Toward the end of his career, St. Augustine wrote his Retractions, in which he corrected, revised, or further explained points that he had labored to make in writings throughout the course of his life. Much more modestly, I have outlined my own retrospective reflections about some theological shortcomings of my own, in my short theological autobiography, “Ecology, Justice, and Liturgy,” in Theologians in Their Own Words, ed. Derek R. Nelson, Joshua M. Moritz, and Ted Peters (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012), 217-32. Here I invent a slightly different task for myself, “Retrackings.” Here I want to give a voice of my own to the experience of many, if not all, authors, “If only I had known this earlier!” In this way, retrospectively, I would like to “re-track” my earlier discussions.
Case One: The Theology of Baptism.
Case Two: The Lowest Level of Mystical Prayer – A Thought to be Treasured
Case Three: Historic Theological Mentors
Case Four: Sometimes Ecclesial Praxis Can Carry the Day
Case Five: My Conversation Partner – Henry David Thoreau
Case Seven: The Theology of Gardens and Gardening
Case Eight: The Phenomenology of Worship
Case One: The Theology of Baptism.
Theologically and vocationally, I learned early on to take the Sacrament of Baptism with utmost seriousness. Probably this was for two main reasons, first my doctoral studies in Luther’s theology, working under the tutelage of the eminent Reformation historian, Heiko Oberman, second my exposure as a practitioner to the influence of the twentieth-century Movement for Liturgical Renewal. Anyone with eyes to see can detect those influences in many, if not all, of my writings. But, along the way, I think that I could have enhanced my argumentation, had I found contexts in which to accent the remarkable Baptismal theology and Baptismal praxis of Ambrose of Milan, a figure of great significance in the life of Augustine of Hippo, a theologian who often occupied my attention.
Augustine apparently did not internalize or he may even have rejected, unconsciously if not consciously, the rich baptismal theology of Ambrose. This is how Gary Wills describes those developments in his striking, short study, Font of Life: Ambrose, Augustine, and the Mystery of Baptism (New York: Oxford, 2012), 137:
For a variety of reasons having to do with his African duties, Augustine’s approach to Baptism differed at a basic level from Ambrose’s. Ambrose had a mystical, poetic, and all-inclusive theology of Christian initiation. He saw Baptism as the culmination of the entire sacred history leading up to Jesus’ fulfillment of all the prophecies that pointed directly to Baptism. The whole meaning of the Trinity was enacted and revealed in the action at the font, which brought new Christians into the inner dialogue of the persons with each other in the Godhead. The reality of the church was embodied in the rebirth of humanity out of the saving waters.
Augustine, by contrast, had what has been called a “minimalistic” view of Baptism, legalistic, almost mechanical, with further steps often needed to reach the full Christian life, beginning with the relatively impoverished procedures of infant Baptism (in contrast to the rich indoctrination of Ambrose during Lent and the Easter octave).
I would now like to think of my own discussions of Baptism over the years as more Ambrosian than Augustinian. This historical reference, had I been able to underscore it, might have helped my own readers to better grasp what I was trying to say. Modern American readers, I suspect, will have mainly experienced Baptism in some Augustinian form, mediated by various (although not all) Protestant traditions, legalistic, sometimes almost mechanical – and, I should add, often sentimentalized. So: a Baptismal mysticism!? What is that?! How might I make compelling sense out of my own Baptismal mysticism, if many of my own hearers and readers are under the influence of Augustinian conceptions and practices of Baptism? return to top
Case Two: The Lowest Level of Mystical Prayer – A Thought to be Treasured
In my book, Before Nature: A Christian Spirituality, I sought to explicate what I called a Baptismal spirituality. My description of that spirituality would have been helped, I now realize, had I referred to Thomas Merton’s essay, “Is Mysticism Normal?”
