CHRISTIE'S PROGRESS JOURNAL: OCTOBER 1-15, 2004

10-1-04 I am reading a book called,Russian Narrative and Visual Arts: Varieties of Seeing, edited by Roger Anderson and Paul Debreczeny (University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 1994). Here’s what I found to be relevant for my research in Nature Theology, particularly in Russia:

-“…[A]side from the most familiar and conventional Christian views, the natural environment—the subject of landscape painting—was variously regarded as grist for the microscope, as a decorative setting for the contemplation of moral values , as an anthropomorphic organism whose bosom heaves in sympathy with suffering humankind, as a forest of symbols or as a pantheist temple, or as the formative environment of the social organism. (12)” (*Did Russian Orthodox believers see Nature as a pantheist temple?)

-“Verbal art…has always been able to ‘depict’ more easily than visual art a scene shrouded in mist or snow, or even in complete darkness. (15)”

-ICONS (originated in portraiture…as it developed, it came to include much more than merely the central figure…other figures, biblical references, martyrdom, landscape, and architecture were added to the compositions.) (23) (*When was Nature added to iconography? Who first incorporated it into her/his composition? Why was it added?)

-Even though romantic imagery originated in foreign countries, successful Russian artists endowed it with a Russian meaning. (36) (*Synthesizing romantic landscapes into Russia’s history of iconography helped make it distinctly Russian art.)

-Sea image in Russian romantic poetry. (28-9) “The sea for the romantics may also symbolize boundless space, in which context it is always associated with the sky, and the horizon…In Russia, the invocation of open space becomes particularly important, and the blurring of the distinction between sea and land develops a peculiar significance. (28)” (*The significance being freedom.)

10-3-04 As I find more about the importance of icons with Russian history, I would like to look deeper into the role of nature within the iconography. Particularly within The Holy Trinity, used by Andrei Tarkovsky in Andrei Rublyov.  There is a tree just to the right of the middle figure. Was Tarkovsky the first to incorporate nature into icons? Was this accepted/condemned?

10-4-04 I am interested in studying the role of Sabbath within religious traditions, as well as within environmental thought. Is Sabbath valuable to us today? Can/ should there be, or is there, a universal, weekly day of rest. What would it entail? Can we declare a periodic Sabbath for all the land? What laws would go into effect as a result. Wendell Berry addresses such issues in his writings.

10-6-04 Last night I went for a walk. It was about 10pm…very dark...there was a warm breezy wind…a fabulous layout of stars. I walked for about an hour, just thinking about life. Thoughts of new-life and renewal were triggered every so often by the deep orange tips of maple leaves. I thought about seasons in nature and how they represent seasons in life…autumn is gorgeous for a while, but those lovely leaves must fall dead to the earth. They lie under wet snow for months, decaying and decomposing. Yet, this is essential as they become valuable nutrients for the new-growth and beauty of spring, which has to come about in order for the voluptuous greens of summer to flourish. It doesn’t make the autumns and winters of life more enjoyable, but it is a comfort to know that if we just wait long enough, summer does come.

10-7-04 The difficulty with a topic like Nature Theology is that much of the findings from my research must be inferred. This becomes a sticky realm of opinions and deep inference (sometimes so deep that the inferrer (myself) may drown in over-inference…death by too much reading-into-things.) Yet, I feel a passion to put a voice to age-old interaction between Nature and theology. For so long they have influenced each other, but perhaps we have just never known the connections, let alone how to converse about them. I see the pursuit of my individual major as my attempt to give voice to the ever-existing, even essential, interaction between the natural world and the spiritual world.

10-8-04 Today I went to the Music Library to listen to Stravinsky’s Firebird. I would like to incorporate some kind of music into the puppet show in the spring, but I’m thinking it will be more organic than the symphony ballet that Stravinsky put together. I want to incorporate the drone of whistling bottles, bamboo percussion instruments/flutes, a rain stick, bongos…It would be grand to have sounds from these musical instruments characterize the movement of the characters in the puppet show, specifically the Firebird. There could be three main musical “movements”: the Appearance of the Firebird (accompanied by her soothing dance), the Capture of the Firebird, and the Lullaby of the Firebird (like in Stravinsky’s ballet)…something soothing, lulling, and beautiful for the audience.

I’d like the character of the Firebird to be ravishingly gorgeous, soothing in her movement, adorned with flowing, colorful “feathers”.

