Sacralisations of nature beyond church-based religion in modern western societies

Abstract

In environmental ethics and landscape research, sacralisations of nature have commonly been considered in the context of so-called nature religions or ethnic religions of traditional societies. However, an analysis of the cultural history of the perception of nature indicates that sacralisations of nature – contrary to classical theories of modernisation and secularisation – have remained widespread and influential in modern Western societies too. Some of these sacralisations represent (new) forms of church-based or church-oriented religion or religiosity, while others lie beyond it. I confine here myself to the latter, not to denigrate the relevance of the former but to highlight that sacralisations of nature are common even among people who are non-church-going and regard themselves as non-religious and that sacralisations thereby constitute essential non-instrumental, non-material appreciations and valuations of nature in modern Western societies. By way of examples, I reconstruct eight such types of sacralisations of nature beyond church-based religion.

Keywords:

• Sacralisation of nature
• spirituality
• religion
• sacredness
• secularisation
• landscape
• wilderness
• ecosystem services
• environmental ethics
• non-material values of nature

Introduction

If one reads early theories of modernisation and secularisation, one could easily conclude that perceptions of nature as sacred are a phenomenon primarily associated with the so-called nature religions or ethnic religions of traditional societies (see, e.g., Cooper, 2016; Verschuuren, Wild, McNeely, & Oviedo, 2010) and are at most a marginal phenomenon in modern Western societies. Where such sacralisations of nature do appear today in the latter, one could assume that they are confined to specific social-cultural groups, such as strictly devout Christians who regard the world and nature as God’s holy creation (Kearns, 1996) and are limited to more or less esoteric movements such as religious naturalism (Crosby & Stone, 2018), Dark Green Religion (Taylor, 2010) and eco-theology (Deane-Drummond, 2008).

I would like to demonstrate that these assumptions are deceptive: sacralisations of nature are widespread in modern Western societies. They represent mainstream perceptions of nature that are common not only among church-going people but even among people who are non-church-going and who regard themselves as non-religious or atheistic. Accordingly, sacralisations constitute widespread and essential non-instrumental, non-material appreciations and valuations of nature – and, thus, important motives for its protection (cf. Church et al., 2011; Cooper, Brady, Steen, & Bryce, 2016).

The background of my study is current debates which are re-examining processes of modernisation, secularisation and sacralisation. Early modernisation theory – which originated from ideas of Max Weber and Talcott Parsons and became a dominant paradigm in the 1950s and 1960s – assumed a progressive transition from ‘pre-modern’ or ‘traditional’ to ‘modern’ societies. This transition was thought to include a progressive process of secularisation, i.e., the transformation from identification with religious institutions, values, behavioural patterns, concepts of history, society, individuality, etc. towards non-religious institutions, values, concepts, etc. in every aspect of social life and governance (Joas, 2021; Krech, 2013; Norris & Inglehart, 2011). This modernisation theory is, in the meantime, widely considered as disproven in terms of its universal-historical, global claim to validity, but also in terms of its claims about the development of Western societies, especially its secularisation thesis (Joas, 2021; Knöbl, 2003). The current secularisation debate paints a more nuanced picture of modern Western societies: While these may display a decline in adherence to the church and church-based religion, there is no all-encompassing and teleological process of secularisation and no slow and steady death of religion – instead there is a pluralisation of clerical religion alongside persistent and new forms of religiosity outside of religious institutions as well as localised securalisations and localised sacralisations (Joas, 2021; Krech, 2013; Norris & Inglehart, 2011; Tromp, Pless, & Houtman, 2020).

Contributing to this more nuanced and sophisticated debate on secularisation, I will reconstruct eight types of sacralisation of nature that have either emerged in recent decades or are older in terms of the history of ideas but which are each present and influential in contemporary modern Western societies. This is not to give a typology, i.e., a comprehensive system of types that would be homogeneous with respect to any set of specific criteria. Rather, it is to highlight that – in modern Western cultures – there is a broad and heterogenous spectrum of sacralisations of nature beyond or outside church-based or church-oriented religion or religiosity.

