Nature Lost, Nature Regained: Rethinking Nature Across Theology, Philosophy, and the Sciences

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
— T. S. Eliot, East Coker, Four Quartet

To ask even the simplest of “natural” questions today is often to be met with impoverishment or absence. From the nearest tree or blade of grass to the mystery of the person, our age too often experiences existence as if it had flatlined. As Tom Wolfe once put it, modern man finds himself floundering in the primordial ooze, “gulping for air, frantically treading… when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can’t see it, but he’s much impressed. He names it God.”

This malaise has deep ancestry. Each age has installed its own candidate for a single, foundational “base”: Thales’ water, Democritus’ atoms, Newtonian mechanics, ether, DNA as the “secret of life,” quantum fields or strings in contemporary physics. The names change, but the ideology persists: reality imagined as a single substrate, all explanation converging to one foundation. Yet this vision was always fragile. If this is Nature Lost, how might we regain it — theologically, philosophically, scientifically?

The Centre for Theology and Philosophy, in collaboration with the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross (Santa Croce, Rome), invites scholars from across disciplines to explore this enduring and contested idea of nature. Once regarded as the very ground of intelligibility—what Aristotle called physis and the scholastics treated as a principle of order—nature in modernity has been dismantled, dissolved, or reduced to a functional mechanism. Declared obsolete by some, defended or reimag
ined by others, “nature” remains at the center of our deepest debates: about the human person, technology, freedom, metaphysics, and meaning itself. The conference is co-sponsored by ICT (Toulouse), St Mary Seminary and University (Baltimore), Triertium (Olomouc) and New Trinitarian Ontologies (Austin).

Demetrios Bathrellos, Andrea Bellantone, Piero Coda, Rachal Coleman, Conor Cunningham, William Desmond, Mark Edwards, Fiona Ellis, Eduard Fiedler, Philip Gonzales, Viviana González Hincapié, Jonathan Goodall, Fabrice Hadjadj, Ryan Haecker, Giulio Maspero, John Milbank, Sr Tereza Obolevich, Paul O’Callaghan, Adrian Pabst, Aaron Riches, Jacob Sherman, Mariusz Tabaczek, Ilaria Vigorelli, Robert Wozniak