Downing

Abstract

Is ‘beauty’ an ‘ecotheological’ issue? Or, specifically, is the God of the Judaeo-Christian Bible concerned only with the ‘goodness’ of creation, not its beauty? Perhaps that common opposition is created by our commonplace art-establishment approach to aesthetics, with its Platonic and Kantian idealist heritage. It is argued that if we bracket those prejudices, we can find very rich resources for aesthetics and in particular for environmental aesthetics in the down-to-earth theological materialist realism of many of the biblical writers. And for that, support is enlisted from some recent writing in (non-theological) environmental aesthetics.

Introduction

Aesthetics might seem not to be an important ‘ecotheological’ concern. Although touched on occasionally in passing, environmental aesthetics has not so far appeared as a topic in its own right in this journal. The response might be, well, most of the contributions have been Christian, and the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures are concerned with ethics, not art and aesthetics. Aesthetics is a Creek concern, not a foundational Christian one. The God of the Christian Bible is concerned with goodness, not beauty. Beauty is not a basic Judaeo-Christian theological issue at all.

In what follows I want to argue to a very different conclusion. But I ask first that we bracket for a while our commonplace art-establishment approach, with its Platonic and Kantian idealist heritage. Instead I shall urge that we consider the down-to-earth materialist realism that we find in some of the biblical writers. And for that I shall enlist, briefly, the support of some recent writing in (non-theological) environmental aesthetics.

The Supposed Irrelevance of the Scriptures to Aesthetics

First, do people really take aesthetics as foreign to the Jewish and Christian foundational Scriptures? Well, this is G. Bertram, in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament:

In the light of Creek thought we are first struck by the meagreness of the role played by the term [’beautiful’, kalos]’ even in the old Septuagint Creek translation of the Jewish Scriptures. There is no reference to the kalon [to kalon] in the Platonic and Hellenistic sense. The problem of the beautiful is outwith the range of biblical thinking [and] these facts apply to the New Testament as well...the kalon does not occur at all as an aesthetic quantity: this is linked with the low estimate of art in Biblical religion’ (Bertram: 1968,553-54)¹

Such has been the agreement on this division of interests that the topic is not raised at all in many of the recent shorter Bible dictionaries, and I have only found it touched on in passing in a couple of much older ones (Renard 1894; Hirsch 1902).²

Further, perhaps among Christians talk of ‘the Fall’ involves seeing the land as under a curse and far from beautiful in any way? Or so Alien Carlson proposes, in passing, in a work that in other respects I suggest has much to offer in this field: ‘The reigning [Christian] religious tradition could not but deem nature an unworthy object of aesthetic appreciation’, relic of a harmony lost. At best nature was there to be dominated and domesticated (Carlson 2000: 3 and 83-84).³ And initially one might be tempted to cite in support the material gathered by B. Stephenson and S.P. Bratton, discussing ‘Luther’s Understanding of Sin’s Impact on Nature and the Unlanding of the Jews’ recently in this journal (Stephenson and Bratton 2000).

Contemporary Aesthetic Conventions

Before offering a rather different account of the foundational resources available to Jews in the Jewish Scriptures, and to Christians in their extended Scriptures, it is worth attempting to sort out the terms we use. ‘Aesthetics’ is taken to be about ‘art’, and the paradigm ‘artist’ is the painter. The artist in our modern Western tradition very likely produces what he or she feels is right or as nearly right as she or he can attain, (self-) expression for its own sake. What is produced may arouse in the viewer or hearer a feeling of delight which is also an end in itself. Aesthetic taste, sensitivity, are for individuals. There are no objective criteria, techniques for achieving the desired effect: that would amount to a craft, not art (Collingwood 1938: 108-15). Perhaps the lack of craft utility as such is the one necessary feature of art, a necessary condition for beauty. Art for art’s sake is the slogan.

Of course, by such criteria, the environment is excluded from appreciation unless and until it is painted (or photographed or filmed). Then by extension we can look back and try to see it through an artist’s eye; perhaps frame it in a camera’s ‘view-finder’. At best we struggle to ‘see it as’ an ‘art object’ (Carlson 2000: 45). But ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, it is not simply there, God-given.