I also intend thereby to contribute to a better understanding of those non-material valuations of nature (Chan, Gould, & Pascual, 2018; Díaz et al., 2015; Kirchhoff, 2019) which in environmental ethics are often simply called ‘spiritual values’ (see, e.g., TEEB, 2010) and which are not adequately representable in the language of ecosystem services (Kirchhoff, 2012, 2019). As modern Western societies are not uniform, the eight types detailed below are not equally representative of every society. Rather, they show a bias towards North American and European societies or even individual European countries. However, this bias does not detract from my argument, which aims not at completeness but to highlight the relevance of sacralisations of nature beyond church-based religion.

Preliminary conceptual remarks

Before I reconstruct the eight types, let me explain what I mean by ‘sacralisation’ and ‘beyond church-based religion’.

Under the concept of ‘sacralisation’ of nature I subsume any perception of nature as divine, sacred, holy, awe-inspiring, sublime or as an all-embracing or comprehensive, non-negotiable or absolute. Such perceptions can be called ‘religious’ provided that – following the common distinction in the sociology of religion between institutional, church-based religion or religiosity and non-institutional, individual forms of religion or religiosity outside the church (Joas, 2021; Krech, 2013; Luckmann, 1967; Pollack, 2003; Tromp et al., 2020) – one does not limit the meaning of ‘religion’ or ‘religiosity’ to church-based forms of religion or religiosity. Church-based sacralisations and sacralisations outside or beyond church-based religion have important commonalities and differences (Joas, 2021; Schlette & Krech, 2018): for the former, a direct reference to a deity or deities is constitutive. The sacralisation is based on the certainty that something refers to a deity, bears witness to a deity. If this deity is seen as transcendent, as in Christianity, a relationship to a transcendent entity is constitutive for the sacralisations. By contrast, sacralisations beyond church-based religion – which in modern Western societies emerged about 1800 in reaction to the Enlightenment disenchantment and instrumentalisation of the world – are constituted by a particular type of human experience, namely ‘the human experience of self-transcendence’ (Joas, 2021), i.e., the awareness of a transgression of one’s own self ‘in which the self … [feels] embedded in something greater than the self’ (Benson, Roehlkepartain, & Rude, 2003). However, not every human experience of self-transcendence constitutes a sacralisation, only such experiences of self-transcendence which carry us out of the everyday horizon of expectation and interpretation – and in which it becomes subjectively evident to us that we are connected or confronted with something comprehensive, higher etc. that is subjectively experienced as unconditional. This can still be a deity, but no longer has to be. Sacralisations beyond church-based religion can extend to any social entity, but there are preferred fields. These include reason, tradition, the nation, and – as established most notably by romanticism – love, art, the ‘cult of the individual’ (Durkheim) and nature (cf. Schlette & Krech, 2018). Thus, even atheists who exclude any reference to deities can have experiences of self-transcendence in which they experience something as sacred. That is one important and quite obvious difference between church-based sacralisations of nature and sacralisations of nature outside of it. Another, less obvious but no less important difference is that the former involves a transcendence of nature towards a supernatural deity, while the latter do not. To this extent, the latter represent forms of nature religion, if one defines ‘nature religion’ as ‘a type of religion in which nature is the milieu of the sacred, and within which the idea of transcendence of nature is unimportant or irrelevant to religious practice’ (Davy, 2005). I intentionally avoid speaking about ‘intra-religious’ and ‘extra-religious’ sacralisations because this would require a problematically narrow definition of religion like Emile Durkheim’s (1912/1995, p. 44) classic definition: ‘A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things […] which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them’. Likewise, I intentionally avoid calling the former ‘religious’ and the latter ‘spiritual’, because this would require categorically separating religion or religiosity from spirituality when in fact they are overlapping phenomena with ‘religion’ emphasising objective institutional organisation and ‘spirituality’ emphasising personal, subjective feelings and experiences which, however, are inherent parts of religion as well (Zinnbauer, Pargament, & Scott, 1999).

Sacralisations beyond or outside church-based religion mostly represent a subjectivisation and individualisation of the sacred that is no longer regarded as an ontological property independent of people but as founded in the individual experiences of human subjects. This process is sometimes described as a profound shift from externally validated conventional religion to spirituality based on personal experience (Church et al., 2011; Cooper, 2016; Heelas, Woodhead, Seel, Szerszynski, & Tusting, 2005; Tromp et al., 2020). This shift to individual experience, however, does not mean that experiences and attributions of sacredness are entirely left to individual discretion: between the allegedly metaphysically given and the seemingly individually arbitrary lies the realm of the social – and sacralisations beyond church-based religion represent social attributions of sacredness that follow culturally shaped, intersubjective, collective patterns and semantics. This holds true for sacralisations of nature as well, as it does for other perceptions of nature (see Brady, 2003, 2013; Cosgrove, 1984/1998; Kirchhoff & Vicenzotti, 2014).

