Sacred Nature, page 1
also by karen armstrong
Through the Narrow Gate
A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths
Islam: A Short History
Buddha
The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam
The Spiral Staircase
A Short History of Myth
Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time
The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions
The Bible: The Biography
The Case for God: What Religion Really Means
Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence
The Lost Art of Scripture: Rescuing the Sacred Texts
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2022 by Karen Armstrong
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Bodley Head, an imprint of Penguin Random House, London.
www.aaknopf.com www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Excerpts from “The Country of the Trees” and “Do Stones Feel?” by Mary Oliver, reproduced from Blue Horses (Corsair, 2018). Copyright © 2014 by Mary Oliver.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Armstrong, Karen, [date]- author.
Title: Sacred nature : restoring our ancient bond with the natural world / Karen Armstrong.
Description: London ; New York : Bodley Head, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022001872 (print) | LCCN 2022001873 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593319437 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593319444 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Nature—Religious aspects. | Ecotheology.
Classification: LCC BL65.N35 A74 2022 (print) | LCC BL65.N35 (ebook) | DDC 202/.12—dc23/eng20220419
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001872
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001873
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Sacred nature : restoring our ancient bond with the natural world / Karen Armstrong.
Names: Armstrong, Karen, 1944– author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220156794 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220156824 | ISBN 9780735282421 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735282438 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Nature—Religious aspects. | LCSH: Human beings—Effect of environment on. | LCSH: Human ecology—Religious aspects. | LCSH: Spiritual life. | LCSH: Nature—Psychological aspects.
Classification: LCC BL65.N35 A76 2022 | DDC 201/.77—dc23
Ebook ISBN 9780593319444
Cover photograph by David Lichtneker / Millennium Images, UK
Cover design by Tyler Comrie
ep_prh_6.0_140870842_c0_r0
In Memoriam
Felicity Bryan
(16 October 1945–21 June 2020)
Contents
Introduction
1 Mythos and Logos
2 Sacred Nature
3 The Holiness of Nature
4 Our Broken World
5 Sacrifice
6 Kenosis
7 Gratitude
8 The Golden Rule
9 Ahimsa
10 Concentric Circles
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother
and even such a small creature as I finds
an intimate place in their midst.
Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature.
All people are my brothers and sisters, and all the things [in nature] are my companions.
From the “Western Inscription” (Ximing) by Zhang Zai
Introduction
I vividly remember my first visit to the British Museum, a place that has since become so familiar and important to me. I was a young nun, studying for university entrance, and my tutor had told me to go and look at the manuscripts on display. In those days, the British Library was housed in the museum, and I found myself gazing in wonder at the handwriting of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. The immediacy of their presence was almost shocking; time seemed to have collapsed. I was looking at the moment that these poems, which were now a part of myself, had come into being. I did not want to analyse the manuscripts. I simply wanted to be in their presence. It was a kind of communion.
My reaction may sound extreme, but I was not a typical museum visitor. For over four years I had lived in a convent entirely cut off from the outside world. We heard no news. As an exception, we were informed about the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, but our superiors forgot to tell us when it was over, so we spent three weeks waiting anxiously for Armageddon. For four years, I had seen no television, no films, no newspapers. I had no idea about the social revolution of the sixties. As I contemplated the manuscripts, shrouded in my all-enveloping religious habit, I was more like a closeted Victorian girl than a young woman of the mid twentieth century.
Today, when I watch visitors to the museum encountering the great relics of the past, I notice that they seem impelled not just to look but to take photographs. Unlike my younger self, they do not seem to want simply to commune with the Rosetta Stone, for example, but to seek to own it in some way, as though it does not become real to them until they have a virtual copy. Do the changes I have seen over sixty years in even such a small act of witnessing not reflect our changed relationship with nature? We walk in a place of extreme beauty while talking on our mobiles or scrolling through social media: we are present, yet fundamentally absent. Instead of sitting contemplatively beside a river or gazing in awe at a mountain range, we obsessively take one photograph of the view after another. Rather than let the landscape find an intimate place in our minds and hearts, we are distancing ourselves from nature, which is becoming a simulated reality. Our urban living and all-absorbing technology have alienated us from nature, so that even the magnificent films of David Attenborough may fail to reach our innermost core.
Some of us strongly feel that sense of alienation and loss. But it is not a recent phenomenon. The Romantic poets whose manuscripts in the British Library filled me with such wonder had already mourned our broken relationship with nature. William Wordsworth (1770–1850) recalled the luminous vision of the world that he had enjoyed as a boy but lost as a grown-up:
There was a time when meadow, grove and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;
Turn wheresoe’er I may,
By night or day
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.
