Dr. Lance H. Gracy

Historical scholarship is clear there was an increase in technological production—particularly in agriculture—in the Middle Ages, but scholars such as Harrison and Aberth have challenged—and have, I would argue, successfully undercut—the formerly pervasive opinion that such an increase heralded an “estrangement” between humans and nature to the end of man becoming an exploiter of nature. Aberth in particular challenges the idea by arguing that such a view misses crucial historical observations revealing an opposing trend. For instance, while there was an intensification of agriculture in the Middle Ages—and so an intensification of methods of agricultural production—this was made possible by a “greater involvement on an individual level with the land, rather than an alienation from it.” [1] Furthermore, Harrison neatly tackles and dissuades one from presumptions held not only about the medieval view of nature, [2] but also about what “dominion” in biblical context means. [3] And others, such as Kiel, have undermined the mythos of medieval Christianity’s so-called “ecological guilt” through his historical analysis of the great extent to which pagan empires degraded the environment. [4] In short, to point to the increase in technological production in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, or to the biblical culture of the Middle Ages, as evidence against the medieval view of nature, is misplaced because, for one, medieval technology was not the sort of technology causing a separation or estrangement between man and nature [5]; and because, secondly, it was not properly a medieval or biblical attitude that brought about this separation or estrangement, but more of an ensuing “plague-attitude” that shifted humanity’s view of nature, technology, and production. Thus, according to Aberth,

It is far more likely that the real shift in environmental attitudes only came during the later medieval period, when ecological catastrophes such as the Black Death of 1348-49 did indeed necessitate drastic reconfigurations in human lifestyles…[6]

As it is even with us today, the “real shift” in the environmental attitude of a people is formed through the ecological catastrophe they endure as well as by the ensuing ideology that arises from that catastrophe to serve—for good or for ill—the wants or needs of a people. The medieval view of nature in Bonaventure’s day, as well as prior to his day, represents an environmental attitude that had not reached the pitch of a separation or estrangement of man from nature by technological production—regardless of whether we deem this prototype to modernity “anthropocentric” or not. [7] Therefore, insofar as controversy over the roots of ecological crisis are concerned, I would argue ecological crisis is due to personal causes as well as to natural or preternatural events. [8] And I think this an important argument for philosophers to contend with if they in any way desire to account for the macrocosmic-ideological factors of environmental degradation. Moreover, it is an important theoretical outlook for examining the impetus behind the rise of modern science—of why so many Schoolmen concerned themselves with, for example, studying the nature of poison and “pestilential air,” which to them seemed to consist of both natural, preternatural and personal causes. [9] In any case, the originating cause of ecological crisis cannot be reduced to some inherent or necessary tendency in the (Judeo)-Christian tradition to “dominate” nature.

St. Francis, “Lady Nature,” and Cistercian Reform

Alain of Lille’s work on the allegorical figure of “Lady Nature” in his De Planctu Naturae (“The Complaint of Nature”) and the Cistercian reforms that preceded the advent of the Franciscan religion are clear indicators for understanding where the medieval theoria of nature fits within more contemporary perspectives. Alain sees in Nature something pristine—a primeval beauty undefiled as “she descends from the heavens in her chariot.” [10] But Nature is not fantasized as some ever-subsisting purity. Like “Lady Philosophy” in The Consolation of Philosophy of St. Boethius, who had her robes torn by violent men insisting on taking only those parts of Philosophy to suit their fancy, the author is ordered to listen to Nature’s diatribe on the “lustful and perverse disposition” of the human race acting irregularly. [11] The complaint of Lady Nature is a rather regretful vision concerning the abuses of nature as contrasted from the ideal of nature, the latter of which consists of “the parliament of the living creation,” the book of Creation, a book in which all creation testifies to its Creator, but of which humankind is neglectful. [12] In its essential similitudes, the book of Creation tells of “the lark, like a high-souled musician,” who “offered the lyre of its throat, not with the artfulness of study but with the mastery of nature, as one most skilled in the lore of melody.” [13] It also tells of “[T]he horned owl, prophet of misery, [who] sang psalms of future deep sorrowing.” [14] Alain’s point is twofold: On one hand, nature in its essential constitution is what its Creator intended. On the other, mankind has degraded nature. And while Francis returns to the primeval essence or constitution of nature, to its prelapsarian core, not even Francis would say that nature’s potential to fall was thereby eradicated in the process of a primeval return. Hence, the medieval view of nature is one of balancing the twin-aspects of nature’s glorification with its objective potency to fall. And here the Bonaventurian understanding of nature resides. This understanding does not ipso facto turn man into a “dominator” of nature, but rather a mirror, a pursuer of its glorification and a conduit for its very intelligibility, who must handle it with special concern as it “bends” for his sake. If the elements, the air, the water, and all other natural beings were corrupt or discordant, medieval man was negatively affected. And so too, for all that, is modern man.

