Early Christian Perspectives on American Nature:
The Dissenting Views of James Fenimore and Susan Fenimore Cooper
By Alfred Kentigern Siewers, Bucknell University
[Given 10.24.11 to the Nature, Philosophy and Religion Society of the International Association for Environmental Philosophy
at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Philadelphia]
James Fenimore Cooper’s five novels of the Leatherstocking Tales (The Deerslayer, The Last of
the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers and The Prairie), and his daughter Susan Fenimore Cooper’s
book of nature-writing Rural Hours, both featured the headwaters of the Susquehanna River at
Cooperstown, NY, the Leatherstocking Tales in arguably the two most important novels for the
series, The Deerslayer and The Pioneers. The Pioneers has been called by scholars America’s first
environmental novel, and Rural Hours has been hailed as the first book of nature-writing by an
American woman. Together they left an influential legacy for early American views of nature, yet an
alternative perspective often neglected in recent times. Their environmental legacy from the start was
out of sync with American views of technological progress, manifest destiny, and an emerging
transcendental approach to wilderness that ironically helped to enable environmental destruction.
That the Coopers’ writings reflect a traditional Christian worldview, and a conservatism not
identifiable on our current political spectrum, also helps to explain their relative obscurity in current
environmental discourse. But there are three reasons today that impel a re-reading of their combined
legacy in light of environmental criticism: 1. They expressed a philosophy of nature emphasizing the
integrity of human culture and physical environment, a central issue today in a time of rapid global
urbanization on an unprecedented scale. 2. In focus on the flora and fauna of the Cooperstown area
they exemplified lessons about environmental experience now highlighted by the emerging field of
ecosemiotics and its effort to bridge the gap in scholarly studies between work on human symbolism
of all types and attention to the physical environment. 3. Their writings suggest bridges between
Christianity and environmentalism sought particularly by many people of faith and also many
environmental activists in the United States today.
On the shores of Otsego Lake, one can see how both Cooperstown and the lake form the
National Register historic district called the Glimmerglass Historic District. The District uniquely
follows the imaginary geography of the elder Cooper’s Leatherstocking series and the viewshed
related to it, in which Glimmerglass is the fictional peri-contact name for the lake as a mirroring
confluence of sky, water and forest. The Mohawk name Otsego variously translates “rock place,”
“rendezvous place,” and “welcome water.” All those meanings, together with the metonymic
“Glimmerglass,” sum up the role of the lake as a clearing reflecting the sky and forest, and as the
headwaters of the Susquehanna with its fmeeting rock at the outlet of the river, immortalized in the
Leatherstocking Tales. Looking over the miniature finger lake and hearing of the historical district
based on fictional landscape, one experiences a remarkable example of overlay landscape in
American culture. The entwinement of imaginary and physical geographies as a landscape marks
many indigenous cultures--the Dreamtime of Australian aborigines, the Otherworld of the Celts,
landscape as story in Haudenosaunee traditions of Lake Onondaga also in upstate New York,
bowdlerized by Longfellow. Yet even the story of Creation in the Hebrew Genesis tells of Paradise as
lying among four major Near Eastern rivers. Likewise the elder Cooper’s Glimmerglass emerged
from Native traditions and early Insular Christian traditions, as well as from the physical landscape
itself.
Of Glimmerglass, Natty Bumppo, the Leatherstocking, asks in The Deerslayer, “Have the
governor’s, or the King’s people given this lake a name? If they’ve not begun to blaze their trees, and
set up their compasses, and line of their maps, it’s likely they’ve not bethought them to disturb natur’
with a name.” The lake has no official name because it hasn’t been set down on any official map yet,
his companion Hurry replies. “I’m glad it has no name,” responds Natty, or, at least, no pale face
name, for their christenings always fortell waste and destruction.” Hurry explains that each Indian
language has different vocabularies and names for places, but adds that for his network of friends
“we’ve got to calling the place the Glimmerglass, seeing that its whole basin is so often fringed with
pines cast upward from its face, as if it would throw back the hills that hang over it.” As Hurry and
Deerslayer move across the lake their canoe “lay on the glassy water, appearing to float in air,
partaking of the breathtaking stillness.” And “The echoes repeat pretty much all that is said or done
on the Glimmerglass, in this calm summer weather.” (pp. 534-5). The Glimmerglass stands as mirror,
window and clearing for the coming together of earth and sky in the forest, and of mortals and
immortals, to use Heidegger’s four terms for the encounter with place as an experience, for regioning
as ontological that we can hear imagine in a geographic overlay as well.
