Nature

2. Nature

Our word Nature comes from the Latin noun ‘natura’, which itself comes from the verb nascor, natus sum meaning ‘to be born’. Therefore the word natura has the primary meaning of ‘birth’. Its secondary meaning is ‘nature’, both as the order and constitution of the universe and as the natural disposition or character of a person, creature or thing. In other words, ‘nature’ has both an outer and an inner meaning, describing both what is outside us and what is within.

Behind this dual idea, however, we must not lose sight of the concept of birth. Nature is the birth of things into manifestation, and those things—as the Roman poet Lucretius pointed out in his De Rerum Natura—can neither come from nothing nor return to nothing. At the start of the poem Lucretius celebrates genetrix…Venus (‘mother Venus’) as the birth genius by which every thing that is to live is able to be formed (concipitur).

Lucretius stresses the cyclical path of Nature, which ‘resolves all things back into their elements/And never reduces anything to nothing.’ In other words, everything must both die and continue. Socrates also emphasizes this point in Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, where he attempts to prove the immortality of the soul. Not only does death happen to the living, he argues, but life happens to the dead.

Nature is a living word in the profoundest sense, whereas the word that has replaced it—‘environment’—is a dead word, as well as a dangerous one. Whereas the connection between nature outside us and nature within us (our own human nature) is intrinsic to the original word ‘nature’, the usurper word ‘environment’ severs that connection, for it purports to be nature outside us alone. (And what is the connection between outer nature and inner nature but meaning itself?) Under the banner of ‘environment’, therefore, we believe we can harm nature without harming ourselves. Under the aegis of ‘nature’, on the other hand, any violation of the natural world is a violation of our selves. The word ‘nature’, moreover, speaks to the cycles or spirals of life and death that keep our universe invigorated. Today’s watchword, which is ‘growth, growth, growth’, takes no account of these cycles but assumes, in contradiction of Nature, that growth is linear and endless.

Honouring the cycles of generation (through Venus) means honouring our own origins, both of blood and of spirit. Albany’s admonition to Goneril in King Lear warns of the catastrophic consequences of behaving as if we were somehow absolved from the ties of Nature:

‘That Nature, which contemns it Origin
Cannot be bordered certain in it self;
She that her self will sliver and disbranch
From her Material Sap perforce must wither
And come to Deadly Use.’
(4.2.32-36)

Within Nature is contained the mystery of both our appearance and disappearance in the world. She is the symbol that binds us to the unfolding of life.