In the last sentence of The Origin of Species, Darwin wrote: “There is grandeur in this view of life…that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, have been and are being evolved.”
That is the expression of a modern man who, although not religious, could still see nature and life as sacred.
On the sacredness of nature, Mircea Eliade wrote: “The cosmic rhythms manifest order, harmony, permanence, fecundity.”
All the elements of the sacred view are there in The Origin of Species: the cosmic rhythm, the struggle for existence that orders life, the harmony of the species and the earth, the permanence of the inherited character of life, and above all the fecundity that overcomes death and through which all species and individuals are born.
The remote, inactive celestial God and the demiurge who carried out the work of creation: they are there too. Never was a most high God more remote. Never was a demiurge more intent on perfection than was natural selection. And so it came to pass that chaos gave birth to cosmos.
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May 3, 2008 at 10:29 am
jakeb
Your reference to the elements of the sacred view being in TOoS, “the cosmic rhythm, the struggle for existence that orders life…” — Sounds like Darwin was aesthetically a brother with the writer of Ecclesiastes.
May 5, 2008 at 2:38 pm
Ken
And Isaiah.
May 8, 2008 at 3:41 am
Benedict
I think we have to include Job here, as well, no?
May 8, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Ken
Yes, and Job.
May 11, 2008 at 11:10 am
jakeb
Help me with Job — for some reason, I’m not getting it. I don’t see Job as agreeing that the struggle for existence is the ordering force in life. What am I forgetting?
May 11, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Ken
I guess I was just thinking that Job is one of the “nature” books in the Bible. I agree with you that in the book of Job it is God, not the struggle for existence, that is the ordering force in life. I think Eliade and Darwin would concur.
Although I can see Eliade’s description of the sacred view of life in Darwin’s work, The Origin of the Species reflects a modern perspective in which history, not heaven, is the source of meaning. Although I can see a mythical structure to the description of life in The Origin of the Species, that description of life is more profane than sacred, as Eliade used those words, because it is history, not divinity that is the basis for meaning, and thus, reality.
Darwin’s expression, “natural selection,” which he contrasts with “human selection,” also contrasts with “divine selection.” Ironically, the use of a metaphor like that is consistent with the way ancient religious humanity viewed all of life: every thing here was modeled after its counterpart in heaven, everything here derived its meaning from its counterpart in heaven.