I am almost en route to a Franciscan conference in Durham, UK, where my contribution will be a talk about a Franciscan philosophy of nature in a Steinian key. My desire to come up with something new began with my first encounter with Thomism. Was it not obvious, I thought, that its Aristotelian metaphysics is not really separable from Aristotelian physics?

There was also personalism, which placed the human person at the centre. This was very much in line with my Franciscan intuitions. However, what about nature? Making all relative to the human person did not seem to do justice to nature and what we can learn from nature. This was not it, either, but it helped me to move forward.

Eventually, the question that interested me came into focus: What does it mean to act naturally, and what can we learn from nature about it? It seemed to me that Franciscan thought was never far from asking what it means to act in a properly human way. This requires understanding human nature, and in the context of modern science, we cannot understand human nature without also understanding the rest of nature.

What, for example, do we make of the fact that our nature arose in evolutionary biology? What do we make of the fact that we are, in a manner of speaking, a third kind of chimpanzee?

This is not to deny that human beings are fundamentally different from animals, including chimpanzees. No chimpanzee will ever write a novel or ask about the meaning of being. We step out of the self-centred perspective of our lives and reflect on life in ways no other creature can.

But our animal nature is never left behind. All that we understand we understand in the language of life that is all around us. This attentiveness to our kinship with animals and the life we share with them, even while our lives are so much more meaningful than ordinary animal lives, is at the heart of the Franciscan philosophy of nature.

A proper philosophy of nature steps beyond a mere description of nature as it is. If we think of nature as creation, as a work of art, then our presence in nature is not akin to that of curators of a museum. The image of scripture is that of a gardener, and a gardener is very actively shaping nature in order to bring out its beauty. A proper Franciscan philosophy of nature requires us to understand its nature in such a way that it lets us act beautifully, in harmony with nature, and in a way that builds on and extends the creativity that has given rise to nature.

Pray for me that I can convince my audience that I have found a way to do this!