If I read the art historians aright, this sort of approach is articulated, classically, by David Hume and even more influentially by Immanuel Kant (with earlier eighteenth-century adumbrations). As well as sundering the aesthetic from any utility, it also involves a clear distinction of the aesthetic from the moral. The aesthetic is what in fact delights me, the moral concerns what I ought to do, the factual is what is the case. ‘Ought’ and ‘is’ and ‘beauty’, moral imperative, agreed fact and ‘the aesthetic’, are quite distinct.⁴ The opera moving us is quite other than poverty making demands on us or the bare statistics of infant mortality in Iraq.

I myself certainly see no obvious or even implicit signs of any such detached aesthetic appreciation in our biblical texts. However, I see no reason to rest satisfied with the account of aesthetics so far summarized, even if it is implicit in many of the biblical commentators I have referred to. There indeed the unquestioned assumption seems to be that aesthetics is about ‘art’ in the sense just outlined, even if art is allowed to include craft. Little if any high-grade art/craft work seems to have been produced in ancient Israel; its ‘best’ artefacts and craftspeople were imported.⁵ The implicit conclusion would then seem to follow that ancient Israel had no aesthetic sense. However, an equally valid conclusion might be that the wrong question was being asked.

We need also to note that ‘art for art’s sake’, art as self-referent, as essentially non-utilitarian, is the preserve of the privileged, and such appreciation is itself an important sign of status. But this stance is a late arrival on the scene, however much privileged westerners take it for granted (Berger 1972; Berger [ed.] 1972; cf. Eagleton, 1990: 70-71; 366-417; Bourdieu 1993: 215-37). And it is an arrogant cultural imperialism that assumes only our approaches to aesthetic appreciation are valid.

So, what I want to urge is that we bracket this Western tradition for the moment, and ask what sorts of things and activities may seem, plausibly to us, to have constituted aesthetic objects and/or activities, and assessed by what criteria, among our canonical and perhaps deuterocanonical authors and their succeeding audiences. And then, are there any significant overlaps between any of their aesthetic criteria and any that we ourselves do in fact deploy in ordinary life, away from galleries and concert halls and art critics? I suggest that it is particularly significant for readers of this journal that the matter of what constitutes aesthetic appraisal, and on what criteria, is currently being opened up both in consideration of environmental aesthetics and in attempts to appreciate other cultures than our own.’Aesthetics’ do not have to be defined in terms of post-Enlightenment Western art appreciation.

Materialist Aesthetics in the Jewish Scriptures

So, what kinds of things, actions, activities, people, characteristics are commended in an ‘aesthetic’ vocabulary in the Judeao-Christian Scriptures, and what kinds of commendation are made for what apparent reasons? In line with what I have so far been urging, I am going to suggest that we can indeed perceive a kind of aesthetic appraisal which . we may usefully distinguish. To risk a generalisation, we are most likely to find it when what is commended is some sort of abundance or intensification: not a normal suffciency, but a plenitude.⁶ Using our terminology, but still refusing tight distinctions, a work of moral supererogation could be distinguished, so that doing what the law demands, but going beyond it might be a beautiful act. If we find any such it will not be other than moral, it will include what is morally demanded, but be larger. More likely, we shall find that which does what is needed, but is more than that: useful, but more than useful. Excess, but excess of particular welcome kinds, is commended, and such commendation is close enough to the kinds of commendation we ourselves commonly advance as aesthetic for us to see it, too, as aesthetic appraisal. My main argument, then, is that where we find kinds of welcome abundance or intensification we are in a field we would be likely to discern as aesthetic, even though what counts as welcome abundance may still differ in different contexts and different strata of society, then as now.

Let us imagine a peasant society in biblical times in the way scholars currently do, but let’s imagine self-critically. A peasant community survives. Kings and lesser landlords leave enough for survival. Usually they do. Anything more than that is a dream. Picture people in just such a village community gazing over a bumper barley harvest. Families and sub-families and slaves and landless labourers, women and men, girl and boy children may well have worked on different plots, some with better soil, water, sun, shelter from winds, resistance to pests. But all the villagers agree that harvest is nearly ready, all have some stake in the success. And it is good. It is above expectation. In a really poor year harvest is dispiriting, not a few will die, if not directly of hunger, then of lowered resistance to disease. In an average year, the community will survive, probably, even if all go hungry at times. But this is abundance, and this abundance is beautiful, it delights the eyes and cheers the heart. Even in an average year there will be a feast involving an offering to the tribal deity, at the end of harvest, stealing a pretence of excess out of bare survival. But this harvest promises days and months of something better than sufficiency. That is, if they can get it in and stored before someone with power to take it, takes it, creams off all the surplus. For now it is beautiful, rather as a well-spread table looks good to most of us, if not quite the same, because probably none of us has sweated for days on end to achieve this escape from constant penury.

