Supernaturalism

The meaning and the history of the word supernatural depends entirely upon the order that it seems to supersede: the natural. The French Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac (1896–1991), in his erudite and controversial book Surnatural (1946), provides a significant history of the transmission of the word. He informs us that it was only in the ninth century, with Carolingian translations of Pseudo-Dionysius (c. fifth century c.e.) and John Scotus Eriugena (c. 810–877), that the Latin word supernaturalis entered theology. Even then its usage was rare until the middle of the thirteenth century, and it did not come into standard use until after the Council of Trent in the middle of the sixteenth century.

History of the word and the concept in the West

The reason for the hesitancy of its use prior to the dawning years of modernity, before the rise of the secular as a domain distinct from the sacred and the physical as distinct from the metaphysical, was an older semantic resonance associated with the word natural. The early Christian fathers, in speaking of the difference between Adam's fallen state of sin and carnality and the salvation wrought in Christ, interpreted Adam and Eve's previous nakedness as the "natural" state. The "natural" was the human condition without sin; the pristine state in which was manifested the untarnished image of God. Such a natural condition was to be redeemed, not superseded. Even in the late sixteenth century, when the English poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney (1554–1586), came to write his famous Defence of Poesie, the point could be made that poetry's efficacy lay in being able to transmute this corruptible world back into its pristine and idealized naturalness. The "supernatural" then arrives late in the cultural history of the West.

Early cosmology certainly conceived of realms, powers, and principalities beyond the mundane. The ancient Greeks had their notion of the heavens (ouranios ) and even of a place above the heavens (uperouranios ) from which the gods descended. Derived in part from Plato's Timaeus and Aristotle's Physics, the ultraheaven, and its synonym the hypercelestial (uperkosmios ), announced a cosmological, epistemological, ethical, aesthetic, and ontological hierarchy. Everyday experience was mythologized as one traversed the lines between the visible and the invisible, the sensuous and the intelligible, the body and the soul. Such was the veneration for the ancients and for ancient knowledge (which was believed to be closer to the truth because nearer in time to Adam and Eve's experience in Eden), that this cosmology remained in place throughout Christendom until the maps of the universe were redrawn in the seventeenth century.

In the New Testament, the writer of the Gospel of John has Jesus speaking of the need to be born from above (anothen ). In his first Letter to the Corinthian, in a series of distinctions between the body, soul, and spirit, Paul (himself experiencing a translation to the third heaven) writes of the celestial man (anthropos ex ouranou ) whose image humans bear. This usage seemed to have sanctioned the adoption of the term, and its cosmological associations, by the early Greek fathers (particularly Clement of Alexandria (c. 150–215) and Origen (c. 185–254)). The celestial and hypercosmic as realms of the spiritual and divine became spheres occupied by Christ, the Spirit, and God himself. The term was translated directly into Latin, for we find Tertullian (c. 155–220) writing about Christ as supercelestial in De carnis resurrectione. Other Latin writers used supermundialis or supermundanus similarly. As with the ancient Greeks, the orders of existence differed in the celestial realms, and so Origen, and later Augustine of Hippo (354–430), described angels as having a supercelestial nature (phusis ). Gradually, discussions begin to appear of the celestial essence (uperousios, uperousiotes ) and descriptions of the Trinity as the super-essential. These words are translated in Latin as supersubstantialis and superessentialis. But it still remains significant that supernaturalis arrives much later, only to become the most common word of all.

What is different about supernaturalis is that it more explicitly defines a nature, powers, and dominions that are unearthly. There had, of course, been the dualistic myths of the Zoroastrians and, later, Gnostics, that had separated the forces in the world above from those operating in the sublunar realm. But despite the dualistic cosmology, the transit between the above and the below constituted a continuum. With supernaturalis a distinction was being made such that, by the seventeenth century, any incursions from the supernatural realm were understood as ruptures of the natural order. As such, supernaturalis could only gain currency as that which was naturalis came to be understood as the order of things in the postlapsarian, rather than the prelapsarian, world. This distinction arose in mediaeval theology.

For the medieval Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) God is the supernatural truth contemplated by the fathers, the supernatural cause of all things, a supernatural principle whose effects are registered throughout the created world. These were not entirely separate, or even antithetical, orders of being as the latter participated in the former by being the effects of the God who maintained and sustained them. The participation of creation in the operations of the divine constituted the sacramentum mundi. Nevertheless, for Aquinas, theological knowledge as a divine science rested upon understanding the effects of God within creation as revealed in Christ, the operation and pedagogy of salvation. He distinguished such knowledge from the knowledge of created things in themselves, which was a natural science.

This distinction between knowledge on the basis of revelation and knowledge on the basis of observation led increasingly to a division of intellectual labor, and the examination of things created took on an independence that, ultimately, led to the establishing of "Nature." The Reformation emphasis upon faith as distinct from human reasoning, revelation opposed to fallen creation, called into question the older construals of the sacramentum mundi. So by the time of the Council of Trent (and the Catholic counterreformation), "Nature" was becoming an autonomous, rule-governed realm open for systematic enquiry, manipulation, and improvement. When the older Platonic and Ptolemaic cosmologies were being superseded, then the supercelestial lost its valance. The "supernatural" arrives as that which transcends the natural and is superior to the natural insofar as it is more powerful (for both good and evil) in being more spiritual.

