A paper presented to the Nature Philosophy and Religion Society session at the Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy conference, 2023, in Toronto
James Fenimore Cooper
It struck me in working on this paper that there is what I like to see as a thread in American thinking about nature that is very compatible in my view with Russian views of nature in literature and philosophy, but which has been neglected. This is not the famous nature philosophy of Transcendentalism in New England, but the tradition of nature seen in the foundational mythic fiction of James Fenimore Cooper in his Leatherstocking Cycle and reflected also in his political philosophy writings on American democracy, and also in the essays on nature and community of his daughter Susan Fenimore Cooper, and also in the very extensive philosophical and semiotic work of their younger contemporary, Charles Sanders Peirce. Coincidentally or not, all three writers lived in counties that are part of Appalachia, in the Northeastern U.S. but in the Middle States so to speak and not in New England, in upstate New York and in the case of Peirce in Milford, Pennsylvania, where Peirce lived much of his life and wrote most prolifically up to his death. So, I am calling what I see their shared strand of writings on nature as American Appalachian philosophy of nature, as if it were a school and needs a category, which I think it does.
I think this is justified because of their common philosophical approach, general regional orientation in rural upland areas of the so-called Middle States, and shared religious culture in old Trinitarian Anglicanism, which seems for all of them to have been a kind of choice in what could be called a resistance to secular modernity, evident in their writings and approach to nature. While Appalachia may be best known as a region of the American South, of course it extends into the North as well, and has some common haracteristics as what has been termed flyover country, a bit divorced from the culture of the urbanized coast, and politically in modern times recalcitrant toward progressivism. In the North, Appalachia is probably somewhat less Scots-Irish in background and more Anglo and German. However, northern Appalachia arguably had earlier and perhaps more intense encounters with industrialization in the so-called Yankee world, and those seem evident as context to both the writings of the Coopers and of Peirce. James Fenimore Cooper wrote what has been called the first environmental novel in American literature, The Pioneers, and through the work of Rochelle Johnson and others his daughter Susan’s essays and book of reflections Rural Hours have become recognized as important early American nature writings. Peirce himself in Milford PA became a neighbor and best friend of Gifford Pinchot, a leader in early conservation efforts in America, and Peirce’s ideas involve the type of Christian panentheistic approach to nature explored in this essay as common to elements of both American and Russian literature and philosophy. Not to mention that the elder Cooper’s fiction had been an important influence on that famous son of the Empire State Theodore Roosevelt and his conservation efforts involving the national park system in America.
On the Russian side of things, the fiction of the elder Cooper has long been numbered among popular great books for reading among Russians back into the Soviet era and earlier. In fact, the famous Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky referenced the Leatherstocking Cycle in his film of environmental apocalypse Stalker. Both the elder Cooper and famous Russian fiction writers, most notably Dostoevsky, wrote philosophical fiction. But the Russian parallels also extend to holy Christian tradition, which also informs American ideas of wilderness. Recently I was reflecting on the fall Church feast day celebrating St. Sergius of Radonezh, the famous 14th-century forest monk who was pivotal in the history of Russian Christian culture and pre-communist political history. St. Sergius went to live in the woods, and it seems that the world came to him. According to traditions of his life, his wonderworking prayers ranged from friendship with a bear to spiritually aiding the cause of Prince Dunskoy in the Battle of Kuliko, a key watershed in the end of Tatar control over what became Russia. St. Sergius’ forest monastery ended up becoming Sergei Posad, today the large monastic spiritual center and important pilgrimage destination of the Russian Orthodox Church.
The love of the forests as a spiritual retreat in Russia is reflected in the use of a term meaning desert to describe monastic centers there. This parallels the American love of wilderness as a spiritual place, foundationally shaped in literature shaped by Christian views, notably the elder Cooper’s mythic novels of the great American Eastern Woodlands. Henry David Thoreau went to the woods, too, in New England. But before his more individualistic and modernistic quest, the fictional Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper based in the headwaters of the Susquehanna Valley helped to shape a more Christian-related sense of wilderness as a place of spiritual renewal, reflected more in the philosophy of Charles Peirce than in the New England Puritan-derived Transcendentalism of Thoreau and Emerson. In the nature philosophy expressed by the elder Cooper and his daughter Susan, and Charles Peirce, lies what I call here an Appalachian American philosophy of nature, reflecting the region in which they lived, away from the Puritan-rooted region of Thoreau and Transcendentalism. I will argue that between this foundational Appalachian American philosophy and Russian views of nature as especially expressed in the works of Dostoevsky and the philosophers Ivan Ilyin, S.L. Frank, and controversially Alexander Dugin, there lies a common significant thread. That is the thread of what I shall call Christian panentheism.
