"Behold, the husbandman": Rogationtide and the Anglican naturalists

Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain - James 5:7, from the Second Lesson at Evensong on Rogation Tuesday.

I noticed yesterday on Twitter a reference to the priest-poet as "a tradition at the heart of Anglicanism".  This is, indeed, true and a cause for rejoicing.  Rogationtide, however, reminds us that there is also another tradition within the Anglican experience that should be celebrated: that of the parson-naturalist.  As Bishop Graham Usher in his new book The Way Under Our Feet: The Spirituality of Walking states, there is "a long line of naturalist priests within the Anglican tradition".

From John Lightfoot's Flora Scotia to Gilbert White's Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, from Parson Woodforde's observations of his garden and the weather to Francis Kilvert's descriptions of rural churchyards, there is a rich history of Anglican parsons rejoicing in the created order.  There were also those who looked to the stars, such as John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal.

Nor was this a clerical tradition only.  During the Interregnum, for example, we see how a delight in and reverence for the natural world was itself an expression of Anglican lay piety in Izaak Walkton's The Compleat Angler (recently described by Paul Lay as "a kind of manifesto for this Royalist retreat to the rural") and the poetry of Henry Vaughan.  Vaughan's poetry, says Ben Quash, was indicative of a "readiness to read God in the Book of Nature", even as his Church was "denied its ordinances and public ceremonies".

J.C.D. Clark points to a two-fold significance in this tradition of Anglican naturalism.  Firstly, it was the out-working of a "sophisticated theory" about the compatibility of reason, science, and Faith.  Secondly, it was related to "Anglican social practice mix[ing] the sacred unashamedly with the secular in a deliberate expression of the role of the eternal in daily affairs".  Here, in other words, was the fruit of the vine tended by Hooker, what John Milbank describes as the refusal of "any facile separations between the sacred and the secular or between faith and reason, grace and nature".

Rogationtide can bring us to see how this tradition of Anglican naturalists and the theological vision from which their activity flowed, rather than being a quaint distraction, actually draws into the heart of the Faith.  Falling as they do during Eastertide, and in the days immediately before Ascension, the Rogation Days - with their prayer for the land, for seasonable weather, for a good harvest - are a reminder that the Christian proclamation is of the redemption of material and physical.  The Resurrection and the Ascension are not Gnostic myths of spiritual ascent, but the gathering up of the material - the 'secular' - into life eternal in the Holy Trinity. 

The tradition of the Anglican naturalists recalls us to see the material and the physical as the stuff of the Resurrection and the Ascension, that the created order has come forth from the Father and is returning to the Father, and thus sustained in being by the grace of the Triune God.  It is right that we therefore rejoice and delight in, reverence and conserve, that which is gathered up into God in Christ.

(The illustration is Eric Ravilious, 'The Tortoise in the Kitchen Garden' from 'The Writings of Gilbert White of Selborne', 1938.)