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- ‘Nature is never spent’ (Gerald Manley Hopkins).
- ‘One day soon, maybe . . . there will be no more Nature’ (Prince Bernhard, at a Wildlife Fund dinner).
- ‘There is no more Nature’ (Samuel Beckett, Endgame).
- ‘Nature fights back’ (Rachel Carson).
The disappearance of Nature is a central theme of modem fiction,. Among those novelists who tend to see it as an accomplished fact already, two responses seem to prevail. The first is typified by Robbe-Grillet’s verdict that modern man feels no deprivation at the loss of Nature, for Nature was never more than an illusion, comforting perhaps in a meaningless world but no less illusory for all that. To be rid of Nature is to be at last free. The second response is typified by Beckett’s verdict: there is no more Nature, and the loss is tragic and the deprivation catastrophic. To be rid of Nature is to be in the realm of the lost ones, in a world of sheer ‘lessness’. A third response, however, has to be considered. This is latent in Mailer’s identification of the source of our troubles about Nature in the triumph of what he calls corporation-land: that combination of technology, materialism and exploitative brutality towards the environment which is most evident in the cities of America. However, in Mailer’s case there is also a certain fascination for, as well as hatred of, this massive agglomeration of brutalities : there is pride, energy, vitality in it, as well as regimentation, pollution and despair. Mailer’s ambivalence is characteristic of a general uncertainty about ‘the big plot being hatched out by Nature’.
This uncertainty is evident enough elsewhere, in the utterances of people speaking from many different viewpoints.
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- Copyright © 1974 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Cox, Harvey. The Secular City, London (SCM Press) 1965, p. 23Google Scholar.
2 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring, (New York, 1962)Google Scholar Penguin Books 1965, p. 215.
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8 On this, see Blueprint for Survival, The Ecologist Volume 2 No. 1, (January 1972) reprinted by Penguin Books, 1972: The greater the number of different plant and animal species that make up an eco‐system, the more likely it is to be stable. This is because…in such a system every ecological niche is filled. That is to say, every possible differentiated function for which there is a demand within the system is in fact fulfilled by a species that is specialised in fulfilling it. In this way it is very difficult for an ecological invasion to occur i.e. for a species foreign to the system entering and establishing itself, or worse still, proliferating and destroying the systems basic structure. But, as the authors go on to point out, as industrial man destroys the last wildernesses, as herds of domesicated animals replace inter‐related animal species, and vast expanses of crop monoculture supplant complex plant eco‐systems, so complexity and hence stability are correspondingly reduced. Hence the very activities of man in trying to increase production, and thus to provide for the needs of developing peoples, are adding to the possibilities of ecological disaster.
9 Aylen, Leo, Greek Tragedy and the Modern World, London (Methuen) 1964Google Scholar, Appendix p. 354. See also Armstrong, A. H., An Introduction to Greek Philosophy, London (Methuen) Third Edition, 1968, p. 4Google Scholar.
10 The second law d thermodynamics states that in any closed system all differences of temperature must tend to even out spontaneously. That is to say, a dissipation of energy tends to proceed throughout the system, thus increasing the randomness, or lack of order, without the system. Now the irony at the heart of this idea, which has caught the imagination of creative artists, is that whereas the presence of life within a system is always the presence of a certain order, or organisation of matter and energy, which is counterentropic, i.e. is a centre of ‘negentropy; the communication of informzation always hastens the dissipation of that organisation. since the transmission of any message dissipates the information it contains. Hence human civilisation, which depends on communication between people, is itself bound to undermne the resistance of mere biological life to the increasing randomness in the system. (This may be seen as the basis for Lawrence's emphasis on the ‘greater morality of life itself’ over the merely ‘social’ morality of civilised man). See Norbert Wiener, The Human Use ofHuman Beings, London (Sphere Books) 1968, Chapter I1 passim: Jaques Monod, Chance and Necessity Appendix 4; Tony Tanner, City of Words, London (1971), Chapter 6 passim; and Lévi‐Strauss, A World on the Wane, London 1961, p. 397Google Scholar.
11 Job, Chapter 1: vi; Psalm 89: vi‐vii; 1 Kings, Chapter 22: xix; see also Jacob's dream at Bethel,Genesis. Chapter 28: x‐xii.
