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Universal nature


Here is a chart for "universal nature" from the 11th century. It was devised by a English monk named Byrhtferth. Note how it makes connections between natural phenomena and personal temperaments.

Well before the 11th century, ancient models of how things were put together all assumed that the behavior of nature and the behavior of humans answered to a single underlying structure.

From the mists of time in ancient China, for example, we have the five element theory: Water, Wood, Fire, Earth and Metal. These elements comprised universal nature -- which incorporated human moral conduct: Fire is inquisitive; Water is insecure, etc.

The ancient Greeks posited a
four element theory: Air, Water, Earth, Fire. The early thinker Hippocrates (of the Hippocratic Oath) assigned these elements also to personality factors.

It wasn't until the Enlightenment -- let's say this began in the 17th century; it's hard to pinpoint exactly when "enlightenment" came to the West -- it wasn't until the Enlightenment that the behavior of natural elements (air, water, etc) and the grounds for human moral conduct were divorced from each other.

If you dealt in "science," then you weren't dealing in "morality," and vice versa. This was one of the innovations of the Enlightenment.

In the process was lost any sense that a single system cohered together both natural and moral phenomena.

Sure, we now have such "master theories" as evolution. But the tendency here is to celebrate randomness and the unpredictable workings of impersonal forces rather than the workings of an orderly system conforming to higher, even if mysterious, powers.

This is somehow less comforting than earlier models of universal nature.

I am not promoting a return to ancient Chinese or Greek theories of universal nature; nor am I persuaded by Byrhtferth's 11th century model. I am merely bemoaning the loss of a phenomenological awareness in our culture for any organic and orderly universal nature at all.

A loss of wonder at the mystery of how all of this got here, and works beautifully, rather than there being nothing at all.

Recently I came across an essay by Wendell Berry entitled "Solving for Pattern." Written in 1981, the essay is prescient in its discernment that "big business agriculture" not only degrades the corn and the meat it produces, but also degrades the land, ultimately the society it purports to serve. Here is Berry (the bold is mine):

The real problem of food production occurs within a complex, mutually influential relationship of soil, plants, animals and people. A real solution to that problem will therefore be ecologically, agriculturally, and culturally healthful...

This is one challenge to today's environmentalist movement. It is difficult to be respectful to nature -- which is a moral disposition -- when morality itself is something of an optional, because ungrounded, reality.

Logos2Go

Colossians 1.17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

歌 罗 西 书 1.17 他 在 万 有 之 先 , 万 有 也 靠 他 而 立

The image for the 11th century model comes from R. W. Southern, "England in the Twelfth Century Renaissance" in Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 165.

The citation from Berry is actually from Chapter 9 of his book The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agriculture. The chapter can be found here.

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