10-9-04 I began reading a book called, Natural Science and the Spiritual Life, by John Baillie, NY, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952. It is a well-written exploration into the relationship between the natural sciences (the study of the natural world) and faith. Here are some things he points out about said relationship:

-“A distinction is drawn between matter and spirit, and it is said that science concerns only the former and faith only the latter. Both these statements, however, are manifestly untrue. Faith as well as science has something to say about the physical world, and science as well as faith has something to say about the world of spirit. (10)”

-“The presuppositions of ancient science were all associated with a pagan theology. The physical world was conceived to have been generated by God, or to have emanated from Him, or at the very least to be of the same nature as God. Nature itself was divine and therefore held the ultimate principle of its explanation within itself. It was a self-explanatory system. (18-19)”

-Bacon and Descartes thought knowledge of Nature was inductive…its patterns are hidden from us. They got this idea from Christian revelation. “They learned it from…the Christian doctrine of creation which teaches that the world is not itself divine but is contingent upon the divine Will. (20)” (*Apostle Paul says in Romans 11:33 & 34: “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counselor?”)

-“[M]odern science could not have come into being until the ancient pagan conception of the natural world had given place to the Christian. (25)”

-“Knowing the force and action of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens and the rest of our environment as directly as we know the different skills of human artisans, we may put the former no less than the latter to their proper uses, and thus render ourselves masters and lords of nature.” (29) –Descartes (from “Discourse on Method”)

-“As long as man had found himself in communion with nature and had based his life upon mythology, he could not raise himself about nature through an act of apprehension by means of the natural sciences or technics. It is impossible for man to build railways, invent the telegraph or telephone, while living in the fear of demons. Thus for man to be able to treat nature like a mechanism, it is necessary for the demonic inspiration of nature and man’s communion with it to have died out in the human consciousness.” –Nicolas Berdyaev

(* It’s easy to hate or abuse something or someone from which we've separated/estranged ourselves.)

-“Our religion has indeed taught us that man has dominion over nature, but it has alsothought us that this dominion is to be exercised for the glory of God and the salvation of the soul, and that its use is therefore to be controlled by obedience to divinely ordained laws without consideration of convenience or comfort or material gain or even survival. (36)”

   (*Genesis 1:1-2:3 subdue earth, have dominion over it; Genesis 2:4b-2:25 till it, keep it)

-Bacon: “I had rather believe all the fables of the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind…For while the mind of man looketh upon secondary causes, it may sometimes rest in them, and go no further; but when it beholdeth the chain of them, confederate and linked together, it must needs fly to Providence and Deity.” (37) (*Bacon, Descartes, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo all believed the world was under God’s guiding hand.)

-Greek scientists had an “intellectualized form of nature worship,” and that “this nature is thought of as being changeless and eternal. (31)”

-“When nature is believed to have no preordained meaning or purpose in itself, the speculative interest in it fails, and the remaining concern is only to subdue its inherent purposefulness to our own chosen ends. (35)”

-“It is not only about the world that many important things can be discovered by scientific means, but also about ourselves. For man not only transcends nature but is at the same time part of it. (40)”

10-10-04 Today I went to the Sunday morning worship service at the Main Street Moravian Church in Northfield. The pastor led the congregation in a liturgy unlike almost every other I have heard. It was a Stewardship Liturgy. It addressed stewardship of the land, of our water, of our air, of other people. It was refreshing to participate in, and a great reminder about how to coexist with nature!

This got me to thinking about the biblical idea of environmental stewardship, and why religious people ought to treat the natural environment with reverence and care.

10-11-04 Last night, I read sections of a book called, A Natural Theology of the Arts: Imprint of the Spirit, by Anthony Monti, Ashgate, 2003.

-In the foreword of the book, John Polkinghorne (Queens College, University of Cambridge, England) wrote: “If God is the ground of all that is, then everything will, in its own way, bear some testimony to the Creator. Exploring these ‘hints of divinity’ is the activity called natural theology. The rational beauty and transparency of the universe, together with the finely tuned fruitfulness of its history, have suggested to many that we see here signals of the presence of a divine Mind and Purpose.”

-“Natural theology may be defined as the search for the knowledge of God by the exercise of reason and the inspection of the world. (29)” –John Polkinghorne

-“Emphasizing the infinite qualitative distance between God and creation, Barth insists that there is nothing that man can do to reach God; any contact between the two, therefore, must be entirely God’s doing, through the sheer objectivity of his revelation of himself to us. (30)”

-Colin Gunton defines natural theology as “that knowledge of God which is obtainable independently of revelation.” (30)  Gunton has a theology of nature… creation’s createdness points to God.