A Baptismal spirituality, for me, is a spirituality that’s “down to earth.” It’s a spirituality that’s available to all who are followers – or who are seeking to be followers – of the one who said, “I am the way…” (John 14:6) It’s a spirituality that claimed me from my earliest days, growing up, as I did, immersed in the mundane traditions bequeathed to the Church Catholic by the Protestant reformer, Martin Luther. It’s a spirituality which is predicated on the faith of a struggling and spiritually broken monk who left the monastery – and got married! Call it an earthly spirituality. There are many other spiritualities available in the traditions of the Church Catholic, to be sure, as Merton forthrightly acknowledges. But this, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and health, is the one that has claimed me, body and soul. It is a spirituality, I now have come to understand, which is rooted at the ground level, which Merton calls “the lowest level of mystical prayer.” This is a thought to be treasured, I believe. These are Merton’s words, spoken in his own Roman Catholic dialect.
What Christians need to realize is not so much that the highest level of mystical union is abstractly open to all, but that the lowest level of mystical prayer is really much more common than people imagine. By this lowest level of mystical prayer, I refer to a prayer which, though infused, at least according to the Thomist sense of the word, is not perceived or realized. It is that latent or “masked” contemplation which would seem to be offered to those who are barred, by temperament or vocation or other circumstances, from ever becoming fully mature contemplatives, and there are many such. Perhaps the majority of Christians will never in fact enjoy the graces of manifest infused contemplation on earth. But it would seem likely that no one who arrives at the degree of perfection in what we have described as the mystical life, will be deprived of the comfort and strength of this masked or latent contemplation. This is the grace given to so many saintly souls in the active life who, though their prayer is apparently very humdrum and prosaic, nevertheless find God in an obscure and subtle way in all the activities they perform in His service. There is an unaccountable strength and peace, a certain interior “lift” which takes hold on souls who know how to find God in His will, and which carries them through difficulties and through problems in a way that bears witness to God’s intimate presence with them and in them as they go about their duties for His love. They never realize, perhaps, how close He is to them. They know they are not pure contemplatives, and sometimes their relations with God in formal prayer are distressingly commonplace and dull, so that they are perhaps tempted to give up all hope of sanctity, falsely believing that to be saints they have to burn with a flame that they can really feel. And yet, God is with them in their work. They have a wonderful gift, which they themselves can barely appreciate, of finding Him in their daily tasks, in their common round, and in the people they deal with. It is something so diffuse and tenuous that they can never grasp it or explain it, and it does not help them much to try. If they rationalize the experience, they instantly lose hold on their tenuous possession of God and He slips out of their ken.
These are the “masked” contemplatives. They are mystics, but they do not know it. And generally, even if you tell them so, they will not be inclined to believe you. They will always fear that you are joking, and that a term so exalted as that could not possibly apply to them.
The truth is, they are the little ones who will perhaps turn out to be much higher in heaven, than many who seemed great by more manifest graces of prayer.
[Merton’s article first appeared in the November 14, 1949 issue of Commonweal; for access, see: https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/mysticism-normal.] return to top
Case Three: Historic Theological Mentors
All my theological works are replete with references to historic thinkers, most of them Christian theologians. More particularly, my study, The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1985), offers an overview of the history of Christian thought about nature. To that end, in that work, I identify some theological motifs that underlie that ambiguity and that promise, as those motifs shaped the thought of a number of major theological figures. Indeed, one of the chief goals of The Travail of Nature is to celebrate the contributions of those who were, in various ways, proponents of Christian ecological traditions.
But The Travail of Nature did not tell the whole story of my own encounter with what I still regard as the – all too often unnoticed – richness of the Christian tradition’s celebration of the natural world. In an autobiographical essay, “Ecology, Justice, Liturgy,” in the volume Theologians in Their Own Words (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), eds. Derek R. Nelson, Joshua M. Moritz, and Ted Peters, pp. 217-232, I did explicitly outline my own theological trajectory in historical perspective. But nowhere have I attempted to substantively tell the whole story about how I perceive that my own theology has been shaped by a variety of mostly Christian thinkers and practitioners, beyond those discussed in The Travail of Nature.