Natty is to meet his Native American friend Chingachgook at the outlet of the Susquehanna.
“Has that no Colony name yet?” he asks of the river. Hurry replies, “No doubt, Deerslayer, you’ve
seen the Susquehannah, down in the Delaware country?” “That have I, and hunted along its banks a
hundred times.” “That and this are the same in fact, and I suppose the same in sound. I am glad
they’ve been compelled to keep the red men’s name, for it would be too hard to rob them of both
land and names!” “Deerslayer made no answer, but he stood leaning on his rifle, gazing at the view
which so much delighted him. The reader is not to suppose, however, that it was the picturesque
alone, which so strongly attracted his attention. The spot was very lovely, of a truth, and it was then
seen in one of its most favorable moments, the surface of the lake being as smooth as glass, and
limpid as pure air, throwing back the mountains, clothed in dark pines, along the whole of its eastern
boundary, the points thrusting forward their trees even to nearby horizontal lines, while the bays
were seen glittering through an occasional arch beneath, left by a vault fretted with branches and
leaves. It was the air of deep repose, the solitudes that spoke of scenes and forests untouched by the
hands of man, the reign of nature, in a word, that gave so much pure delight to one of his habits and
turn of mind. Still, he felt, though was unconsciously, like a poet also. He found a pleasure in
studying this large, and, to him, unusual opening into the mysteries and forms of the woods, as one is
gratified in getting broader views of any subject that has long occupied his thoughts. He was not
insensible to the innate loveliness of such a landscape, either, but felt a portion of that soothing of
the spirit which is a common attendant of a scene so thoroughly pervaded by the holy calm of
nature.”
Natty experiences the lake as iconographic relationship, mirror and window, echoing both
native and early Insular Christian beliefs influential on the fictional cycle. Scott L. Pratt in his book
Native Pragmatism outlines the influence of Woodlands Indian ethics on Euroamerican culture in four
areas: First the Iroquois notion of orenda or power infused in nature, second the Algonquinan
wunnégin, a kind of landscape orientation of openness toward many points of view on the same
multiplicitous “nature”; third, a logic of place, involving making judgments based on context rather
than from theoretical matrices. And fourth, the logic of home, as a result of displacement of Indian
nations, adapting the logic of place to changed physical situations. Taken together these four aspects
of indigenous worldviews lie behind a tradition of native overlay landscape influential on the elder
Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. Their author found them echoed in accounts of Indian cultures by
John Heckewelder, a Moravian Christian missionary and Cooper’s primary source for northeastern
Indian cultures.
The mainly positive take on Indians by the Moravians expressed by Heckewelder also points
elsewhere to patristic Christian roots of the overlay landscape. The Moravians in their late medieval
roots in central Europe shared Trinitarian and ascetic orientations with early Irish Christian writers.
The latter helped shape the Insular tradition of the overlay landscape known as the Celtic
Otherworld, which influenced the so-called “green world” tradition in early English literature from
Chaucer to Spenser and Shakespeare, on to the Burkean sublime and Romantics like Coleridge and
Sir Walter Scott, many influential on Cooper. In the Leatherstocking Tales, diverse cultural
semiospheres, or meaningful cultural environments such as Iroquois and English cultures, overlap
within shared ecosemiospheres or eco-regions, such as the Eastern Woodlands, Great Lakes and
Prairie. Those ecosemiospheres for Cooper in turn overlapped in and shared a Creation infused by
God’s gifts, or what church fathers called uncreated energies. “Many gifts but one nature,” Natty
Bumppo said. This proverbial saying was type and shadow of the cosmology of the Leatherstocking
Tales, in which creation’s many gifts or energies find their source in a mysteriously apophatic nature
or essence of God. The divine is experienced by personal relationship with His energies. The relative
openness of the Moravians to native culture and their awareness of the importance of storytelling in
landscape (in the form of journaling) related to the Trinitarian and ascetic sense of cosmological
relationships they shared in part with early Insular traditions.
