Oaks, Wolves and Love: Celtic Monks and Northern Forests

In 1967 Lynn White, Jr., published a controversial paper, "The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis'1 which suggested that part of the blame for Western culture's abuse of nature lay at the door of Christian tradition. Through the long scholarly battle precipitated by White's analysis, historians, theologians, and environmental managers have both lauded and condemned Christian writings and attitudes concerning nature. In the field of environmental history, the academic squabble over the worth of Christianity as an ethical basis for environmental management has unfortunately resulted in sweeping summaries of hundreds of years of European and Middle Eastern religious thought and technological development. Dedicated to extracting an overall evaluation of Christian ecotheology, such summaries have paid very little attention to differences among individual religious sects or to the social milieus in which they arose. The literature has tended to rely on a few well-known texts, such as the first chapters of Genesis, and to dwell on the best-known figures and groups, such as Saint Francis of Assisi. The result has been a historiography that dabbles in the most accessible literatures and then summarizes information from widely disjunct sources and eras. Most modern students of environmental history are familiar with Saint Francis's The Canticle of Brother Sun and with such stories as "The Wolf of Gubbio" from the Little Flowers of St. Francis.2 Fewer are familiar with Saint Antony of Egypt, despite available translations, and only those very conversant in folklore, archaeology, medieval art, or Celtic history are likely to have studied Saint Coemgen (Kevin) or Saint Columban. Eclectic scholarship and lack of interest in primary sources have given the false impression that early Christian appreciation of wild nature was isolated and strongly suppressed throughout the church. In Wilderness and the American Mind, Roderick Nash addresses the common misconception that early Christian and monastic interest in nature was limited to a handful of insightful saints. Although Nash recognizes Christian monasticism as a possible exception to the supposed early Christian antagonism to wilderness, he suggests, however, that the monks paid little attention to their environment and had few, if any, aesthetic concerns. He distinguishes Saint Basil's fourth-century written description of "the forested mountain on which he lived" as unusual for the time because it seems to acknowledge natural beauty in wilderness.3 Nash concludes, "On the whole monks regarded wilderness as having value only for escaping