I am not kind to neopagans in my conversation and I believe I have mentioned druids with irritation a half-dozen times here. I have regarded them as poseurs, relying on an imagined continuity with ancient pagans and misrepresenting what those ancients believed. Hint: they were not interested in "harmony with nature." Following CS Lewis, who saw a lot of good in them, I have looked more kindly on actual pagans, especially those that are safely in the past.
Neopaganism is often an extension of a milder set of imaginings that is not necessarily unhealthy. Many people feel a connection with others from the past, especially if they can be in the same place or believe they have some connection such as descent from them. Yes, the druids and wiccans are just as likely to be adopting their outlook in order to stick it in the eye of the normies and show how transgressive and freethinking they are, but I have focused on that too often. The gentler attraction shows up in the wistful words of legitimate historians talking about how they got interested in a particular site or subject, or even the field in general. "I wondered what it would be like to be standing on this bank as a soldier with a spear in hand, watching the fires go up in the camps across the river..." Or if something already has mystical associations, even more so. "When was delivering my own first child unexpectedly out in the remote village where my grandmother's people have long lived, I thought about those other women, perhaps with only a midwife and another friend or relative nearby..." "I imagined what it would be like to be that potter, trying out the new design he had seen on the pots arriving from the south..." Nothing wrong with any of that.
One way that it pretty obviously goes wrong is in making up what you think happened or they were like, not realising that your little narrative is not based on any historical reality, but only on the beliefs of your own era. Scandinavian artists of 100-200 years ago started increasing the number of trolls, elves, and women in the forest in long white gowns in their work, considering them important to national identity. But it seems they had been less important in previous centuries, and we don't fully know what they thought before widespread literacy. Romantic poets start believing that the industrial revolution has separated humanity from the land, and all these machines have destroyed our contact with nature, and pretty soon you have all manner of folk thinking their revival of pagan figures is teaching important lessons to modern woman and man, and the order of the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley are due to pop up any day (Crowley's parents were fundamentalist United Brethren, BTW).
I do get frustrated when this infiltrates the church, as it pretty thoroughly has at this point, with frequent reminders to "get out into God's creation," or to contemplate its wonders in some large general way of appreciating natural beauty. This is virtually absent from scripture. Those people looked at "nature" quite differently. Well, church camp is one of the few ministries that keep the young connected to the church, so perhaps I shouldn't complain.
Also, it seems to be a major foundation of a lot of literature that I am devoted to, beginning with JRR Tolkien. The contradictions are large in my mind at present.
I just learned that we actually know little for certain about Anglo-Saxon paganism. We make educated guesses based on associated knowledge and reports from much later. I shall have to look into this. I guess I just started a series, but I suspect it is only one more entry. Still, I'm going to go back and add "Part One" to the title.
I've heard that much of what we know of historical European paganism comes through the quills of Christian monks & scholars, which is kind of funny to me since many neo-pagans seem to be looking for an alternative to Christianity. I don't rub it in, though. I love the pagans in my life and don't want to be too irritating.
ReplyDeleteAs for the Church, it's been a while since I've read through this, but I think our scriptural connection to the natural world is quite strong given the role of humanity as stewards of God's creation in Genesis. As early as the 3rd or 4th century, some Christians wrote about nature as way to learn about God, casting it as "the book of nature" to complement "the book of scripture."
Beyond Genesis, there is Job 12:
“But ask the beasts, and they will teach you;
the birds of the air, and they will tell you;
8 or the plants of the earth,[b] and they will teach you;
and the fish of the sea will declare to you.
9 Who among all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
And Romans 1:
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. 19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; ...
This was one reason the Western Church funded so much research into the natural world in the middle ages. The medieval universities, which included mathematics and astronomy as a standard part of education, were all Catholic to begin with. Copernicus and Galileo were both funded by the Catholic Church (Galileo was directly a client of the pope as well as professor at a Catholic university), and Kepler was a wannabe preacher who ended up having to settle for astronomy. So, he sought God's design in nature and came up with the laws of planetary motion. He openly discussed astronomy as a way of learning about God and practiced it that way.
