Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Allen Verhey (1945-2014) was Robert Earl Cushman Professor of Christian Theology at Duke Divinity School.

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Nature and Altering It

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

PREFACE.......................................................................................................................................viiI. "Nature": What Is It? Sixteen Senses and Still Counting....................................................................................1II. "Every Ethos Implies a Mythos"............................................................................................................13III. The Problem of Arrogance: Reading Scripture Regarding Nature — A Response to the Accusation of Lynn White, Jr......................47IV. An Alternative Mythos and Ethos: Revisiting the Christian Story...........................................................................63V. From Narrative to Practices, Prophecy, Wisdom, Analysis, and Policy........................................................................119APPENDIX A: A Note on Typologies for the Relation of God and Nature...........................................................................134APPENDIX B: A Note on Typologies for the Relation of Nature and Humanity......................................................................136NAME INDEX....................................................................................................................................143SUBJECT INDEX.................................................................................................................................146SCRIPTURE INDEX...............................................................................................................................149

Chapter One

If we are to think about "nature" and about "altering it," it would be good to know what we are thinking about, what "nature" is. But "nature" turns out to mean many different things. Following C. S. Lewis's wonderful philological exercise in Studies in Words, I undertook the task of listing some of the different senses of "nature." The list quickly grew to sixteen. The task grew tiresome as the senses multiplied, and I left the task unfinished, still counting. Even so, the list provides a convenient place to begin and may provide some clarity along the way.

"Nature" #1: Like us, the Greeks used "nature" (phusis) quite often and quite unselfconsciously to mean the kind of thing a thing is. In one of his famous definitions, Aristotle says, "whatever each thing is like when its process of coming-to-be is complete, that we call the nature [the phusis] of each thing" (Politics 1252b, cited in Lewis, p. 34). That's the sort of thing anything is, Aristotle thought, the kind of thing it grows into. The Latin natura and the English "nature," like the Greek phusis, frequently have this meaning: the sort or kind of thing a thing is, the character of a thing.

"Nature" #2: Even before Aristotle, however, phusis had come to mean something else, something more. It came to mean "everything." The pre-Socratics thought it would be useful to capture all the things they knew — minerals, plants, animals, human beings, gods — under a single name, and for some reason the name they gave to this heterogeneous collection of things into a single object of study was phusis, or "nature" (Lewis, p. 35). Parmenides' work, "On Nature" (Peri Phusis), for example, was a work about "everything," and may well mark the linguistic invention of this sense of "nature." This sense of "nature," however, could not accomplish much. Strictly speaking, "nature" in this sense has no opposite. Moreover, not much can be finally said about "everything." And to be told that something is a part of "nature" in this sense is not to learn anything more about it.

"Nature" #3, #4, #5, and #6: This invention of a new sense of "nature" did produce important reactions — and additional senses of "nature." Some said that these older thinkers had not given an account of everything, after all. There was something more. They might have said, I suppose, that phusis contains more than the older thinkers thought, but instead they said that there was something more than phusis (Lewis, p. 37). "Nature" was in a sense demoted, at least restricted. "Nature" was not "everything" but "everything but...." Plato, for example, who thought everything in the perceptible universe to be only an imitation and a product of the imperceptible and timeless "forms," used "nature" (nature #3) quite naturally for the whole perceptible universe, for "everything but ..." the forms (which were, in his view, more real and more valuable than everything else). For his part, Aristotle demoted or restricted "nature" to that which is subject to change (nature #4), and he studied those things in what he called "natural philosophy." But there is more — and more to study. There are those things that are unchangeable but cannot exist "on their own." These things were studied in mathematics. And there is one thing that is unchangeable but can exist "on its own," namely God, the unmoved mover. Christianity and Judaism and Islam, of course, also insisted that there was something more than phusis. There is God. Moreover, this God is related to "everything" as creator. "Nature" is the work of God, God's creation, "everything but ..." God (nature #5). Eventually "nature" was demoted or restricted even more, to refer to something less than the whole created world, to everything "under the moon" but not to the sky (nature #6).

"Nature" #7: Besides these restrictions and demotions, however, there was also an apotheosis of "nature" (Lewis, p. 40). This was hardly possible before "nature" had been named. But once named, "nature" could be personified and was. "Nature" was raised to divinity, to the sense of Great Mother Nature. To be sure, it is difficult sometimes to decide whether the personified "nature" names a deity or is understood as a rhetorical figure. At any rate, "nature" does come to have this sense sometimes, not just "everything" but a divine force or mind taken to be immanent in everything. When Stoics like Marcus Aurelius called Phusis "the eldest of deities" (Meditations IX, I), it sounds like religion. And this sense of Great Mother Nature has resisted dismissal. We still talk of "she" who "abhors a vacuum," is "red in tooth and claw," eliminates the unfit, moves toward higher forms of life, warns, comforts, teaches, and so on.

Meanwhile, we also go on using "nature" in other ways — to identify the kind of thing a thing is, or in one of the restricted senses we have observed, or in some other sense still. The list of the meanings of "nature" grows if we consider the implied opposites of "natural."

"Nature" #8: The "natural" can be contrasted, of course, with the "unnatural." This sense may be dependent upon nature #1, the sort of thing a thing is, the "unnatural" marking a departure from the sort of thing a thing is but also — and curiously — marking it as bad. "Natural" then comes to mean not only fitting to the sort of thing that a thing is but also "good" (nature #8). But as C. S. Lewis observed, "when the timid man forces himself to be brave, ... he is not called unnatural" (p. 43).

"Nature" #9: The "natural" can otherwise be contrasted with "the interfered with." It is a...