Lessons from the Woods
Trees will teach you that which you cannot learn from the masters
(Painting: A Walk in the Forest, Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin, 1869)
“Believe me, for I know, you will find something far greater in the woods than in books. Stones and trees will teach you that which you cannot learn from the masters.”
II, Epistola CVI, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
A false dichotomy seems to prevail today between a despairing worship of the natural world and a reactionary protest against reverence for the natural world as if it implies worship. As with all extremes, the truth usually lies not somewhere in the middle, the product of some kind of dialectic, but somewhere above, transcending the dichotomy. Mankind’s friendship with the arboreal is no exception.
It is well understood by traditional Catholics of the 21st century that widespread ecological despair is highly correlated with a widespread lack of Hope in eternity. Something less addressed is that a similarly widespread inattentiveness to the natural world, often owing to our urbanised and industrialised surroundings, also makes us inattentive to the lessons we ought to be taking from it as a Teacher ordained by God.
In his poem The Tables Turned, William Wordsworth alluded to the same sentiment as Saint Bernard’s,
Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.
Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.
And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
A heart that watches and receives the miniscule details and enormous magnitude of the natural world is one that watches and receives God-given reality. While Heaven is ultimately the playground to which we aspire, noted G. K. Chesterton, the Earth we now inhabit is a task garden. Immersed in and given ability to domesticate this imperfect garden after his exile from, and awaiting of, the perfect garden, man learns not only science but also the reality of his own nature. He is vulnerable and limited within the vastness and complexity of the whole created order over which he is assigned his duties. Although it was before his Fall that he, formed from the humble soil, was commanded to dress and keep the Earth, his retention of this duty in the form of labour and toil is not just postlapsarian punishment, but ordered for his humility. In other words, for his prelapsarian restoration.
‘Before destruction, the heart of a man is exalted: and before he be glorified, it is humbled.’ - Proverbs 18:12
In Question 12 of Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, the Angelic Doctor addresses how man can know God and the extent to which he can comprehend Him. In so doing, he famously writes that our human minds cannot, on this side of eternity, even comprehend or exhaust the essence of a single fly, let alone God. Studying a single fly or a blade of grass, we ought to attain both humility and a ray of the infinite wisdom. As the Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov so poetically reminds us who, though endowed by God with reason, so easily stray from His natural and divine order, “each blade of grass, each little bug, ant, golden bee, knows its way amazingly; being without reason, they witness to the Divine Mystery, they ceaselessly enact it.”
In ages past, when mankind was less urbanised and less industrialised, he was able to learn both science and spiritual wisdom in his daily labour and toil, exposed to both the Beauty and the harsh, difficult conquest of nature. While Beauty is a teacher of the transcendent, the latter is a teacher of man’s abilities and limitations. Humility is that on which all virtue and wisdom is founded, and Beauty, as wrote Dietrich von Hildebrand in Beauty in the Light of the Redemption, contains a sursum corda; It elevates our humbled souls to see and long for God.
By contrast, those who today call themselves educated might be rich in the knowledge of manmade technology, but are increasingly poor in the knowledge of reality. We build skyscrapers that rise above the clouds and yet fail to see from them the Creator that gives us the very capacity to build them. We build an economic system that is detached from our own habitats and then commission experts to understand the supply chains. We brazenly contribute to the depletion of species, soil nutrients and habitats for our own temporary gain and then wonder why ecosystems no longer support us.
Can life prevail in an anthropocentric world that has long abandoned non-tokenistic reverence for the natural world? This question is famously posed by the Finnish deep ecologist Pentti Linkola in his so-titled book, which posits that man’s destruction of woodlands and natural habitats - and disregard for the implications thereof - denotes the end of man himself. In seeking and having it all without constraint, rather than delighting in the abundance of sufficiency, mankind became at once sedentary, suicidal and sick. So can life prevail? The answer of Linkola, who could not bring himself to believe in a God who forgives what man has done to the natural world, must be different to our own. For Christians, the possibility of forgiveness, itself blooming from a tree, changes everything.
The Gospel is all that transcends the false dichotomy of despair and ignorance around us. The Creator’s use of a tree for our salvation is the great lesson from the woods.
Every Good Friday, we hear the words of the 6th century hymnographer Saint Venantius Honorius Clementianus Fortunatus chanted in the Liturgy:
None in foliage, none in blossom
None in fruit thy peer may be
Through a tree we were enslaved
And through a tree we are set free
In his book The Tree of Salvation, Father G. Ronald Murphy sets out how the tree of the Cross brings us reconciliation with God in a way that was even prefigured in ancient mythology. Prior to their knowledge of Christ, the Yggdrasil – an evergreen tree of life – was understood by much of the Germanic and Nordic world as holding up the skies, uniting the gods to the lower worlds, and providing place of refuge on the day of mankind’s judgement. In like manner, the Gospel of Christ’s reconciliation of all worlds was able to be explained to the North by emphasising the analogous tree of the Cross. More than mere explanation, churches in which the living sacraments are contained were themselves constructed to bear likeness to an evergreen tree, as the new sites of eternal life, reconciliation of heaven and earth, and refuge. Why is this relevant? Aside from serving as the great lesson from the arboreal, this crossover from ancient paganism to Christianity might convict us of a need to imitate our evangelical forebears those centuries ago. We are called to meet our own pagan world where it is at with the same light of Christ that reveals obscured truths and vanquishes despair.
After our first ancestor’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, its glimpses have followed and even haunted us. As the early Syriac text The Cave of Treasures reminds us, it is the duty of Christians – who have been granted return to the Garden – to share the treasures thereof with the rest of the middle world that is between earth and eternity. If education is the pursuit and sharing of Truth, Goodness and Beauty, the sermon preached by the trees is a good place to start.
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