Of course, coming down from a high pass in the hills six miles away, a royal steward also sees the golden fields, ripe for harvest, and it looks good to him, too; it could even be beautiful. If it’s as good as in the last village, and as good as it looks from a distance, there’s a bit more to keep in his own barn before he dutifully transfers the stipulated measures to one of the king’s granaries. It is beautiful, but not in quite the same way as it is for the villagers. The steward is fat and ‘well-pleasing’, it is fifteen years since he was last hungry. He sees silver, and a larger house, and increased respect, and more fields to pass on to those sons who will not follow him as royal stewards; and, through his daughters, marriages to increase his standing further.

And the king, riding up the valley, hears what his nobles say, and notes his steward’s pack train on its way down, and sees more carved panelling for his throne room and perhaps for his temple, and even some of those new chariots his recently returned ambassador has described. And the whole country looks beautiful to the king, too.

You care for the earth and make it fruitful,
you enrich it greatly,
filling its great channels with rain.
In this way you prepare the earth
and provide grain for its people.
You water its furrows, level its ridges,
soften it with showers, and bless its growth.
You crown the year with your good gifts;
places where you have passed drip with plenty.
The open pastures are lush
and the hills wreathed with happiness;
the meadows are clothed with sheep
and the valleys decked with grain,
so that with shouts of joy they break into song
(Ps. 65.9-13, RNEB).

If our own forms of aesthetic appraisal are meaningful, then Psalm 65 is unmistakably an articulation of aesthetic delight that I assume we can appreciate. It is also, of course, ‘theological’. The implicit but clear assumption is that God and people share the same aesthetics. I have distinguished kinds of appraisal for different people; but I would emphasize that their appraisal is on a continuum. They could all chant this psalm and their uses of it would overlap. Royal stewards and even kings are still close to the earth, and beauty is close to a full stomach, it includes utility. Beauty, beauty of this kind, also overlaps with ethics. It is beautiful as something to be shared. Having what it is to be shared, but more than usual, in different levels of the community, co-operating and in conflict, is an aspect of the delight. The valleys stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing. Or,

The eye likes to look on grace and beauty,
but better still on the green shoots in a cornfield (Ecclus 40.22 [Ben Sirah, late third century BCEI).

It is the lived environment of God’s world that is enjoyed, and not ‘the view’.

Such aesthetic appreciation is also expressed elsewhere in the Wisdom tradition, especially in Proverbs and in Job. Poetry generally seems likely to articulate aesthetic pleasure, while clearly it can also articulate much else - grief, greed, anger, anxiety, hatred and much more. Poetry, of course, also itself creates aesthetic pleasure, and we shall return to that, briefly. The set of poems that most obviously articulates and elicits aesthetic delight is the Song of Songs. This is clear from all the modern commentators I have considered, and it is noted that the Song includes an unusually high concentration of words which we conventionally translate with terms of aesthetic approval: ‘beautiful’ (11);’lovely’, ‘pleasant’ (4);’goodly’, ‘more pleasing than’ (3);’awe-inspiring’ (2), and ‘delightful’, ‘sweet’ and ‘pleasing’ (once each) (Murphy 1990: 70).

