Reading the Book of Nature after Nature

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.

Recovering World-Welcoming Words: Language, Metaphysics, and the Voice of Nature

“…2 My text here and throughout is the Arden Edition (Third Series) of King Lear, see Shakespeare (1997).…”

Spiritual Ecology: On the Way to Ecological Existentialism

“…This happens in one of two ways: either (1) failing to address other spiritualities or (2) considering other spiritualities to be malformed, incomplete, or even downright nihilistic. An example of the latter is when Jacob Sherman (2020), in an otherwise astute reading of the book of nature (liber naturae), criticizes Morton for being "nihilistic," yet fails to acknowledge that any sense of "nothing" (nihil) in Morton is related to Morton's spirituality, which involves Buddhism and western esotericism, not to mention Yoda. Taylor's account of the green sisters focuses primarily on Christianity, but neither omits nor denigrates non-Christian spiritualities.…”