Sources of Spiritual Benefits of Wilderness:
A Philosopher’s Reflections
Baylor Johnson
Abstract—Social scientists have investigated the spiritual benefits reported by wilderness users. This paper draws upon both
western and eastern religious traditions to suggest what features of
wilderness are sources of these benefits. Poets and nature writers
are used to support and enrich the paper. The God of western
monotheism is portrayed as eternal, unchanging, and omnipotent.
Buddhism suggests that everything is constantly changing and that
this is an aspect of duhkha and our dissatisfaction. For if everything
changes, then everything we love will perish. Through wilderness
we can have intimate experience of powerful forces and ancient
things, from the stars above and the mountains around, to the
“eternal” cycles of nature. For many, these provide the closest
approach to direct experience of God’s power and eternity, and the
spiritual comfort these can provide.
Just as we find features of wilderness that answer to our spiritual
needs, so too our own psyches help to explain the peace of mind
wilderness gives us. When we go into the wilderness we leave behind
our normal cares and obligations, and live for a time a simpler life
with simpler concerns, and we experience this change as a newfound peace of mind. We also challenge ourselves with material
simplicity and physical exertion beyond our normal routine. In
return we experience a kind of self-transcendence and renewal akin
to the “rebirth” known in nearly every spiritual tradition.
Introduction ____________________
I am concerned with the wilderness as we imagine it, or in
the current phrase, the wilderness we have “constructed.”
Scientifically verifiable features of wilderness inspire many
of our spiritual experiences of it. If this were not true, then
we would have these experiences as readily in a shopping
mall as in wild places. Still, our minds contribute essential
components to our spiritual experiences in wilderness, experiences to which we would remain blind if we lacked the
needed sensitivity. As sight emerges only when something
visible encounters an eye capable of seeing, so too spiritual
experiences require both an inner and an outer dimension.
Who is the “we” who have these spiritual experiences of
nature? First and foremost it is I, for this essay is necessarily
autobiographical. My own wilderness journeys gave me the
lens through which to see what others might find there as
well. But if this were no more than an autobiographical
Baylor Johnson is Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, St.
Lawrence University, Canton, NY 13617. E-mail: bjohnson@mail.stlawu.edu
In: Watson, Alan; Sproull, Janet, comps. 2003. Science and stewardship to
protect and sustain wilderness values: Seventh World Wilderness Congress
symposium; 2001 November 2–8; Port Elizabeth, South Africa. Proc. RMRSP-27. Ogden, UT: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky
Mountain Research Station.
USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-27. 2003
report it would be of little interest. So, I have tried to find
confirmation for my feelings in writers who have recorded
their own responses to wild nature. Ultimately, I think the
experiences of which I write are shared by many moderns,
particularly those influenced by the history and literature of
Europe and its satellite cultures. I have traced some elements of this experience beyond the western cultural tradition, and to me the experiences seem so deeply natural that
I am tempted to think that anyone who is capable of opening
himself or herself to nature must have them. I also know,
however, that it is difficult to sort what we contribute to
experience from what we find there, and so I will content
myself with this narrower claim: I hope to have captured
some central elements of the spiritual experience that many
modern westerners have of wild nature. If these experiences
are something that we share with our brothers and sisters
born to other cultures, then that is good. But I do not claim
to know enough to say that this is so.
Although I do not want to claim too wide a scope for the
spiritual experiences I describe here, the spiritual yearnings
that underlie them are transcultural. According to the
teachings of Buddha, for example, at the heart of human
existence lies duhkha. Though often translated as “suffering,” a better rendering might be “unsatisfactoriness” (Hagen
1997). Buddha himself began his quest for enlightenment
when, after an extraordinarily sheltered childhood, he discovered that disease, aging, and death are unavoidable for
all living beings. Though duhkha is a multifaceted concept,
a core element is the fact of change. Nothing abides. We
ourselves and everyone we love will age and die. Every
institution, every cause to which we devote our care and
efforts will eventually decay and cease to exist. Wherever we
seek, we can find nothing that remains stable and unchanging. As a result, all our mundane hopes are doomed to
failure, for in the end, if everything changes, nothing can be
accomplished—not, anyway, as a permanent achievement.
