III A short theology of taxonomy

I have thus far argued for that genre is a ‘theological’ notion in so far as it perpetuates a certain mythoi. But it is also the case a very important theological description ought to be given of the idea of order itself. We have already seen that a habit formed in the study of literature of viewing the literary genres as ideal and permanent forms in some way encoded into the very order of existence itself. This naturally runs up against the observable contingency of genres – their changing shape and variety, and the emergence of new genres of literature unheralded. Epistemology and ontology are not necessarily the same.

The human capacity for ordering and organizing is one of the most powerful techniques human beings have for interacting with and mastering the world. Perhaps the most famous of these systems in the natural sciences stems from the work of Carl Linneaus (d. 1778), who classified life forms according to successive categories – the kingdom, phylum/division, class, order, family, genus, and species. The classification system which bears his name allows for an effective comparison between individual animals, and it allows for the interpretation of newly discovered life forms according to a conventional system. The power of the Linnean system is at least in part because of its comprehensiveness. It simply makes room for every conceivable life form. This comprehensiveness gives the system the impression that it is not simply imposed by the human mind on the natural world, but is in fact the way things really are order by nature itself.

The problem comes with the emergence of a new way of thinking about life forms themselves – the obvious case being Darwin’s Origin of Species. The Linnean system was in fact part of Darwin’s own equipment in analyzing the natural world. But could it contain or explain his observations about the evolution of the species? Did it give a distorted picture, perhaps, of the natural world according to which the species were immutable, once-for-all given categories – as is suggested at least in the opening chapters of Genesis?  (need a commentator, esp Foucault). 

In his famous study of taxis The Order of Things[1], Michel Foucault sought to demonstrate simply how taxonomic activity is radically contingent. Foucault called the various historical eras ‘epistemes’ to indicate that these were periods in which different ways of knowing held sway. By showing that something as essential as the business of knowing things itself was a very different matter in different epistemes, Foucault unmasked the kind of aura of permanence that systems of knowledge like the Linnean system held. Foucault’s work is a powerful act of iconoclasm, with historical inquiry as his weapon against the systematic idols of the scientific age. He reminds science of the twists and turns of its own story, pointing to its constructedness as a form of knowing. This does not necessarily falsify it: but it does chasten its claims to know the order that of things.

Christian theology can never be satisfied with an account of the cosmos which denies that there is in the world, in some sense, an inherent order bestowed on it by its creator. The creation texts, themselves masterpieces of literary patterning, testify to the act of creation itself as an ordering of things. In Genesis 1, the sequence in the text is itself a metaphor of the divine creative activity. God ‘separates’ (  מַבְדִּ֔יל) the day and the night (Gen 1:6), giving to them their meaning as different periods of time. He likewise creates the living creates each ‘according to their kind’, and they are given different parts of the created order to inhabit. 

In Proverbs 8:22ff, the principle of wisdom is to be found embedded in the very fabric of the creation, because it was there in the construction of things:

"The LORD brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old;

 I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be.

When there were no watery depths, I was given birth, when there were no springs overflowing with water;

before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth,

before he made the world or its fields or any of the dust of the earth.

This is part of the rhetorical strategy of the book of Proverbs: the wisdom that it presents is not simply arbitrary or conventional. It is inscribed in the ways things are, and available for discovery by human beings if they are willing to pursue it under the rubric of ‘the fear of the Lord’. ‘Wisdom’ is an ontological principle: the fabric of the cosmos is on the same level as the business of ordinary human life. Just as the frame of things can be observed and discerned, so also the sequence and pattern of human life can be. Nevertheless, the theological rubric of ‘the fear of the Lord’ indicates that not all human knowledge gives rise to wisdom in a straightforward way. The dimension of doxology is not far from view; without it, the notion of wisdom collapses:

"Now then, my children, listen to me; blessed are those who keep my ways.

Listen to my instruction and be wise; do not disregard it.

Blessed are those who listen to me, watching daily at my doors, waiting at my doorway.

For those who find me find life and receive favor from the LORD.

But those who fail to find me harm themselves; all who hate me love death."