It would seem that bodies, erotically arousing and aroused bodies, bodily selves, are beautiful. M.V. Fox, writing engagingly of ‘Love, Passion and Perception in Israelite and Egyptian Love Poetry’, asserts nonetheless that ‘our knowledge of the Israelite ideal of [human physical] beauty is meagre’ (Fox 1983: 225). I would like to suggest, in disagreement, and very prosaically, that we may well have quite a good idea. I am quite persuaded by Fox and other later commentators that the metaphors deployed are elaborated as metaphors, not as physical allegories. As he says, ‘In "your nose is like the tower of Lebanon", for example, if the image is taken as a description of the length [or shape] of the girl’s nose, the comparison is hyperbolic to the point of being grotesque’. So direct comparison is out. I shall pursue Fox’s positive suggestions in a moment. But first - and prosaically - I have to say that the images deployed for the man or the woman indicate no hint of anorexia. Like Rachel and Joseph and the cattle in Pharaoh’s dream they were probably pleasingly well-fleshed (Gen. 29.17; 39.6; 41.2, 4). ‘Gaunt and thin’ is clearly ugly, ‘ill-favoured’, in the older English. Again, it is a matter of abundance of what is welcomed. Perhaps I should qualify that as ‘manageable superabundance’. No one calls Goliath beautiful; though I suppose people on his side might. In general, good food and good health and likely good progeny, perhaps, are displayed and assured in flesh, and plump flesh is beautiful.⁷ That is the implication in particular of the choice of metaphors in the Song. The practicalities of good health and good progeny are not explicit in the poems, the focus is on the couple’s response to one another, enjoyment of one another. But in general terms, of course, the health of the food providers and the health of progeny are precisely the issues our modern geneticists highlight in discussions of display and the attraction of mates. The lively sensuous awareness of the young woman and the young man betoken expected pleasure and welcome fertility together. Some commentators make silence on the issue of issue significant, but I think that is culturally insensitive, modernising.⁸ One might as well argue that silence as to orgasm means it was expected for neither. A belly like a heap of wheat (Song 7.2) is where seed is safely stored.

Of course, fertility alone does not constitute the whole story. Childless Hannah is more loved than fertile Penninah, ill-favoured Leah is more fecund even if Rachel is more beautiful and more desirable. Thinking of those two sisters, I would guess, too, that there would be something special about eyes; we are told that David’s were remarkable but Leah’s, sadly, were below standard (1 Sam. 16.12; Gen. 29.17). Perhaps David’s were just bright and lively, but also, I would guess, large; and so, too, the eyes of the woman in the Song, to bring to mind pairs of plump pigeons.

Fox accepts that the lovers are obviously attending to each other’s bodies seen or imagined in delighted detail, and we may be able to decide what is the aspect of each distinct part that prompts the choice of metaphor. The metaphors are elaborated, but not to describe body parts, nor to articulate particular emotions. They are not comparisons, even if some small point of comparison gets them under way. They disclose or create something new:

The images thus become largely independent of their referents and combine to convey a unified picture of a self-contained world: a peaceful, fruitful world, resplendent with the blessings of nature and the beauties of human art. The world blossoms in a perpetual spring. Birds sing and bathe in milk; spices give forth their fragrance; springs flow with clear water; fruits and wines offer their sweetness; heaps of wheat are surrounded by lilies; ewes, white and clean, bear twins and never miscarry; goats stream gently down the mountain side; proud and ornate towers stand tall above the landscape. Nor are there lacking silver and gold, precious stones, and objects of art: a rich and blessed world (Fox 1983: 226-27).⁹

Imagining a young couple imagining unrestrained delight in one another opens up a vision of the ordinary world surpassed. The ordinary world of goats and watchmen and brothers and sisters and mothers and vineyards is still there, there is no fantasy, no space-travel, no magic potions. The practicalities remain. Perhaps conventional morality is sidestepped, and beauty is here sundered from sexual ethical concerns? Analogies suggest, of course, that the romance is in the head. The brothers and the watchmen recall conventional morals. Many of our commentators do also discern what to us may be a very appealing interpersonal ethic. Neither person exploits the other, neither uses the other, neither reifies her or his own body-self as an instrument for pleasure or power. Even though the woman is more often the subject of the man’s gaze, she remains the major speaker; and I think there is a valid contrast with Bathsheba, subject to David’s gaze – or subjecting herself; and Queen Vashti, dismissed for refusing to be gazed at; and other examples of women treated as property. In the Song there seems to be a genuine mutuality. But this still, I would argue, represents the aesthetics of abundance. The poems imagine what could happen beyond the convention Cf. Trible again, but cited this time with approval (Trible 1978: 144-65). that puts a woman into a man’s house and bed and expects them to get on well enough and even enjoy life a bit. And it is the ‘beyond’, the excess, the abundance, that is beautiful but can only be expressed, constituted, in terms of the teeming metaphorical world which Fox evokes. It is a ‘holistic’ aesthetics, where human life is ‘ecologically’ appreciated, not in demarcated segments.

