Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 3, December 2005
___________________________________________________________________
Gatta, John. Making
Nature Sacred. Literature, Religion, and Environment in America
from the Puritans to the Present. New York, NY, Oxford
University Press, 2005. 291 pages. ISBN: 0-19-516505-5; 0-19-516505-3
(pbk.) Hbk: $ 74.00. Pbk: $ 19.95
Reviewed by
Universidade Gama Filho,
Brasil
Thomas Pynchon opens Gravity’s Rainbow with Wernher von Braun’s immemorial assertion on how “Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.” In his meditation, the German space scientist went on to assert that: “If God applies this fundamental principle to the most minute and insignificant parts of His universe, doesn't it make sense to assume that He applies it to the masterpiece of His creation, the human soul?” As Pynchon quoted he skipped over God. But his mise en scène aims specifically at calling Braun’s bluff over what science teaches. His hand was to show how associating an idea of God to Nature is often a pretext for prospects of a more daunting end.
There is optimism in Nature within the American literature surveyed by John Gatta in Making Nature Sacred. It is often the guarantor of the soul’s eternal flight. There is also a breed of tension in this work, perhaps most highlighted when Gatta introduces a quote from Herman Melville. The author of Pierre waxed in thrall at “Nature’s total indifference to the human catastrophe once ‘all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago’”(121). In Pynchon’s monumental novel, human agency is shown to be manipulable up to a certain threshold of chaos. This is when Nature in a broad sense takes over, rolling on as it rolled... We are then bodies at mercy wandering in the Zone. There, Nature encompasses the urban as well as the rural, destroying beyond repair – mutating into an outer worldly process.
It is thus not surprising to see Pynchon absent from Gatta’s extensive study, subtitled Literature, Religion, and Environment in America from the Puritans to the Present. In fact, few authors have managed to portray Nature’s decay and putrescence as sensorially as Pynchon. The fragmented Braun quote used as opening salvo is not mere irony. It shows how Gravity’s Rainbow stands as the counter-intuitive debunking example, the anti-transcendent limit, to the design of Gatta’s work. As such, it might have provided scraps of some radical doubt to set off the elated tone upon which the environment’s current state of critical transformation is equivocally feted in this book.
Throughout time, sacralizing nature has equated Zeus’ body with Daimon’s spirit, to cite only one tradition. Nature’s supreme destructive force, beyond the beauty it fosters, slams moral yearnings shut against an ecstatic foray into faith as explosion. Little wonder, then, that monotheists have often viewed Nature under a most inauspicious light.
Gatta’s ambitious work lushly draws the reader into Nature as the setting out of which the United States of America emerged. The book’s structure is subtle, and denotes a project. It bears itself as a prescriptive struggle against environmental destruction, though it takes in a large mass of thought in other to allay any sense of tragedy. The outcome of the book’s tone is thus mingled in pathos, though its purpose stretches toward redemption.
This is also why it is difficult to venture into Gatta’s work without confronting its philosophical and metaphysical undertones. Doing so merely heightens the book’s outstanding merits. At times, the scope of the work attains the encyclopedic. The discussion of lesser known authors and poets opens spaces of interest somewhat removed from a purely religious dimension.
Gatta structures his inquiry cleverly. At first, he appears to present the work of William Bradford and Thomas Morton as two formative poetic paradigms of the religious experience in colonial America. In “Hideous and Desolate Wilderness” Bradford expounds on the pilgrim experience, whereas the nominally Anglican Morton describes an egalitarian spirit celebrating Nature’s beauty in Of Plimoth Plantation. Just as soon as the puritan vs. naturalist religion dialectic seems established, Gatta tips it to crumble. He keenly disturbs the traditional opposition between the Pilgrim/Puritans and the New England mercantile class, by connecting Bradford’s naturalism to a form of “neopagan entrepreneurship”. (31)
Few are the saints in the early part of American literature, which only means authors are presented as human beings. Next to humankind there lies the land. It scurries about in this narrative’s foreground. This is land emptied by the early settlers’ imagination of indigenous peoples, despite the menace the latter did seem to breed for the foreigners. For the taking is in the land, and beauty is merely a euphemism for application of the settlers’ god-given right to make that land their own.