The voice of wisdom hints that there is more than simply organization on view in the activity of the creator. Creation is a wrestle of order out of a primeval chaos. Early Christian theology expressed this through the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, with ‘nothing’ taking on the tinge of a profoundly negative power. The creation is not simply morally neutral: it is an expression of God’s righteousness. In Psalm 104:7, for example, the creator ‘rebukes’ the waters. The chaos symbolized by water is stilled by the conquering and powerful word of the creator. 

at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight.

The incidental remark of Paul in the midst of church controversy in Corinth that ‘God is not a God of disorder, but of peace’ is likewise instructive: the ‘peace’ he names here is not simply the opposite of disorder in a literal sense but the kind of shalom that indicates the deep consonance of the Creator with the creation. It not simply ‘order’ but peace. Its opposite is then evidently tragically short of this picture of harmony. Likewise, in paralleling the act of creation with the act of raising Jesus from the dead Paul is at least implicitly pairing the nothing from which the world is created with the force of death itself. It is not simply neutral but hostile to God and his goodness. 

This is description of the activity of divine ordering in creation is not however tantamount to a purely essentialist account of order in creation. One further theological point needs to be made: that the concept of ‘nature’ is not, in Scripture, at odds with human history. It is not as if time is simple representative of a decaying of the pure state of the world. Far from it: the creation is created unfinished. It is ‘good’, but not yet perfected. The human creature is invited to bring an order to it. Representative of this is the moment when man gives names to all the animals. We learn that ‘whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name’ (Gen 2:19). The rights of naming bestowed on the first human by the creator is a mark of the responsibility he is being accorded. Freedom is given to the human being not simply to engage in a guessing game about the names of the creatures, but to choose the name that reflects his own response to the creature. 

That is to say: there is not only an acknowledgement that human ordering is an activity that is at its best an attempt to make sense of things as they appear (and we trust, as they are). Human beings are themselves creative. They bring an ordering to the world that makes available new possibilities in it. They see things with their systematic brains that make for novel and powerful connections between things. Human cultural activity is, on a theological account, an echo of the divine creative activity. It brings an order to things, not simply sees the order in things. This allows then for a theological description of how human systems of classification may differ over time without thereby falling into complete arbitrariness. The activity of human beings in seeking to order and classify the world around them is not simply descriptive. It will have a creative energy as well.[2]  

We also recognize the limitations of the process of classification as an activity undertaken by human beings who are limited and fallen and historical creatures. They are simply unable to take account of everything. They must submit their systems of knowing to revision and development. The impression of permanence and utter comprehensiveness is always a false one. 

‘Nature’ then is not the opposite of ‘culture’, on a biblical account. What is properly ‘natural’ may arise contingently from the generations of human interactions with the non-human world. Again, a passing comment from Paul is instructive. In discussing the length of men’s hair in 1 Cor 11:14, Paul asks: οὐδὲ ἡ φύσις αὐτὴ διδάσκει ὑμᾶς ὅτι ἀνὴρ μὲν ἐὰν κομᾷ ἀτιμία αὐτῷ ἐστιν (‘doesn’t nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair it is shameful to him?’ ‘Nature itself’ is the teacher he asks his readers to pay attention to. And yet he is here pointing to the conventional pattern of behaviour in his own culture. As commentators Rosner and Ciampa point out, the closest parallel to the language Paul uses here is found in Plato’s Poetics 1460.[3] In that text, Plato is explaining that heroic hexameter is the right meter, as ἡ φύσις διδάσκει – which from the context must refer to the idea of experience, or trial and error. 

We can see then that the ‘natural’ and the ‘historical’ are not opposites. The idea of a given order in creation that permeates the being of things is not necessarily in contradiction with the contingency of human accounts of this order, or the development of human traditions to explain them. Indeed, the activity of human ordering is as much part of the divine ordering as the substructure of atoms. The creator makes space for the naming and ordering of the world by those he makes in his image.

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[1] Michel Foucault, The Order of Things : An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002).

[2] Philosopher Alasdair McIntyre describes the development of traditions of knowing.

[3] Roy E. Ciampa and Brian S. Rosner, The First Letter to the Corinthians, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, Mich.; Nottingham, England: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co. ; Apollos, 2010), p. 539.