First, that term needs clarification. It comes from early 19th-century German idealism, but has been associated with the medieval Catholic mystic Nicholas of Cusa’s influence, who argued that Creation occurred within God. Nicholas of Cusa himself, although a German Cardinal in the West, was strongly influenced by Orthodox Christian ideas through John Scottus Eriugena, the early Irish philosopher and Latin translator of the works of St. Maximus the Confessor. The term panentheism has a pedigree that transcends supposed differences between Eastern and Western Christianity by harkening back to their common root in what can be called pre-Schism Orthodox Christianity.
The early twenty-first-century Orthodox Christian and exegetical writer Priest Daniel Sysoev, considered a modern martyr for his assassination by a Muslim extremist, described Christian panentheism in this way from a Russian Orthodox perspective. He wrote that Creation is in God. His statement can be taken as panentheism as it emerged from 19th-century German philosophy. But it is more than that, too, as Christian panentheism, so to speak. Sysoev’s explanation is scriptural from Church tradition. Genesis 1.1 states that “In the beginning God made the heaven and the earth.” John 1.1 states that “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Here in this connection between Old and New Testament, beginning is identified or equated with the Word, the Logos. So, in the Logos, God made the heaven and the earth. The Logos also can be translated as the Story, the Harmony, the Reason, the Purpose, the Principle, and so on. However, Logos meaning the Son of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, is also a Person. Creation is in the divine person, Jesus Christ, fully God and fully man. He is one of the three Persons also of the Holy Trinity, one in Essence. This is not an impersonal God, and is a Trinitarian God.
The result is a sense of personal relationship in Creation, and a special role for man as both in a sense microcosm and macrocosm, in Christ as theanthropos or God-man, that sets Christian panentheism apart from the New Age panentheism that made Father Seraphim Rose of blessed memory skeptical of the term. Such impersonal panentheism, so to speak, ended in exaltation of the individual will, a nice match for the typical American mindset. But that is the distinction between the philosophy of nature of the Coopers and Peirce in Northern Appalachia and New England Transcendentalism. The Coopers and Peirce were skeptical of the individualistic mob emerging in American democracy. Transcendentalism emerged from the Unitarianism that evolved out of Puritanism with its Judaistic tendencies and rationalism that tend toward Scholasticism, which was also in line with the Deistic tendencies of American elites. But Christian panentheism is simultaneously pansemiotic (viewing Creation as living text in the Logos) and personal (experiencing the Logos as Jesus Christ, one of the three Persons in mysterious relationship in the Most Holy Trinity).
Christian panentheism necessitates a view of natural law different from Scholasticism. To this, the modern Orthodox bioethicist Herman Engelhardt added, “Natural law is, after all, the spark of God’s love in our nature, not the biological state of affairs we find in broken nature. Natural law is not an objective external constraint, but the will of the living God experienced in our conscience…. Traditional Christians recognize the reference environment for humans to be Eden, and the goal of all adaptation to be the pursuit of holiness.”[1] Engelhardt based the above description of natural law on a statement by St. Basil of Caesarea that referenced “the spark of divine love latent within you,” to be enkindled by ascetic effort in synergy with grace, as the transfiguring and dynamic basis for natural identity.[2] Here, the translation of logos as harmony is apropos, harmony as principle, but not rationalistic and legalistic. Rather, natural law draws man and subsequently Creation into Paradise through relation with the Logos, the Son of God, Jesus Christ, Himself in both oneness and relationship with the Holy Trinity, a mystery beyond human ken, felt by us only through the energies rather than the essence of God. Those uncreated energies are a central feature of Orthodox Christian Trinitarianism. Blessed Theophylact of Ochrid writing in the 11th century characterized natural law in Orthodox terms in this way, in his commentary on the Prologue to the Gospel of John: “…indeed He gives light to all—but coerces no one to accept it. Are we not all endowed with reason [logikoi]? Do we not all by nature know right from wrong? Have we not all the power to apprehend the Creator from His creation? Therefore, the logos given to us, which teaches us by nature and is also called the natural law, may be called ‘light’ given to us by God. But if a man makes poor use of this logos, he darkens himself.”[3] The non-Puritan American nature writers of northern Applachia, the Coopers and Peirce, had in their nineteenth-century Anglican Trinitarianism a sense of this too.