He is still aware of the beauty of nature but knows “there hath passed away a glory from the earth.” He sees a tree and a field that both “speak of something that hath gone.”
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
In my own humble way, I recall something similar. I grew up in the unspoilt Worcestershire countryside in the late 1940s and distinctly remember trying to tell my puzzled parents about something I called “putsch.” There was no word I knew of for what I recall as a strange but compelling luminosity in the woods and lanes near our home that I could not make my adult companions see. They assumed I was thinking of the fairies pictured in my story books, but it was more of an impersonal, all-encompassing radiance. Once I went to school to be inducted into the rational worldview that governs modern life, I, like Wordsworth, experienced the “light and glory die away, / And fade into the light of common day.”
But our changed relationship with nature is not just an aesthetic loss. Over many years now, we have become increasingly aware of the damage we are inflicting on the natural environment and its potentially drastic impact on human life. It is true that the earth’s climate has continually altered over the millennia, but hitherto this has always been a slow process, and we are now seeing rapid changes. Global temperatures and sea levels are rising at an alarming rate and this is entirely due to human activity. We know that burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the earth’s atmosphere, where it is trapped and causes the earth’s temperature to rise. Unless this is checked, human life will be imperilled. Water shortages will make it increasingly hard to produce food. Some regions will become dangerously hot, while rising sea levels will make others uninhabitable. Already, polar ice and glaciers are melting fast. Scientists have set a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees centigrade as the “safe” limit for global warming. If the temperatu
As I write this introduction in the summer of 2021, the environmental crisis has assumed new urgency. Temperatures in the United States and southern Europe have reached their highest ever levels, leading to devastating forest fires that have destroyed entire communities. At the same time, Germany and the Netherlands have suffered unprecedented flooding, which has taken lives and wreaked appalling damage. Climate change is no longer an alarming possibility; it has become a fearful reality. Disaster can be averted only if we change the way we live. This crisis has been caused by our modern way of life, which, despite its considerable achievements, is fatally flawed. We are beginning to realise that the way we live now, for all its manifold benefits, not only inhibits human flourishing but threatens the very survival of our species. We have to change not only our lifestyle but our whole belief system. We have ransacked nature, treating it as a mere resource, because over the last 500 years we have cultivated a worldview that is very different from that of our forebears.
* * *
*
Wordsworth’s perception of the sacrality of nature—its “light and glory”—may resemble the way we perceived the world when humanity was in its infancy. Today this primal way of life has survived only in a few remaining communities of indigenous tribal peoples. When, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the first Western explorers in Australia, Africa and the Americas watched a shaman entering a trance state, they assumed he was experiencing the “supernatural” or exploring his “inner world.” But the shaman did not encounter gods, nor was he making an interior spiritual journey. Rather, he was acting as an intermediary between his community and its natural environment, ensuring that there was a fruitful interchange between the two. He had no conception of what we call the supernatural. He was not looking beyond or above nature, nor was he seeking the divine within himself, like a modern contemplative. Instead, the shaman projects his awareness outwards into the depths of the landscape, which for him is alive, spiritually, psychologically and sensuously. He experiences an awareness which he and his community have in common with the animals, insects and plants around them—even with the lichen growing on a stone. Where tribal people sense reciprocity between themselves and the natural environment, we moderns see it as a mere backdrop to human affairs. But before the development of modern Western civilisation, our own ancestors would have shared this primordial understanding.
The American anthropologist David Abram believes that our modern Western focus on the “inner world” and the Christian idea of a supernatural heaven are both results of a profound psychic change. At an earlier stage of our history, we would have experienced nature as animate too, but over time we have come to regard it as mechanical, prosaic and predictable.[1] After spending many years living intimately with indigenous people of Indonesia and Nepal and studying their cultures, Abram began to understand that they had a far more developed perception of nature than we have in the modern West. What is more, by immersing himself wholly in these tribal cultures, he found that he was starting to develop such insight himself. One night, when sheltering in a cave during a violent rainstorm, he became fascinated watching two spiders weaving an intricate web, creating one elaborate and beautiful pattern after another:
It was from them that I learned of the intelligence that lurks in nonhuman nature…leaving one open to a world all alive, awake and aware. It was from such small beings that my senses first learned of the countless worlds within worlds that spin in the depths of this world that we commonly inhabit, and from them that I learned that my body could, with practice, enter sensorially into these dimensions.[2]
Over the years, he found that he was experiencing hitherto-unexplored levels of consciousness. When a shaman spoke of a “power” or “presence” in the corner of his house, Abram realised that a sunbeam illuminating a column of dust was indeed a power, an active force that not only imbued the air currents with warmth but altered the mood of the room. When walking on dirt paths through the landscape, he learned to slow his pace and become conscious of the spiritual and physical difference between one hill and another.
