For Another Theology of Nature

It is only fitting that a robust notion of nature would be revived in contemporary theology, seeing that theology played key role—a role perhaps more significant than that of philosophy—in the formation of this notion, all the way down to its colloquial reverberations and practical implications. While, convinced that the thinking of nature reached its apogee in nineteenth-century German Naturphilosophie, philosophers and scholars in the humanities abandon it for being historically limited and treat it with disdain as an anachronistic remnant of hierarchical reasoning projected onto the world at large, new studies in theology show that nature is anything but an outdated concept.[i] On the contrary, it breathes with the promise of a future, notably the future or the futures of the past, of what nature will have been.

Multiple forces are at work in the revival which is now underway. For one, increasing attention is paid to the animist cosmovisions from outside the Western fold and the workings of spirits—more than of spirit, in the singular—in African, Indian, Chinese, and Amerindian traditions. For another, reinterpretations of Christianity present an image of nature very different from the conventional rigid and hierarchical chain, as soon as the focus shifts to its mystical or relatively marginal representatives (for instance, Eriugena in Willimien Otten’s recent study or Hildegard von Bingen in my own work), its doctrine of incarnation, as well as the vegetal and animal figurations of divinity. Against the hegemony of medieval scholasticism replete with a twisted version of Aristotle, against the predominance of the Thomist understanding of nature even in the presumably secular scientific circles, the alternative resources of Christianity are mobilized to unearth its plasticity, the inherent transgressability of boundaries, the mélanges, hybridizations, metamorphoses, and cross-pollinations of different classes of beings, fields, or realms.

It is possible and, indeed, necessary to identify crucial overlaps between animist traditions and heterodox currents in Christianity, as Mark Wallace notes.[ii] These, however, will not detract from the promise of an alternative reading of Christian doctrine; instead, they will strengthen it. Most conspicuously, incarnation may be thought as the promiscuity of essence itself (which, incidentally, is one of the connotations of “nature”), the impurity of essence combined with or morphing into another essence: human and divine, finite and infinite. Incarnation is a unique instance of figuration, which by far exceeds the human figure. It would be sufficient to cite the figuration of the Holy Spirit as a dove, or, likely, a common pigeon; of Mary as “the greenest branch”; Jesus as a “brilliant flower” blossoming on that branch, in the Hildegard’s Symphoniae.[iii] Across vegetal, divine, animal, and human realms, threading into and out of each other, Christianity imagines life’s figurations in the living, in all its richness, with all its ambiguities and paradoxes.

The prospects of another theology of nature open up in how Christianity concentrates on birth, growth, death, rebirth, that is to say, on the signature activities of nature, rather than on a collection of beings classified as “natural.” Here, figuration is by definition not static; it is a constant trans-figuration, shedding and assuming new figures. With divinity brought down to earth, Christian theology foregrounds a complex, ramified relation between life and the living, life’s force and its forms, involved in an ongoing conversation, indeed, in nature itself qua this conversation, as Willimien Otten points out with reference to Eriugena.[iv] In this unfolding conversation between life and the living, there are neither absolute beginnings nor abrupt end points; there is no hierarchy among forms of life either, where humanity, vegetality, animality, and the animate body of the entire earth[v] are capable of expressing, of figuring, of being suffused with divinity. It is on the grounds of such a literally down-to-earth theology that the “more-than-human” (by now, a staple term in ecological discourse) is at the same time divine, vegetal, animal, ecosystemic, or planetary.

A related surprise, which a heterodox Christian theology of nature holds in store, has to do with perspectivism. Brazilian anthropologist and philosopher Eduardo Viveiros de Castro identifies perspectivism as a core outlook of Amerindian cosmovisions. Embodiment is comprehended on the basis of the manufacture of textiles and, specifically, of clothes: “There are virtually no examples, in Amerindian ethnography, of animals dressing up as humans, that is, assuming a human body as if it were a clothing. All bodies, including the human body, are thought of as garments or envelopes; but you never see animals donning this human ‘clothing.’ What you see are humans donning animal clothes and becoming animals, or animals shedding their animal clothing and revealing themselves as humans.”[vi]What bearing does this have on radical Christian theology?

