“He has no other teachers besides the oaks and beeches.” Words we might expect about Thoreau in fact are about one of the great Christian intellectuals of the Middle Ages. Today when a focus on trees too often betokens a turning away from the Creator of trees, we can restore trees, and the whole natural world, to their proper place in God’s plan for our life.
William of St. Thierry in the earliest biography of St. Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: “To this day he confesses that whatever he gains from the Scriptures, whatever he finds in them, comes chiefly from the woods and fields, and he has no other teachers besides the oaks and beeches; he was accustomed to make a good-humored joke of this among his friends.”*
The reference to a good-humored joke is a caution not to take the point too far. Surely, coming from a man steeped in theological tradition stemming from the earliest days of the Church, these words are a playful yet significant exaggeration that can shock us into noticing something we are missing: the key role of learning from and indeed contemplating the natural world. In other words, Christian wise men are in earnest when they refer to the natural world as another ‘book’ alongside Scripture.
The great St. Augustine of Hippo was insistent on this. “It is the divine page that you must listen to; it is the book of the universe that you must observe. The pages of Scripture can only be read by those who know how to read and write, while everyone, even the illiterate, can read the book of the universe.” And again, “Some people in order to discover God, read a book. But there is a great book: the very appearance of created things. Look above and below, note, read. God whom you want to discover, did not make the letters with ink; he put in front of your eyes the very things that he made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?”
St. Maximus the Confessor goes further. “In the sacred Scriptures, the Word is veiled as Logos; in the created world, he is veiled as Maker and Creator. Thus I state that both are needed by he who wants to turn to God judiciously. He needs the spiritual reading of Scripture and the spiritual contemplation of natural creatures.”
So just what did the oaks and the beeches teach Bernard? Here we must be careful; for who knows just how what he learned from the trees shows up in Bernard’s treatises on the love of God, or on humility and pride? Or in his renowned sermons, or his writings on chivalry, or even about the Virgin Mary.
What I would give to be able to draw out Bernard, when with a playful smile he claimed the oaks and beeches as his main teachers!
But then again, his very teachers are still holding class. Yeah, their voices are in no way diminished in themselves; it is we who have left the classroom, we who are ill-disposed to listen, we who neglect our studies.
What persistent, and can I say respectful teachers we have! But this is no surprise. Their ‘voice’ of course is not simply their own. You can hear something more in its warmth, it timbre. Is there even a trembling? Here speaks a Father who has so very much to say, and so wants to be heard, that He never gives up; He continues to speak through manifold avenues.
Help us, Father, to hear and to learn. From the trees. Like Bernard. “Morning after morning the Lord God opens my ears that I may hear.” ~ ~ ~
SPECIAL PODCAST: THE PHILOSOPHY OF MUSIC AND DANCE: What We Need to Know. I gave this rather intense lecture at our recent LifeCraft Day at the Barn addressing why music and dance matter, the problems we face in this area today, and what we can do to harness their power for good in our homes and communities.
LAST WEEK’S PODCAST is on the power and importance of HOSPITALITY.
Most recent READ-ALOUD: The Juggler of Notre Dame.
*Quotation from The First Life of Bernard of Clairvaux (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2015)
Husband, father, and professor of Philosophy. LifeCraft springs from one conviction: there is an ancient wisdom about how to live the good life in our homes, with our families; and it is worth our time to hearken to it. Let’s rediscover it together. Learn more.
Just as with Tolkien’s Ents!
Thanks
Thank you David, and Bob–yes, like the Ents!
I walked in a bush reserve here in Australia near my house yesterday morning. I saw blue wrens and wild deer and heard magpies carolling and kookaburras cackling. Dew was sparkling on the grass like diamonds. All these very clearly told me that God loves me, was with me and knew my comings and my goings. I think it makes perfect sense to be learning from Creation.
And the thing is, Cate, it is hard to put one’s finger on just how these things in Creation spoke to you; but they did. They did so just as surely as I’m writing this response right now!
Socrates: There was a tradition in the temple of Dodona that oaks first gave prophetic utterances. The men of old, unlike in their simplicity to young philosophy, deemed that if they heard the truth even from “oak or rock,” it was enough for them; whereas you seem to consider not whether a thing is or is not true, but who the speaker is and from what country the tale comes. Plato, Phaedrus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. This remark precedes Socrates’ analysis of writing as a threat to dialectic and true memory.
Thank you, Brian! This offers a wonderful perspective!
Indeed any Catholic who is inspired & stands in awe of Gods creation and the beauty that surrounds nature is well on the way to properly ordering their life in a very intrinsically rich way!
It certainly is a very great gift of the Lord.
For whatever reason and for what it’s worth, the last time I read The Lord of the Rings, the whole Tom Bombadil experience greatly revived me; changed my life even. Thanks for the reflection.
And thank you, Pete. I am convinced that the Lord of the Rings has a unique power of reviving people! Why? I think it has something to do with how wonderfully it captures and expresses the beauty of the order in nature–and here I mean ‘nature’ in the rich sense of Aristotle, including human nature.
Thank you for this article and observations. I once gave a homily on the one greatest physical deterrent to belief in God. The street lamp or rather millions of street lamps. Hopefully with AI, low level or ground facing lights will only come on as needed. And maybe, just maybe, “the heavens [will] proclaim the glory of God” again for billions.
Amen, Father. Thank you for the reminder to turn our eyes upward, especially at night!