12 Timothy MacDermott, OP, The Devil and His Angels, in New Blackfrirars, Volume 48, No. 557 (October 1966) pp. 16–25.
13 Caird, G. B., Principalities and Powers, Oxford (Clarendon Press) 1956, pp. 1–4Google Scholar. Caird notes that. Philo of. Alexandria (b. c. 25 B.C., d. AD. 40) mingles Greek (Platonic) and Jewsh (scriptural) thought on the angels in a remarkable way. ‘Philo uses the word “powers”…to denote one of three things: sometimes they are attributes of God, sometimes they are created beings identical with the Platonic ideas, and sometimes, again, as in Stoicism, they are immanent causes in the material world, though Philo censures the Stoics for imagining that such powers could be corporeal and independent of any higher cause. In their third capacity, the powers are occasionally to be identified with angels’. See also Newman, Sermon on The Powers of Nature, Parochial and Plain Sermons Vol. I1 (London 1868)Google Scholar.
14 Caird, op.cit. pp. 31ff, MacDmott, op.cit. p. 19.
15 The traditional notion of the fall of Satan, in Jewish apocalyptic, represented it as having occurred at the beginning of the world: the God of suffering and service could no longer be identified with the great accuser, who had therefore to be cast out. But in the New Testament this tradition is modified: the fall of Satan is there represented as happening at the moment of Christ's triumph. (Revelation, Chapter 12: X; Luke, Chapter 10: xvii‐xx). But I do not think the traditions are really contradictory: we are dealing with a description of a state of chaos (disorganisation, entropy) in the world, brought about by a ‘fall’, not with a temporal event.
16 Caird, op.cit. p. 37. See also MacDermott, op.cit. pp. 21–22.
17 The ‘powers’ are deceptive, making men think that laws and processes which are actually the results of God's will are somehow unalterable decrees of fate, that is, simply part of the ‘human condition’. See Heinrich Schlier, Principalities and Powers in the New Testament, Freiburg and London (Herder and Collins) 1961, p. 29Google Scholar.
18 Schlier, op.cit. pp. 21–22.
19 Caird, op.cit. pp. 56–60. According to Caird, the consorting of unclean animals with demons testifies ‘to the existence of a strong popular feeling that not only in human life but in the world of nature there is a residue which cannot be brought into congruity with the holiness of God’‐and which is under the control of the demonic powers. Caird, op.cit. p. 59. Caird refers to Deuteronomy, Chapter 32: xvii; Psalm 106: xxxvii; Leviticus, Chapter 16: viiff; Isaiah, Chapter 34: xiii‐xv.
20 Schlier, op.cit. p. 23.
21 Matthew, Chapter 5: xliv; Luke, Chapter 6: xxvii‐xxxv.
22 John, Chapter 14: xvii.
23 John, Chapter 19: xi.
24 Mark, Chapter 11: i‐vii. See also Caird, pp. 70ff.
25 T. S. Eliot, East Coker, II.
26 MacKinnon, Donald, Borderlands of Theology, London (Lutterworth Press) 1968, p. 92Google Scholar.
27 See Taylor, G. Rattray, The Doomsday Book, London (Panther Boooks) 1970Google Scholar, Chapter 11 passim.
28 Ward and Dubos, op.cit. pp. 298–299.
29 Adlai Stevenson, speaking to U.N. Economic and Social Council 1965 (quoted in Maddox, op. cit. p. 20).
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32 As Chesterton saw, op.cit. p. 91. Newman makes the same point, op.cit. pp. 361–362.
33 Of course, according to Newman (and Christian tradition generally) the angels are not just the powers of Nature. That is to say, the term ‘angel’ is not just equivalent to the term ‘natural tendency’tout court. But I am not concerned here with the theological question whether, or how, angels are said to be more than the powers of Nature. That they are this is enough for my argument.
34 See T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. 19–22:
35 That many novelists picture, in their fictions, some kind of resistance to the law oE entropy which the sentimental scientists regard as written into the human condition, surely shows that they believe entropy not to be the final truth about human civilisation, just as Diké is not the ultimate truth about God.
36 Without this, of course, Lévi‐Strauss would be right: ‘entropology’ would be the proper term for the study of human cultures. See my article Analogy and Metaphor, New Blackfriars, Vol. 53, No. 631 (December 1972)
37 Camus, , Selected Essays and Notebooks, edited and translated by Thody, Philip, Penguin Books 1970, p. 198Google Scholar.
38 See the articles by MacKinnon, Donald, Theology and Tragedy, in Religious Studies, Vol. 2, No. 2 (April 1967), pp. 163–169CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Atonement and Tragedy in Borderlands of Theology.
39 John, Chapter 1: xix‐16: ii.
40 Colossian Chapter 1: xviii‐xx: ‘As he is the beginning, he was first to be born from the dead so that he should be first in every way; because God wanted all perfection to be found in him and all things to be reconciled through him and for him everything in heaven and everything in earth, when he made peace by his death on the cross’.
41 Matthew, Chapter 25: xxxi‐xlvi.