For most of us, immersed as we are in urban life and increasingly retreating from the world of nature into technology, such an experience is alien. Where we see a range of separate beings and phenomena, tribal people see a continuum of time and space, where animals, plants and humans are all permeated by an immanent sacred force that draws them into a synthesised whole. For millennia, long before the development of urban civilisation, this was probably how most humans experienced the natural world.
The first Western explorers assumed that the “uncivilised natives” they encountered held these strange beliefs because their brains were insufficiently developed. But the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) was convinced that they were neurologically identical with our own.[3] When faced with a practical problem, they were able to respond quickly and efficiently, solving it with skill and insight. Their minds were not different from ours, he concluded; they simply relied on different regions of the brain. Modern neurologists would probably agree. They have pointed out that while we in the modern West tend to rely more on the left hemisphere of the brain, the home of rational and pragmatic thought, tribal people have a right-hemispheric worldview, which identifies connection between things; indeed, the right hemisphere is the source of poetry, music, art and religion. Lévy-Bruhl used the term “participation” to describe the logic of indigenous people, who experience not just humans and animals but apparently “inanimate” objects, such as stones and plants, as having a life of their own, each participating in the same mode of existence and influencing each other.
The essence of this “participatory” understanding of the natural world did not die with the arrival of civilisation. It would be expressed differently in each culture but, until the advent of Western modernity, it remained substantially similar across the world. We will see that people in early civilisations did not experience the power that governed the cosmos as a supernatural, distant and distinct “God.” It was rather an intrinsic presence that they, like the nineteenth-century shaman, experienced in ritual and contemplation—a force imbuing all things, a transcendent mystery that could never be defined. In the ancient Middle East, ilam, meaning “divinity” in Akkadian, was a radiant power that transcended any singular deity. In India, the Brahman, the ultimate reality, was indefinable; it was a sacred energy that was deeper, higher and more fundamental than the devas, the gods who were present in nature but had no control over the natural order. In China, the ultimate reality was the Dao, the fundamental “Way” of the cosmos; nothing could be said about it, because it transcended all normal categories.
Monotheism, the belief in a single God that is central to the faith of Jews, Christians and Muslims, was the great exception. At the very beginning of the Hebrew Bible, in the first chapter of Genesis, God issues a command to the first human beings, giving them total dominion over the natural world: “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and conquer it. Be masters of the fish of the sea, the birds of heaven and all living animals on earth.”[4] Unlike the other scriptures we shall consider, the Hebrew Bible does not focus on the sanctity of nature, because the people of Israel experienced the divine in human events rather than in the natural world. The historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1907–86) argued that they were the first people to perceive history as a succession of unique and unrepeatable occurrences.[5] So while the ancient Egyptians regarded the annual flooding of the Nile and the rising and setting of the sun as divine events, the Israelites saw the hand of their god Yahweh in the incidents of their past and the political challenges of the present. However, so deeply embedded was nature’s sacrality in the human psyche that some Jews and Christians, in their distinctive ways, would also affirm it. And as we will see, Muslims made it central to their faith.
But in early modern Europe, the link between nature and the divine was severed, and Christians began to see “God” as separate from the world. Originally, European Christians, like the peoples of the Middle East, India and China, had seen the sacred as a ubiquitous force that pervaded the natural world and pulled the disparate elements of the universe together. As the Dominican theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) had explained in his definitive Summa Theologiae, God was not confined to a supernatural heaven but was “present everywhere in everything.” God was not a being but rather “Being Itself” (esse seipsum), the divine essence at the heart of all things. God was all that is, Thomas taught, so “wherever God exists he exists wholly.”[6] But Thomas’s theology was to be superseded with a radical shift in the Western conception of the divine. By the fourteenth century, students at the universities of Paris, Oxford and Bologna were studying logic, mathematics and Aristotelian science before they began their theological studies, and when they arrived in divinity school, they were so well versed in logical thought that they instinctively tried to describe theological issues in rational terms. The Franciscan philosopher John Duns Scotus (1265–1308) was one of the first to develop a rational, almost scientific theology. As a result, in Western Christendom, people were beginning to regard God as just another being—albeit of a superior kind—rather than “Being Itself,” and it was not long before they would break with the more traditional understanding of the sacred.