Then, natural theology took off in the English speaking world in the 19th century.
So, there is a long history with some scriptural backing for Christians to want to get out into nature and learn about God's Creation, and also to view nature positively (God said it was good, after all). I think the Christian faith has a much stronger claim to a positive (even harmonious) relationship with nature than the pagan or neo-pagan religions do. After all, Christ didn't just come to redeem humanity, but all of Creation - the whole natural world.
That said, I doubt the average 20th or 21st century preacher urging the flock to get out into God's creation is aware of all that history, and he / she is also probably not urging them to learn about nature as a way to learn about the Creator, either. Even so, it's not a bad thing, is it?
The Puritans were especially big on reading the Book of Nature as revealing God. Much of this was almost divining, observing flocks of birds for portents or expecting nature itself to cry out and accuse the wicked - which is why spectral evidence and dreams were considered suitable for court testimony. One can see the 19th C split with the Unitarians and Congregationalists forming well before then.
ReplyDeleteBut even then, this is late in the history of the church, and was much more about studying nature than appreciating it or marveling at it. The verses in Romans talk about the things that God has made, but this is unspecific. It would include not just mountains but angels, and humans, and the stars in the sky. We came to appreciate design when we we started designing. It may be that God always intended us to progress to that point, but earlier humans were much more likely to see nature as dangerous and evil.
I didn't know that about the Puritans.
ReplyDeleteSince God proclaims His creation good in Genesis, and the idea of learning about God from nature in Christianity goes back to the ancient world, I tend to think the Jewish and Christian ideas about nature are different from much of the rest, but I don't honestly know.
I've read the Gnostics thought the material world was evil, which was an important point of difference between them and the ancient Christians.
I'm curious what you've read about how early humans saw nature.
Natural theology was also very big in the High Middle Ages, in part because of the success of the argument for negative theology. This argument came to be important via a chain that runs from Aristotle->Avicenna->Averroes->Maimonides->Reconquest of Spain and translation project->Catholic theologians especially including St. Thomas Aquinas. It proved, to the satisfaction of the philosophers of the era in all three of the great monotheistic religions, both the existence of God and the impossibility to human beings of really knowing him as he actually exists. You have to make do with lesser sorts of knowledge.
ReplyDeleteOne of these is negative theology, i.e., knowing what God is not narrows down the field of what God is. Natural theology is another one: you can know something about God by knowing about his works.
There is a problem here too, though, for the serious philosopher: God made everything, including all the things we call 'bad.' Those things have to be good insofar as they are products of God, so you have to talk about the badness of them in terms of ways in which they fall away from God's perfect intention (per St. Augustine). Yet that requires you to do something already proven impossible, which is knowing the mind (and thus intentions) of God. If it's bad, there must be something wrong with it; or maybe there's something wrong with my understanding of it; or maybe it's not really bad, and I just don't get it; or maybe....
In a way the pagans and those who venerate saints are just going after an easier set of questions. I clearly do think this is bad, so where can I find some help in dealing with it?
Like Tom, I know some practicing neopagans. They borrow heavily from the Santería tradition, using trance work to commune with gods who can then be consulted on an oracular basis. I'm always amazed -- actually not at all amazed -- with how perfectly the gods' opinions on political matters align exactly with their worshippers'. I have gently suggested that in serving as the hostess to even a god, one is providing a kind of filter to what kinds of things are able to be expressed. I have less gently pointed out the stark deviation in what they suggest has been recommended to them by the ancient god/dess and the received mythology about what that being actually wanted or did. But these are matters of faith, and things that are devoutly wanted to be believed.
Thinking a bit more about this, AVI, could you tell me what you've read about early attitudes toward nature? Especially that they saw it as evil? I would be very interested in reading more about this topic.
ReplyDeleteAs for the passage in Romans being nonspecific, I actually don't think angels would be included. Paul is saying no one has an excuse for atheism because we have the evidence of everything God created. How would invisible angels (or invisible anything) testify to God's existence?