To populate that land, Gatta’s history unfolds into a list of honors. Anne Bradstreet is cited as “the first poet to give an embodiment to American nature.” (47) Yet she writes at a time when another relationship to incarnation begins. This is the intense corporeality begun in Taylor’s “Carnall Love” and culminating, a century on, in Whitman’s “vision of love as a king of living tissue” (114). With the explorer/botanist, J. Bartram, Gatta traces back the “beginning of respect for ‘brute creation’”. (54) What remained dominant in popular mentality was the frontiersmen’s ethic. In the scruffiness of these windblown faces, one can almost overhear the sigh: “whoever heard of mercy on a muskrat?” (83)
Casting away from the 17th century, we witness the burgeoning of botanical literature coming into full bloom in the 19th with the Transcendentalists. This is the moment when Romantic religion reaches the American shores, and beckons a “shift to the book of nature as central text.” (74) Not everything the era created was outstanding. Some writers like W.C. Bryant, bathing in the day’s leitmotif, imagined a prehistoric race inhabiting the land. He called them the “mound-builders” – though setting their existence prior to the contemporary indigenous peoples whose creation these sacred surges have proved to be. This is perhaps the most diabolical case of attempting to displace Native Americans from their rightful heritage. Gatta is quick to strip the myth that evaporates them from the sacredness of “empty space”.
Otherwise, the great works of the 19th century do prevail. Emerson’s Nature first opens truly modern ground. The sharing between naturalist religion and science (understood as the basically descriptive empirical field it was in contemporary times) flourishes fully in the work of H. D. Thoreau. Thoreau’s Walden is perhaps the unsurpassed expression of the North American sacralization of nature, bound to a political vision.
In Brazil, Sergio Buarque de Holanda described how explorers and early settlers, the bandeirantes, consecrated the Eastern tropical forest as a “vision of paradise”. It was out of its forests that the myth of the noble savage and of Eden’s parousia was cast. Walden’s gesture was instead to throw science’s net far broader than we have come to expect in our own times. In doing so, it captured a nature beyond the one prophesied in the scriptures.
As such, Thoreau’s politicized reclaiming of the wild in the name of the sacred proves to be the limit to the American spiritual experience. The Civil War blurred the line between beauty and torment, and between the background and foreground of what nature was expected to provide to Americans. From that wound, Thoreau’s work crafts a sense of place. Gatta reminds us of the punned titled of “Walled-in”, and the carving out of a temple from the natural space. He draws a mindful lesson for our times: this attention to immanent expression of the sacred is what led Thoreau to “disavow the argument from design.”(136)
The narrative moves on to argue that it was the ecological conscience forged by Jonathan Edwards nearly a century later, instead of Thoreau, which ultimately leads to the mixture of spiritual awareness and social concern raising pointed questions for the American political system regarding its people’s “god-given” rights to a lifestyle. As Gatta asks, “if, in present-day democracies, the shaping of green political policy must depend largely on the behavior of popularly elected representatives, can the relatively few ‘saints’ who possess true virtue hope to prevail?” (69) Such pertinence notwithstanding, Gatta’s political inquiry begins to fade with the ongoing chapters. It is a major drawback for the book’s project.
On the surface a series of case
studies is aligned. Their diversity prevents the sacralization of
nature from being assembled according to clear-cut paradigms.
Types accumulate to form the author’s understanding of an
environmental religion. On the other hand, there is some
surprising teleology at work. We are left with an uncanny sense
that the tone upon which the book had started, namely a
prescriptive wager to place religion at the service of
environmental consciousness, is shifted a half-circle. By the end,
institutionalized religion and the name of the god are there to
undermine the political independence of environmental
consciousness, subjecting the latter to its aims, as it were.
