Loving God's Wildness: The Christian Roots of Ecological Ethics in American Literature

LOVING GOD’S WILDNESS

LOVING GOD’S WILDNESS

THE CHRISTIAN ROOTS OF ECOLOGICAL ETHICS IN AMERICAN LITERATURE

JEFFREY BILBRO

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2015 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

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Cover art: Scenes of Trimble County by Harlan Hubbard. © Claude W. Caddell. All rights reserved. Reproduced with permission. Photograph courtesy of Deanna Ralston.

Cover design: Michele Myatt Quinn

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The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bilbro, Jeffrey.

Loving God’s wildness : the Christian roots of ecological ethics in American literature / Jeffrey Bilbro.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8173-1857-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8173-8801-0 (e book)

1. American literature—History and criticism. 2. Ecology in literature. 3. Christian ethics in literature. 4. Environmental protection in literature. 5. Ecocriticism—United States. I. Title.

PS169.E25B55  2015

810.9'355—dc23

2014035963

Contents

Acknowledgments

1. Rediscovering the Roots: Learning to be Priests in God’s Wild Temple

2. Watching for the Glory of God: Thoreau’s Adaptations of Puritan History and Natural Philosophy

3. Preserving God’s Wildness for Redemptive Baptism: Muir and Disciples of Christ Theology

4. Lost and Saved in a Garden: Cather’s Marian Restoration of Ecological Community

5. The Way of Love: Berry’s Vision of Work in the Kingdom of God

Conclusion: Untangling the Roots

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful for those who have walked ahead of and alongside me on this project. Without their gifts of wisdom, humor, and love, I would never have finished.

First of all, I am grateful for the authors whose works were the inspiration and subject of this study. They addressed themselves thoughtfully and creatively to the tradition they inherited, and so handed down a better place than they received.

I am grateful to the librarians at Baylor University, Spring Arbor University, and the University of the Pacific who guided me through bibliographic mazes as I tracked down my sources. Thanks are also due to those who funded the HEB Foundation Faith and Learning Fellowship, which allowed me to focus more of my energies on this project. The editors of Christianity and Literature supported my work by publishing a shortened version of the argument that appears here in chapter three, and Bob Krushwitz at Christian Reflections published Doing Good Work, an essay that explores ideas articulated more fully in chapter four. Dan Waterman, the anonymous readers, and the editorial staff at the University of Alabama Press shepherded this manuscript to publication professionally and kindly.

I am grateful for the scholars and teachers whose writings and conversations shaped my readings of these authors. My bibliography records many of these debts, but in addition I’d like to thank Bill Jolliff for introducing me to Wendell Berry’s novels, Corey Beals for teaching a course on Berry’s environmental philosophy, and Nancy Chinn for sharing her love of Willa Cather. I couldn’t have asked for a better mentor than Joe Fulton; there aren’t many people who publish award-winning books on Mark Twain and own a farm with cows and chickens. In addition, Luke Ferretter, Sarah Ford, David Lyle Jeffrey, and Richard Russell read versions of this manuscript, and their hard questions helped me avoid many pitfalls. Most importantly, these friends taught me that rigorous scholars can be genuinely kind people.

I am grateful for my colleagues whose conversations and ideas shaped my understanding of these issues: Josh Boyd, Christina Iluzada, Michael Milburn, Cameron Moore, and John Pierce. Jack Baker is the only person I know who gets more excited about Wendell Berry than I do. Tom Holsinger-Friesen asked important questions from a theologian’s perspective. Bethany Bear and Steven Petersheim read complete drafts of my argument, and their honest critiques greatly improved my thinking. Their friendship and support throughout this process helped me retain a modicum of sanity. Sarah Macfadyen read through my manuscript in its final stages and helped clarify many points that remained weak.

I am grateful for my friends and family who kept me from floating away into the academic ether. The gracious people who live in Stehekin allowed my family and me to experience the joys and challenges of an embodied community that actually cares for all its members. My family read drafts of my work, and their thoughtful questions humored my fantasy that normal people might be interested in the fruits of my research.

