Reading the Book of Nature After Nature

religions Article Reading the Book of Nature after Nature Jacob Holsinger Sherman Department of Philosophy and Religion, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA 94103, USA; [email protected] Received: 10 March 2020; Accepted: 16 April 2020; Published: 20 April 2020 Abstract: Early modernity tended to appeal to the trope of the book of nature as a way of securing knowledge—including knowledge about God—against the exigencies of history and culture, but as theorists such as Timothy Morton, Bruno Latour, and others have argued, today this assumed dualism of nature and culture is both ecologically and critically suspect. What might it mean to read the book of nature in a time of ecological precarity, what many have called the Anthropocene? I will argue that premodern theological traditions of the book of nature, such as one finds in the twelfth century Hugh of Saint Victor, have something extremely important to add to a postmodern ‘terrestrial’ hermeneutics of nature, precisely because the premodern book of nature already performs the construal of nature as culture (and of culture as nature) so often recommended today by critics such as Latour, Haraway, and others. On such an account, nature is neither a fantasy object to be ignored or fled, nor a stable text to be tamed, rationalized, and epistemically leveraged, but rather the changing concept and experience of nature is a symbol illuminated in a book we half receive, and half create, a symbol open to both critique and contemplation, which gives rise to thought, action, and the sort of novel moral intuitions we need now more than ever. Keywords: Book of Nature; Hugh of Saint Victor; Anthropocene; Bruno Latour; Timothy Morton; Slavoj Žižek; ecology and religion; eco-theology 1. Introduction As we confront the advent of the state of universalized precarity and massive global changes entailed by “the new climatic regime,” as Bruno Latour calls it, the vulnerability of our practices, traditions, and the human condition itself become ever more apparent (Latour 2018). How do we respond to challenges of such scope? More to the point of this Special Issue on ‘Faith, Vulnerability, and the Anthropocene,’ we might ask: are there resources within the intellectual and spiritual traditions of communities of faith that can help us in the collective effort to discover the moral sources required to meet the unprecedented tests of our time? To many, it might seem absurd to suggest that the humanities, let alone philosophy or theology, could have anything to say about such an intractably material situation as the contemporary ecological crisis; surely, only science can save us now? And yet, one can argue, that our predicament is not only a technical and scientific crisis, but also a crisis of human collective activity, which is to say, of politics, and so depends crucially upon human commitment, imagination, and deliberation (Arendt 1998). The paradox of the Anthropocene is this: human agency is now responsible for fundamentally transforming the biogeochemistry of the earth, while at the same time, we seem incapable of altering the shape of our collective activities. We are tragically responsible, and we can’t seem to do anything about it. But might this paradox seem intractable only because basic ontological, ethical and aesthetic assumptions have gone unquestioned? And, if so, doesn’t this cry out for a metaphysical and theological response? Religions 2020, 11, 205; doi:10.3390/rel11040205 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions Religions 2020, 11, 205 2 of 12 One of the most important of these often-elided questions is the relationship between human beings and nature, a relationship that was once taken for granted, but that now appears deeply unstable in the epoch of the ‘Anthropocene’. Early modern philosophy taught us to appeal to nature as a source of certainty and universality, an epistemological bulwark against the exigencies of history and culture, but today this assumed dualism of nature and culture is both ecologically and critically suspect. There is moral risk here, for ‘nature’ seems to have been the constitutive good in relationship to which so many of the novel moral intuitions and practices of our ecological consciousness came into being.1 Can we still appeal to nature, and what might that appeal look like in a time of ecological precarity? In order to address such concerns, this essay begins by critically considering the contemporary scholarly questioning of the very concept of nature, and then argues that the creative retrieval of premodern theological traditions of the book of nature might provide key tools for the construction of the kind of postmodern ‘terrestrial’ hermeneutics of nature we need now more than ever. 2. The Problem of ‘Nature’ What’s the matter with Nature? One way to think about it would be as follows. Ever since the nineteenth century, environmental and ecological