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Sacred Nature

Restoring Our Ancient Bond with the Natural World

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From one of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world, a profound exploration of the spiritual power of nature—and an urgent call to reclaim that power in everyday life.

Since the beginning of time, humankind has looked upon nature and seen the divine. In the writings of the great thinkers across religions, the natural world inspires everything from fear, to awe, to tranquil contemplation; God, or however one defined the sublime, was present in everything. Yet today, even as we admire a tree or take in a striking landscape, we rarely see nature as sacred.

In this short but deeply powerful book, the best-selling historian of religion Karen Armstrong re-sacralizes nature for modern times. Drawing on her vast knowledge of the world’s religious traditions, she vividly describes nature’s central place in spirituality across the centuries. In bringing this age-old wisdom to life, Armstrong shows modern readers how to rediscover nature’s potency and form a connection to something greater than ourselves.
 
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year

“Karen Armstrong takes the hugest subjects of human searching—faith, myth, origins—and in her writing they become windows, each opening into yet another connecting room or landscape. . . . Masterly. . . . Intensely beautiful. . . . The global challenge to keep more silence, to slow down, seems formidable. But if even a few people sit down and read Sacred Nature, it will be a good start.” —Lucy Lethbridge, The Tablet

“Armstrong has written a rich and subtle exploration of the sacredness of nature, filled with a timeless wisdom and deep humanity that comes from a lifetime spent studying religious thought. . . . Much has been written on the scientific and technological aspects of climate change. . . . But Armstrong’s book is both more personal and more profound. Its urgent message is that hearts and minds need to change if we are to once more learn to revere our beautiful and fragile planet.” —PD Smith, The Guardian

“Armstrong’s book makes a vital contribution to discussions on climate change. . . . Her efforts and intentions here are simple: this book is not a rejection of Christianity or Western spirituality, but a rejection of the spiritual outlook that keeps us from seeing the natural world as a part of ourselves. . . . In the face of catastrophe, Armstrong is urging us to return to the spirit.” —Farooq Chaudhry, Chicago Review of Books

“Sacred Nature abounds in interesting facts about Asian religions, and how-to advice on calming the world’s frenzy and hearing the ‘still small voice’ of the inner life. The book is a spiritual time capsule of the post-Christian soul in crisis, a lamentation in the key of Greta Thunberg, with undertones of Carl Jung.” —Dominic Green, The Wall Street Journal

“Grand in its reach. . . . Armstrong’s book . . . offers a polycontinental, multi-cultural look at the ways faith and space coexisted for centuries. . . . It’s a perfect book to emerge from a period of isolation and contemplation.” —Andrew Dansby, Houston Chronicle

“An accessible account of how a wider religious perspective might contribute to humans’ adopting a more solicitous attitude to nature.” —Rowan Williams, New Statesman

“Armstrong . . . delivers a searching, spiritual take on climate change. . . . The illuminating examinations of a broad array of religious traditions are thought-provoking and have the power to change the way readers see the world and humanity’s place within it. Eye-opening and wide-ranging, this original take on climate change edifies.” —Publishers Weekly

“Armstrong taps into her encyclopedic knowledge to offer a way forward for a hurting world. . . . Tying together dramatic creation tales, complex moral systems, and scriptural musings on the natural world, Armstrong argues for gratitude, mutual caregiving, and stewardship of resources, among other practices, to help bring us closer to our environment and, ultimately, to each other. . . . Thought-provoking wisdom regarding the natural world.” —Kirkus
1

Mythos and Logos

A great deal of environmental discussion is scientific: we constantly hear about emissions, particles, pollution levels and the ozone layer. This provides us with essential information and we have become familiar with the terminology. But it does not move us emotionally. Today we tend to use the term “myth” rather vaguely to mean something that is not true. When we hear of gods walking on the earth, a dead man striding out of his tomb or a sea parting to release an enslaved people, we dismiss these tales as “only myths.” But in the past, “myth” meant something entirely different.

