Abstract
The American transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, emphasised the summons of individual experience and personal feeling in projects that fused philosophical and spiritual quests. Influenced by English and German Romanticism, the biblical criticism of Herder and Schleiermacher, and Hume’s scepticism, they were concerned with the way encounters with non-human nature could advance the cultivation of philosophical insight and moral development. They, together with William James and Stanley Cavell, came to mind on reaching the end of Gretel Van Wieren’s Listening at Lookout Creek, particularly as I sought to ‘place’ the work so as to better understand its pedigree, aims and methods. In the second of his Gifford Lectures, entitled ‘Circumspection of the Topic’, James observes that modern transcendental idealism, under which he includes Emersonian thinking, ‘seems to let God evaporate into abstract ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult’ (The Varieties of Religious Experience, Oxford University Press, 2012 [1896], p. 33).
In the Carus Lectures of 1988, Cavell argued that ‘Emersonian perfectionism can be taken as the paradoxical task of secularizing the question of the profit in gaining the whole world and losing one’s soul’. This is paradoxical because such losing and finding ‘must proceed without the option of forgoing this world for another place, and without a given discourse in which to think about what is one’s “own” self’ (Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism, University of Chicago Press, p. 26).
Cavell qualifies the notion ‘perfectionism’, associating it with the embrace of individual autonomy and responsibility under the conditions of democracy, the pursuit of happiness, and the acknowledgement of one’s participation in ‘a structure that produces unaccountable misery’ (p. 28). This tradition labours to transpose Kant and Rousseau’s various explorations of the possibility of ‘freedom as autonomy’ into the context of American expansionism and industrialisation, seeing the task of recognising the rights associated with this freedom (for oneself and others) as essential aspects of citizenship and moral progress.
I note these sources in the approach to Van Wieren’s text because without them readers may feel rudderless. Immediately, and with little by way of orientation, we join the author in an immersive search for personal authenticity and insight: a quest to reconnect with memory and nature that has become urgent amid the author’s own alienated patterns of urban life and academic teaching, and amid her growing consciousness of the environmental crisis. This is not a conventional piece of academic philosophy, theology or sociology, but something like a travelogue and philosophical memoir, peppered with North American idiom. On reading this work in Oxford, UK, I was struck by the sheer foreignness of the project, which is not intended in any pejorative sense, but only to highlight the book’s particularity and contingency. Readers are invited to accompany the author as she seeks contemplative encounters of the landscapes of Oregon and Michigan, wagering that these will remedy workplace alienation and contextualise parenting anxieties, as well as bringing pragmatic clarity and urgency to her own religious commitment. The implicit additional invitation is to us, her readers, that we would undertake a similar wager amid our own landscapes and circumstances.
Van Wieren is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, and an ordained minister of the Reformed Church in America. While Calvin’s appreciation of revelation in the ‘book of nature’ remains the groundwork, ambivalence toward her Dutch Reformed heritage echoes the early transcendentalists’ desire to transcend Calvinist New England congregationalism. This is evidenced by fact that one is more likely to find quotes from Thich Nhat Hanh in this volume than the reformer of Geneva. Van Wieren’s spiritual autobiography begins with Calvin (pp. 78–79), opens-out ecumenically to embrace Ignatius of Loyola, then the wider Christian mystical tradition (p. 9). Zen Buddhism, Durkheim, Lévi-Strauss, and a growing chorus of thinkers on ecological issues also play their role. In this instance, an Emersonian ‘immanent divinity in all things’ is adapted to the spiritual needs of the author as she comes to terms with the Anthropocene, and perhaps not surprisingly, doctrines pertaining to the Incarnation and Trinity are pushed to the background, presumably failing a test of pragmatism. Reflecting on her experience as a pastor in rural New York State, Van Wieren notes that ‘I discovered ecological theology and began to recognize just how formative the natural world had been in cultivating my spiritual outlook. More than God, I began to believe in Nature. More than Nature, though, I still believed in God’ (p. 13).
The book is divided up into 17 brief chapters as the author describes her experiences at Lookout Creek, within the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, near Blue River, Oregon, together with those at her family cabin within the Manistee National Forest, on the northern lower peninsula of Michigan. Having never travelled to these places, I found it helpful to look at satellite images and photos between chapters, to enter more fully into the reading experience. Van Wieren notes that ‘[h]alf of the chapters document my daily experiments in nature-reconnection during my ten-day stay at the Andrews; the other half reflect on times of nature connection I’ve had with my three children . . . at the Cedar Shack in the midst of our otherwise hi-tech, hyper-overloaded lives’ (pp. 6–7). We follow the author as she sets herself various ‘spiritual exercises’ that heighten attentiveness, including skinny dipping in rivers, fishing, hiking, conversing with local scientists and her children ‘on location’, reading ‘spiritual’ works, meditating on salamander, rotting logs and spawning salmon, as well as contemplating the differences of ‘spirit’ between old growth forests and those that have been more invasively and intensively managed. Interspersed within these observations are perceptive linkages to experiences of motherhood and pastoral ministry.