These shifting patterns are germane to the spiritual expression Gatta perceives as dominant in this heightened environmental consciousness as delivered by the apophatic spiritual attitude, the via negativa. For as the poet Denise Levertov emphasizes, God is not in the objects of nature. To which Gatta comments, “this last apophatic principle also helps clarify what ‘making nature sacred’ might mean in present-day terms.” (242) Though it beckons iconic creation instead of divine localization, in revealing this pattern fully by book’s end, Gatta seems to bid farewell to the terms of praxis by which environmental consciousness can implement real change in judicial decisions such as Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation (1990).
It also seems to ward off another wager. In the early half of his book, Gatta insightfully gives the historical backdrop of land allocations to some of the leaps in poetic inventiveness tracing North American literature. The framing of the “village common” (93) crowns the act of social preservation of nature, still powerfully exerting its importance on how we nowadays think of our spaces. Such insight makes the book’s recurrent philosophical motif a justifiable blend of phenomenology and hermeneutics. The work strives to “see nature”, which Gatta recognizes as “a hermeneutical problem of interpreting the visible world as text.” (11) But seeing requires a labor of love.
The history of a religion is often its own deepest critic, lest of course one believe that its history is merely the reflection of man’s imperfection. Other cultures have clearly lodged imperfection in all of nature. When immersing into Gatta’s literary archaeology, it is astonishing to encounter the complexity of past spiritual forms. Judeo-Christianity and its younger brethren, Islam, all tend powerfully toward a vision of the divine as unique, God or Allah as One. By contrast, modern science is faced with the predicament, confirmed with every leap and punctuated moment of equilibrium, of nature’s massive diversity and multiplicity. In its hermeneutical form, philosophy attests to the reality of both.
This is a dominant motif in the work of Paul Ricoeur, under whose aegis Gatta sets his own interpretive method.(10) For all the religiosity and faith in Ricoeur’s thought, the late French philosopher believed primarily in a split subject. In order to get to the sense of philosophy’s interpretation and conception of subject, Ricoeur believed it acceptable to go the path to atheism as a last resort. Yet he did not yield in his conviction and trust in the irreducibility of two separate discourses: the philosophical and the religious. There is no leap of faith in Ricoeur’s work, though there is devotion to the original insight, division, and through it the unfolding multiplicity of the names of god specific to religious discourse.
After being steeped in the challenge of heightening environmental consciousness, which has been the topic of considerable discussion within post-Nietzschean structuralist thought, Gatta curtails the import of this latter field on grounds of its skepticism regarding the coming-to-presence-of-sense. But is this not a more radical understanding of the via negativa, which does not parlay to the act of naming transcendent signifiers? C.S. Pierce, Gatta’s other forgotten one, would surely comply when defining his doctrine of “agapasm” as an immanent logic of historical progression as “a positive sympathy among the created springing from continuity of mind”.
Despite the via negativa, the book emphasizes continuity between the North American Indian to present times. Although Black Elk figures prominently in the second part of this work, it is somewhat hard to be convinced of Gatta’s reassurance. A momentous gap of silence covers, well beyond this book, the notion of continuity with Turtle Island. One day, literary history will have to come to terms with this by integrating Native American oral expression into the literary tradition. Despite Gatta’s remarks that curiosity about Indian spirituality only begins in the 1930s, (146) it is plain to say Native peoples themselves clearly do not recognize the act of making nature sacred as specific to post-contact.
The silence of the native underscores how the “wild” in America cannot thus refer to nature alone, let alone to divinity. This is why the book’s ultimate conclusion, leaning on W. Berry’s vision, portraying God as the “wildest beings in existence”, seems to be too large a step for mankind to make. It flushes history out into a void. It may be philosophically Nietzschean to criticize this teleology, but the thread of thought in this book aims politically at an ideological capturing of reality by organized religion.
Many of the ecological tales of the closing chapters are euphemisms for compelling testaments of faith. But if “pilgrimage is a religious quest” (227), one might wonder at what point the spiritual is elided into the religious, and whether religious experience transfigures the political means to progressively reorganize an economic order to avert a change in the very conditions this book uses as its wellspring to existence. As we ponder over these questions, we commend Gatta’s accomplishment in offering a major collection of authors whose verse and prose provides a predominantly urban culture with its threatened, timeless, nature.