Religious Experience and the Phenomenology of Nature

Dear Colleagues,

Faced as we are with climate change, mass extinctions of species, global pandemics there is probably no more pressing theme today than that of nature. It is, however, not at all clear what we mean by ‘nature’, whether discourse about nature is even meaningful today. Many speak of the ‘death of nature’ ^[1] while at another extreme we find the exhortation toward a ‘re-enchantment’ of nature ^[2]. This Special Issue aims to explore is the place of religious experience within this our current situation.

Nature philosophy, including environmental ethics, but also the revival in Schellingian themes ^[3] and the rediscovery within Phenomenology of the theme of nature questions any unidirectional subject/object relation to nature ^[4]. Nature is that in which we find ourselves as human beings and despite our moulding of our environments, according to such a view, the human engagement with the world itself embodies nature. The emphasis on embodiment shows not only the limits of dualisms, but also the commonality of the human with the natural world in which we are and breathe. The inter-subjective experience of such being in nature and the inter-corporeal being with animals and plants around us, is reflected in the sacramentality of religious observance from totemic rituals to the Christian Eucharist.

Inspired by the overcoming of dualisms of body and mind and nature and freedom deriving from the Phenomenology and Schelling, we can re-examine the religious sense of nature as containing sacredness. This religious sense can be understood metaphysically as an intuition of a reality that appears unapproachable. Phenomenologically, the question as to the source of this sense of the inapproachable, sacred, can be understood in terms of feelings of awe (e.g., Otto ^[5]). Not only can nature be a source or locus of religious experience, but it may also be the case that religious affectivity gives us access to nature beyond the objectifying and instrumentalizing tendencies of modernity. In this respect, we can think of the phenomenologies of life (Bergson, Tymieniecka, Henry) ^[6], which explore modes of appearance of nature beyond the dualities of mechanism and vitalism. These accounts draw on—explicitly or implicitly—religious motifs such the Christian notion of life as Christ, Vedantic life as Sat (Truth of Being, identical with self-consciousness and fullness), or Islamic God as truth or reality (al-Haqq), as well as other concepts across many traditions that connect life and nature. These motifs can be understood in dialogue with the growing movement of panpsychism in the philosophy of mind (Strawson, Goff, Chalmers, Nagel) ^[7].

Just as nature is everywhere, so any discourse about dwelling in nature (ecology) must be seen to concern the totality of human experience, in the sense of the full richness of its diversity. One manner in which such diverse experience can be understood is the way in which nature is experienced as a temporal phenomenon. This is clear already in the experience of the cyclicality of the seasons. It is also manifest in the current sense of ecological crisis which draws on a religious sensibility that has remained present in different guises through modernity, namely the eschatological. In attempting to think nature with respect to religious experience, we are thinking within the intersection of temporal strands: mortal time, conscious time, cyclical, indefinite time, eternal, creative ‘time’. Understood eschatologically or messianically this relation is one in which ending is woven into the fabric of time: time as ending, transforming of past in the present and the opening up of a new future, time of forgiveness, repentance, grace and judgement (kairos) ^[8].

Similarly, in thinking of nature from a specifically Christian standpoint, we are invariably drawn into the thought of Incarnation and Creation ^[9]. The complexities of both terms indicate ambiguities in the articulation of nature within religious experience. Understood as creation, nature can be understood as a domain of divine bounty to be valued and cared for or as an object to be mastered and exploited, while remaining a source of temptation away from the creator. The prohibition on idols emphasised the distance between divinity and nature, making questionable any source of religious experience within nature.

A more immanentist account of God and divinity, broadly speaking polytheistic, allows for a less ambivalent account of nature. The “world is full of gods” (Aeschylus) or at least there are domains of gods and spirits—sacred groves, forests, mountain tops—where human experience is confronted with nature as overwhelming, as powerful, as forbidding ^[10]. Yet, in such accounts there are ways towards the divine, through rituals of cleansing and purification or through ecstatic experiences of possession. Boundaries can be crossed while retaining a reverence for nature as that which has a being in and of itself, which is for the human only as a gift of its own bounty.

