Divine Cosmos - by Lucas Nossaman (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Tells the story of how 19th-century American writers re-envisioned science and religion in the age of German naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt's "cosmic" ecology.

When Alexander von Humboldt began to publish the volumes of his Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Earth (1845-1859), Americans suddenly found themselves reimagining the natural world. Humboldt presented nature as a "cosmos," an interconnected web that exceeded the scientific world of static taxonomy and individual species that 18th-century science had produced. As Lucas Nossaman shows, Humboldt's ecology did more than initiate a change in natural science. His writings caused Americans to reconsider how to portray the divine in nature.

Inspired by Humboldt, USscientists, theologians, and literary writers participated in what can be described as a final synthesis of science and religion before the arrival of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Writers such as Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, and Herman Melville utilized their particular religious contexts and employed Humboldtian modes of observation to envision nature holistically rather than in terms of singular evidences of "design." They discovered that natural forms connected across regions, and indeed, across the entire divine creation.

Nossaman argues that this "Divine Cosmos" moment provides important background for later conflicts between science and religion - including the debate over evolution - and for the light it sheds on great US writings influenced by Humboldt. With implications for fields across American Studies, Divine Cosmos argues that early ecological thought transformed how Americans perceived the divine in the natural world.

Review Quotes

Divine Cosmos offers readers a freshly conceived, invaluable commentary on the ways in which Humboldt's distinctive vision of 'ecology' informs key works of 19th-century American literature - with further application to the religious aspirations and environmental challenges of our own day. Throughout this cross-disciplinary study Nossaman also does a splendid job of helping us bridge the presumed chasm between science and religion.
John Gatta, William B. Kenan Jr. Professor Emeritus of English, Sewanee: The University of the South, USA

Nossaman's earlier work on the importance of Humboldt's ecological views to Frederick Douglass and James McCune Smith has already opened the door to fresh understandings of Humboldt's centrality to American literature, religion, and culture. Divine Cosmosopens that door wider still, using interdisciplinary questions about nature, ethics, and the divine to survey a full range of American writers in Humboldt's light. This is the book we've been waiting for, one imbued with wonder and wisdom, integrating Humboldt's ecological vision across the spectrum of American religion, science, and literature.
Laura Dassow Walls, Professor Emerita of English, University of Notre Dame, USA, and author of author of Passage to Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (2009)

About the Author

Lucas Nossaman is Assistant Professor of English and Assistant Director of the Honors College at North Greenville University, USA. His work on American literature has appeared in J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, Nineteenth-Century Prose, Christianity & Literature, and Renascence.