Concept
Spiritual naturalism
Overview
Spiritual naturalism, or naturalistic spirituality combines a naturalist philosophy with spirituality. Spiritual naturalism may have first been proposed by Joris-Karl Huysmans in 1895 in his book En Route.
Coming into prominence as a writer during the 1870s, Huysmans quickly established himself among a rising group of writers, the so-called Naturalist school, of whom Émile Zola was the acknowledged head...With Là-bas (1891), a novel which reflected the aesthetics of the spiritualist revival and the contemporary interest in the occult, Huysmans formulated for the first time an aesthetic theory which sought to synthesize the mundane and the transcendent: "spiritual Naturalism".
Long before the term spiritual naturalism was coined by Huysmans, there is evidence of the value system of spiritual naturalism in Stoicism: "Virtue consists in a will that is in agreement with Nature".
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The other has spiritual beings as its object, spirits, souls, geniuses, demons, divinities properly so-called, animated and conscious agents like man, but distinguished from him, nevertheless, by the nature of their powers and especially by the peculiar characteristic that they do not affect the senses in the same way: ordinarily they are not visible to human eyes. This religion of spirits is called _animism_. Now…
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
States what Spiritual naturalism is.
Reply Obj. 2: According to Augustine (De Civ. Dei ix, 33), by the heaven is understood the formless spiritual nature, and by the earth, the formless matter of all corporeal things, and thus no creature is omitted. But, according to Basil (Hom. i in Hexaem.), the heaven and the earth, as the two extremes, are alone mentioned, the intervening things being left to be understood, since all these move heavenwards, if…
Aquinas Thomas, Summa Theologica, Part I
States what Spiritual naturalism is.
(2) The _Realism_ of the purposiveness of nature is also either physical or hyperphysical. The _former_ bases the purposes in nature, by the analogy of a faculty acting with design, on the _life of matter_ (either its own or the life of an inner principle in it, a world-soul) and is called _Hylozoism_. The _latter_ derives them from the original ground of the universe, as from an intelligent Being (originally…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Spiritual naturalism is.
Related ideas
- Ghost
- Hinduism
- Atheism
- Judaism
- Spirit (animating force)
- Buddhist meditation
- Religious naturalism
- Anthropomorphism
- Stoicism
- Mind
- Infinity
- Mordecai Kaplan
- Superstition
- New Testament
- Noble Eightfold Path
- Nature
- Pantheism
- Panentheism
- Process theology
- Process philosophy
- Quantum mechanics
- Philodemus
- Science
- De rerum natura
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Metaphysical naturalism.