Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality

by Belden C. Lane

The proper starting point for a Christian attentiveness to the ecological crisis, he argued, is the exercise of delight—the enjoyment of all the manifestations of God’s glory in the natural world. This is the place to begin—not with paralyzing fear over the potential of ecological catastrophe (as real as that may be) and not with crippling guilt over the human abuse of creation (as awful as that is, too), but with enjoyment and delight. This is the wellspring of free and spontaneous human action. Drawing on Augustine’s distinction between what we can properly “use” a...

Richard Baxter drew on a significant theme in the Calvinist tradition when he urged believers to concentrate on “the delights of sense” as part of their daily meditation on holy things. “What a pleasure is it to dive into the secrets of nature,” he exulted. “What a deal of the majesty of the great Creator doth shine in the face of this fabric of the world!” He encouraged the devout to attend carefully to the budding of trees, the melodies of songbirds, even the minutiae of physics, astronomy, and geometry.

Diving into the secrets of nature as spiritual discipline

“The world is God’s book,” Taylor affirmed, “no page is empty, but full of lines; every quality of the creature, is a several letter of this book, and no letter without a part of God’s wisdom in it.”8

Calvin himself. He had argued that, “We have been placed here, as in a spacious theater, to behold the works of God, and there is no work of God so small that we ought to pass by it lightly, but all ought to be carefully and diligently observed.”9

we should ponder them at length, turn them over in our minds seriously, and faithfully, and recollect them repeatedly.10

Calvin had encouraged Christian scholars to consult pagan philosophers and scientists, not hesitating to make use of what Origen described as the “gold of the Egyptians.”13

Since the Reformation, then, people influenced by the Calvinist tradition have been taught to regard the world as a lit stage where natural wonders regularly transpire. From Francis Bacon’s meticulous study of seventeenth-century science to young Jonathan Edwards’s analysis of flying spiders on his father’s Connecticut farm, from Cotton Mather’s experiments with smallpox vaccinations to Annie Dillard’s fascination with the 1,356 living creatures in a square foot of forest topsoil—they knew that praise is a matter of studying in minute detail the footprints of God in the world.

They were, in many ways, heirs of Bonaventure, the thirteenth-century Franciscan who found “vestiges” or “traces” of the Holy Trinity in buttes, butterflies, and buzzards everywhere. Nature points us through the “vestiges” of these concrete mysteries, he said, to the deeper “image” of God in our own created being—our human capacity for rational consciousness—and beyond even that to the “likeness” of God that we discover through the indwelling Christ.

Calvin expressed it this way: “The sun discovers to our eyes the most beautiful theater of the earth and heaven and the whole order of nature, but God has visibly displayed the chief glory of his work in his Son.”17 A Christocentric thrust necessarily lies at the heart of any genuinely Reformed theology of creation. The natural world points indelibly to the Image from which it is made.

Nature regularly appears in the Reformed tradition as a mirror (speculum), school (schola), dramatic representation (theatrum), painting (tabula), clothing (vestis), book (liber), compass (circuitus), or imprint (impressio) of God’s astonishing glory.18

A careful attentiveness to the world of nature, as they saw it, never compromised, but only enhanced, their theology of God’s grandeur.

They remained wary of “images” used in worship and elegant pageantry in church life. But they perceived the art of creation, God’s own aesthetic work in nature, as a pure and reliable witness to God’s stunning beauty.19 Human artistic forms may be contrived and self-referential; but God’s own handiwork is an art untainted.

The early Reformed suspicion of “image making,” says William Dyrness, was motivated by its reaction to the “externalization of piety” in late medieval practice. Calvin’s “war against the idols” attacked a hollow and perfunctory reverence for external things like relics and pilgrimages. The Reformed tradition, in contrast, actively encouraged a meditation on imagery drawn from Scripture and creation, viewing such images as important aids to the internalization of faith. This validation of an imagination focused on the increase of spiritual desire served, as a result, to legitimate the natural world as a basis for pious and aesthetic meditation.