Peirce likewise described natural law panentheistically as situated in God. He argued that nature’s laws were potentialities that come into being and evolve, and yet ambiguously can be at once both divine and in creation. Peirce viewed natural laws as in a sense theophanies, or manifestations from God, which constitute both the origins and purpose of creatures in God.[4] Peirce wrote in this way that the universe is perfused with signs, similar to St. Maximos’ description of natural law as contained in the Logos as elements contained in a book.[i] Of course the ultimate distinction of Christian panentheism in both cases is that that book, so to speak, the Logos, is a Person, and a Person in unity but distinct in the mystery of the Trinity as Divinity. There is no sense either of a watchmaker God of Deism here, nor of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, in which the individual will has become the divinity without the grace of deification, and the distinction between deifying uncreated energies and divine essence, found in Orthodox Christian tradition.
Emerson wrote in his essay nature that in becoming a transparent eye-ball, “all mean egotism vanishes… I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” Losing biases and contradictions of the self within nature, the unity of the transparent eyeball with nature shapes what has been described as a private cosmic freedom. But this interiorization of supposed spiritual unity easily itself falls again into egotism of a higher level, encompassing a virtual reality of instrumentalism. We see this reflected in Joseph Priestley’s contemporary materialistic determinism of Deism, in which progress and American exceptionalism become both naturalism and divine. Thoreau’s different drummer becomes one with the sun as but a morning star at the end of Walden. The exertion of the will to power becomes transcendent and virtual and in our age digital in an online nature that is both wholly instrumental and increasingly controlling, as if Charles Taylor’s modern buffered self has reverted to a premodern permeable self, which is however really a permeable cortex in the hive mind of the Machine.
The genealogy from Puritanism to Unitarianism to Transcendentalism to the New Age and New World Order if you will involves a significant element of the ancient heresies of Monoenergism and Monothelitism. These asserted that there was only one energy and one will in Christ, namely the divine. The Fifth Ecumencial Council, of which St. Maximus would afterward act as articulator, in upholding Theopaschism lay the ground work for later rejection of those heresies. Christ had two energies and two wills, human and divine, like his two natures in one Person, unconfused and undivided. Christian panentheism, as in the works of St. Maximus, recognizes that distinction, unlike Emerson, who promotes unity with nature without the transcendent Person of the Logos. The void left by the loss of the Godhead is filled by the individual’s will to power, which becomes falsely identified with the divine. Thus we end up with a modern atheistic monotheletism and monoenergism, and the identification of natural law with technological science designed for the human will to know and mold into a hive mind of the global Machine.
Unlike the American Transcendentalists, the Russian Orthodox Christian philosopher S.L. Frank, in a line from Dostoevsky, did not confuse fallen nature with natural law. Rather, in a Christian panentheistic way, both Russian writers sought the natural in the Logos, Jesus Christ. Unlike some of the Slavophiles and Communists alike, S.L. Frank did not identify sobornost, the Russian idea of spiritual mystical unity as in the Eucharist, based in Byzantine Christianity, with obschestvennost. The latter term, rooted in the Russian word for peasant commune, was used by Frank to indicate the mechanical and individualistic existence of worldliness in society. The term obschestvennost in a more technical sense has been defined as “a social connected system of interacting subgroups that reside in a broader social milieu” (Sergei Horujy). In identifying human society associated with nature, the peasant commune, with sobornost, many populist Slavophiles and communists in late imperial Russia conflated in effect a sense of the human being in the fallen natural world with sobornost, the spiritual unity embodied in the Eucharist. Frank in his writing on society distinguished the two, calling for an interconnection between them, in the sense that sobornost should inform obschestvennost, but not an identification of the two. In this again he expressed Christian panentheism typical of Orthodox Trinitarianism, rather than a pantheism or more individualistic conflating of nature and will with the divine. Dostoevsky in his philosophical fiction made the same distinction. In the parable of the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, it is the corrupt church man who conflates society and the divine, establishing the basis for totalitarianism, like the Communists who would do the same, or in Dostoevsky’s view the capitalists as well lacking the spirituality of sobornost. The elder Zosima warns that we are all at least in part responsible for one another’s sins. This highlights also the distinction between our fallen state and our spiritual unity in Christ. We find ourselves in losing ourselves in Him, as is indicated in Crime and Punishment by the appeal of the Gospel account of the raising of Lazarus to the murderer Raskolnikov. He finds a spiritual unity with his beloved Sonia the prostitute and that flows into the promise of a unity and resurrection in Christ. However this is something personal pointing toward Christ, rather than to fallen self. Raskolnikiv, a nihilistic murderer, symbolically bears a name indicating schism, someone cut off from sobornost by worldly individualism. The self-assertion of modern Western individualism is in this distinguished from the self-emptying of Christian panentheism, in Dostoevksy’s work and in Frank’s explication of Russian philosophy.