Excursus: modern scientific de-sacralisation or dis-enchantment of nature

Most sacralisations of nature presented in the following can only be understood against the background of a fundamental desacralisation of nature in modern Western cultures that dates back to the scientific revolution. Building on novel approaches developed in publications like Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum Scientiarum, René Descartes’ Discours de la Méthode and Galileo Galilei’s Discorsi, the modern, experience-based natural sciences arose. These proceed analytically and recognise causal causes only. Nature is no longer thought of as an expression of a divine semiosis, as a book to be read from, but as nothing more than matter in motion that is to be objectively described and technologically appropriated. This development set an end to physico-theology and to references to mysterious forces and led to what Max Weber (1919/2004, p. 20) later called the ‘disenchantment of the world’: nature as a completely desacralised, controllable object and as a mere resource for technical and cultural endeavours of humans.

Eight types of sacralisation of nature beyond church-based religion

1. Early romantic aesthetic sacralisation of nature

One of the earliest but still very influential types of sacralisation of nature beyond church-based religion emerged around 1800 in the early Romantic period in different European countries (de Man, 1984; Kirchhoff & Vicenzotti, 2014; Prickett & Haines, 2010). The early Romantics complained that the Enlightenment, with its orientation towards analytic reason, lead to an objectification and disenchantment of the world, to the dissolution of religious meaning, and, indeed, of meaning as such. In this situation, early Romanticism pursued a religion of art: the idea and individual practice of an aesthetic re-creation of a higher, magical reality beyond the everyday world objectified by reason.

For this is the beginning of all poetry, to cancel the progression and laws of rationally thinking reason, and to transplant us once again into the beautiful confusion of imagination (Schlegel, 1800/1968, p. 86).

The aesthetically productive subject is able to create fleeting moments in which the isolated individual could experience a dissolution of the boundaries of its individual self and thus a subjective sense of reintegration into an original wholeness. The early romantics were aware that yearning for the transcendent on earth was unfulfillable; but by looking for it there, the whole world was haloed for them. Most early Romantics were critical of conventional religion and its institutions – William Blake is known for his sharp attacks on them – but by no means rejected religiosity. However, for them it is (in particular) nature that represents – in perceptions of sublimity – the medium through which the aesthetically productive subject generates feelings of self-transcendence and reunion in which subject and object are brought together. For the early Romantics, ‘the fearsome and disorienting effects of the sublime signal our more vulnerable position in the order of things, and at the same time provide an occasion for grasping the self as connected to something beyond itself: not merely as an individual, but as part of a larger whole’ (Brady, 2013, p. 107).

One classical topos of the early romantic enchantment with nature is the view to the horizon, where earth and sky, material and immaterial, aesthetically merge – so that a unity of the otherwise separated can be imagined. Within a forest, similar aesthetic experiences are possible: when light and shadow merge in the play of leaves, when the view into the distance gets lost somewhere between the trunks. Many paintings by Caspar David Friedrich represent this romantic sacralisation of nature. The romantic topos of woodland solitude, particularly shaped by Joseph von Eichendorff, transmutes the forest into a place of retreat in a changing society, into a timeless ideal dream-world, into a shelter in which old fairy tales, legends and values still appear alive. Another classic topos of the romantic enchantment is gruesome or threatening nature, e.g., deep dark ravines, that mirrors the abyss of one’s soul and which are neither controlled nor controllable by the mind – the later unconscious in psychoanalysis.

While romantic perceptions of nature have emerged in Europe – with a focus on England, France and Germany, but finally establishing itself, e.g., also in Spain – Romanticism has spread globally in modern societies, featuring strong interconnections across national and linguistic boundaries (King, 1962; Prickett & Haines, 2010). For a critical discussion of reclaiming romanticism in the 21^st century see Rigby (2020), who, however, subsumes some perceptions of landscape under ‘romanticism’ that should better be subsumed under the Rousseauian ‘cult of naturalness’ (see below).

