Epiphanic Nature

Abstract

For various religious traditions, God or religious reality is found in nature and throughout the natural world. Theistic traditions, for which God is distinct from his creation, can accommodate and even proclaim the sense that God is present in nature. For those traditions, or strains of traditions, that recognize the presence of God in nature there is a widespread possibility for believers and others to encounter God in his creation. At the same time, it has been possible for those outside religious traditions, or independently of them, to encounter God or religious reality in nature. In this chapter, we remind ourselves of the Native American sense of the mysterious, or wakan or manitou, in the natural world and go on to see how a religious sense that God is to be found, and experienced, in the natural world is accommodated by the Islamic, Jewish, and Christian traditions. We consider English and American literary expressions of natural epiphanies or of a sense of the religious significance of nature, and end the chapter by exploring the religious sensibility of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century naturalist John Muir, for whom “all the world seems a church and the mountains altars.”