For most of human history, there were two ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge about the world: mythos and logos. Both were essential to comprehending reality: they were not in opposition to one another but complementary modes of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence. Mythos was concerned with what was considered timeless. It looked both back to the origins of life and culture and inward to the deepest levels of human experience. It was concerned with meaning not practical affairs. Humans are ​­meaning ​­seeking creatures. If our lives lack significance, we fall very easily into despair, and it was mythos that introduced people to deeper truths, making sense of their moribund and precarious lives by directing their attention to the eternal and universal. As far as we know, cats do not agonise about the feline condition, worry about the plight of cats in other parts of the world, or try to see life from a different perspective. But from a very early period humans felt compelled to devise stories that enabled them to place their lives in a different setting and give them a conviction ​­that—​against all the depressing evidence to the ​­contrary—​life had some meaning and value.

A myth is an event which, in some sense, happened once, but which also happens all the time. Mythology points beyond the chaotic flux of historical events to what is timeless in human life, helping us to glimpse the stable core of reality. It is also rooted in what we call the unconscious mind. Myths are an ancient form of psychology. When people told tales of heroes descending into the underworld, struggling through labyrinths or fighting with monsters, they were bringing to light fears and desires from the obscure regions of the subconscious mind, which is not accessible by purely logical investigation but has a profound effect on our experience and behaviour. Myth could not be conveyed by rational proof; its insights were intuitive, like those of art and poetry. What’s more, myth became a reality only when it was embodied in rituals and ceremonies, enabling participants to apprehend the deeper currents of life. Myth and ritual were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first. Without spiritual practice, the mythical story would make no ​­sense—​in rather the same way as a musical score remains opaque to most of us until it is interpreted instrumentally.

We are far more conversant today with logos, which is quite different from mythical thinking. Unlike mythos, logos corresponds to objective facts. Logos is wholly pragmatic: it is the rational mode of thought that enables human beings to function. It is the basis of our modern society. We use our logical powers when we want to make something happen, to achieve something or to persuade others to adopt a particular opinion. Where myth looks back to origins, logos forges ahead, develops new insights and invents something fresh. It also, for good and ill, helps us to achieve greater control over the natural environment.

But logos, like mythos, has limitations. It cannot answer questions about the ultimate value of human life. It cannot assuage our sorrow. It can unveil wonderful new facts about the physical universe and make things work more efficiently, but it cannot explain the meaning of life. From a very early period, Homo sapiens understood this instinctively. He used logos to develop new weapons and hunting skills; and he turned to myth, with its accompanying rituals, to reconcile him to the inevitable pain and grief that might otherwise overwhelm him.

Before the modern period, both mythos and logos were regarded as essential, but by the eighteenth century the people of Europe and America had achieved such astonishing success in science and technology that they began to discount myth as false and primitive. Society was no longer wholly dependent on a surplus of agricultural ​­produce—​like all previous ​­civilisations—​but relied increasingly on technolog­ical resources and the constant reinvestment of capital. This freed modern society from many of the constraints of traditional culture, whose agrarian base had always been precarious. The long process of modernisation took some three centuries and involved profound changes: industrialisation, the British agricultural revolution, the political reform of society and an intellectual “enlightenment” that ­dismissed myth as futile and outmoded. Yet while our demythologised world may be comfortable for those of us fortunate enough to live in First World countries, it has not become the earthly paradise predicted by Francis Bacon and other Enlightenment philosophers.

We must disabuse ourselves of the fallacy that myth is untrue or represents an inferior mode of thought. We may be unable to return wholesale to a premodern sensibility, but we can acquire a more nuanced understanding of the myths of our ancestors because they still have something to teach us. And of course, we continue to create our own myths, even if we don’t describe them as such. The twentieth century saw the emergence of some very destructive myths that ended in massacre and genocide. We cannot counter these bad myths with reason alone because undiluted logos cannot deal with ​­deep-​­rooted fears, desires and neuroses. We need good myths that help us to identify with our fellow human beings, and not just with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need good myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which challenges and transcends our solipsistic and tribal egocentricity. And, crucially, we need good myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, because unless there is a spiritual revolution that challenges the destructiveness of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.

