Nature, Space and the Sacred

Transdisciplinary Perspectives

S. Bergmann, H. Bedford-Strohm, P. M. Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351915670
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Nature, Space and the Sacred offers the first investigative mapping of a new and highly significant agenda: the spatial interactions between religion, nature and culture. In this ground-breaking work, different concepts of religion, theology, space and place and their internal relations are discussed in an impressive range of approaches. Weaving together a diversity of perspectives, this book presents an innovative and truly transdisciplinary environmental science. Its broad range offers a rich exchange of insights, methods and theoretical engagements.

Chapter 1
Editorial

S. Bergmann, P. M. Scott, M. Jansdotter Samuelsson and H. Bedford-Strohm

The spatialization of nature - how nature and space interact, in theory and in practice - is a significant area of enquiry that crosses many disciplines. The spatialization of nature in religious and theological perspectives is a less well developed area. We offer Nature, Space and the Sacred as the first exploratory mapping of this new and highly significant agenda: the spatial interactions between religion, nature and culture.

In this ground-breaking work, different concepts of religion, theology, space and place and their internal relations are discussed in an impressive range of approaches. While we think that the interaction between religion, space and nature needs its own dedicated treatment, we also consider that religious/theological perspectives are necessary but not sufficient. A wider range of disciplines is required to engage comprehensively with this theme. In this book, the reader will find a weaving together of perspectives - from religious studies and theology as well as from geography, anthropology, architecture, landscape architecture, archaeology, and philosophy. As such, this book embodies an innovative and truly transdisciplinary environmental science.

Of course, space has never been absent from the religions. Religions happen in spaces: religious communities occupy places and religious adherents have for millennia travelled to sacred places in order to honour the deities associated with such sites. This traditional area of enquiry is represented in the present volume and, as editors, we are especially delighted to present studies from countries that were once part of the Soviet Union.

Nonetheless, a new agenda is emerging, which is wider than the location of religious communities and pilgrimage to sites designated as sacred. In his opening chapter, Sigurd Bergmann presents some aspects of this emerging agenda: What is the relationship between spaces and places? How does attention to space enable us to reconsider urban spaces and their relation to nature? What happens to spaces under the pressures of globalisation? What is the religious contribution to making spaces more habitable? Should we, finally, speak of the spatiality of divinity?

Earthing the Sacred

To present some of these questions, old and new, the chapters of the book are grouped into five sections. Contributions to the first section, 'Earthing the Sacred', begin with locating 'religion' in a natural context. Religions, including Christian faith, do not present ideologies only of the beyondness of divinity but also of divinity as embedded in nature and affected by it. In 'Transforming the Theological Climate in Response to Climate Change: Jesus and the Mystery of Giving'. Anne Primavesi argues that the deep interrelationships and interactions of the ecosystem are manifested in Christian tradition as well as in science. Humans and natural entities both give and take, but this is not a simple exchange of objects between giver and receiver. The mystery of giving is about giving and taking from the thread of life, which could be translated as a counter-imperial ecology of love - like an earth-bound vision of the kingdom of God. expressed by Jesus.

Next, in 'The Whole Household of God', Ernst Conradie shows how the metaphor of household has been used in theology in many ways. He then contends that there are differences in the applicability of the metaphor in built and non-built environments - for example, the image of the earth as a house does not take the self-productive activity of the earth into account, and Conradie regards this as a challenge for further reflection. Moltmann's notion of the inhabitation of the Spirit in the earth serves to balance out a one-sided use of the idea of oikos. The human reception of the Spirit's work may be understood as the (passive) experience of grace (thankfulness for the home received) and the (more active) expression of gratitude (preparing the house). Conradie concludes that only a mutually interpretative use of the notions of 'house' and 'home' will suffice: it is the homemaking engagement of God's Spirit that makes the house into a home.

Offering a metaphorical interpretation of 'building heaven', Forrest Clingerman argues next that place offers us a means of engaging with nature. This manner of engaging he characterises as 'emplacement'. Yet. as he notes, such an approach encounters a theological difficulty: the tension between this affirmation of place and the Christian affirmation of the placelessness of divine activity. As a way of negotiating this tension. Clingerman argues nicely that 'we build Heaven through the reflexive practice of thinking about how we are emplaced in place, something potentially present in any place wherein we dwell'. In short, that 'Heaven is the reinterpretation of a place in light of its depth of meaning'. Resonances with the theology of Paul Tillich are obvious and enable Clingerman to affirm the importance of place as a site of in-depth learning.

