In his autobiography, Charles Darwin remarks that
the old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. Everything in nature is the result of fixed laws.
Darwin can already see the new shape of biological explanation that will result from his theory. The “fixed laws” of variation and natural selection account for the form and behavior of living beings: once these are known, there is nothing more to be said. If we ask why the bivalve shell has this kind of hinge, we can only answer that it resulted from an accumulation of variations that happened to be beneficial to the ancestral organisms at some time in the past. A century and a half later, most scientists now believe that the structure and behavior of any organism can be fully explained in terms of its contribution to the “struggle for existence” in that organism’s ancestors.
For the popularizers of Darwinism, from Huxley to Dawkins, accepting this theory is incompatible with the pre-modern perception of a biosphere laden with purpose and meaning. We can no longer find an intelligible order in the world around us, only the accidental order emerging from the operation of “fixed laws” on a large collection of separate individual entities. But already among Darwin’s immediate audience, there were those who disputed this reading of his scientific findings. In 19th-century Russia, renowned naturalists including the botanist Andrei Beketov (1825–1902), the zoologist Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov (1845–1916) and the geologist (and anarchist) Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) pointed out how British economic theory had conditioned Darwin’s way of seeing. These Russians embraced the hypothesis of a common ancestry of living beings, and many of them adopted the metaphor of “struggle for existence” in their own thinking about the causes of evolutionary change. But in the organisms they studied, the struggle does not appear as a competition among otherwise non-interacting individuals for a fixed pool of resources—the situation presupposed by Thomas Malthus in the essay that Darwin hails as the inspiration for the theory of natural selection. Instead, they found a collective “struggle” against the challenges of difficult terrains and climates, where the survival of each species depends on that of the whole ecosystem. This observation opens up new ways of thinking about order in nature, by taking a closer look at the central metaphor of Darwinian evolution.
To guide us in this task, we can turn to the seventh-century Byzantine theologian Saint Maximus the Confessor, a pivotal contributor to the intellectual tradition that continues to form the imagination of Eastern Europe—and thus an influence on Beketov and his compatriots, whether directly or indirectly. Maximus provides some of the most detailed reflections from the Patristic era on the practice of “natural contemplation” (theōria physikē), the activity of contemplating God in and through the “meanings” (logoi) by which He orders His creation. Maximus sees the world as the fruit of an intelligible divine project, owing its existence entirely to God’s freedom and wisdom. But this project has a very different character from the top-down design envisioned by Darwin’s believing contemporaries, since it is actualized through the cooperation of the creatures themselves.
Maximus calls our attention to the peculiar notion of “existence” presupposed by Darwin’s “struggle.” If we understand this in a bare-bones materialist sense, there is nothing to struggle for: the collection of elements that constitutes the organism keeps existing in any case, however they are rearranged.
In the writings from the later years of Maximus’s public activity, we have a particularly rich exploration of this aspect of order in nature, thanks to a fierce controversy over the proper interpretation of the Council of Chalcedon’s definition of “two natures” in Christ. This question leads him to a deep reflection on the inner structure of a “nature,” to develop criteria for determining whether something has a certain nature. Surprisingly for us, who still tend to inhabit the modern mechanical perspective, Maximus does not find a being’s nature primarily in the arrangement of its physical parts. Instead, he focuses on a kind of innate desire, which he calls “natural will,” as the root cause of all other natural properties:
Natural will is a power reaching for what is according to nature, and preservative of all the properties that essentially belong to the nature. Held together naturally by the natural will, the essence yearns to be and to live and to move according to sensation and reason, desiring its own natural and full realization. For nature is established by willing itself and everything that naturally makes for its own subsistence. (Opuscula 1, PG 91, 12)
Later in this same letter, Maximus makes clear that natural will belongs to every natural being, not just humans:
For every being [...] naturally longs for what is according to nature, and possesses according to its essence, as a gift from God, the power to achieve this, for its own maintenance in being. (Opuscula 1, PG 91, 12)
Maximus thus thinks of nature in terms of a desire or appetite for existence. He agrees with Darwin in finding the primary locus of purposeful action at the level of the individual organism seeking to realize and preserve its own being, and not in an extrinsic purpose imposed by a designer. He might even accept the terminology of “struggle,” since every organism has to overcome obstacles and respond to threats in order to achieve its aim.
But Maximus calls our attention to the peculiar notion of “existence” presupposed by Darwin’s “struggle.” If we understand this in a bare-bones materialist sense, there is nothing to struggle for: the collection of elements that constitutes the organism keeps existing in any case, however they are rearranged. The “struggle for existence” can only be the struggle to maintain a particular way of being in the world, defined in large part by a characteristic way of “struggling.” Maximus uses the Greek word logos to name this specific way of existing, with different kinds of organisms carrying out their struggle according to different logoi. As he remarks just after the first passage cited above, each nature “comes to be by reaching out appetitively according to its own logos” (Opuscula 1, PG 91, 12).