Most of all, I am grateful for my wonderful wife, Melissa. I’m thankful for her patience and grace, for her keen editorial eye, and for her wisdom in making me set aside my writing to take walks, spend time with friends, and cook good meals. It is to her that this book is dedicated.

1

Rediscovering the Roots

Learning to be Priests in God’s Wild Temple

He discharges also the Office of a Priest for the Creation, under the Influences of an admirable Saviour, and therein asserts and assures his Title unto that Priesthood, which the Blessedness of the future State will very much consist in being advanced to. The whole World is indeed a Temple of GOD.

(Mather, Christian Philosopher 7)

American wilderness confronted the Puritan colonists when they arrived in the New World to carry out their divine errand. They immediately had to determine what their efforts to plant a pure church should look like in this natural environment. Part of their theology led them to view it as a temple of God, in which they should glorify and serve its Creator, but the theological view that largely prevailed saw this vast continent as "the Devil’s Territories" that needed to be conquered and cultivated for God’s Kingdom (understood in terms of capitalist economics). That both these designations come from the same author—Cotton Mather—indicates the ambivalence the Puritans felt regarding the character of this land and their proper relation to it. Their ambivalence has had a profound and enduring legacy. This study explores its effects in some of the nation’s foremost works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ecological literature, focusing in particular on how Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Willa Cather, and Wendell Berry imaginatively develop this theological tradition to propose practical, physical means by which humans should live and worship within the wild temple of God’s creation.

In tracing this history, this book tells the story of how the dualistic Christianity that the Puritans brought to America—the theology that led them to see the land as an empty wilderness that God would turn into a productive source of marketable commodities—was reshaped by later authors into a theology that demands care for the entire created community. This is a story of a remarkable recovery: nineteenth- and twentieth-century American authors had other religious ideas from which they could draw, but many of them chose to turn to Christian theology for a foundation from which to practice their love for the wild world. Perhaps the protagonist of this story is the rich Christian tradition that contained within itself the resources to heal the scars that it helped cause.

The Problematic Roots of Puritan Dualism

Before turning to these literary successors, though, a clearer understanding is needed regarding what the Massachusetts Bay colonists thought about how they should perceive and use the vast natural landscape, so different from what they had left behind in England. Although recent scholarship has rightly questioned the status of the Puritan colonists as the forefathers of American culture, they are relevant predecessors here because Thoreau, in many ways, saw himself as their successor, and Thoreau remains the forefather of American ecological literature. Thus, Thoreau’s reaction to Puritan dualism, a mode of thought he saw as prominent among his neighbors, shapes the contours of the religious, American, ecological imagination.

Reading through Puritan histories and sermons, one soon realizes that although they spoke often about the divine end that brought them to the New World, they did not apply their theology as carefully to considering the physical means by which they should fulfill this end. For instance, in his mammoth work of American history, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702), Cotton Mather criticizes the later European colonists who came to America not to found a pure church, but to secure greater economic opportunities. Mather describes a congregation of such individuals who mocked a visiting Puritan preacher: "One of our Ministers . . . urged them to approve themselves a Religious People from this Consideration, That otherwise they would contradict the main end of Planting this Wilderness; whereupon a well-known Person, then in the Assembly, cry’d out, Sir, You are mistaken, you think you are Preaching to the People at the Bay; our main End was to catch Fish" (147). Ironically, Mather follows this incident by reporting that God judged these sacrilegious fishermen through the financial failure of their colony. In other words, Mather makes economic success the standard for God’s favor even as he criticizes the fishermen for pursuing economic ends.¹

Viewing economic prosperity as the marker of success in carrying out their divine errand corroborates Mather’s description of the New World elsewhere as "the Devil’s Territories." Writing in the late seventeenth century about the recent witchcraft epidemic in Salem, Mather explains that it is perfectly natural to suppose the Devil would oppose the Puritan colonists because they are infringing on his territory:

