Religion and Nature Writing in Canada

Given the immense importance of nature within Canadian culture, and especially within the literary imagination, many types and genres could be considered to be "nature writing," from scientific treatises, memoirs, and exploration journals, through novels and short stories, and including all kinds of poetry from the epic to the short lyric. To be sure, a full account must include works of prose and poetry both in French and English, Canada's two official languages. While this examination of prose written in English might seem unduly restricted, it does reveal broadly applicable trends and motifs. Furthermore, nature writing in Canada may be related to either explicit or implicit religion. If the natural world is comprehended under the aegis of a religious worldview already widely held and promoted by religious institutions, then nature writing in such a context is linked to explicit religion.

In this light older Canadian writing frequently detailed in unambiguous terms a savage and unforgiving natural world inhabited by forces opposed to the order of grace and to the divine transformation of the human. Less common, but equally explicit, was the religion of nature writing that set forth a human realm corrupted by human sin contrasted with an unfallen and benevolent world of nature. Two stories anthologized in The Oxford Book of Canadian Short Stories in English illustrate this plain and unambiguous portrayal of nature in the explicit religious context of nineteenth-century Canada. Nature writer Charles G. D. Roberts, in his story "Do Seek Their Meat from God," contrasts the instinct prompting a panther to stalk a child with the providential urge that leads a father to save that child. In Susie Frances Harrison's "The Idyl of the Island" a city-weary visitor from a nearby hotel comes upon a woman sleeping on a mossy couch in an edenic island setting, described in the most lyrically romantic terms. Up until a generation or so ago the explicitly religious context of Canadian nature writing was a supernatural theism that placed the Creator outside of nature. The world of nature was either opposed to or allied with that transcendent realm of grace. At its extreme nature might be portrayed in negative terms as the realm of darkness and demons.

In 1965 Alec Lucas, contributing a chapter on "Nature Writers and the Animal Story" to Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English, set Canadian nature writing in the framework of western literary history. Lucas showed how writing about the natural world, from biblical and classical texts through the medieval period, inevitably concerned itself with the human relationship to nature, and just as often, with the relationship of both the human and natural to the divine. Accordingly, animal fables amounted to commentaries on people and social relations, often allegorizing and moralistic, and assuming dominion over nature that was provided for human benefit by God.

Though Renaissance humanism promoted close examination of the whole of nature, and included humans within nature, Cartesian logic and Newtonian physics fostered a rationalistic understanding of a mechanistic world. In the nineteenth century, though Romanticism's discovery of a moral order within nature gave way to Darwinianism, both movements restored human beings to the world of nature. Lucas outlines the contributions of pioneer writers and field naturalists to Canadian nature writing, suggesting that by the twentieth century nature ceased to be a source of moral law or evidence of the divine, but a unity including both people and animals. He traces the Canadian tradition of outdoors and animal stories, sometimes in the pastoral tradition, sometimes through natural history, that often advocated a return to nature to escape the evils of urban life and to refresh the spirit. Within all of the schools and genres that Lucas surveys and details whatever estimate is given of nature tends to be made against the backdrop of Christianity in its various forms. The religion of nature is subordinated to a Christian worldview, or understood generally within the context of western monotheism.

In the final paragraph of this informative and detailed essay published in 1965 Alec Lucas concluded that the zenith of nature writing "has long passed." Perhaps, he surmised, it was because the "literary vein has been worked out," or that after two World Wars the public had learned well the lesson that people and animals are "too much alike." In addition, Lucas supposed, urban dwellers were several generations removed from their rural forebears, and the physical sciences had replaced the biological sciences in the public imagination. Of course, from the vantage point of more than a generation later this pronouncement surely has to be reckoned as premature in the extreme. The 2002 volume, Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, gives prominence to the persistent significance of nature in Canadian literature in articles on "Animal Story," "Ecocriticism," "Exploration Literature," "Landscape," "North," and "Science and Nature Writing."

Nature writing in Canada, in particular considered in relation to religion, can be said to have undergone a complete and unqualified renaissance. The obvious Christian use of natural phenomena as a means of evangelization, or of demonstrating a divine order discernable in creation, continues only as a relatively minor aspect of this genre. The materials from the Moody Bible Institute's "Sermons from Science" ministry are one ongoing Protestant evangelical example of nature understood from an explicitly religious perspective. Though "Sermons from Science" was the theme of one pavilion at Montreal's Expo 67, this kind of approach probably has been regarded as "too American" within the Canadian religious context, where "born-again" Christianity is much less prominent than in the United States.

