The full length book manuscript on the Appalachian Trail was submitted to the publisher prior to the New Year, and is now out to the reviewers.  News soon.

My project on the spirituality of Appalachian Trail long distance hikers is nearing completion.  The first  manuscript exceeded 600 pages so it is currently split into two drafts, one on the perceptions of experiences of today’s hikers and one on the values of the AT.  The social study of factors such as engagement in prayer is in a complete draft with statistics completed.

University of Scranton Press has decided to make my book Christianity, Wilderness, and Wildlife: The Original Desert Solitaire available in paperback.  This will reduce the price of book and make it more acccessible to students.  The hard cover is now out of print (I have a few copies left) and soon to be replaced by a less expense paperback.  I feel good about a major Christian writing project that is staying print for more than 15 years.

A chapter on Rachel Carson in the book published by Equinox Press, Deep Blue, on spirituality and water is currently in page proofs, indicating the volume should be available sometime later this spring.   The chapter is entitled “The spirit of the EDge: Rachel Carson and numinous experience between land and sea”.  Meanwhile, the editors for The Egg Shell Earth have made final corrections the book chapter on Rachel Carson still in press.  The volume should be released sometime in 2008. :  Bratton, S.P. editor’s request, in press for 2008, Thinking like a mackerel: Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind as a foundation for a trans-ecotonal sea ethics, 25 manuscript pages.  For inclusion in Lisa Sideris and Kathleen Dean Moore, The Egg Shell Earth, press changed, now at SUNY.

My new book Environmental Values in Christian Art is now available from the State University of New York Press, Albany, as of the end of Novemeber 2007.  Copies should shortly be available from internet book sellers as well.  The cover looks great.

My most recent book manuscript is in press with SUNY, and should be available late in 2007 or early in 2008. The title is Environmental Values in Christian Art. 

My primary motive for writing the volume is to open new avenues for historic exploration of Christian environmental attitudes and ethics.  In addition, the manuscript attempts to correct common misconceptions about historic Christianity and its relationship to nature.The proposed volume explores five key questions:

• How did the relationship to nature change in the transition from Roman and Celtic (pagan) religion to Christianity?  Did disregard for nature or human dominance over nature become more prevalent themes? How did the first Christians portray the changes in cosmology?
• What is the relationship between Christ and nature?  What is the meaning of the Passion for all living creatures?  And how does this relationship change from the early church to the Renaissance and Reformation?
• How does Christian art depict animals and plants, and what spiritual roles do non-human creatures play in religious art? How do themes like hunting change through time?
• How does Christian art represent the ownership and management of natural resources?  Are peasants and non-Christians, such as Jews, part of the productive landscape?  Is resource sharing a continuing Christian theme?  What is the relationship between the environment and resource economics in Christian art?
• What impact, if any, has Christian representation of nature had on modern environmental values, particularly in terms of natural aesthetics? 

The manuscript does not attempt to cover all possible settings for Christian art but focuses on specific eras and geographic locales.  The selections range from early Christian Rome and
Ireland, to the origins of the Gothic in France and the Italian Renaissance.  Works utilized as examples include catacombs frescos, Roman sarcophagi, apse mosaics, Irish high crosses, illuminated manuscripts, stained glass windows, and oil paintings.  

Transition from pre-Christian to Christian art

This research argues that early Christian art did not reject or suppress natural motifs. According to critics of Jewish and Christian care of the environment, the ancient Hebrew God described in the Torah is a transcendent deity divorced from nature, who is separate from and over the cosmos. Critics of monotheism have claimed ancient Judaism devalued the natural by abandoning the notion that spirits inhabited every rock and tree, and by placing the control of the universe in the hands of a single god. Christianity then found salvation in a semi-human, semi-divine figure, Jesus of Nazareth, further focusing Christians on human perspectives and concerns, at the expense of the natural.  This line of reasoning concludes early Christians displaced pagan environmental values rooted in pre-Christian religious beliefs, such as awe for nature and protection of sacred trees, and replaced them with a highly anthropocentric or human-centered worldview. If the “pagan displacement” theory is valid, early Christian art should display a radical change from pre-Christian natural themes. In addition, early Christian art should either be less interested in nature than is pagan art, or should present more themes concerning control or domination of nature.  

Early Roman Christian art

In contrast to the hypothesis that the Jesus movement excluded the natural, early Roman Christian art retained a wide array of pre-Christian natural motifs. Roman Christians changed the environmental values expressed in art by favoring peaceful and pastoral subjects and reducing the violence against nature which was a common theme in pagan Roman art. Christian art largely eliminates scenes of hunts and dismembered sacrificial animals. Animals are active participants in spiritual events such as the Nativity.  The Good Shepherd’s faithful dog accompanies him through green pastures, just as a panther romps with Dionysus. The peacefully grazing sheep covering Christian sarcophagi are rooted in Virgil, and Roman ideals of independent farmer-philosophers who live in a golden age where the land is owned by all. These images are thus strongly egalitarian. Most aggressive interactions between humans and nature concern Biblical texts, such as Jonah and the sea monster or Daniel in the lions den.  These scenes are metaphors for resurrection or human survival through faith in God, and therefore rarely depict humans as fighting or resisting nature in order to damage or dominate. As Christian art evolves and aristocratic patronage becomes more evident, themes such as the hunt reemerge. The earliest Roman Christian art does not display Christ on the cross at all. The Passion is expressed through symbols, including natural metaphors. By the fifth century Christ does appear on a cross, but as living and invulnerable – in the form of a deity.  Not till 790 CE, does a western artist depict Christ as dead or dying during the crucifixion.  Christ’s relationship to nature thus undergoes an historic progression  from the Good Shepherd or a pastoral care-giver, to more the more solar or celestial deity typical of Byzantine mosaics, to the Gothic Christ, whose death on the cross produces the life-giving blood that maintains all creation.  The sequence implies an evolutionary change in Christian thought about the meaning of death in nature and the relationship of God to nature. In early Christian art, renewal in nature proves the Resurrection. By the Gothic, the death of Christ proves that nature also can be renewed.  

