Nature and God

Bill McKibben and other learned environmentalists would not disagree with the existence of a relationship between Man and the Sublime found in Nature. And yet this relationship between Man and Nature is very much in keeping with the relationship between Man and the Sublime found in such works as Plato’s Timæus, the poems of William Wordsworth, and the essays of the philosopher and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson. If one consults his Old Testament text he will find the challenge of Climate Change is the test of Man’s Covenant with God in the New Millenium. I would argue that, just as the Rainbow in Genesis was a symbol of this new Covenant between God and Man, so is evidence of the Divine to be found for those that can perceive it within the confines of Nature, and that the fight against Climate Change is the test of that covenant with God. When swimming in the Adirondacks from the Main Dock to the Boathouse in late summer I experienced something Sublime just like Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond. Whereas Thoreau had been paddling in a canoe and I had been swimming we both had this experience occur in Nature. Just like the narrator of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein who experienced a noble tempest and as found in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the noble tempest in Shelley is a tempestuous metaphor for Man’s Relationship with Nature and by extension with God. Doctor Frankenstein created the Monster in an effort to be “like God” and conquer Death. In like manner does the Monster become a symbol of Man’s Search for God and the ever-widening repository of Belief in an unseen Higher Power. Frankenstein the Monster tries to understand the World as we see it by inculcating a kind of Mephisto Waltz in Nature such that he is not blind to his reality, but rather an Other, cast out of society and perforce, living in nature: The Grand Experiment. One sees the Monster’s attempts to integrate into society when he comes upon a little cabin in the woods, inhabited by a family of French-Canadians. In addition to the misunderstanding which follows the Monster, it grows to know itself as a hideous thing, which must keep in hiding in the woods and not come out, save those times when it is absolutely necessary. Here, the Monster is trying to help the little girl, only to be shot at, like an Animal. The Myth of the Noble Savage is indeed encapsulated in these pages and it is a work of Supreme Beauty. Thoreau also had an encounter with the Sublime from which he concluded and interpreted the Signs in Nature as a kind of pleasure or displeasure of the Lord. In William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ (1794) moreover, the Poet wonders about the Creator and hand in the Creation of All Living Things. So too does William Wordsworth speak of that Divinity in his poem ‘Tintern Abbey’: “(A) motion and a spirit…/Of all my Moral being” (100-111). Indeed, the Lake District is a place from which many receive a kind of Power, which comes from Nature. Wordsworth may have been content in being “A worshipper of Nature” (152) and may have engaged in the Poetic Fallacy to some degree, mistaking God for Nature, yet even still his vision of God in Nature is striking. The Poet makes no apologies here for his undying love of the Natural World and for the heightened state of Bliss, and teaches an important lesson moreover for those who would hear it—whoever would find a sense of the Divine, or the Sublime, should bend his ear and eye towards Nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his essay “On Nature” of the causal link between Man and Nature, which holds in that respect an additional aspect of that Fair Sublimity. He demonstrates here his longing moreover to become One with Nature, and by extension a Higher Power. Emerson’s experience is very much in keeping with my own: I myself became the “Universal Eye-ball” on that dock in the Adirondacks. Indeed, this statement is the firm foundation of the transcendental philosophy to create in the mind’s eye what his imagination might profess. Namely Emerson’s vision is that of Man becoming the prism through which God’s greater Glory may be magnified thereby. He is a “Lover of Immortal Beauty,” hearkening back to Keats, but even still does not seek to be moved to a greater or lesser degree by his Mortal condition, choosing rather to engage in a Search, which is ultimately mystical in nature. Emerson seeks this mystical union with Nature through a meditation upon it, severing his familial relations and ties with his fellow man in that moment, thusly partaking of his Solitude. These more Romantic notions are to be found in the book The End of Nature in which Prof. McKibben seeks guidance in The Holy Bible while he reflects on The Story of Job. Still McKibben’s focus is on more relevant sources such as Darwin or Edward Abbey of the desert(ed) Southwest. He also ties