-“Artistic creation does not copy God’s creation, but continues it [so that] the artist, whether he knows it or not, is consulting God when he looks at things.”  –Jacques Maritain (34)

-“If natural theology is a ‘remainder’ left over from the paradisal knowledge of God, it is then at the same time an anticipation of knowledge of God in glory…All knowledge of the world ‘as’ creation is hence a metaphorical knowledge of this world as parable of the world to come.” –Jurgen Moltmann (57)

10-11-04 I read a lecture given by Edmund W. Sinnot in 1950, called Science And Religion: A Necessary Partnership, Edward W. Hazen Foundation, Connecticut. The main theme of the lecture was the necessity to unite the natural sciences and religious faith. Here are some things he stated that support his theme:

-“The sciences are great liberators. They have freed man from much of the ignorance and superstitious fear which natural events used to inspire in him. He looks the universe in the face as one who learns her secrets and can help guide her destiny. The tree of knowledge he has eaten of, and the tree of life seems almost at his hands. (5)”

-“The conception of nature as friendly to man, the abode of cosmic purpose and spiritual values, the dominion of a Divine Power who guides it toward some high destiny, is for many now the great illusion, destroyed forever by evidence that the universe is simply a vast mechanism of matter in motion, rigidly determined, bearing man irresistibly along but toward no rational end; displaying order, but an order without meaning or purpose and surely without God. (9)”

-“Science deals with reality through intellect alone, but religion involves, in addition, these deep and vivid contacts with something which the mind can never reach. The two contrasting disciplines, which men have sought so long to ‘reconcile,’ seem but different ways of looking at the same universe. (14)”

10-14-04 I read parts of a booklet called, Religious and Ethical Perspectives on the Environment. The packet addresses the concept of God-given dominion, saying: “God created the heavens and the Earth and all that is in them. Since it is God’s creation, the whole created order (the whole Earth) has value beyond its usefulness for humanity. The Earth and all that is in it must be respected and cherished because God made it and saw that it was good…Dominion has often been understood primarily as humanity’s license to use the Earth and all that lives on it without limitation…theologians have stressed the necessity to understand dominion in the context of its partner, stewardship—the responsibility to care for the Earth and all the creatures on it. (24)”

-The packet also brings up the idea of the existence of the web of life, saying, “Humanity and the rest of creation form an interdependent community. Nature depends on human stewardship to preserve the glories of the creation. (25)” My first thought after reading this was: Really? It nature not self-maintaining or resilient at all?!?

-The packet’s content suggests that there are many motives for being a steward to the natural environment. Those motives include: beauty through preservation of the natural environment, health through halting destruction of the natural environment, and justice leading to good care of the environment.

10-15-04 In my Campus Ecology course last spring, we read a chapel talk by Dr. Larry Rasmussen called, The Everlasting Covenant, given in Boe Chapel on Sunday, February 2, 2003. A main theme within his talk is the disconnection between faith and action, particularly regarding the natural environment. He says, “We have very little in the way of feelings of intimacy and kinship with the rest of nature. We don’t consider ourselves bone of its bone and flesh of its flesh, though we indeed are.”

-Rasmussen points on that the primordial calling and command is “To till and serve.” He says it’s not the first commandment, but “it’s the first one to humans and it’s long, long, long before Moses and Sinai. It comes at the dawn of our species…”

-He speaks of all the creatures in the world, saying: “[T]hey , too, are all from adamah [topsoil] and return to it and they, each and every one, are all recipients of the very breath of God that gives them life. They, too, receive the Spirit; they, too, are kin.” Later in his talk, he refers to other creatures as humankinds’ co-siblings of creation.

-He suggests that environmental degradation could be deterred if a change occurs in the way we live. He says, “It would mean learning over again to say yes and to say no in a Christian asceticism that loves the Earth fiercely in a simple way of life, a life of material simplicity and spiritual richness…How we live is the issue. And let us at least begin by forswearing false gods. Let us worship, not the God of the economy or the non-negotiable American way of life, but the God of the sparrow, the God of field and tree and children in city streets, the God of all those now departed species, the God whose creating still gives birth to stars and spins out galaxies billions of light years beyond us. Let us confess that we have been worshipping a tribal God, a species God, even a God of class and race and clan. Let us begin to understand that any God-talk that does not take in all 15 billion years of the universe to date, and all 50 or 100 million galaxies, is simply quaint, the worship of species idol…Till this gift of life, and serve it, embrace it, cherish it. Keep the everlasting covenant.”

-This weekly prayer is said in Boe Chapel: “We dedicate ourselves to the care and redemption of all that You have created.” (Amen.)