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Trees and the “Unthought Known”: The Wisdom of the Nonhuman (or Do Humans “Have Shit for Brains”?)

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Abstract

Drawing on Richard Powers’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Overstory (2018), this article explores the limits of human wisdom (or why humans persist in denying what we know about the earth, especially what we knew as children) and wisdom’s bounty within the wider world, unknown, untapped, unprotected, and disrespected, with a particular focus on trees. It asks how people (the author included but especially white westerners) have come to disbelieve the intelligence of the nonhuman and, as a consequence, resist the ecological disaster wrought by our cherished obliviousness, and it argues for tree knowledge as a reasonable Christian claim, despite warnings that such claims reflect heresy. Influenced by Powers and Lewis Rambo, the essay asks about conversion—what will it take to convert us?—and suggests that pastoral theology’s responsibilities include an embrace of seeing more through fiction and trees.

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Notes

  1. I use “nonhuman,” alongside other terms, to capture what modern Western humans neglect—earth, creation, nature, environment, and so forth—even though it remains an inadequate term, especially when it fosters a binary between human and nonhuman.

  2. There are important exceptions: Calder and Morgan (2016); Clinebell (1996); Graham (1992, 2006); Helsel (2018); LaMothe (2017); Louw (2007); Martin (2015); Mercer (2014, 2017); Pihkala (2016); and Rowley (2013, 2015). As I revised this paper, I reviewed an article for the International Journal of Practical Theology that also notes the “gap in practical theological research” (see McCarroll forthcoming 2020).

  3. I am glad for the chance to turn to Rambo’s work. The Campbell-Stone movement behind his tradition shapes my own faith, albeit through the more liberal branch. He remembers revivals to save souls in the Church of Christ (1993, p. xii-xiv), whereas I lived with a Horace Bushnell-style assumption among Disciples of Christ that children absorb faith through socialization.

  4. Of course, artists, literary figures, and mystics have long grasped the place and power of trees as friends, teachers, and so forth. See Harrison (1992); Kohn (2013); Popova (2019); and Thurman (1979).

  5. Patricia’s initials are the same as Wohlleben’s (Rich 2018).

  6. I have since learned that singing to trees falls within a long historical tradition. See Brockman (2018).

  7. As Rubén Arjona reminded me in his response to this paper, Anton Boisen himself studied forestry and talks about this in Out of the Depths (1960, pp. 50–51, 57), suggesting that he knew about interconnections between tree and forest, document and web.

  8. According to Wikipedia, the Ents “were partly founded in [Tolkien’s] disappointment ‘with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of “Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill”’ in Macbeth” (Tolkien 1981, pp. 211–212).

  9. This is not to say that there are no powerful alternatives in the tradition or those with unique relationships to nature and trees, such as Howard Thurman (1979) and our own Don Capps (2011). For a recent plea for Christian animism, see Wallace (2019).

  10. Calvin’s quote on nature as God appears in Book 1, “The Knowledge of God the Creator,” in a section devoted to how the knowledge “Shines Forth in the Fashioning of the Universe” (Calvin 1536/1977, p. xi). But the subsection title makes Calvin’s point: “The confusion of creature with Creator” (p. 56).

  11. Ecofeminist and liberation theologians with Calvinist roots have reformed such positions (e.g., Alves, 2016; McFague 1997) as have Catholic scholars (e.g., Boff, 1997; Gebara, 1999).

  12. Powers confirms this hunch in an interview conducted by Michael Alec Rose (2018). The novel itself was inspired by what Powers describes in a Guardian interview as “a kind of ‘religious conversion’” in front of a giant redwood (John 2018; see also Brady 2018; Smith 2019).

  13. Seventeen species “are named on the first page alone” (Planta 2018). Powers wanted a story “with nonhuman characters that did not in any way try to anthropomorphize them” (Rose 2018).

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Acknowledgments

I dedicate the essay to my childhood friend Betsy Roberts (now Giles) who shared my love of the outdoors and thank colleagues in the Collegeville Institute seminar on Christian practical wisdom with whom I shared initial reflections as well as friends in New Directions in Pastoral Theology, especially Rubén Arjona for his formal response.

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    Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore

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Miller-McLemore, B.J. Trees and the “Unthought Known”: The Wisdom of the Nonhuman (or Do Humans “Have Shit for Brains”?). Pastoral Psychol 69, 423–443 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-020-00920-7

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