One famous illustration of the Celtic Otherworld was the sense of the sea as a spiritual
realm. This was expressed in the Hiberno-Latin philosopher John Scottus Eriugena’s ninth-century
work on nature, with its adaptation of writings by the Greek church fathers St. Maximus the
Confessor, St. Gregory of Nyssa, St. Gregory the Theolgoian, and St. Dionysius the Areopagite. The
image of the desert as a spiritual sea to early Christian ascetics in the East transferred to the sea in the
British Isles. Later, in the Middle English and Elizabethan periods, partly under Welsh influence, this
textual imagery of the spiritual Otherworld transferred to the countryside generally and ultimately
more specifically the forest in works such as The Faerie Queene and A Midsummer Nights Dream. The
elder Cooper frequently quoted Spenser and Shakespeare in chapter epigraphs to the Leatherstocking
Tales and was hailed as the American Scott. His work clearly reflected the influence of what
Northrop Frye called the English literary green world with its older origins in the Celtic Otherworld.
Those again meshed well with the author’s interest in Moravian Christian traditions explicit in the
Leatherstocking Tales, and his background in a meld of Quakerism and traditional Anglicanism.
Much of The Pathfinder, for example, describes the forest as a sea infused as creation by gifts or
energies of the divine, and a similar sense of the Great Lakes as reciprocally mirroring this image of
the forest-sea. Both express an overlay of spiritual gifts and creation. The strong triadic emphasis in
the Trinitarian theology of the early Irish, as with the Moravians, emphasized a sense of energy in
nature rather than the Scholastic sense of analogy; the non-filioque Trinity in the theology of Eriugena
and the Moravians finds a modern secular echo in ecosemiotics as an alternative to Saussurean
semiotics.
Indeed, poetic overlay landscape, laying imaginary geography onto physical environment,
reflects developments in the contemporary field of ecosemiotics. Ecosemiotics studies the
interrelation between human culture and physical nature and grew out of biosemiotics, which
developed primarily around the Baltic in the 20th century. Biosemiotics seeks to redefine the
definition of life as the making of meaning and exchange of information. In doing so it echoes earlier
Christian patristic views, sometimes called “pansemiotic,” of the cosmos as constituted by logoi of the
Logos, or uncreated energies of God, associated with the words of the Word or harmonies of the
Harmony, or stories of the Story (depending on the translation of logos). The notion of the physical
world as a kind of unfolding iconography or iconographic book heavily bases both the
Leatherstocking Tales and Susan Fenimore Cooper’s nature-writing. It is implicit also in notions of
experientially reading nature in Indian cultures familiar from Heckewelder and other influences on
James Fenimore Cooper, in which ideas of the manitou of the Manitou show some parallels to patristic
Christian pansemiotics. The key is that the sense of energy or gift amid the experience of symbol and
environment forms a personal relationship including the participant reader/audience in landscape.
This is a bit different from emphasis on analogy as the basis for cosmology found in Scholasticism
and even later in Emerson’s “Nature” (although not always completely separate in spirit).
The Estonian ecosemiotician Timo Maran explains the interaction of overlapping cultural
semiospheres within overlapping physical environments or ecosemiospheres through his concept of
“nature-text.” A nature-text, or landscape narrative that flows across text and physical geography,
involves a four-aspect relationship of author, reader, environment and text. The concept draws on
the nineteenth-century American Charles Peirce’s semiotics, which itself shows parallels to both
Native and early Christian thought. Peirce’s model of the sign included environment, as what he
termed object, as an element in the semiosis or the making of meaning through signs. Rather than
seeing the exchange of meaning as bifurcated between signified and signifier only, in arbitrary
internalized meaning, as in Augustinian-derived and Saussurian semiotics, Peirce’s model thus
opened up semiosis as including relationship with physical environment, a triadic rather than a binary
model of the sign. It involved Sign or text, environment or Object, and what Peirce called
Interpretant, which is the equivalent of Maran’s elements of reader and author combined in a
landscape tradition.
