Abstract
Thinking ethically at this Anthropocene moment is beset by a host of difficulties, according to Peter Manley Scott’s latest contribution to his oeuvre at the intersections of ecological and political theology. In this first of a three-volume series on a Trinitarian doctrine of creation, Scott gathers and examines these difficulties under the rubric of a ‘postnatural turn’. They stem from what he identifies as a fundamental, erroneous distinction between humanity and nature that shapes and marks even the dustiest corners of our Western traditions of ethical thought. Though he sustains a critique of this dichotomy, and its impact on ethical theory, throughout the book, Scott’s aim is thoroughly constructive. He proposes a meta-ethics that is intended to guide human action in our ‘postnatural condition’.
Scott asks us to pause to consider how we are to think theologically and ethically beyond the humanity-nature dichotomy, especially when it comes to matters of right. Finding readily available responses inadequate, he re-tools a whole panoply of concepts—he bends everything from ‘nature’ and ‘society’ to ‘institution’ and ‘technology’ in a postnatural direction—in order to develop a theory of postnatural right that is oriented by the Christian doctrine of creation. Pointing in a unique way beyond the humanity-nature dichotomy, Scott offers a theology of right as ‘a basis for a just social life rooted in a common creatureliness’ (p. 9).
Before I review what Scott means by a theology of postnatural right, and the intricate argument he develops in support of it, the book as a whole can be understood as an attempt to thread the needle—or more accurately, multiple needles. Let me explain. Scott is unconvinced that two prevalent approaches to ethics can offer guidance during these times. On the one hand, there are those who build an ethics upon a transhistorical natural teleology, natural law or moral order. On the other, there are theorists who construct an ethics upon the contingency of history and human freedom vis-à-vis nature. Though Scott engages a wide range of theologians and philosophers, by the end of the book it becomes clear that his primary representative of the former stance is Oliver O’Donovan, particularly in his early work Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics (Eerdmans, 1986), while G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Cambridge University Press, 1991 [1820]) is taken to represent the latter, historicist position. Scott attempts to thread the needle, so to speak, between the positions O’Donovan and Hegel represent. Threading the needle, however, does not simply mean reconciling a number of their insights. It also entails critiquing the extent to which both positions construct an ethics upon one side or the other of an axiomatic dichotomy between history and nature. Though both positions come in for critique, Scott also affirms key elements of each as he develops a position that holds together teleology and contingency. In other words, he treats O’Donovan and Hegel as spokespersons for two common approaches to ethics that presuppose a humanity-nature metaphysical dichotomy. (He sees similar dynamics elsewhere, for instance in environmental ethics, where anthropocentrism makes the human primary and ecocentrism flips the primacy to nature.) With O’Donovan on one side and Hegel on the other, Scott threads the needles between teleology and contingency, nature and history, theology and philosophy, human exceptionalism and human embeddedness within wider nature, normativity and description, order and transformation, determinacy and freedom.
With this framing in the background, in what follows I review Scott’s argument by breaking down the book’s title into three parts. Scott constructs a (1) theology of (2) postnatural (3) right. Why is it a theology and what is theological about Scott’s argument? What is the postnatural condition and how does Scott bend familiar concepts in strange, postnatural ways? And what is his theory of right and how is it helpful?
The book’s title signals that it is Scott’s response to Hegel’s magnum opus, yet it is identified as a distinctly theological project. In particular, it is the first volume of a three-part series on the doctrine of creation. This volume’s unique subject matter is ethics, the concept of and norms associated with postnatural right, and the source of creation (identified at the beginning with the Father, though this is not a recurring theme). The other anticipated volumes will take up, respectively, a metaphysics of created matter (associated with the Son) that identifies the foundations of the norms proposed in this first volume, and a politics of spiritual community (associated with the Spirit) that will provide an account of how these norms are formed and taken up.
Furthering a turn in recent ecotheology to creatura as a complement to creatio, Scott ecologically attunes the doctrine of creation by highlighting its potential to ground a common creatureliness that is open to change. Though creation theology has often functioned to ground a fundamental distinction between humans and the rest of nature (think: imago dei), Scott flips the emphasis to argue that the doctrine should provide an account of what all creatures, human and otherkind, share in common. Together, they comprise ‘a greater society’ of humanity and nature (p. 7). Yet this is a tricky matter, especially when considering human action. Theologians who appeal to creation to name commonality, especially a common human nature, tend to treat creation as a transhistorical order, an unchanging natural law, a rigid teleology, or an overly fixed set of givens. This stems from what Scott interprets as an overemphasis on creatio originalis in theological ethics, and a relative neglect of creatio continua and creatio nova. However, attending to ecology, like attending to historical contingency, demands a more dynamic understanding of the relation between regularity and change, and how human action is to be understood in relation to them. Scott argues that we should eschew language that connotes rigid fixity, such as structure, essence and human nature, for the language of institutions, patterns, repetition and the human condition. In this view, creatures are universally conditioned, such as by ecological situatedness, and have a universal, supernatural end in God as well as a multiplicity of immanent, postnatural ends. Institutions are sites of interaction between humanity and nature in which new ends are produced and patterns are repeated as creatures secure the conditions of life. Scott thus uses neglected aspects of the doctrine of creation to name theologically both relative stability and patterns of free action in the midst of necessity. This theology helps to show that creaturely life is ecstatic, natural teleology is marked by creation’s openness to new creation, and human engagement with matter is a dynamic process of discovery, appropriation and construction. In short, creaturehood is defined by movement from creation to eschatology and the tension of being established yet not determined.
