**4. Conclusions**

The ontological implications of this are profound. As Latour has argued, once we dispense with a demarcation of nature and culture, human freedom, culture, and imagination must themselves be seen to participate in nature—rather than modernist self-transparency, we discover a kind of wildness within our very selves and cultures, which displays the same opacity as nature without. Nature is the otherness that surrounds us, *and* the otherness that indwells us (Latour 1993).

If the universe is not bifurcated into active agents of meaning, on the one hand, and stubborn facts, on the other, then at least two strategies of approaching the universe open to view. Either, we might see meaning itself as fundamentally illusory, the sort of thing that dissolves once we rid ourselves of the illusions of our own superiority. Or, we might alternatively see wisdom and intelligibility as ontologically basic, and so expect to find the world itself replete with a plenitude of meaning and agency. In this respect, the best of Romantic 'anthropomorphising' is saved. It is not a lapse into the pathetic fallacy that lilies have feelings like ours, but a repetition of nature's hidden significance which involves simultaneously the 'naturalising' of our own human responses. The lily imbued with our response is also our response imbued with the entrancing strangeness of the lily.

On such an account, we might expect to find within our own active capacities a kind of participation in, or expression of the ubiquitous meaning-making of the universe. This is not an expression of anthropocentric artistic arrogance: instead, in order to mean in some respects beyond the lily, we must first attend to its own utterances. Only with such vulnerable communion does a reading of the book of nature become also legitimately our own continued writing of it. This is what we find in Hugh's account, and so much of the theological tradition alongside him: nature not as a concept but as a symbol, not only the symbol of divinity, but finally the symbol of the union of God and creation in the man Jesus Christ, the Logos-Wisdom through whom all things were made and who on earth could speak the word that turned water into wine, restored damaged natures, and caused the dead to live again.

Nature as creation, participating in and suspended from the Triune God, functions as the value-bestowing constitutive good that we found wanting in contemporary accounts of ecology without nature. But it has this capacity not as a substance among other substances, nor a thing existing alongside of and in contrast to other things of the world, but precisely as a symbol. A symbol is, of course, a sign, but a sign that partakes synechdochically of that which it signifies. This is what distinguishes it from a mere representation which presents a kind of external similitude, and so invites definition or decoding, while a symbol enjoys an internal and unfinished relationship with its referent, a real ontological correspondence that makes it to be what it is, and at the same time, to be a symbol (Borella 1989). As Paul Ricoeur writes:

The manifestation through the [symbol] thing is like the condensation of an infinite discourse; manifestation and meaning are strictly contemporaneous and reciprocal; the concretion in the thing is the counterpart of the surcharge of inexhaustible meaning which has ramifications in the cosmic, in the ethical, and in the political. Thus the symbol-thing is the potentiality of innumerable spoken symbols which, on the other hand, are knotted together in a single cosmic manifestation. 7 (Ricœur 1967, p. 11)

Accordingly, symbols invite contemplation more than definition. Modern theories of the symbol have tended to aestheticize them, holding that symbols signify, to be sure, but also that they signify nothing beyond immanent human experience. This is often taken to be a consequence of their social construction: if we immanent beings make symbols, then surely the symbols can, at best, signify us. At this point a theory of projection is still sadly in league with the pathetic fallacy. We encountered a similar logic above in Žižek and Morton, albeit with Lacanian and Derridean or object-oriented spins respectively, but for Hugh, the symbol of nature was discovered more than invented, received more than made. Thus, the contemplation the symbol evoked was not limited to a human horizon. Morton, in getting rid of nature, would seem to ge<sup>t</sup> rid of all normativity in the name of human species-modesty. But following Hugh of Saint Victor's example, in the name of nature as Creation, we are able to sustain human dignity in a measured way, while encouraging a real vulnerability towards a nature that is all the more normative insofar as we are forever having to relearn its subtle and complex standards—a nature saturated with meaning beyond our human limits.<sup>8</sup>

