Tenth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

Though often hidden by the earlier great expressions on the natural world by Wordsworth and Emerson, Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) - the English nature writer - brings a distinct emotional dimension to ecological spirituality. William James, in his ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’, described Jefferies’s 1883 autobiographical work ‘The Story of My Heart’ as a “wonderful and splendid mystic rhapsody” and commentators from Salt (1906) to Rossabi (2017) have relished in the ambiguities of Jefferies’s wider works, but none have sought to examine Jefferies’s emotional link between consciousness and nature in detail or illuminated its value for contemporary environmental thinking. This paper takes William James’s categories for positioning the “naturalistic pantheists” (enlargement, union, and emancipation) to provide a new reading of Jefferies’s works on consciousness and nature, not only in his autobiography but also in the earlier mystical expressions in his novels and essays. The paper develops the categories of enlargement, union, and emancipation as specific features of loving the earth in Jefferies and argues that contemporary attitudes to nature require recognition of the specific affective links with the environment that Jefferies articulated. While rationality and intellect remain key vehicles, the work of Jefferies shows the force of emotion and the affective ground of the pantheistic spirit. Recognizing that some of Jefferies’s intense emancipations of the soul can hold a problematic tension of escape, the conclusion shows how Jefferies can help us rethink our future emotional relationship to the earth and understand the emotional identifications at the core of ecological spirituality.