2. Moral sacralisation of naturalness

In most modern Western societies, an assumed intrinsic superiority of the natural over the artificial is well established and widespread. Many versions of this ‘cult of naturalness’ can be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. (The following description is based on Kirchhoff & Vicenzotti, 2014; Bertram, 2020.)

While the Enlightenment conceives of the history of humanity as progress shaped by humans, leading from a ‘raw’ primordial state to a morally and economically prosperous civilisation that is determined by reason, Rousseau criticises the civilisation of his time as characterised by intolerable inequality, self-love (amour propre) and alienation form one’s own self. To this stage of homme civilisé, Rousseau contrasts the antecedent stage of homme barbare characterised by authenticity, equality and natural compassion: where once humans had lived essentially solitary lives as nomadic hunting proto-humans (homme sauvage), there emerged sedentary, agricultural communities with a division of labour, in which humans lived unalienated from themselves in harmony with each other and with external nature (homme barbare). However, this harmonious state – inevitably and irreversibly – vanished with the establishment of private property and, with it, the emergence of inequality. In an unequal society, however, human beings become enmeshed in social relations that are inimical to their freedom, sense of self-worth and feelings of compassion since under these conditions there is a clear incentive for people to misrepresent their true beliefs and desires in order to attain their ends (homme civilisé).

Importantly, Rousseau did not believe that a return to the state of the homme barbare was possible. He was not a representative of primitivism; the famous formula ‘back to nature’ does not come from him but was falsely attributed to him by his contemporary critics. Instead, Rousseau’s political ideal was progression to a republican, agrarian society in which liberty, equality, and fraternity are realised by a social contract based on rational civic virtue (volonté générale). Nevertheless, with his narrative of the evolution of humanity, Rousseau laid the foundation for a ‘cult of naturalness’ that opposes ‘alienation by civilisation’. Influential examples of this cult are the appreciation of pastoral landscapes and their inhabitants, the topos of the so-called noble savage (Ellingson, 2001), the veneration of Indigenous people and knowledge (Cooper, 2007), the ideal of authenticity (Taylor, 1992), many strands of the life-reform movement (Hau, 2003) and the homesteading movement (Gould, 1999). What is sacralised here is an alleged original and unalienated inherent individual natural essence of humans or the cultural phenomena created by allegedly unalienated humans. Such humans or cultural phenomena are viewed as transcending the isolation of the human individuals from each other and from nature.

3. Socio-cultural sacralisation of unique cultural landscapes

Around 1900, with the emergence of heritage protection movements in many European countries, the sacralisation of unique cultural landscapes became influential. Their protection is still a fundamental goal of nature conservation and – supported by loyalty-based values – one of its essential motivations.

Much of what many people deplore about the human subversion of nature […] has to do with the loss of places that they keep in shared memory and cherish with collective loyalty. Many fears stem from the loss of the particular – the specific characteristics of places that make them ours (Committee et al., 1999, p. 65).

‘Each traditional landscape expresses a unique sense or spirit of place (genius loci) that helps to define its identity’ (Antrop, 2005, p. 27).

This ideal of unique cultural landscape is based on cultural theories and philosophies of history formulated around 1800, which were directed against the universalism of the Enlightenment, according to which a timeless human reason would and should prevail in the course of history so that a uniform type of civilisation would spread throughout the world. (The following presentation is based on Berlin, 2000; Kirchhoff, 2014, 2018.) According to Johann Gottfried Herder, one of the most influential proponents of such Enlightenment-critical anti-universalist theories, the goal of human history consists in the development of unique forms of culture all over the world. Cultures develop rationally if and only if each of the world’s peoples sensitively grasps the special natural possibilities of that stretch of the earth that serves as its dwelling place and realises these possibilities according to its specific character. In this historical process, people and nature modify and shape each other reciprocally and, as a result of their common history, coalesce into a unique, ‘organic’ unity of ‘land and people’ – as the conservative folklorist and cultural critic Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl later called it. This organic unity manifests itself in a cultural landscape with a high diversity of unique forms of land use that reflect the specific natural conditions of the area but are not determined by them, as they depend on the specific character of the people who live in it as well. Importantly and contrary to widespread misinterpretations, Herder and Riehl both conceive of peoples not as biological, but as linguistically and culturally united communities, and both categorically exclude any hegemony of one culture over another – which makes their theory fundamentally different from later racism.