Nor will I. Alas, however much I would love write at length about all those who, I believe, have most influenced my lifelong theological explorations (I discussed four of them in The Travail of Nature: Irenaeus, Augustine, Francis, and Luther), I realize that at this point in my life, as I approach my nineties, that is not about to happen.
Hence I have decided to provide a more or less chronological list here of those thinkers whom I believe have been most important in the development and exposition of my own theology over the years, should anyone be interested. I will also identify along the way, in very short compass, the themes espoused by each of these figures. Here they are:
Irenaeus (b. 130): the history of creation and salvation
Augustine (b. 354): spirituality; the history of creation
Francis of Assisi (d. 1226): personal engagement with nature
Martin Luther (1483-1546): God’s immanence in nature; Jesus Christ’s ubiquity in nature
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862): personal engagement with nature
John Muir (1838-1914): personal engagement with nature
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945): radical ecclesial discipleship
Paul Tillich (1886-1995): theology of culture; theology of nature
Rosemary Radford Ruether (1936-2022): theological feminism and nature
Joseph Sittler (1904-1987): cosmic Christology
Jürgen Moltmann (1926-2024): creational eschatology return to top
Case Four: Sometimes Ecclesial Praxis Can Carry the Day
In the later years of my retirement, I began to take on a probably improbable challenge, which turned out to be a delight: carefully re-reading Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. Re-reading carefully, is the important nuance. On other encounters with Pelikan’s multi-volumed work, I must confess, I was looking for stuff. Then I had theological axes to grind (not a bad figure in itself – why not aspire to be a sharp theological interpreter?). But, with this recent reading, I encountered Pelikan’s gifts for historical interpretation in a perhaps more nuanced and therefore all the more instructive way.
One of the things I learned, as if for the first time, is this. In the life of the Church, sometimes praxis can carry the day, and, on occasion, rightfully so. In contrast, I grew up theologically in a time when it was self-evident to me and to many others in my theological generation that what really counted in the life of the Church was not praxis, but theoria. Insofar as I was able to grasp such things as a young theology student, what was critically important in the life of the Church, for me, was mainly given voice by the leading theologians of the day, such as Karl Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Paul Tillich.
Yes, in those days I was deeply involved in the practical life of the Church, especially as that life had been and was being shaped by what was then known as the Movement for Liturgical Renewal. But, if I may say so, it was the theological recipes of those times, rather than the theological cuisine, that claimed most of my scholarly attention. I was much more interested in the theoria than the praxis. Thus I once taught an undergraduate course, Religion and Ritual in the Christian Tradition (a bombastic title for a very modest course). But even in that setting, I now realize retrospectively, I was more interested in the former than the latter. Perhaps to my own theological disservice.
Pelikan’s argument is fascinating: in the early centuries of the Church’s life, at key points, practice did carry the day. A key example: the development of the Church’s Eucharistic theology of the Real Presence of Christ: “…[N]o orthodox father of the second or third century of whom we have record either declared the presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist to be no more than symbolic (although Clement and Origen came close to doing so) or specified a process of substantial change by which the presence was effected (although Ignatius and Justin came close to doing so). Within the limits of those excluded extremes was the doctrine of the real presence. Fundamental to that doctrine was the liturgical recollection (anamesis) of Christ…. The theologians[, however,] did not have adequate concepts within which to formulate a doctrine of the real presence that evidently was already believed by the church even though it was not yet taught by explicit instruction or confessed by creeds.”(pp. 167f.)
If that phenomenon can serve as a frame of reference for us today, maybe as a young theological student I should have been more attentive, if I may say so, to the liturgical matrix of my own theological development than I was. And maybe I should have seen the great theologians of my own day, with whom I was so enamored, more from this perspective: that sometimes – more often than not? – practice can carry the day. In a word, going to Church is fundamentally more important than reading theology.