The American Charles Peirce provided a kind of typological diagram for this Christian panentheism also found in contemporary Russian literature in his semiotic work. As previously mentioned, Peirce in his philosophy developed a view of natural law as theophanies or manifestations of God, situated at once both in the divine and in Creation. He engaged in this with the work of medieval philosophers including combatively but engagingly the aforementioned Eriugena, an influence on Nicholas of Cusa, who in turn also influenced as noted the Russian Orthodox philosophy of Frank. Peirce’s trinitarianism was evident throughout his work, he said law in terms of triadology, reflecting the nature of the Holy Trinity as one essence but three Persons in Christian panentheism. From that triadic relation came the uncreated divine energies described in Orthodox theology. A more binarized view had arisen in Scholasticism, which rationalistically had subsumed the Holy Spirit to a union of the Father and the Son, and thus binarized the essence of God and Creation beyond the continuum with the energies of God articulated by Orthodox theologians such as St. John of Damascus, St. Photius the Great, and St. Gregory Palamas. Peirce clearly stressed the full mystical triadology of the Orthodox view, not the binarizing of Scholasticism. In fact that emphasis on triadology is reflected in his semiotic model. For Peirce, meaning emerged from a combination of Sign, Object, and what he called the Interpretant. This was different from semiotics as it emerged from more mainline Western thinking in the work of de Saussure, which came to predominate. For de Saussure, meaning emerged from a binary religion of the Signifier and the Signified, which was arbitrary and interiorized ultimately within each human mind. For Peirce, triadology opened up a connection between meaning and environment, or the Object so to speak. Meaning involved often a relationship between the sign or text and the environment and the linking of the two by author and reader, to use another series of terms later developed by Peirce’s successors in the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics, where scholars in countries of the historically Eastern Christian cultural zone proved receptive to the American Peirce’s view of nature.
From Peirce’s triadic sense of meaning and its relation to environment, he also developed his idea of abduction. Peirce used the term abduction not to mean kidnapping, but to indicate an intuitionism that combined deduction and induction, into abduction, or in effect a hunch. Thus, he also saw epistemology as a kind of triadic process, with an emphasis on intuitionism. To get back to panentheism, nature and transcendence were not merely fused in a transparent eyeball of human will in Peirce’s model. Rather, that which was natural existed in a personal relationship with the transcendent. This was symbolized again by the relationship between text, which could be consider logos, and environment and the combination of author and reader as interpreters. This dance, or perichoresis, of cosmic meaning-making formed in effect a type of the Trinity’s relation to Creation. Another type of that can be seen in the image of marriage as involving Christ as bridegroom and the Church of many souls as Bride, or more particularly the Dance of Isaiah in the Orthodox wedding service when the hands of Priest, Bridegroom, and Bride are tied together as they circle an icon of the Wedding at Cana three times, symbolizing the presence of Christ with the Husband and Wife in the spiritual aspect of Christian marriage.
Parallel to Peirce’s interest in triadic intuitionism, the Russian Christian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, a twentieth-century contemporary to S.L. Frank, became known for his scholarship on Hegel, which was even recognized for its brilliance albeit negatively by the Bolshevik leader Lenin who exiled both Ilyin and Frank on the so-called philosophers’ ships in 1922. While the communist evolution of Hegel’s dialectic involved a fusion of two elements materialistically, dialectical materialism, Ilyin’s interpretation of Hegel as compatible with Christianity involved a sense of intuitionism like Peirce’s, arising from a dialogue so to speak in the synthesis of dialectic, not a materialistic fusion. Ilyin developed from his interpretation of Hegelian intuitionism his concept of legal consciousness, which served in many ways a synonym for sobornost, the mystical unity also developed in Frank’s philosophy of nature. For Ilyin, legal consciousness expressed in effect Peirce’s idea of natural law as situated in God and on a continuum between the divine and Creation but not a fusion of them, reflecting the way in which the uncreated energies of God infused Creation so that Creation emerged in Christ and would return back to Christ in St. Maximus’ view. That Creation again was constituted and redeemed by logoi that formed a text in Christ as the Logos, the Gospel book so to speak or personal storyteller and author and reader all in one of the cosmos. This involved too one of Ilyin’s more controversial ideas, that of resistance to evil by force, which he developed as a Christian ethos of dealing with totalitarianism. This was applied by him in the 1920s to Communism but would be applied also later to Nazism by the Orthodox Saint Alexander Schmorell in the early 1940s, among others. Ilyin’s developed ethos of resistance to evil by force involved the idea that such resistance could become a duty for Christians facing totalitarian evil in order to protect the vulnerable. It involved a sense of shared responsibility for sin and duty to the vulnerable similar to that expressed by Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima. Likewise, however, it was not deterministic but an existentialist expression of free will that Ilyin argued needed to include penitence for such resistance. In this it drew on Byzantine Orthodox ideas of necessary war different from the idea of the just war as it developed into first Crusades and then secular idealistic campaigns in the modern West. Ilyin’s ethos here likewise involved a sense of Christian panentheism, in which there was not a fusion of the divine and Creation in the will to power of the self, but an overlapping yet distinction. Just as St. Basil wrote about the spark of divine love in each human heart as natural law, so the same early saint also argued that a soldier fighting in battle and killing an enemy under orders, even if that enemy was an enemy of the faith and his country both, should still consider doing penance for three years of excommunication after that killing. There was no fusion of will and right, but rather a mystical interplay of difference yet interconnection between the divine and the human, involved in the complex process of theosis or becoming one with the uncreated energies of God in Creation, but not the mystery of the essence of God as Trinity.