I think it is putting it mildly to say that this isn’t a happy
thought, as it is stating the obvious to say that the Christian
idea of an eternal and unchanging God who blesses us with
eternal life, reveals a western response to the same fear of
impermanence. The solutions are different. Buddhism says
that change and impermanence are ineliminable features of
existence and counsels us on how to live in peace with them.
Christianity says that they are illusions, and that the deepest reality is eternal and unchanging. But though the solutions are different, the stimulus, the disquiet we feel before
the threat of impermanence, is the same.
The God of Christianity promises us eternal life. The God
of the Old Testament, on the other hand, usually wore a
sterner face. This is revealed nowhere more clearly than in the
Book of Job (Holy Bible) where God’s most faithful servant is
visited with terrible afflictions. Job’s friends tell him that he
must have sinned and so deserved his punishment. But Job is
167
Johnson
clearheaded and knows he has done nothing to earn the
suffering he endures. He calls upon God to give an accounting of Himself, and unlike the rest of us, whose sufferings
include the abysmal silence of the Universe, Job gets a reply.
God comes in the form of a whirlwind and speaks a great
hymn, much of it devoted to wild nature. Here are a few
excerpts (Job 38: 4–7, 18–21, 31–32):
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Declare, if thou hast understanding. Who hath laid the
measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the
line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations therof fastened?
or who laid the corner stone therof; when the morning stars
sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?…
Hast thou perceived the breadth of the earth? Declare if
thou knowest it all. Where is the way where light dwelleth?
and as for darkness, where is the place thereof, that thou
shouldest take it to the bound thereof, and that thou shouldst
know the paths to the house thereof? Knowest thou it, because
thou wast then born? or because the number of thy days is
great?…
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose
the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his
season? or canst thou guide arcturus with his sons?…
The sense of this, I take it, is that Job is not the point of
God’s creation, but a weak, small, and ignorant fragment of
the whole. Why should Job know the reason of his suffering?
Why indeed should he think he should know? What he can
know is his modest place in the order of things, and when he
knows that, he will understand that he should praise God for
the scraps of grace and understanding he has been granted
rather than complaining that he does not understand what
God alone can grasp.
These images of the human condition and of the divine
lead us toward the first group of spiritual blessings we find
in wilderness. The God who speaks to Job from a whirlwind
is mighty beyond Job’s imagining. Later, the medieval philosophers declared Him—God, I mean—infinite in wisdom,
power, and goodness.
By definition, we cannot experience what is infinite, for
“infinite” means “without limit,” and what is literally without limit exceeds the compass of our senses. This is why God
must appear to Job in the form of a whirlwind, as he appears
to Moses in the form of a burning bush. He must assume
finite form to be perceptible.
Like Job and Moses, if we are to experience God we must
find Him in finite form, or perhaps better, in analogous form.
Neither the whirlwind nor the burning bush is God, but each
is godlike, in a way—in power and mystery perhaps. So, too,
wilderness is godlike and answers to our craving for something enduring in the midst of change. As God reminds Job
of his finitude—his ignorance, his weakness in comparison
to the wonders of nature, the shortness of his life, and the
inevitability of his death—so the wilderness reminds us of
all these things too. Yet, as God comforted Job despite His
awesome presence, so experience of the enduring and awesome faces of wild nature can comfort us and answer to our
yearning to be part of something larger and grander than our
puny, short-lived selves.
