The Encyclopedia of World Religions

316 S nature and religion

Further reading: Dee Alexander Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (New York: Henry Holt, 2001); Vine Deloria Jr., God Is Red, 3d ed. (Golden, Colo.: Fulcrum, 2003); Sam Gill, Native American Religions: An Introduction (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1981); Ake Hultkrantz, Religions of the American Indians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981); Clara Sue Kidwell, Homer Noley, and George E. Tinker, A Native American Theology (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis 2001); Joel W. Martin, The Land Looks After Us: A History of Native American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Peter Matthiessen, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (New York: Viking, 1991); John G. Neihardt, ed., Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). nature and religion The significance of the natural world for religion. All religions must deal not only with humanity, but also with the envi ronment in which we dwell. They must, in other words, have something to say about the plants and animals, the mountains and forests, the soil and sky and stars that are visible and tangible. They must deal with nature. That is not always easy to do. Nature can be experienced in many ways. Sometimes it seems lush and beautiful and friendly beyond anything else imaginable, and we believe nature must be the very footstool of G OD or the manifestation of divine reality. Yet at other times, in the wake of floods or drought or earthquake, nature appears cruel and ruthless, the enemy of all human hopes and dreams. Yet again, there are times when we are struck by the heartlessness of nature, the suffering of so many creatures, and the hardness of the natural environ ment against which we must often struggle. Religions have contented with all these per ceptions. The members of some religions, like T AO ISM and a few “nature mystics,” have virtually been “pantheists,” that is, people who have thought God and nature virtually to be identical. The harshness of nature, they say, is the harshness of God, yet to know the heart of nature is to get beyond that and into a profound sense of wonder at the ultimate

beauty of what is in the world before and beyond humankind. All one can do, they say, is attune oneself with the essence of nature—the Tao, in Taoist language—and through it go beyond human concepts of good and evil. At the other end of the spectrum are those who, as in the ancient G NOSTICISM and M AN ICHAEISM , have emphasized the EVIL in nature, and have said that nature could not have been created by a good God. Many Gnostics said that the world as we know it was created by a lower god than the supreme Lord, who botched the job and made the fallen natural and human world around us; we ourselves are sparks of light from a higher realm who have become entrapped in this evil realm and must escape from it. The positions of most of the major religions are somewhere in between. H INDUISM and B UD DHISM would say that nature contains beings, ani mals, demons, and others who, like ourselves but with less capacity for understanding, are driven by ignorance and desire. Thus nature too is suf fering, but also bears the divine spark or the B UD DHA -nature and can be freed through compassion. Some would say that the suffering of nature is at least in part a projection of our own twisted con sciousness onto it. The western MONOTHEISM of J UDAISM , C HRISTIAN ITY , and I SLAM would generally say that nature is good insofar as it was created, like us, by the one supreme God. Christianity would add that nature, also like us, has been touched by SIN and is “fallen,” so that its original pure and true nature is hard to see. But, though it is generally said that animals (and other beings in nature) do not have immortal souls like humans, they suffer in fallen nature and as creatures of God deserve our compassion and help. In many ways, then, nature remains a deep mystery for religion, but also an arena for the exer cise of whatever love and VISION religion provides.

Nazarene, Church of the A church in the Holi ness tradition, founded in the United States. The Holiness movement is an outgrowth of Methodism that emphasizes sanctification, that is, the develop