Amerindian ethnography dovetails with the Bhagavad Gītā, on the one hand,and with the poetic-dramatic writings of Hildegard von Bingen (such as the allegorical morality play Ordo virtutum), on the other, where the body is similarly described in terms of a garment worn by the soul. Strikingly, though, Origen, whose “view of material creation” may be otherwise characterized as “static” and “pejorative,”[vii] is on the same page, as far as Christ’s incarnation is concerned. In a lengthy exegesis of John 1:1, Origen lays the groundwork for a Christian perspectivism. According to Origen, the sense of Christ becoming “all things to all things” is to be sought in his extraordinary capacity to assume the form and to speak in a way that would be radically contingent on, and appropriate to, the addressee’s kind of being: “The Savior, therefore, in a way much more divine than Paul, has become ‘all things to all,’ that he might either ‘gain’ or perfect ‘all things’. He has clearly become a man to men, and an angel to angels” (Comm. Jn. 1.217).[viii] Human and angelic incarnations stand out as no more than examples of a perspectivist incarnation, refracted into as many kinds of things as there are in the world and beyond—into “first and last” and “what lies between” as Origen will specify next (Comm. Jn. 1.219).[ix] This means that Christ has become an animal to animals and a plant to plants, not to mention a rock to rocks, given the encompassing designation “all things” and a complex theology of stones already apparent in the Biblical text itself. A Christian perspectivalism starts gaining shape right before our eyes, even when it comes to a thinker as canonical and apparently rigid as Origen.

Another theology of nature, germinating in alternative readings of the event of incarnation, splinters into plural natures (also resonating with Amerindian “multinaturalism,” as defined by Viveiros de Castro). Although Origen’s formulation is becoming “all things to all,” there is not a trace of suffocating closure in the process. In lieu of a totalizing nature indifferently holding all natural beings, each nature is given its due with the singular event of Christ’s incarnate becoming of and for various natures. Intimately adjusted to the recipients of the spiritual-material message, it is a work of justice as much as that of naturing—of birthing, fleshing, figuring, and transfiguring. Beyond oppressive hierarchies, totalities, the ideals of immutability, and the purity of essence; beyond the pitfalls of anthropocentrism; beyond, too, an instrumentalizing conception of the world, a theology of nature being rediscovered or reinvented today comes back down to earth. It finds itself in the midst of a fragile, still livable planet, overfull of sense and no longer guaranteeing the renewal of life, the resurrection of nature as a faint sign of Christ’s resurrection (in a memorable formulation by Tertullian). A lot, then, rides on the current self-reinvention of theology: not just its own disciplinary future, but also a very practical task of fostering a revamped attitude to finite existence.

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[i] Refer, for instance, to Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA & London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2007) or Lorraine Daston, Against Nature (Cambridge, MA & London, UK: The MIT Press, 2019).

[ii] Mark I. Wallace, When God Was a Bird: Christianity, Animism, and the Re-Enchantment of the World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019), p. 11.

[iii] For a detailed reading of these analogies, consult Michael Marder, Green Mass: A Theological Ecology of St. Hildegard of Bingen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021).

[iv] Willemien Otten, Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking: From Eriugena to Emerson (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020), p. 116.

[v] Wallace, When God Was a Bird, p. 145.

[vi] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere: Four Lectures Given in the Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, Feb. – Mar. 1998 (HAU Masterclass Series, 2012), p. 122. < https://haubooks.org/cosmological-perspectivism-in-amazonia/ >

[vii] Otten, Thinking Nature and the Nature of Thinking, p.61.

[viii] Origen, Commentary on the Gospel according to John, Bks. 1-10, translated by Ronald E. Heine (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1989), p. 76.

[ix] Origen, Commentary on the Gospel according to John, Bks. 1-10, p. 77.