Romans 1 again: "For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made"
We can know about God from what He has shown us in the things He has made. That seems like a clear statement about the relationship between man, God, and nature, and it is a positive one for the Christian.
Grim, I have heard the answer that Adam's sin also corrupted the natural world, so the "bad" things in the world are corruptions of God's original plan. What do you think about that?
And why exactly do you link the veneration of saints to dealing with bad things? I guess because asking for intercessory prayer is mostly to deal with bad things, but then we should include asking friends to pray for us as well, no? And the veneration of saints goes well beyond just asking for intercessory prayer.
I will finish the series first, but for openers, I first got the idea from CS Lewis, who gave it as a simple declaration about the Jews and expanded it to all agricultural peoples, that they seldom rhapsodise about nature, but have to work with it and against it all the time. Yachtsmen rhasodise about the sea, fishermen fear it and watch it warily. Farmers worry about appeasing gods to get rain.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that they had no ideas of beauty, but that they thought the parts they had tamed as more beautiful than the wild ones. Some may have liked adventure on the see, but most regarded it as a job, and a dangerous one, and were glad to see the harbor. Hunters these days think in terms of being out in the forest and getting away from their day jobs. American hunters 200 years ago don't seem to talk like that.
As for the angels, I think they would be very much included in Paul's thought, as in "all things visible and invisible" in the creed. To exclude them from the general idea of creation would be a modern interpretation that separates nature out as a field of study.
As for evil, it was often very local and personal, of what was bad for their families - disease, famine, locusts. They saw those as nature as well, though sometimes sent by a deity or spirit or unquiet ancestor.
Tom, as for 'what I think about it,' I think that is essentially how the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes it.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p1s2c1p7.htm
The harmony in which they had found themselves, thanks to original justice, is now destroyed: the control of the soul's spiritual faculties over the body is shattered; the union of man and woman becomes subject to tensions, their relations henceforth marked by lust and domination. Harmony with creation is broken: visible creation has become alien and hostile to man. Because of man, creation is now subject "to its bondage to decay". Finally, the consequence explicitly foretold for this disobedience will come true: man will "return to the ground", for out of it he was taken. Death makes its entrance into human history.
Now how plausible that account is as a point of philosophy, I shall not opine.
"And why exactly do you link the veneration of saints to dealing with bad things?"
I was thinking of the nun who advised me to invoke a certain saint (St. Anthony of Padua, I think) if I lost my car keys. Is it bad that I lost my car keys? Maybe there's some terrible accident that I'm being protected from encountering by not being on the road right now. It's beyond my ability to know that, and it may be a generous miracle that has caused me to mislay my keys at this critical juncture.
Human knowledge being limited, though, what's apparent to me in the moment is how irritating it is that I can't find my keys. So you invoke the Patron Saint of Lost Things for help in resolving the 'bad thing' that you are encountering. One of the sagas shows people invoking Thor to try to deal with storms at sea in a similar way. Is the storm a bad thing? It is to the fisherman.
AVI, thanks for the reply. I'll take a look at Lewis and others and see what I find on it as well.
ReplyDeleteSomething interesting about terms - when you say "they thought the parts they had tamed as more beautiful than the wild ones", I think I've been misunderstanding something. Nature to me is the material world, tame or wild. Humanity is part of nature for me. Was Lewis dealing more with the romantic idea of untouched nature?
On angels, it is absolutely NOT that I'm trying to exclude them from Paul's thought in general or from creation. It is simply in that particular selection from Romans Paul is saying no one has an excuse to disbelieve because creation teaches us about God, so right there I think he's talking about the material world that anyone can experience. But that's just my interpretation.
Grim, yes, those both make sense. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to think about how philosophy would deal w/ the catechism's view.
Yes, I was primarily thinking of nature in that sense as the untouched world, not the material world as a whole. More the popular usage of a nature lover, or lover of natural things. What Grim is referencing I think comes closer to that material definition.
ReplyDeleteAh, that makes sense. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteAmazing how often disagreements turn out to be merely matters of definitions!
ReplyDelete