To return to American fiction, we see these elements expressed in the philosophical themes of James Fenimore Cooper’s writing about nature. Cooper’s Deerslayer, published in 1841, includes a scene at the headwaters of the Susquehanna in which Natty Bumppo, the titular Deerslayer, is described as contemplating the beauties of the break in the Eastern Woodlands at Lake Glimmerglass or Lake Otsego, where the water and the sky seem to reflect the forest into each other. There “he felt a portion of that soothing of the spirit which is a common attendant of a scene so thoroughly pervaded by the holy calm of nature,” Cooper writes.[ii] Here the sublime is related to a specific place and experience of it, not transcendental primarily, although it retains the edginess described by Burke of terror at great expanse and imminent danger mingled with joy. Natty and his foil, Hurry Harry March, then argue about the nature of the place and its overlapping cultures.
In their discussion, Deerslayer identifies a relation human personhood to a context of the divine, in response to Harry’s brief diatribe against “redskins,” Natty replies that, regardless of race, “I look upon him as the most of a man, who acts nearest the right, Hurry. But this is a glorious spot, and my eyes never aweary looking at it.” As they continue talking, Natty also reveals his aversion to the disturbing of nature and attempted ownership and manipulation of it through naming, in the way that European Americans do it in their mapping. Harry in fact has engaged in giving the lake his own private name of Glimmerglass with his friends, in private resistance to any attempted official naming, but admits it is just his own term in objectified form. “I’m glad it has no name,” Deerslayer says, “or, at least, no pale face name, for their christenings always fortel waste and destruction.” Harry notes that different Indian peoples have different names for the lake. Deerslayer says that hunters and trappers are likely to call it by something reasonable and resembling. That’s when Harry tells him of the name Glimmerglass, so given because of its reciprocal reflection of sky and water. as a kind of archipelagic opening or poetic clearing in the sea of the primordial forest. In the discussion that follows, though, we are told that “Hurry Harry thought more of the beauties of Judith Hutter,” a local beauty, “than of those of the Glimmer glass, and its accompanying scenery,” unlike the intrepid Natty, more overwhelmed by the larger context of the lake as mirror of sky and forest both.
Deerslayer questions why Judith’s stepfather Mr. Hutter is in his words burrowing or fortifying in seclusion on the lake: “To my eye it is such a solitude as one might open his whole soul in, and fear no one to disarrange his thoughts or his worship.” Harry tries to disabuse him of these sensibilities by speaking of the evils of the Indians roaming the area. The narrator warns that while Deerslayer’s ingenuousness guards against sophistry, he is not totally free of prejudice. But, in arguing with Harry’s notion of racial hierarchies, Natty reminds Harry that “God made all three” races, white, black and red, described by his companion. “God made us all,” Natty argues, “in the main, much the same in feelin’s; though I’ll not deny that he gave each race its gifts….