Herder’s concept of unique cultures represents what later came to be called the ‘cultural landscape’ conceptualisation of the human-nature relationship, which was developed in the early 19^th century by Carl Ritter as the constitutive paradigm of classical geography and gained widespread influence not only in Germany but throughout Europe and in North America as regional or landscape studies (Kirchhoff, Brand, & Hoheisel, 2012; Knight, 1992). While clear differences existed and still exist, landscape heritage as a movement has taken surprisingly similar forms in modern Western societies, e.g., in England, France and Germany (Swenson, 2013).

Nowadays, after the end of classical geography, the appreciation of unique cultural landscapes has remained present in institutions like the UK’s National Trust, the UNESCO’s World Heritage of Cultural Landscapes or the EU’s Landscape Heritage, and also in the shape of conceptions of socio-ecological systems which exhibit sustainability and resilience due to co-evolutionary relationships between the social and the environmental system (see, e.g., Berkes & Folke, 1998).

The concept of unique cultural landscapes involves multiple sacralisations: historically shaped cultivated areas are perceived (i) not only as differing from each other but as unique; (ii) as organic unities of people and land that transcend the Enlightenment separation of humans and nature; and (iii) as comprehensive instances of meaning and superordinate totalities, to which (iv) every inhabitant should feel committed and to which they should strive to act in loyalty, thus transcending isolated individuality.

4. Nationalist sacralisations of nature

In particular in the 19th century, associations of nature with nation – social constructions of certain idealised landscapes as symbolic of national identity – became influential in many Western societies. In England, e.g., the White Cliffs of Dover were invested with historical associations of national defence, homecoming and homeland, with national culture, island past and island experiences – independent of continental Europe (Readman, 2018, p. 47, 51). In Germany, oak forests in particular were stylised into patriotic temples, into symbols and alleged facts of German historical and cultural identity – in demarcation from France (Schama, 1995, p. 75–134; Wilson, 2012). In the United States, National Parks were perceived as nature ‘set apart’ and wilderness that represents an archetypal America, which – according to the frontier myth – is the source of the greatness of the nation and the people (Ross-Bryant, 2005). Reference to mountainous landscapes has played an important role in the formative process of the Catalan nation and identity, both in its late 19th century origins and in its present form (Nogué & Vicente, 2004). (See Schama, 1995, and Agnew, 2011, for further nationalist sacralizations of nature, e.g., in England, Italy and Poland.)

5. Scientific sacralisation of nature as optimal self-organising ecosystem

Sacralisations of nature beyond church-based religion have developed in modern Western cultures even where one might least expect them: in the natural sciences, especially in certain organismic currents of ecosystem theory. Generally, ecosystem theory – compared to classical synecology – represents a further step in the modern objectification and demystification of nature in that nature is conceived as a causal system determined by flows of materials and energy (Jax, 2009). However, according to organismic ecosystem theories, the biosphere naturally – i.e., as long as it is not impaired by humans – consists of self-organising ecosystems that have achieved, in the course of millions of years of evolutionary history, a level of organisation which categorically transcends that of all human-made agricultural and technical systems in terms of complexity, stability and efficiency. (For details, see Kirchhoff, Brand, Hoheisel, & Grimm, 2010; Kirchhoff & Voigt, 2010.)

Barry Commoner (1971, p. 41), one of the leaders in the modern US-American environmental movement, has famously summed up this view in the phrase ‘Nature Knows Best’, which he deems a ‘Law of Ecology’. Correspondingly, the environmental economist David Rapport (1998, p. 46) has asserted:

Natural evolution of ecosystems represents the best of all possible worlds.