On the supposition that the medieval view of nature—as expressed in Bonaventure particularly—cannot be the culprit-influence of human estrangement from the natural world, there are nevertheless pronounced issues that need to be addressed with it. One issue concerns stratagems employed to try and discredit the medieval attitude or view of nature. Rather than attend that entire topic here, my focus will be on a specific area of environmental critique important for recovering or returning to the medieval view of nature, especially over and against the stratagems . For this, I think the status of animals and wildlife is the relevant topic, as it seems one of the most pronounced strategies to discredit the medieval view of nature is to associate Francis of Assisi with something altogether foreign to the medieval world instead of associating him with the attitude of medieval nature and culture in general. As Sorrell writes: “Lynn White’s claim that Francis was a pan-psychist heretic runs into many problems…No Catholic biographer, whether early or late, has seen Francis’s interpretation of the natural environment as unorthodox.” [15] Bonaventure affirms many times the “primeval innocence” and goodness of the compassion and natural affection of St. Francis for creatures, “which had such wonderful charm that it could bring savage animals into subjection and tame the beasts of the forest, training those which were tame already and claiming obedience from those which had rebelled against fallen mankind.” [16] However, can the basic medieval understanding of nature—which would see nothing in principle wrong with the art of hunting or of “taking nourishment from animals” [17]—find agreement with the “primeval innocence” of St. Francis? Let us consider it in what follows.

According to Sorrell, the Cistercian reform (1100s) and the ensuing Franciscan “revolution” are a testament to the twelfth and thirteen centuries as a high-point in the medieval understanding of nature. The Cistercians presupposed their life to be “in permanent contact with nature, and that the sites habitually chosen for Cistercian monasteries, in one of those lonely valleys dear to St. Bernard, had become integrated by him to the mystical life itself.” [18] The religious-mystical outlook of the Cistercians—of, for instance, “their delight in associating something observed in creation with pleasant and appropriate Biblical passages”—prompted deep considerations about nature. [19] One incident, relayed by Caesarius between 1220 and 1235—and so contemporary with St. Francis—conveys a kind of initial advancement of the view of nature with respect to the growing Franciscan movement. The monks considered it against divine will to keep birds for amusement, but storks were permitted to nest at the monasteries “because by them not only the monastery but all the places round are cleared of foul worms.” [20] This statement expresses part of the Franciscan ethos in The Constitutions of Narbonne, where Bonaventure stipulates that “No animal for the use of any brother or place shall be kept by the Order or by any person in the name of the Order, except for cats and certain types of birds for the purpose of removing garbage.” [21] Caesarius describes an incident when the Cistercian monks were laboring in the fields, observing the storks making ready to migrate:

…[W]hen they had marshalled their ranks for traveling abroad, that they might not be thought ungrateful for the hospitality granted them, they [the storks] sought out the brotherhood which at that moment was working in the fields, and flew round them with many hoarse cries and made them all wonder, not knowing what they wanted. And the prior said to them: ‘I suppose they are asking permission to go’; and raising his hand blessed them. At once, wonderful to say, with great cheerfulness they flew off together, making the monks feel ashamed, who think little of receiving or waiting for the blessing, when they set out for a journey. [22]

