Textual Animism and Christianity

I just noticed that three months have passed since my last post. I am sorry for that, but also happy since I was busy with other exciting things (mostly).

I am reading a book by an eco-philosopher David Abram, The Spell of the Sensous. In it, Abram developed an approach to the questions regarding our relatedness to/with nature and other beings on the planet which builds on the works of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger - in other words, it is very much "phenomenological" in terms of his philosophical approach.

There are lots of great topics explored in the book, but I would like to mention one in particular which strikes me as very relevant for Christian spirituality. Abram traces the historical replacement of oral culture which was more embedded in the interrelatedness of humans with our surroundings like plants, animals and seas, by a written (alphabetically) culture which had a tendency of somewhat removing us from our natural surroundings. But, the focus on the written texts done by humans after this technological revolution resembles, in many ways, our former way of relating to natural world, claims Abram. Here is how he puts it:

"In learning to read we must break the spontaneous participation of our eyes and our ears in the surrounding terrain (where they had ceaselessly converged in the synaesthetic encounter with animals, plants, and streams [ for hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and escaping the dangers of natural world]) in order to recouple those senses upon the flat surface of the page. As a [native American] elder focuses her eyes upon cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives. As non-human animals, plants, and even 'inanimate' rivers once spoke to our ancestors, so the 'inert' letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless - as mysterious as a talking stone." (Abram, Spell of the Sensous, 131)

Abram goes on to claim that "it is only when a culture shifts its participation to these printed letters that the stones fall silent. Only as our senses transfer their animating magic to the written word do the trees become mute, the other animals dumb". (same page).

Many might not agree with such a "magical" view of a very everyday activity as reading. The claim that stones fall silent when a culture focuses to the written word also sounds simplified. But even if Abram is at least partly right here as long as phenomenology of reading is concerned, interesting questions can be asked about Christian spirituality and Bible-reading practices:

If we are doing a form of "textual animism" when reading the Bible, what does this teach us about that aspect of Christian spiritual experience and practice? In other words, if we see the Bible-reading as not merely receiving information about God but as experience, the spirituality of Bible-reading could be related with wider mystical, felt way of experiencing all physical reality which surrounds us, most primary first: other humans, animals, stones, trees and rivers. Can Abram's philosophy shed any light on Christian ages-old doctrine of "the two books of God": The Bible and nature, and of relation between the two?

But more problematically: Has Christianity which has its beginnings in very urban (not rural) cultures, with its strong focus on texts (reading and interpreting the books of the Bible) dampen the voices of nature for Christians, so that Christians have harder time to hear those voices? Throughout Middle Ages, nature was increasingly described either in early scientific/mechanistic ways (less so) or (more) by way of Greeco-Roman mythology, in other words, with pagan religious narratives which were to be taken "only as stories". Did Christianity with its focus on the other world and abstract entities (God, angels) have problems to accommodate the strong presence and experiential force that our co-habitant natural environment continued to have on us, so that nature-mysticism was essentially "given up" to paganism? Did the excessive focus on a group of texts (Bible) and interpretations of those texts (which developed into abstract theology) have something to do with that?