My commentators do not help me with social setting: who is the Song for, who has/have created it? The sequence seems set in a townscape that flows through the domesticated into the wilder countryside. It is clearly anthropocentric: where else can we stand? But is it composed for aristocrats imagining peasants with greater freedom from family constraint? For all the extent of the female voice, is it a male imagining being wanted by a woman? Is it even bucolic parody, in part or throughout (Whebee 1993: 266-78)? I confess I am somewhat uneasy with the latter suggestion.¹⁰ Unless we know the setting well enough to know that we laugh with the other, we always risk laughing at what the other values, an obvious cultural imperialism.

So I cannot pin down the socio-cultural context of either the ideal or the real provenance of the work. The nearest ancient analogy I can think of is, perhaps, Dio Chrysostom’s Seventh (Euboean) Discourse, 64-80; or, better, the second-century CE Daphnis and Chloe, by Longus,¹¹ in which unspoilt bucolic bliss is imagined for literate townspeople. The difference is that the young people in the Song know their own and each other’s bodies and articulate that knowledge delightedly. They have words where Daphnis and Chloe, despite the flocks they tend, have only inarticulate vague surmise.

Nonetheless, I would want us to recall again the integrated physical contexts from which most of the metaphors in the Song are drawn, and which Fox’s summary emphasizes. We have streams, springs, vineyards, milk, honey; flocks of fertile sheep, goats, deer, pigeons; apples, raisins, figs, pomegranates, nuts, heaped wheat; spices for food; expensive scents and jewellery; and prestigious buildings. Abundance is evoked in terms of other abundances, and especially of food and drink, with ostentatious wealth also part of the palette. Sight or imagining of healthy young human bodies evoke other impressions of colour, scent, movement, texture, touch and taste. Then, even if we were persuaded that the original author was smiling, even imagined her or his characters laughing as they allowed each other’s bodies to evoke extravagant imagery, we are still afforded some idea of what was in the composer’s circle deserving of admiration and evoked delight, and why.

At this point perhaps I should ask again, ‘but how is this ‘theological’?’ God is never noticed in Song of Songs. Past expositors have only managed to interpret it as theology precisely by dematerializing it, making it spiritual allegory (God and Israel, Church, soul). A fideist response carries some weight: it is there in the Scriptures, it is at the very least available for theological reflection. But my argument is that the Song displays with particular force the aesthetics discernible elsewhere in many of the books of the canon, where what delights people is taken also to delight God. A ‘biblical’ theological aesthetics elsewhere is as it is here, essentially a materialist, ecological aesthetics.

Leaving human bodies and food and drink on one side, then, what else is admired, awakens delight? Intense colours do, especially deep reds, but also purples and blues (Exod. 35-39), lustrous black, pure white, the green of new growth; and metallic and shiny bronze, silver and gold, most of which appear in the Song, and are scattered elsewhere. These are natural tints, but in their strongest forms, the colours of ripe fruits, of healthy goat hair, of the promise of harvest.

Trees are valued, for fire, for tools, simple furniture, house and boat building. Anything may serve: acacia, olive and oaks (various) attract attention, cedar is most prized. Cedar is taller by a half than local oaks (to 30+m) and spreads wider (Ezek. 31.3); its leaves are dark green, with purple cones. It enables the erection of large edifices, takes a deep polish. Pace E.F. Schumacher, here ‘big is beautiful’ tin trees, towers, mountains). Close-grained cedar carves well. It is both useful and prestigious. When there is time and energy to spare, what is useful can be enhanced without diminishing its usefulness. That is extra, and celebrates the sheer fact of super abundance. But it also signifies power. And skilfully worked it will celebrate what is seen as best, richest, strongest, in the world around: carved almond blossom, pomegranates, lilies, palm-trees, oxen, lions, composite beasts. Finely spun and closely woven dyed-stuff is valued (Exod. 35-39, again), especially with gold thread (Ps. 45.13). So are other products of craft skill: jewellery, vessels, carved woodwork, scents. Much of what is crafted is still functional, but more than functional.

