A former nun takes us on a journey into the presence of the sublime
Sacred Nature: How We Can Recover Our Bond with the Natural World
KAREN ARMSTRONG
(BODLEY HEAD, 256 PP, £14.99)
Tablet bookshop price £13.49 • tel 020 7799 4064
Karen Armstrong takes the hugest subjects of human searching – faith, myth, origins – and in her writing they become windows, each opening into yet another connecting room or landscape. Her books are full of endlessly surprising and fascinating insights offered in pellucid prose that carries the authoritative heft of decades of deep reading and study.
Her latest, Sacred Nature, is in part a synthesis of thousands of years of human responses to the natural world and in part a guide to daily practices that might reignite the deep, wordless engagement with nature that was integral to the lives of our pre-modern ancestors. The balance between “mythos” and “logos”, she argues, has gone awry: mythos, which looks back deep into the hidden reality explored by stories and archetypes, is in retreat; logos, its outward-looking, reason-led opposite, is in the ascendant.