The New-Englanders are a People of God settled in those, which were once the Devil’s Territories; and it may easily be supposed that the Devil was exceedingly disturbed, when he perceived such a People here accomplishing the Promise of old made unto our Blessed Jesus, That He should have the Utmost parts of the Earth for his Possession. . . . The Devil thus Irritated, immediately try’d all sorts of Methods to overturn this poor Plantation. . . . I believe, that never were more Satanical Devices used for the Unsettling of any People under the Sun, than what have been Employ’d for the Extirpation of the Vine which God has here Planted, Casting out the Heathen, and preparing a Room before it, and causing it to take deep Root, and fill the Land. (Wonders 13)²

Mather here links the wilderness and its savage inhabitants to the devil, and the settlers’ agricultural civilization to the advance of the Church. He is very clear about the religious end of these settlers—to be God’s people in this heathen land—but the practical means by which they should advance God’s church appear indistinguishable from the means of those immigrants who came to the New World to get wealthy off of the land. If the wilderness is indeed the devil’s territory, then turning this disordered nature into profitable natural resources—regardless of the consequences for the native inhabitants and the existing ecological order—would be a sign that God’s order is being brought to the New World. But in this case God’s order begins to look very much like the economic order of the fishermen whose main end was to catch fish. Is there any practical difference, then, between those who are planting a restored church and those who are seeking financial profit? Both groups relate to the American wilderness as if their material wants are the standard of value by which nature should be ordered: one group simply states this aim outright, while the other claims that this reordering of wild nature signifies the advance of God’s church. Thus, as William Cronon points out, European colonists in New England, regardless of their ostensibly religious aims, tended to view the natural landscape in terms of its commodity value (Changes in the Land 19–33).

Mather’s confusion at the turn of the eighteenth century is an American counterpart to the anthropocentric shift that Charles Taylor perceives in the European elites of this time (222). For a variety of reasons, religion in this era became more focused on humans, and God’s transcendence and inscrutable mystery were downplayed. This Providential Deism, as Taylor calls it, held that rather than inviting humans to the transcendent end of glorifying God, the plan of God for human beings was reduced to their coming to realize the order in their lives which he had planned for their happiness and well-being (242). Therefore, instead of becoming partakers in the life of God or lov[ing] God and lov[ing] Creatures in the fulsome way that God does (224), humans are called merely to pursue happiness—to catch fish and become economically successful. This anthropocentric shift depends in part, as we will see, on the Cartesian dualism articulated in the early seventeenth century, but what makes Puritan authors like Cotton Mather such important figures is that while they are influenced by deistic and Cartesian thought, they remain within an older Christian tradition whose theology opposes these compartmentalizing tendencies of modernity. So at the same time that they follow Enlightenment, anthropocentric logic, Puritans from William Bradford and John Winthrop to Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards draw on a rich tradition to insist also that the chief end of humans is to glorify and enjoy God, that all of creation is God’s temple, and that humans should use and participate in creation in a way that brings God glory.

This work of reintegrating economic and religious activities is ongoing—a project to which the imaginative writers examined in this book contributed significantly. But the Puritans themselves were uneasy with this division, which is why Puritan historians, despite their repeated citations of material wealth as evidence of God’s favor, also record an ambivalence about the enervating spiritual effects of economic success. They recognized that turning the wilderness into a set of extractable natural resources might not be the best means by which to establish God’s church in the New World. Mather himself worries that the Puritan colonists, despite the Prayerfulness and Watchfulness with which they pursued "more glorious Aims" (Magnalia 142, 147), were susceptible to "the Enchantments of the World [that] make them forget their Errand into the Wilderness" (Magnalia 144). The conundrum, as Mather puts it, is that "Religion brought forth Prosperity, and the Daughter destroy’d the Mother" (Magnalia 143). The colonists confused financial prosperity with spiritual success because they failed to consider carefully enough the economic means that would best align with their religious errand.