Ethics in Natural and Built Space

The second section, 'Ethics in Natural and Built Space', explores the concept of space with regard to nature as it is designed, shaped and affected by human activities. The changing space of earth, its climate and its biodiversity are challenging the ethics of human self-understanding, and they demand an alternative practice in architecture and in the design of artefacts and landscapes as a spiritual and creative human skill. In the first contribution, 'Atmospheric Space, Climate Change and the Communion of Saints', Michael Northcott argues against a tendency to interpret climate change in terms of a future threat and contends that, especially for the poor, climate change is a present, spatial reality and threat. Of particular interest is Northcott's deployment of the traditional discourse of sin to indicate disruption between humans and the earth as well as between humans and God. We are here dealing with a moral economy/ecology, and Northcott deftly situates this economy in relation to the doctrine of providence.

Next, Anders Melin's article presents four contributions to the debate on the ethics of creation: Ruether's and McFague's feminist accounts of creation seen as a web of relationships leading to a partnership-oriented view; Sideris' critique of such views as the denial of evolution theory; and. finally. Gregersen's theological approach of God as 'the Creator of creativity', which offers a view of nature intended to be consistent with the scientific understanding of nature as self-regulative. Melin himself favours Gregersen's view and adds two comments on biodiversity. First, he argues that we should acknowledge the intrinsic value of different life forms, as these are products of the divine creativity. Second, he wants to distinguish between natural and anthropogenic extinction, since natural selection 'seems to be' a part of God's plan for creation. To preserve biodiversity is mainly a negative duty, which consists in refraining from actions that could lead to the extinction of species.

In the following chapter, 'The Master of the Universe or the Humble Servant', Björn Vikström explores how the concept of sustainable development is altering our understanding of humanity and nature. He argues that the concept can be interpreted in more than one way and much depends on the anthropology explicitly or implicitly being discussed. Is this the human as a technician or the human as a servant, and which meanings of the spaces of nature are operative under each account? He concludes with some discussion as to how a religious view of the human as servant might be brought into dialogue with different ethical positions towards the enhancement of practices that support sustainable development.

In 'The Proper Praise for an Architecture of the Improper - Joseph Beuys: Building with Butter', Annette Homann inaugurates an architectural discussion where the body, linked as it is with with the erotic, the sacred, and the subconscious, has a significant place in the creation of architecture. Symbolic references and imaginary processes are compared with those established in the work of Joseph Beuys. As the work of Beuys invites an interpretation of, and imperative respect for. the more than human world, so architectural practice is able to educate us about the phenomenological world and about the ancient, erotic space of chora. As a point of departure from theory to practice. Homann refers to her work with architecture students at the Carleton School of Architecture in Ottawa. This study-is followed by Carola Wingren's 'Ideal Landscapes: Landscape Design between Beauty and Meaning', which offers an interesting and. for scholars of religion and culture, extremely fruitful insight into the world of landscape design and gardening architecture. Drawing on her own practice as a landscape architect and on her experience of the bureaucracy and politics of roads in Sweden, she argues that requests for the designing of beautiful urban landscapes are usually also requests for meaningful landscapes.

In 'The Altar of the Dead', Anna Petersson investigates how the surviving families and friends of those killed in road accidents in Sweden invest in different types of place as ways of remembering their relatives. The reason for this appears to be the varying ability of different places to bring about a positive presence of the deceased. The placing of things representing the deceased's personal or social life by the gravesite or accident site could in this context be seen as a way of linking the positive presence of the deceased to a site that is connected to negative feelings of pain and sorrow, and hence of bringing life to a place which lias taken life.

Nature as Entanglement

While dominant concepts of nature have emphasized the dimension of time and treated organisms as closed entities, the articles in the third section, 'Nature as Entanglement', offer an alternative view. Tim Ingold's contribution depicts organisms as knots where lines are interconnected in 'zones of interpenetration or entanglement', and the following chapters explore the political dynamics which are evolving through such an ecologically deep understanding of the sacred web of life.

