Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
however, was the realm furthest from the divine mind, and being full of imperfections,
conflicts and contradictions, could be largely disregarded and to some extent disparaged,
even though
anima mundi
was its creator and imposed upon it an overarching harmony
that prevented a descent into total disorder.
In some of his dialogues Plato proposed a seamless interconnectedness of existence
within a hierarchical ordering of the cosmos. The human soul was connected to the souls
of animals and plants through the
anima mundi
, but failed humans reincarnated as an-
imals, which were not worthy of much respect because they “came from men who had
no use for philosophy”. For Plato, the Earth was merely a convenient place from which
to carry out the contemplation of celestial bodies, but any other habitable planet would
have done just as well, since not much attention needed to be paid to what was after all
merely the lowly abode of the body. Plato's most famous student was Aristotle, who,
returning to a more sophisticated expression of the ancient non-dualistic animism, es-
poused a more immediate felt relationship with nature, in which each being was not the
imperfect manifestation of a disembodied eternal idea, but displayed instead its own dy-
namic coming into being entirely from within itself.
A dualistic interpretation of Plato's ideas was later incorporated into Christianity,
which before the Reformation espoused a peculiar kind of hierarchical animism in
which man occupied a privileged position halfway between physical matter and the spir-
itual world. During the Middle Ages, the common folk who had no access to reading
and writing were deeply animistic, and believed that nature was sacred, despite the ef-
forts of the Church and its priests to impose the view that there were no spirits in trees,
rocks, streams or forests. Instead, the priests attempted to convince the peasantry that
these entities did not possess their own internal Godlike powers, but rather that God
had intended them merely as a sign of his own divine presence, which emanated from
some disembodied, invisible domain far from the world of matter. But the animism of
the common folk was resilient, and defied the efforts of medieval Christianity to stamp
it out. As a result the Church simply adapted and compromised by taking over many
ancient sacred places and by tolerating certain kinds of animistic practice. This peculiar
and complex syncretism between animism and Christianity held sway for about 1600
years, until the birth of modern science.
The Scientific Revolution
This gradual sense of separation from nature in Western culture was greatly intensified
during the scientific revolution which blossomed in the 16th and 17th centuries, in the
wake of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648) that had decimated Europe in what had been
