Nature Is the Symbol of the Spirit

In 1836 Ralph Waldo Emerson published a short book called Nature, and in its chapter on language he made a claim that has been quoted ever since, that nature is the symbol of spirit. He meant that every natural fact corresponds to a fact of the mind, so that a lion stands for courage, a rock for steadiness and a river for time, and that people can speak of their inner lives at all only because the outer world has lent them words. Light and darkness, he noted, are the ordinary expressions for knowledge and ignorance. Whether the claim is a deep truth about reality or a pleasing habit of speech is the question that the topic invites.

India held a similar view long before Emerson and without his vocabulary. The hymn to the earth in the Atharvaveda calls the earth a mother and the poet her child. The Isha Upanishad opens by declaring that all this, whatever moves in this moving world, is pervaded by the divine. Rabindranath Tagore built his school at Santiniketan around classes held under trees because he believed that a child taught away from the natural world learns facts but loses the capacity for wonder. In the Western Ghats and in Meghalaya, communities have protected patches of forest for centuries because they believe that a deity lives there, and these sacred groves now shelter species that have vanished from the land around them. Their rules, which forbid cutting wood or hunting inside, were enforced for generations by belief and not by guards, and they predate most of the institutions that now govern forests.

The belief has moved people to act at great cost. According to tradition, in 1730 hundreds of Bishnoi men, women and children, led by a woman named Amrita Devi, were killed at Khejarli in Rajasthan while trying to prevent the felling of khejri trees for the Maharaja of Jodhpur. The commonly cited number is 363. In the 1970s, women from the hill villages of Uttarakhand, among them the villagers of Reni led by Gaura Devi, stood in front of loggers and embraced the trunks, and the Chipko movement that grew from these acts changed how forests in India are governed. Whatever one thinks of the theology behind such sacrifices, what the villagers defended was real, since forests hold soil, store water and feed households. The spiritual claim and the ecological claim ended in the same action.

Modern science has found a reason for the pull. In 1984 the environmental psychologist Roger Ulrich reported that hospital patients recovering from surgery who could see trees from their beds left sooner and needed fewer strong painkillers than those who looked at a brick wall. Studies of forest walking in Japan have found lower stress hormones in participants after time among trees. A belief that treats a forest as sacred often protects it more reliably than a law that treats it as timber. An experience that restores the mind may be what the old traditions were describing in their own language.

A belief that treats a forest as sacred often protects it more reliably than a law that treats it as timber.

Yet nature does not always look like spirit, and the strongest objection comes from nature itself. Tennyson spoke of nature red in tooth and claw. Cyclones drown villages, droughts empty granaries and parasites feed on living hosts. Darwin wrote to a friend in 1860 that he could not persuade himself that a beneficent God had designedly created the ichneumon wasps with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars. If nature is the symbol of spirit, the objection runs, then the wasp is a symbol too, and it is hard to say what spirit it stands for. Emerson's claim seems to work only if the unpleasant facts are quietly set aside.

A second objection holds that the symbol is supplied by the reader and not by the world. Psychologists of religion argue that human minds are quick to detect agency and meaning, which is why people hear voices in the wind and see faces in clouds. On this view the spirit in nature is a projection, a trick of perception that may once have helped our ancestors survive. Kant said something close when he argued that the sublime is found in the mind that is overwhelmed and not in the storm that overwhelms it. If so, Emerson has the direction of explanation reversed, and it is spirit that makes nature a symbol and not the other way round.

The reply to both objections is that the origin of a perception does not settle its worth. Even if the mind projects meaning, the projection has produced music, poetry, ritual and a morality of restraint, and those are real achievements. Emerson himself never said that nature was gentle. He said that it was a language, and a language can speak of cruelty as well as of grace. The wasp is a symbol of what is hard to reconcile with goodness, and the willingness to look at it may be part of what a spiritual reading of nature requires.

The modern world has begun to test the idea in law. In 2017 the High Court of Uttarakhand declared the rivers Ganga and Yamuna to be living entities with the rights of persons, and in the same year New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River after negotiations with the Maori community that regards it as an ancestor. The Supreme Court of India stayed the Uttarakhand order within months, after the state government argued that practical questions, such as who could sue on behalf of a river and who would pay for the damage a flood might cause, had not been answered. The Ganga remains polluted. Recognising a river as spirit in law has proved easier than cleaning it.

This is the difficulty at the centre of the topic. A symbol can move people to protect what they might otherwise exploit, but it cannot do the protecting itself, and it can be withdrawn the moment it becomes inconvenient. It remains unclear whether nature carries any meaning that a mind has not first given it, and a forest that shelters both the saint and the wasp offers no help in deciding.