William Bradford, in his history of the Plymouth settlement, sorrowfully observed this same phenomenon, attributing the loss of spiritual energy and church unity to the colonists’ material prosperity: For now as their stocks increased, and the increse vendible, ther was no longer any holding them togeather (151). As they spread out in search of more land on which to raise corn and cattle, members of Plymouth no longer wanted to return to town for church, and Bradford mourns the resultant division in the church, concluding, This, I fear, will be the ruine of New-England, at least of the churches of God ther, and will provock the Lords displeasure against them (153). Bradford inextricably links the pursuit of individual wealth to communal disintegration. And his lament over this church split calls attention to the communal dimension of the Puritan errand: God’s city on a hill was supposed to bear witness to the loving community made possible by the coming of God’s kingdom. Yet, even as the Puritans desired to establish a pure church body, they did so by breaking away from the established church hierarchy and by interpreting the Bible for themselves. So the colonists who wanted to move away from Plymouth were, in a sense, simply repeating this separatist move. The tension between individual wealth and community health is explicit in Bradford, but what remains implicit is the impoverished view of the physical world that accompanies the disintegration of church community. By seeking economic success on their own, and insisting that this effort would not hinder their spiritual fate, the colonists who moved away reinforced the Cartesian and Gnostic tendencies in American Protestantism, tendencies that Thoreau and Muir would combat and that would lead Cather and Berry to turn to Catholic models of community and tradition. These Plymouth Puritans, then, enacted a damaging dualism when they acquiesced to the view that salvation is a solitary and spiritual affair, disconnected from their economic way of life.³

One of the immediate sources for this view of salvation is the Enlightenment dualism between the spiritual and the physical. This dualism finds expression most clearly in Descartes, who founds his philosophical inquiry in isolation from those around him, from his past, and even from his own body. He begins Discourse on the Method (1637) by recounting a winter day when he sat by himself in front of a fire and decided to discard all previous tradition and even his own sensory impressions in an attempt to lay a purely rational, immaterial metaphysical foundation. Yet it is much easier to believe in Descartes’s extreme division between the spiritual and physical, the intellectual and bodily, while sitting comfortably in an armchair in Germany than while struggling to survive in the American wilderness. The New World’s physical realities, combined with Christian teachings about the spiritual importance of bodily actions, prevented Puritans like Bradford and Mather from fully accepting the extreme dualism that Descartes advocates. Their thinking nevertheless was shaped by this Enlightenment strain of thought. So, on the one hand, they conceived of the Puritan errand as spiritual, rendering questions about the physical and economic arrangements of their life in the American wilderness unimportant; on the other hand, biblical teaching, church tradition, and practical experience indicated that the way they lived in the physical realm had more spiritual significance than Descartes thought.

The Puritans’ ambivalence comes through clearly in a text that Thoreau cites in Walden, Edward Johnson’s Wonder-working Providence of Sion’s Saviour (1648). In his account of the physical hardships that the Puritans faced when they settled Concord, Johnson describes the ways that these challenges brought the community together and increased their spiritual fervor:

The toile of a new Plantation being like the labours of Hercules never at an end, yet are none so barbarously bent . . . but with a new Plantation they ordinarily gather into Church-fellowship, so that Pastors and people suffer the inconveniences together, which is a great meanes to season the sore labours they undergoe, and verily the edge of their appetite was greater to spirituall duties at their first comming in time of wants, than afterward: many in new Plantations have been forced to go barefoot, and bareleg, till these latter dayes, and some in time of Frost and Snow: Yet were they then very healthy more then now they are: in this Wildernesse-worke men of Estates speed no better than others, and some much worse for want of being inured to such hard labour. (83–84)

Johnson conveys a sense of excitement about the opportunity for each person to participate in the cultivation of God’s church. In the New World, unlike back in England, rich and poor, preachers and lay people all engage equally in this Wildernesse-worke. And these harsh physical conditions are the means by which God raises up his church.⁴ Yet Johnson’s description indicates that this initial period of harmony and spiritual fervor has passed. Now that they have become more prosperous, the people are less healthy, and their appetite for spirituall duties has lessened.

