1. The Reality of Nature
There is a dignity and poignancy in the bare fact that a thing exists.
‘Is Theology Poetry?’, The Weight of Glory
Surprised he stood
To feel that wideness quenching his hot mood,
Then shouted, ‘Trembling darkness, trembling green,
What do you mean, wild wood, what do you mean?’
Dymer, canto 1, st. 19
Medicine labours to restore ‘natural’ structure or ‘normal’ function. But greed, egoism, self-deception and self-pity are not unnatural or abnormal in the same sense as astigmatism or a floating kidney. For who, in Heaven’s name, would describe as natural or normal the man from whom these failings were wholly absent? ‘Natural’, if you like, in a quite different sense; archnatural, unfallen. We have seen only one such Man. And He was not at all like the psychologist’s picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed, popular citizen. You can’t really be very well ‘adjusted’ to your world if it says you ‘have a devil’ and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood.
The Four Loves, ch. 3
All the beauty [of Nature] withers when we try to make it an absolute. Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first and we lose both first and second things. We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best when we are being greedy.
Letters (23 April 1951)
In space and time there is no such thing as an organism, there are only animals and vegetables. There are no mere vegetables, only trees, flowers, turnips, etc. There are no ‘trees’, except beeches, elms, oaks, and the rest. There is even no such thing as ‘an elm’. There is only this elm, in such a year of its age at such an hour of the day, thus lighted, thus moving, thus acted on by all the past and all the present, and affording such and such experiences to me and my dog and the insect on its trunk and the man a thousand miles away who is remembering it. A real elm, in fact, can be uttered only by a poem.
The Personal Heresy, ch. 5
No one sunrise has ever been exactly like another. Take away from the sunrises that in which they differ and what is left will be identical. Such abstracted identicals are what science predicts. But life as we live it is not reducible to such identities. Every real physical event, much more every human experience, has behind it, in the long run, the whole previous history of the real universe—which is not itself an ‘instance’ of anything—and is therefore always festooned with those particularities which science for her own purposes quite rightly discounts. Doesn’t the whole art of contriving a good experiment consist in devising means whereby the irrelevancies—that is, the historical particularities—can be reduced to the minimum?
Letters to Malcolm, ch. 7
Nature is by human (and probably by Divine) standards partly good and partly evil. We Christians believe that she has been corrupted. But the same tang or flavour runs through both her corruptions and her excellences. Everything is in character. . . . The evils we see in Nature are, so to speak, the evils proper to this Nature. Her very character decreed that if she were corrupted the corruption would take this form and not another. The horrors of parasitism and the glories of motherhood are good and evil worked out of the same basic theme or idea.
Miracles, ch. 9
If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lessons you had already decided to learn; this is only another way of saying that nature does not teach. The tendency to take her as a teacher is obviously very easily grafted on to the experience we call ‘love of nature’. But it is only a graft. While we are actually subjected to them, the ‘moods’ and ‘spirits’ of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, ‘Look. Listen. Attend.’ . . .
A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy.
The Four Loves, ch. 2
Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. I do not see how the ‘fear’ of God could have ever meant to me anything but the lowest prudential efforts to be safe, if I had never seen certain ominous ravines and unapproachable crags.
The Four Loves, ch. 2
Say your prayers in a garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be overwhelmed and, after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you.
The Four Loves, ch. 2
We may find it difficult to formulate a human right of tormenting beasts in terms which would not equally imply an angelic right for tormenting men. And we may feel that though objective superiority is rightly claimed for man, yet that very superiority ought partly to consist in not behaving like a vivisector—that we ought to prove ourselves better than the beasts precisely by the fact of acknowledging duties to them which they do not acknowledge to us.
‘Vivisection’, God in the Dock
Once the old Christian idea of a total difference in kind between man and beast has been abandoned, then no argument for experiments on animals can be found which is not also an argument for experiments on inferior men. If we cut up beasts because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons. Indeed, experiments on men have already begun.
‘Vivisection’, God in the Dock
Man with dog closes a gap in the universe.
The Four Loves, ch. 3
Nature has that in her which compels us to invent giants.
‘On Stories’, Of Other Worlds
[St Athanasius’s] approach to the Miracles is badly needed today, for it is the final answer to those who object to them as ‘arbitrary and meaningless violations of the laws of Nature’. They are here shown to be rather the retelling in capital letters of the same message which Nature writes in her crabbed cursive hand; the very operations one would expect of Him who was so full of life that when He wished to die He had to ‘borrow death from others’.
Introduction to St Athanasius’s The Incarnation of the Word of God,