How is progress toward ‘Emmersonian perfection’ measured in this work? For Van Wieren, the answer comes in the extent to which she is deepening contemplative attentiveness and moral awareness within wilderness spaces, and the extent to which she is a ‘good enough’ mother. These two things are connected, as the author considers the bestowal of contemplative virtues onto her children as a core parental responsibility, with sustainable fishing and hunting held up as practices by which a schooling in such virtues is guaranteed (pp. 94–103). It also requires finding a way to speak honestly about the effects of climate change and biodiversity loss to her children, instilling a spirituality of resistance rather than nihilistic despair (pp. 112–13). An example of failure comes in the form of a fishing expedition in the late evening in which her son catches a Great Lakes Steelhead, and is encouraged to keep it for food, only for them to realise later that they have mistaken a female for a male, therefore preventing the future fertilization of eggs (pp. 49–52). Like the young Augustine stealing pears in Book Two of the Confessions, what seems like a minor offence becomes an object lesson in the perniciousness and pervasiveness of sin and an invitation to confession. For Van Wieren, a failure of contemplative awareness leads to tragic consequences; individual failure participates in global waywardness. The implied remedy remains on the level of the individual: encounters with the wild that bring about confession, purgation and consolation, a return to ‘reality’ and the embrace of responsibility.
The tradition of Emmersonian perfectionism has, sometimes unfairly, been criticised for being overly individualistic and elitist. Any author embracing a confessional or therapeutic process through the act of publishing makes themselves vulnerable to such accusations automatically. There are two points in the book where the risk is greatest for Van Wieren. The first comes when the author reports a pang of conscience that her husband is working to feed, clothe and transport their three children, while she is ‘sitting in an old-growth forest having a drink after a long hard day observing a slug eat a leaf’. She concludes the thought by wondering if it was ‘possible to find gladness in the midst of despair’ (p. 45), speaking, it seems, of her own despair. ‘Despair’ seems an overly dramatic descriptor for the self-awareness that one’s solitude may have costs for others, and perhaps it would be better to leave such language to those facing more dire situations not of their own choosing. The second point is where Van Wieren identifies herself with ‘the upper echelon of American society’ (p. 77), laments the way in which technology and the hurried pace of life limits capacity to ‘cultivate a rich spiritual life’, and then backtracks on any hint of self-recrimination, putting such self-critical tendencies down to ‘[t]hat damn Calvinist perfectionism creeping back in’ (p. 77). At this point, I considered whether the argument was undermined by a lack of serious attentiveness to the structural inequalities of American society and the way these impact the quality of life for those who find themselves beneath the ‘upper echelon’.
Van Yperen shows rather more awareness of such sensitivities in his work Gratitude for the Wild: Christian Ethics in the Wilderness. Among the dangers he outlines in chapter 1, ‘Speaking for the Wilderness’, is that a ‘strategy of emphasizing affection and attachment [to wilderness] runs the risk of re-inscribing ideologies of violence and exclusion, repackaged in nostalgic appeals to natural beauty’ (p. 15). He urges readers to remember that ‘it is no coincidence that the establishment of the first national park coincided with the birth of the reservation system’ (p. 20), and warns that ‘wilderness can become a myth that merely sustains a luxury for a small percentage of North American society’, with the further risk that ‘[s]uch consumerism is sometimes masked by the language of ethical extension’ (p. 21).
Like Van Wieren, Van Yperen locates his argument squarely in the American transcendentalist tradition, remaining firmly in the grip of Thoreauvian scepticism despite efforts to bring the argument back within the orbit of the Christian faith. Tellingly, there is no point at which the Christian doctrine of creation, or biblical traditions related to wilderness, feature with any deep and systematic rigour. Rather, the weight of the book’s claim to advance a Christian ethic rests with those sections engaging James Gustafson’s ‘theocentric’ methodology for ethics, and Martin Luther King Jr’s adaptation of select Thoreauvian insights in his preaching and campaign speeches. Furthermore, like Van Wieren’s book, there is an attempt to embed the author’s experiential encounters with non-human nature insights within a wider philosophical project. This is evidenced from the beginning, when invocations of Thoreau’s writings (p. 1) and explorations of the definitional parameters of ‘wilderness’ (pp. 19–22) are paired with the author’s memories of encounters with coyotes in the Yellowstone National Park, and feelings of awe within the Pemigewasset Wilderness (pp. 12–13). This is the opening gambit for the argument to follow, which evokes the possibility of according non-human nature a kind of agency within the wider democratic play of rights and freedoms in the American polity. The irony is that such agency can only be recognised if humans themselves develop the capacity to speak ‘on behalf of’ nature, having first taken the time to learn its ‘language’ through contemplative immersion.
