Quotes about Nature

Then the maiden climbed into a tree, and, seating herself in the branches, began to knit.

Is it not a fundamental error to consider children as innocent beings, whose little weaknesses may perhaps want some correction, rather than as beings who bring into the world a corrupt nature and evil dispositions, which it should be the great end of education to rectify?

Everything in the so-called world of nature is meant to lead us back to God. In that sense, created matter is meant to serve eucharistically. By treating the world as a eucharistic offering in Christ, received from God and offered to him, we are drawn into God's presence.

Elsewhere, Schmemann puts it beautifully: Christ came not to replace "natural" matter with some "supernatural" and sacred matter, but to restore it and to fulfill it as the means of communion with God.

Nature, then, is incapable of conceiving what lies above nature. As a consequence, no creature can achieve divinization for itself naturally, simply because it cannot grasp God. It belongs wholly to God's grace to distribute divinization by grace, according to the measure of each being, to enlighten nature with supernatural light and to lift it above its own limitations by the superabundance of glory.

God "has placed in all intellectual beings, as their hidden but primary power, the potentiality of knowing him; ever a generous Lord, he has planted in us lowly men, as part of our nature, the longing and desire for him

Is gleaned from both "books" together. The "contemplation of nature" and of the structures of meaning hidden within it, structures that are part of every single being, becomes for Maximus a necessary step, a kind of initiation, into the knowledge of God.

An affirmation of a paradoxical unity of ontological opposites, rooted in the Chalcedonian Understanding of the Person of Christ—"one individual or person subsisting in two natures, without confusion or change, without division or separation".

Aristotelianism and the theology of Chalcedon enter here into an unbreakable alliance: they preserve the rights of nature against the rampages of an unchecked supernaturalism.

They try to reveal revelation to themselves. For the grace of the Holy Spirit never destroys the capabilities of nature. Just the opposite: it makes nature, which has been weakened by unnatural habit, mature and strong enough once again to function in a natural way and leads it upward toward insight into the divine.

Laws of nature do not make exceptions for nice people. A bullet has no conscience; neither does a malignant tumor or an automobile gone out of control. That is why good people get sick and get hurt as much as anyone.

When the night wind makes the pine trees creak And the pale clouds glide across the dark sky, Go out my child, go out and seek Your soul: The Eternal I. For all the grasses rustling at your feet And every flaming star that glitters high Above you, close up and meet In you: The Eternal I. Yes, my child, go out into the world; walk slow And silent, comprehending all, and by and by Your soul, the Universe, will know Itself: the Eternal I.