I do not pretend that all that white men do is properly Christianized and according to the lights given them; for then they would be what they ought to be, which we know they are not; but I will maintain that tradition, and use, and colour , and laws, make such a difference in races as to amount to gifts….When the colony’s laws, or even the king’s laws, run ag’n the laws of God, they get to be onlawful, and ought not to be obeyed. I hold to a white man’s respecting white laws, so long as they do not cross the track of a law comin’ from a higher authority, and for a red man to obey his own red-skin usages, under the same privilege.[iii]
This narrative of place at the source of the Susquehanna River, from Natty’s experience of the headwaters in Chapter 2 to this discussion of gifts in Chapter 3 of The Deerslayer, elides place and names and gifts and laws, shaping an awareness of the multiplicity of deep experience of landscape, which ultimately in turn contextualizes a kind of theophanic spectrum, spanning the divine and the experience of human beings in Creation. Only through openness of the soul to that multiplicity and its theophanic origin and purpose does a human find realization in personhood. Different overlapping names and laws as metaphors both emanate from and merge into the ultimate metonym of the river and lake, across different dimensions of time, evoking in Cooper’s cycle a sense of the landscape as being in God panentheistically. The place’s meaning, in relation to a sense of experiential human identity both constituted of and heading towards gifts from God, nonetheless related to a sense of place in the divine, changing and adapting to that latter experience. All this occurs in the context of a Creation that is a place of worship ultimately in the divine, involving (we are told) the holy calm of nature soothing the spirit, offering such as one might open his whole soul in, in which to fear no one able to disarrange one’s thoughts or worship.
Natty’s discussion of the gifts of different races, while critiquing Hurry’s assertion of racial hierarchy, comes shortly after the narrator has warned us that Natty has his prejudices too. The whole discussion comes right after the description of the transformative power of nature at the headwaters, with its melding and reciprocal mirroring of river, lake, sea, sky and forest. Natty’s discussion of how the laws identified with gifts are superseded or fulfilled in the divine laws culminates in his later comment, “different gifts, but only one nature.”[iv] Natty’s notion of gifts, which he describes as a combination of tradition, use, culture and laws, parallels the notion of cultural semiospheres developed by the mid-twentieth-century Baltic semiotician Juri Lotman.[v] Lotman, following on von Uexhull’s work, described how organisms and species have their own Umwelt or meaningful environment, in which they engage in making meaning. But a semiosphere could be thought of as a larger bubble of such bubbles of meanings so to speak. Thus, too, a semiosphere associated with a particular eco-region could be called an eco-semiosphere, which removes a central focus from human concerns and places them in a larger context of meaningful environment including the non-human. So Natty’s sense of gifts depend both on place and ultimately the divine, in which they meld into nature at large, in a path that nonetheless involves the personal, the particular, and the place-based. Thus, throughout The Leatherstocking Tales, Natty as hero, is, as he observes at times, a meld of gifts from both Indian and Euroamerican cultures, amid the influence of the ancient forest. Such gifts can also be thought of as emanations in which we grow, and reflect and engage in dialogue and personify and grow beyond, depending on our engagement or not in a sea of divinity, to which the medieval Eriugena compared the Scriptures or the logoi of the Logos in Maximus’ terms, articulating the uncreated energies of God infusing nature.
In this sense of gifts as overlapping and morphing emanations related to larger contexts of nature, Natty’s personification of them in a cultural and environmental exchange evokes an empathy with other beings and larger contexts. When Natty shoots an eagle carelessly, his sense of his gifts arguably shapes his remorse, for which he finds solace in the forest and perhaps penance in his captivity with the Mingoes. We hear his regret at the wasteful shooting of passenger pigeons in The Pioneers. He, together with his close Indian friends, all vanish with the forest whose disappearance at the hands of a rapacious and objectifying economy he mourns as well for destroying humanity, an early image of what the Christian environmental writer Paul Kingsnorth today calls the emergence of the global Machine or technocracy, the triumph of what SL Frank called obschestvennost over sobornost, of a self-centered pantheism over the Christian panentheism of Frank and Cooper.
The character of David Gamut in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans represents a Puritan in the wilderness who is nonetheless a psalmodist, bearing a pitchpipe and comically singing holy music based in Scripture. He offers comic relief while also convincing the hostile Natives that he is a mad man and thus getting special positive treatment as a type of holy fool. Gamut’s character arguably represents in Cooper’s view both the inadequacies of the transcendentalist-leaning Puritan view of nature, while also his music suggests the underlying panentheistic tendencies of Christian faith disrupting worldly hostilities and adversaries. Gamut is also a pacifist, symbolizing perhaps some of the absolutism of an individualistic pantheism in Christian heterodoxy, as decried by Ilyin’s anti-pacifist writing against Tolstoy in Russian philosophy. Not distinguishing clearly between self, nature, and the divine can lead to a delusory absolutism, Cooper suggests. Yet typically Gamut’s complicated if often stock role in the novel indicates the complexity and mystery of life in God as well. The main hero of the novel, Hawkeye, decries Gamut’s pacifism, but finds his role useful in subterfuge nonetheless. Hawkeye has been most influenced by the fading-away Moravian Christians of the Eastern Woodlands, who were less absolute in establishing cultural boundaries with the Indians than many other brands of Protestantism on the American frontier. In this his respect for both Native traditions and the Moravians is more reflective of the Cooper family Anglicanism and a less ultimately will-to-power view of nature. Power as a synonym for energy and virtue becomes linked more to grace than private strength and self-will.