Van Yperen is acutely aware that Christian engagements with environmental ethics can be prone to explicit or implicit anthropocentrism, as well as the danger of sentimentality (a point emphasised with an incisive quotation from James Baldwin, p. 23). Additionally, he is attentive to the way a fear of pantheism can fuel an over-correction, while outmoded theodicies and unfamiliarity with evolutionary history can result in Christian contributions to ecological ethics that lack pragmatism and fail to grapple meaningfully with suffering (p. 15). I discern two principles at the heart of Van Yperen’s attempts to steer Christian ethicists away from such dead ends. The first comes with his conviction, derived from American transcendentalists, that the individual encounter with wilderness can be a revelatory event that makes unique demands on language, generating its own philosophical method, and producing authoritative truth claims that Christian ethicists ignore at their peril. Thus, Van Yperen adopts Thoreau’s faith that ‘there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright’ (Thoreau, Walden, Civil Disobedience, and Other Writings, Norton, 2008, p. 167).
The second principle driving the argument is that any absolute distinction between the tasks of apprehending nature and culture, and the task of perceiving God, needs to be avoided if sound ethical insights are to ensue. Pope Francis is seen as an exemplar to follow in this regard, with his call in Laudato Si’ for an integral ecology that refuses to separate theological, social and environmental concerns. This is evident in Gratitude for the Wild when the early observation linking the establishment of national parks and reservations (cited above) is later juxtaposed with observations pertaining to the promulgation of the Wilderness Act (1964) and the Civil Rights Act (1964) under Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration (p. 73). Van Yperen comments on these legislative initiatives perceptively, observing the philosophical, religious and political ground from which they spring and the presence of contradictory and competing moral intuitions motivating each. Together, they exemplify the mix of triumph and tragedy that is the American democratic project as it unfolds in relation to the land.
Once the premises and the parameters of the argument have been established in the Introduction and chapter 1, three further chapters follow by way of elaboration. In chapter 2, readers are introduced to Terry Tempest Williams and Doug Peacock, two figures whose wilderness-inspired piety exemplifies the enduring appeal of the Thoreauvian tradition. They are compared with Timothy Tredwell (pp. 44–46), an environmental activist killed by a grizzly bear he had devoted himself to understand and protect. In the latter case, the author detects a failure of pragmatism and a failure to ‘speak for nature’ due to naïve and tragic misapprehension. Chapter 3 follows, beginning with an evocative reflection on the place of wolves in the popular and political imagination of Americans (pp. 51–53), leading to an attempt to draw the perspectives gleaned from Williams and Peacock into conversation with Gustafson’s pragmatic ‘theocentric’ ethic. The aim is to test the possibility of a Christian wilderness piety. The two components of the argument are linked so far as wolves have been seen as exemplars of ‘natural evil’—a category that Gustafson is seen to repudiate—but at the cost of a robust account of human evil, according to Van Yperen (pp. 59–62). The chapter ends with another instance of shock therapy against naïve conceptions of nature, as the author describes a scene he witnessed, in which a foetus is removed from a doe killed by a passing car, and fed to a waiting wolf; an experience described in sacramental terms (p. 68). The final substantive chapter engages with Martin Luther King Jnr’s appropriation of Thoreau’s oft-quoted complaint of ‘improved means leading to unimproved ends’. Van Yperen explores this connection in a way that risks repetitiveness and over-straining, into a resource for developing a Christian ecological ethic that embodies ‘the fierce urgency of the now’. Accompanying this final stage of the argument is an exploration as to whether the notion of ‘garden’ should replace ‘wilderness’ as a pragmatic solution to addressing deficiencies in the latter concept (pp. 84–85).
In the end, Van Yperen joins Van Wieren in making the transcendentalist wager, affirming that experiences of the wilderness can reshape moral discourse, religious piety and democratic polity for the better. As pragmatists, they are not much troubled by the infamous ‘is/ought’ distinction, and do not seek direct engagement with sceptical questions as to why descriptions of experiences should necessarily result in claims about nature’s inherent value or an imperative to act in one way or another. The tenor of both authors is that the wilderness is a place of revelation, in which a kind of therapy may take place that bestows a re-grounding in reality, bringing us back to earth and thus to ourselves. The experience schools willing human subjects in forms of gratitude and humility, which may translate into a renewed democratic politics. The argument would be strengthened by, on the one hand, a deeper engagement with cognitive and behavioural sciences that would add empirical weight to the importance of wilderness encounters for human insight and wellbeing, and on the other hand, by more serious acknowledgement of Christian doctrines of creation and incarnation within the burgeoning field of eco-theology. I am grateful to both authors for wrestling with the legacy of the transcendentalists, for translating their insights into the present, and above all, for sharing evocative reminiscences of their encounters in wild places.