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  • Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism by Robert S. Corrington
  • Robert King
Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism
Robert S. Corrington. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013.

Over the past two decades, Robert S. Corrington’s Ecstatic Naturalism has evolved into a religious and aesthetic naturalism while gaining both more traction and interlocutors. The American Journal of Theology and Philosophy and the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture dedicated special issues to his writings, and the sixth annual International Congress on Ecstatic Naturalism met April 2016, at the Drew Theological School. The annual meeting seems richer each year in range and depth, as engagement or wrestling with Ecstatic Naturalism increases. For the uninitiated or uncertain, Nature’s Sublime provides a clear and concise account of Ecstatic Naturalism’s foundations and framework as one approach to the possibilities of religious experience in the twenty-first century.

An approach to understanding Ecstatic Naturalism is to survey the sequence of titles from Corrington’s relevant oeuvre: Nature and Spirit: An Essay in Ecstatic Naturalism (1992); Ecstatic Naturalism: Signs of the World (1993); Nature’s Self (1996); Nature’s Religion (1997); and now Nature’s Sublime: An Essay in Aesthetic Naturalism. We should include as well his Introduction to C. S. Peirce: Philosopher, Semiotician, and Ecstatic Naturalist (1993), as Peirce’s semiotics and focus on communities and habits of interpretation inform Corrington’s own inquiries: “I am convinced that Peirce was an important precursor of ecstatic naturalism and that he gained some insights into the elusive depths of nature” (xii). Exploring and experiencing those elusive depths with “an ecstatic naturalism that points to the self-transforming potencies within the heart of nature” is Corrington’s purpose, his work seeking to provide the logistical support, a four-way synthesis of phenomenology, metaphysics, psychoanalysis, and aesthetics, for such deep-diving. As stated in this latest work, he is “concerned with seeking the primary traits within nature of the human process, the nature of human communities, the structure and powers of religion, and powers and potencies of art” (1).

Among Corrington’s fundamental assumptions is that, echoing Peirce, the world is “perfuse with signs,” but how do we discern them, experience them, interpret them properly? Much of this involves our own “community of interpretation,” whose conventions and dogma may conspire to constrain [End Page 115] our engagement with “the unconscious of nature,” exposure to “the most fundamental distinction within the one nature that there is, namely that between nature naturing and nature natured” (xii). Nature natured can be defined as the creation, the world around us, “the innumerable orders of the world.” Nature naturing is a more elusive concept, the creative powers of nature, the raw energies of the universe, “nature perennially creating itself out of itself alone” (xiii). The interval between these two forms the “natural difference,” the physical realm of the orders of nature, an abundance of signs and sign systems, even sacred folds. As the unconscious of nature, nature naturing “represents the uncanny, the powerful, the alien, the abject, yet also the meaningful, the purposive” (34).

Discernment is most meaningful in interpreting the sacred folds, “the intensified semiotic fields that fold in on themselves over and over again, increasing the depth and power of meaning with each infolding” (4). To ground this bold concept, one might think of the Grand Canyon, or the Pacific Ocean pounding the Oregon Coast; or Thoreau atop Mt. Ktaadn, overwhelmed by exposure to the raw power of wilderness and mountains, or in the culminating “Spring” chapter of Walden and its evocation of nature’s sublime.

But much of our semiotic communities and their conventions mitigate against a radical embrace of the ontological difference and sacred folds, promoting forms of abjection, securing our comfort zones and embracing personal or materialist gods—some gaze into the Grand Canyon and think, “What a place for a golf course,” and climb back into their RV to watch a “reality show” on their flat screen TV. There is a strong moral imperative to Ecstatic Naturalism, as Corrington looks to have abjection overruled, with an emancipated self and society achieving the crucial selving process, “shriven” by the natural...

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