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Chapter 13 - Making Art

Meaningful Materials and Methods

from Part IV - Before Science and Religion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2022

Peter Harrison
Affiliation:
University of Queensland
John Milbank
Affiliation:
University of Nottingham
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Summary

Can physics be beneficial for bringing about human moral and spiritual goods? Modern physics is perpetually in search for grand unification of our world-pictures, but its method is arbitrarily self-limiting in ruling out any place in its conception of nature for the human as spiritual and moral beings. But this estrangement between nature and the human has not always been the case. Drawing from Pierre Hadot’s pioneering work, this essay retrieves the notion of physics as ‘spiritual exercise’ from ancient philosophy and early Christianity for reimagining the enterprise of physics today. Envisaged as spiritual exercise, ancient physics goes beyond a mere acquisition of ‘objective’ knowledge of nature towards the fashioning of human moral and spiritual transformation. Illustrating from Origen of Alexandria, I show that this vision of physics is principally grounded upon a metaphysics that unites all parts of nature, including human nature, into a single whole. This chapter argues that it is desirable to retrieve the ancient vision today not as a displacement of modern physics but through the re-invention of natural philosophy alongside it. This retrieval should give urgency to the task of rethinking the desirability of a comprehensive and unified metaphysical account of nature for today.

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After Science and Religion
Fresh Perspectives from Philosophy and Theology
, pp. 299 - 315
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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