The great myths of the past presented the natural world as imbued with sacrality. ​­But—​I ​­repeat—​a myth makes no sense unless it is translated into practical action. Myths were not just cautionary tales: they had to be put into practice and were therefore always accompanied by ritual. Ritual, like myth, is often misunderstood in our pragmatic world; in the early modern period, it was rejected even by religious people as outdated superstition. Yet ritual ceremonies were indispensable to premodern religion, and they never were wholly spiritual affairs but involved the body and, through the body, the emotions. Neurophysicists tell us that, without being consciously aware of it, we receive and transmit important information through our senses, physical movements and gestures. Carefully crafted rituals making use of emotive music, dance and drama can dramatically bring a mythical event of the distant past into the present. If devised with sufficient skill, they can also yield an aesthetic ecstasy that enables participants to “stand outside” their mundane selves for a moment. By acting out a ritual role with skill and concentration, we can leave the self behind and, paradoxically, achieve ​­self-​­enhancement. Through the arts we experience a more intense form of being and feel part of something larger, more momentous and complete. Only if myth is translated into action do we discover its relevance and meaning.

Many of our ancestors’ myths that we shall consider in this book taught them how to revere the natural environment. Unlike in our modern environmental discourse, nature was presented and experienced imaginatively and aesthetically rather than scientifically, and this involved the emotions and the body. In the next chapter, we shall see that different cultures across the world saw nature as imbued with the sacred in remarkably similar ways. Perhaps this perspective is built into the structure of the human mind. But the religious ceremonies were not just aesthetic exercises: they demanded practical commitment and response. We shall see that these rituals were hard work. They were ​­time-​­consuming and demanding; they involved, quite literally, sacrifice. They not only expressed a deep anxiety about the sustainability of our world but made great demands on participants, who were expected not just to honour the divine in nature but also to reform ​­themselves—​to transcend their egos and reach out to all their fellow human beings. If today we have come to realise that devotion to the planet requires devotion to everything and everybody on it, then this is a perception that dates back to the very beginning of humanity.
© Michael Lionstar
KAREN ARMSTRONG is the author of numerous books on religious affairs, including The Case for God, A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha and The Great Transformation, as well as a memoir, The Spiral Staircase. Her work has been translated into forty-five languages. In 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and began working with TED on the Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public, and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The charter was launched globally in the fall of 2009. In 2013 Armstrong was awarded the British Academy's inaugural Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and in 2017 the Princess of Asturias Prize for Social Sciences. She lives in London. View titles by Karen Armstrong

About

From one of the most original thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world, a profound exploration of the spiritual power of nature—and an urgent call to reclaim that power in everyday life.

Since the beginning of time, humankind has looked upon nature and seen the divine. In the writings of the great thinkers across religions, the natural world inspires everything from fear, to awe, to tranquil contemplation; God, or however one defined the sublime, was present in everything. Yet today, even as we admire a tree or take in a striking landscape, we rarely see nature as sacred.

In this short but deeply powerful book, the best-selling historian of religion Karen Armstrong re-sacralizes nature for modern times. Drawing on her vast knowledge of the world’s religious traditions, she vividly describes nature’s central place in spirituality across the centuries. In bringing this age-old wisdom to life, Armstrong shows modern readers how to rediscover nature’s potency and form a connection to something greater than ourselves.
 
A New Yorker Best Book of the Year

“Karen Armstrong takes the hugest subjects of human searching—faith, myth, origins—and in her writing they become windows, each opening into yet another connecting room or landscape. . . . Masterly. . . . Intensely beautiful. . . . The global challenge to keep more silence, to slow down, seems formidable. But if even a few people sit down and read Sacred Nature, it will be a good start.” —Lucy Lethbridge, The Tablet

“Armstrong has written a rich and subtle exploration of the sacredness of nature, filled with a timeless wisdom and deep humanity that comes from a lifetime spent studying religious thought. . . . Much has been written on the scientific and technological aspects of climate change. . . . But Armstrong’s book is both more personal and more profound. Its urgent message is that hearts and minds need to change if we are to once more learn to revere our beautiful and fragile planet.” —PD Smith, The Guardian

“Armstrong’s book makes a vital contribution to discussions on climate change. . . . Her efforts and intentions here are simple: this book is not a rejection of Christianity or Western spirituality, but a rejection of the spiritual outlook that keeps us from seeing the natural world as a part of ourselves. . . . In the face of catastrophe, Armstrong is urging us to return to the spirit.” —Farooq Chaudhry, Chicago Review of Books

“Sacred Nature abounds in interesting facts about Asian religions, and how-to advice on calming the world’s frenzy and hearing the ‘still small voice’ of the inner life. The book is a spiritual time capsule of the post-Christian soul in crisis, a lamentation in the key of Greta Thunberg, with undertones of Carl Jung.” —Dominic Green, The Wall Street Journal

