was mistaken when he wished for an end to strife amongst gods and men for “if that were to occur, then all things would cease to exist.”[36] An unsentimental observation of Nature, however casual, reveals that this is so. In his engrossing book, Things Hidden since the Beginning of the World, the contemporary philosopher and scholar René Girard recognizes the difference between the “Word” or “Law” of the Hebrews and the Logos of Heraclitus as both persist in Christianity, and has found a way to bridge the gap between them, or to justify their conflation, without pretending that they are the same. He writes that, historically speaking, it is true that “you gradually turn away from the Bible as you move in the direction of philosophy.”

When a ‘Christian philosophy’ comes into being [in the Middle Ages], the two types of Logos [the Heraclitean and the Hebrew] are brought together. That they are related to one another comes to seem more and more obvious. Clearly one cannot give priority to the Greek Logos; at the same time, one is well along the path that leads to this reversal.

[René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, p 263]

Professor Girard sees Christ as both exemplifying and teaching a new way of being, free of both ego and of desire for vengeance and, in community, free of the need to find common purpose in blaming and persecuting a scapegoat. Acting entirely out of love of God and of all people, Christ revealed the Way in which human beings must live in order to be in harmony with the Logos as it pertains to our species, that is to conform to the will, the overall plan, the relational “pattern,” the purpose—of God.

Love is the only true revelatory power because it escapes from, and strictly limits, the spirit of revenge and recrimination.…[O]nly Christ’s perfect love can achieve without violence the revelation toward which we have been progressing—in spite of everything—by way of the dissensions and divisions that were predicted in the Gospels. The present expression of these dissensions is to load responsibility for all the divisions upon the Gospels themselves. We can only agree among ourselves in attacking the Gospel, which by a wonderfully revealing symbolism is in the process of becoming our scapegoat.

[Ibid., p 277]

As I stated long ago in the Introduction, the most trustworthy authority in an exploration of this kind is one’s own experience of the world. And such experience comes only when the chatter of the monkey-mind is somehow silenced in contemplation—a mental state that can easily be learned, since it is natural to the human animal. Simply fall still, and wait, as Kafka says. A dear friend who is a bio-physicist, an expert on the brain, and the kindest of atheists, once told me: “I tried meditating, but I couldn’t do it. My mind just never stops thinking.” He seemed rather gratified by his lack of success. In contrast, the great Christian mystic Meister Eckhart advised: “Stand still and do not waver from your emptiness….All things will become simply God to you….”

+

Human myths, legends, and visual symbols have always assumed our deep grounding in nature, psychological and spiritual as well as physical. The great French historian of religion Mercia Eliade writes, in Images and Symbols,

We have seen that myths decay and symbols become secularized, but that they never disappear, even in the most positivist of civilizations, that of the nineteenth century. Symbols and myths come from such depths: they are part and parcel of the human being, and it is impossible that they should not be found again in every existential situation of man in the cosmos.

[Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, p 25]

A myth is a symbolic story of action occurring in time, but in a special kind of time. A religious object may symbolize something in the secular world—a mask painted yellow with spots to represent a victim of smallpox—but if it is a symbol empowered by being, at the same time, a happening of < >´, it will have power, like the Inuit mask worn in the ritual dance which “maintains an orderly universe.”[37]

A great symbol resonates deeply with us, often for forgotten reasons. One pervasive image, found in many and various traditions, is that of the Cosmic Tree, which grows at the center of the universe, connecting Hell or Chaos below, Earth, and Heaven above, as if on one axis. [38]

…With thy summit thou dost hold up the Heavens, with thy branches thou fillest the air, with thy foot thou steadiest the earth.

[Satapatha Bråhmana, III, quoted Ibid. p 44]

Yggdrasil, the World Tree, is central in Norse mythology. It was “so tall that its top touched the vault of the sky; its branches stretched over all the earth, and its huge roots went down to the deepest depth.”[39] The first human beings were made when three Family praisebrother gods, “so fair that a radiance spread from them and lit up the darkness round them,” blew life into two small trees growing side by side, an ash and an alder, “straight as gods and tough as wood.” “Odin gave them souls, Hoenir gave them the will to think and move, and Lodur gave them feeling and warm red blood.” They “turned and twisted” into a man and a woman, and for a birth gift they were given the whole earth for their home. Odin came to be first among the gods. To gain the greatest power he hanged himself from the great wind-swept branches of Yggdrasil, Odin sacrificed to Odin. And when he came down from Yggdrasil, he was the All-father.[40]