In wilderness we encounter, if not God himself, at least an
experience with divine qualities. Wild nature gives us the
divine in concrete, finite form. Rocks and rivers, if not eternal,
168
Sources of Spiritual Benefits of Wilderness: A Philosopher’s Reflections
are at least very old, and if each season is new and quickly
fades, still the cycle of the seasons is, by comparison with our
short lives, forever. I live and die in a few decades, but the
giant sequoias stand for millennia. So, too, the geese I see
winging overhead are as mortal as I, but the pattern of
migration they enact is ancient and recurring. Whether
because the Buddhists are right and nothing is truly unchanging, or else because the theologians are right and
eternity, although real, cannot be given to the senses, we can
never experience the full eternity of the divine. In wild
nature, though, we encounter things and processes that are,
from the perspective of puny human life, ancient enough to
serve as stand-ins.
Immensity and power are also divine qualities found in
wilderness. In the modern world few of us live with any real
consciousness of the starry heavens above, but when we
move into wilderness they replace the roadways of suburbia
as our guides and companions. So, too, the immensity of the
mountains, the power of rivers, the glaciers, the sea, are
known directly when we travel in the wild. We crave these.
And in a strange sense we crave even the knowledge that all
of them are indifferent to the human realm—stern and
unrelenting like the God of the Old Testament.
These—the eternity of wild nature, its awesome power, its
indifference to human concerns—are what aesthetic theorists have called the “Sublime.” Thoreau knew the experience of the sublime as well as any writer ever has. He
encountered it when he was among the first white men ever
to climb Mt. Katahdin in Maine, later writing (Thoreau
1972: 64):
Vast, Titanic, inhuman nature has got [the beholder] at
disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his
divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the plains. She
seems to say sternly, why came ye here before your time? This
ground is not prepared for you. Is it not enough that I smile
in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air
for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity
nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence
to where I am kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee,
and then complain because you find me but a stepmother?
Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here
is no shrine, nor alter, nor any access to my ear.
Robinson Jeffers knew the sublime face of nature, too, and
used it over and over again as a source of comfort. Here he is,
for instance, in Their Beauty Has More Meaning, comforting
himself against his own inevitable death (Jeffers 1963: 77).
Yesterday morning enormous the moon hung low on the
ocean,
Round and yellow-rose in the glow of dawn;
The night-herons flapping home wore dawn on their wings.
Today black is the ocean, black and sulphur the sky,
And white seas leap. I honestly do not know which is more
beautiful.
I know that tomorrow or next year or in twenty years
I shall not see these things—and it does not matter, it does
not hurt;
They will be here. And when the whole human race Has
been like me
Rubbed out, they will still be here: storms, moon and
ocean,
Dawn and the birds. And I say this: their beauty has more
meaning
Than the whole human race and the race of birds.
USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-27. 2003
Johnson
Sources of Spiritual Benefits of Wilderness: A Philosopher’s Reflections
And here he is in a mood many of us have shared in recent
days, searching for some solace before the stupidity and
cruelty of human doings (Jeffers 1963: 84):
Calm and Full the Ocean
Calm and full the ocean under the cool dark sky; quiet
rocks and the birds fishing; the night-herons
Have flown home to their wood…while east and west in
Europe and Asia and the islands unimaginable agonies
Consume mankind. Not a few thousand but uncounted
millions, not a day but years, pain horror, sick hatred;
Famine that dries the children to little bones and huge
eyes; high explosive that fountains dirt, flesh and
bone-splinters.
Sane and intact the seasons pursue their course, autumn
slopes to December, the rains will fall
And the grass flourish, with flowers in it: as if man’s world
were perfectly separate from nature’s, private and mad.
But that’s not true; even the P-38s and the Flying
Fortresses are as natural as horse-flies;
It is only that man, his griefs and rages, are not what they
seem to man, not great and shattering, but really
Too small to produce any disturbance. This is good.
This is the sanity, the mercy.
It is true that the murdered
Cities leave marks in the earth for a certain time, like
fossil rain-prints in shale, equally beautiful.