The ethos of this story is nearly indistinguishable from that of the Franciscans. However, the ethos is not to the end of mischaracterization: it is not sentimentalism, nor are its adherents reducible to a genius loci for warding off the “callous and irresponsible attitudes of the Dark Ages” or the “ascetic epidemic” where nature is regarded as suspect or cursed.[23] On the contrary, the ethos concerns, not natura as such, but a belief in the glorification of natura prevalent among many medievals: “the belief in a divine creation, organized according to a plan that is hierarchical and unchanging, with all parts having their established positions and dependent on divine will and action.” [24] In agreement with Sorrell, I think this is the fundamental basis, or the fundamental insight, of St. Francis’s conception of the natural world, and even if this fundamental basis expresses itself differently in Bonaventure, harmony remains. [25] Such a basis is the view Francis and Bonaventure, more prominently than virtually all others of their time, inaugurated during a momentous time in Europe. Moreover, it is not restricted to Francis only, but was undoubtedly prevalent in Bonaventure and prior to both. Perhaps then as Francis represents the beginning of a new perception on natural things, Bonaventure represents a “rational end” to this new perception, like a generation of father to son, just as a beginning already contains the end latent within itself. [26] But we must be clearer: What exactly does Bonaventure prescribe for the ethical treatment of nature, wildlife, and the like? Or better yet: What is the proper response to “the call of nature” as held alongside the ens creatum and the calling of the Most Actual Principle, or God?

No lover of nature and wisdom can reject the regressive side of nature—that of the corruption and alteration of nature. To realize the possibility of nature’s glorification means also recognizing its fallenness or its potential to fall because, after all, the glorification of nature makes sense only if nature needs perfection. For Bonaventure and Francis, a proper understanding of nature requires recognition of the corruption of nature—whether as a kind of theurgic phenomenon, of “how necromancers and witches can harness the power of the elements through their worship of the devil” [27] or as a natural phenomenon of alteration (the deficiencies or decays of nature, whether of human nature, sewage, poison, pestilence, etc.). If God knows every creature in the pure sublimity of its goodness, which He made, and if the rational creature desires a perfection of its nature (i.e., a desire-for the sublimity of its goodness as sourced in God), then a rejection of this desire-for subliminal goodness in the rational creature is tantamount to a derogation or deficiency in nature. But since this desire-for subliminal goodness involves proper uses of nature, rejection of the proper uses of nature constitutes a derogation or deficiency of nature, and even as the condition of fallenness applies to nature, still noble uses of nature are retained for the sake of glorification. [28] The proper or noble uses of nature then are worked according to both conditions, which includes not only general usefulness and the legality of that use, but what I would describe as flexible ethics under the nobility of philosophical art. Hence, St. Francis did not admonish the hunter for setting a trap; rather, he admonished the rabbit with tender affection for not being clever enough to avoid the trap. [29] In this example, Francis is indirectly approving of hunting (i.e., approving of the principle of the “catch” while not partaking in it himself), which is also to say that Francis is cognizant of the artisanal purpose of the hunter’s art as something in harmony with a fullness in nature as expressed in the being of the “game animal.” On another occasion, Francis expressed this flexible ethics by cursing a “vicious sow” that had killed a lamb. [30] Other accounts show Francis, in typical fashion, acting in opposition to the misuse of game and non-game animals. But the metaphysical understanding is this: intellective understanding partly seeks to extirpate the romantic allure of natura and partly seeks to retain that allure to the end of drawing the mind up into truth more vestigial than natural to lead the mind or soul into deeper things, like ecstatic knowledge. Generally, this means two things concerning the medieval view of nature:

• Respecting the naturality of things enough not to permit the possibility of a creature’s glorification to become a romantic presumption and overriding factor to dupe one into believing falsities; and
• Recognizing the possibility of a creature’s glorification, especially via the mechanical arts, as the rightful and legitimate way of (re)configuring the true romance of the ens creatum as sourced in the Divine Art and Divine Mind.

