Spiritual Naturalism

Spiritual naturalism and naturalistic spirituality are interchangeable terms for the same philosophical perspective, with the latter term more commonly used. Book searches for the two find no usage for Naturalistic Spirituality before 1956 whereas Spiritual Naturalism may have first been proposed by Joris-Karl Huysmans in 1895 in his book En Route - “Huysmans was the first to defect to 'Spiritual Naturalism' and eventually to a form of mysticism; he was followed by Maupassant:” and “In 'En Route' Huysmans started upon the creation of what he called ‘Spiritual Naturalism,’ that is, realism applied to the story of a soul. ...”.

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 new approach carried him through the remaining volumes of his "spiritual autobiography"