E. B. White, took similar comfort, expressed in the following more gentle passage (in McKibben 1990: 85):
With so much disturbing our lives and clouding our
future…it is hard to foretell what is going to happen…I know
one thing that has happened: the willow by the brook has
slipped into her yellow dress, lending, along with the faded
pink of the snow fence, a spot of color to the vast gray-andwhite world. I know too, that on some not too distant night,
somewhere in pond or ditch or low place, a frog will awake,
raise his voice in praise, and be joined by others. I will feel a
whole lot better when I hear the frogs.
Perhaps Howard Zahniser, who did as much as any single
individual to bring about passage of the Wilderness Act of
1964, said it most directly (in Nash 1973: 214–215):
To know the wilderness is to know a profound humility,
to recognize one’s littleness, to sense dependence and interdependence, indebtedness and responsibility.
In wild places, then, we can participate in something that
is, if not truly eternal, at least very long enduring in comparison to human life, and this is a comfort in the face of our own
mortality and the impermanence of all we care about. It is
vitally important to recognize that it is not the abstract idea
of the enduring that we encounter in wilderness, but experience of the enduring. Without the idea, our experience
would be—as Kant (1929: 93) famously said—blind: “Thoughts
without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are
blind.” But we can have the idea anywhere and anytime.
In wilderness we encounter the divine, or at least its
analogue, because we come face to face with ancient things
and timeless cycles there. You must be a clod indeed to sleep
under the tent of stars every night and not be reminded of
their age, and, indeed, of the immense mystery that enfolds
our lives. To climb down the Grand Canyon—at least with a
modicum of geological knowledge—is to feel oneself descending into the abyss of ages unfathomable. If we learn of these
things through textbooks, we face them in the wilderness,
USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-27. 2003
and it is this face-to-face contact that makes a wilderness
experience a spiritual experience.
The passages quoted above do not speak only of the
timelessness of wild nature. They speak too of its vast size
and power, and even its indifference to man. These impressions are as powerful to a person in the wilderness as any
other. It can be a dangerous and scary place. Storms, the
great predators, the huge forces of flood and avalanche, and
even the very immensity of space all demand respect that
edges easily into fear. Beyond that, they all remind us in a
visceral way of our comparative weakness and vulnerability.
As Zahniser says, wilderness engenders humility.
But what is it in us that responds to this humbling? Why
does some part of us crave knowledge of forces and powers
that belittle us? How is it a spiritual benefit to be thus
humbled?
Humility is, of course, a virtue. It is good to know one’s
proper stature, especially in this time of so much human
hubris toward nature. But though this may be a good
consequence of being humbled by wild nature, it isn’t what
makes us feel so good, so blessed when we sojourn there.
The explanation of that, I think, is that wild nature
humbles not only us as individuals, but all of human kind
and all of its ambitions. To be insignificant in a human crowd
is painful, for it reminds us that we have not achieved the
fame and fortune that others have. To be insignificant in
wild nature, by contrast, can be comforting, for wilderness
dwarfs not only ourselves but fame and fortune, too. It
provides a perspective from which we can dismiss concern
with all such things and be content with whatever concrete
joys life affords us. And in wilderness these joys seem
abundant despite the simplicity, and even danger and deprivation, that wilderness travel can involve. There is a
mystery to be solved here that is similar to the mystery of the
comfort we find in nature’s humbling of us. Why should the
deprivation, exhaustion, challenge, and even danger we find
in wilderness bring us spiritual joy and peace, a feeling of
being fully alive?
Surely many different things interact to produce the
answer. What we have said above may form a background.
In wilderness we may already be feeling the comfort of
identification with places and processes much grander and
much more enduring than our individual egos, and feeling
too that the defeats and frustrations of our normal lives are
much less important than they seem from an office cubicle.
Beyond that, the challenges we overcome in wilderness are
empowering and invest us with a sense of our capability and
worth.
