About 15 years ago, I was out in the woods for a late afternoon ramble with my spaniel Monty, and I lost my bearings. It got darker, and I realized that the footpath from which I’d foolishly strayed would soon be invisible to me in the twilight, even if it were only a few yards away. This emerald entanglement of buzzing life where I’d been ambling with awe rapidly transformed into a murky, obscure, creaking maze of threatening shapes and biotic tripwires. I eventually escaped after an hour of wandering—which was enough to learn something new about the woods.
I continue to wander in the woods often. In those arboreal labyrinths I encounter the God who, as the Book of Genesis puts it, “looked upon everything that He had made and saw that it was very good.” The woods have an ability to draw me into ecstasy, and I commonly experience, entranced like a gawping idiot in those secret chantries under leafy vaults, a state of hyper-awareness that I am enclosed by a complexus of living reality in immeasurable manifestations, overlapping, interdepending, and conjoining in a veritable convergence of pure vitality. The distinction between myself and the cosmos of which I am a part becomes blurred in such moments, and the separateness of things becomes a way by which to grasp their co-extensiveness. Invariably, at these moments, an ephemeral tranquillity enters the depth of my soul which is totally incommunicable. And yet, I have not forgotten that with the withdrawal of light that bequeaths life to that viridescent realm, the woods change to terrorise the mind.
The woodland that was revealed to me on that evening of confused wandering is, I am told, the permanent condition of unmanaged rainforests around the world. Indeed, I recall something of this from when, years ago, I crossed part of the Nepalese Chitwan rainforest on the back of an elephant. A hairy caterpillar fell from a branch overhead and landed on my arm, immediately rolling off and leaving a thick red stripe on my skin where whatever its toxic stubbles had left behind continued to irritate me for days. I became cognisant of the fact that I was surrounded by creepy-crawlies that are less than benign. Nature remains, in the immortal words of Lord Tennyson, “red in tooth and claw.”
“The devil lives there”
A friend of mine, an officer in the British Army, recently returned from being stationed in Brunei. He remarked that the rainforest out there is not beautiful. It is thorny and tangled, humid and pestilent, dark and suffocating, and the animals do not call to each other but screech and fight in hidden hollows among the canopies. The locals, he told me, are terrified of the rainforest and prefer to remain in concrete apartment blocks, from which they rarely venture unless forced by necessity. They believe, he said, that the rainforest is where demons live.
As my friend spoke, I was reminded of the scene in The Mission in which Fr. Gabriel—the Jesuit priest brilliantly portrayed by Jeremy Irons—is told by one of the little Amerindian boys that he doesn’t want to return to the rainforest. When Fr. Gabriel translates to Cardinal Altamirano who is with him what the child said, the Cardinal asks why he doesn’t want to go back to the rainforest, to which Fr. Gabriel replies, “He says that the devil lives there.”
My friend told me of a Brunei soldier who became separated from his squadron in the rainforest, and after many days of searching, any hope of finding him was abandoned. He appeared, though, downstream weeks later—desperately weak but alive—and was brought back to the barracks. Following much questioning on how he had survived, the soldier eventually explained: after a couple of days, a female jinni—a spirit, according to Islamic tradition—appeared to him and told him that she could keep him alive only if he would marry her. He refused. When he was on the brink of death by starvation, the jinni appeared again and made her request once more. This time he agreed, and she sustained him over the ensuing weeks until he made his way out of the forest. He said to his officers that he couldn’t forgive himself for his decision to enter this unholy union with the spirit, but in the barracks he was often found alone talking with his otherworldly spouse—whom he alone could see. Eventually, he was dismissed from the military and soon after took his own life.
Succubi and incubi appear in Christian demonology, and similar phenomena are also found in the traditional stories of the West. In the folk ballad King Henry, first written down in the 1790s and catalogued by Vaughan Williams in the early 20th century, a Scottish king returns from a day’s hunting only to find his banquet interrupted by a female demon. His friends and courtiers flee, leaving the king alone with the demoness in his hunting lodge’s hall. She commands him to kill his horse, greyhounds, and goshawks, that she may eat them. He obeys. She then drinks the king’s wine and tells him to make a bed, that the two of them may lie down together:
Take off your clothes now King Henry
And lie down by my side
Now swear, now swear you King Henry
To take me for your bride.
Oh God forbid, says King Henry,
That ever the like betide,
That ever a fiend that comes from hell
Should stretch down by my side.
When King Henry wakes up in the morrow, the demoness is lying next to him but now she is transformed into “The fairest lady that ever was seen,” as the song says.
There are many ways to interpret this song, and no doubt most interpretations are correct—that’s how these songs work. But one interpretation is that having succumbed to the demonic presence and its demands, he awoke in the morn to find that he liked his new servitude, and thus was well and truly ensnared. This king had gone out hunting in the wild, and by morning found himself imprisoned by its powers.
The ballad of King Henry may be based on another, older, and much longer song entitled The Marriage of Sir Gawain. The tale of the song is that the knight-errant Sir Gawain is forced by King Arthur into a marriage with a very ugly and cursed woman whom the king has met in a wooded glade. But she is eventually freed from her curse by Gawain and transforms into a beautiful young lady. In this tale, the hag is drawn from nature and becomes beautiful by her induction into the courtly and civilised life of the knightly fellowship. Of course, in the widely loved poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain’s experiences are filled with bewitchments and enchantments. And again, in that poem it is nature that is cursed.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins with the Christmas celebration of King Arthur and his knights, a feast which is disturbed by the Green Knight who is the personification of raw nature. He is nature embodied, who, when killed by Sir Gawain, only returns to challenge the young knight. Thereafter, it is in the wild that Gawain is tested. Then he finds himself at the castle of a lord who only feels fully himself when out in the wilderness, into which he rides with the hunt every day to enjoy the thrill of the chase, leaving Gawain in the company of his lady who tests both Gawain’s courtesy and purity. Finally, Gawain goes to the Green Chapel, literally the hallowed sanctuary of nature where he must face the Green Knight and face his death. He survives, but he loses his honour—at least in his own eyes. At each stage, nature is presented as hostile, dangerous, bloody, deceiving, and disordered.
