Rethinking the Twelfth-Century Discovery of Nature

Abstract

According to long-standing scholarly opinion, the twelfth century discovered nature. This essay argues that earthly nature was not discovered in the twelfth century. The twelfth-century authors of the philosophia mundi or the sculptors who fashioned the acanthus capitals at Rheims Cathedral in fact did not think of their work as belonging to the category of nature but to something entirely different from nature–to the order of creation. Continuing to seek “nature” in the medieval past risks overlooking or misunderstanding some profoundly suggestive materials about how people once experienced God, each other, and the world. Examining metaphor and imagery that adopts features of the natural world, this essay thinks through the implications for twelfth-century people's spiritual lives of the idea that God, through the Incarnation, entered not nature, but creation. In particular, the essay examines the role of “trees of incarnation” as contemplative models in women's religious communities for making Christ present in the imagination and in the world. M. D. Chenu's attention to the category of nature in his historical and theological writings is then revisited in order to propose ways of rethinking the manner in which medieval religiosi perceived the material world as a medium for experiencing and continuing the Incarnation of Christ.

Handbook of Leaving Religion

“…Despite the possibilities opened up by Nock's intervention (many of which Nock himself did not explore), much historical literature from the middle of the twentieth century continued to treat leaving religion as a sub-topic of the study of conversion. Historians of the medieval world have tended to approach it only through related categories such as heresy, apostasy, unorthodoxy (Grundmann 1953;Russell 1965;Leff 1967;Moore 1975;Kanarfogel 2012) while historians of the later medieval and early modern period represent dissent from tradition in terms of doubt, scepticism, or secularisation (Febvre 1937;Popkin 1979;Tuck 1988;Edwards 1988;Cohen 1999). While the former group sometimes treats deviation from or abandonment of normative belief according to medieval categories of faith and heresy, the latter tend to suffer from an implicit teleology that champions the story of scepticism as the story of modern secularism and Enlightenment reason.…”