Especially in North America, such natural ecosystems were emotionally connected with forest wilderness (see, e.g., Westra, 1994; cf. Nash, 1967/2014). In nature conservation and environmental management, they were accredited with the property of ecosystem integrity, i.e., ‘the capability of supporting and maintaining a balanced, integrated, adaptive community of organisms having a species composition, diversity, and functional organisation comparable to that of natural habitat of the region’ (Karr & Dudley, 1981, p. 56). The conservation of natural ecosystems that exhibit ecosystem integrity was – and still is – widely regarded as the necessary requirement for overcoming the ecological crisis and securing the long-term survival of humanity, because such natural ecosystems represent the ultimate resource upon which humans depend (Karr & Dudley, 1981; Westra, 1994). Similarly but more universally, the Gaia hypothesis states that the whole Earth naturally represents a self-regulating living system beyond human utilisability. (For different concepts of ecosystem integrity see Kirchhoff, 2020b; for a critique of the Gaia hypothesis see Williams, 1992; for a critique of organismic views of nature that dominated scientific ecology until the 1980^th, but nowadays are widely regarded as disproved, see Botkin, 1990; Kirchhoff & Voigt, 2010; Kirchhoff, 2014).

Organismic theories of ecosystems represent a twofold scientifically based sacralisation of nature. First, nature is sacralised by attributing to it an ecological organisation that is optimal and transcends the scope of human scientific analysis, computability and technical construction. Natural ecosystems are beyond human control and, therefore, objects of ‘ecological awe’. Accordingly, the transition from the realm of scientific knowledge to that which remains hidden from it is marked by the transition from finite to infinite complexity. Second, nature is sacralised by claiming that humans must conserve the naturally given ecosystems and, indeed, ultimately reintegrate into them, if they are to survive in the long term. Nature, in the form of perfect ecosystems and an all-encompassing Gaia, provides the norms we have to follow.

Religious-external sacralisations of nature by organismic and optimistic theories of ecosystems exhibit a striking structural analogy to religious-internal sacralisations of nature by Christian cosmologies and physico-theologies that emerged in the 17^th and 18^th century: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz argued that the factual world must be the best of all possible worlds with a perfect order, because God was benevolent, omnipotent and unlimitedly wise. Rapport’s above cited statement strikingly mimics Leibniz’ view – although God’s predicates are replaced by nature’s alleged unlimited power of self-organisation and optimisation by natural selection.

In the USA, Christian sacralisations of nature were also further developed by transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and by naturalists such as John Muir into the perception of wilderness as sacred (Nash, 1967/2014) – as represented in paintings such as Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868) and Rocky Mountain Landscape (1870) by Albert Bierstadt. However, these sacralisations regard the transfer of sublimity from God via external nature to the human soul as constitutive for the aesthetic experience of the sublimity and sacredness of wilderness. Other than the above sacralisation of nature as super-organismic community that is grounded in a scientific theory, these sacralisations of nature, though distancing themselves from religious institutions, remain explicitly based on Christian religion and, in the last instance, are church-oriented – as is obvious in the close relation of the American transcendentalism to the religious movement of Unitarianism, a non-Trinitarian branch of Christianity (cf. Friesner, 2017; for an examination of the religious roots of American environmentalism, see Berry, 2015).

6. Spiritual ‘ecological’ sacralisation of nature: deep ecology, peace with nature and ecospirituality

Organismic scientific-ecological conceptualisations of nature have been criticised not only from within the science of ecology but also from within the ecology-movement, namely by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (1973) as anthropocentric and eco-technocratic ‘shallow ecology’. Instead, he called for a spiritual ‘deep ecology’ (‘ecology’ here meaning more a worldview than a scientific subdiscipline of biology) that ascribes to the earthly ecosystem and the entire diversity of life on earth an absolute intrinsic value independent of its usefulness for humans (Taylor, 2001). Similarly, the German physicist and philosopher Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich (1984) demanded that we respect nature as co-world (Mitwelt) instead of environment (Umwelt) and that we make peace with nature.

These views of nature do not only subjectivise and morally recognise nature, but also include the esoteric and physiocentric assumption that humans can be truly human not in society but only in natural communion with animals and plants, wind and water, heaven and earth (Meyer-Abich, 1987). Since the 2000s, similar views have been expressed under the label ‘ecospirituality’. This movement is characterised by the perception of nature as a personified entity with ‘maternal’ traits that must be guarded and venerated against evil ‘male’ technical dominion and exploitation; by ideas of a spiritual connection between human beings and nature; by the awareness of nature as a sacred entity (Lincoln, 2000; Taylor, 2001). In France, to give one example of many others, Michel Maffesoli (2017) has claimed a ‘sensibilité écosophique’ that notes the harmonious ecological equilibrium and overcomes the disconnection of the humans from external nature and, thus, their own nature.

