Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (review)

Belden Lane has spent much of his career interpreting the relationship between nature and Christian spirituality. In an earlier book, Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality (1988, revised and expanded in 2001), he examined the characteristics of sacred place. In that work he drew on cultural geography and phenomenology to offer a descriptive account of the experience of place and the sacred in such diverse communities as the Lakota Sioux, New England’s Puritans, the Shakers, and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker House. In The Solace of Fierce Landscapes (1998) he explored desert and mountain imagery in Christian apophatic mysticism, interweaving historical scholarship with reflections on his experience with his mother as she journeyed toward death in a nursing home. In both works, Lane demonstrated how to integrate rigorous scholarship, insightful theological reflection, and contemplative attention to personal experience in the development of a theme. His latest book follows the same pattern as he attempts to interpret the relationship between spirituality and nature in the Reformed tradition.

Lane identifies the themes of beauty—nature’s and God’s—and desire running through the history of Reformed piety, and these themes hold the book together. As John Calvin, many Puritans, and Jonathan Edwards attest, the beauty of the earth mirrors the beauty and grandeur of God. Such beauty has the capacity to awaken desire in the human heart. When disciplined properly, desire mirrors the heart’s deep longing for God, our true desire, and leads to enjoyment of God. God allures us through the radiant splendor of creation, stimulates our desires, draws us toward God, and “ravishes” the soul with beauty. For Lane, this aesthetic-spiritual logic is the foundation of a Reformed ecological ethic.

Calvin, the Puritans, and Jonathan Edwards are, as the author admits, not the first place most people look to find either a robust ecological spirituality or resources on beauty and sensuality. Calvin has long been caricatured as a severe, dry, humorless, polemical figure whose primary contribution to Christian history was a theory of predestination that consigns from birth most of the human race to eternal torment. This may be a distorting picture of Calvin, but it is not without some basis in his writings and from what we know of his life. The Genevan reformer could, as Lane notes, be ruthless in conflict and unbending when convinced he was right. Unfortunately, many of Calvin’s heirs have developed and emphasized some of the less savory aspects of Calvin’s thought. The harsh Calvin was the one Lane was introduced to as a boy growing up in a fundamentalist, Calvinist community in Florida, and he admits to having a long-standing “love-hate relationship with John Calvin” (45). However, Lane knows another Calvin—and another kind of Calvinism.

Lane eagerly introduces us to a dimension of Calvin’s life and thought that is often neglected. Calvin delighted in the beauty of the world, and he employed great rhetorical flair when speaking of creation: to Calvin the world is a “mirror” of God’s beauty, a lovely garment by which God self-reveals, a “painting representing in stunning strokes the divine splendor” (47). Lane takes the title for his chapter on Calvin from the Reformer’s metaphor of the world as a “theater of God’s glory” in which God invites humanity into a shared communion of longing and performance of praise through beauty. This chapter introduces the reader to the Calvin whom Lane loves: the one who experiences the glory of God in “undomesticated wildness” (45).

This legacy finds its root in Jonathan Edward’s and Calvin’s seventeenth century Puritan heirs, who similarly have been misrepresented as suspicious of beauty, reluctant to indulge in pleasure, and fearful of sensuality. The Puritans experienced their desire for God in erotic desires and relationships, as well as in nature. Thus, desire for nature’s beauty and desire for conjugal love paralleled one another in...