Spiritual naturalism, or naturalistic spirituality combines a naturalist philosophy with spirituality.[1] Spiritual naturalism may have first been proposed by Joris-Karl Huysmans in 1895 in his book En Route.[2]
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".[This quote needs a citation]
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".[3]