Nature is therefore sacralised in a threefold way: (i) as moral subject, (ii) as all-encompassing reference point for human self-realisation and (iii) by diagnosing a fall of humankind through destruction of the original paradisiacal ecological community of humans and nature. Accordingly, Nicola Righetti (2014) counts Deep Ecology among the ‘quasi-religious movements’.

7. Neo-pagan sacralisation of nature

The neo-pagan movement emerged at the end of the 1960s and has gained considerable popularity in many modern Western societies (Rountree, 2012; Spindler, 1987). European neo-paganism builds on the pagan tradition in European history, namely the specific empathy with religious feelings and ideas of classical antiquity among many humanistic intellectuals (Spindler, 1987). Seeking to provide a new meaning of life and culture, it emerged as a reaction to the perception of a fundamental crisis of the ideologies that had hitherto inspired the life of Europeans, and due to feelings of disappointment and despair with the course of European societies (Spindler, 1987). Neo-paganism criticises key ideas and values of these ideologies, namely: ‘the high value placed on ‘progress’, materialism, and consumerism; familiar dualisms, such as animate/inanimate, body/spirit, mind/body, natural/supernatural, nature/culture; and the belief that humans are categorically different from, and superior to, all other species and possess a God-given right to dominate and exploit the environment for human gain and pleasure’ (Rountree, 2012, p. 306; cf. Cooper et al., 2016). In particular, neo-paganism is opposed to Judeo-Christian traditions, which are accused of desacralising nature and the entire universe, depriving the world of all immanent sources of enthusiasm and inhibiting people from religious approaches to nature.

Paganism postulates […] that the sacred is within reach of human existence. […] it refuses the one God, out there, beyond the world, and yet jealous, who forbids creatures from having spiritual experience aimed at human beings in their relations with the world. The one God requires from people a conscience of being exiled. Paganism seeks religion in our exalted feeling of wholeness here and now. Far from desacralising the world, it sacralises it. Indeed: it takes the world for sacred (Pauwels, 1981, p. 295, cited according to Spindler, 1987, p. 9).

The main positive characteristic of neo-paganism is that its adherents – drawing on pre-Christian and non-Christian beliefs – want to live a nature-religious and experiential religiosity. Its first principle, as formulated by the international Pagan Federation, is: ‘Love for and Kinship with Nature. Reverence for the life force and its ever-renewing cycles of life and death’ (Pagan Federation, 2022). Deities are worshipped in nature, and trees and forests are considered especially sacred. Nature as a whole(ness) is revered as ‘the great mother’ who gives birth to and brings forth everything. Individual experiences of nature should lead to an expansion of consciousness, to the awareness of the harmonious unity with nature and the whole world. Every human being is said to be able experience this divine nature and world, without needing any mediating expert. Accordingly, the second neo-pagan principle is a ‘positive morality, in which the individual is responsible for the discovery and development of their true nature in harmony with the outer world and community’ (Pagan Federation, 2022). Like the followers of the ecology movement, the followers of neo-paganism seek a life ‘in harmony with nature’, but not with the help of scientific knowledge of nature (see Kirchhoff, 2020a) but instead based on individual religious experience of nature. In North America, neo-pagan religions are among the fastest growing faiths in North America today, particularly among young people, the best-known version being Wicca, a duotheistic, nature-based tradition of religious witchcraft created in Great Britain by Gerald Gardner in the 1940s (Tosenberger, 2010).

8. Sacralisation of nature as community of solidarity

The last type of sacralisation of nature that I would like to address has been expressed quite recently by foresters such as Erwin Thoma (2012) and by Peter Wohlleben in his international best-selling book Hidden Life of Trees (Wohlleben, 2016). In an obviously anthropomorphising description, Thoma and Wohlleben both stylise natural forests – in contrast to human-made forests – as communities of solidarity in which the individual trees support each other in their existence. According to Wohlleben, even dead trees remain included in this community, as is shown by the fact that the stumps of felled trees, by remaining connected to the living roots of other trees, are enabled to form a protecting bark over the cut.