We see this semiotic model of Peirce’s exemplified by overlay landscape itself. For example,
in the Leatherstocking Tales, there is the Text of the stories, the environment or Object of the
physical geography of Otsego Lake and related regions, and the imaginary landscape tradition of
Glimmerglass, the imaginary geography melded with the physical environment as Interpretant.
Peirce’s triad echoes the notion of the Trinity without the filioque found in both Moravian and early
Insular texts, in which, following a recent commentary, “the word proceeds from the mind according
to the meaning.”
Susan Fenimore Cooper also shaped an overlay district based in Christian cosmogony,
drawing in part on themes and insights from her father’s writing, but especially on her own entwined
reflections on the eco-region around Otsego Lake and on nature as enveloped in the divine. The
central metaphor of her Rural Hours is that of the garden. She encourages horticulture and related
biblical practices such as gleaning as building community. She writes that “gardening is a civilizing
and improving occuption in itself…it usually makes people more industrious, and more amiable…..
But another common instance of the good effect of gardening may be mentioned:--it naturally
inclines one to be open-handed” (81). Her account of the cycle of seasons around Lake Otsego
entwines references to the Bible, her Anglican Christian faith, and related holidays, with meticulous
descriptions of the flora and fauna that engage pan-American and trans-Atlantic botanical and
zoological discussions. In this she reflects the patristic and pansemiotic approach of seeing the
symbolism of information-energy infusing Creation with meaning. She explicitly approaches
ecosemiotics in her discussion of how study of God’s Word in scripture can combine with
experience of springtime in Creation to uplift the sorrowful heart. She compares this to the
illuminated manuscripts, such as the Book of Kells, of old, and remarks that “when the previous
Book of Life has been withdrawn from the cloisters and given to us all, as we bear its sacred pages
about in our hands, as we carry its holy words in our hearts, we raise our eyes to the skies above, we
send them abroad over the earth, alike full of the glory of Almighty Majesty,--great and worthy
illuminations of the written Word of God.” She takes the narrative overlay landscape of her father,
which as a kind of chronotope included both the “wilderness” past of Otsego Lake and its later
settlement, and relates it to contemplation of the everlasting.
Susan Cooper’s detailed concern with the cultivation of place relates it to the cultivation of
the heart in earlier Christian asceticism, in which the desert could be both wilderness and garden of
the heart, and by extension community. Indeed, her life as unmarried founder and director of an
orphanage, in tandem with being a pious Episcopal parish member, bespeaks a dedication to sacred
calling that makes it possible to think of her as a quasi-Anglican monastic in an era and region with
no such available vocations. Her concern with gardening in an integrated physical and spiritual sense
reminds us of the image of the “garden of the heart” discussed by Fr. Alexis Trader in his recent
book on points of contact between patristic Christian psychology and modern secular cognitive
therapy. Trader ponts out how the image of a garden symbolizes a deep-structural renewal of the
human person, as discussed and experienced by patristic writers, and modeled by Christian ascetics.