Some scholars, in fact, have discerned a direct connection between the Reformed conception of nature as a “second book” and the rise of realistic Dutch landscape art in the seventeenth century.22

Reformed theologians, in fact, have traditionally been wary of the very term “spirituality,” as if it suggested individualistic experiences given to mystical flights of the imagination. They prefer the word “piety”—referring to a more practical, communal, and societal expression of obedience to Christ.

Through the history of the Reformed tradition, one traces a recurring emphasis on nature as a “school of desire,” training the soul in a longing for God. Nature and desire are not at all inimical to the dynamic core of Reformed spirituality.

We don’t usually think of Calvin as an exponent of “creation spirituality,” yet in a rare excess of language, he could go so far as to say that “nature is God” in recognizing the degree to which the cosmos is utterly filled with God’s glory.24

He celebrated the divine presence in the created world to such an extent that his language could almost slide into pantheism. Jonathan Edwards pushed the same edges in using the Platonic language of emanation to describe God’s relation to the world. He spoke of God’s glory as a refulgence that flows from the divine being into the world and back again to its luminary. Perry Miller noted that the Puritans were “always verging so close to pantheism that it took all their ingenuity to restrain themselves from identifying God with the creation.”25 The Reformed tradition has persistently discerned God’s glory filling the earth, even as it warns that God’s being is never contained by anything within it. A panentheist amazement lies close to its heart.26

The Puritans (as Reformed believers) had to set clear boundaries about sexual behavior because of their passionate spirituality. They also had to caution themselves against the danger of pantheism because of the earthly spirituality they espoused—warning themselves against confusing the world’s lesser beauty with God’s unique glory.

Seventeenth-century Puritans like Richard Sibbes and Francis Rous marveled at the mystery of God’s incomparable love, eliciting the longing of the human heart and the whole of creation.

So we find two strains of spirituality that weave in and out of the Reformed tradition in the two centuries between John Calvin’s first edition of the Institutes and Jonathan Edwards’s initial preaching in the Great Awakening. The one begins with a sense of awe at God’s majesty, the other with a delight in God’s beauty. We usually think of Reformed piety as a highly intellectual response to a transcendent God. Yet it lends itself to provocative sexual imagery in describing God’s love and to intense delight in reading God’s mysteries from the book of creation.

Edwards was famous for his Enfield sermon on “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” but he wrote with equal passion (and far greater frequency) about the wonders of creation.

God’s sovereignty and God’s beauty are self-correcting and mutually stimulating themes in the history of Reformed spirituality. If we stress only one side of the tradition, we make Theodore Beza’s austere predestinarianism indicative of the whole. But if we emphasize only the other we wind up with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s amorphous nature mysticism, cut off from any roots in the past.

Calvin began his Institutes with the question of how human beings are able to know God. We have a twofold knowledge of God’s wisdom, power, and goodness, he said: one apparent in nature and the other in Scripture.While the latter provides the “spectacles” by which we properly read the former, the undeniable evidence of God’s grandeur lies in the symmetry and beauty of the created world.33

Nor was his delight in creation merely an aesthetic or purely spiritual concern. Putting himself in the place of Israelite farmers working the hill country of ancient Canaan, Calvin insisted on ecological responsibility as a proper expression of gratitude to God. “If now I seek to despoil the land of what God has given it to sustain human beings,” he argued, “then I am seeking as much as I can to do away with God’s goodness.”

Honoring creation was for him a Eucharistic impulse, an act of profound thanksgiving for all the sensible ways in which God comes to us.

Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor at Geneva. Beza, like the Westminster Confession after him, moved the discussion of predestination from a Christological concern about the believer’s assurance (where Calvin had placed it) to an analysis of the doctrine of God in itself and the timeless enigma of the eternal decrees.

