A Tale of Two Trees: Unveiling the Sacred Life of Nature in Islamic and Christian Traditions

Abstract

This dissertation compares the ancient ṣaḥābī (“companion”) tree that still stands today in northeastern Jordan and the tree that became the Cross, memorialized where it once stood in Jerusalem. The former, by virtue of lowering its branches to give shade to the Prophet Muḥammad when he was a child, has been venerated as his last living terrestrial companion. The tree of the Cross has a religious history as a participant in the Crucifixion, displaying piety, agency, and voice. The presence of these trees in religions perceived largely as being “non-animist” or even “anti-animist” forms this dissertation’s central line of inquiry: what within these traditions affirms the religious agency of these two trees? What does their consciousness signify about other trees and about the rest of the cosmos within Islamic and Christian traditions? Significant strands of Islam and Christianity suggest that the agency that these two trees display is not only miraculous. After a study of trees within scripture, the dissertation branches out to a study of religious views of non-human consciousness in the natural world. Islamic and Christian scriptural portrayals of nature include the religious life of others within the cosmos. Notwithstanding intra-religious contestations, each religious tradition includes a metaphysics that accounts for and explains the consciousness of non-human beings. According to the exegetical and metaphysical expositions of the Sufi author of primarily Persian poetry Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī (d. 672/1273) and the patristic theologian Origen of Alexandria (d. 253/4), non-human others are alive and also religious. The consciousness of the two trees is exceptional but also universal; both thinkers unveil the inner animateness of the natural world. In this work I also explore the ethical implications of being in relationship with living non-human others. I engage the present global ecological crisis as a problem rooted in ignorance of the spiritual integrity that is inherent in all beings in the cosmos, highlighting the urgent need to engage religious environmental views. Not only are the two trees alive and devotional, but, according to many of the sources of this study, so too is the cosmos teeming with life, consciousness, and inherent spirituality.