Which, in terms of my own experience as a born-again Lutheran – early on in my own theological trajectory, I found myself driven into a fresh and radical understanding of the historic, “Catholic Luther” (David Steinmetz) – surely would have made a lot of sense. In retrospect, I can now see that the whole sixteenth century Reformation was driven by the conviction that some fundamental practices – like Penance and the Mass – in the Church Catholic had run amok and that therefore those practices had to re-formed, precisely because, when all has been said and done theologically in the Holy Catholic Church, practice, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, does carry the day. return to top
Case Five: My Conversation Partner – Henry David Thoreau
As I have been completing my retirement years, I finally discovered the obvious about my whole theological trajectory. All along, beginning already as an adolescent, I had had a conversation partner, a voice that constantly kept speaking to me within. Augustine had had his Plato, mediated to him through the traditions of Neoplatonism. Karl Barth had had his Hegel, mediated to him through the traditions of Kierkegaard and Neo-Kantianism. I finally realized, oh so lately, yet oh so clearly, that, long before I had begun to write theologically, I had had a conversation partner of my own, Henry David Thoreau, whose voice had been mediated to me by I know not whom.
True, during the years of my theological studies and then beyond, had I been asked to name my own conversation partner, in all likelihood I would have answered: Luther. The latter has always been a kind of older brother for me, theologically. But, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, I now realize Luther’s was not the voice that I kept hearing within from my adolescent years onward. That voice was Thoreau’s. True, beginning as a theology student, I sometimes tried to push that ordinary saint from rural, colonial Massachusetts to the periphery of my own inner world. But his voice always kept resonating there, nevertheless.
No surprise retrospectively, then, that after I had completed the book-writing decades of my life and after I had entered into a phase of mostly reading what I really wanted to read, books like Charles Taylor’s monumental history, A Secular World, and when, along the way, I noticed that a new, short study of Thoreau’s life and works had been enthusiastically reviewed, Lawrence Buell’s Henry David Thoreau (2024), I immediately ordered that book. My engagement with the great author of Walden, who learned even more when he joined a party to climb Mt. Katahdin in Maine, has never shown any signs of abating. For as long as I can remember, Thoreau has been my own John the Baptist, for me a voice crying in the wilderness.
Had I, along the way, more self-consciously realized how much and how long Thoreau had been speaking with me within – perhaps the force of my own theological testimony over the years might have been enhanced, even deepened. return to top
Case Six: Defining Nature
In being preoccupied all of my adult intellectual life with the theology of nature, I of course have been challenged all along to think the unthinkable, to attempt to define the construct “nature.” In my historical study, The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress 1985), I allude to Arthur Lovejoy’s observation that that term has dozens of definition, this before proposing my own working definition (see pp. 11f.). Had I known at that time about C. S. Lewis’ much more comprehensive study, “Nature (with Phusis, Kind, Physical etc.), in his Studies in Words (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1960), chap. 2, I could have referred to it and thereby accented even more fully the difficulties of defining the term. return to top
Case Seven: The Theology of Gardens and Gardening
In the Travail of Nature and in most of my writings in the theology of nature more generally, I typically have thought of the natural world as having three dimensions, urban, agricultural, and wild. Nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes.
At various places along the way, more particularly, I have discussed the culture of American suburbia and its historic presuppositions about nature, reflections on my part that typically have had negative implications. Thus in Brother Earth I described what I called “the cult of the simple rustic life,” as a kind of love for gardening gone flat. But rarely in my writings did I consider gardens and gardening in their own right. Had I done so, my explorations of nature as a cultural and theological theme might have been more interesting, even more revealing.