In another example: Golgotha, the hill where Christ was crucified, was the center of the earth, says The Cavern of Treasures, an early Syrian account. Adam was created and eventually buried at that same place in Jerusalem, and “The blood of the Lord will redeem him [Adam] also.”[41] According to the medieval Legend of the True Cross, the wood of the cross on which Christ was crucified was hewn by King Solomon from a tree growing from Adam’s grave. This was the “Tree of Salvation,” planted in Adam’s mouth at his death by his grandson, Seth, to whom the seed was given by the archangel Michael.[42] That seed came from the “Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil” which grew in Eden. Adam had sinned against God by eating the fruit of that tree, but the angel promised Seth that “when [the new tree, the “Tree of Salvation”] bare fruit he should be guerished and whole.”[43] Of course the fruit of that Tree was the crucified Christ, the Redeemer, who restored humankind to favor with God by sacrificing not an animal, as was the Judaic custom, but himself.

A tribe living in the deep forests of Bolivia today believes that any tree may be the great Cosmic Tree at the center of the universe, connecting Hell, Earth, and Heaven, and so the people offer prayers before the felling of all trees.[44]

The Garden of Eden represents the happy situation of human beings before they ate the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil which, with the Tree of Life, grew “in the midst of the garden.”[45] When Adam and Eve had eaten the apple they began to categorize things as good or evil, to see themselves as naked—and most of their descendants continually judge and analyze the world as it relates to them, that is to the ego, whether individual or societal. Buddhists, and mystics from every tradition, describe the bliss of non-judgemental awareness. To give someone or something full, ego-free (that is, enlightened) attention is to come to experience some degree of love for that thing or that person, a degree limited only by our own ability to give such pure attention. It is to see an open field, not as an opportunity for a housing development or strip mall, but as itself, the long grasses moving in waves with the wind, the broad sky above it.

+

At this point I would like to return again to the quality of relationship which I am calling < >´, and to propose that it is analogous to that which the twentieth century German philosopher Martin Heidegger refers to as “truth.”[46]

Heidegger founds his argument in the root meaning of the Greek word for truth, which is alétheia, the unconcealed, “the essence of truth in the word ‘unconcealment’.” “Unconcealment” seems exactly right, as its meaning can be either in terms of action (a bringing out from concealment) or of being in a state of unconcealment. His argument is careful, logical, and eloquent, rhythmic and often poetic—but he is talking about the inexpressible. His prose is no more “difficult” or “dense” than he finds necessary in his effort to separate what great art is from all that it is not; he is trying to make clear, rather than to obscure in hope of appearing profound. His thinking is profound.

According to Heidegger, our Western understanding of the world is distorted by the structure of our language. We think in terms of the propositional statement: the subject, and then the predicate, “in which the thing’s traits are stated of it.”

A thing, as everyone thinks he knows, is that around which the properties have assembled. We speak in this connection of the core of things. The Greeks are supposed to have called it to hypokeimon. For them, this core of the thing was something lying at the ground of the thing, something always already there. The characteristics, however, are called ta symbebétoka, that which has always turned up already along with the given core and occurs along with it.

These designations are no arbitrary names. Something that lies beyond the purview of this essay speaks in them, the basic Greek experience of the Being of beings in the sense of presence.…Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally original experience of what they say….The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation.…

…[T]he thing as bearer of its characteristic traits…is not as natural as it appears to be. What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose.

What could be more obvious than that man transposes his propositional way of understanding things into the structure of the thing itself?

[Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in David Farrell Krell ed., Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, pp 148-150.]

Heidegger goes on to say that “Everything that might interpose itself between the thing [work of art] and us in apprehending and talking about it must first be set aside. Only then do we yield ourselves to the undistorted presencing of the thing.”[47] Exactly. Talk is something other, in no way essential; it can only be secondary. As he advises further on, “We ought to turn toward the being, think about it in regard to its being, but by means of this thinking let it rest upon itself in its very own essence.”[48] Surely this is an eloquent evocation of true love; it applies to things and creatures and people in the world all around us as well as to the things that are great works of art.

