the nature of Creation and the Creation of nature, and language
“language is holographic in this sense: each word bears the image of the entire cosmic paradigm that its speakers entertain”
For the sake of clarity, it is necessary to distinguish “nature” in its original sense from the manner in which it is typically employed today. “Nature” did not originally mean “wilderness” and it was not, to begin with, juxtaposed against “human culture” or “human society.” In contemporary discourse, we retain a vestige of what the likes of Thomas Aquinas and other mediaeval philosophers would have meant by the term when we use nature in the sense of “essence.” For instance, if I pose a question like “what is the nature of ethics?”1 I am not inquiring after flora and fauna and geology but rather I am asking about the crux of the term’s meaning. Still, despite the apparent correspondence of the mediaeval and modern terms, it remains exceedingly difficult for a person to grasp the original meaning of “nature” today because words are not like little pebbles that can be discreetly partitioned one from another. Instead, words are fluid, like eddies in the wind, or gestures on the breath of meaning. Barfield suggests invokes a fourth element when he describes words “flashing, iridescent shapes like flames—ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them.”2 Perhaps the most accurate metaphor to illustrate to semantic transformations of many words can be found in manner by which a bud differentiates into a flower and a calyx. In the same way, the discreet meanings of the term “nature” that we encounter today were once contained, integrally and embryonically, in a prior meaning of it.
The point of these corrections is to emphasize the field qualities of meaning. To wit, the meaning of a single word is inflected by the meaning of all the other ones. Language is holographic in this sense: each word bears the image of the entire cosmic paradigm that its speakers entertain. The word “matter,” for instance, conveyed fundamentally different meanings for the classical philosophers than it did for the mediaevals, and again for the moderns, and yet again for the postmoderns. In the first instance, “matter” was the body of form or essence or idea. The mediaevals, building on the Platonic-Aristotelian view, contributed the notion that matter did not just happen to embody the forms that it did, and that instead, God functioned as the formal, final, and efficient cause of Creation, invoking it out of non-being, sustaining it over time, and drawing it towards its evolutionary end. Modern thinkers added the notion that matter is the raw material out of which the Creator originally fashioned the universe but they largely conceived of Creation as an event in the perfect past tense rather than something ongoing. Following the quantum revolution, matter is not really conceptualized as perceptible stuff at all but rather a sort of emergent phenomenon that is ultimately reducible to underlying quantitative and probabilistic metrics.
Given the evident transformation the term has undergone over these various epochs, Barfield’s allusion to “the slowly evolving consciousness” may begin to make more sense.3 In any case, it may now be clear how the same word may mean different things according to the semantic field qualities of a given worldview. The Aquinas’ “matter” was not the same “matter” that Newton intended to describe with his famous Laws of Motion. Similarly, mediaevals did not live amidst the same “nature” as we find ourselves today. The key to enter into the world-view of the medieval philosophers is to conceive of everything that exists as an image of its cause. The appearance of each being gestures towards its transcendent source. A rose is transcendent to any one of its petals. Similarly, as a rose gestures towards the rosebush, which gestures towards the earth, which gestures towards the sun and stars, which gesture towards “L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle,”4 and so on, so in a spiritual “chain,” every being in nature is an expression of a higher intelligence. This gradient of Creation was referred to as the Scala naturae, or “the Great Chain of Being.” In an ultimate sense, Nature, for the medieavals, was the embodiment of essences that were spoken into existence by the Logos of God:5
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος
En archē ēn ó Lógos
“In the Beginning was the Word”6
or
בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם
Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve’et ha’aretz.
“In the Beginning, the Gods created the Heavens and the Earth”7
Being, per se, is transcendent to any particular being just as language, per se, or The Lógos, is transcendent to any particular word. And the “uncreated link in the chain,” “the Speaker,” or “the Unmoved Mover,”8 transcendent to Being as such, is always God.
As a final comment, the nature of ethics can be seen as the task of harmonizing our existential lives with our essential ones as human beings wrought ad imaginem Dei which is, “towards the image of God.”9
I will briefly return to this point as an appendix to the reflection to follow.
Barfield, Poetic Diction, 75.
I will not elaborate on this theme any further here, but the interested reader is kindly directed to my article in Cosmos and History Vol. 16, No. 1 (2020), pp 47-70, titled “Owen Barfield & the Evolution of Consciousness,” to Part IV of my dissertation, titled The Redemption of Thinking (2020), or to my forthcoming book with Landon Loftin tentatively titled What Barfield Thought (2023).
Dante, Paradise, Canto 33:145 “l’Amor che muove il sole e l’altre stelle,” “the Love that moves the sun and other stars”
In principle, everything bears a direct relation to the ultimate Good, both in its origin and its end. This was sometimes called “procession” from God and “reversion” toward God and symbolized by the Greek letters Α (alpha) and Ω (omega).
John 1.1
Genesis 1.1.
Aristotle:
There is a mover which, not being moved, moves, being eternal and reality and actuality. The desirable and the intelligible move without being moved. The primaries of these are the same … It moves as loved.” (Metaphysics, Λ.7, 1072a26–27, b3–4)
Cf. Genesis 1.27:
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
The Latin Vulgate reads:
Et creavit Deus hominem ad imaginem suam : ad imaginem Dei creavit illum, masculum et feminam creavit eos
which is, literally, “towards,” and not “in the image of God,” as many contemporary English translations have opted to render the term. Evidently, these prepositions bear fundamentally different connotations and, by extension, imply fundamentally different anthropologies.