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In terms of language, it seems to me that the concept of the 'un-natural' arises in language from the time before the formulation of the theory of evolution.
If you accept the notion of a creator, and mankind being separated from the animal kingdom, then in my mind, it is perfectly reasonable to categorise things as to natural and un-natural. If you are postulating that every living being is created from a divine design then any deviation from that design can be seen as negative.
The Christian view of what is 'natural' is a bit more complicated than that though, isn't it? For a start, the word is most often used to refer to human nature, and even then there isn't always a clear distinction being made between 'natural' and 'unnatural'. Aquinas, for example, was interested in the idea of connaturality - the way that two things can be related through their natures (an appetite and the being that has that appetite, for instance). What was connatural for a particular individual was not set in stone; it could change. From this article:
St. Thomas says that something can be connatural to a being insofar as it becomes natural through habituation, because "custom is a second nature." What he has in mind here is the way that habits and customs -- and, at another level, divine graces -- fill in the blanks, so to speak, which the generalities of nature leave undetermined ...
There are all sorts of varieties of second-nature connaturality, for example the connaturality of the lover with the beloved, whereby our nature adapts itself to the thing which, or to the person whom, we love ...
Certain aspects of second nature -- acquired habits or habitual graces -- cooperate with our nature in the sense of completing or perfecting it.
I know there are people on the board who know a great deal more about theology that I do - it would be great if someone could explain this a bit more. I don't know, for example, how influential an idea it has been in theological terms.
Something else that might be important here is the idea of 'fallen nature'. Again, this is usually used to refer to human nature; however, I have come across the idea that the growing tendency in the 18th and 19th centuries was in part a reaction against the concept of 'fallen nature'. In Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language & the Culture of Performance, Jay Fliegelman writes:
In his 1775 Journals, the itinerant Quaker John Woolman describes a crisis of conscience that sheds light on the new definition of "unnatural", a crisis occasioned by wearing "garments dyed with dye hurtful to them" ... In this episode sin itself becomes the act of denaturing things so that they can no longer be seen for what they are. Detached from a Christian metaphysics that defined the natural as fallen, purity becomes identified with the natural. |
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