NATURE AND GRACE

NATURE

Grace builds upon nature, as Thomas Aquinas teaches us, and we can draw a few conclusions from that dictum. The first is that if the natural has been denied or depraved or reduced to rubble, the evangelist must set about rebuilding that foundation. You can preach to a heroin addict, but you must at the same time be re-forming him, so that he will be addicted to heroin no more, and will instead be an ordinary human being who can breathe freely with a sound mind and a sound body.

The second is that nature is our ally. She is not omnipotent. Tolkien’s figure of uncorrupted nature, Tom Bombadil, though he is not tempted by the rings of power, is not sufficient to destroy the evil. But we do not require that nature be omnipotent. We require only that she be herself.

Consider how many of our political conflicts are predicated upon denying nature, or upon embracing the unnatural and perverse. Any farmer’s kid could tell you the difference between a cow and a bull, but we pretend for political purposes that it is all a matter of perception. Our grandparents did not have ultrasounds, so they wondered about the sex of a child before it was born. We are more sophisticated now. We wonder about it after.

What we say about nature we may say also about culture, by analogy. It is natural for human beings to dwell in a culture; it is natural and good for them to revere their forebears, to remember the deeds of heroes, to cherish works of beauty and truth that have been bequeathed to them, to order their days by feasts that elevate them above their own time, and to bend their knees together in prayer to God who has blessed them.

In man there is no nature without culture, and all cultures build upon human nature. Any division between them is factitious: as if you could talk about the nature of the wolf as separate from the pack.

Now, we are fallen creatures, and our cultures also are fallen; and in our time, we risk falling beneath fallenness itself, falling into the void. Never in the history of man has there been a people without culture, without any strong memory of what has come before them: without folk art and music, without the common lived experience of poetry, without heroes that everyone honors, and without the communion of worship.