“Grand in its reach. . . . Armstrong’s book . . . offers a polycontinental, multi-cultural look at the ways faith and space coexisted for centuries. . . . It’s a perfect book to emerge from a period of isolation and contemplation.” —Andrew Dansby, Houston Chronicle

“An accessible account of how a wider religious perspective might contribute to humans’ adopting a more solicitous attitude to nature.” —Rowan Williams, New Statesman

“Armstrong . . . delivers a searching, spiritual take on climate change. . . . The illuminating examinations of a broad array of religious traditions are thought-provoking and have the power to change the way readers see the world and humanity’s place within it. Eye-opening and wide-ranging, this original take on climate change edifies.” —Publishers Weekly

“Armstrong taps into her encyclopedic knowledge to offer a way forward for a hurting world. . . . Tying together dramatic creation tales, complex moral systems, and scriptural musings on the natural world, Armstrong argues for gratitude, mutual caregiving, and stewardship of resources, among other practices, to help bring us closer to our environment and, ultimately, to each other. . . . Thought-provoking wisdom regarding the natural world.” —Kirkus

Excerpt

1

Mythos and Logos

A great deal of environmental discussion is scientific: we constantly hear about emissions, particles, pollution levels and the ozone layer. This provides us with essential information and we have become familiar with the terminology. But it does not move us emotionally. Today we tend to use the term “myth” rather vaguely to mean something that is not true. When we hear of gods walking on the earth, a dead man striding out of his tomb or a sea parting to release an enslaved people, we dismiss these tales as “only myths.” But in the past, “myth” meant something entirely different.

For most of human history, there were two ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge about the world: mythos and logos. Both were essential to comprehending reality: they were not in opposition to one another but complementary modes of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence. Mythos was concerned with what was considered timeless. It looked both back to the origins of life and culture and inward to the deepest levels of human experience. It was concerned with meaning not practical affairs. Humans are ​­meaning ​­seeking creatures. If our lives lack significance, we fall very easily into despair, and it was mythos that introduced people to deeper truths, making sense of their moribund and precarious lives by directing their attention to the eternal and universal. As far as we know, cats do not agonise about the feline condition, worry about the plight of cats in other parts of the world, or try to see life from a different perspective. But from a very early period humans felt compelled to devise stories that enabled them to place their lives in a different setting and give them a conviction ​­that—​against all the depressing evidence to the ​­contrary—​life had some meaning and value.

A myth is an event which, in some sense, happened once, but which also happens all the time. Mythology points beyond the chaotic flux of historical events to what is timeless in human life, helping us to glimpse the stable core of reality. It is also rooted in what we call the unconscious mind. Myths are an ancient form of psychology. When people told tales of heroes descending into the underworld, struggling through labyrinths or fighting with monsters, they were bringing to light fears and desires from the obscure regions of the subconscious mind, which is not accessible by purely logical investigation but has a profound effect on our experience and behaviour. Myth could not be conveyed by rational proof; its insights were intuitive, like those of art and poetry. What’s more, myth became a reality only when it was embodied in rituals and ceremonies, enabling participants to apprehend the deeper currents of life. Myth and ritual were so inseparable that it is a matter of scholarly debate which came first. Without spiritual practice, the mythical story would make no ​­sense—​in rather the same way as a musical score remains opaque to most of us until it is interpreted instrumentally.

We are far more conversant today with logos, which is quite different from mythical thinking. Unlike mythos, logos corresponds to objective facts. Logos is wholly pragmatic: it is the rational mode of thought that enables human beings to function. It is the basis of our modern society. We use our logical powers when we want to make something happen, to achieve something or to persuade others to adopt a particular opinion. Where myth looks back to origins, logos forges ahead, develops new insights and invents something fresh. It also, for good and ill, helps us to achieve greater control over the natural environment.

But logos, like mythos, has limitations. It cannot answer questions about the ultimate value of human life. It cannot assuage our sorrow. It can unveil wonderful new facts about the physical universe and make things work more efficiently, but it cannot explain the meaning of life. From a very early period, Homo sapiens understood this instinctively. He used logos to develop new weapons and hunting skills; and he turned to myth, with its accompanying rituals, to reconcile him to the inevitable pain and grief that might otherwise overwhelm him.