For Turretin, the phenomenal world diminishes in importance when compared to the naked majesty of the God who brings it into being.41 He had little interest in the duplex cognitio (the twofold knowledge of God in creation and Scripture) that had occupied Calvin so much. His attention to the created world as a disclosure of God’s grandeur was marginal at best. Calvin knew God (through wonder and delight) in the mirrored beauty of the world that God creates and redeems in Christ. Turretin sought God more directly (with awe and trepidation) in the interior mystery of God’s predestinating will.

Creation for them was not a function of God’s restless desire to communicate the divine love and beauty to others, as it had been for Calvin and would later be for Edwards.42 It became an empty field on which God plays out the mystery of God’s transcendent will.

Calvin had himself been critical of efforts to approach the divine majesty directly through speculative inquiry, apart from the ordinary means by which God has chosen to be made manifest. He acknowledged that in knowing God through the contemplation of creation it is possible to err, excessively plumbing the secrets of the natural world. But he recognized an even greater threat in the effort to assault heaven through intellectual inquisitiveness.

Men are commonly subject to these two extremes; namely, that some, forgetful of God, apply the whole force of their mind to the consideration of nature; and others, overlooking the works of God, aspire with a fo...

Environmental historian Keith Thomas shows how Puritans in England were at the forefront of the movement to end cruelty to animals in the early seventeenth century. Drawing on Calvin’s own caution that when God placed the beasts “in subjection unto us, he did it with the condition that we should handle them gently,” Puritans like Philip Stubbes spoke out against malicious animal sports, including cock-fighting and bearbaiting.45 What Christian heart can take pleasure to see one poor beast to rent, tear and kill another? . . . Although they be bloody beasts to mankind and seek his destruction . . . , yet they are good creatures in their own nature and kind, and made to set forth the glory and magnificence of the great God . . . and therefore for his sake not to be abused.46

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the first modern legislation against animal cruelty was passed in Puritan Massachusetts in the year 1641.

The seventeenth-century Puritan condemnation of the mistreatment of animals was rooted in a willingness to question anthropocentrism and a conviction that the dignity of animal life depends on the creatures’ own capacity to “set forth” God’s glory.

Developing skills in grafting and fertilizing fruit-bearing trees, propagating mulberry trees for local silk industries, planting timber trees, and even raising bees were all part of a plan by which Austen sought to relieve poverty in the process of establishing the kingdom of heaven on earth. He was a seventeenth-century “Johnny Appleseed,” as it were, seeking to realize a fruitarian commonwealth, “another Canaan, flowing with milk and honey.”53

Men must discourse with Fruit-trees, having learned to understand their Language which though it be not Articulate, and distinct to the outward sense of hearing, in the sound of words, yet they speake plainly, and distinctly to the inward sense. . . . The trees . . . always speake Rationally, and Religiously; in every thing taking Gods part, speaking of his praise and glory; and for the instruction of all men.54

He observed that trees invite human beings to delight in their beauty, though they also complain that certain people “greedily pluck us, and tear us, and sometimes breake off some of our Branches to get our Fruits . . .” They “love us too much,” he heard them lamenting, as the trees cautioned human beings against an exercise of untempered desire. “Too much love to Creatures abates love to God,” they warned.55

Responsible agriculture creates a sensitivity to the interdependence of all living things.

One historian of Puritan farming observes that “as the communal features of New England husbandry vanished, the need for common regulation went with them.”57 Taking pleasure in trees as a mirror of God’s glory increasingly gave way to an emphasis on commodity alone.

Cecelia Tichi argues that the Puritans came to New England in the seventeenth century with a vision of environmental reform rooted in a vivid apocalyptic hope. They expected that the Christian millennium would originate in the New World and “that God intended Puritans to bear major responsibility for its site preparation.”58 Writers like Edward Johnson thus delighted in the fact that a “remote, rocky, barren, bushy, wild-woody wilderness” was being turned into “a second England for fertilness.” He saw it becoming “the wonder of the world,” with “neer a thousand acres of land planted for Orchards and Gardens” in Massachusetts, besides “fields filled with garden fruit.”59

Initially, then, we discover a significant Puritan sensitivity to environmental concerns, a zealousness to protect and defend a world that echoes the divine image. But the holy desire that prompted this concern was gradually diverted from its original focus on delight in God’s glory to an unrestrained use of creation as “serviceable goods” satisfying the needs of an expanding economy.

