Topics: Beauty; Humanism; Naturalism; Nature; New Age; Worldview
Reference: Romans 1:18–23
The main point of Christianity is this: Nature is not our mother; Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same Father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity.
Nature was a solemn mother to worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.
—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Ignatius, 1995)