This sacralisation of forests resembles the earlier sacralisations of nature as organism-like super-ecosystems. However, the sacralised community no longer consists of all the different species living in the same place but is essentially limited to the individuals of a single species – indicating a clear shift from organic unity through division of labour among different species (cf. Kirchhoff, 2020c) to solidarity through sharing among the genera.

The enormous resonance of this new sacralisation of forests might be the expression a growing ‘unease in culture’: Forests as stable communities of solidarity represent a moral counter-world to a society that is perceived as increasingly individualistic, lacking in solidarity and changing in accelerating ways (Kirchhoff, 2017).

Conclusion

Modern Western societies feature a wide spectrum of culturally-shaped aesthetic and symbolic perceptions of nature that are constitutive of the important non-material values ascribed to nature. Part of this spectrum involves a range of sacralised perceptions of nature intrinsically connected with experiences of self-transcendence.

The above analysis has shown that such sacralisations of nature are anything but limited to forms of church-based religion or religiosity. Instead, at least eight types of sacralisation of nature beyond church-based religion or religiosity are present and widespread in modern Western societies. These include quite different, even categorically distinct perceptions of nature, ranging from the apolitical aesthetic (romanticism) through the socio-cultural (cult of naturalness; unique cultural landscape; forest as solidary community), the political (nationalist) and esoteric (deep ecology; neo-paganism) to the scientific (ecological organicism).

The cultural history of nature in modern Western societies turns out to be less a history of the disappearance of sacralisations than a history of ever new sacralisations. In this process, church-based sacralisations of nature have remained important, while sacralisations beyond church-based religion seem to have gained in significance.

While sacralisations beyond church-based religion can extend to any social entity, nature seems to have become a pre-eminent subject of such sacralisations in modern Western societies. My hypothesis is that this is due to the fact that nature is predisposed to being sacralised: If one understands the concepts of ‘nature’, ‘culture’ and ‘technology’ not as names of different classes of objects existing independently of any observer (as, e.g., Albanese, 2002, does in her analysis of ‘nature religion’), but rather – similarly to Kant’s concept of ‘transcendental reflection’ – as ‘markers for relations to the world, which we assume and reflect upon on the basis of acts of recognition’ (Hubig, 2020, p. 145), or, more specifically, as reflexive concepts that refer to practice-oriented assessments of the world, then ‘technology’ designates what we recognise as totally disposable, ‘culture’ what we recognise as conditionally indisposable and ‘nature’ what we recognise as indisposable or unavailable (Hubig, 2011). (In contrast to the human individual to whom an end in itself is attributed, this indisposable nature can simultaneously be regarded as a mere means or resource.) While ‘cultural habits of humanity have always made room for the sacredness of nature’ (Schama, 1995, p. 18), it is precisely this reflexive attribution of non-disposability or unavailability, which parallels the idea of the unavailability of God, that inherently predisposes nature to be an eminent object of sacralisation beyond church-based religion or religiosity. This inherent potential of nature for sacralisation has unfolded in modern Western societies particularly after the ‘death of God’ (Nietzsche) and the waning of belief in history as the progress of rationality, whereby eminent former objects of sacralisation such as God, human rationality and human history have lost influence. I have confined my study to sacralisations of nature beyond church-based religion. This was not to denigrate the relevance of church-based sacralisations of nature but to highlight that sacralisations of nature are common even among people who are non-church-going and regard themselves as non-religious.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. In particular, the detailed comments and advice from reviewer #2 have enabled me to improve my terminology and characterisations of the types considerably. Many thanks to the editors of Landscape Research for enabling the exceptionally good peer review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

I am indebted to the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (Bundesamt für Naturschutz – BfN) for funding the proof reading of the manuscript and the gold open access.

Notes on contributors

Thomas Kirchhoff

Thomas Kirchhoff studied landscape planning and philosophy. His research focuses on lifeworldly and scientific views of nature, in particular: the theory and history of ecology and nature conservation; nature aesthetics and nature ethics; the theory of landscape, wilderness and biodiversity; the cultural meanings of forests; the concepts of ecosystem health, integrity and services; the connection between the social constructions of home (Heimat) and landscape. Across a range of topics, he explores the cultural genesis, normative content and social significance of different lifeworldly and scientific perceptions and conceptions of nature. In the face of scientifical-naturalistic tendencies, he argues for a plural conceptualisation of nature.