Susan Fenimore Cooper’s exploration of the details of the landscape and ecology of her home region, relative to human dwelling there, adds to the mythic overlay landscape of her father’s writings in a Christian panentheistic way. In her writing about village improvement societies and of human society as embedded and interwoven in nature, there emerges a sense of the sacral garden and the ghost of the sacral forest, a potent invocation of imaginary regionalism anchored in detailed observations about the physicality of the Headwaters region. The overlay landscape is a time-honored element of Christian literature going back to Byzantine novels and early Irish and Welsh otherworldly tales among other sources, and ultimately to biblical and hagiographic narratives. It involves a spiritual or imaginary dimension interwoven with the physical landscape, linking the spiritual to specific historical places and often creating a sense of region. This type of overlay landscape reflects the Incarnation and the two natures of Christ in one person. It can be seen in Russian novels, such as the way that Dostoevsky’s great novels tend to have actual and recognizable geographic settings, what the Russian author called fantastic realism. In S.L. Frank’s vision of society, this is the overlay of sobornost on obschestvennost. It is not a fusion but an embodied and dialogic emplacement of the Creation in the human in the divinity. Perhaps Susan Fenimore Cooper’s most notorious essay was her gentle but powerful defense of women not having the vote, against women’s suffrage. In it she essentially took the Christian panentheistic approach that we live in Christ, not in the statistics of manipulatable mass voting, and that women’s spiritual and family and philanthropic roles were more essential than the former. No slouch herself, she in addition to her work as a writer founded and directed an orphanage and was key in founding a hospital, among other community duties. Never marrying herself, she was in many ways a lay Anglican monastic, striving for the Christian panentheistic practice of self-emptying in Christ rather than self-assertion.
At the intersection of beauty and memory or piety with the physical creation in this imaginative geography lies what the Christian phenomenologist Erazim Kohák meant when he said that we live authentically as persons, relationally, when we live at the intersection of time and eternity. An experience of beauty in the world is an experience of time, yet that combined with memory that is sanctifying becomes also piety that partakes in Kohák’s sense in eternity. This geography of the imagination becomes relational rather than objectifying. This involved also what in the Coopers’ time was known as the sublime, in particular Edmund Burrke’s more physiological or environmental version, emphasizing the intersection of beauty and terror on a boundary between worlds.
Susan Fenimore Cooper’s central metaphor of the garden for human community life as regional connects again the universal and particular in this sense. She clearly draws on a Christian universalism in doing so. Her philanthropic work and conservation writings helped shape civic regionalism around Otsego Lake. Her father’s patronal and somewhat aristocratic view of American republicanism set up his critique of commercial Whiggery, and his allegorical critique of a rule by business oligarchy in his fiction about Venice. A paradoxical aristocratic Jacksonian Democrat critical of the development of the mob in American life, which he saw as atomistically disconnected from the overlay of spiritual unity and place, his stories and essays linked to his daughter’s Christian communitarianism. Both Coopers pointed beyond the purported physical source of the Susquehanna River at Otsego Lake to the mystery of the origins of the beauty of the Headwaters of God’s Creation, in a cosmic gift economy of relationship. That formed the source of their critique of the emerging impersonal matrix of a globalized consumerist landscape of mass media and ideological motivations, endangering in the elder Cooper’s view the American republic. In that evocation of the mystery of relationship, spanning the material and the spiritual, their legacy of region endures panentheistically in the imagination of their readers.
To return to Russian literature, Dostoevsky’s Elder Zosima was written in part on Elder Ambrose of Optina, whom the novelist visited. It was a younger contemporary at Optina, Elder Anatoly the Younger, to whom is credited a post-revolutionary prayer against the Antichrist, in which he asks to be protected in God’s “hidden desert of salvation.” That evokes again the overlay landscape, as do more graphically Elder Zosima’s descriptions of the natural world as lit by the love of God. The Grand Inquisitor can be taken as Dostoevsky’s ultimate parable of Christian panentheism. The progenitor of the Antichrist who is the Inquisitor calls for Christ to succumb to the three temptations, including using miracles to amaze and stupefy the masses, to take power, to take materialistic surfeit. These are all the temptations of atheistic panentheistic mixed with pantheistic views of nature today, that result in a virtual reality re-enchanting the world with delusion and creating a permeable cortex out of the old liberal individual. In the so-called Anthropocene, there is no real escape into nature a la Transcendentalism, only technocracy. The existence of Creation in Christ is willfully forgotten even when it cannot be escaped.