Despite these hints that material progress has not contributed to spiritual progress, near the end of his history, Johnson points to financial prosperity as a sure sign of the Lord’s blessing on these Puritan colonists: The Lord, whose promises are large to his Sion, hath blest his peoples provision, and satisfied her poor with bread, in a very little space. . . . Nor could it be imagined, that this Wilderness should turn a mart for Merchants in so short a space, Holland, France, Spain, and Portugal coming hither for trade. . . . Thus hath the Lord been pleased to turn one of the most hideous, boundless, and unknown Wildernesses in the world in an instant, as ‘twere (in comparison of other work) to a well-ordered Commonwealth, and all to serve his Churches (208–210). So which is it? If these settlers came to the New World to found a primitive, pure church, and if the church community is strengthened by harsh, wilderness work, why would God thwart this spiritual end by providing material blessings? In his rhapsodies about the wealth that America’s natural resources bring, Johnson has apparently forgotten his earlier admission that this economic success dulled the settlers’ spiritual appetites. For, although the Puritans continually strove to connect the physical and the spiritual in some contexts—hence their obsession with strict legal codes, proper clothing, church seating arrangements, and spiritual interpretations of natural signs—they often did not extend this attention to consider how they should use creation to sustain their lives economically. Underlying Johnson’s narrative, then, is a vague sense that Descartes might be right, that the physical and the spiritual are in conflict. Both those who see the physical hardships of the early colonists as increasing their spiritual appetites and those who see the wilderness as the devil’s territories needing to be cultivated and made marketable by the advancing church of God share a dualistic view in which wild nature is opposed to the spiritual realm. This basic Cartesian dualism that runs through the Puritan paradigm prevents them from imagining a harmonious physical order that would serve spiritual ends. They must conquer the natural world or be conquered by it, but they remain unable to imagine how spiritual ends might be cultivated in cooperation with the created order. And yet, as demonstrated by these attempts to see material prosperity both as a sign of God’s favor and as a sign of spiritual corruption, even this opposition between the physical and spiritual indicates a relation between the two. These Puritans had some residual sense that the physical world was connected to the spiritual world; they just weren’t sure how.

The Puritans’ de facto compartmentalization of economic and religious activities remained an uneasy division. And their latent conviction that the physical world must be connected in some way to God’s spiritual kingdom formed the foundation on which later ecological writers would build. Many of these writers, however, also failed to imagine adequately how physical creation might participate in God’s order. One prominent tradition, for instance, views American nature in simplistic terms as God’s particular revelation to his chosen nation. This view developed from the Puritan belief that they had left the corrupt church in England and come to the American wilds to recreate the church in its primitive purity (Johnson A2).⁵ They therefore had quite a grand view of their role in divine history, a perception that gradually imbued the howling wilderness with a religious significance derived from Old Testament portrayals of the wilderness or desert as a place of testing as well as a place where God woos his bride (Deut. 32.10; cf. Hosea 2.14). This American wilderness was, after all, the location where God was working out his covenant with the New-English Israel (Mather, Magnalia 121).⁶ As Sacvan Bercovitch explains regarding the natural philosophy of the Puritans’ descendants, "the concept of the creation as figura is a Christian commonplace. What distinguishes both Mather and Edwards is that they invoke the figura with a specific federal eschatology in mind" (Puritan Origins 155). Early texts, then, simply saw God’s character revealed in his creation—for example Anne Bradstreet’s seventeenth-century Contemplations (167–74). However, later Puritans—for instance Mather in Christian Philosopher (1721) and Jonathan Edwards in Images or Shadows of Divine Things (c. 1728)—viewed America’s natural world as providing a particular revelation for God’s New England church.