together ideas of socialism and enlightenment from the Present Day concluding finally with a passage from Paradise Lost: Let it speak, the Maker’s high magnificence, who built/ so spacious, and his line stretcht out so far;/ That man may know he dwells not in his own;/ An edifice too large for him to fill,/ Lodg’d in a small partition, and the rest/Ordain’d for uses to his Lord best known. Adam asks the Angel Raphael about the movements of the Heavens. McKibben goes on to make a point about how insignificant Man is and how we need not see the shapes in constellations there. Walt Whitman the poet would not have us take everything from books—“Stop this day…You shall listen…” (Song of Myself, 33-38). Whitman speaks of Society and in Nature Whitman is trying to be a kind of Green Man or Santa Claus. “I go with fishermen and seamen…And nothing, not God, is greater than one’s self is(…)Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes” (Song of Myself, 1259-1279). And on and on into Nature Whitman goes to find himself. Continuing into the proverbial deepness, Herman Melville wrote his epic novel to illustrate Man’s preoccupation with a search for God. By encountering the White Whale the whalers aboard the Pequod have an experience similar to that of Jacob when he wrestled in his dream with the Angel Gabriel. That is, Moby-Dick is a striving after a kind of relationship with Nature, such as Henry David when he canoed after the loon on Walden Pond: a man in search of a connection with the Divine or the Sublime. The currents then of Modern Man stress a reliance on Nature as The Great Teacher, instructing us all. But as those who have ears to see and eyes to hear our encounters with the Sublime in Nature are not an experience of God Himself but a reflection of the Divine within Nature. Unlike William Wordsworth, Robert Frost’s poetry dwells in nature without taking part in the grand mystery. For example, his moving poem entitled, “After Apple-Picking,” dwells in a kind of dreamy dwelling place where Dreams abound upon the meditation of apples dropping one upon the next, or “just some other sleep,” writes Frost. While Frost writes of “Stopping On A Snowy Evening,” in a rather Romantic mood, his chief humor was to be found in poems such as “The Woodpile” and “Hyla Brook,” in which he alludes to that other realm of Færy—But does not enter through the door, unlike J.R.R. Tolkien. The Oxford Don Professor of English Literature and Medieval Literature at Merton College would have gone further still than Frost, had he been a poet. Even still, Tolkien invented the notion of ‘The Ent’, a creature that protects and stewards the natural landscape. Indeed, the idea of the Ents in Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” Cycle were taken from Shakespeare’s ‘MacBeth’ and given Divine properties, such that “Elsinor could march to Dunsinane.” Still, Tolkien would have been proud to be taken as an environmentalist. The poet Robert Frost, on the other hand, attains a more relative and realistic conception of True North, while I have stopped by a snowy wood on a winter’s night and felt a certain degree of mystery--It is cold. In Vermont moreover I have lived often during the winter season to see the land grow cold in the dead of winter. Many find a spirituality through Nature. And when I got “sick” I found that a long walk out into the countryside to be therapeutic and not simply a walk without destination, encountering several scenes of “Hardy-esque” country. It was very picturesque to behold, even in the woods and stopping by a man-made pond. Indeed, it was freeing to walks as a “free spirit”—Even in my state of bewilderment and despair, walking and continuing to walk down foreign, country roads. I kept going, until I found the main road, and that made all the difference in finding my way home again. At home in Vermont, one finds tranquility, even in such a small thing as a simple stream, where lived there a poet. Mr. Hayden Carruth hears the wind blow through the trees in his poem, which in turn inspires The Poet to create with words a description of The Spirit. He hears voices then in the form of faces which turn to each other. Then the voices say Good-bye. The only power that the Poet still possesses is that of the ability to break with his then lover The Sleeping Beauty. This poem has a mystical dimension in the cruder sense and yet also possesses a lingering presence of preternatural estrangement. Carruth is at home in the mystery of things. While Carruth’s message is fairly bleak in his poem, I offer up my own assessment of it in conclusion. To exist is hard work especially in the backwoods of Vermont of which I have had a taste and to exist in the backwoods of Vermont with a mental illness like Carruth compounds everything else even though you do get a fair share of poetic inspiration through your apparent illness and yet I offer up these words: “I came to the woods in order to live deliberately."