Is this merely a regression to the erroneous premodern belief in a seamless fabric of nature and culture? Surely not, and this for two reasons. First, as Latour argues, the putative error only appears as such in light of the modern project decisively to separate nature and culture, a project that has always betrayed itself by covertly appealing to hybrids of all sorts, as is especially evident today with the advent of the Anthropocene. Moreover, one might argue, in the second place, that the premodern error lies not as modernity pretended in the conflation of nature and culture, but rather in the insistence that nature (and thus the ideals of culture) be timeless and necessary, somehow given apart from the

<sup>7</sup> Appropriately, the context for Ricoeur's comment is his discussion of the symbols of nature. The entire passage reads: "First of all, then, it is the sun, the moon, the waters—that is to say, cosmic realities—that are symbols. Shall we say, therefore, that symbols, in their cosmic aspect, are interior to language, or even foreign to it? Not at all. For these realities to be a symbol is to gather together at one point a mass of significations which, before giving rise to thought, give rise to speech. The symbolic manifestation as a thing is a matrix of symbolic meanings as words. We have never ceased to find meanings in the sky. . . It is the same thing to say that the sky manifests the sacred and to say that it signifies the most high, the elevated and the immense, the powerful and the orderly, the clairvoyant and the wise, the sovereign, the immutable. The manifestation through the [symbol] thing is like the condensation of an infinite discourse; manifestation and meaning are strictly contemporaneous and reciprocal; the concretion in the thing is the counterpart of the surcharge of inexhaustible meaning which has ramifications in the cosmic, in the ethical, and in the political. Thus the symbol-thing is the potentiality of innumerable spoken symbols which, on the other hand, are knotted together in a single cosmic manifestation" (Ricœur 1967, p. 11).

<sup>8</sup> In fact, a genealogy can be traced from the medieval contemplative *liber naturae* through to Romantic retrievals of the trope of the book of nature against its modern reduction to mathematics. The whole story has ye<sup>t</sup> to be told, but key elements of it can be found in Brett Grainger's recent work (Grainger 2019, pp. 61–104).

contingencies of history and becoming. This is what produces ideological appeals to nature, in that nature becomes a shortcut around politics, history, negotiation, and interpretation. But nature is not simply given, necessary, and therefore something to be passively received. Nature is not the stable backdrop for human activity and drama, but a dynamic participant in the drama of creation, of which we are all a part. This, perhaps, is something the twelfth-century Victorines could not ye<sup>t</sup> know, but it is also something about which early modern philosophers were equally ignorant. The nineteenth century discovery of nature's vast history, and the new sense of our evolutionary and cultural historicity, undoubtedly transforms our reading of the book of nature. The book of nature is written in a living script. Arguably, however, the discovery of deep time more easily comports with Hugh of Saint Victor's refusal of any ultimate distinction between nature and culture than it does with modernity's characteristic bifurcation of the two. Beyond, but not against, what the premodern Hugh of Saint Victor knew, we might argue in postmodern fashion that if our creative symbol-making capacities are not merely expressions of transcendental human freedom, but rather if our creative and historical capacities are received like gifts, because we too are part of nature, we can in principle reconcile the opposition of active creation and passive reception without returning either to the modern illusion of a merely 'given' factual nature or to the demoralizing skepticism of thoroughgoing nominalism which assumes a purely 'willed' culture somehow outside and beyond nature.

Much more needs to be said in order to do justice to this argument, but we have at least established the possibility of a theological invocation of nature that escapes the now-problematic bifurcations of modernity, on the one hand, and the essentializing reifications of premodernity, on the other. By contrast, in accord with a more terrestrial hermeneutics of the book of nature, nature is neither a fantasy object to be ignored or fled, nor a stable text to be tamed, rationalized, and epistemically leveraged. Read theologically and Christologically, a creative retrieval of the book of nature is neither an exercise in nostalgia nor anachronism, for nature is not merely given, either for exploitation or sentiment. Rather, nature and the moral stances that nature empowers are able to remain without falling prey to the unravelling of recent critical theory. But nature remains precisely by relinquishing the pretensions to certainty and the immunity to history that so attracted her modern devotees. Instead, the changing concept and experience of nature is a symbol illuminated in a book we half receive and half create, a symbol open to both critique and contemplation, which gives rise to thought, action, and the sort of novel moral intuitions we need now more than ever.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