It is important that these challenges do not typically
throw one into competition with other people. Where we
compete against one another, as willy nilly we must in
modern civilization, there must be both winners and losers,
and the losers must outnumber the winners. When, as we
usually do in the wild, we compete only against ourselves,
success is much more likely, if only because a defeat of one
kind—failing to get to the mountain top, for instance—can
be a triumph of another—for example, the wisdom of knowing when to turn back, or the knowledge of how to cope with
failure. Indeed, perhaps in wilderness we can temporarily
forget about competition and focus instead on competence—
acquiring it, testing it, glorying in our possession and growth
in it.
169
Johnson
This sense that the wilderness is a place of testing from
which we emerge strengthened and cleansed in spirit is not,
of course, a modern invention, a kind of urban cowboy play
for effete office workers only. The worldwide tradition of
vision quests and initiation rituals requiring wilderness
sojourns is a reminder of this. So, too, is the story that Jesus
tested himself by a journey into the wilderness, which
resonates with an even older tradition. Consider this passage from Wilderness and the American Mind (Nash 1973:
16):
The Israelites’ experience during the forty-year wandering
gave wilderness several meanings. It was understood, in the
first place, as a sanctuary from a sinful and persecuting
society. Secondly, wild country came to signify the environment in which to find and draw close to God. It also acquired
meaning as a testing ground where a chosen people were
purged, humbled, and made ready for the land of promise.
The demands and challenges of wilderness experience
focus the traveler’s attention in the same way as activities
that promote what Csikszentmihalyi (1990) calls “flow.”
Removal to wilderness has generally already pulled us away
from the tensions and troubles of our anxious daily lives.
And the life we lead in the wild is not only separate from the
sources of our tension, it is also stripped down to basics. We
live primitively (or at least did so until the first uncomprehending fool dragged his cell phone along), and the things we
must do, though possibly challenging, are few and fairly
obvious. But they are also important in obvious ways. We
need to get to a camping place by sundown; we need our tents
to stand up to the storm. We need to get up and over the pass
before that storm breaks. We feel, not the acid stomach
created by social anxiety, but the healthy thirst and hunger
from bodies taxed by exertion.
All these elements—physical removal from sources of
social anxiety, challenges that are few, focused, and deeply
felt, the feelings of competence and worth that we get from
meeting such obvious challenges—cooperate to drive ordinary anxieties from our mind, leaving us feeling peaceful,
worthy, and open to the spiritual meanings of humility and
eternity described earlier. I am not sure whether this is the
Bible’s “peace that passeth understanding” (Holy Bible,
Philippians 4: 7), but it is at least akin.
I know that the beauty of wild nature is also important to
the spiritual peace we find there, but this subject is so large
that I shall pass it by with only this one sentence addition to
what others have said. The beauty of the wild commands our
attention, pulls us outward and away from our egos, and like
the sublime, nurtures the self-forgetting that every spiritual
tradition extols. Appreciation of the beauty of wilderness
reinforces an effect that begins when we are humbled by
wilderness and seek refuge in its timelessness. All of these
pull us away from focus on ourselves as individual egos and
toward identification with the larger world, toward, that is,
the loss of self that spiritual humility demands.
In summary, I have suggested that in wilderness we
experience an image or analogue of the divine that speaks to
deep-seated spiritual yearnings. Ancient rocks and seas, the
seemingly timeless rhythms of life and the seasons comfort
us. They say that while individually we and all our earthly
hopes are mortal, still we are part of something everlasting.
The vast size and awesome power of wild places, and even
170
Sources of Spiritual Benefits of Wilderness: A Philosopher’s Reflections
their indifference to us, is, oddly, another source of spiritual
comfort. For by comparison with wild nature our personal
troubles, and even the troubling doings of the human race,
seem petty enough to be forgotten. Another way of saying
this is that wilderness encourages the self-forgetting that is
extolled in every spiritual tradition. It pulls us away from
our own small troubles and toward identification with a
greater whole. This movement is strengthened by physical
removal from the scenes and causes of our normal concerns,
and by the demand that we focus attention on a few deeply
felt and immediate concerns. Not least, though neglected
here, the beauty of nature also consoles us, as all forms of
beauty do, and pulls us outward away from self and into our
surroundings.