In 'The Wedge and the Knot: Hammering and Stitching the Face of Nature', Tim Ingold notes that, in outlining his idea of the 'straggle for existence' in The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin compared the face of nature to a surface riven by innumerable wedges. In subsequent ecological thinking this image has gained currency, along with the idea that organisms are externally bounded, solid entities that compete for limited space along the lines of their adjacency. Taking a different track, much influenced by Henri Bergson. Ingold explores the implications of an alternative viewpoint suggested by the image of entanglement. Here the organism is imagined not as a wedge-like block in a carpentered world, but rather as a line - or rather a knotted bundle of lines - in a world that is woven. In such a world, how should we conceive of 'the environment'? What we have been accustomed to calling 'the environment' might, he suggests, be better envisaged as a zone of entanglement. Thus an ecology of life must be fashioned in the stitching of lines, not in the hammering of blocks.

In 'Knowing Natural Spaces', Kingsley Goodwin addresses the realist-constractivist debate in environmental philosophy through a reinterpretation of Arne Naess' deep ecology. Arguing that Naess' position does not need to be interpreted as realist but can instead be interpreted phenomenologically. Goodwin maintains that deep ecology is open to engaging with concepts of nature from sciences and religions. For Anna Duhon and Lisa Jokivirta in 'Seeking Transformation in a Consumer World: Can We Achieve a Unity of Ends and Means?', increasing consumerism and a growing awareness of the global environmental problems are linked. Awareness of consumerism as one cause behind environmental destruction they argue, is not always included in campaigns to 'save the earth'. They propose ecospirituality as a multi-traditional movement that tries to link humans to earth through a small-scale, community-based and practice-oriented environmental ethics; this in turn makes ecospirituality a strong alternative when it comes to changing the values and attitudes prevalent among Western people.

In the final essay of this section, 'Restoring or restorying nature?, Glenn Deliege offers the region of Flanders in Belgium as the context for a sophisticated argument that seeks to move from practices of restoring nature to the matter of restorying nature. If the latter were practised, he argues, a clearer and stronger identification of people with their local places would result. Only in this way, Deliege argues, can places have their proper 'weight' ascribed to them and thereby their full value to local inhabitants acknowledged.

Sacred Geographies

In this section, sacred geographies are interpreted in a variety of local explorations. Indian North America, contemporary cultural sites in Kyrgysztan and Estonia as well as mesolithic and neolithic landscapes, offer places and sites for anthropological and archaeological reflections. The authors begin from the intrinsic value of place and investigate how cultural practices and ideologies interact with them. The section profiles what we can call a 'sacred geography' in a broad sweep of human history.

For John A. Grim in 'Indigenous Embodied Knowing: A Study in Crow/Apsaalooke Space, Nature and the Sacred', the Sundance or Ashkisshelissua of the Crow/Apsaalooke Peoples of Montana is interpreted as a ritual where people's quest for knowing centres on multiple experiences of space, nature and the sacred. The experiential learning of the Sundance aims to manifest the deep einbodiedness of the personal body, the community, the bioregion as well as the complex of heavenly bodies. In 'Natural Sacred Places in Landscape', Maiju Torp Kõivupuu offers a veiy valuable contribution to a contextual exploration of nature, space and the sacred. Describing the Estonian practice of cutting a cross in the bark of a tree as a tradition of cultivating holy places in times of modernity, she shows how difficult it is to keep this tradition in the midst of new interests, especially economic ones. She describes how the landscape that expresses a common history has an important role in the development of identity. She also shows how cultural heritage is concerned with the relationship between lore culture and the preserv ation of antiquities.

In 'The Domestic Order and its Feral Threat', T. R. Kover considers the origin of the current devaluation of nature: how far back should we go to trace it? When precisely did the dichotomy between humanity and nature first became instantiated? Drawing in part on the work of Paul Shepard, Kover argues that the ecology and subsistence practices of agriculture, with their need to impose and maintain an artificial order upon the natural world, initiated the symbolic conception of this cosmological dichotomy, in which the domestic order became synonymous with the good and the wild became a symbol for chaotic and malevolent evil. There is some suggestion that this fundamental dichotomy could be challenged by a rethinking of what wildness might mean: as difference, but not as threat.