You ask why I make my home in the mountain forest

And I smile, and am silent,

And even my soul remains quiet;

It lives in the other world,

Which no one owns.

The peach trees blossom.

The water flows. [Li Po (701-762 CE)]

+

It is often claimed that since human beings are inescapably part of Nature, it follows that our actions are “natural” acts.[49] The fact is that our actions can be, but very often are not natural acts; this is at once our humanity and our tragedy. We are seldom able to work un-self-consciously, and that can be seen symbolically as one effect of the curse punishing us for the sin of Adam: the sin of a shamelessly ego-driven and constant evaluation of everything we experience in terms of how it may affect us, our families; my house, my country, but seldom “my planet.” To make a work that has anything even reminiscent of the presence of a work of nature, its “Being,”—that is, to make a work of art—is very difficult indeed; it cannot be accomplished by an act of will. Our estrangement from Nature brings about a culture in which most of us don’t understand, or care, what “natural harmonies,” or “presence” might mean; some of our ancestors did understand and did care.

Frank Lloyd Wright wrote, “Who can teach proportion? Without a sense of proportion, no one should attempt to build. This gift of sense must be the diploma Nature gave to the architect.” The Greeks studied the proportions and relationships in nature, and applied them in their buildings; architecture that is called “classical” (including the greatest “modern” buildings) has done the same thing ever since. In the 18th century, Alexander Pope advised, “Learn hence for ancient Rules a just esteem. To copy Nature is to copy them.” We come across this quotation now and then, but who pays real attention to what it says? When a building has this “quality without a name” it sits in the surrounding landscape as a blessing, not as a disturbing offence, an eye-sore. Indigenous buildings tend to qualify. Who would not choose to drive a road through uncorrupted mountain or prairie landscape, or the voluptuous Amish farmlands of Pennsylvania, or a series of 18th and early 19th century New England villages, rather than between the soul-blighting strip malls and housing developments of contemporary suburban or exurban sprawl?

When they can, human beings tend to make gardens, no matter how limited the space—an atrium in an office building, a planter in a dentist’s waiting room, an apartment house balcony crowded with living plants. From the stupendous gardens of Louis XIV or of Akbhar the Great, to a suburban back yard, our longing for living green drives us to dig and plant our own bit of Earth to live in. A Japanese Zen monk says of the monastery garden, “To us, where we live is paradise, and so we take care of it and keep it tidy.”[50] To human beings, specific places offer an intimation of meaning: a glade in deep woods, where the light from sun or moon pours in through the general darkness, lighting up grasses and wild flowers growing on that small part of the forest floor: a rocky island cut off from the coast, inhabited by wind and birds and surrounded by the wild sea. We want to bring their unnameable quality home, where we can be nourished by it daily. A green lawn, a tree for shade, some flowers in summer—grandeur is not required. “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.”[51] The contemporary hope of a garden requiring no maintenance is anti-nature, anti-human, anti-reality. A different attitude is possible: another Zen monk says, “We have our gardens not just so we can look at them, but so we can work in them.”[52] When we make a garden, we are attempting to do what art always does, which is to make something which has < >´, the logos as found in nature, but which is our own and near at hand, a dependable source of pleasure, life, courage, and hope.

The English word “sacred” means designated as sacred, consecrated, assigned to a god, that is, claimed by human beings for their own religious purposes. It is contrasted with that which is secular. But Nature has always provided places which make us stop in our tracks—awed, enchanted, delighted, humbled, thrilled, and at the same time, at home. For us, such places simply are sacred. The Irish cave on a hill above the sea can be felt to have that quality while still operating as a quarry. In fact the shadowed, mundane activity of the quarry workers intensifies its felt meaning for us. The white marble basin is situated to catch the water of the spring, the statue of the Virgin is positioned in blessing in a natural setting that manifests the quality-without-a-name in and of itself. Such human designation of the place as sacred simply recognizes what it is, and even someone coming upon it by chance sees that it is so. The temples of ancient Greece were placed in the landscape in the same way. “This place has power; it is a place sacred to the gods.” It is not we who make that place sacred: it is sacred in itself. And we try to make art that has that quality.