The Life of St Sergius tells how young Bartholomew (later Sergius) and his brother searched for a desert place in many parts of the forest, until finally they came to a clearing near a stream, and obeying the voice of God were satisfied. His brother reminded him that God gave a sign before Sergius was born, in three cries from within the womb, that he would lead others to believe in the All Holy Trinity, to which the Chapel in the woods was dedicated. We are told that everywhere on all sides were forest and wilderness where the saintly desert-lover and desert-dweller stayed. The saint requested tonsuring as a monk, being given the name Sergius, while saying “I thirst as the hart thirsteth for the springs of the living water.” Living alone in the wilderness, we are told that a bear used to come to the holy man and became a kind of companion. “The forest was not far distant from it as it now is; the shade and the murmur of trees hung above the cells; around the church was a space of trunks and stumps; here many kinds of vegetables were sown,” it says.
Later in the Life, the saint is famously found gardening by a visitor who cannot believe he is the abbot until he is corrected by a visiting prince and becomes a monk himself. We’re told that St. Sergius as abbot “himself baked the holy bread; first he flayed and ground the wheat, sifted the flour, kneaded and fermented the dough”—the same bread involved in his originally gaining the gift of reading. He taught by example the monks “to have the Psalms of David all day on their lips.” Although wilderness surrounded the monastery at first, within first years Christians began coming to live around it, and the forest was cut down and a plain created with a village. St. Sergius’ prayers for Grand Duke Dmitry against the Tatars indicate the significance of a Christian society as a meaningful environment that would help shape what can be called the natural world of generations of Christians to come growing up in what would become Russia. “God provides for everything, and neither does he abandon this place,” the saint counseled the monks. Ultimately a country, like the Coopers’ region, could rest in Christ, but as neither as a materialistic nor virtual object, rather in Christian panentheism in an energized relationship that defied essentializing. Thus in the end Dostoevsky was not a full sated Slavophile but in the Back to the Soil movement was more complicated. So too Flannery O’Connor’s fiction dwells in the Christ-haunted South and not a neo-Confederate, neoconservative, or neoliberal constructed virtual world. Christian panentheism is more complicated and too nuanced for twenty-first-century memes, until it is assumed in life.
In the end, we can think of commonalities between elements of what I have called American Appalachian and Russian Orthodox Christian philosophy of nature as not focused on the natural world in modern secular terms, but about natural law as a kind of energy field of grace. Both view natural law neither as an external constraint of a Deistic God nor atheistically as a grid for interiorized manipulation of the external. Rather it lies within the embrace of a personal God who dwells within the mystery of the holy Trinity, the God-man Christ, the Logos or Story in Whom Creation both moves and rests, in the sense of life as embodied story, in this case the story of God.
[1] H. Tristram Engelhardt, Jr., The Foundations of Christian Bioethics (Beverly, M.A.: 2000), 246-47.
[2] St. Basil, Ascetical Works, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 9, Sr. M. Monica Wagner, trans. (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 1962), p. 233 (response to Question 2 in The Long Rules).
[3] Blesed Theophylact, Archbishop of Ochrid and Bulgaria, The Expalnation of the Holy Gospel According to John, trans. Fr. Christopher Stade (House Springs, MO: Chrysostom Press, 2007), 17.
[4] Eriugena’s theophanic philosophy of nature also parallels in certain unexpected respects the postmodern “ecoosophy” or “geophilosophy” of Deleuze and Guattari, two late-twentieth century European writers influenced by the early 20th-century Baltic scientist Jakob von Uexhull, whose biosemiotics in turn overlapped with Peirce’s work.
[i] Charles S. Peirce, “The Basis of Pragmaticism in the Normative Sciences,” in The Essential Peirce, Selected Philosophical Writings, vol. 2 (1893-1913), ed .the Peirce Edition project (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1998), 360-397, at 394.
[ii] James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer, in The Leatherstocking Tales, ed. Blake Nevius, The Library of America (New York: Literary Classics of the U.S., 1985), 524-25.
[iii] Ibid., 528-29
[iv] Ibid., 921.
[v] Juri Lotman, “On the Semiosphere,” trans. Wilma Clark. Sign System Studies 33.1 (2005): 205-229/