"We really do need nature to live well": cherishing the Anglican agrarian imagination

White was part of a long line of naturalist priests within the Anglican tradition.

So says Bishop Graham Usher of the famous 18th century parson-naturalist Gilbert White, in his new book The Way Under Our Feet: The Spirituality of Walking.  It is easy to caricature and ridicule these amateur naturalist parsons.  This, after all, was the age of Latitudinarianism, when parsons spent more time on their hobbies and social engagements than on the office and work of a priest.

Except, of course, that the past generation of historical scholarship has demonstrated that this was not the story of Anglicanism during the 'long' 18th century.  Instead, it was an era characterised by the triumph of a robust orthodoxy, in which the public theology, liturgy and pastoral presence of the established Church secured strong and enduring popular support.  The parson-naturalists, then, appear in a rather different context to that assumed by the caricature.

White's celebration of what we might term the Anglican agrarian imagination - what one commentator has referred to as the "reverence - even rapture" with which he wrote of the natural world in his small country parish - reflects John Milbank's description of a "quietly heroic and theoretically quite definite resistance to an overly facile and uncritical progressivism":

Anglicans tended often to resist the turning of Newtonian science into a crude metaphysics. They sustained a sense of a genuine divine transcendence beyond any immanent heights, so allowing for the equal closeness of God to all of his creatures ... many "country" as opposed to "court" Anglicans ... did not tend to accept the dead matter of the Newtonian universe but ... continued to insist on an animated, teleological and variegated natural order.

I write this post on the day after this year's International Dawn Chorus Day.  A number of reports this year have particularly mentioned how the current context of lockdown has brought a new recognition of the gift of the dawn chorus:

The sepulchre of night is peeled back as the world turns towards the light of the new day. Listening to the contributions of each member of the voluble choir spurs feelings of wonder and gratefulness to be alive on our sublime planet. The dawn chorus reconnects me to life; a sense of hope returns. It is my favourite moment of each of these strange, new days - Guardian;

It has become a soundtrack to lockdown: not the wailing sirens or the helicopters overhead – but the melody of birdsong at sunrise, now sounding clearer than it has been for decades, in a world that has ground to a halt ... the sound of birdsong giving people around the world some distraction from the stress and anxiety of lockdown – and a reminder to many that life does and will go on - Channel 4.

It is a reminder that the Anglican agrarian imagination - that quiet joy in the sights, sounds, and rhythms of the natural world, and what Milbank terms as being "sturdily incarnated in [the] land" - rather than being an antiquated embarrassment for modern urban and suburban Anglicanism, actually has a deep resonance against a background of awareness of ecological loss and of how dependent our well-being is upon encountering and enjoying nature.  In words from another recently published book, Isabel Hardman's Natural Health Service: What the great outdoors can do for your mind, "we really do need nature to live well":

Instead of looking for ways to let nature in, we should be asking why our default when designing anything, whether it be physical building or theoretical system, is to shut nature out.

The Anglican agrarian imagination, then, should be retrieved, nurtured, and renewed.  Rogation days and Harvest Thanksgiving, the imagery of the country parish, the walking clubs, Ember Days to mark the passage of the seasons, the amateur naturalists, the trees and shrubs in the grounds of the parish church, the parish flower list, the natural imagery celebrated in wood and stained glass in the parish church, all this and more should be cherished as a means of drawing us into the gift of the natural order, essential to our well-being and flourishing.

A rejection of the Anglican agrarian imagination, by contrast, suggests an acceptance of the very order which has brought to us ecological catastrophe and, as is increasingly recognised, a pattern of life which undermines our well-being in mind and soul.  Parson White, in other words, is more relevant and resonant than many of those contemporary ecclesial trends and projects which boast of their relevance.