+

All of Nature is in a state of flux. Ansel Adams’ wonderful remark, “Sometimes I think I come along just when God is ready to have somebody click the shutter” points to an essential fact: for us the logos is ephemeral, and no one can go out for a walk sure of finding it. The glory of the world is only apparent sometimes. I have no idea why this is the case, although of course my own receptivity is very much involved. But, Kafka says, “Simply wait. The world will offer itself to you to be unmasked.” A painter goes out into the fields, and after looking around for some time, sets up her easel in a place that provides a view she can love, that she recognizes as offering trees, groundplain, clouds out of which she can hope to somehow make something manifesting < >´—for herself and perhaps for others. The poet Mary Oliver has said that she goes out into the natural world every day, “looking for epiphanies,” that is, for moments when the real can be seen to be charged with the transcendent.[53] The Tao Te Ching tells us: “Tao…arrives but does not abide. Desire it and you do not so much as hear a sound of it. Yet suddenly it is found within the mind. So obscure is it that its form cannot be seen. So pervasive is it that it is within all our being.”[54] Ansel Adams turned up when the sunlight, the rock formations and trees and shadows, the clouds, allowed him to literally capture (in the brief time when it was entirely there) an image which could be developed into a photograph with < >´—that is: the truth of the matter. Heidegger’s statement that truth happens in the being of the work gets it right. Tao is not separate from the world. In Nature and in great art we see the transcendent, for which we have many names. “One cannot see its action nor hear its sound, and yet [the Tao] brings to perfection whatever it seeks to accomplish.”[55]

This is what we feed on in art and nature: the unknowable but experienced “way of being,” the “pattern” itself: < >´, Logos, the Tao. But at this point we arrive at a division, between those who see the pattern of all as purely accidental, and those who see it as caused—whether by an ultimately unknowable agent or Absolute, or by a Father God who favors our particular group and speaks to us in our own Holy Scriptures.

Whatever we think about all this, it is necessary here to insist on an essential understanding, which is that it is in the world, in reality, that perfection is available, and not in the imagination. Heraclitus wrote, “The things of which there is seeing and hearing and perception, these do I prefer.”[56] We can hold an idea or concept of perfection in mind, and theorize about it—but we can experience it only in the world, and when it happens we are ecstatic. This is not a cold and sterile perfection, of perfect harmony and balance: it is alive, enlivened by some irregularity or irregularities of exactly the right kind, detectable or not but usually and preferably not, occurring at just the right place in space and time and exactly as they should. The living heartbeat is an example, as has been noted before. It is harmonious and predictable, and yet to be healthy its rhythms must be enlivened by small and unpredictable irregularities. The normal “time” of the heart, or of a great performance of music or dance or theatre, fluctuates in a range of patterns between order and chaos.[57]

The idea of God cannot be God for us. This is why, in the Christian story, God became incarnate in Christ, so that the reality of God—our experience of That—could be grounded, real-ized. I learned this understanding of the tradition from Christian theologian, psychiatrist and writer James Wilkes, through the protagonist in his monologue, “The Breath of Dawn.”

It’s the concrete that saves us from the ideological…it’s the same with the corpse on the cross and in the tomb…it’s the anchor that stops a drift into a fantasy world of religiosity…Easter without the corpse leaves us in a world of caprice and magic. My great spiritual fear is that I will be seduced away from the concrete world that makes history into some sort of sanitized perfumed spirituality of my own making. The corpse can save me from that.

[James Wilkes, Breath of Dawn, p 2]

[T]he holy belongs here…[A] spirit world on its own, separate from this world of matter and the senses holds no meaning for me and remains incomprehensible… not only is it not holy it is not anything.

[Ibid. p 5]

If there is only chaotic physical matter, there is no incarnation of Spirit; if there is only the idea, the imagined, there is no “truth.” As Heidegger says, “[T]ruth essentially unfolds only by installing itself within a particular being.”[58] I don’t know what German verb Heidegger used, but I doubt that “install” expresses his exact meaning. Let us remember his evocation of the ancient Greek understanding, by which the qualities of the thing, which necessarily include the multiple proportional relationships among its constituent qualities, occur simultaneously with the thing; they are there from its beginning, its inception: they are not “installed.” For people of our culture to grasp this reality requires that we somehow escape our analytical, verbal minds. Relationship can be measured only in its simplest embodiments, as in the relationship of width to length or height, or of weight to volume. Relationship between qualities that are categorically different—as in sound to texture to size to color to taste, let alone when numerous relationships of multiple kinds react with each other—cannot be measured at all, and can only be experienced as a wholeness by means of the unconscious mind. In chapter 9 here I argued that an imagined, proposed, “conceptual” building or work of art cannot manifest < >´.[59] I wrote:

