The Nature writings of the 19th century mystics and naturalists attracted the attention of the first scholars of mysticism, including William James and Evelyn Underhill. In fact a notable predecessor to James was Richard Maurice Bucke, friend and biographer of Whitman, who published a book called 'Cosmic Consciousness' in the late 1890s. The spiritual impact of Whitman on Bucke undoubtedly led to this book, a compilation of the spiritual greats in recorded history. Bucke's analysis is entirely influenced by the deep impression that Whitman made on him, though he adds some concerns of his own, for example an evolutionary theme. William James, although he quotes from Bucke, has little patience for Whitman:
In some individuals optimism may
become quasi-pathological. The capacity for even a transitory sadness or a
momentary humility seems cut off from them as by a kind of congenital anaesthesia.
The supreme contemporary example of such an inability to feel evil is of course
Walt Whitman.
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Thus it has come about that many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as the
restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his own
love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist. Societies
are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for its propagation,
in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are already beginning to be
drawn; hymns are written by others in his peculiar prosody; and he is even
explicitly compared to the founder of the Christian religion, not altogether
to the advantage of the latter. (Varieties of Religious Experience, p.83,
84)
William James is using Whitman to illustrate one side of a dichotomy that he sees dividing religious experience: the religion of the 'healthy minded' and the religion of the 'sick soul'. James has detected in the Nature writers of his time, and perhaps in the general expansiveness of the American mood, a reversion from what he sees as the wholesome preoccupation of Christianity with sin and damnation to a more primitive, if not pagan, optimism. Without entering his arguments in detail, it is worth noting that he finds the 'healthy minded' a feature of the spirituality of the Nature mystics, and associates them with pre-Christian religions.
It is not a coincidence that James was psychologist as much as philosopher, and it is not unfair to the profession of psychology as a whole to say that their interest lies with the 'sick soul.' What James is really sensitive to is a Christian outlook that Muir, Thoreau, Whitman and Jefferies have abandoned entirely. This states, and no doubt part of its original energy came from Manichaean and Gnostic sources, that Nature, and man in particular, represents the 'fall.' We have characterised part of the impulse behind this view as via negativa, but in our conclusions about Nature Mysticism and via positiva James's attack on the 'healthy-minded' will be re-examined. The basis of the attack is that 'healthy-mindededness' is naive. If we think of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the horrors of which led Voltaire to create his Doctor Pangloss and the story of Candide, from which we have the expression 'Panglossian' (meaning naively optimistic in the face of irrefutable tragedy, and intended to caricature the philosopher Leibniz), then Muir's almost visceral delight in the same phenomenon would illustrate James's point. Is the ability then, to find the transcendent in Nature, merely a Panglossian trait? More on this later, but meanwhile we look at two more scholars who have in different degrees contributed to the debate: Evelyn Underhill and Edward Mercer.
Evelyn Underhill (1875 - 1941)
Evelyn Underhill first published
her Mysticism — The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness
in 1911, some nine years after James' Varieties. It built on the work
of James and Bucke; it focused on mysticism; it was broader in its sources,
though it did not venture further than the Religions of the Book (considering
mystics of the Far East to be nihilists); and it shared the emphasis on mystical
experience. Underhill was aware of Whitman and Jefferies, neither of whom she
acknowledged as full-blown mystics. Unlike James she placed no great emphasis
on the distinction between the healthy-minded and the sick soul, seeing in the
mystics a universal earnestness and determination in their pursuit of the absolute.
There are many sympathetic references to Nature in her book, none of which make
the association with naive healthy-mindedness that James implies. Here are some
examples:
Such use of visible
nature as the stuff of ontological perceptions, the medium whereby the self
reaches out to the Absolute, is not rare in the history of mysticism. The
mysterious vitality of trees, the silent magic of the forest, the strange
and steady cycle of its life, possess in a peculiar degree this power of unleashing
the human soul: are curiously friendly to its cravings, minister to its inarticulate
needs. Unsullied by the corroding touch of consciousness, that life can make
a contact with the "great life of All"; and through its mighty rhythms
man can receive a message concerning the true and timeless World of "all
that is, and was, and evermore shall be." Plant life of all kinds, indeed
from the "flower in the crannied wall" to the "Woods of Westermain"
can easily become for selves of a certain type, a "mode of the Infinite."
So obviously does this appear when we study the history of the mystics, that
Steiner has drawn from it the hardly warrantable inference that "plants
are just those natural phenomena whose qualities in the higher world are similar
to their qualities in the physical world."