Secularization and disenchantment

According to M. H. Abrahams, the contemporary understanding of the supernatural is a cultural product of early romanticism and the processes of secularization. With modernity and the authority given to human reasoning, the increasing exploration and cataloguing of the natural world, and with the continuing Protestant attacks upon superstition, the world became secularized.

Secularization brought about a demythologisation of human experience, just as the technological calculation and manipulation of the world brought about what the sociologist and economist Max Weber (1864-1920) termed its "disenchantment." The process of disenchantment took place through the systemic rationalization of observable (and therefore verifiable) phenomena. The early romantics were themselves reacting against the stripping of the world of its mysteries and mythologies—the world according to the mathematics and mechanics as Isaac Newton (1642–1727) conceived it and the industrial revolution constructed it.

In an early essay titled "Language and Human Nature," the philosopher Charles Taylor wrote of a distinction between two views of the world, the objectivist and the expressivist. In premodern cosmologies what was real was expressive of creation's divine and spiritual origins. But from René Descartes (1596–1650) onwards the world was not viewed in terms of its theological provenance, but in terms of what the human subject observed. Objectivism conceived the world as a realm of contingent, neutral facts that could be gathered encyclopedically. Materiality lost its translucence and became opaque. Objects lay passive beneath the scrutinizing gaze of a subject who calibrated and catalogued them. This objectivist realm, from the seventeenth century onwards, became nature and all its values, laws, and dynamics were immanent and self-manifesting. The natural was that which presented itself to the senses and could therefore be examined by empirical science. It was a state that lent itself to systematic explanation. Nature could be made to deliver up whatever secrets it contained so that people might learn how the use them to their own advantage.

A new functionalist, instrumentalist, pragmatic, and utilitarian approach to the world cut creation free from a dependency upon a creator. In doing this a series of further divisions followed: subject and object, the cultural and the natural, the private and the public, the freedom of enlightenment and the dangerous darkness of ignorance. The supernatural was born of these new binaries. It was conceived as the opposite of the natural, that which stood outside of the rational and integrated orders of nature. The supernatural was then irrational, disordered, a realm of darkness, ignorance, and superstition. Religion—a conceptual category also coined during this time—was to be purged of these cruder, mythological elements and refigured, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) termed it, within the limits of reason alone. As such, religion—a private devotion that no longer trespassed on public truth—was clawed back from the supernatural. Catholicism, with its liturgical and doctrinal commitment to the sacramental world view, was repeatedly condemned by both deists and Protestants for its supernaturalism and its promotion of superstition.

Re-enchantment

The supernatural as it emerged from the gothic imagination came to be defined as a realm of forces and dominions beyond the human. These forces and dominions are either mythically organized in some cosmic battle between good and evil (angels, demons, wizards, and vampires) or make manifest another dimension following death (ghosts, hauntings, and intimations of heaven). Both of these forms of the supernatural have a history within the Western tradition, but, as Mark Edmundson has noted, what is striking in contemporary Western and Eastern cultures is the resurgence of that gothic imagination.

There has been a cultural shift with respect not only to the credibility of the supernatural but also to its interface with the everyday. Postmodernity, as the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman observes, has re-enchanted the world. The everyday is again being mythologized, such that where once C. S. Lewis placed his supernatural world of Narnia on the far side of the wardrobe, the writers Philip Pullman and J. K. Rowling have their supernatural worlds investing the ordinary. Furthermore, the scientific reasoning that Weber saw as fundamental to the process of disenchantment plays an important role in the re-enchantment of the world. In the popular imagination the cyborg, the clone, the alien, and the android have all joined the traditional array of supernatural figures. Science has absorbed the supernatural, as more and more cyberspace games trade in gothic fantasies, and the exhilaration of surfing the net is being described in terms once reserved for mystical experiences of self-transcendence.

See also Naturalism; Nature; Thomas Aquinas

Bibliography

abrams, meyer howard. natural supernaturalism: tradition and revolution in romantic literature. new york: norton, 1971.

bauman, zygmunt. "introduction." in intimations of postmodernity. london: routledge, 1992.

edmundson, mark. nightmare on main street: angels, sadomasochism, and the culture of the gothic: cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, 1997.

heim, michael. the metaphysics of virtual reality. oxford: oxford university press, 1993.

lubac, henri de. surnaturel: etudes historiques. paris: aubier, 1946.

lubac, henri de. le mystère du surnaturel. paris: editions montaigne, 1965. available in english as the mystery of the supernatural, trans. rosemary sheed. new york: crossroad, 1998.

taylor, charles. "language and human nature." in human agency and language: philosophical papers 1. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press, 1985.

ward, graham. cities of god. london: routledge, 2000.

graham ward