We may have all kinds of reactions to an idea—delight, admiration, apprehension—but it cannot be convincing until we see or hear it in committed form, in the world.[[60]]….Ideas are necessarily more or less vague, contingent. They are not fully visible, audible, tangible, in an explicit set of nuanced qualities, details, and internal relationships. Our ideas about art may radically shape our experience of it, but the work remains precisely itself regardless of our changing opinions.

[Chapter 9, “Meaning and Motive,” p 124]

Duchamp’s readymades can be appreciated as art because they embody relationships long labelled “divine,” not because of any “ideas” they may be said to carry. Since the early twentieth century we have understood that matter is energy in one of its forms; that it is not the “solid matter” that for so many millennia we believed it to be. The reality and meaning of something exists in the pattern of arrangement of its parts, from the atomic and subatomic entities of which it is constituted to its form at our level of experience—that is, in its Logos, at every level of its being. No idea can begin to substitute for such a marvel!

The God we call on when we fear death is incarnate in all of Creation. Nature is here, the ultimate beauty—our source and home, forever and always: physically, mentally, spiritually, psychologically, aesthetically. Shall we continue to destroy her? It appears likely that we will. Such action is foul and despicable in all its aspects, and in knowingly performing it we break our own hearts.

[1] See p 227.

[2] Encyclopedia Britannica, Logos: Vol.14 p 250d and Vol.17 p 870b]

[3] Webster’s Third International Dictionary, 1966

[4] The essential Darwinian concept of “fitness” recognizes this effort made by every living creature. Until recently, we humans fit ourselves to our environment by studying it and thinking about it as well as by adjusting to it physiologically. Now we overwhelm it, and study ourselves to discover why we feel the lack of it. See Harvard Magazine, Jan/Feb 2007: research re religion and fitness. In the same way: re optimism and evolution in Time magazine, 5/28/2011.

[5] Such emulation is not a Platonic mimesis, an imitation or mirroring, although it may sometimes employ that device; it is an attempt to make a new manifestation of < >´, often by someone roused by an experience of it in Nature or in art. Re “that supreme ‘given’ that we call nature….”: from Curtis White, “The Spirit of Disobedience,” Harper’s magazine April 2006, p 38

[6] R. H. Blyth, A History of Haiku Vol I, p 18-1

[7] Heraclitus says, in fragments 98 and 99, “Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes fairest harmony,” and “It is by disease that health is pleasant, by evil that good is pleasant, by hunger satiety, by weariness rest.” [http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/Philosophy/Heraclitus.html, 11/30/14]

[8] Described in chapter 12, “Critics and Cognoscenti,” p 176.

[9] Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece, p 56

[10] See epigraph to chapter 12, “Critics and Cognoscenti” p 151

[11] Cézanne made at least 60 paintings of Mt. Ste.Victoire.

[12] National Public Radio, summer of 2004.

[13] Boston Globe editorial, 7/21/06.

[14] The New York Times, 7/22/06.

[15] Such intelligence is referred to as “non-carbon-based” intelligence, living intelligence being “carbon-based.” There is considerable theory written in support of the idea that “non-carbon-based” entities can also be said to “live,” because they meet accepted scientific criteria for life, such as being self-reproducing.

[16] The New York Review of Books, Feb 11, 2010, p 16

[17] Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, 1992

[18] The New York Review of Books, Feb 11, 2010

[19] Jan Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, mentioned in Chapter 14 Pt I, p 222.

[20] Scott D. Sampson, How to Raise a Wild Child, 2015

[21] quoted in Curtis White, “The Spirit of Disobedience,” Harper’s magazine, April 2006 p 36

[22] America was seen as a new Heaven by its first Explorers, and the American West was called the “new Eden” during the 19th century—that is, an unspoiled place in Nature. The native peoples had not spoiled it, and it was so vast that it would take the European settlers and their descendants centuries to do so.

