The Royal Road to Harmony, Post 11

Prince Charles, who will one day sit on the throne of the United Kingdom, is the author of the book I am investigating in this ongoing series of posts. Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World is the book's title, and its theme is that we, all of us, must quickly recover humankind's lost feeling of connectedness to nature. If we don't restore our erstwhile harmony with nature, environmental disaster looms. We need to get back in balance.

Harmony and balance, yes — but how did we ever get out of harmony with nature in the first place? Isn't it quite unnatural for us to have done so? Charles writes:

There are many factors that have shaped the modern Western attitude to Nature, but if I were to put my finger on the biggest ones, I would point to three: the fascinating changes in human perception caused by the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, the impact on our outlook of the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century and the deliberate demolition job carried out on traditional culture by what became known as ‘Modernism’ in the twentieth century.

The Scientific Revolution and Its Legacy

Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). who
figured out how the planets
travel around the sun. 

The seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution still has us in its thrall. That transformation, Prince Charles writes,
'established the authority of a mechanistic approach to thinking'.

Nature, previously understood as something alive and possessed of an inner spontaneity, was now a machine. After the discoveries of Johannes Kepler (left), we knew the planets revolved around the sun in paths that we could now compute. We would one day use similar computations to send a man to the moon.

How powerful we were becoming ... and it all began with a new mode of thinking that reduced all things, planetary or otherwise, to systems in which every whole exactly equals the sum of its parts.

Once we decided the world was such a reducible system, all we had to do was analyze everything down to its tiniest parts and then discover the laws by which those infinitesimal parts behave.

Fast forward to the early twentieth century. Albert Einstein discovers the Laws of Relativity which mean that nothing whatsoever can travel faster than light.

Fast forward again to the very week in which this blog post is being written. Scientists in Europe have reported that their experiments with tiny particles called neutrinos seem to have revealed that these particles can in fact exceed light speed.

Science is marvelous ... but there is a greater depth to reality than science can yet plumb.

Yet, per Prince Charles, the ongoing legacy of the Scientific Revolution, with its insistence on reductionism, 'persuades us now to see the whole of the world as one of cold and separated utility'.

Aquinas's 'Eternal Law' and Dylan Thomas's 'Green Fuse That Drives the Flower'

In the thirteenth century, Prince Charles points out, Thomas Aquinas had a completely different point of view. Aquinas taught that

... the Creator was not separate from His creation. Instead, divinity was considered to be innate in the world and in us. The natural world itself was an expression of this sacred presence and in such a created unity, humanity had an active role as participant ... religion and science, mind and matter [were] all part of one living, conscious whole.

That Aquinan point of view, Charles says, is echoed in the Qu'ran of Islam, in Taoism in China, in the Vedic tradition of India, and in Stoic philosophy in ancient Greece. All have said that the natural world cannot be turned into a mere thing to be manipulated for Man's own advancement. To do so separates Man from Nature, and in so doing separates Man from God.

In this statue that adorns the Charles Bridge in Prague, Czech Republic,
the Virgin Mary with Christ Child in the center receives the
book of 'natural theology' from St. Thomas Aquinas at the right. Aquinas was
a Dominican whose order was founded by St. Dominic,
depicted on the other side of the Madonna.

Aquinas spoke of his core principle as that of Eternal Law. We've now mostly forgotten it.

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Yet the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (left) called the divine principle at the heart of the unfolding universe ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower' — so writes the Prince of Wales. The 'green fuse' has not been wholly forgotten, thank goodness.

The thought of Aquinas emphasized Creation's unity, putting mankind in a position of humility and recoverable harmony with nature. Yet that notion began to come apart in the very century in which Aquinas (1225 - 1274) lived and died. Charles writes:

At the heart of things, within a very short space of time, that all-important, timeless principle of participation in the ‘being’ of things was eliminated from mainstream Western thinking.

By the seventeenth century, seeds of thought planted in Aquinas's time four centuries before had sprouted into a mechanistic worldview that treated the material universe as inert, purposeless, manipulable raw material. Once the Scientific Revolution was in place we could, as instruments of God's will separable from the natural world, begin to master the universe.

In the eighteenth century in Britain came the inevitable result: the Industrial Revolution. (Our Industrial Revolution in the U.S. followed in the nineteenth century.)

Today, during the Great Recession, we are desperately trying to figure out why the various industries that produce stuff for us to buy, thus driving economic growth, aren't generating enough jobs. They used to, but no more. Those without jobs and wages cannot buy stuff. That's bad. Our economy is out of balance.

Yet few if any voices are raised to assert that the imbalance in the ecology of how we treat Mother Nature must be fixed if we are ever to get our economy back in balance and our people back to work.