The need to attune our theological concepts ecologically stems from what Scott theorizes as our ‘postnatural condition’, the exposition of which comprises the first two of the book’s three parts. Scott’s argument in Part I is carried by his description of this postnatural condition through the themes of nature, order and technology. Each of these is then reprised and developed in a constructive direction in Part II, where he theorizes postnatural action. It is here that he intricately threads the needles as he reconceptualizes nature as social and institutional, order as historical and teleological, and technology as anthropological and eschatological. The crux of the argument is that a postnatural account of nature is not a contrastive notion, as it is for those who accept an axiomatic split between humanity and nature, but, rather, describes what underpins or underlies all creatureliness. This underpinning is best understood as an extension of the concept of the social. What we have is social nature and social humanity, the two together comprising one great society. If ‘sociality refers to the for-one-another aspect of creatureliness’, then, Scott affirms, all creatures, human and otherkind, are part of a ‘greater society’ of creatures (p. 29, emphasis original). And this greater society is the appropriate context within which to consider the realization of creaturely freedom in a just creaturely order, objectively speaking.
By what criterion, then, can we judge whether a creaturely order is just? For this, Scott directly engages with and seeks to correct postnaturally Hegel’s philosophy of right. He argues that an order is objectively ‘right’ when its institutions and patterns of relation promote the flourishing of each and all. As mentioned above, the concept of creaturely flourishing Scott has in mind is a combination of teleology ordered supernaturally toward God and the relatively stable yet open ends that are discovered and constructed through contextual social institutions. This is what it would mean to carry through on the suggestion by Raymond Williams, with which Scott opens the book, that we consider ‘a right order of life’ (p. 7). Life encompasses and exceeds humanity, and it is defined, with help from Paul Tillich, by the notion of eccentricity or self-transcendence. A right order of life, Scott argues, must be postnatural, oriented toward a greater society and is a complex process of discovering dependence and necessity even as creatures construct new ways of relating to one another through contingent institutions to secure life. In short, a right order of life is a just, creaturely, ecstatic order encompassing all creatures.
How, one might ask, is such a theology of postnatural right helpful? It provides Scott, and those who might appropriate it, with a tool to critique actually existing institutions and social orders. The norms Scott associates with postnatural right are characterized by a five-fold schema: postnatural right is universal, necessary, social, revolutionary, and ideal. Postnatural right universally applies to all creatures, necessarily conditions all creatures (including humanity) by ecological situatedness, connects them via institutions in a greater society, challenges all naturalized hierarchies through a revolutionary notion of God’s equal regard for each, and judges existing states of affairs from an ideal future perspective of deeper sociability and greater creaturely freedom. Right is thus a pattern of questioning and discernment with which to evaluate existing institutions critically and to spur them toward right-fulness. In a helpful example of how this critical tool can be applied by practical reason, Scott submits the UK’s institution of ecosystem services to such an assessment.
In closing, it is important to note that summarizing this book is no easy task. I hope to have given Scott’s argument a fair hearing. The book is demanding, however, and does not reward a hurried reading. It opens in the middle of a complex set of debates in ecotheology and political philosophy, and ends with a promise of further movements on its core themes in succeeding volumes. The best context for reading it, in other words, is not the undergraduate classroom or the church book club but the research library and the advanced seminar room. Readers who are unfamiliar with the wider debates and Scott’s decades of intervention in them are likely to end up lost. The most unfortunate aspect of the book is that Scott’s prose presents a further thicket through which readers, who might already feel tangled up in freighted and idiosyncratic concepts, need a clear pathway and a relatively stable compass. If—applying Scott’s terms—the human mind might be considered postnaturally as embedded in a wider ecological and material milieu, then I think it is appropriate to recommend that readers make liberal use of caffeine to attune their brain function to the challenges and riches of this text. For it is full of riches from a leading theologian working at the borders of multiple disciplines to push theology in generative directions. And its theologically-driven theory of socio-ecological institutions is worth the effort required to understand it. Those with an interest in adapting a theological ethics of creation, natural law and society to the realities presented by our contemporary ecological challenges will find much to learn to catalyze their thinking on these matters, and to dispute.