Nature and Human Nature

Spending a week in the mountains of Colorado brings front and center the beauty and power of nature.  Craggy mountains, wheeling hummingbirds, shockingly bright yellow stars, burbling mountain streams.  During the week I also had the good fortune to read some of Robert Spaemann's Essays in Anthropology, his effort to locate man in nature, and to understand nature and man together.

Spaemann's basic point is that nature must be understood in terms of man, its pinnacle, rather than from below.  This "anthropomorphic" understanding of man, anathema to scientism, shows nature in a starkly different light than the "passive material open to manipulation" that scientism sees.

Nature has a telos, says Spaemann, an anticipation toward an end it has not yet reached, a goal toward which it strives and yearns.  What is that end?  Spaemann quotes Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle:

The ultimate end of the motion of all being . . . is 'the attainment of a divine likeness' (quoting Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, Book III, 22).  That thought, too, can already be found in Aristotle.  Methexis, 'participation in the eternal and divine,' is the end towards which all things strive, that for the sake of which they do what their nature enables them to do." (quoting Aristotle, De Anima 415b).

Yet because humans alone are able to construe this end as particularly their own, the following applies:  'man is the end of all generation'. (Aquinas, Ibid.)  Only insofar as he transcends nature does the human being recover it.  Only in human beings does what nature really is intrinsically manifest itself.  Why?  Because only in him does nature's purposive structure become free of ambiguity and appear as both free will and the free recognition of a foundation and end he did not posit himself.

Spaemann, Essays in Anthropology, 16.

At the stunning Maroon Bells, to which one travels on a bus in order to reduce human impact, a sign on one of the fourteener's warns potential climbers, "You take care, for the mountain does not care."   Ellen and I went on a hike with a young naturalist, Kyle, who knew the answers to all of our questions and was passionate in his concern for the ecosystem.  I thought and said, "Nature may not care about man, but Kyle, you certainly care about nature!"  In terms of the passage above quoted, and the sign that I read, I thought that the sign more accurately might read, "I care, but I have no hands or arms to act.  I rely on your your arms and legs, your care, climber!"

If nature finds its end in the human being, nature's "highest peak," can't it also be said that man finds his end in caring for nature as his trust, and yearns for his own proper caretaker, the Divinity?  Our telos, our destiny is a divine one: To care, and to yearn for divine caring, to love and to yearn for divine love.