Making Nature Sacred Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present

by Gatta, John

• ISBN13: 9780195165067
• ISBN10: 0195165063
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-10-14
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Since colonial times, the sense of encountering an unseen, transcendental Presence within the natural world has been a characteristic motif in American literature and culture. American writers have repeatedly perceived in nature something beyond itself-and beyond themselves. In this book, JohnGatta argues that the religious import of American environmental literature has yet to be fully recognized or understood. Whatever their theology, American writers have perennially construed the nonhuman world to be a source, in Rachel Carson's words, of "something that takes us out of ourselves." Making Nature Sacred explores how the quest for "natural revelation" has been pursued through successive phases of American literary and intellectual history. And it shows how the imaginative challenge of "reading" landscapes has been influenced by biblical hermeneutics. Though focused onadaptations of Judeo-Christian religious traditions, it also samples Native American, African American, and Buddhist forms of ecospirituality. It begins with Colonial New England writers such Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards, re-examines pivotal figures such as Henry Thoreau and John Muir, andtakes account of writings by Mary Austin, Rachel Carson, and many others along the way. The book concludes with an assessment of the "spiritual renaissance" underway in current environmental writing, as represented by five noteworthy poets and by authors such as Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard,Marilynne Robinson, Peter Matthiessen, and Barry Lopez. This engaging study should appeal not only to students of literature, but also to those interested in ethics and environmental studies, religious studies, and American cultural history.

Author Biography

John Gatta is Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture (OUP, 1997) and a variety of other publications concerning the interplay between religion and literature.

Table of Contents

Introduction	3	(12)
Landfall: The New World as New Creation	15	(20)
Hayle Holly Land	15	(3)
From William Bradford's ``Hideous and Desolate Wilderness'' to Cotton Mather's Sacred Geography	18	(9)
Thomas Morton's Idol Experiment: Nature Religion in New Canaan	27	(8)
Meditating on the Creatures in Early American Life and Letters	35	(20)
Visible Wonders of the Invisible World	35	(5)
Anne Bradstreet's Meditations on the Creatures	40	(8)
Ethical Views of ``Brute Creation'' in Two Quakers: William Bartram and John Woolman	48	(7)
Intimations of an Environmental Ethic in the Writings of Jonathan Edwards	55	(16)
From Edwards to Aldo Leopold	55	(2)
Sacred Grounds of Leopold's Land Ethic	57	(3)
YES! in Thunder	60	(2)
The Divine Beauty of Creation	62	(4)
From Aesthetics to Environmental Ethics: The Nature of True Virtue Applied to Nature	66	(5)
``Revelation to US'': Green Shoots of Romantic Religion in Antebellum America	71	(30)
Surveying the Field	71	(2)
From Reading Nature's Book to Worshipping in God's First Temple: Bryant and Cooper	73	(15)
Emerson's Nature	88	(2)
From Commodity to Cosmos	90	(4)
Revelation to US: The Primacy of Experience	94	(1)
Reshaping Nature	95	(6)
Variations on Nature: From the Old Manse to the White Whale	101	(26)
Hawthorne's Recovery of Eden	101	(5)
Secret Gardens: Women's Plot, Women's Work	106	(4)
God's Grassy Handkerchief: Walt Whitman's World	110	(6)
``Heartless Voids and Immensities'': The Inscrutable Nature of Moby-Dick	116	(11)
``Rare and Delectable Places'': Thoreau's Imagination of Sacred Space at Walden	127	(16)
Spirits of Concord	127	(5)
Active and Contemplative Religion	132	(1)
Sandbank Visions of Numinous Evolution	133	(10)
Post-Darwinian Visions of Divine Creation	143	(32)
Beyond Deicidal Darwinism	143	(5)
Godliness Writ Large in John Muir's Sierra	148	(9)
Earthspirits of Other Peoples in Mary Austin and Black Elk	157	(8)
Rachel Carson's Reverence for Hidden Pools of Life	165	(10)
Imagined Worlds: The Lure of Numinous Exoticism	175	(24)
Swamp Spirits of African America	175	(6)
Discerning the Invisible Landscape in Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams	181	(7)
Seeking the Unseen Snow Leopard	188	(7)
God, Satan, and Uncle Sam in the Everglades	195	(4)
Reclaiming the Sacred Commons	199	(26)
The Gifted Land of Wendell Berry	199	(8)
Annie Dillard's Interrogation of Creation	207	(7)
Paradise Regained in Suburbia: John Cheever's Fable of Beasley's Pond	214	(5)
The Undomesticated Ecology of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping	219	(6)
Learning to Love Creation: The Religious Tenor of Contemporary Ecopoetry	225	(20)
Religious Features of ``The Secular Pilgrimage''	225	(5)
Poetry of Sabbath Spaces	230	(4)
Love for ``All of It''	234	(5)
Beyond Humanism toward Reverence: The Beauty of Unknowing	239	(6)
Afterword	245	(2)
Notes	247	(36)
Index	283