The Desantification of Nature

We have lost our capacity to see not only the reality of the world about us but even of what was to have been the main purpose of our investigation to start with–the reality of our own presence within the world.  If man thinks and acts as if God does not exist and is not present in all things, he thinks and acts a lie; and the result of this is that he reduces his own life to a falsity, which is the same thing as unreality.

This from The Eclipse of Man and Nature: An Enquiry into the Origins and Consequences of Modern Science by Philip Sherrard.  Sections from Chapter 4.

IN THE PRECEDING chapters attention has been concentrated above all on the theme of man and on the shifts in the Christian and post-Christian understanding which have resulted in what we have described as his eclipse. But running alongside this theme, and indeed overlapping it and intertwined with it, is another, which concerns man’s attitude to nature. We have frequently had occasion to note how our understanding of man is intimately related to our understanding of nature. Indeed, so much is this the case that our failure to perceive the divine in man has gone hand in hand with a failure to perceive the divine in nature. As we have dehumanized man, so we have desanctified nature.

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By the phrase, ‘desanctification of nature’, I refer to the process whereby the spiritual significance and understanding of the created world has been virtually banished from our minds, and we have come to look upon things and creatures as though they possessed no sacred or numinous quality. It is a process which has accustomed us to regard the created world as composed of so many blind forces, essentially devoid of meaning, personality and grace, which may be investigated, used, manipulated and consumed for our own scientific or economic interest. In short, it has led us to see the world only so much secularized or desacralized material, with the consequence that we have ruptured the organic links and spiritual equilibrium between man and nature, and have restricted religion more and more tot he privacy of the individual conscience or to concern for the beyond of a transcendent God or of an individual salvation after earthly existence is over.

This does not mean of course that people have stopped finding a charm or a beauty in nature, or an outlet from the artificial and suffocating atmosphere of our over-industrialized cities. On the contrary, from the eighteenth century onwards our history has been characterized by periodic ‘back to nature’ movements, as if nature was a kind of unspoilt paradise ready with ever-open arms to compensate man for all the other losses he has suffered. But what this so often represents is the romantic or sentimental reaction of an exhausted and disillusioned individualism, containing in it very little that may be described as spiritual. In fact, it can very well go, and very often has gone, with an entirely ‘atheist’ outlook. What is in question here is not this kind of naturalism, but a loss of the sense of the divine in nature–a loss of the sense that the very stuff of the universe has a sacred quality.

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Physical phenomena are to be accounted for in physical categories alone, and that is all there is to be accounted for in them.  The idea that every natural effect has a spiritual cause is completely neglected, and the fact that the neglect amounts to a kind of spiritual castration of the natural order seems to be of little or no concern.  It is as if one examined and analysed the Eucharist according to the scientific method and because one could not discern any trace of the divine in it declared it was simply composed of its material elements.  Having adopted a method of investigation which in its nature precludes the perception of spiritual qualities, it is gratuitous, to say the least, to pronounce that the object one investigates is to be explained in non-spiritual categories alone.

Ye it is the conclusions achieved by this kind of circulartory reasoning which for the last three hundred years or more have been regarded as constituting knowledge in a virtually exclusive sense and which moreover have been termed scientific.  It is precisely the fact that these conclusions or what are called scientific theories are the product of this kind of circulartory reasoning, and not of experiment and observation, which makes the claim that they are objective so spurious.  Having restricted the scope of scientific investigation to the rationally observable and purely quantitative aspects of what is changing and impermanent, and having adopted more or less exclusively a view of causality that takes into account merely efficient causes and ignores formal or spiritual causes, scientists are literally condemned to trying to explain things in terms of those meagre interpretive possibilities which are all they can now envisage.  In other words, their theories or hypotheses do no more than reflect the limitations within which they operate and have no greater objectivity than the arbitrary and illusory assumptions which underlie them.

Modern science, then, ignoring the sacred aspect of nature as a condition of its own genesis and development, tries to fill the vacuum it has created by producing mathematical schemes whose only function is to help us manipulate and ‘dominate’ matter on its own plane, which is that of quantity alone.  The physical world, regarded as so much dead stuff, becomes the scene of man’s uncurbed exploitation for purely practical, utilitarian or acquisitive ends.   It is treated as a de-incarnate world of phenomena that are without interest except in so far as they subserve statistics or fill test-tubes in order to satisfy the curiousity of the scientific mind, or are materially useful to man considered as a two-legged animal with no destiny beyond his earthly existence.

This is why the application of science–which is not really the application of science at all but the application of an unbelievable ignorance–has produced such disequilibrium, ugliness and even destruction not only in the natural world but in human life as well.  Paradoxical as it may seem, through our attempt to achieve a knowledge of the world based on the observation of the physical phenomena of the world, we have reduced ourselves to a chronic state of blindness.  We have lost our capacity to see not only the reality of the world about us but even of what was to have been the main purpose of our investigation to start with–the reality of our own presence within the world.  If man thinks and acts as if God does not exist and is not present in all things, he thinks and acts a lie; and the result of this is that he reduces his own life to a falsity, which is the same thing as unreality.

As we have said, this dehumanization of man is an inevitable consequence of man’s attempt to live as though he were only human.  Man can be truly human only when he is mindful of his theomorphic nature.  When he ignores the divine in himself and in other existences he becomes sub-human.  And when this happens not merely in the case of a single individual but in the case of society as a whole, then that society disintegrates through the sheer rootlessness of its own structure or through the proliferation of psychic maladies which it is powerless to heal because it has deprived itself of the one medicine capable of healing them.