I just stepped in from a hike through the Grand Forest on Bainbridge Island, Washington. The forest is quite nice, if you like all spongy and mossy (which I do). The dominant trees are douglas-fir and Western Red Cedar, but none of these are old growth trees, so there is a proliferation of smaller plant life under the moderate canopy: Sword Fern; Huckleberry; and a ton of other plants that I'm not familiar with. The relative density of plants creates a habitat for lots of small animals, various birds and squirrels.
Anyway, as I looked into the messy tangle of plants, I remembered a line from The Mission: referring to the jungle, Father Gabriel says, "It's a trifle overgrown." This, in turn, made me think of a comment that one of you had made to me privately, saying that left on its own, nature tends toward chaos. This comment reminded me of the Genesis passage in which God tells the people to subdue the earth.
This is all very fascinating to me because I have always been of the camp that views the natural world as balanced and ordered, self-balancing and self-ordering. Once again, you my friends are pushing me into more nuanced ways of viewing the world.
I would love to hear more of your thoughts on this topic.
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Hmmm . . . what is chaos? Perhaps nature is indeed self-regulating and self-balancing, but not always in ways that we tend to think of as orderly. I think of central Oregon, where you have some forests made mostly of ponderosa pines and some made mostly of lodgepole pines. The nice widely-spaced ponderosa pine forests (before Europeans came on the scene) regulated themselves largely through gentle, slow-burning, slow-moving ground fires. The trees live for a long time. The lodgepole pine forests, on the other hand, tend to grow in very dense, crowded groups that compete fiercely for nutrients with each other and fall victim every so often to mass killings by mountain pine beetles and by intense fires. Lodepole pine trees rarely grow for more than about 70 years. Both of these cycles were around before humans, but which is orderly and which chaotic? Is it a matter of interpretation?
This also makes me think of early modern poetry. In Spenser and Shakespeare's time, nature was most truly wonderful to people when tended and tamed by human hands. The "wilderness" ideal wasn't something these folks favored. I tend to agree with Wendell Berry that when you love a place, you will work with it and through it, knowing your place in it and helping it to realize a potential that is a product both of its own inherent possibilities and your best imagination. This involves neither "subduing" it in the most common sense of that word nor letting it "run wild." This is how I imagine the Garden of Eden--Adam and Eve didn't "subdue" it, but I don't imagine it as very "chaotic" either. Instead, I imagine Adam and Eve being such a part of their surroundings that they wore them, if you will, naturally participating in all their various wonders by doing things like naming their creatures and just generally exploring them. (Or at least this is how it works in my overactive imagination.) In my King James version of Genesis, along with telling Adam to subdue the earth, God tells him to replenish it. I am hopeful that this replenishing and subduing are joint efforts between us and our surroundings rather than a one-way relationship.
One sci-fi series that had great impact on my thinking was the Chronicals of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R Donaldson (particularly the first three volumes). The poeple that populate his Land, and the Land itself, have a harmony about them. There are the wood people and the stone people (among others). The stone people, for example, built everything out of stone--but "build" is the wrong concept for what they did. Rather, they were versed in rock lore which enabled them to shape and form the rocks, according to the nature of the rock (nature per the rules of this imaginary place). There was a bending of the person to the nature of the rock, and a bending of the rock to the nature of the person--the natures of both being preserved, and, in some measure, enhanced. I think this kind of interaction is what Quercus might have in mind.
These are cool themes, and, I think, do say something meaningful about the real world.
Before ending, I must raise one more major allusion. In Miracles, C.S. Lewis dwells heavily on the interaction of man with nature, or more pointedly, of reason with nature. It is, as he puts it, a one-way interaction. Nature, when acted upon by reason, is improved; reason, when acted upon by nature, is not improved. Of course the full context is needed to ward of the impending misconcepts that come to mind. Nevertheless, Quercus' allusion to W. Berry seems to align with this view. And it is this which I take to be a proper understanding of the subduing of nature.
It is a shame that, to modern minds, concepts of heierarchy, submission, and ruling, seem only to imply negative ideas like forced domination. That's not at all what comes to my mind when I think of man subduing nature. Done properly, such subduing strikes me as a blessing both for man and for nature--not unlike the rock people in Donaldson's novels.
Theo-fan: right on! The Thomas Covenant series has always been one of my favorites.
I want to make a correction. In my post above, when I said, "Both of these cycles were around before humans," I meant to say "Before Europeans."
Your rich comments provoke two thoughts. First, I'm allergic to reducing our human activities to reason alone, as we so often do. There's so much more involved in everything we do, from emotions to intuition to revelation to physical memory. Do you think that if C.S. Lewis talked in terms of the operations of reason (alone) upon nature, it's because it's just a general Western habit of thought to do so? It makes me think of something I just read from Bishop Kallistos Ware, who wrote that not only should we use our God-given reason when reading scripture, but really we must do so if we want to approach a fuller understanding. I think that this comes out of that same habit. All those other parts of us should also come into play, right?