Aided by the European Romantic movement, this idea expanded in nineteenth-century America, leading many to see the natural environment not as the "Devil’s Territories but, in John Muir’s terms, as God’s wildness. Rather than being opposed to God’s errand, the American wilderness became intimately connected to the success of this errand. Bercovitch quotes from Margaret Fuller and Thomas Cole to describe the potent mythology of American nature: ‘Marked by God’ for man’s ‘most magnificent dwelling place,’ the New World provided the ‘conclusive proof’ of the ‘perpetuity and destiny of our sacred Union,’ and so enabled the viewer to ‘see far into futurity.’ Its natural wonders, truly perceived, were oracles of the ‘new order . . . to be’" (Puritan Origins 152). Perry Miller traces the remarkable extent to which nineteenth-century American Christians latched onto this notion of Nature as God’s agent of revelation and redemption: Nature had somehow . . . effectually taken the place of the Bible; by her unremitting influence, she would guide aright the faltering steps of a young republic (Nature’s Nation 203). Their Puritan ancestors would not have countenanced this elevation of Nature to the status of Scripture, but the Puritan understanding of their privileged role in divine history helped prepare the way for this revaluation of American nature. By the nineteenth century, the Puritans’ attempt to found a primitive, pure church had become transposed into an effort to found a new nation in a uniquely primitive, pure wilderness. How Americans were supposed to live off of this supposedly primitive wilderness was a question that proponents of this view usually overlooked—with the consequence that they marveled at the beauty of parts of God’s creation while making fortunes from the destruction of other parts.

Although the idea that careful observation of the natural world, and particularly the American natural world, could reveal God’s character did not blossom in America until the early nineteenth century, its seeds are located in the Puritan view of America’s role in redemptive history. The Puritans’ latent dualism, incubated by Enlightenment thinking, and their lack of clarity regarding how the physical realm participated in the spiritual realm, led to competing views of the American natural environment: either it was the "Devil’s Territories" to be exploited, or it was God’s primitive revelation to his chosen nation. Neither of these views leads to particularly sustainable human economies. Combined, they lead to the schizophrenia typical of America’s treatment of the environment: we set aside parts of our country as National Parks and wilderness areas, and we allow individuals to destroy other parts by mountaintop removal coal mining.

Americans remain deeply conflicted about how the physical world might relate to God. Many simply give up trying to reconcile the two; Melville’s Captain Bildad is typical in this regard, as he comes to the sensible conclusion that a man’s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another, a conclusion that allows him to conduct his financial affairs without any interference from his religious beliefs (74). Indeed, Bildad’s compartmentalization is symptomatic of the dualistic legacy left by the Puritans. But some Americans nevertheless found the Puritans’ Christian theology to be inspiring and necessary as they sought to imagine what it might look like to care for creation and lovingly participate in its redemption.

More Promising Roots

The Puritan ambivalence regarding religious ends and physical means has had profound effects on the ways that Americans have perceived and used the natural environment. It underlies Lynn White’s claim in his seminal essay The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis that Christianity—or a debased form of it—was a prime cause of the environmental crisis. It helps to explain Harold Bloom’s observation that American religion has a distinctly Gnostic cast, in which salvation is solitary and spiritual rather than communal and embodied (31–46). It corroborates Annette Kolodny’s argument that Americans have treated the land and women with similar disregard, pursuing individual gain with little thought for spiritual or communal consequences. It structures the dialectic between nature and industry—both of which Americans value highly—that Leo Marx traces through American literature. It has led many environmentalists and ecocritics to dismiss the Judeo-Christian tradition and either reject religion entirely or look to other forms of religion for the possibility of ecological renewal. But despite the Puritans’ ambivalence over how the physical and spiritual worlds were connected, their faith that these spheres are indeed related led some to articulate a theological framework in which humans should love and participate in God’s wild order. And from this belief, haltingly expressed by John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and Jonathan Edwards, emerged an American literary tradition that imagines more complex, sustainable ways for humans to live with the rest of creation.

