Aesthetics of Nature and the Sacred
— Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Taylor, 2005

"Aesthetics of Nature and the Sacred." Pages 18-21 (Volume 1) in Bron R. Taylor, editor-in-chief, The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature. London and New York: Thoemmes Continuum Publishers, 2005. Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/171450

Confronting nature one experiences the archetypes of the world. A living landscape couples dynamism with antiquity and demands an order of aesthetic interpretation that one is unlikely to find in art and its artifacts. A visit to wildlands contributes to the human sense of place in space and time, of duration, antiquity, continuity, to the human mystery of being the sole aesthetician in a kaleidoscopic universe. One encounters "the types and symbols of Eternity" (Wordsworth). We reach the sense of the sublime. When beauty transforms into the sublime, the aesthetic is elevated into the numinous. Perhaps the supernatural is gone, but the natural can be supercharged with mystery. I f anything at all on Earth is sacred, it must be this enthralling creativity that characterizes our home planet. Here an appropriate aesthetics becomes spiritually demanding.