I'm doing a bit of research for an article on the Russian hermit tradition in which the forest is seen as the wilderness in the same terms as the earliest Christian ascetics described the deserts of the Middle East. The theme of desert or wilderness in Christian spiritual traditions is well researched from its biblical roots onwards. One of the essential keys to understanding its role is to see this theme as existing alongside another biblical image, that of the garden or paradise. The Christian ascetic enters the wilderness and finds it to be the place where the first shoots of the renewed creation grow. This draws on a fine prophetic tradition (eg Is. 35) as well as a later Christian insight about the renewal of all living things through the resurrection.
My interest is much more in the spiritual imagination of the those ascetics who chose their wildernesses quite carefully, or at least they reflected quite carefully on the wilderness at hand, whether it was moutain, desert, island or forest. My article is about the nature of forest as wilderness-paradise and how its physical characteristics shape a particular approach to mystical theology. I'll say more about this some other time, but I wanted to mention a book I would never have come across had it not been for Thomas Merton's own reflections on his natural environment as a hermit in the woods around his abbey in Kentucky. He wrote a review of George Huntston Williams' outstanding book on this theme, Paradise and Wilderness in Christian Thought and I was pleased to find a copy in New College Library. Williams wrote beautifully (often with a preacher's rhetoric!) and his range of interest in this theme was breathtaking. As well as surveying the biblical and patristic origins of the theme, he looked at how it developed in early American Protestant thought, with the early settlers pushing deeper into the wilderness of their own land. He also understood the modern need to see the wilderness in ecological terms and, for someone writing in the early 1960s, his level of awareness of the issues is impressive. Part of this awareness was a consideration of how modern secular thinkers have seen wilderness in a contemplative mode, and he cites Henry Bugbee in this regard. In our own day, I see Robert Macfarlane as carrying on this tradition in a deeply reflective and insightful way.
But the insight that impressed me most in Williams' book was that of a Russian emigre bishop in Paris in the 1920s, who saw that the spirituality of the desert was as relevant in the wilderness of the modern city as it was in the rocky wastes of Sinai. This shows how much Christian thinking about the wilderness is really about the place of the human person in a challenging environment which urges a kind of interiority and seeks transformation from the inside out, an environment that speaks both of desolation and potential, of loneliness and of rich solitude. Andrew Louth's excellent study, The Wilderness of God, makes the same connections. It is important to understand that this wilderness is not merely symbolic, it is about the real interactions of people with their environment, and about the real possibilities of transformation of them and of that environment.
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