The experience of nature and divinity is reflected in divisions within society and politics. The manner in which the divinity is gendered or represented in racially specific ways and the manner conversely in which human beings are stratified in terms of their proximity to or distance from nature have been used and continue to be used to justify relations of oppression ^[11]. The mastery of nature goes hand in hand with a mastery of nature within the self and of the mastery and servility of genders, races and classes.

We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400-600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the Guest Editors ([email protected]) or to /Religions/ editorial office ([email protected]). Abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors for the purposes of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.

Notes

1. See Merchant, C. Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution; HarperCollins: San Francisco, CA, USA, 1990; Latour, B. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime; Polity: Cambridge, UK, 2017.

2. See Meijer, M.; De Vries, Herbert. The Philosophy of Reenchantment; Routledge: New York, NY, USA, 2020.

3. This revival has been underway in the English, German and French speaking worlds for some time and has produced a large body of literature. For a strong statement of the relevance to Schelling to contemporary debates see Hamilton-Grant, I. Philosophies of Nature after Schelling; Continuum: London, UK, 2008.

4. The growth of eco-phenomenology in recent decades has built upon themes already present in such classical phenomenologists as Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Representative collections include Brown, C. S.; Toadvine, T. Eds. Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself; SUNY Press: Albany, NY, USA, 2023.; Bannon, B. E. Ed. Nature and Experience: Phenomenology and the Environment; Rowman and Littlefield: New York, NY, USA, 2018.; Kuperus, G.; Oele, M. Eds. Ontologies of Nature: Continental Perspectives and Environmental Reorientations; Springer, 2017. For the classical sources of this movement in phenomenology, see Merleau-Ponty, M. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France; Northwestern University Press: Evanston, IL, USA, 2003.; Heidegger, M. On the essence of Phusis in Aristotle’s Physics B, 1. In Path-Marks; Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 1998; pp. 183-230.; Husserl, E. Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Second Book; Springer, 1990.

5. Otto, R. The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational; Oxford University Press: London, UK, 1958.

6. Cf. Bergson, H. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion; University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, IN, USA, 1977.; Tymieniecka, A.-T. Logos and Life: The Three Movements of the Soul: The Spontaneous and the Creative in Man’s Self-Interpretation-in-the-Sacred; Springer, 1998.; Henry, M. Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh; Northwestern University Press: Evanston, IL, USA, 2015.

7. C.f. Strawson, G.; Freeman, A. Consciousness and Its Place in Nature: Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?; Imprint Academic: Exeter, UK, 2006.; Nagel, T. Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is almost certainly False; Oxford University Press: London, UK, 2012.

8. C.f. Walls, J.L. The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology; Oxford University Press: London, UK, 2008.; Ó Murchadha, F. Traces of endings: the time of last things. In Hermeneutics and Phenomenology: Figures and Themes; Fairfield, P., Geniusas, S., Eds.; Springer, 2018; pp. 175-187.

9. C.f. Deane-Drummond, C. Creation. In Systematic Theology and Climate Change: Ecumenical Perspectives; Northcott, M., Scott, P., Eds.; Routledge: London, UK, 2014; pp. 69–89.; Gregersen, N. Ed. Incarnation: On the Scope and Depth of Christology; Fortress Press: Minneapolis, MN, USA, 2015.

10. C.f. Berkes, F. Sacred Ecology; Routledge: New York, NY, USA, 2017.; Douglas, M. Purity and Danger; Routledge: London, UK, 2002.

11. Merchant, C. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture; Routledge: New York, NY, USA, 2003.; Kearns, L.; Keller, C. Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies for the Earth; Fordham University Press: New York, NY, USA, 2007.

Prof. Dr. Felix Ó Murchadha
Dr. Mary Shanahan
Guest Editors

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• philosophy of nature
• the Sacred
• dis-enchantment/re-enchantment
• phenomenology of religion