On Nature and God
Part 2, Atheism, Paganism, and Faith
Today a follow up reflection on the Maurice Blondel quote I shared yesterday:
To reach man, God must go through all of nature and offer Himself to him under the most brute of material species. To reach God, man must go through all of nature and find Him under the veil where He hides Himself only to be accessible. Thus the whole natural order comes between God and man as a bond and as an obstacle, as a necessary means of union and as a necessary means of distinction.
As I pondered this quote in the reflections I shared in the last post, I imagined how our seeking God through the scrim of nature can get stuck on either side, and how that "getting stuck" leads to either atheism or paganism, unbelief or idolatry.
Let me explain.
As Blondel describes, we must find God "under the veil" of nature. God is speaking to us through nature, the heavens declare the glory of God, but we can fail to hear or see Him. Coming from God's direction toward us, God's communication gets "hung up" in nature, diffused and refracted, and never penetrates all the way to us. We behold nature, but do not see God shining thorough it.
When this happens we experience atheism, or more properly, materialism. We experience nature as mute and silent, as inert "stuff." Nature is experienced as disenchanted, evacuated of any sacred character. Our only relationship to nature is "scientific" and "factual."
So, if atheism is God's communication getting "stuck," "blocked," or "dissipated" by nature in its movement toward us, there's a related problem with our movement toward God getting "stuck" or "hung up" in nature. This is the temptation in paganism.
In this situation, the sacred character of nature is readily perceived and recognized. Nature is enchanted, suffused with spiritual meaning and potency. But if our movement toward God gets stuck or hung up there, in nature, we come to worship nature rather than God. We don't "push through" nature to seek the Creator. This leads to idolatry, worshiping creation over the Creator, which tends to manifest in a neopagan, bespoke, spiritual-but-not-religious posture.
To summarize, Blondel's quote made me wonder if there's a single dynamic at work that connects atheism, paganism, and faith. That dynamic concerns how the movement between God and humanity through nature can lead to one of three outcomes. First, if we fail to perceive God in and through nature, we end up with atheism, scientism, materialism, and disenchantment. God is "blocked" by nature and nothing sacred is perceived in or through the material world. We end up with unbelief, a dry "factual" experience of the cosmos. Second, we might perceive the sacred aspect of nature but fail to reach the Creator behind and beyond nature. This leads to a neopagan, spiritual-but-not religious posture. Instead of unbelief, we have idolatry. Lastly, we have faith, full and complete communication through nature from both sides. We experience the sacred through nature, we experience divine communication, we hear. And we, in response, penetrate through nature to express doxological recognition of the Creator.
Simply:
Atheism is God hidden in nature.
Paganism is God mistaken as nature.
Faith is God communicating through nature.
That's a great idea or interpretation. It really makes sense.
Here's something I wonder, though. Let's say one doesn't get stuck either way, that one perceives God shining through nature. Well nature is gorgeous and amazingly clever in how it works, and science has only make it clearer and clearer through centuries how clever nature's design is. So this makes God seem incredibly brilliant and truly a transcendent artist. But what's also clear in nature, at least in the part of nature that's alive as we observe it on planet earth, is that there's a desperate struggle for existence going on. Only the fittest survive, and many individual beings capable of suffering are forced to give their lives, whether they choose to or not, so that others might thrive. So if we see a brilliant God through nature's design and an artistic God through nature's beauty, what kind of God do we see though nature's red-in-tooth-and-claw evolutionary process?
Question? Is feeling closeness to God in a particular "place" idolatry? I think about Celtic "Thin Places." I have a few places that feel sacred.