Tea at Trianon: The Medieval Mystical Concept of “Natur Naturans”

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, November 11, 2026

The Medieval Mystical Concept of “Natur Naturans”

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

In the 13th century, Latin translations of Aristotle flooded European universities. Aristotle wrote extensively about physis (nature) as an intrinsic, active principle of motion and change within the material world. The idea was, broadly, that the physical world was not inert or lifeless. Each natural thing possesses an internal principle governing its characteristic movement and development.
Going back to the simple little grazing rabbit or the bird tending its nest, according to Aristotle’s physis, natural things possess their own principles of movement and development. And you can see this principle at work. An acorn looks nothing like an oak tree, but it grows into an oak because it contains the principle of “oakness” and its nature is to grow into the fulfilment of that principle.
When Aristotle became the foundation of Christian philosophy, thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure had to find a way to understand this in a way that did not end in Pantheism. The obvious question had to have a coherent Christian answer: If nature itself is imbued with an active energetic force that creates, shapes and moves things, does that mean nature has its own independent power separate from God? If nature does all the work, does that mean God is relegated to being a passive bystander, perhaps something like what later thinkers would call the “watchmaker” deity who made everything like a machine that runs on its own, and then left?
The solution was obvious: God’s power of creation is combined with His will to sustain everything that exists in existence from moment to moment. And everything He created is endowed with an inherent nature and functions according to that nature. Everything has characteristic powers, activities or behaviours and ways of developing inherent to it. The rabbit grazes and burrows; the bird builds its nest and sings; the acorn develops into an oak because they were all created with those powers and instincts. (Read more.)