Nature as sacrament
Black Wood is looking lush today. We’ve had a little rain to complement the sunshine, and the deep green is shining through. Although it is not an especially flower-rich environment, the banks of garlic and bluebells seem to have spread a little around the edges, and within the gap made by fallen or felled trees. I also noticed some cow parsley and a vibrant patch of creeping buttercup today.
It’s interesting that many of the pictures I stop to take are of paths. I suppose it is a convention of the way we often represent our environment, but it also seems to reflect the phenomenology of it; I mean the way in which it appears to our embodied, temporal perception, the way the environment unfurls around our movement through it – while always disappearing behind a curve, a promise of mysteries to come. There is always more to what can be experienced in any moment and place, - and yet, this ‘more’ is not just an absence. It seems to be manifest within the things we experience and way we experience them. It reveals itself in the perspective which is at once our subjective point of view and our belonging to a place and presence whose reality exceeds us.
I have been reading more of Alison Stone’s Nature, Ethics and Gender in German Romanticism and Idealism. My walk today put me in mind of her discussion of Novalis and Schlegel. Writing at the turn of the 18th into the 19th century, they wanted to resist the disenchantment of nature by the analytical mind, which could not sense nature’s deeper unity and mystery. However, they came to see that it wasn’t enough to present that mystery just as a lack, or a blank screen, on which to project our imaginative fantasies. Instead, they argued for a sense of nature’s mystery, infinity, unity and depth as manifest and embodied in the particular things and environments we experience. They did not want understanding and imagination, or thought and feeling, to be separated.
To my eye, there are sacramental overtones here: that the manifestation of the spiritual in the physical is a real process, not just the projection of our minds or memories. Stone does not seem as if she’d be especially sympathetic to that view. She traces how Schlegel came to reject his early argument for the superiority of a Greek view, which saw natural entities as ‘incarnations’ of divine spirits. He wanted to affirm the mystery and magic of nature, but not deny modern secular reason and science.
However, this view of ‘incarnation’, as a kind of direct identity of divine being with natural being, is surely not the only one. Christian incarnation is precisely about the particular identified with the fullness of the divine. But this identity does not exhaust the divine or subject it to some impersonal force; nor is nature hollowed out and emptied as simply a vessel for a capricious divine presence or fate. In Christ, the divine and human are united in one person, but not confused. Grace perfects nature without supplanting it. The new creation is a fulfilment of creation’s own innermost longing: the glorious freedom of the children of God, the path of a renewed mind and wisdom.
Christ is the one in whom all is created, and who reconciles all things: not into a bland unity, but into the mystery of a grace-filled difference, a verdant profusion of life – and a Way that leads to the infinite mystery of God.