‘Natura Emanata’

Abstract

We turn, then, to the consideration of the imaginational, penumbral ‘nimbus’ of finite creation, its nature, its status, and its privative potency as the source of the spatio-temporal ‘common order of nature.’ For, as has been said, though Natura creatrix is the fons et origo of the prima facie world of common experience and perception, this is no creatum, no eternal actuality, but an emanatum or projection of Natura aeterna upon the reference-system of the microcosmic part, whereby Natura naturata is at once relatively pulverized and debilitated to durationality. Doubtless, it is because the ‘common order of nature’ is thus a derivative of eternal Natura creata that it transcends mere ‘mechanism,’ that it exhibits a durational production of novelty which modern ‘creationist’ literature is apt to mistake for genuine creation; but the potency by which, as Whitehead¹ has said, the “flying dart” is “hurled beyond the bounds of the world,” the “throbbing emotion of the past” passes into “a new transcendent fact,” has its source beyond the ‘world’ and the ‘past,’² because these are but eccentric projections of Natura creata and aeternitos, for in mere ‘events’ and time, as such, there is no potency. The anxiety of the modern world to ‘take Time seriously’ (in the phrase of Samuel Alexander)³ has overreached itself in the acceptance of time as an absolute prior in which all existence is located or moves; but as well might we take the ever present liability of man to disease as belonging to the original ground of human existence, and its prophylaxis as the very nature and essence of human life-process—as if ‘life’ were definable as struggle with disease.