Ashleigh Kennedy--outside reading #3

Making Nature Sacred--by John Gatta

Post-Darwinian Visions of Divine Creation

After 1855, the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species was introduced and had a varied impact on American sensibilities. It did not immediately destroy either the religious faith or the nature Romanticism cherished by large numbers of Americans (Gatta, 143). In fact, for some time people thought that it was possible to incorporate Darwinism into preexisting concepts of natural history, natural theology, and providential design. Along with this view many others thought differently. The Harvard botanist Asa Gray, for example, became an outspoken defender of Darwin’s transmutation hypothesis after having scorned Robert Chamber’s (writer of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation) explanations of how new species emerged (Gatta, 143). Further more, scientist John Muir agreed with the transmutative premise of evolutionary theory—but maintained a biblically colored holiness that saw God’s presence inscribed “in magnificent capitals” at places like Yosemite. As the denial of God’s real presence in the material world started to decline, Romantic naturalism still survived. Traces of Romantic religion survive, for instance, in Mark Twain’s hauntingly lyrical evocations of the Mississippi River. In the form of paeans to grand, unknowable forces beyond human will, they persist even in spots of narrative exposition scattered throughout the fictions of Theodore Dreiser and Jack London (Gatta, 145). Furthermore, ethnic communities reflected their own versions of naturalism outside Euro-American ethnic traditions. For example, in 1902 Gertrude Bonnin published a personal essay on “Why I Am a Pagan” for the Atlantic. By 1932, curiosity about this ethnically and attractively “strange” spirituality was addressed by the publication of Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (Gatta, 146). In this Black Elk, who witnessed the massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee, expresses his ecological vision of holiness which was influenced by his contact with non-Indian culture.