Though the conclusion
be not convincing, the fact remains. The flowery garment of the world is for
some mystics a medium of ineffable perception, a source of exalted joy, the
veritable clothing of God. I need hardly add that such a state of things has
always been found incredible by common sense. "The trees which move some
to tears of joy," says Blake, who possessed in an eminent degree this
form of sacramental perception, "is in the Eyes of others only a green
thing that stand in the Way." (Mysticism, p.191)
To "see God in nature," to attain a radiant consciousness of the "otherness" of natural things, is the simplest and commonest form of illumination. Most people, under the spell of emotion or beauty, have known flashes of rudimentary vision of this kind. Where such a consciousness is recurrent, as it is in many poets, there results that partial yet often overpowering apprehension of the Infinite Life immanent in all living things, which some modern writers have dignified by the name of "nature-mysticism." (Mysticism, p.234)
In the first passage Underhill hints at a personal sensitivity to nature, though in the second one is left with the impression that "nature-mysticism" is for her too grand a term. Incidentally, she gives the following as a list of poets that fit the description in the passage: Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning and Whitman.
Underhill is keen to defend the mystic from the general assumption that they
deny the world; she often uses their relation to Nature to illustrate this.
At one point she cites the seeing of "all creatures in God, and God in
all creatures"; at another the brother Wolf of Francis of Assisi; and at
another the case of the Peruvian Saint, Rose of Lima, who sang the praises of
God for a whole hour in alternation with a songbird.
In another passage Underhill recommends natural objects as subjects for contemplation.
Seen thus a thistle
has celestial qualities: a speckled hen a touch of the sublime. Our greater
comrades, the trees, the clouds, the rivers, initiate us into mighty secrets,
flame out at us "like shining from shook foil." The "eye which
looks upon Eternity" has been given its opportunity. We have been immersed
for a moment in the "life of the All": a deep and peaceful love
unites us with the substance of all things, a "Mystic Marriage"
has taken place between the mind and some aspect of the external world. Cor
ad cor loquitur: Life has spoken to life, but not only to the surface-intelligence.
That surface-intelligence knows only that the message was true and beautiful:
no more.
The price of this
experience has been a stilling of that surface-mind, a calling in of all our
scattered interests: an entire giving of ourselves to this one activity, without
self-consciousness, without reflective thought. To reflect is always to distort:
our minds are not good mirrors. The contemplative, on whatever level his faculty
may operate, is contented to absorb and be absorbed: and by this humble access
he attains to a plane of knowledge which no intellectual process can come
near.
I do not suggest
that this simple experiment is in any sense to be equated with the transcendental
contemplation of the mystic. Yet it exercises on a small scale, and in regard
to visible Nature, the same natural faculties which are taken up and used
it is true upon other levels, and in subjection to the transcendental sense
in his apprehension of the Invisible Real. Though it is one thing to see truthfully
for an instant the flower in the crannied wall, another to be lifted up to
the apprehension of "eternal Truth, true Love and loved Eternity",
yet both according to their measure are functions of the inward eye, operating
in the "suspension of the mind." (Mysticism, p.302)
Underhill was an Anglican, though attracted to some aspects of Roman Catholicism. Her religious beliefs made an uncritical examination of Nature Mysticism difficult, but probably more valuable than James's. When she says that the absorption in Nature cannot 'in any sense to be equated with the transcendental contemplation of the mystic,' we would have to disagree with her; all the evidence being presented here arguing that, although rare, the Nature mystic reaches the heights of the greatest jnani.
Underhill was one of the very first female professors at Oxford University, and was succeeded much later by another scholar of mysticism, R.C.Zaehner. He was a Roman Catholic, and again his treatment of Nature Mysticism has to be understood in that context. Although he shared James's disquiet about Whitman he is relatively understanding of Jefferies, and invents a new category of mysticism for him.
J.Edward Mercer seems to have written
the only book published in the English language with the title 'Nature Mysticism'
(1912). Mercer was aware of Jefferies and Whitman (both of whom are quoted extensively,
though Jefferies more so) but naturally not of Traherne or Krishnamurti; he
does also cite James' Varieties. Nature Mysticism is scholarly
review of a wide range of sources, stating at the same time that 'metaphysics
and theology are to be avoided' the latter surprising as Mercer was bishop of
Tasmania. He gives us a useful definition of nature mysticism that can complement
the first approximation given earlier:
The goal of the nature-mystics is actual living communion with the Real, in and through its sensuous manifestation. (Nature Mysticism, p.10)
This definition is useful because it avoids the emphasis on ecstatic or otherwise special experiences and focuses more on a continuum, as implied in the word communion. The use of the term 'the Real,' though vague at this point, is also useful if we place it for the time being merely in opposition to the false or fanciful (thus alerting us to the danger of the romantic or merely aesthetic dimension of Nature Mysticism). Mercer is careful also to deal with the charge of anthropomorphism and also deals with the issue of animism (quoting Wordsworth's recollection of a boyhood incident on a lake where a peak seems to come alive to him). Mercer is oddly cautious about Nature itself, spending many chapters on the elements (eight on water, two on air, and one on fire) before dealing briefly with vegetation; he more or less rules out a discussion of animal life. Despite this the book is valuable, particularly for its conviction that nature mysticism is worthwhile in itself and also for the view that its pursuance can be fostered.
