Early Christian Perspectives on American Nature:
The Dissenting Views of James Fenimore and Susan Fenimore Cooper
By Alfred Kentigern Siewers, Bucknell University
[Given 10.24.11 to the Nature, Philosophy and Religion Society of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Philadelphia]
James Fenimore Cooper’s five novels of the Leatherstocking Tales (The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers and The Prairie), and his daughter Susan Fenimore Cooper’s book of nature-writing Rural Hours, both featured the headwaters of the Susquehanna River at Cooperstown, NY, the Leatherstocking Tales in arguably the two most important novels for the series, The Deerslayer and The Pioneers. The Pioneers has been called by scholars America’s first environmental novel, and Rural Hours has been hailed as the first book of nature-writing by an American woman. Together they left an influential legacy for early American views of nature, yet an alternative perspective often neglected in recent times. Their environmental legacy from the start was out of sync with American views of technological progress, manifest destiny, and an emerging transcendental approach to wilderness that ironically helped to enable environmental destruction. That the Coopers’ writings reflect a traditional Christian worldview, and a conservatism not identifiable on our current political spectrum, also helps to explain their relative obscurity in current environmental discourse. But there are three reasons today that impel a re-reading of their combined legacy in light of environmental criticism: 1. They expressed a philosophy of nature emphasizing the integrity of human culture and physical environment, a central issue today in a time of rapid global urbanization on an unprecedented scale. 2. In focus on the flora and fauna of the Cooperstown area they exemplified lessons about environmental experience now highlighted by the emerging field of ecosemiotics and its effort to bridge the gap in scholarly studies between work on human symbolism of all types and attention to the physical environment. 3. Their writings suggest bridges between Christianity and environmentalism sought particularly by many people of faith and also many environmental activists in the United States today.
On the shores of Otsego Lake, one can see how both Cooperstown and the lake form the National Register historic district called the Glimmerglass Historic District. The District uniquely follows the imaginary geography of the elder Cooper’s Leatherstocking series and the viewshed related to it, in which Glimmerglass is the fictional peri-contact name for the lake as a mirroring confluence of sky, water and forest. The Mohawk name Otsego variously translates “rock place,” “rendezvous place,” and “welcome water.” All those meanings, together with the metonymic “Glimmerglass,” sum up the role of the lake as a clearing reflecting the sky and forest, and as the headwaters of the Susquehanna with its fmeeting rock at the outlet of the river, immortalized in the Leatherstocking Tales. Looking over the miniature finger lake and hearing of the historical district based on fictional landscape, one experiences a remarkable example of overlay landscape in American culture. The entwinement of imaginary and physical geographies as a landscape marks many indigenous cultures--the Dreamtime of Australian aborigines, the Otherworld of the Celts, landscape as story in Haudenosaunee traditions of Lake Onondaga also in upstate New York, bowdlerized by Longfellow. Yet even the story of Creation in the Hebrew Genesis tells of Paradise as lying among four major Near Eastern rivers. Likewise the elder Cooper’s Glimmerglass emerged from Native traditions and early Insular Christian traditions, as well as from the physical landscape itself.
Of Glimmerglass, Natty Bumppo, the Leatherstocking, asks in The Deerslayer, “Have the governor’s, or the King’s people given this lake a name? If they’ve not begun to blaze their trees, and set up their compasses, and line of their maps, it’s likely they’ve not bethought them to disturb natur’ with a name.” The lake has no official name because it hasn’t been set down on any official map yet, his companion Hurry replies. “I’m glad it has no name,” responds Natty, or, at least, no pale face name, for their christenings always fortell waste and destruction.” Hurry explains that each Indian language has different vocabularies and names for places, but adds that for his network of friends “we’ve got to calling the place the Glimmerglass, seeing that its whole basin is so often fringed with pines cast upward from its face, as if it would throw back the hills that hang over it.” As Hurry and Deerslayer move across the lake their canoe “lay on the glassy water, appearing to float in air, partaking of the breathtaking stillness.” And “The echoes repeat pretty much all that is said or done on the Glimmerglass, in this calm summer weather.” (pp. 534-5). The Glimmerglass stands as mirror, window and clearing for the coming together of earth and sky in the forest, and of mortals and immortals, to use Heidegger’s four terms for the encounter with place as an experience, for regioning as ontological that we can hear imagine in a geographic overlay as well.
