Abstract
This essay considers relationships between nature, ecology and apocalypse in the poetry of Patrick Brontë (1777–1861) and Emily Brontë (1818–1848). It argues that though Patrick’s poetry emphasises the spiritual benefits of human connection with the natural world, his apocalypticism leads him to see no eschatological future for the natural world. Emily’s poetry is more attentive to destruction and violence in the natural world, but it also offers an eschatological vision of a future in which all of creation participates. Reading Emily’s poetry in theological conversation with that of her father, this essay argues that Emily reinterprets Patrick’s evangelical apocalypticism in the light of her understanding of God as the eternal source of all finite being. Drawing on a theological view of creation as God’s eternal relationship with the earth, Emily suggests that meaningful eschatological hope can be located only in a future in which the whole of creation participates with the human.
Highlights
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Gezari’s identification of Christian eschatology with this ‘happy afterlife for disembodied spirits’ is a reductive reading of a theological tradition steeped in imagery of resurrection and renewal; not least because, as Judith Wolfe has pointed out, nineteenth-century theology saw a significant shift toward a view of the eschaton as in some way continuous with earthly life in the present
She found in the Christian apocalyptic tradition a language in which to imagine the renewal of the created world and a vision of an eschatological future in which nature would participate with humanity
Summary
For Patrick Brontë, as for many Evangelicals of his era, the world of nature was a system of legible signs that, if read with the right kind of spiritual discernment, disclosed both the work of God in creation and the imminent destruction of nature when God would bring this world’s history to an end. A life lived in connection with nature might inspire faith and encourage simple contentment, while the landscape itself is filled with signs that point the faithful reader to the divine These signs, direct the believer’s gaze away from the world and towards the eternal. Patrick allows the landscape of Kirkstall Abbey to exercise this benevolent influence on the night-time wanderer, but he signals throughout the poem that the spiritual benefits derived from nature are grounded in the creative agency of the Christian God. Any visitor to the abbey, Patrick suggests, might receive the spiritual consolations of nature, but only those who read the scene through the eyes of Christian faith will perceive its fullest meaning and learn to look beyond the landscape itself and to God; these faithful alone will live on ‘when all things decay;/And heaven, and earth, and time, shall pass away’ To grasp the full extent of nature’s divine revelation is to recognise nature itself as transient and to ‘anchor all [one’s] hopes, beyond the skies’ (p. 78)
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