Meditation on the Creatures: Ecoliterary Uses of an Ancient Tradition

Abstract

Ancient and early modern understandings of the nonhuman world differed markedly, of course, from those developed in our own age of ecological discourse. The spirituality of premodern Christians, centered as it was on self-reform and the fate of human souls, rarely showed concern with what qualifies today as “environmental reform.” Yet neither should this spirituality be dismissed as wholly anthropocentric. Without conceiving a distinct domain of “nature” in our terms, Celtic Christians and other inhabitants of preindustrial Europe took for granted their kinship with the beasts, plants, and unseen spirits who shared their life in this world. If their outlook was indeed anthropocentric in most practical respects, it was more nearly theocentric insofar as its creed revered the One who created and sustained “all things, visible and invisible” (factorem caeli et terrae, visibilium omnium et invisibilium).