Many of the items described or imagined for the temple also figure in the Song. Any further ritual significance of items of temple, palace or domestic furniture is beyond this essay, and beyond me (Tomes 1996). But it is all grist to the mill. Craftsmanship may make a spade better to dig with or a sword better to kill with, while shape or decoration that might make them art-objects for us (we’d never try to use anything so fine) would, I am suggesting, rarely if ever detract from use for the ancient Israelites. Good craftwork would enhance the product, if only by encouraging the user. And if the decoration carried a ritual symbolism tin ploughing, grinding, spinning, fighting, sacrificing), that is still use. Aesthetic pleasure enhances utility, including ritual utility. Aesthetics are fully ‘contextualized’.

Of course, in the tradition, not everything beautiful is to be snatched for oneself, not everything that looks appetizing is to be eaten (Gen. 3.6).

I have not attempted to order chronologically or date the scriptural sources I have quoted. If my suggestions are at all persuasive they are available for various reconstructions of the course of ancient Israelite and Jewish culture. I would include, however, at least a further reference to Ecclesiasticus: e.g., 24.13-17 and especially 43.9-12, 16-18; 50.5-12; as well as, again, the rest of the Wisdom literature and also the rest of the Psalter. Perhaps it is worth quoting from Psalm 104 (with its echoes of Ikhnaten’s much earlier Hymn to the Sun God):

Countless are the things you have made, Lord;
by your wisdom you have made them all
the earth is full of your creatures...
May the glory of the Lord remain for ever,
and may the Lord rejoice in his works (vv. 24, 31).

There are other aspects to Hebrew aesthetics, of course; not least the concern for language, for prose and for poetry itself. At this point I would only suggest that a poetry of verbal repetition with variation makes for effective communication. It may also afford some distinguishable intellectual satisfaction, allowing for more precision and elegance than any one set of words might. But that is still an enhancement of the practical, not word-play for its own sake. It comes under the same heading of ‘intensification of the ordinary’.

Materialist Aesthetics in Christian Tradition

There is much less to go on in the specifically Christian New Testament canon. All I would argue here is that it seems largely continuous with what I have so far discussed. So, harvest imagery reappears, with an element of threat in some instances, but primarily as indicating what is good, and welcome and shareable. There are no more than the slightest hints of erotic appreciation (husbands and wives owe their physical selves to one another); but physical well-being in general is obviously appreciated. More importantly, the field or fields from which positive metaphors and similes are drawn is much the same -in effect, everyday life: grain, grapes, figs, fish, flocks, birds, flowers, rich colours, wine, food, feasts, weddings, in much the same small-town rural scenery (although Rev. 22.1-5 may suggest a Graeco-Roman tree-lined and channelled city avenue).^l2 There is the same admiration for size, including monumental building, even if the New Testament writers tended to be rather more ascetic when it came to consumption and to positional goods. But I would argue that the absence again of kalos where ‘beautiful’ or ‘lovely’ might be demanded in English is irrelevant. We have an appreciation of the enhancement or intensification of what is generally approved, similar to that which I hope I have shown in some measure in the Jewish Scriptures.

Greek’ opposition, there is in fact a very similar appreciation of the natural human context in ‘pagans’ around the same time (e.g., in Cicero and in Dio of Prusa), and in Hellenized Jews such as Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus.¹³

But does the biblical appreciation I have sought to identify still hold in the ongoing Mediterranean Christian tradition, and especially in its Western European manifestations? There may be anti-materialist exceptions, but there are a host of eminent examples of positive delight in much of the world around. A telling early instance would be Tertullian, very sure of that very ‘fallenness’ which Carlson supposed precluded appreciation of the wild, undomesticated world. Tertullian responds ironically to the ‘heretic’, Marcion, who despised the Creator and his work:

A single tiny flower from the hedge, I suggest, not to mention wild flowers in the field; a single tiny shell-fish from any sea, not to mention those from the Red Sea; a single small wing from a moorfowl, not to mention the peacock will, I suppose, show you what a poor craftsman their Creator was.