Before the modern period, both mythos and logos were regarded as essential, but by the eighteenth century the people of Europe and America had achieved such astonishing success in science and technology that they began to discount myth as false and primitive. Society was no longer wholly dependent on a surplus of agricultural ​­produce—​like all previous ​­civilisations—​but relied increasingly on technolog­ical resources and the constant reinvestment of capital. This freed modern society from many of the constraints of traditional culture, whose agrarian base had always been precarious. The long process of modernisation took some three centuries and involved profound changes: industrialisation, the British agricultural revolution, the political reform of society and an intellectual “enlightenment” that ­dismissed myth as futile and outmoded. Yet while our demythologised world may be comfortable for those of us fortunate enough to live in First World countries, it has not become the earthly paradise predicted by Francis Bacon and other Enlightenment philosophers.

We must disabuse ourselves of the fallacy that myth is untrue or represents an inferior mode of thought. We may be unable to return wholesale to a premodern sensibility, but we can acquire a more nuanced understanding of the myths of our ancestors because they still have something to teach us. And of course, we continue to create our own myths, even if we don’t describe them as such. The twentieth century saw the emergence of some very destructive myths that ended in massacre and genocide. We cannot counter these bad myths with reason alone because undiluted logos cannot deal with ​­deep-​­rooted fears, desires and neuroses. We need good myths that help us to identify with our fellow human beings, and not just with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need good myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which challenges and transcends our solipsistic and tribal egocentricity. And, crucially, we need good myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, because unless there is a spiritual revolution that challenges the destructiveness of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.

The great myths of the past presented the natural world as imbued with sacrality. ​­But—​I ​­repeat—​a myth makes no sense unless it is translated into practical action. Myths were not just cautionary tales: they had to be put into practice and were therefore always accompanied by ritual. Ritual, like myth, is often misunderstood in our pragmatic world; in the early modern period, it was rejected even by religious people as outdated superstition. Yet ritual ceremonies were indispensable to premodern religion, and they never were wholly spiritual affairs but involved the body and, through the body, the emotions. Neurophysicists tell us that, without being consciously aware of it, we receive and transmit important information through our senses, physical movements and gestures. Carefully crafted rituals making use of emotive music, dance and drama can dramatically bring a mythical event of the distant past into the present. If devised with sufficient skill, they can also yield an aesthetic ecstasy that enables participants to “stand outside” their mundane selves for a moment. By acting out a ritual role with skill and concentration, we can leave the self behind and, paradoxically, achieve ​­self-​­enhancement. Through the arts we experience a more intense form of being and feel part of something larger, more momentous and complete. Only if myth is translated into action do we discover its relevance and meaning.

Many of our ancestors’ myths that we shall consider in this book taught them how to revere the natural environment. Unlike in our modern environmental discourse, nature was presented and experienced imaginatively and aesthetically rather than scientifically, and this involved the emotions and the body. In the next chapter, we shall see that different cultures across the world saw nature as imbued with the sacred in remarkably similar ways. Perhaps this perspective is built into the structure of the human mind. But the religious ceremonies were not just aesthetic exercises: they demanded practical commitment and response. We shall see that these rituals were hard work. They were ​­time-​­consuming and demanding; they involved, quite literally, sacrifice. They not only expressed a deep anxiety about the sustainability of our world but made great demands on participants, who were expected not just to honour the divine in nature but also to reform ​­themselves—​to transcend their egos and reach out to all their fellow human beings. If today we have come to realise that devotion to the planet requires devotion to everything and everybody on it, then this is a perception that dates back to the very beginning of humanity.

Author

© Michael Lionstar
KAREN ARMSTRONG is the author of numerous books on religious affairs, including The Case for God, A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha and The Great Transformation, as well as a memoir, The Spiral Staircase. Her work has been translated into forty-five languages. In 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and began working with TED on the Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public, and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism. The charter was launched globally in the fall of 2009. In 2013 Armstrong was awarded the British Academy's inaugural Nayef Al-Rodhan Prize for Global Cultural Understanding and in 2017 the Princess of Asturias Prize for Social Sciences. She lives in London. View titles by Karen Armstrong