Rather, the dynamism of this literary renaissance lies in the implicitly religious dimensions of nature evident in Canadian writing since the late 1960s. Such factors as the impact of a counter-culture with its back-to-the land emphasis, the growth of feminism stressing the human connection with nature, a suspicion of high technology, and the significance of the environmental movement were incorporated into a newly burgeoning Canadian literature in the 1970s. And, contrary to what Lucas foresaw, the study of the biological (or "life") sciences returned to prominence over physics and chemistry. This implicitly religious nature writing derives from a nature mysticism or ecological worldview that discovers within the very realm of nature itself a sacred dimension or wisdom that is potentially illuminating or instructive. The watchword of this trend might be Wallace Stevens' poetic injunction to seek everything within reality and nothing beyond it.

From a vast spectrum of nonfiction, some principal exemplars might be selected. David Suzuki, a geneticist and Canada's leading environmentalist, is a world-renowned broadcaster, lecturer, and writer. In books such as The Sacred Balance and Wisdom of the Elders Suzuki proclaims a spirituality of nature that brings science under the auspices of indigenous ways of knowing that retain their cultural validity today. Saskatchewan novelist Sharon Butala in The Perfection of the Morning (1994), subtitled "An Apprenticeship in Nature," explores how in her spiritual journey her soul found its home through daily contact with nature. Though Butala is more literary and less the environmental activist than Suzuki, like him she links her celebration of nature to native wisdom and to feminism. In a subsequent devotional book, Coyote's Morning Cry (1995), she sets forth her "meditations and dreams" in a more direct presentation of her own religious insights as derived from the natural world.

Other literary naturalists, or writers having scientific interests, have similarly advanced a spirituality of nature through the medium of their nonfictional and semi-autobiographical writing. Barry Lopez (Arctic Dreams), Harold Horwood (Dancing on the Shore), Richard Nelson (The Island Within), or the books of Farley Mowat might be cited as examples. Outdoor educator James Raffan in several books about canoeing relates the inner and mythic meanings of landscape to the Canadian spirit, as has Canadian Literature specialist John Moss whose Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape (1994) might be said to be a work of literary ecocriticism.

Because fiction, and especially the novel, has become the preeminent literary genre, the presence of nature writing of religious significance in the Canadian context must be highlighted in its various manifestations there. One great example is W. O Mitchell's Who Has Seen the Wind (1947), a novel that contrasts the explicit religion of a prairie town with the mystical aspects of a boy's experience of nature as he grows up. Here implicit religiosity emerges as more vital, in terms suggestive of C. S. Lewis's account of sehnsucht in Surprised by Joy or Rudolf Otto's Das Heilige. Margaret Atwood (Surfacing) and Marian Engel (Bear) in two novels of the 1970s portrayed the initiation of a woman in the Canadian wilderness, replicating a feminist version of an Amerindian vision quest. As in the case of nonfiction writings, novels that significantly render a spiritual vision of nature have often drawn upon the worldviews of First Nations peoples. A prime example is Rudy Wiebe's A Discovery of Strangers, winner of the Governor-General's award for English fiction in 1994, whose first chapter represents the world as it appears to the northern animals in the nineteenth-century "Barren Grounds" that are its setting.

In this way contemporary Canadian fiction embarks on an aesthetic of nature that interrogates human nature as well. As religion in Canada has moved away from an older understanding of divine transcendence that places the locus of the sacred beyond the world, so Canadian literature has found within the immanent dimensions of nature a more proximate source of meaning. Northrop Frye has well described, in his comments on the Canadian cultural context, the deep ambivalence of Canadians towards nature, attitudes alternating between the extremities of terrified revulsion and warm devotion. In the last generation Canadian writing has moved conclusively towards affirmation of nature as the matrix of human life, the fundamental context of our being in the world, and as sacred source of knowledge about ourselves as part of the web of life.

William Closson James, Queen's University at Kingston, Canada

Further Reading