I want to close with some questions to which I can suggest
only brief and partial answers. As McKibben (1990) has
suggested in The End of Nature, the wilderness landscapes
that provide our spiritual experiences are endangered, and
along with them the sense of nature as a scene of awesome
forces and timeless cycles, a place untouched as petty human
dramas play out their insubstantial plots. What will happen
to this sense of wild nature as a perceptible analogue of the
divine, as global climate change and other environmental
threats change the very face of nature? A lot of the answer
depends, of course, on what one thinks will happen. My own
expectations are pretty grim. If we have to watch the death,
not only of selected species, as we do already, but of whole
ecosystems, if reliable patterns of weather and climate
change, if even ocean currents and levels themselves alter
with the melting of large permanent ice fields, then I think
it will be hard to maintain the feelings about wilderness that
I have discussed in this paper.
Air pollution creates beautiful sunsets, and so dying
landscapes may still have their own stark beauty. There will
still be places where humans are few. Titanic forces will still
be at work in the world. Our doings do not yet trouble the
stars, and so those will remain as symbols of eternity. The
mountains will not grow younger because we have increased
2
the atmospheric concentration of CO . Rivers and seas will
still batter us about, indifferent to our wishes.
But these are further removed from the human sphere
than the spring peepers E. B. White was waiting to hear. If
the frogs are dying, if the dawn that Jeffers beheld recurs,
but its birds have become extinct, will we still feel enfolded
within the greater rhythms of nature? When what survives
does so only by our leave, when the entire world is but a park,
and a greatly impoverished one at that, will terrestrial
nature seem to anyone divine? Can wild nature figure as a
refuge from human mortality and failings when we know
that the refuge is mortal and a victim of our failings?
I am pessimistic about the answer. I fear that future
generations will soon be deprived of the spiritual comfort we
have found in wild nature. It will, of course, still be possible
to care about wild nature. But this caring will be from a
different perspective than I have described in this paper. It
is, I think, quite possible to care deeply about what depends
on you, but it is very difficult to see it as an awesome,
everlasting analogue of the divine. Wilderness can no longer
be our refuge from the human sphere once its inclusion in the
human sphere is obvious.
Ultimately, I think some of the spiritual benefits we derive
from wilderness depend upon seeing it as other: wilderness
USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-27. 2003
Johnson
represents the natural versus the artificial, the everlasting
versus the human and mortal, the all-powerful versus the
petty sphere of mankind. The approaching global environmental crises will make it impossible to maintain these
dichotomies, as wilderness is revealed to be not a realm
apart from the human, but a part of the human realm, and
without these dichotomies, our descendants will be deprived
of at least some of the spiritual experiences of nature I have
described in this paper.
References _____________________
Sources of Spiritual Benefits of Wilderness: A Philosopher’s Reflections
Hagen, S. 1997. Buddhism plain and simple. New York: Broadway
Books. 159 p.
Holy Bible, King James Version. Cleveland, OH & New York: World
Publishing Company.
Jeffers, R. 1963. Selected poems. New York. Toronto: Random
House. 115 p.
Kant, I. 1929. Critique of pure reason. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Toronto: MacMillan. 681 p.
McKibben, B. 1990. The end of nature. New York: Doubleday. 226 p.
Nash, R. 1973. Wilderness and the American mind (revised edition).
New Haven: Yale University Press. 425 p.
Thoreau, H. D. 1972. The writings of Henry David Thoreau: the
Maine woods. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 392 p.
Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1990. Flow: the psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper and Row. 303 p.
USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-27. 2003
171