William Wordsworth and Nature Mysticism

Adding a little but brilliant piece of poetry to the previous theoretical post.


. . . And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things." (Tintern Abbey)

For the whole poem, see Tintern Abbey and for some background and analysis (from which you are free to take only as much as you like, and ignore the rest) see Tintern Abbey analysis.

This poem reminds me, just as psalms and many other poems do, on Schleiermacher's suggestion that poetry and rhetoric are primary expressions of religious feeling, and that theology is "only" secondary.

Nature Mysticism: The Christian Way

Some Christians think that nature mysticism is a pagan thing, or pantheist at best. There is a reluctance against taking the spiritual experiential engagement with nature "too seriously" in Christianity. Revealed religion is pitied against "natural religion" which supposedly can't bring you to Christ and the forgiveness of sins.

Of course, nature does not speak or show the very specific historical name "Jesus Christ" to people's ears or eyes, respectively. Yet our living in nature enables a deep spiritual experience which can bring us in a real communion with God, renew our "hearts and minds" (to use the phrase of political rhetoric in a somewhat different way).

Caroline Franks Davis argues in her book The Evidential Force of Religious Experience that nature mysticism is deeply compatible with Christianity:

“Nature mysticism and other extrovertive experiences are often associated with pantheism, but there is nothing to prevent other types of theists from having such experiences. The difference is that whereas pantheists feel that what they have seen in nature is the whole of the divine, monotheists (or pan-en-theists) believe that the divine has transcendent aspects as well as immanent ones.” (Davis, Evidential Force of Religious Experience, p. 60)

One feature which is philosophically very interesting is that through experiencing the bond with all creation, the subject-object distinction in experience can be transcended (objects being the beings or entities in nature). The self, when it is experientially confronted with its own deep sense of createdness which it shares with all surrounding nature or Universe, can become loose at the edges, and therefore humbled in a very positive and healthy way. Self as a construction can "relax" and just be creation. And through such experience God's reality can be felt.

So, in Christian nature mysticism, the experience of “dissolution of the subject-object distinction” (in whatever degree) happens in relation of one with nature or universe, whereas the better known kind of Christian mystical tradition describes this dissolution happening when the self is submerging or being unified with God himself. In the extreme case of the ‘nature version’, it is experienced that one, the self, or “the subject” is "melted away" in union with creation. God is not an object of the experience (in either version of Christian mysticism), but in Christian nature mysticism God’s creative presence is realized through the felt experience of one’s belonging to and being related to nature or Universe.