The Protestant Era by Paul Tillich II. Religion and Culture
Chapter 7: Nature and Sacrament
IV. Ways of Interpreting Nature
The concept of nature has a number of very different meanings, depending upon what it is contrasted with. The formal concept of nature contrasts the natural with everything nonnatural (the unnatural or the supernatural). It therefore also includes soul and mind as results of natural growth. The material concept of nature contrasts the natural with everything in which freedom is involved. The concepts antithetical to the material concept of nature are spirit and history.
Theology places a negative value-judgment upon the natural in the formal sense, which is
viewed as corrupted, sinful, and fallen, in opposition to the supernatural, which is the redeemed, the restored, the perfected. In this study we are concerned with nature in its material sense as the bearer of sacramental meaning and power.
The conception of nature that we find earliest in history, so far as we have knowledge of it, is the magical-sacramental conception. According to it, everything is filled with a sort of material energy which gives to things and to parts of things, even to the body and the parts of the body, a sacral power. The word "sacral" in this context, however, does not signify something in
opposition to the profane. Indeed, at this phase of cultural development the distinction between the sacred and the profane is not a fundamental one. The natural power in things is, at the same time, their sacral power, and any commerce with them is always both ritualistic and utilitarian.
One could characterize this primitive view as pan-sacramentalism, but, if this is done, one must remember that what we today call the "sacramental" is not thought of by the primitive mind as a separate or special religious reality. The primitive man holds to a magical interpretation of
nature; the technical control of reality is supposed to be effected without reference to what we call natural law." The control of reality is accomplished through the operations of magical energy without using the circuitous methods of rational manipulation. It should be pointed out, however, that there has never been a merely magical relation to nature. The technical necessities somehow always assert themselves and create certain areas in which rational objectivity
prevails.
When this occurs, generally the magical view of nature disappears and is replaced by the rational-objective attitude. Only when the latter view of nature is reached may we speak of
"things" in the strict sense, that is, as entities completely conditioned. Mathematical physics and the technical control of nature based on it are the most impressive and the most consistent
expressions of this view. Nature is brought under control, objectified, and stripped of its qualities. No sacramental conception can find a root in this soil. Nature cannot become the bearer of a transcendent power, it can at most be an image of it, a witness to it. But the rational- objective view of nature is also never fully applicable. The qualities of things resist any attempt at their complete eradication. Even in the structure of the atom there is something primordial, a Gestalt, an intrinsic power. And the highly complicated machines created by the applied
sciences are, in many ways, analogous to the basic organic forms; they can gain a new magical power over the minds of those who serve them.
The technical attitude toward nature and its merely quantitative analysis have been opposed since the times of Greek philosophy by the vitalistic interpretation of nature. Here an immediate power of being is attributed to things. Everything, the whole world-process, is envisaged as an expression of life: élan vital, "the vital urge," the "creative power of life," and the like are the characteristic phrases used. The modern Gestalt theory has given unexpected scientific
confirmation to these ideas. But vitalistic philosophy goes beyond this justified protest. Even the mind is subjected to the principle of unbroken vitality and is branded as a sort of disease and fought against as a degenerate form of life. In this vitalistic philosophy nature recovers its
power again, but it is a power without meaning; and power without meaning is ultimately impotent. Sacramental trends on the basis of the "vitalistic" philosophy of nature can be seen in the attempts of some semipagan movements to re-establish the symbolism of the religions of nature by using elements and forms of the natural world (fire, water, light) as powerful in themselves without relationship to spirit and transcendence.
The symbolic-romantic interpretation of nature attempts to give back to nature its qualitative character, its depth, its meaningfulness, by interpreting nature as a symbol of the spirit. The power of things is the power of soul or spirit in them. It is clear that this provides rich
possibilities for the symbolic interpretation of sacraments. In the place of pan-sacramentalism we have here a pan-symbolism. But it should be pointed out that this view is very little aware of the real structure of nature. It gives us the creations of an arbitrary imagination. The
quantitative, calculable "nature" of physics is certainly not overcome by it; only subjective imagination has been added. For this reason the symbolic-romantic interpretation of nature
cannot provide a solid basis for a new theory of the sacrament.
The unsatisfactory character of all the interpretations of nature mentioned thus far drives us to a view which we may call "new realism," a term in which elements of the medieval and of the modern use of the word "realism" are united. Thinkers like Schelling and Goethe and Rilke in our day, have proposed this way of penetrating into the depth of nature. We must follow them with the means of our present knowledge of nature and man. The power and meaning of nature must be sought within and through its objective physical structures. Power and physical
character, meaning and objective structure, are not separated in nature. We cannot accept the word of mathematical science as the last word about nature, although we do not thereby deny that it is the first word.
The power of nature must be found in a sphere prior to the cleavage of our world into subjectivity and objectivity. Life originates on a level which is "deeper" than the Cartesian duality of cogitatio and extensio ("thought" and "extension"). It was the wish of the vitalistic interpretation of nature to reach this level. But a philosophy of life that denies intellect and spirit has deprived life of its strongest power and its ultimate meaning, as even Nietzche
realized when he said: "Spirit is life which itself cutteth into life." The difficult problem for all attempts to reach the uncleft level of reality is the necessity to penetrate into something
"nonsubjective" with categories of a subjective mind and into something "nonobjective" with categories of objective reality. This necessarily falsifies the pictures, which can be corrected only by a strict understanding of the indirect, symbolic character of terms used for the
description of the power and meaning of nature.
A realistic interpretation of nature such as we have outlined would be able to provide the foundation of a new Protestant theory of sacraments. But this alone is not sufficient. No sacrament, in Christian thought, can be understood apart from its relation to the new being in Jesus as the Christ; and, consequently, no sacrament can be understood apart from history.
Nature, in being adapted to sacramental use in Christianity, and especially in Protestantism, must be understood historically and in the context of the history of salvation. Obviously, there are historical elements in nature. Nature participates in historical time, that is, in the time that proceeds in an unrepeatable and irreversible way. The structure of the cosmos, of atoms, of stars, of the biological substance, is changing in an unknown direction. Although the historical element in nature is balanced with the nonhistorical one (the "circle of genesis and decay," the self-repetition in nature, the circular movement which dominated Greek thinking), Christianity, following old mythological visions in Persia and Israel, decided for the historical element and included nature in the history of salvation.
If nature is interpreted in this realistic and, at the same time, historical way, natural objects can become bearers of transcendent power and meaning, they can become sacramental elements.
The Protestant criticism against any direct magical or mythological use of nature as the bearer of the holy is heeded. Nature, by being brought into the context of the history of salvation, is
liberated from its ambiguity. Its demonic quality is conquered in the new being in Christ.
Nature is not the enemy of salvation; it does not have to be controlled in scientific, technical, and moral terms or be deprived of any inherent power, in order to serve the "Kingdom of God,"
as Calvinistic thinking is inclined to believe; rather, nature is a bearer and an object of salvation.
This is the basis for a Protestant rediscovery of the sacramental sphere.