Nature and Supernature

At Mass yesterday Father remarked that it is not the heart but the crucifix which is the real symbol of love.  A truism, perhaps, for a practicing Catholic, but one worth repeating to oneself from time to time.

I am working on a dissertation that deals—in a more direct fashion than I expected it would when I began—with the clash of medieval and Renaissance views of nature and society, or natural and human law.  The older medieval view was that nature and natural law were responsible for much of what was good in man; in the high Renaissance this view was sometimes warped into a Pelagian worship of man-as-natural being, in much the same way that post-Cartesians worshipped man-as-thinking-thing.  One of the many facets of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation was a reaction to this excessive Renaissance optimism.  Thus reformers of both stripes and secular Renaissance skeptics joined in emphasizing the insufficiency of human nature for salvation, and perhaps even for social and political life.  The later, Hobbesian view of a warlike state of man has real connection to the strong Calvinist notion of man as totally depraved.

Between their ideas and the Platonic-Aristotelian image of simple shepherds, devastated by the elements and bonding together to ensure survival for themselves and their families, gapes a wide gulf.  For the ancients and medievals nature was lively and dangerous, and human beings bonded together to find their natural place in it.  But beginning with the early modern era, nature became subject to the conquering techne of man, while human beings themselves became less and less worthy of trust and less and less natively inclined to order.

Who is right?  Both; neither; I’ll get back to you on that.  I have strong sympathies with the older view, of course; but … This much I will grant to the modern view.  On a day-to-day level, mere human virtue however advanced seems to be but rarely sufficient to deal with the trials and tribulations of ordinary life.

Too bad I wrote an undergraduate thesis arguing in the opposite direction!

But the older I become, the more convinced I am that sanctity is necessary not merely for entry into heaven, but also to live a tolerably happy life on earth.  At a certain point after being woken up for countless times in the middle of the night, nature is no longer sufficient; supernature becomes necessary.  The heart will always remain, but it can only beat on the blood of the cross.