In retrospect, this theological inattention to gardens and gardening on my part doesn’t even ring autobiographically true. I grew up in a semi-rural setting. My mother had three or four small, cantilevered flower beds, on which she worked with considerable devotion. And I regularly helped her with that work. Further, my childhood spanned the era of World War II “Victory Gardens” in the U.S. Any patriotic family like mine, was then expected to raise vegetables, presumably to keep American strong at home while many of its young men were fighting abroad. Devout Christian families like mine were particularly fond of recalling biblical motifs in this context, like the parable of the sower – “A sower went out to sow….” (Matthew 13:3-9, Luke 8:5-8). We felt called upon by God not only to scatter seeds, but all the more so to enrich the soil so that it could become “the good soil.” So, when I was growing up, the gardening experience became very dear to me. At that time I also helped my father plant and cultivate a number of specimen trees on our land. Thanks to my father’s caring, I learned to treasure trees of many species, as well as all the plants in our vegetable and flower gardens.
Later, after my wife and I had found a way to purchase an old farm house in rural southwestern Maine, a place that I would keep referring to throughout my writings, she and I invested what we considered to be enormous energies in creating and sustaining both vegetable and perennial gardens, and, as I had done with my father many years before, I also planted a number of specimen trees, eventually including one of the genetically new elm trees that was supposed to be resistant to Dutch Elm disease.
And when Laurel and I traveled to the British Isles and to Europe, as we did several times, our itinerary was always organized around visits to cathedrals – and to gardens, from the great ones like Versailles to the many simple, but magnificent cottage gardens of England.
Given this considerable experience with gardens and gardening, and with trees more particularly: I find it remarkable, in retrospect, that I never found a way to discuss gardens and gardening at length in any of my writings, apart from recurring discussions of the Garden of Eden story in Genesis 2. How could that have happened? Especially since historic Western experience of nature, a theme that has preoccupied me my whole professional life, takes the garden and gardening as a fundamental datum of human experience.
On the other hand, as best as I now can recall, the classical Western thinkers whose lives and works most fascinated me over the years (see Second Thoughts, Case Five), never wrote encomiums about gardens and gardening either. Many monasteries in the Middle Ages, to be sure, had their often lovely cloistered gardens (typically focused on medicinal herbs), which doubtless shaped monastic sensibilities over the years. But I am not sure how much such sensibilities shaped normative theological reflections in that era and thereafter, if at all.
Even Henry David Thoreau, who knew a great deal about plants and how to garden, was more of a student and contemplator of plants than a theorist and practitioner of gardens and gardening (one of the best studies of Thoreau’s life and works, Lawrence Bluell, Henry David Thoreau: Thinking Disobediently [New York: Oxford University Press, 2024], perhaps revealingly doesn’t list garden or gardening in its index).
I began to reflect about all this only very late in life, when I was working my way through the excellent study of gardens and gardening in historic Western culture by Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
If I had another theological lifetime, I would like to explore what now appears to me to have been the eclipse of any extensive reflection about gardens and gardening in classical Western theology, to this very day. Of course, the primal Western theological vision was predicated on the image of Adam and Eve having been thrown out of the Garden. And in the West, at least, much theological energy was invested in explications of Augustine’s vision of the City of God, not so much in projecting the image of some new Garden of Eden. In all my years studying these matters, even reading Dante, I cannot remember coming upon dreams of a New – non-spiritualized – Eden. Prototypically, the great and oft-celebrated St. Francis of Assisi, much as he loved all the creatures of nature, was a wanderer, not a gardener. return to top
Case Eight: The Phenomenology of Worship
While I stand by the argument and the conclusions of my study, Ritualizing Nature: Renewing Liturgy in a Time of Crisis (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), I have come to realize that the force of that book could have been enhanced had I found a way to integrate the argument in the phenomenology of worship by the Quaker theologian, Richard A. Baer, Jr., for many years a coworker of mine in the field of ecological theology. In his essay, “Silent Worship, Glossolalia, and Liturgy,” Quaker Religious Thought (41:4), Jan. 1, 1975, 28-37, Baer writes: “My thesis is that each of these three practices permits the analytical mind, the focused, objectifying dimension of man’s intellect, to rest, thus freeing other dimensions of the person, what we might loosely refer to as man’s spirit, for a deeper openness to divine reality. In their distinctive ways I believe that tongues, Quaker silence, and the liturgy of the church all contribute powerfully to this goal.” return to top