Gulnara Aitpaeva's chapter offers exciting observations from a less known field of local worship at sacred sites in Kyrgyzstan. It emphasizes especially how spirituality affects the health of practitioners of traditional Kyrgyz culture and the role of sacred sites in this context. There is a strong belief in Kyrgyz traditional society that certain people are chosen for spiritual missions like healing, reciting epics, guarding sacred sites, or mediating between this and the other world, and that their health is directly affected by their acceptance or rejection of the spiritual mission. Usually a process of recognizing and developing a supernatural gift is based on pilgrimages to sacred sites.

Zemfira Inogamova's chapter, entitled 'Keeping the Sacred Secret', discusses the practices of believers at sacred sites in Kyrgyzstan. She raises the ethical issue of how observers and scholars should deal with the hiddenness and integrity of sacred sites, in Kyrgyzstan as well as in other places. The experiences, hopes and fears that practitioners have about sacred sites in relation to changing economic and social organization are the focus of this chapter: how people think about these sites, what kind of respect they show, how they maintain control over the sites, and the matter of cultural property rights. Do sacred sites belong to the people of Kyrgyzstan or to certain private owners?

Turning to the East

The book's final section, 'Turning to the East', offers evidence of an increasing exchange of perspectives between the so-called East and West and of the constructive fruitfulness of this dialogue. Gardening and village planning practices are analysed with regard to their religious and cultural implications. While the previous section offered insights into a central Asian context, these chapters draw on fields in northern and southern Asia. They are all driven by an intense desire to provide new inspiration and elaborate conditions for human interaction with nature, in a deep inter-cultural and inter-religious dialogue between East and West.

In 'Touching the Depths of Things', Mary Evelyn Tucker maintains that, while science and policy approaches are clearly necessary, they are not sufficient in helping to transform human consciousness and behaviour for a sustainable future. Tucker then emphasizes the importance of values and of ethics, religion and philosophy for this transformation. She sees a growing role for religions in shaping attitudes and action for a broader commitment to environmental protection and restoration, and she describes various activities in the field of environment and religion. NeoConfucianism, and especially the philosophy of Wang Yangming, are explored as a source of wisdom which can help us today to find an appropriate understanding of science. Wang emphasizes that empathetic knowing affirms human subjectivity as a primary way of apprehending the nature of things. For him, embodied acting is something that unifies knowledge and action. By living compassionately a common kinship with the larger community of life is acknowledged and enacted. Tucker expresses her awareness of the danger of narcissistic subjectivism in Wang's thought but sees this danger as being dealt with through his emphasis on connectedness with the wider social community.

In 'Stone and Sacred Space in China and Japan: Implications for our Treatment of the Earth', Graham Parkes notes that, in traditional Chinese culture, stones are thought of as a certain configuration of the essential energies of the earth. For humans to flourish, stones have to be arranged in patterns so as to harmonize the energy flow of the place, a practice known as fengshui. Similar thoughts are to be found in the Shinto tradition of Japan, where especially high intensities of Kami were to be found in stones and rocks, generating a sacred space around them. Parkes argues that such commitments could serve as an inspiration in the effort to transform Western attitudes to nature. For Daniel M. P. Shaw, in 'The Way Forward? Shinto and a Twenty-First Century Japanese Ecological Attitude', nature, space and the sacred all converge in Shinto, the indigenous spiritual tradition of Japan. Shinto believes in Kami as a vital energy, present in natural entities and phenomena and inspiring a sense of awe. Shinto values form a holistic ecological attitude which could be used as a source of inspiration for environmental ethics to meet the challenge of environmental problems in Japan today.

All the chapters elaborate on a fundamental point: human beings cannot use natural space sim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface Sallie McFague
• List of Contributors
• 1 Editorial S. Bergmann, P. M. Scott, M. Jansdotter Samuelsson and H. Bedford-Strohm
• 2 Nature, Space and the Sacred: Introductory Remarks Sigurd Bergmann
• PART A EARTHING THE SACRED
• PART B ETHICS IN NATURAL AND BUILT SPACE
• PART C NATURE AS ENTANGLEMENT
• PART D SACRED GEOGRAPHIES
• PART E TURNING TO THE EAST
• Index