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Chapter 2: Naturae Desiderium: The Desire of Nature between History and Theology
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2 Naturae Desiderium The Desire of Nature between History and Theology . To attribute some form of desire or yearning to the natural world is hardly a new proposition. The proposition alone has for a long time been seen as a fount of diverse but unmistakable controversy. For example, Aristotle, in a woeful misreading of Empedocles of Acragas, chastises the Presocratic thinker for championing an original state of nature in which bodies are separated and in movement.“Empedocles,” he writes,“omits the period when Love was gaining ascendancy.”1 Likewise , much of what Rémi Brague terms“the wisdom of the world”that has been lost with the rise of the modern cosmological anthropology and anthropological cosmology is also the loss of an ability to listen for a hidden desire in the most basic cosmic structuring of things.2 Even more revealing in this regard is the disparaging judgment of the eminent literary historian E.R. Curtius regarding Bernard Silvestris’s cosmological poem De mundi universitate: “The whole is bathed in an atmosphere of a fertility cult,in which religion and sexuality mingle.”3 The very idea of a desire of nature is not only ambiguous but inflammatory. This essay will render neither a dismissive nor an exculpatory judgment on the idea. The point rather is to investigate its role in the 33 unveiling of a trajectory of thought about religious and secular reason whose influence is still felt today. We will get a view of that trajectory only by examining its force in a particular juncture and examining that historical appearance of secular reason from a particular angle. The full force of the trajectory can be brought to light only if one holds in abeyance certain standard preconceptions about how to gain access to ideas in the past. To be more specific, I will look at how a problem in thinking about the history of thought presents us with a problem for thinking about thinking. The focus is on the Middle Ages, but my approach is not designed to tout the medievals as superior to the moderns. In short, I will argue that the historical passage of Christian thought through the Middle Ages still counts as Christian thought precisely in its character as a passage. The point will be to show that the demarcation between the history of theology at a certain point in the past and what we conceive of as actual (or, to employ an even more telling term,“constructive ”) Christian thought need not become a divide. To elucidate this point, I reexamine in this essay a question of periodization of history that lies at the cusp of the putative apex of the Middle Ages. The ramifications of this periodization, it will be argued, extend beyond the confines of the two periods in question and even beyond the confines of history. In other words, the close scrutiny of what constitutes the epochal divide between two supposedly distinct periods of medieval intellectual history is of more than antiquarian interest . The period under study in this essay, namely, the movement from the twelfth to the thirteen century, is intensely fascinating in terms of the how the thinkers in the later period viewed their relationship to the previous century and also in terms of vital questions in philosophy and theology today. The essay has four parts.The first deals with a few elements of a new history of medieval philosophy as a framework for assessing the contemporary debates about religious and secular reason. Here I lay out the fundamental genealogical questions that are sometimes ignored in some prevalent presentations of the thought of the High Middle Ages. The second part looks more closely at a specific question, namely, the concept of nature. Here I attempt to look in a new way at some as34 Peter J. Casarella pects of the twelfth-century theology of nature that have been either overlooked or unfairly characterized in certain standard versions of the history of medieval Christian thought. The originality of these conceptions , I argue, lies elsewhere than what has normally been assumed. The third part looks at how an influential contemporary exponent of the critical rediscovery of medieval thought configures this epochal transition. Specifically, I turn to theologian John Milbank, focusing on the brilliant but also highly problematic way in which he approaches one important strand in the thinking of Henri de Lubac in his book The Suspended Middle: Henri de Lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural.4 The demystification of scholastic thinking...