ethics have tended to appeal to a unified concept of nature as a given, well-ordered, moral and biophysical whole that must be saved, managed or preserved. Formally, this peculiarly modern understanding trades on a disjunctive theory of nature as wilderness: the wilderness or the wild is all that is other from culture. Materially, such appeals are seen at work in strategies which aim to draw boundaries between nature and the human in order to create a preserve or protected space from the influence of human technology and culture-making. Today, however, this idea of nature as corrupted by the supplement of culture is increasingly contested. To begin with, the unified modernist concept of nature has been thrown into question by research in the history, sociology, and philosophy of science (Latour 1993, 2004; Stengers 2010; Grebowicz et al. 2013; Haraway 2016a, 2016b). We can take Bruno Latour as representative here. According to Latour, the critique of nature is bound up with a critique of modernity. On Latour’s account, modernity defines itself by erecting an absolute dualism between nature and society, an establishment accomplished by the elevation of the human subject out of nature and into the putatively transcendent realm of culture. We are, I assume, all familiar with accounts of modernity that make this sort of Cartesian or Kantian dualism central to the identity of the modern. What Latour adds to this common story, however, is a strong account of how this modern aspiration to purify the realms of nature and culture both came about, and how it has always been undone by the equally modern aspiration to ‘illicitly’ mix these two realms. Thus, modernity is marked not by one but by two fundamentally conflicting practices that Latour calls ‘purification’ and ‘translation’ (Latour 1993, pp. 8–12). In purification, moderns seek through experimental and analytic means to construct a nature freed from culture and subjectivity, while in translation (or ‘hybridization’) moderns bring together these supposedly pure spheres in new hybrid assemblages of nature and culture (Latour 1993, pp. 39–48). Hybrids, however, remain invisible to modern eyes. Modernity understands itself only in terms of the first procedure of purification. This is the story we were all taught. Modernity purifies the world; it separates the value spheres of the good, the true, and the beautiful, and so frees the world from antique superstition. The earth no longer groans, trees no longer speak, and the heavens dictate neither our moods nor the proper construction of the republic. Nature exists in its pure brute calculability, mute, 1 The vocabulary here is Charles Taylor’s. Taylor distinguishes between ‘constitutive goods’ and ‘life goods’. A “constitutive good is a moral source ::: that is, it is a something the love of which empowers us to do and be good” (Taylor 1989, p. 93). Life goods, by contrast, are things it is good to be, what are often called virtues. But these life goods are goods precisely because of their relationship to some substantive aspect of reality, the constitutive good, relation to which constitutes the goodness of life goods and empowers the agent in his or her moral actions. Although a genealogical account of how we came to see environmental questions as ethical and not merely pragmatic is beyond my scope here, one can argue that ‘Nature’ often played a key role as the constitutive good in the emergence of ecological virtues throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Religions 2020, 11, 205 3 of 12 stupid, and subject to the laws of mechanical necessity. With nature scoured of any human or personal trace, a new Promethean humanity discovers (or invents) itself as utterly free from the constraints of nature. What it means to be modern is to distill finally culture from nature, the discursive from the real, the social, linguistic, and constructed from the natural, material, and given. As one of Latour’s interpreters explains, “Modernity tries to purify the world by dissecting it into two utterly opposed realms. On one side we have the human sphere, composed of transparent freedom and ruled by arbitrary and incommensurable perspectives. On the other side we have nature or the external world, made up of hard matters of fact and acting with objective, mechanical precision” (Harman 2009, p. 57). The error of premodern peoples, so the story goes, was to believe in a seamless fabric of nature and culture: political arrangements were believed not only to model but also to follow the heavens, signatures were spread throughout the world of nature, the moon somehow connected to the growing of seeds or to the metal silver, the sun for its part sympathetic to gold, our own bodies and moods composed of the four elements that make up our temperaments ::: a world of cosmos, psyche and politeia all mixed, confused. But moderns, it is said, put to an end this confusion.

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