John Milbank
Is Nature all inclusive? From the perspective of a ‘higher naturalism’ one can argue that that is indeed so. Nature is guided by the psychic, but the soul is itself ‘born’ and so natural. The human power to transcend and alter nature is still a heightening of the transformative capacity of nature herself. The ‘Copernican’ turn to the priority of the human and the finite, conceals an aporia as to whether nature is within us or we are within nature, besides suppressing the opening to the infinite of our natural understanding and language. This was grasped by Schelling, who synthesised naturalism and human-focused Idealism via a Trinitarian Ontology that conceived the Absolute itself as an infinite and instantaneous ‘natural’ emergence of the expressive ideal in which all creatures participate in various degrees. Through an appreciative critique of Raymund Ruyer it can be seen that the natural oscillation between potential, expression and synthesis requires such a Trinitarian account of transcendence, if an arbitrary bias is not to be given to one of the three. All this concurs with the ultimacy of ‘field’ rather than mechanism, which modern science discloses but will not admit, as Rupert Sheldrake has argued. Art belongs to nature and is only sundered from it thanks to what theology takes to be a cosmic lapse. Finally, God himself as ‘creating and created’ for Eriugena belongs within nature and the stillness of supernatural ‘being’ around which Creatures besides the Creator revolve, is merely co-ultimate with nature.