Smith, Greg dot com

Most of us look at a majestic waterfall or towering redwoods or a stormy sea battering a cliff and feel awe and wonder. More than that, we feel that untamed nature is beautiful and transcendent. 21st century people can't imagine anyone not feeling that way or not wanting to experience wild and pristine places.

But people haven't always felt that way. Throughout much of Western history people found mountains and oceans and forests and storms frightening and inhospitable. But a bookish English poet during the Industrial Revolution taught the English-speaking world to see the world around them in a very different way...

Of course most people at most times in most people have had moments when they thought: wow, that flower or sunset or lake is pretty or awe-inspiring. But until relatively recently in history they didn't write poems or sing songs or paint paintings about Nature or the natural world.

There's an obvious reason for this, if you think about it. When people live close to natural world it's something to be overcome and endured, not admired. I don't mean "close to" in the way we do today, where we choose to encounter nature from a position of safety or comfort (including engaging in risky "nature recreation"). I'm talking about people whose survival is constantly being jeopardized by natural forces. A cliff over a raging sea is inspiring if you are safe and well-fed and can go back to the bed-and-breakfast for a pint, but if you're an Irish peasant struggling to grow potatoes and stay warm and dry and keep your children alive? Well, in that case inspiration is the furthest thing from your mind. Walking mountain passes is invigorating for us as a form of recreation: but if you're the Iceman and you're worried about bandits and bears and blizzards then mountain passes are menacing and to be avoided if at all possible. Storms with wind and rain can be profound when watched through a large bay window with a glass of merlot and the right music through the sound system, but if your hut is being ripped apart by a hurricane and the storm surge is rising through your front door then it's just terrifying.

Perhaps for these reasons there are no significant examples of landscape scenes being painted for their own sake in Western art before the early 19th century.

But around the turn of the 19th century something shifted in Western culture, and the natural world became a source of wonder and inspiration and even worship.

The precursor was the Enlightenment, the backdrop was the Industrial Revolution and the new approach was called Romanticism and its poet laureate was an englishman named William Wordsworth.

Wordsworth (1770-1850) became disenchanted with the rationalistic and increasingly mechanistic life of the growing industrial society. He moved up into the rugged Lake District of northwest England and sought a new sources of inspiration.

Now Wordsworth was surely not the first man in history to enjoy a walk in the hills. But he was one of the first major literally figure in Western culture to describe wild nature as transcendent and supernatural and make it the subject of his art.

In his poem The World Is Too Much with Us, published in 1807, Wordsworth laments that the modern life of man, consumed with earning and buying and selling and making, blinds mankind to the beauty and freedom of the natural world:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.

William Wordsworth work was immensely popular within a culture that had, after the Enlightenment, lost its sense of wonder in God. The culture was searching for something awe-inspiring. The Romantic Movement was so significant and popular precisely because it transposed the previous sense of the supernatural from God into the idea of a heroic man, freed from the constraints of industrial society, alone in a transcendent natural world. Writers like Byron and Coleridge and James Fenimore Cooper (with his quintessentially Romantic novel Last of the Mohicans) and composers like Beethoven and later Wagner gave the Western world something like a new religious impulse.

Take a look at the painting below. In all the history of Classical and Western art there had never been something like it:

It was painted by Caspar David Friedrich. The opening paragraph of his Wiki entry almost summarizes the Romantic Movement:

Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was a landscape painter of the nineteenth-century German Romantic movement, of which he is now considered the most important painter. A painter and draughtsman, Friedrich is best known for his later allegorical landscapes, which feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees, and Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey the spiritual experiences of life.

Incidentally, around the same time that the Romantic artists were portraying the natural world as a source of supernatural wonder and an object of worship new movements in Christianity were seeking wonder and awe in energetic worship services. Methodism in England and the Second Great Awakening in the United States were movements among the masses. They were reacting to the Enlightenment and industrialization with a style of worship that emphasized the experience of the worshipper.

Yesterday I wrote about Simeon Sytlites and the ascetic saints of the fifth century. We can't understand the worldview or the culture that produced people like that. But my contention is that they wouldn't be able to understand our culture or worldview or fascination with the natural world. Simeon didn't sit on top of the pillar to enjoy the view. People of that world saw the natural world as something to be endured or escaped while we see it as something to be at the least treasured or at most worshiped.

The Romantic poets and painters and composers shaped the spiritual worldview of the educated and elite while the new experiential forms of Christianity shaped the worldview of the common people in rural areas, especially in the American frontier interior. Thus the foundation for our current culture wars were laid: educated urban elites seeking to experience (and worship) nature in recreational pursuits while working class people in rural America seeking spiritual meaning in vibrant Christian worship.

This shift in how we view the world and our place in it will be a thread in the WTH class I'm teaching this fall and the book that I'm working on, The Church at the Edge of the World.