Contemplative or “noetic” knowledge has been traditionally regarded as the highest mode of understanding, a view persisting in many non-Western cultures and in Eastern Christianity, where “thēoria physikē” (the illumined understanding of creation following the purification of the heart) is seen to provide deeper insights into nature than the discursive rationality modernity has used to dominate and conquer it. Working from texts in Eastern Orthodox philosophy and theology not widely known in the West, with a variety of other sources including mystics such as Maximos the Confessor and the Sufi ... More

Contemplative or “noetic” knowledge has been traditionally regarded as the highest mode of understanding, a view persisting in many non-Western cultures and in Eastern Christianity, where “thēoria physikē” (the illumined understanding of creation following the purification of the heart) is seen to provide deeper insights into nature than the discursive rationality modernity has used to dominate and conquer it. Working from texts in Eastern Orthodox philosophy and theology not widely known in the West, with a variety of other sources including mystics such as Maximos the Confessor and the Sufi Ibn ’Arabi; poets such as Basho, Traherne, Blake, Hölderlin, and Hopkins; Russian Orthodox philosophers such as Florensky and Bulgakov; and nature writers like Muir, Thoreau, and Dillard, this book challenges both the primacy of the natural sciences in environmental thought and the conventional view, first advanced by Lynn White, Jr., that Christian theology is somehow responsible for the environmental crisis. Instead, the ancient Christian view of creation as iconic, its “holy beauty” manifesting divine energies and constituting a primal mode of divine revelation, offers the best prospect for the radical reversal that is needed in our relation to the natural environment. Advancing beyond Heidegger’s apocalyptic talk of gods and anticipation of an unthinkable Ereignis to overcome our technological framing of the environment, this book offers environmental philosophy, ecotheology, and ecocriticism elements for rethinking our relation to the natural world that can be found not only in non-Western traditions, but manifest in the Christian East and concealed within Western Christianity itself.