Humankind is believed to be fallen, and agriculture is hard work as a consequence. But what God makes and sustains is beautiful. One may trace this further in the very influential discourses on the six days of creation (the Hexaemeron) of Basil the Great and then of Ambrose respectively. But we find a similar delight in the wider world in that greatest early exponent of human fallenness, Augustine of Hippo. He can take it for granted that quite rightly ‘men go abroad td admire the heights of mountains, the mighty billows of the sea, the broad tides of rivers, the compass of the ocean, and the circuits of the stars’ (Confessions 10.[viii] 13). It may be that some of the Desert Fathers and Mothers saw the desert negatively; but Antony delighted in the beauty of the place where he settled (Syriac Life of Antony, 50).

I would expect a full list to be very extensive. Christian leaders studied the Jewish Scriptures, and chanted the Psalter, as well as valuing the other works just cited. But we may at least recall Prudentius, Caedmon, Alcuin¹⁵ (on bird song), the imagery in the poetry of Hildegard of Bingen and of Hadewijch. And even if we go on to the Protestant Reform, so far from the Fall precluding a sense of natural beauty, its enjoyment is there in Calvin in sixteenth-century France and Switzerland, with full approval of Basil and Ambrose; and it is still prominent in a Calvinist such as Jonathan Edwards in eighteenth-century north America. When Luther thought of the land as subject to God’s punitive curses, it is successive blights that he has in mind, not a general uglification. Land uncursed, together with what it produces, is still beautiful.

Recent Work in Environmental Aesthetics

Alan Carlson’s main complaint against the Western tradition was directed at prejudice against ‘wilderness’. On the one hand, this prejudice is much wider than any supposed Christian fixation on fallenness: antipathy towards the threat of the wild is there in most of the Creek and Roman classics. On the other hand, it seems to be contradicted in the passages from Tertullian and Augustine quoted above. More importantly, I think we should appreciate how culture-bound and privileged is any positive appreciation of wilderness (to which I also succumb). Appreciation of the wild is for those who do not have to struggle to survive in its harsh conditions, have somehow the leisure and the income and equipment to enjoy it or the good fortune to be paid to. In very many cases the wilderness is available for appreciation at the expense of the peoples who have been excluded from it. Appreciation of the wilderness as non-productive is as patrician and ‘artificial’ as is much of the rest of the eighteenth-century aesthetic which seems to obscure it.

However, I wish to draw towards a conclusion with a pointer to the positive contribution I think recent essays in environmental aesthetics may offer. In their introduction to a special issue on this theme in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Arnold Berleant and Allen Carlson write as follows:

Environmental aesthetics move the notion of appreciation toward a more engaged and complete experience than we usually ascribe to the arts. For in environmental experience there is not the traditional object of appreciation, but an entire region, and we experience environment not primarily through one sense, but through the whole range of sensory awareness. Moreover, this awareness is itself not static, but rather changes over time, as environments are affected by the passage of the sun, of days, seasons and years. By its engaging, inclusive, dynamic character, then, environment compels our appreciative experience in ways that may be more forceful and direct than we generally have in our appreciation of the arts. This offers a challenge to aesthetic theory in reconciling the aesthetic appreciation of nature, and the environment more generally, with the appreciation of art, which traditionally has honoured stability, permanence, aesthetic distance, and a separate and circumscribed aesthetic object... Indeed, environmental aesthetics is a bridge between traditional forms of aesthetic appreciation and the recognition of significant aesthetic value in other domains conventionally excluded from the fine arts (Berleant and Carlson 1998. 98).

In particular, Carlson stresses the added value of trying to understand more deeply aspects of what is there to be variously experienced. This intensifies the appreciation. But, here again, there is a long tradition of Christian naturalists (John Rae, Gilbert White to name but two), for whom the details mattered as part of their lived faith.

Conclusion

Our post-Enlightenment idealist aesthetics may well still serve to enhance our shared enjoyment of life, as long as they do not dominate, restrict, exclude. But it does seem to me that in the aesthetics of material plenitude,-abundance, intensification which is expressed in our canonical Scriptures, and is echoed in ongoing Christian tradition, we have some very rich resources for encouraging, articulating and enabling just such an environmental aesthetic in response to God who in wisdom creatively sustains all there is, and, with all its harshness, sees this rich and varied creation as very good; and very good includes beautiful. The ‘very good’ of Gen. i.31 is not, I think, repeated anywhere else in the canon; but what I have been arguing allows me to use the phrase in summary. Our scriptural traditions encourage us to appreciate how God’s world can be shared as full, good, beautiful.