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.
Highlights
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?
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 a technical and scientific crisis, and a crisis of human collective activity, which is to say, of politics, and so depends crucially upon human commitment, imagination, and deliberation (Arendt 1998)
Summary
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). The paradox of the Anthropocene is this: human agency is 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 can’t seem to do anything about it Might this paradox seem intractable only because basic ontological, ethical and aesthetic assumptions have gone unquestioned? In order to address such concerns, this essay begins by critically considering the contemporary scholarly questioning of the very concept of nature, and 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 more than ever
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