The desert fathers and the great ascetics of the Celtic tradition ventured out into the wilderness precisely to contend with demons. Our artistic tradition testifies to this spiritual heritage, with the Temptation of St. Anthony being an especially loved topic among the great masters of the Renaissance (and among their works on this theme, there is nothing that equals Hieronymus Bosch’s Triptych of Temptation of St. Anthony). This leads me to wonder whether the recent talk of ‘rewilding Christianity,’ popularised by writers such as Martin Shaw and Paul Kingsnorth—both of whom I deeply admire, I hasten to add—may be just as romantic as the popular appetite for rewilding itself. Man, it must be observed, is always falling into some type of neo-primitivism, a Rousseauian error that is especially tempting in an age when we’re losing our grip on technology and growing unsure of whether technologies serve us or we serve them.
Civilisation is man’s nature
This is where I suspect Kingsnorth in particular has misconstrued the cosmic pilgrimage of the baptised. At a recent UnHerd event in London, he delivered what I can only describe as a first-class sermon on the story of salvation. But a major theme of his talk was that of the setting into which man was placed at the moment of his creation: Eden. Our proper home, Kingsnorth told us, is where the plants and the animals are—that is, the wild. But he overlooks the fact that man is so created with an accompanying commandment to transform Eden that it may be a garden harmonious and pleasing to God, as Scripture says: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.”
Whilst I acknowledge that our technology-driven alienation marks a colossal spiritual danger, it should not cause us to lose sight of an important truth: man actuates his nature through civilisation and not by returning to the wild. To paraphrase Edmund Burke: civilisation is man’s nature. Nature is not the realm of our redemption, and thus it needs to be permeated by grace, a supernatural principle which must be extended to all that baptised man touches—including the wild. In fact, in the Christian narrative, all nature was placed under the jurisdiction of the devil following man’s fall from grace. The wilderness is not where the cathedral is found but likely where a hive of demons awaits. And as much as it troubles a countryside bumpkin like me to acknowledge it—for a countryman I am through and through—the Christian must accept that whilst his origins are in the garden, his final glorification (the eschaton itself) is in the New Jerusalem. Hence, heaven is a townscape, where perfect urbanism and perfect urbanity converge. That doesn’t mean that heaven is a celestial version of modern London; in fact, I expect it’s more like a transfigured Stow-on-the-Wold.
The old countryside landscapes of Europe—so loved but so misunderstood by 19th century romantics—are what you get once you’ve exorcised the wilderness of its hellish chaos and transformed it into a stable source of food and clothing, and more importantly, a real home for civilised man. Rejecting the technologized, mechanistic, materialistic anti-civilisation of late modernity that constantly stifles the human spirit need not mean embracing a sentimental primitivism. In my view, it should mean retrieving Christendom.
Our ancestors knew nature, and they thought it was terrifying. We also intuit that it’s terrifying, which is why we’re fleeing nature through technologies that un-anchor the ‘self’ from the body, and by extension from the natural world altogether. But the way to deal with the terror of nature, which is a very real terror, is neither to romanticise it nor run from it. Rather, like the desert fathers, we must contend with nature and all who linger in its twisted paths, that it may be redeemed.
In fact, I would go further and suggest that the best way to contend with the terror of nature is—like the Benedictine monks of old whom Kingsnorth accuses of wrongly “taming” Christianity—that of transforming raw nature into barley fields, olive groves, and vineyards. Nature is not ‘the environment’—some mass of things out there—but a reality contiguous with whatever we are, on which we must imprint our presence. That is what it is to till and keep the garden.
Just as we must personalise the chaos of our human nature, that it may be pleasing to God and neighbour, so too can all that we touch be so converted. This is likely why nature is so terrifying to us: all its horror—the poisons, the thorns, the parasites, the tearing of flesh—is fully present in distilled form in the human heart. The only way to survive such darkness in the heart is arduously to tame it for the sake of others, and we rightly desire to extend that noble impulse to any part of the world we wish to inhabit. The problem, then, is not that impulse. Rather, it is the corruption of that impulse by late modernity, which conflates tilling with dominating, cultivation with consumption, and the sanctified soul with the ‘authentic self.’
In recent times, a fad called ‘forest bathing’ has emerged among urban dwellers. This activity comprises travelling out to some woodland and, well, being in it. The point is calmly to sway amongst the trees in the hope of momentarily suspending one’s technologically- and isolation-driven anxiety, ultimately to experience the ‘mental health’ of an average pre-modern. And of course, only those who are sufficiently removed from nature can have such a conception of nature as a benign source of personal wellbeing.
The forest is not a place of peace; it is a dark chamber where animals hunt and are hunted, from which the sane seek refuge to huddle by the hearth. Of course, we must rediscover nature and our contiguity with it, but that will mean encountering not something consoling but a chaotic realm in need of redemption. For this reason, the hunting of quarry was always at the heart of our common culture, and that is why no activity is more threatened by both technologized urbanisation and animal-centric sentimentalism. By hunting, we rediscovered nature and ourselves as a part of it, and we did this not by syrupy feelings but by respecting nature’s inner violence, simultaneously making it our own and beautifying it beyond measure—a power that is unique to our species.
