After Darwin (part 1)

Hildegard on the embrace of nature

Let us understand, once and for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating the cosmic process, and still less in running away from it, but in combating it.

— T. H. Huxley, “Evolution and Ethics,” 1893

With this declaration, “Darwin’s Bulldog” lays his finger on a defining characteristic of the modern scientific worldview. As he explains in another essay,

From the point of view of the moralist the animal world is about on a level of a gladiator’s show. The creatures are fairly well treated, and set to fight – whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day. The spectator has no need to turn his thumbs down, as no quarter is given.

[…]

On the contrary, the ideal of the ethical man is to limit his freedom of action to a sphere in which he does not interfere with the freedom of others; he seeks the common weal as much as his own; and, indeed, as an essential part of his own welfare. Peace is both end and means with him; and he founds his life on a more or less complete self-restraint, which is the negation of the unlimited struggle for existence. He tries to escape from his place in the animal kingdom, founded on the free development of the principle of non-moral evolution, and to establish a kingdom of Man, governed upon the principle of moral evolution. For society not only has a moral end, but in its perfection, social life, is embodied morality.

In these and other essays, Huxley persistently strives to alert his public to the radical shift that has occurred in the overall gestalt of the natural world as presented by modern science, especially after the triumph of Darwin. For Huxley, Nature can no longer be looked to as a bearer of meaning: those who maintain the Romantic ideal of the cosmos as guide to human action end up as cruelly inhuman “social darwinists,” Huxley’s chief philosophical opponents in the later years of his life.

Although the “bulldog” was adept at rhetorically downplaying this point, his critics were already aware of the fragility of his solution. A reviewer of “Evolution and Ethics,” for example, magnanimously deigns to “spare our readers any further discussions as to the ultimate philosophical consequences of adopting such a positive, a priori, rationalistic belief in a Moral Law as Professor Huxley […] unicompromisingly professes.” The events of the last century have made this fragility dramatically apparent. The collapse of rationalism has transformed the “combat against nature” into an open-ended pursuit of absolute individual autonomy, tending towards the “war of all against all” that Huxley was so anxious to avoid. And the victory of technological civilization over the limits of nature has already caused palpable and irreversible damage to many natural systems, making the indefinite maintenance of these achievements unsustainable.

At the same time, the intervening years of scientific investigation place us in a much better position than Darwin or Huxley to evaluate what kind of world we inhabit. A variety of findings from disparate disciplines seem to converge on a picture in stark contrast to 19th-century materialism, one that remains open to the kind of symbolic and metaphysical reflection that provided the shared basis for moral life in pre-modern civilizations. The time feels ripe for revisiting these discarded cosmologies, to ask what light they can shed on our own empirical discoveries, and to see how these discoveries may resolve tensions latent in these older models, providing solutions they could only blindly reach for.

In the next few posts, I am going to translate and comment on some texts that represent the overall gestalt of nature for medieval Europe. All of these selections make explicit reference to the theme of cooperation and mutual service in nature, and show how the medievals viewed this tendency towards the “common good” as a fundamental principle of the cosmos. In my comments, I will have two complementary questions in mind: Does this thesis help me make sense of contemporary physics and biology? And to what extent does it need to be modified or nuanced by the results of those sciences?

---

The first text is taken from Hildegard von Bingen’s work of allegorical moral theology, the Liber vite meritorum. For a concise summary of Hildegard’s life and thought, see Pope Benedict XVI’s letter “Lux sui populi,” by which he conferred on her the title of Doctor of the Church, augmenting her theological authority for all Catholics. This book is a series of allegorical visions, which include didactic dialogs between personifications of virtues and of their opposed vices. In one of these exchanges (Book I, lines 188-222), the virtue of Mercy makes an explicit appeal to nature as a moral guide, in complete contrast to the whole modern cosmovision synthesized by Huxley:

Plants with their flowers present their aroma to other plants, and each stone transmits its sweat to other stones, and every creature meets its own kind with an embrace. All creatures also minister to man, and in that service they gladly do good to man. You, however, do not deserve to have the form of a human, but only the most savage and merciless look appears in you, and you are bitterest smoke in the darkness of malignity. 

But I am in the air and in the dew, and am the sweetest grass in all greenness, and my insides are filled with acts of service towards everyone. For I was present in that Fiat by which all creatures came forth, which serve man; but you were excluded there. For with my eyes I descry everything necessary for life, and join myself to that, and gather up all the broken to health, because I am the ointment of all ills; and because my words are right, while you are bitter smoke.¹Hildegard seems to view flowers as a means of inter-plant communication, and even sees rocks as intimately interconnected — by what we would characterize as the dissolved minerals diffusing from one place to another. Her commitment to the relational character of rocks is particularly striking in light of her use just a line earlier of the adjective “stony” as a term of abuse against the individualistic vice. Even stones are more generous than the hard-hearted egoist!

These natural phenomena are traced back to the very origin of the cosmos in God. For Hildegard, the very existence of things results from an act of “mercy,” an overflow of divine generosity. In this picture, humans are indeed engaged in a war against the cosmic process — but only insofar as they are self-absorbed and exploitative.

Contemporary physics and biology provide avenues for fleshing out the relational character of both rocks and plants in much more astounding and intricate detail than was accessible to 12th-century naturalists. But we also need to take Darwin’s observations seriously, which seem to cast doubt on the universality of the principle that “every creature meets its own kind with an embrace.” Is there room for competition and violence in Hildegard’s scheme? How does she make sense of phenomena of predation, parasitism, etc. that were certainly known to her? I do not know the answers to these questions, but suspect it has something to do with the intuitions I explored in the first posts of this substack.

1. Herbe cum floribus suis aliis herbis odorem prebent, ac lapis
lapidi sudorem immittit, et omnis creatura noto suo am-
plexus ostendit. Omnes quoque creature homini mini-
strant, ac in illa ministratione homini bonum libenter
inferunt. Tu autem digna non es ut ullam formam homi-
nis habeas, sed tantum seuissimus uisus absque misericor-
dia in te apparet, et amarissimus fumus in nigredine
malignitatis es.

Sed ego in aere et rore, ac in omni uiriditate suauissi-
mum gramen sum, ac uiscera mea plena sunt unicuique
adiutorium exhibendo. Nam in illo Fiat affui quo omnes
creature processerunt, que homini seruiunt; sed tu ibi
exclusa es. Oculis enim meis omnia necessaria inspicio, et
me illis coniungo, ac omnes fractos ad sanitatem colligo,
quoniam unguentum dolorum sum; et quoniam loquele
mee recte sunt, ubi tu amarus fumus es.

Corpus christianorum continuatio mediaevalis 90, lines 206-222.