connection with the nonhuman world

connection with the nonhuman world. The metaphorical and analogical reasoning so characteristic of religious interpretations of the world is not merely a rhetorical flourish but is, instead, closely tied to general psychological processes in which self-knowledge and knowledge of other humans function as the most readily accessible starting points for inferences we make about human connections to the most comprehensive and consequential forces at work in the nonhuman world.™ Anthropomorphism’s dual perception of nonhuman phenomena—as simultaneously both like and unlike human persons—has shaped modern religious and spiritual perceptions in two especially intriguing directions. In one case, it has fastened on the difference between the human and the divine and cultivated iconoclastic perceptions of the spiritual in which anthropomorphic representation is regarded as a dangerously misleading, albeit necessary, accommodation to the limitations of human reason." In the other case, it has emphasized the point of metaphorical identity between the human and the nonhuman. Thus, an ancient idea held that the physical universe was a macrocosm mirroring the human microcosm, and this included what literary critics have named “the pathetic fallacy,” that is, a sympathetic response in nature to the affective states of humans. The early modern political philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), for example, described how human disobedience to divine law prompted an anthropomorphic emotional response from nature: “with sad motion wheeling, let the sky lament and mourn.”” In the modern history of religions, these two modes of anthropomorphism, one accentuating 106 Page difference and the other accentuating identity, have varied according to social circumstance, rhetorical purpose, and political ramifications. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” illustrates, in one historical context, how anthropomorphic language crosses the boundary of the human in order to interpret human ethical responsibility to both the human and the nonhuman environment. The Rhetoric of Divine Wrath Clearly, Edwards’s anthropomorphic rhetoric destabilized in a terrifying way the Enfield congregation’s complacent perceptions of the world. It did so by starting from an assumption that Edwards and the congregation shared: that humanity’s ultimate environment should be construed, anthropomorphically, as a cosmic society held together by a covenant that God had made with the whole of creation. The sermon induced terror among the congregants by graphically portraying their own responsibility for disrupting the harmonious order of this all- encompassing society and provoking divine wrath for their rebellion against the covenant. The primary evidence for this divine wrath came not, however, from the external orders of nature and divine providence, which Edwards imagined working together to maintain the harmonious order of the world. Instead, wrath had arisen from a clash between the benign will of the world and the rebellious human will: “there is laid in the very nature of carnal men a foundation for the torments of hell: there are those corrupt principles, in reigning power in them, and in full possession of them, that are seeds of hell HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_021352