Early Irish Christian art

The first Irish Christians also retain their pre-Christian repertoire of natural symbols and images.  Their relatively small churches are imbedded in the sacred landscape, while high crosses serve as bridges between the human and the celestial.  Celtic Christian art, while frequently picturing hunts, is highly interested in diversity in living nature.  For the Celts, creation is more than a backdrop for human spiritual adventure, the cosmos is a co-participant in the Christian story. Ireland is more than home. The verdant landscape is life – life everlasting – with Christ and the angels strolling across each lake, dancing on each hedge row, and touching the leaves of each wood.  Early Irish high crosses are imbedded in the natural and represent cosmic change and flux.  Later Irish crosses are more human centered, and the passion becomes more the death of an individual.   Presentation of humans as the focus of the cosmic story emerges as Celtic Christian art becomes increasingly literate and self-confident.  Both Roman and Celtic Christians are highly concerned with the transition in ritual practices, and the replacement of animal sacrifice with the Eucharist.  This transition coincides with commodification of nature.  An emphasis on servanthood in nature is consistent with the concept of the Eucharist originating in Christ’s loving ministry and death for not just humankind, but the entire cosmos. In addition, Roman Christian art, with its primarily urban origins, idealizes the rural and pastoral, while the Irish, who are still largely farming and herding, show little interest in sheep and imagined pastoral settings.  

The Gothic and the suffering of God

The Gothic period was an era of revolutionary innovation in western art and architecture.  Romanesque churches had relatively low profiles, and their interiors were dusky, even at mid-day. Gothic experiments in with arches and vaults produced ever-taller cathedrals, where light pouring through great colored windows flooded the sanctuaries. Churches served as solar observatories, and Gothic artistic adventure became one of the foundation stones of modern science. As the liberal arts became the focus of Christian education, artists and craftspeople increasingly engaged in direct observation of nature, and representations of leaves, animals and other living creatures became increasingly realistic.  The Gothic is far more concerned than early Christianity with nature in space and time.  God as Creator is a more dominant theme.   The cathedral itself is an imitation of the cosmos and all nature is a spiritual metaphor.  Christ’s death on the cross is the well spring of creation.The threatening and wild aspect of nature so evident in the Romanesque is replaced in the Gothic by a sense of control.  Cathedral art reflects economic relationships and often touts the land rights of the nobility and the ecclesiastical hierarchy.  Gothic painting idealizes the life of the peasant on the land and avoids the harsh realities of food and fuel shortages. Contra to these trends is artistic representation of the activities of the mendicant orders, particularly the Franciscans, who model the suffering Savior by serving both the poor and the living Creation. The increased Gothic emphasis on history and on the nature as ideal fuels anti-Semitism.  Gothic portrayal of nature as God’s creation simultaneously depicts Judaism as outside the natural order. The concept of the suffering Creator thus becomes a tragic weapon against non-Christians. The dualism between the natural and the unnatural so prominent in the Gothic is absent from early Christian art.  

Renaissance and Reformation humanism and God as the mysterious creative other

The Renaissance period, while bringing humanism to the fore, progresses from utilizing individual natural objects as metaphors to composing entire landscapes to depict spiritual states or divine qualities. While the Resurrection is still strongly associated with God’s creative and sustaining acts, the blood of Christ loses its direct association with renewal in nature. God becomes a mysterious creative other.  The Reformation reduces the importance of the Passion as creative event and instead emphasizes an omnipotent God subtly present in everyday landscapes.  Economic subtexts support the values of the middle classes, and while idealizing peasants and country scenes, honor the mercantile.  The problem of the “contented peasant” continues in landscapes of the Dutch Golden Age, although still life and market scenes comment on the futility of material possessions. Dutch art separates raw nature and resource harvest from the ownership of goods.  American 19^th century landscape painting reflects its Reformation heritage, which has had, thereby, a significant impact on modern nature photography and painting.  

Conclusion         

Rather than being a simple process of rejecting pre-Christian values concerning nature, Christianity initially largely adopts the environmental aesthetics of pagan Roman culture, while reducing the emphasis on violence toward nature. The earliest art depicts Christ as Good Shepherd or as loving care taker, and reflects egalitarian values.  Over a millennium, the Passion and Christ’s blood become the well spring of the Creation.  Gothic art both idealizes and deletes suffering from depictions of rural countryside and emphasizes humble Christian service to a wounded Creation. The Renaissance and Reformation reverse the trend, presenting God as a mysterious other in a productive landscape. Depictions of Jews as unnatural and of contented peasants as part of the land continue as ethically problematic subjects. The Reformation concept of the divine within nature influenced 19^th century American landscape painting, which in turn has greatly influenced the modern aesthetics of wilderness and natural landscape.