A number of years ago, I read Charles Darwin’s On the Origins of Species as part of a never-finshed attempt to read the Harvard Classics, an old collection of all the most important classical books.
It was dull reading. Darwin goes on and on explaining the minutiae of his observations of biology, and there are very few illustrations or charts to help you picture all of it.
But there are a few times he gets philosophical or poetic. One line, the only line, that stuck with me was:
We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see superabundance of food; we do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life; (page 79)
This disturbed me, probably more than it should have. On a normal day, I would not have thought much about it. But that day, I guess I was in a stupor of boredom after reading 78 pages of biology, and this one line hit me hard. I like to hear birds singing. It’s one of my favorite things about the house I now live in — outside, you can often hear birds chirping wonderfully. But is this just a happy illusion? Is nature really just a cruel place, a dog-eat-dog world, after all?
I thought about all this recently, when I came accross the following reflection of Tertullian, an early Christian writer, in his treatise On Prayer:
Every creature prays. Cattle and wild beasts pray and bend the knee. As they come from their barns and caves they look out to heaven and call out, lifting up their spirit in their own fashion. The birds too rise and lift themselves up to heaven: they open out their wings, instead of hands, in the form of a cross, and give voice to what seems to be a prayer.
It’s interesting how two people observing nature can have such opposite reactions.
It’s probably not fair to compare these two men’s writings, separated as they are by a great chasm of time and context. To Darwin’s credit, he says some stuff at the end of Origin that puts a more positive light on his 500+ pages of stark explanations of biological life, but he still exalts the “war of nature” in a way that tends to leave me uneasy and, fairly or unfairly, has been used to justify nihilistic ideologies over the last century and a half.
Certainly, nature is full of violence, cruelty, and random chance. Our own lives are a testament to that sometimes. But I try to remember that there’s more to life than those things, that somehow, some way, our existence points toward God and goodness. It’s the only way to carry on.