The truth of creatures may come at first out of nothing and into an unstable soul, but then that truth must be recovered from something in a stable soul. Bonaventure believed Francis’s experiences were intelligible and credible and that God had gifted Francis with a sublime action of faith, a pure world of divine signification living and breathing beyond worlds of brute matter; however, Bonaventure also knew that, regardless of the many stories circulating about Francis—some of which were fabricated—humanity in its wayfaring state is temporally compressed to return to a kind of natural knowledge or groundedness after lofty spiritual experience. A man or woman may have grand visions, piercing insights, and ecstatic encounters, but they cannot persist endlessly in ecstatic knowledge, lifted up in holy contemplation. One must “come back down to earth” while becoming not like a tree whose foundation is below, but rather like a human, set upon the earth but with their foundation above. The medieval view of nature in Bonaventure is one that accommodates a suspended middle between nature and grace. However poignant it may be to admit: the medieval view of nature requires no Thoreau-like escapade. It looks like the friar, having just prayed with the great architectural walls of a sacred imitation of nature, stepping out in simplicity to observe the marks and figures God has set upon Creation and holding those marks in memory as forms of everlasting enjoyment; it looks like man or woman in wonder at the primitive artifacts of God and the fundamental why of their existence: of fire, owl, cloud, and woods; [31] it looks like the gratitude of all peoples for the succor and sustenance of the animal: in both the tender affection felt for one’s fellow creature, and in the respectful recognition of the good hunter’s art; it looks like loving wisdom through what Leopold called “split-rail values.” [32] In short, it looks like purified affection so rightly ordered that it brings all creatures to the unassailable Rule of Wisdom: that knowledge be honored, truth be believed and assented to, and benevolence be desired. [33]

And yet, having said all that, the fullness of what lies under the senses is a difficult thing to understand, and is it not more difficult to understand the specific subjective threshold by which the mind is transferred to the nobility of a flexible ethics of use?

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[1] Aberth, Environmental History of the Middle Ages, 30.

[2] Cf. Peter Harrison, “Subduing the Earth: Genesis 1, Early Modern Science, and the Exploitation of Nature,” in The Journal of Religion, vol. 79, no. 1 (1999); 86-109. Harrison writes: “Nature, in this scheme of things, was to be known in order to determine its moral and spiritual meanings and not so that it might be materially exploited” (91). Earlier on, Harrison expresses one aspect of the semiotic disposition of nature (beasts) as that which signifies “the affections of the soul” and these affections were regarded by the patristics and others as “unruly impulses” (91). Any objection regarding whether this aspect of the semiotic constitution of nature is total should recognize the corresponding aspect of the figurae sacramentales in the New Creation of St. Francis. And as for where Bonaventure stands on this, his view is one of balance concerning the unrectified affection in animals and a prevailing reality of a rectified affection. As Dante indicates, Ovid captured the poetic ideal of this balance well: “As when Ovid says that Orpheus with his lyre made wild beasts tame and made trees and rocks approach him; which would say that the wise man with the instrument of his voice maketh cruel hearts divers tender and humble ; and moveth to his will such as have not the life of science and art; for they that have not the rational life are as good as stones” (Dante, Convivio, II.1.3).

[3] Ibid., 88. As Harrison citing Steffen writes: “[…] [W]hile it is true that one of the meanings of the word ‘dominion’ (rada) is ‘to tread down,’ what the term denotes in the Genesis context is ‘the ideal of just and peaceful governance.’ Dominion, he concludes, ‘is not a domination concept.’”

[4] Micah Kiel, Apocalyptic Ecology: The Book of Revelation, the Earth, and the Future (U.S.: Liturgical Press, 2017).

[5] Ibid., loc. cit. E.g., Aberth writes that technological breakthroughs in the Middle Ages came about through a “‘technological complex,’ whereby each individual innovation only became meaningful in the interdependent context of others, such as the rigid horse collar being used as part of a whole harnessing package that included the whippletree, traces, bridles, reins, and so on.”

[6] Ibid., loc. cit.

[7] Given the moderation Bonaventure held his friars to, which would have been seen as excessive by most medieval standards, it would be misplaced to dish-out charges of anthropocentric over-production to a religious order that encouraged its members to travel barefoot, on foot, with virtually nothing on their person, to acquire nothing on their travel, and to travel only when one is “of mature behavior and then with a prudent and trustworthy companion” (Cf. Constitutions, 5.1-9).

[8] This is contextual. I am referring to the Black Plague. And I am not suggesting that natural or preternatural events come about by impersonal causes. Indeed: what precisely was the cause of the Black Plague? My point is just that an understanding of the causal basis of ecological crisis must include consideration of historical events instead of only human ideas and traditions.

