Wrestling with Nature From Omens to Science

56 Lehoux

pirically undergirded theological movement that is largely independent

of contemporary religious practice.^44

KNOWING NATURE

Ancient science approached nature in a remarkably wide variety of ways,

with a correspondingly wide variety of motivations. But all philosophers,

all investigators came to their subjects not in a vacuum but as under-

stood within developing... what?—one almost wants to say disciplines

although that would not quite be the right word; perhaps fi elds, broadly

conceived, is better. They came to their subjects as integrated parts of

established fi elds; fi elds that had ways of approaching nature, ways of

understanding, ways of analyzing, ways of synthesizing that were effective

and impressive in their scope and power. Not hidebound by tradition, but

not infi nitely variable either. The development within and across subject

areas could and often did cross- fertilize in fruitful and interesting ways.

The breadth of the projects is remarkable: ethics feeding into logic

feeding into mathematics feeding into theology feeding into physics and

back again. The diversity of these encounters with nature, likewise. We

have seen physics reverberate out into divine reverence in some schools,

but not in others. From the third century BCE, ethics plays very direct and

important roles in the Hellenistic schools (Stoicism and Epicureanism)

and their physics. Finally, plain old curiosity, that motivation almost too

mundane to mention, fi nds an elevation and an outlet in the extraor-

dinarily wide range of phenomena as witnessed and experienced in the

world—in Nature—where the sophisticated methods and tools of classical

science found that they could provide knowledge.

NOTES

1. Good overviews can be found in M. Beagon, Roman Nature: The Thought of Pliny
   the Elder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); and J. F. Healy, Pliny the Elder on Sci-
   ence and Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).


2. Pliny, Natural History 2.1 (translation mine).


3. One could point here to Kuhn’s “essential tension”; see T. S. Kuhn, The Essential
   Tension (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1977).


4. On Aristotle, see e.g., C. Shields, Aristotle (New York: Routledge, 2007); J. Barnes,
   ed., The Cambridge Companion to Aristotle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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