Many patristic and medieval theologians have wrestled with how Christians should understand and relate to creation. These thinkers sought to reconcile the goodness of creation with the Fall, and human responsibility to exercise dominion over creation with human accountability to God for their stewardship.⁷ Early in the patristic period, theologians from Clement to Athanasius to Augustine argued that the Creator makes himself present to humans through the created world in a sacramental way (Schaeffer 65–71). Gregory of Nyssa, for instance, argues that God created mankind after the rest of creation to be the beholder of some of the wonders therein, and the lord of others; that by his enjoyment he might have knowledge of the Giver, and by the beauty and majesty of the things he saw might trace out that power of the Maker which is beyond speech and language (390). Thus humans have dominion over creation in order to behold more fully the beauty and character of the Creator. Galileo, drawing on such a foundation, famously argues for the value of mathematics and science as guides to our reading of the open book of heaven, in which the glory and greatness of Almighty God are marvelously discerned (Galilei). These views of creation inspired those American Puritans who sought to perceive and then participate properly in God’s created order.

Winthrop offers one of the earliest expressions regarding how American colonists should live in God’s creation. He justified the New England colonies in part because, as he explains: The whole earth is the Lords garden & he hath given it to the Sonnes of men with a gen[eral] Commission: Gen: 1:28: increace & multiplie, & replenish the earth & subdue it, which was againe renewed to Noah: the end is double & naturall, that man might enjoy the fruits of the earth, & God might have his due glory from the creature (R. Winthrop 309–310).

Winthrop infamously draws out the implications of his two-fold interpretation of the Genesis command to replenish and subdue the earth, arguing that because the Natives in New England had not improved or enclosed the land, the colonists had a right to possesse & improve it (311–312). But Winthrop’s theology limits this right in important ways: humans should enjoy the fruits of the earth in a manner that brings God due glory. Thus, Winthrop explains that only if the colonists leave the natives sufficient for their use, [may we] lawfully take the rest, there being more than enough for them & us (312). He further conditions the colonists’ use of the land on the good leave of the natives and on sharing European methods of agriculture with them. The tragic gap between Winthrop’s religious intentions and the colonists’ actual treatment of the land and its native inhabitants should not lead us to summarily dismiss Winthrop’s principles. For all the religious fervor of some colonists, most did not apply their faith consistently, letting their colonial identity trump their religious identity. Other colonists came to America simply to catch fish and get rich, and so later inhabitants of America have precious few examples of what it might look like to enjoy the fruits of the earth in a way that brings God glory and respects the lives of other inhabitants.

At the beginning of The Christian Philosopher, Mather articulates a similar theological view of the physical world, one that neither situates it in competition with spiritual ends—which justifies exploiting and conquering "the Devil’s Territories"—nor identifies it with a primitive spiritual revelation—which justifies preserving parts of wilderness but offers little guidance regarding how humans should conduct their daily lives. Instead, Mather portrays humans as occupying a particular role within a physical creation that participates in God’s spiritual life:

THE essays now before us will demonstrate, that Philosophy [by which he means natural philosophy or science] is no Enemy, but a mighty and wondrous Incentive to Religion. . . . In the Dispositions and Resolutions of PIETY thus enkindled, a Man most effectually shews himself a MAN, and with unutterable Satisfaction answers the grand END of his Being, which is, To glorify GOD. He discharges also the Office of a Priest for the Creation, under the Influences of an admirable Saviour, and therein asserts and assures his Title unto that Priesthood, which the Blessedness of the future State will very much consist in being advanced to. The whole World is indeed a Temple of GOD, built and fill’d by that Almighty Architect; and in this Temple, every such one, affecting himself with the Occasions for it, will speak of His Glory. (Christian Philosopher 7)

Mather’s introduction contains the seeds that later authors would