Abstract
Douglas E. Christie, The Blue Sapphire of the Mind: Notes for a Contemplative Ecology, Oxford University Press: New York, 2012; 464 pp.: 9780199812325, £19.99/$29.95 (hbk)
Douglas Christie sets himself the task of developing a ‘contemplative ecology’, by which he really means an ecologically informed contemplative method, and doing so by exploring the extent to which the Christian spiritual tradition, especially that of the Desert Fathers, can inform our current relatedness to the natural world.
The two greatest difficulties in such a project are, first, the world-denying character of so much of the mystical tradition in Christianity; second, the ambiguity of the natural world. Even before humans interact with it, nature contains much that is ugly and violent. Christie is aware of the first problem, and returns to it several times. He succeeds in convincing me that even the most ascetic of the desert monks had a strong sense of place; I am less persuaded that they all had that vision of the unity of the created world that is found in much nature spirituality from Thoreau onwards.
Those who advocate such a holistic vision must, as Lisa Sideris among others has insisted, recognize the more disturbing facets of the natural world in its near-ubiquitous violence and suffering. Christie arrives at this issue only in Chapter 8, and then only, rather oddly, through the Manichaeanism of Czeslaw Milosz, rather than through consulting recent work on evolution and theodicy. He explores some interesting territory through his explorations of Job, Milosz, Thomas Merton and Simone Weil, but a more theologically informed consideration would have served him better.
Nine chapters take us through great spiritual themes, from ‘immersion in the larger whole’ to ‘telos: practising paradise’, and Merton’s sense that the Christian should desire the ‘purposeless life’, understood in a Zen-like way. The author is enormously widely read in poetry and fiction as well as the spiritual tradition. He clearly also cares deeply about his subject, and deploys his own experience with generosity. But his very breadth of knowledge acts against him in this project. Put simply, this would have been a far more effective work had it been half its present length of 353 pages.
That partly reflects just how hard it is to write about contemplation. But in such writing the old adage ‘less is more’ is particularly apt. I also question the appropriateness of Christie’s chosen image, ‘the blue sapphire of the mind’ (which comes from Evagrius). This very static and inorganic image only tends to confirm my sense that the Desert Fathers were not, typically, proto-ecologists – they strove for a hard, brilliant translucence of spirit rather than the intimate, empathetic relation to other creaturely selves to which Christie is drawn.
That said, this book is the fruit of very wide study and intense reflection, and it draws on a remarkable compendium of sources across a whole range of poetic, spiritual and ecological writing. Few readers will not find some facet to illuminate them.