The refocusing of desire in colonial New England was deeply rooted in what emerged as a distinctively Puritan mythos of the land. This new mythology served to justify their laying claim to increasing amounts of landed property. As a result, an earlier vision of the world as a theater of God’s glory was transformed into a subordinating or adversarial perception of nature as an object demanding possession.

The daughters of Eve and the inhabitants of the dark forest came to represent two different typologies of the natural world, each of them drawn in part from biblical imagery. The Puritans perceived productive farmland, for instance, as exemplifying the feminine attributes of receptivity and fruitfulness, overflowing with abundance (after Psalm 65:9–10). They drew the image of the female body as an enclosed garden from Song of Songs 4:12 and figured that the reverse was true as well. The garden of the New World was a lovely female form inviting (and also requiring) enclosure.60 With respect to the dark, Satanic wilderness beyond the Puritan villages, the faithful saw nature as dominated by Native American attributes of chaos and violence. It had to be tamed and suppressed. Puritan preachers regularly compared Indian tribes to the Amalekites and Canaanites who were threatening God’s New Israel.61 Possessing their land was an inescapable part of God’s call. Gradually this mythology of the land preempted earlier Puritan notions of the world as a mirror of God’s grandeur.

Feminist historian Annette Kolodny observes, for example, that New England Puritans were as inclined as other explorers to personify uncharted land as a woman waiting to be taken and “improved” by male conquerors. The image of the New World as a female body open to the plowshare of the bold husbandman became a dominant metaphor in colonial experience. Thomas Morton, in 1632, spoke of New England as “a faire virgin, longing to be sped, and meete her lover in a Nuptiall bed.” William Strachey, in 1609, described the landscape of Maine as a female whose “fertility and pleasure” could be enhanced by “cleansing away her woods” and turning her into a “goodly meadow.”

Land, women, and sexual desire were also intertwined in the later history of the Salem witch trials. Most of the individuals accused of witchcraft in 1692 were young and single women, anxious about their prospects for marriage, reacting to “stifling gender and class hierarchies.” Accusations of witchcraft were further fueled, however, by land disputes between two prominent families competing for access to expanding markets and by socioeconomic tensions between Salem Village and Salem Town.63 As a result, a desire for land, a suspicion of young women as prone to sorcery and unrestrained passion, and interfamily hostilities all contributed to the subsequent frenzy in Salem, Massachusetts.64

Elizabeth Reis observes that Puritans commonly perceived the feminine soul (naturally inclined to insatiability, as they thought) to be an object of desire fought over by Christ and the devil. Consequently, it was easy to view women as particularly subject to being “defiled and deflowered” by Satan’s wiles, uniquely inclined to the evils of witchcraft.65 In this jumble of subliminal anxieties that made up the Puritan psyche, sexual desire was thus stripped of its power to communicate a deeper longing for God and projected onto aberrant women in the process of securing social stability and expanding the prospects for desirable land. In a similar way, fascination and fear characterized early

When William Bradford looked out onto the New England landscape, he saw a “hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts and wild men.” It was, for him, a devilish place, the stronghold of Satan and his “hellish fiends” (referring to the original inhabitants).67

Far from viewing creation as a mirror of God’s glory and honoring indigenous people for their respect for God’s handiwork, Bradford legitimated the confiscation of undeveloped Indian land. He saw it as a matter of God’s chosen people overthrowing the insidious powers of darkness, exercising dominion in using fence and plow to master the world’s wild, disordered state.68

Bradford thus justified attacks on native peoples as part of the necessary work of...

Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. [The Puritan attackers] thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire . . . horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them.