Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present (review)

I recently taught a summer course on spirituality in contemporary nature writing. To my surprise, given the seminary setting in which the course was taught, very few clergy attended the class. Among others, there were a hospital chaplain, a pediatric nurse, a psychotherapist, and the director of an environmental non-profit organization. To my great interest, a majority of attendees lived on the margins of institutional religion, while several rejected Christianity altogether.

We read texts drawn from the now-established "canon" of North American nature-oriented writers: Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Wendell Berry, Norman Maclean, and Annie Dillard, among others. The class participants enthusiastically engaged authors they had previously known only by name, largely because they shared with the authors a conviction that the natural environment can be a place to encounter the sacred. While the class participants also shared with many of our authors an uneasy relationship with Christianity, all the writers we encountered had been shaped to some degree or other by a Western Christian religious consciousness. During a discussion about Wendell Berry's essay, "Christianity and the Survival of Creation," one of the class members remarked with astonishment, "I had no idea that Christianity possessed this kind of regard for the natural world!"

In his latest book, John Gatta surveys North American nature-oriented literature in order to accentuate the implicit and explicit spiritualities expressed in that literature. In doing so, Gatta is attentive to the dynamic I observed in my summer class. Many of the writers treated in this work live or have lived in tension with the established religions of the West, and yet they are intent on "charting the spirit's movement through the natural world" in the words of Douglas Burton-Christie. Gatta is cognizant of the sentiment expressed in my student's reply to Wendell Berry. Conventional wisdom until recent times has assumed Christian hostility or indifference toward the natural world. Thus, any writing that celebrates nature from within a Christian framework is regarded with surprise. Yet, as Gatta points out, "Christianity . . . has most deeply affected the ecological outlook of English-speaking North Americans," and much of that outlook is positively euphoric about the possibilities of encountering the Creator through creation.

Gatta begins with an observation: "no path for pursuing self-transcendence has seemed more enduringly accessible than the one leading nature devotees into [North America's] own forests, fields, river valleys, and mountains" (3). However, in Gatta's analysis nature spirituality has never completely displaced "revealed religion" in American letters (5). Thus, his focus is not on "nature religion" as such, but rather upon the literary expressions that emerge when "historically based, established religions" encounter North American ecosystems. Gatta aims to describe "the diverse theologies of Creation that have arisen and found figurative expression within the primary context of Western religion" (7). While he treats writers like Gary Snyder and Peter Matthiessen, who are inspired primarily by Buddhism, and Black Elk's Native American perspective, Gatta is chiefly concerned with authors whose imaginations have been shaped by Christianity.

This project is significant within the growing field of ecocriticism. Rightly characterized by Gatta as "an angle of ethical attention rather than a fixed methodology or discrete body of texts" (5), ecological literary criticism has nonetheless established itself in the academy in an analogous way to the field of Christian spirituality. Committed to interdisciplinarity, the experiential character of the literature, and to solid scholarship, ecocritics interpret literature in a way that "involves full attentiveness to the nonhuman world." They attempt to regard the nonhuman environment as a "substantial presence—not merely as a backdrop or setting" in literature (5). Ecocritics have formed a professional association (Association for the Study of Literature and Environment, or ASLE), produce a scholarly journal (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, or ISLE), and have established graduate programs. For all its scholarly acumen...