[9] Contaminated air and water were grave problems in medieval cities. Aberth records the following: “In 1460 in the Lyonnais region of France, an unspecified number of witches were tried on thirty counts of diabolism and sorcery, among which was that they received ‘powders made up by demons through wicked artifice, which they secretly sprinkled into food or drink and caused diverse and grave infirmities, which indeed frequently inflicted deadly and very long lasting diseases’” (73).

[10] Aberth, Environmental History of the Middle Ages, 42.

[11] Ibid., loc. cit. The opening complaint is about gender. Nature’s complaints about the human race concern “monstrous acts in its union of genders,” in which “some embrace only the masculine gender, some the feminine” while still others are of “heteroclite gender” or of a mode that is “declined irregularly” in the sense that they are “feminine through the winter and masculine in the summer” (42). The basic principle at work is, that, from abuses of nature comes instability in the soul.

[12] Alain of Lille, De Planctu Naturae, 1, v. 217.

[13] Ibid., 1, vv. 281-4. St. Francis was very fond of the lark.

[14] Ibid., 1, vv. 247-8.

[15] Cf. Sorrell, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature, 148. The claim that Francis was a “pan-psychist heretic” is meant to discredit the orthodox Christian understanding of nature.

[16] Cf. Bonaventure, Maj., Leg., 8.11.

[17] Cf. Bonaventure, De reductione, par. 2.

[18] Sorrell, St. Francis of Assisi and Nature, 30.

[19] Ibid., 35.

[20] Sorrell, 31.

[21] Const. Nar., 3.23.

[22] Ibid., 31.

[23] Ibid., 4-5.

[24] Ibid., 8.

[25] And so, if we were to position this speculative insight under the artisan-practical dimension of mastery in forestry, it would look like the practice of “coppicing,” the harvesting of standing deadwood, replanting trees, and so on. St. Francis urged his friars to engage in the practice of coppicing, which is a method for harvesting wood such that the tree’s integrity (reduced to a “stool”) is left intact for new growth. Cf. Thomas of Celano, Remembrance of the Desire of a Soul, 124. Also cf. Kiser, “The Garden of St. Francis: Plants, Landscape, and Economy in Thirteenth-Century Italy” in Environmental History, 8:2 (2004): 229-245. 

[26] Cf. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings (NY: HarperCollins, 1993), 201.

[27] Aberth, 43.

[28] It is interesting to consider animal ethics in this regard. Consider for a moment the assertion that animals either can reason or were once capable of reasoning: in either view, animals would be liable to punishment. Furthermore, consider the imaginary of such a view for the medieval view of nature: “beasts” are regarded as animals who rejected a desire-for subliminal goodness, thus becoming liable to punishment and are now used by beings that have notrejected such a desire; and animals superseding the “beast” are those who acted in favor of their desire by, say, giving their lives for sacrificial ends. But whether animals are capable of reasoning or not, no animal participates in humanity in corporeitate. The corporal division between humans and animals is the most central factor for assessing the justificatory impulse, i.e., the “common sense,” of human use of animals. By this corporal factor we maintain a division between, on one hand, it being against divine will to keep animals solely for human amusement and, on the other hand, it being in accordance with divine will to use animals nobly for human ends (e.g., consumption and nourishment). In The Constitutions of Narbonne, Bonaventure stipulates that “No animal for the use of any brother or place shall be kept by the Order or by any person in the name of the Order, except for cats and certain types of birds for the purpose of removing garbage” (3.23). Due to their observance of evangelical poverty, the early Franciscans, unlike the other religious orders, did not use animals for breeding purposes or other purposes relevant to funding the operations of the order.

[29] Cf. Thomas of Celano, Life of St. Francis, xxi. “Brother rabbit, come to me. Why did you let yourself get caught?”

[30] Bonaventure, Leg. Maj., 8.

[31] George Morris remarks in his conclusion on the philosophy of art that “the man of genius, works spontaneously and freely, and yet in accordance with the perfect, simple law of the idea” and by the view of the philosophical artist as the “representer of true being,” we are taught, in the words of Goethe, “To know our brothers in air, and water, and the silent wood.” Cf. George Morris, “The Philosophy of Art” in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 10:1 (1876), pp. 1-16.  

[32] Cf. Aldo Leopold, “Wildlife in American Culture,” 177.

[33] Hex., 2.9.