Abstract

The Noetics of Nature was inspired by several perplexities. How could Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew be correct in his statement that the environmental crisis we now face is not primarily ecological, but religious? And how can environmental philosophy move beyond Heidegger, without merely embedding itself in his lexicon? This book argues that a noetic or contemplative understanding-surprisingly parallel to Husserlian phenomenology, and best exemplified in the hesychast spirituality of Eastern Orthodoxy, although embodied in great poets and mystics of many traditions-can lead toward reconciling heaven and earth, visible and invisible, ethics and aesthetics, and philosophy and nature. This noetic understanding of nature as creation leads not away from the beauty of the visible, as Nietzsche mistakenly concluded, but more deeply into it-away from the superficial idolatry of nature as natura naturata, and into nature as natura naturans, no longer "uprooted from the wisdom and beauty of the Creator."

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