Natty is to meet his Native American friend Chingachgook at the outlet of the Susquehanna. “Has that no Colony name yet?” he asks of the river. Hurry replies, “No doubt, Deerslayer, you’ve seen the Susquehannah, down in the Delaware country?” “That have I, and hunted along its banks a hundred times.” “That and this are the same in fact, and I suppose the same in sound. I am glad they’ve been compelled to keep the red men’s name, for it would be too hard to rob them of both land and names!” “Deerslayer made no answer, but he stood leaning on his rifle, gazing at the view which so much delighted him. The reader is not to suppose, however, that it was the picturesque alone, which so strongly attracted his attention. The spot was very lovely, of a truth, and it was then seen in one of its most favorable moments, the surface of the lake being as smooth as glass, and limpid as pure air, throwing back the mountains, clothed in dark pines, along the whole of its eastern boundary, the points thrusting forward their trees even to nearby horizontal lines, while the bays were seen glittering through an occasional arch beneath, left by a vault fretted with branches and leaves. It was the air of deep repose, the solitudes that spoke of scenes and forests untouched by the hands of man, the reign of nature, in a word, that gave so much pure delight to one of his habits and turn of mind. Still, he felt, though was unconsciously, like a poet also. He found a pleasure in studying this large, and, to him, unusual opening into the mysteries and forms of the woods, as one is gratified in getting broader views of any subject that has long occupied his thoughts. He was not insensible to the innate loveliness of such a landscape, either, but felt a portion of that soothing of the spirit which is a common attendant of a scene so thoroughly pervaded by the holy calm of nature.”
Natty experiences the lake as iconographic relationship, mirror and window, echoing both native and early Insular Christian beliefs influential on the fictional cycle. Scott L. Pratt in his book Native Pragmatism outlines the influence of Woodlands Indian ethics on Euroamerican culture in four areas: First the Iroquois notion of orenda or power infused in nature, second the Algonquinan wunnégin, a kind of landscape orientation of openness toward many points of view on the same multiplicitous “nature”; third, a logic of place, involving making judgments based on context rather than from theoretical matrices. And fourth, the logic of home, as a result of displacement of Indian nations, adapting the logic of place to changed physical situations. Taken together these four aspects of indigenous worldviews lie behind a tradition of native overlay landscape influential on the elder Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Their author found them echoed in accounts of Indian cultures by John Heckewelder, a Moravian Christian missionary and Cooper’s primary source for northeastern Indian cultures.
The mainly positive take on Indians by the Moravians expressed by Heckewelder also points elsewhere to patristic Christian roots of the overlay landscape. The Moravians in their late medieval roots in central Europe shared Trinitarian and ascetic orientations with early Irish Christian writers. The latter helped shape the Insular tradition of the overlay landscape known as the Celtic Otherworld, which influenced the so-called “green world” tradition in early English literature from Chaucer to Spenser and Shakespeare, on to the Burkean sublime and Romantics like Coleridge and Sir Walter Scott, many influential on Cooper. In the Leatherstocking Tales, diverse cultural semiospheres, or meaningful cultural environments such as Iroquois and English cultures, overlap within shared ecosemiospheres or eco-regions, such as the Eastern Woodlands, Great Lakes and Prairie. Those ecosemiospheres for Cooper in turn overlapped in and shared a Creation infused by God’s gifts, or what church fathers called uncreated energies. “Many gifts but one nature,” Natty Bumppo said. This proverbial saying was type and shadow of the cosmology of the Leatherstocking Tales, in which creation’s many gifts or energies find their source in a mysteriously apophatic nature or essence of God. The divine is experienced by personal relationship with His energies. The relative openness of the Moravians to native culture and their awareness of the importance of storytelling in landscape (in the form of journaling) related to the Trinitarian and ascetic sense of cosmological relationships they shared in part with early Insular traditions.