We turn now to a brief consideration of the occult view of Nature, partly because it is raised by most of the scholars of mysticism, and partly because we have already established that the occult provides a useful boundary and distinction with the transcendent. We find occult descriptions of Nature in the 16th and 17th century writings of Jacob Boehme, William Blake, and Emmanuel Swedenborg. It is present in some degree in the Romantics of the 18th and 19th centuries, in Goethe and in a highly developed form in the Anthroposophy of Rudolf Steiner. We have seen that both Emerson and William James see Nature Mysticism as a form of the 'ancient' religion or paganism, by which they imply that it has little to do with the transcendent.
To tease out the real relationships between Nature, the transcendent and the occult, we need to recap an earlier discussion on the development of the spiritual impulse. Anthropologists have found that in Upper Palaeolithic times, and in cultures that have up to very recently lived effectively a similar life, a more or less universal spiritual impulse existed which can be called Shamanism (or Paganism, earth religion, animism, or other terms). The characteristic of Shamanism is that the world is seen as imbued with spirit, that is each entity in the natural world has its corresponding spirit, whether mountains, trees, or animals. Although details vary, the rituals and social cohesion that is created out of this basic starting point are remarkably consistent across epochs and continents.
From Shamanism there evolves a more symbolic religion which we could call polytheism, where the spirits have been mythologised into deities, particularly noticeable in the emergence of the city state where its inhabitants are somewhat cushioned from the basic forces of Nature. This is typified by the Athens of Plato, who incidentally seemed to have little interest in the natural world outside the city gates.
Polytheism in turn develops into or gives way to monotheism. Monotheism reduces the spiritual world to a single essence, God. Nevertheless this single entity is 'wholly other' to use the words of Rudolf Otto, and the supplicant retains the 'fascinans tremendum' that has its roots in the ancient impulses in Shamanism.
Monotheism in turn yields to the transcendent, where the single 'One' is found not to be 'wholly other', but one's own true identity; the state of non-dualism. This very brief summary is necessarily crude, but, it has been pointed out before, all four stages seem to coexist in Hinduism, allowing for all types of person within society to find their own spiritual path. This is an important point, and in great contrast to the Christian West which effectively stopped in its development at the monotheistic stage, neither sanctioning the transcendent (as a goal for the individual) nor permitting the more atavistic impulses of Shamanism or polytheism any legitimate expression.
Our discussion of Nature Mysticism can then be seen as an enquiry as to whether the impulse behind it is transcendent, i.e. of the highest spiritual order, or occult (Shamanistic), i.e. an atavistic impulse. There is of course a fascinating example of the collision between an originally transcendent religion and a purely Shamanistic one, in the case of Tibetan Buddhism, where the admittedly Tantric form of Buddhism encountered the Bon native religion between the 7th and 10th centuries. In this case the separate impulses are catered for in different levels of the resulting religion, and there seems little indication that Nature itself is involved in the transcendent side of Tibetan Buddhism.
So, would James and Emerson be right in seeing Nature Mysticism as a 'return' to an older form of religion, i.e. Shamanism or a related form? The answer must be no, because, as we see in the works of Jefferies, Krishnamurti, Whitman, and to a lesser extent in the other examples in this section, animism plays no part. The impulse is instead aesthetic, at least in the first instance, and as it grows become unitive, that is it leads the Nature mystic to the non-dual space of transcendence. In contrast the occult Nature of Rudolf Steiner for example, has no transcendent implication. In fact Steiner raises a host of questions in this context, for example is not his Anthroposophy a thorough updating of the Shamanistic/animist world-view for the modern era? If so, does this not update the atavistic spirit-oriented impulse into a transcendent one? The answers to these questions lie in the realisation that Theosophy is an occult Christianity, with its customary boundaries to transcendence, but with a hierarchy of spirit beings that belong more to a polytheistic outlook. Inherited from its Christian basis is the view in Anthroposophy of the 'fall', and Steiner comments on the inevitable sadness of spirit beings when first incarnated in the material world.
The value of the distinctions being made here is not to prioritise one outlook over another, but to make clearer for an individual where their spiritual path may lie. To call Shamanism 'atavistic' is not to denigrate it at all, but to locate it in relation to the transcendent, and to help distinguish the Nature Mysticism under discussion here from other forms of spiritual life.