In the words of Gregory of Nyssa, amid the incarnational grace of Christ redeeming humanity and
ultimately Creation, “The soul becomes a garden, in the likeness of paradise, [but] not neglected and
open, as in the time of Adam” (250). Likewise the sixth-century Byzantine monk John Moschus
referred to the spiritual life as The Spiritual Meadow abloom with examples of spiritual lives. A section
of Susan Cooper’s description of summer explicates the biblical story of Ruth, celebrating Ruth’s
homely and communitarian practice of faith as related to the idea of gleaning—how a community
can share its gifts of horticultural bounty through the participation of all working together as best
they can. Her vision of the garden, integrating town and wilderness, emerging from her father’s
Christian sense of the overlay landscape related to native traditions, provides a fundamental
alternative to American divisions between city and country, culture and wilderness. The alternative is
different in both regionalism and kind from views of nature exemplified by the Unitarianism of an
older contemporary of her father’s, Joseph Priestley farther down the Susquehanna at its middle
confluence, or in New England Transcendentalism by Thoreau’s Walden. Rather than needing to go
into the laboratory like Priestley, or to live in the woods like Thoreau, to find nature and herself, the
Trinitarian Susan Cooper in her work celebrates both garden and the churchyard as relational icons
of engagement of Creation and the human soul with divine energies in the sense of Moschus’
spiritual meadow. In discussing Ruth, she in effect asks: Why is there not in our rural landscape, as in
the biblical account, the symbiotic relation between those with too much, who do not over-harvest
their fields, and those with too little, and who work to participate in the harvest of the God’s gifts in
creation, through gleaning? She advocates for that community of people and countryside, which she
sees expressed in horticulture, while simultaneously celebrating the devotion to extended family and
personal relationships that she highlights in Ruth’s life.
The Coopers’ legacy influenced the formation of America’s National Parks and
conservationism. Theodore Roosevelt, for example, was inspired in his youth by reading the
Leatherstocking Tales in connection with camping in the Adirondacks. Later as governor of New
York he established the Adirondacks park that became a prototype for the National Park system. But
by that time views of wilderness had become involved in the same secularization as American
Pragmatism. John Muir would cross out God in some of his writings and replace them with nature to
make them more acceptable to scientists and philosophers of his day. And based in the Discovery
Principle of legal sovereignty, the National Parks emerged as government-owned wilderness apart
from human community, removing Native communities from them. The Christian ascetic impulse in
American responses to nature evident in the Coopers became obscured by service to technology in
which wilderness figured as a transcendental abstraction. In the service of American progress, Mark
Twain’s Injun Joe became a dominant literary image of native people, and the river journey of
landscape, rather than the heroic Chingachgook succeeded by Susan Cooper’s devotion to
horticulture in rural countryside from her village orphanage. The Coopers’ perspective as literary
gentry became identified with contemporary American conservatism, while having really no
equivalent in it today.
The contrast is worth noting between the legacy of the Coopers at the Susquehanna
headwaters, with conservation and historic preservation measures based in part on their narratives
have helped shape a thriving integration of human community and rural countryside, and the
situation downstream. Interestingly a key aspect of conservation, preservation and community efforts
at the headwaters was the intersection of the Clark Foundation with interest in overlay landscape of
the Coopers, the Clark family having made its fortune from the Singer sewing machine, a kind of
personal craft aspect of industrialization whose scale one imagines Susan Cooper would have
approved.
At the midpoint of the Susquehanna, at the river’s confluence of main and west branches,
similar landscape conservation and preservation efforts are only just now beginning, inspired in part
by rediscovery of Moravian accounts of early landscapes and cultural exchange with Native peoples
in the eighteenth century by my colleague Katherine Faull. These efforts build on new concepts of
National Parks, a proposed historic corridor involving Native Americans integrally in planning. At
the confluence, the foundational Euroamerican literary figure Joseph Priestley had a concern less
with the natural environment and more with his laboratory and with doctrines of millennial progress
more in syc ultimately with American dreams of manifest destiny than the Coopers’ pessismism. The
mid-Susquehanna became a thriving artery of industrialization, now suffering a post-industrial slump
and rediscovering its history and its river.
The overly landscape of the Coopers’ approach to the environment offered by contrast to
mainstream American narratives of development a non-ideological, incarnational, and personally
spiritual approach to nature, which emphasized relationships. It was pragmatically rooted in
traditional spirituality that informed both Native American and Christian cultures and the emergence
of American Pragmatism. But as that Pragmatism severed from the earlier traditional contexts
evident in the Coopers’ writings, and joined with a technological worldview, it arguably became less
successful in interactions with the environment. In their writings, the Coopers still offer a
traditionalist yet dissenting view in the stories of American environmental history.