One famous illustration of the Celtic Otherworld was the sense of the sea as a spiritual realm. This was expressed in the Hiberno-Latin philosopher John Scottus Eriugena’s ninth-century work on nature, with its adaptation of writings by the Greek church fathers St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Gregory the Theolgoian, and St. Dionysius the Areopagite. The image of the desert as a spiritual sea to early Christian ascetics in the East transferred to the sea in the British Isles. Later, in the Middle English and Elizabethan periods, partly under Welsh influence, this textual imagery of the spiritual Otherworld transferred to the countryside generally and ultimately more specifically the forest in works such as The Faerie Queene and A Midsummer Nights Dream. The elder Cooper frequently quoted Spenser and Shakespeare in chapter epigraphs to the Leatherstocking Tales and was hailed as the American Scott. His work clearly reflected the influence of what Northrop Frye called the English literary green world with its older origins in the Celtic Otherworld. Those again meshed well with the author’s interest in Moravian Christian traditions explicit in the Leatherstocking Tales, and his background in a meld of Quakerism and traditional Anglicanism. Much of The Pathfinder, for example, describes the forest as a sea infused as creation by gifts or energies of the divine, and a similar sense of the Great Lakes as reciprocally mirroring this image of the forest-sea. Both express an overlay of spiritual gifts and creation. The strong triadic emphasis in the Trinitarian theology of the early Irish, as with the Moravians, emphasized a sense of energy in nature rather than the Scholastic sense of analogy; the non-filioque Trinity in the theology of Eriugena and the Moravians finds a modern secular echo in ecosemiotics as an alternative to Saussurean semiotics.
Indeed, poetic overlay landscape, laying imaginary geography onto physical environment, reflects developments in the contemporary field of ecosemiotics. Ecosemiotics studies the interrelation between human culture and physical nature and grew out of biosemiotics, which developed primarily around the Baltic in the 20th century. Biosemiotics seeks to redefine the definition of life as the making of meaning and exchange of information. In doing so it echoes earlier Christian patristic views, sometimes called “pansemiotic,” of the cosmos as constituted by logoi of the Logos, or uncreated energies of God, associated with the words of the Word or harmonies of the Harmony, or stories of the Story (depending on the translation of logos). The notion of the physical world as a kind of unfolding iconography or iconographic book heavily bases both the Leatherstocking Tales and Susan Fenimore Cooper’s nature-writing. It is implicit also in notions of experientially reading nature in Indian cultures familiar from Heckewelder and other influences on James Fenimore Cooper, in which ideas of the manitou of the Manitou show some parallels to patristic Christian pansemiotics. The key is that the sense of energy or gift amid the experience of symbol and environment forms a personal relationship including the participant reader/audience in landscape. This is a bit different from emphasis on analogy as the basis for cosmology found in Scholasticism and even later in Emerson’s “Nature” (although not always completely separate in spirit).
The Estonian ecosemiotician Timo Maran explains the interaction of overlapping cultural semiospheres within overlapping physical environments or ecosemiospheres through his concept of “nature-text.” A nature-text, or landscape narrative that flows across text and physical geography, involves a four-aspect relationship of author, reader, environment and text. The concept draws on the nineteenth-century American Charles Peirce’s semiotics, which itself shows parallels to both Native and early Christian thought. Peirce’s model of the sign included environment, as what he termed object, as an element in the semiosis or the making of meaning through signs. Rather than seeing the exchange of meaning as bifurcated between signified and signifier only, in arbitrary internalized meaning, as in Augustinian-derived and Saussurian semiotics, Peirce’s model thus opened up semiosis as including relationship with physical environment, a triadic rather than a binary model of the sign. It involved Sign or text, environment or Object, and what Peirce called Interpretant, which is the equivalent of Maran’s elements of reader and author combined in a landscape tradition.