What on Earth is Nature?

Scripture’s most humbling verse can be found in the book of Genesis:

‘For dust you are,

And to dust you shall return.’(1)

What better way to convey the lowliness of humans than to call them “dust”. Dust is the thing with the lowest status in all the earth’s bounty. Pointless and bothersome, dust surely signifies the nothingness of nature, the faceless, forgotten, deadness of dust that collects under the bed and coats the lightbulb. 

It is curious then that “nature” demands so much attention across multiple disciplines. In particular, great Philosophers, Theologians, Anthropologists and Sociologists have obsessed about nature for millenia. Why?

The theologian Nathan Lyons argues that the point about dust is not so much that it signifies a nothingness, but that it signifies at all. Dust, ‘the most natural of all natural stuff’ is not bound by its lifeless, material form. It has meaning. 

Take man, he is but ‘dust’ and yet is addressed (‘you’) by God. The creator and creature exchange signs with one another. 

Paracelsus wrote ‘nothing is without a sign, since nature does not release anything in which it has not marked what is to be found within that thing’. (2) More plainly put, Rowan Williams writes ‘the bare fact… is that nature speaks’. (3)

Perhaps one of the most pronounced instances of nature speaking to the modern Western world is its haunting of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights Commission. In 1948, somehow, a diversity of intellects - from Confucians to Catholics - agreed on a set of articles that define human rights. How did Dr Peng-chun Chang (‘one of China’s outstanding liberals’)(4) and Charles Malik (‘one of the great Christian humanists of the twentieth century’)(5) both recommend the same statement about a matter so profound it cannot but reach into the realm of metaphysics. 

The answer: by silencing the summoning signs of nature. 

Famously, the commission could not agree on the source of human rights. God? Reason? Something else? In a pragmatic bid to produce a product, the Belgian motion was passed. This motion did one simple thing: removed any reference to nature from the articles. 

The motion sought to settle an impasse between Chang and Malik. While Malik supported an emphasis on humans as endowed with dignifying capabilities like reason and conscience ‘by nature’, Chang felt that naming the endowing agent as ‘nature’ granted the articles with metaphysical assumptions, signifying some creator and bestower of rights.(6) The obvious subsequent question is: who? Shang ancestry or Yahweh? 

It was nature that posed this problem. And so the Belgian motion was passed by twenty nine votes to four, with nine abstentions, and a sense that the articles could now be deemed “universal” and “secular”.

Having dealt with the problem of nature, the Commission resolved to agree (to disagree) about human rights on the condition that, as Jacques Maritain remarked, ‘no one asks us why’. (7) But banishing the word “nature” in a bid to expel God from the equation is a bit like pronouncing a car fixed by taping over the warning light. Just because the alert is concealed, does not mean that the danger is gone. 

So, w

hat on earth is nature?

Nature is a sign, and it signifies some sacred order in the world. It forces us to live not by lies but by a single law, discriminating and exclusive when it comes to the dignity and rights of humans over all other species. If nature signifies a single thing, if earthly dustiness speaks any word, it is truth. 

The hard lesson of the Belgian motion is that we cannot retrieve “pure” inferences from nature that substantiate “secular” articles for a “universal” audience. This demands a sort of deculturing - be it of Western or Eastern ideals - and what remains is something profane, not secular and abstract, not universal. Naturally, nature resists deculturing in this way because it is itself a sign, and signs furnish our cultural life. As Carmody Grey puts it, ‘nature is only knowable insofar as it is cultural’. 

Given its objective, it was pragmatic for the Commission to pass the Belgian motion in order to complete its work, but the truth remains “out there”, in nature, still speaking. 

Footnotes:

1.       Genesis 3:19 (KVJ)

2.       Nathan Lyons, Signes in the Dust: A Theory of Natural Culture and Cultural Nature (OUP 2019) 172.

3.       Ibid.

4.       Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New (Random House 2001) 133

5.       George Weigel, Foreword to Habib C Malik (ed), The Challenge of Human Rights: Charles Malik and the Universal Declaration (Charles Malik Foundation 2000) vii

6.       Columbia Center for New Media and Learning, ‘Drafting History: Article 1’ Human Rights in Action  https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/mmt/udhr/article_1/drafting_history_2.html accessed 26 June 2026.

7.       Glendon (n 4) 77.

8.       Ibid 29.

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Imogen Sinclair is a successful Latimer Trust Grant recipient and a PhD candidate at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. Her research explores the transcendent sources of culture: Christianity and its sacred order. She brings over a decade of experience in British politics, and her writing has appeared in publications such as The New Statesman and The Spectator. She is also a Fellow at the Pharos Foundation.

Views expressed in blogs published by the Latimer Trust are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official position of the Latimer Trust.