Seeing Nature’s Good
Not many years ago, a student wrote an essay in one of my classes; her thesis was that since sex is good exercise, providing both physical and emotional benefits, we should welcome consensual sex between adults in all its forms. Moral rules limiting sex to marriage are outdated and foolish, she argued.
It wasn’t a very good essay, and I gave it a low mark. I mention because it illustrates a remark made by Paul Lorenzini recently. Paul and I are team-teaching a class in Christian Apologetics, based on a book he is writing, Legacies of the Sixties. In the course of his lecture this week, Paul paraphrased a line from Charles Taylor in which Taylor described an idea in Augustine.
(Is that confusing enough? An idea I heard in Paul’s lecture, which mentioned Charles Taylor’s interpretation of Augustine—a student might be forgiven for thinking that philosophers only talk amongst themselves. In the end, it’s the idea that matters, not its genealogy.)
The Augustinian idea is this: as sinners, we are often misguided about our true good, and that implies that we are often misguided about natural goods. Just as we need divine grace to enable us to perceive our true end, fellowship with God, we need divine grace to perceive natural goods accurately.
The world around us is full of goods; everything God made is good. Augustine says that everything in the world is, therefore, a proper object of love. If we love anything rightly, we can love God in that thing. The key, of course, is to “love rightly.”
Do we accurately see the goods of the natural world?
One cause—maybe the most important cause—of our ecological crisis is that for centuries we have seen the natural world primarily as a resource to be used. Francis Bacon is a famous example. Bacon promoted his new science primarily as a tool that promised to give us power over the world. Many of our problems would be solved, Bacon said, if we gain the power science and technology have to offer. We have come to realize that this view, which objectifies the natural world, reducing its value to its usefulness, leaves us vulnerable when we misuse it. But the problem is deeper than the results—extinctions, climate change, pollution, etc. When we see the world as a resource only, something useful to us, we don’t see the world accurately. We need God’s grace to see.
My atheist friends will immediately object. A person doesn’t need superstition, whether it is belief in God or some other fantasy, to see the world for what it is. Animals, plants, and ecosystems are complex objects of study, worthy of sustained attention. You don’t need to “see God” in the tree to cherish the tree. If our species would surrender its pretensions to special status, we would see that we are just another part of the world. We don’t need to say “natural” world. We are all one with everything that is.
Careful atheists quickly retreat from that last bit. Oneness with all existence sounds too spiritual. In fact, it’s just Hinduism. The philosophical naturalist (i.e., atheist) must try again.
Another try: We are simply bits of the indifferent universe. “Good” is merely a label we happen to attach to various parts of the world (no doubt due to evolutionary accident). But no—that sounds too much like logical positivism, a throwback to the 1930s.
We must try again. Do we really see the world? Do we see the goodness of the world?
My student wrote that sex is good. So far, I agree. But all the goodness she saw in sex was healthy exercise and guiltfree fun. She did not see, or she ignored, the goodness of sex in building marriages and families. Nor did she see that the greater goods of sex are only found through discipline, charity and self-denial.
Our technological use of the natural world has procured some goods for us. But the greater goods are only found through discipline, patience, and attention. We need to learn how to love everything rightly.
For clarity’s sake and emphasis: I include myself in “we.” We need God’s grace to see the world as we should. Today I will take a walk. I will stop and look. I will, to a small extent, love God in the things he has made.
