Divinity and Nature

My interest in nature as a manifestation of the divine has burgeoned over the past year or two. Expressing these kinds of sentiments has always been difficult without falling into the trap of some kind of New Age clichés, so living with Romantic poetry for a semester has been ideal for finding well articulated expressions of this idea. In Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature, I was particularly struck when he wrote, “It is not a novel observation that religion has been in decline in the modern era. Despite the recent rise in fundamentalism, the crisis of belief continues. Many people, including me, have overcome it to a greater or lesser degree by locating God in nature” (pg 71). In the hundred-odd pages of diatribe against burning fossil fuels that we read, I found McKibben’s musings on God in nature to be the most resonant, not only personally, but with the Romantic poetry we’ve been studying.

Along with rejecting most of their cultural and societal norms, the early Romantics (at least Coleridge and Wordsworth) expressed no strong faith in England’s Anglican church. Like McKibben, the bulk of their spiritual needs were fulfilled by the divinity they saw in the natural world. In “The Eolian Harp,” Coleridge proposes a pantheistic outlook: “what if all of animated nature / Be but organic haps diversely framed, / That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps / Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of all?” (lines 44-48).

The spiral symbols for the World Pantheist Movement seeks to express evolution, eternity, spirituality, and growth.

In Warren’s post on the poem, he writes, “The final lines seem to promote some integration of the lovers, Nature, and some god-like figure (which may be Nature itself).” I agree with Warren, and would extend his idea to say that Coleridge is recognizing a unity of all living things as embodiments of God. Significantly, he ends the poem with dismay over his lover’s rejection of his theism for more traditional Christian beliefs. “Meek daughter of Christ! Well hast thou said and holily dispraised / These shapings of the unregenerate mind” (53-55). Though Coleridge does not directly explain his relationship with organized religion, we can infer from these lines that he finds it more problematic than McKibben, a self-professed Methodist and weekly churchgoer.

Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” further explores his God/Nature relationship. Jim wrote, “An education by nature… is inherently one that brings one closer to God.” Indeed, Coleridge recognizes the mountains, lakes, clouds, and surely any natural phenomenon as the language of God. I think Coleridge’s choice of the word ‘language’ is particularly genius, for what better way of describing nature? To Coleridge, nature is how God communicates with us. It is Coleridge’s greatest source of awe, of eternity, and of something far greater than man. Connor called the poem “a yearning desire to find a perception of life that lies outside of dimly cluttered cities… He longs for an understanding of the world much closer to Nature, and God, than city life.” Coleridge has trouble recognizing God in the increasingly industrialized urban centers, and this ultimately ties in to the Romantics rejection of the Enlightenment. Jonathan Bate even wrote that “What is truly radical about "Frost at Midnight" is Coleridge's self-representation as a father in the traditional maternal posture of watching over a sleeping baby. In ecofeminist terms, this realignment of gender roles clears the way for a caring as opposed to an exploitative relationship with the earth.” The so-called ‘progress’ of the industrial revolution and expanding cities were actually increasingly larger obstacles to the quest to find and understand God. Here, Coleridge and McKibben would wholeheartedly agree. In McKibben’s eyes, man’s effect on nature is destructive to what Nature, and therefore God, used to mean: supremacy, eternity, and divinity.

In Tennyson’s In Memoriam, the relationship between God and Nature is more complicated. The Victorian Web says the Victorian “crisis of faith” has been exaggerated, and only took place in certain intellectual circles. But for Tennyson, he spent decades trying to reconcile ideas of God with events in his own life. There were about half a dozen posts discussing Tennyson’s view of God and Nature being irreconcilable. In section LV Tennyson asks, “Are God and Nature then in strife, / That Nature lends such evil dreams? / So careful of the type she seems, / So careless of the single life.” Devon interpreted this as “his general sentiment seems to be that the seemingly random viciousness of nature… negates the existence of a loving God.” But the beauty of Tennyson’s poem is that he ultimately concludes that he can’t understand God, and even if he could, he certainly couldn’t express it through a poem. The Victorian Web asserts that, “he makes explicit that no compact solution exists in his poetry… Instead, the reader will follow his true experiences struggling with his grief for his late friend, experience it with him, and draw some closeness to God by acknowledging the complexities between the human and divine rather than claiming to truly see and understand his ways.”

For Tennyson, his faith was challenged by more than just the death of his close friend, but by the entire scope of the geological and biological sciences of his time. He was grappling with the notion that poetry maybe couldn’t save the Earth, that things in nature can end.

1851 fossil record. The discovery of fossils of extinct species was perhaps the first time humans realized that something in nature can truly 'end.'

The rapidly changing world in Tennyson's time raised questions about the nature of divinity. Bill McKibben recognizes the same phenomenon happening today. The human concept of divinity is always changing alongside our conception of nature and understanding of the universe at large. If Bill McKibben's doomsday predictions do in fact come true, it will be interesting to see how the 'end of nature' affects humanity's view of the divine.

Citations

Bate, Jonathan. "Living With the Weather." Studies in Romanticism v35, 1996, 431-447.

McKibben, Bill. The End of Nature. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

NB: For the life of me, I cannot get my indents to stick, even after numerous edit attempts. Sorry!!