The Noetics of Nature: Environmental Philosophy and the Holy Beauty of the Visible

Notes

247 Preface 1. On the city of Constantinople, see Chapter 4 of this book. 2. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Foreword, in Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (London: T & T Clark, 2010), ix. 3. Photographs of this same landscape were never missing from the copies of Arizona Highways, stacks of which were obligatory in every physician’s waiting room. 4. Bartholomew, “Foreword” to Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment. 5. Max Oelschlaeger, Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). 6. Bruce V. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth: Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1995). 7. MichaelP.Cohen,ThePathlessWay:JohnMuirandAmericanWilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 281ff. Cohen does a fine job here of showing the radical difference between the genuinely religious consciousness of Muir and its reduction to “a kind of behavioral or subjective experience” that can only exercise itself through “an organizational and institutional form,” i.e. through “a sacrifice of spiritual truth for political power.” 8. Foltz, Inhabiting the Earth. 9. Ibid. 10. “But why must ‘the holy’ be the poet’s word? Because the one who stands ‘under favorable weather’ has solely to name that to which he belongs by virtue of his divining, that is, nature. In awakening, nature reveals her own essence as the holy.” And later, Heidegger adds more simply, although it must be emphasized, only by way of exegesis: “The holy is the essence of nature.” Martin Heidegger, “As When on a Holiday . . .” in Notes 248 Notes to pages xiii–4 Martin Heidegger, Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. Keith Hoeller (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2000), 81f. Italics added. 11. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). 12. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), 16. 13. The Pilgrim’s Tale, ed. Aleksei Pentkovsky, tr. T. Allan Smith (New York: Paulist Press, 1999), 77. 14. “What a strange leap, presumably bringing us the insight that we do not yet sufficiently reside where we genuinely are already.” Martin Heidegger, “The Principle of Identity,” in Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stanbaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 33; translation modified. Introduction: The Noetics of Nature 1. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 302. 2. Martin Heidegger, Sojourns: The Journey to Greece, trans. John Panteleimon Manoussakis (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 26f. 3. Christos Yannaras, Postmodern Metaphysics, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2004), 55. 4. See Martin Heidegger, “Science and Reflection,” in Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 157 and throughout. 5. Ibid., 164. 6. Ibid., 166ff. 7. Christopher A. Dustin and Joanna A. Ziegler, Practicing Morality: Art, Philosophy, and Contemplative Seeing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 9ff. Italics in original. 8. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 144ff. 9. Christos Yannaras, Person and Eros, trans. Norman Russell (Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2007), 189f. 10. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2004), 329. 11. Cf. Evan Brann, The Music of Plato’s Republic (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004) and John Sallis, Being and Logos: The Way of Platonic Dialogue (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1996). 12. Since noetic refers to the proper exercise of the nous, the latter is the operative term, and both are notoriously difficult to define either in Ancient Greek or in Byzantine Greek. “Mind” and “intellect” are each hopelessly misleading for English speakers. The glossary definition appended to the English translation of the Philokalia, prepared by several of the finest Notes to pages 4–7 249 Byzantine scholars of the time, probably remains unsurpassed, and is worth quoting at length: Nous is defined here as “the highest faculty in man, through which—provided it is purified—he knows God or the inner essences or principles of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception. Unlike the dianoia or reason, from which it must be carefully distinguished, the [nous] does not function by formulating abstract concepts and then arguing on this basis to a conclusion reached through deductive reasoning, but it understands divine truth...