My shying away from that word, "subduing," was instinctive and, as you pointed out, it comes from a visceral discomfort. This leads me to my second thought. Wendell Berry (again!) expresses the same idea that you do--that it's too bad modern people are so uncomfortable with the ideas of hierarchy, of submission, of ruling. I agree with this insofar as we should seek to understand our proper place. In theory, I completely understand and accept that I have my place in the order of things and that I need to submit to it (although in practice, I often rebel in thought--but at least I recognize this as a problematic tendency). For me and for many people I know, the problem comes in with the attitude that WE are the masters and that the rest of the world (as with other races, or other genders) should submit to US. It feels arrogant. So I think that for many people the discomfort with ideas of hierarchy springs from a basic humility.
(With that said, obviously many people do feel discomfort in the opposite way, because they don't want to recognize that they should submit to anything. This hyper-individualism causes lots of problems for communities, of course . . . .)
Finally, it also occurs to me that God tells Adam to subdue the earth just after Adam is created. After the Fall, on the other hand, perhaps it is arrogant to think that we can either subdue the earth (because at least for now we are part of the natural order, not above it) or to replenish it (because our hearts are too hard to love it properly).
Just thoughts. Really, this is all just musing on things above my head. But it's fun to do.
Quercus, thanks for your exuberance! I'm glad you know the Thomas Covenant series--it makes the reference so much richer. I haven't heard anyone refer to that series before, so I didn't expect anyone to recognize it. With it as one of your favorites I'm pleasantly, and very, surprised. This is cool.
As for the allergy to excessive reliance on reason--I'm willing to bet that this is one of the chords that ties us together as the common friends of Ishmael, our blogging host.
It is precisely this allergy and my own love of sound reason that draws me to C. S. Lewis. In Miracles (and in many other of his writings) he is unequivocal in pointing out, and avoiding, the arrogance that we moderns wield blindly when using reason to dissect and reassemble ancient modes of thought, damaging both ourselves, and the wisdom expressed by the ancients. In Reflections on the Psalms, in fact, he implies that the ancients had great advantage in being incapable of distinguishing between a ritual and what it symbolizes. This is the example he uses showing how we habitually dissect a thing in an effort to grasp its essence, but in the process miss the big picture. He’s right.
And yet, with Lewis, I affirm the value in striving BOTH to see a thing as the whole that it is (a unified, irreducible, harmonious, whole), AND to analyze it for consistency. I think the two modes complement each other, and, when guided by wisdom, they can act as correctives on each others' blind spots. I wonder whether a human (other than living Saints) is capable of fully operating in both modes interchangeably.
As you say, this is all just musing on things above my head. It is indeed fun. Thank you for your kind exchange.
This is a great conversation, particularly because it is composed primarily of voices other than my own. Still, I can't resist the lure of "musing on things above my head," and it's great to talk with both of you.
You have both said wonderful things. You've made me think, and you've made me see more clearly. I really like what each of you has had to say about interacting with nature, learning its essence and your relationship with that essence.
I do believe that just as nature can be affected by reason, reason can be affected by nature. Theo-fan, you relayed to me a comment that someone had made to you once: "There are no failures, only new information." Building on this idea, as man interacts with nature, his rational faculty must be affected. I've surfed with both of you, so I know that you both must know this to be true from your experience with the force of the ocean. (I would love to re-visit the posts about bull riding and lessons from nature with both of you: they are strongly related to our discussion here.)
I think that nature's impact on man must be extended as well to include the more full capacities of the human being as described by each of you. A person with sensitivity and opportunity is affected by nature on all fronts: rational; emotional; spiritual; etc.
It is all relational. Maybe this is a poor simile, but I think that there is a parallel between the relationship of man and nature and a marriage. In both cases, each entity is a force, beautiful in its own right, and imperfect in ways that make it unique to any other force on the planet. As these forces come into contact with one another, merge with one another, there is tension and, ideally, resolution. Maybe both subduing and replenishing are parts of this tension and resolution (this sounds dangerously close to arrogance; I mean this in a way that is similar to water and rock acting upon one another)? I love the rock bending allusion: "to shape and form the rocks, according to the nature of the rock[]. There was a bending of the person to the nature of the rock, and a bending of the rock to the nature of the person--the natures of both being preserved, and, in some measure, enhanced." This is the same idea that I am driving at in a less articulate way.
All of this reminds me of the discussion of leadership in the Tao te Ching, where it says that the sage leads in such a way that the people are unaware that they are even being led. Maybe this is a key to the relationships between man and nature as well. We act subtly upon one another, striving always to understand the nature of the other force, striving to never violate that nature.
Well, I have rambled on enough for now. This is fun though.
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