THE BOOK OF NATURE The Book of Nature is a religious and philosophical concept originating in the Latin Middle Ages which views nature as a book to be read for knowledge and understanding. There also was a book written by Konrad of Megenberg in the 1300s with the original German title of Buch der Natur. Early theologians believed the Book of Nature was a source of Gods revelation to mankind: when read alongside sacred scripture, the book of nature and the study of Gods creations would lead to a knowledge of God himself. The concept corresponds to the early Greek philosophical belief that man, as part of a coherent universe, is capable of understanding the design of the natural world through reason. The concept is frequently deployed by philosophers, theologians, and scholars. From the earliest times in known civilizations, events in the natural world were expressed through a collection of stories concerning everyday life. In ancient times, a mortal world existed alongside an upper world of spirits and gods acting through nature to create a unified and intersecting moral and natural cosmos. Humans, living in a world that was acted upon by free acting and conspiring gods of nature, attempted to understand their world and the actions of the divine by observing and correctly interpreting natural phenomena, such as the motion and position of stars and planets. Efforts to interpret and understand divine intentions led mortals to believe that intervention and influence over godly acts was possible—either through religious persuasion, such as prayer or gifts, or through magic, which depended on sorcery and the manipulation of nature in order to bend the will of the gods. Knowing divine intentions and anticipating divine actions through the manipulation of the natural world was believed achievable and the most effective approach. Thus, mankind had a reason to know nature. Around the sixth century BC, man’s relationship with the deities and nature began to change. Greek philosophers no longer viewed natural phenomena as the result of free acting, omnipotent gods. Rather, natural forces resided within nature, which was an integral part of a created world, and appeared under certain conditions that had little to do with the manipulative tendencies of personal deities. Furthermore, the Greeks believed that natural phenomena occurred by “necessity” through intersecting chains of “cause” and “effect.” Greek philosophers, however, lacked a technical vocabulary to express such abstract concepts as “necessity” or “cause” and consequently co-opted words available in the Greek language to refer metaphorically to the new philosophy of nature. Accordingly, the Greeks conceptualized the natural world in more specific terms that aligned with a new philosophy that viewed nature as immanent in which natural phenomena occurred by necessity. The Greek concept of nature, metaphorically expressed in the Book of Nature, gave birth to three philosophical traditions that became the wellspring for natural philosophy and early scientific thinking. Among the three traditions inspired by Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras, the Aristotelian corpus became a pervasive force in natural philosophy until it was challenged in early modern times. Natural philosophy, which encompassed a body of work whose purpose was to describe and explain the natural world, derived its foremost authority from Aristotle, who viewed natural philosophy as a doctrine intended to explain natural events in terms of readily understood causes. In contrast, Aristotle considered the purely abstract mathematical constructs by Plato and Pythagoras inadequate for knowing the natural world because of their inability to provide causal explanations. Aristotle reasoned that knowledge of natural phenomena was derived by abstraction from a sensory awareness of the natural world—in short, knowledge was obtained through sensory experience. A world constructed by abstract ideas alone could not exist. Furthermore, the structures inherent in nature are revealed through this process of abstraction, which may result in metaphysical principles that can be used to explain a variety of natural phenomena, including their causes and effects. Events that have no identifiable cause happen by chance and reside outside the boundaries of natural philosophy. The search for causal explanations became a dominant focus in natural philosophy whose origins lay in the Book of Nature as conceived by the earliest Greek philosophers. Scholars, natural philosophers, emerging naturalists, and other readers of the new Book of Nature enthusiastically renewed their investigation of the natural world. Alongside sacred Scripture, the Book of Nature also became a font of divine revelation and a source of knowledge of God. This also implied that for mankind, nature itself became a new authority concerning the divine. There now existed two ways of knowing God—two texts, or two books—sacred Scripture and the Book of Nature, and two separate authorities, which was disquieting to many contemporary observers. Which textual authority took precedence? How would inconsistencies between the two texts be resolved? Who would mediate between the two books and exercise final interpretive authority? As Harrison points out, the exegesis of the Book of Nature became a critical concern, especially to the Church. Religious indifference to the material world, which had survived for centuries, came to an end by the thirteenth century. Interest in nature by Church Fathers would transform the study of nature into a theological enterprise. The Book of Nature became a bestseller among clerics and theologians anxious for its knowledge in their search for divine truth and concern for preserving and strengthening the authority of the Church in all matters ecclesiastical, which now included the Book of Nature. Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Nature
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 04:24:47 +0000
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