Nature Conversing: John Scotus Eriugena’s Contemplative Ontological Poetics

Abstract

ABSTRACT Inspired by Willemien Otten’s recent reading of the concept of nature in John Scotus Eriugena as ‘conversation’, this essay explores some implications of this mystical/theological notion in response to the current ecological situation. For Eriugena, natura is the theophanic unfolding of the divine logos, an unfolding in which both philosophical contemplation and human creativity play vital parts. To be part of nature is an endeavour both contemplative and creative or ‘poetical’, a cosmic practice in which natural and human world encounter one another in co-creative crossovers, and whose ends are oriented to the well-being and flourishing of all things in God. Eriugena’s premodern natura sidesteps attempts to ‘deconstruct’ or ‘get rid of’ of nature, as many contemporary ecological commentators claim is necessary, encouraging us instead to think it anew, in the light of a creative and contemplative theophanic unfolding.