[23] In contrast, in 18th century England it was standard practice for painters to charge for landscape paintings based on the number of figures included—so much for one, more for two, and so on. E.H. Gombrich, in a 1966 essay titled “The Renaissance Theory of Art and the Rise of Landscape,” twice refers to landscape paintings as “paintings without a subject,” perhaps revealing his personal level of interest in the landscape.

[24] See p 253.

[25] As in the practice of genocide, both our efficiency and our capacity for destruction are greatly augmented by our machines.

[26] 1 John 2.15-17

[27] Genesis, 1.27

[28] Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, p xxv

[29] Ibid. p xix

[30] The idea that the way of return to God was through escape from the body could be found in various systems of thought at the time—for instance in both Manichaeism and Neo-Platonism. It could also be seen as implied by certain teachings of St. Paul. However in those days most Christians rejected the idea that Adam’s sin was sexual, or that “knowledge” was carnal knowledge. [Ibid. p xxiii]

[31] Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol 2, p 756

[32] Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve and the Serpent, p 124.

[33] Ibid. p 125.

[34] As a member of the Pythagorean Brotherhood, Plato had secret knowledge of the Golden Section, or Golden Ratio, knowledge which he had sworn never to reveal. “Ratio” is one meaning of the Greek word Logos. In a fascinating short essay, Scott Olsen writes that “In the dialogues, Plato carefully selects several interrelated problems that are very subtly posed. Taken together they point to the great mystery of the Golden Section and its reciprocal….” Aristotle and other members of the Academy, Olsen says, reported that “in unwritten lectures, Plato more openly revealed the deep truths of how the One (or Good of the dialogues) combined with the Greater and Lesser of the Indefinite Dyad [the Golden Ratio] to produce the Hierarchy of Intelligible Forms.” Like Pythagoras, Plato had travelled to Egypt for a time to study the mathematical mysteries preserved by the priesthood there. [Scott Olsen, The Golden Section: Nature’s Greatest Secret, p 54 Appendix III]

[35] To “manifest” is to make clear—to display, show, express. It is therefore not the same as to “embody.”

[36] G.S. Kirk et al, The Presocratic Philosophers, p 194

[37] See Chapter 9, “Meaning and Motive” p 128.

[38] It’s interesting that “tree-hugger” is a favorite epithet with which to insult or marginalize an environmentalist; such a person holds to ancient connections, inconvenient and irrelevant to the march of Progress.

[39] Ingrid and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire, Norse Gods and Giants, p 31-34

[40] Ibid.

[41] Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, p 43

[42] John Pope-Hennessy, The Piero della Francesca Trail, with The Best Picture, p 36

[43] Philip Hendry, Piero della Francesca and the Early Renaissance.

[44] Living on Earth radio program, National Public Radio, 7/22/06

[45] Genesis 2:4

[46] It is, I believe, Christopher Alexander’s “quality without a name,” and Robert Pirsig’s “Quality.” Robert Pirsig is the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. In his next novel, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, Mr. Pirsig develops a “Metaphysics of Quality.”

[47] Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings. Ed. David Farrell Krell, p 151

[48] Ibid. p 157

[49] The implication is that we are no more to blame for our acts than is any other animal. This claim is especially popular with landscape architects who work for developers. A favorite maxim is, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs!”—that is, you can’t make a work of art in the landscape without destroying these woods, these fields. Of course, with today’s machinery it’s cheaper and easier to get rid of what’s there than to work with it, and money and speed of execution are the ultimate values.

[50] “Dream Window: Reflections on the Japanese Garden,” John Junkerman, dir.

[51] Genesis 2:15

[52] “Dream Window: Reflections on the Japanese Garden,”.

[53] Poet Mary Oliver, in a lecture at Trinity Church, Boston, in the 1980s.

[54] Lao Tsu, Tao Te Ching, trans. Gia Fu Feng and Jane English

[55] Ibid.

[56] Fragment 55, Hippolytus Ref. IX 9,5 [G.S. Kirk, J.E. Raven, M. Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, p 188]

[57] John Briggs and David F. Peat, Turbulent Mirror, p 108

[58] Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in David Farrell Krell ed., Martin Heidegger, Basic Writingsl, p 194]

[59] This is also Heidegger’s view.

[60] An architect’s drawing is a graphic rendition of an idea, though greatly more specific. Such drawings evolve from the first conceptual abstraction, the proverbial diagram on the back of an envelope, to the careful specificity of working drawings, but only the building is the work of architecture.