The Form of Christianity Differs from the Form of Nature

Yesterday, I began to read Nature, Man, and Woman by Alan W. Watts. I purchased a used copy online, and was so excited when it reached my mailbox at dinnertime.

I thought I would share a snippet with you today. So far, this book has been good. I’ve been mulling over what I’ve read as I prepare for the weekend.

“The form of Christianity differs from the form of nature because in the Church and in its spiritual atmosphere we are in a universe that has been made. Outside the Church, we are in a universe that has grown. Thus the God who made the world stands outside it as the carpenter stands outside his artifacts but the Tao which grows the world is within it. Christian doctrine admits, in theory, that God is immanent, but in practice it is his transcendence, his otherness, which is always stressed. We are permitted to think of him as within things and within the world only on the strict condition that we maintain an infinite qualitative distance between God and the creature which he inhabits. Even on the inside he is outside, as the architect is still really outside the house which he builds, even when he goes in to decorate the interior.

Conceiving, then, man and the universe as made, the Western and Christian mind endeavors to interpret them mechanically – and this is at once its genius and its blindness. It is an idee fixe that the universe consists of distinct things or entities, which are precisely the structural parts of artifacts. Man himself is a part, brought from outside into the total assemblage of nature as a part is added to a building. Furthermore, the workings of the natural universe are understood in terms of logical laws – the mechanical order of things viewed as a linear series of causes and effects, under the limitations of a consciousness which takes them in and symbolizes them on at a time, piece by piece. Earth and sky are measured by approximating the wayward and whimsical shapes of nature to the abstract circles, triangles, and straight lines of Euclid. It appears that nature is a mechanism because such a mentality can grasp only as much of nature as can fit into some mechanical or mathematical analogy. Thus it never really sees nature. It sees only the pattern of geometrical forms which it has managed to project upon it.”

-Alan W. Watts