Nature and Religion
Kat Ford
The importance of man’s spiritual connection to nature has been ingrained through the ages, even in a time of rebirth and innovation such as the Renaissance. Tracing all the way back to the Bible’s Garden of Eden, people of the Renaissance believed their connection to Nature to be crucial to their faith as well as their health. In the Old Testament, man is described to have been put on the Earth by God to tend to the nature He had created previously, "And the Lord God took the man, and put him into the Garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it." (Blue Letter Bible, Gen. 2 15). The teachings of the Old Testament also reflects man’s connection to nature by stating that he came from the earth, and that he was made from it, "Therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken" (Blue Letter Bible Gen. 3. 23), rationalizing that both man and nature are one, and therefore are important to the other’s health.
Being spiritual was also favorable to those who raised plants for their livelihood as well who wanted to remain virtuous and close to nature, as put in A New Orchard and Garden, "to have a pleasant and profitable orchard, he must (if he is able) provide himself of a fruiterer, religious, honest, skillful in that faculty, and there withal painful: By religious I mean maintaining and cherishing things religious" (Harward Sig. Bv). In this case, religious means to show devotion in tending nature in a way that is profitable, but remembering to be thankful for it. The concept of devoting oneself to prayer as well as the land you till is carried into Sir Hugh Plat’s work The Garden of Eden, assuring his readers that keeping a religious lifestyle and cultivating is so beneficial, "according to this Theory of Nature", the land will be "so enriched from the hevens without the help of any manner of foyle, morte, or compost" (Plat 3)
Due to man and nature being interwoven from the teachings of creation to sustaining life through farming, any thought of going against nature, by the view of religious teachings, would be blasphemous and ungrateful. Some areas, such as in politics, take the idea of nature into a different light, one that branches away from the tilling of plants and creation of herbal remedies due to the will of the divine, and brings it solely into the word of the authority. The "divine right of kings" originated in the time of the Romans, where the title of Caesar was passed down by blood on the basis that those crowned were appointed by the gods. This system often carried much further than the assertion that the monarch is divine which leaves little room for argument, which happened to cause many problems if the monarch acted in ways that upset the vast majority of subjects and nobles in their kingdom, as was the case with Richard II. In Act 4, Scene 1, Carlisle exclaims the mindset of a subject during this time period well in his speech to Bolingbroke, upon hearing Bolingbroke plans to ascend the throne:
Being spiritual was also favorable to those who raised plants for their livelihood as well who wanted to remain virtuous and close to nature, as put in A New Orchard and Garden, "to have a pleasant and profitable orchard, he must (if he is able) provide himself of a fruiterer, religious, honest, skillful in that faculty, and there withal painful: By religious I mean maintaining and cherishing things religious" (Harward Sig. Bv). In this case, religious means to show devotion in tending nature in a way that is profitable, but remembering to be thankful for it. The concept of devoting oneself to prayer as well as the land you till is carried into Sir Hugh Plat’s work The Garden of Eden, assuring his readers that keeping a religious lifestyle and cultivating is so beneficial, "according to this Theory of Nature", the land will be "so enriched from the hevens without the help of any manner of foyle, morte, or compost" (Plat 3)
Due to man and nature being interwoven from the teachings of creation to sustaining life through farming, any thought of going against nature, by the view of religious teachings, would be blasphemous and ungrateful. Some areas, such as in politics, take the idea of nature into a different light, one that branches away from the tilling of plants and creation of herbal remedies due to the will of the divine, and brings it solely into the word of the authority. The "divine right of kings" originated in the time of the Romans, where the title of Caesar was passed down by blood on the basis that those crowned were appointed by the gods. This system often carried much further than the assertion that the monarch is divine which leaves little room for argument, which happened to cause many problems if the monarch acted in ways that upset the vast majority of subjects and nobles in their kingdom, as was the case with Richard II. In Act 4, Scene 1, Carlisle exclaims the mindset of a subject during this time period well in his speech to Bolingbroke, upon hearing Bolingbroke plans to ascend the throne:
Marry, God forbid!
Worst in this royal presence may I speak,
Yet best beseeming me to speak the truth.
Would God that any in this noble presence
Were enough noble to be upright judge
Of noble Richard! Then true noblesse would
Learn him forbearance from so foul a wrong.
What subject can give sentence on his king?
And who sits here that is not Richard’s subject?
Thieves are not judged but they are by to hear,
Although apparent guilt be seen in them;
And shall the figure of God’s majesty,
His captain, steward, deputy elect,
Anointed, crowned, planted many years (IV.i.120-133).
By the divine right of kings, Bolingbroke has no reason to be on the throne as he is not a direct descendant of Richard II, and therefore the act would be against nature. This clause is one of Richard’s only defenses left from deposition after all his supporters abandoned or betrayed him.