By desiring what is according to its nature, each being thus seeks to incarnate its own logos. In contrast to Darwin’s Malthusian vision, the difference of logoi does not entail a competitive conflict among the different kinds of beings. Instead, it is precisely by reaching out for its own “natural and full realization” that each organism carries out its function in service of the whole. Maximus recognizes that there is a certain “war of beings against each other” (Ad Thalassium 27, CCSG 7, 193) at the level of what is immediately accessible to the senses, since the generation of new beings often requires the destruction of others. But in the logoi themselves, all contrariety disappears (ibid.), since the goal of each being only makes sense in the context provided by all the others.
The place to look for order, then, is not in some blueprint imposed from above, but in the relationships that obtain among different kinds of beings here and now, by which they collectively provide everything needed for the flourishing of each. The logos of each being is manifest in the way it acts upon and is acted upon by the beings around it, as it strives for full realization as the kind of being that it is. Only with careful and patient observation can one begin to glimpse this logos, grasping how the diverse physical forms of different species correspond to their different ways of being, and what it means for each to flourish as itself. Then the bigger picture gradually emerges, as each logos refers to the logoi of the other beings in its environment. When we examine the aims of each life form in its “struggle” for existence, we find a spectacular web of interdependencies in which each thing finds its place, but without the rigid efficiencies of a mechanical design. Instead, the world appears more like a good symphony, where every note makes sense in context, even though its existence could never have been predicted a priori.
Perhaps the easiest place to begin cultivating this vision of order is the world of plants and insects. According to current historical reconstructions, these very different ways of being appeared on land around the same time. Although the earliest species of each group simply ignored the existence of the other, they soon developed a wide variety of ways of relating, ranging from herbivorous insects to carnivorous plants. Particularly striking is the case of flowering plants, which have made insects an integral part of their very act of reproduction. Once this relationship is established, Darwinian natural selection gives a plausible account of the evolution of flowers, since the plant’s fitness now depends on its ability to attract and guide pollinators to its reproductive organs. But Maximus invites us to take this line of thought a step further. The fact that these plants and insects depend on one another for survival provides a window into their logoi, their place and meaning in the cosmos. Part of what it means to be a flowering plant is to influence insect behavior using visual cues, while the activity of recognizing and distinguishing flowers is central to the life-world of their insect partners.
This example illustrates how relationships among different kinds of living things can open up whole new dimensions of order. As plants learn to direct insects with shape and color, and insects develop finer capacities of visual discrimination, insect vision becomes an independent world of meaning. Flowers no longer fit into a simplistic version of natural selection that ranks everything on a single static “fitness axis,” but are part of a dynamic and open-ended “game” that constantly creates new possibilities. The interdependence between flowers and pollinators creates a positive feedback loop, in which flowers eventually shape insect preferences in ways that are completely unrelated to any transparent measure of nutritional value (analogous to the exotic colors and shapes generated by sexual selection in birds). Through this visual conversation, plants and insects can diversify indefinitely: current estimates suggest upwards of 350,000 distinct species of flowering plants, with about an equal number of insect species interacting with them.
Seen through the lens of Maximian natural contemplation, Darwin’s observations thus bring us deeper into the relational order of nature. Each organism strives to maintain its own existence, driven by its “natural will,” by interacting in various ways with the other beings that surround it. These interactions define what it means to live as this kind of being, so that the organism can be truly said to “contain” its environment as part of its own logos. Since no part of the biosphere is truly isolated from any other, such contemplation eventually leads us to see the whole world in each individual. Modern science enables us to appreciate this reality in a way that Maximus could never have reached on his own, with the stars themselves included every living being, as the source of the elements that make their life possible.
Where evolutionary theory departs from Maximus’s own worldview is its recognition of the plasticity of ways of being. Not only have many species gone extinct when there was no longer a role for them to play, but new species have appeared to fill new roles opening up over the course of geological history. In fact, the geological changes that created these roles were often caused by a prior generation of organisms. For example, early cyanobacteria radically transformed the atmosphere by filling it with oxygen, opening up a new space of possible chemical reactions that made multicellular life energetically possible. In this way, the “meaning” of a given organism transcends its own time, and includes all the future developments that depend on it. While Maximus had no way of reconstructing the events of deep time, this aspect of evolution is deeply coherent with the kind of order he contemplates in the world around him, where the whole is fully present in and through each of its parts. In this way, the ancient cyanobacteria are also present in me, along with the whole history of earth, stretching back to the Big Bang.
Darwin was a meticulous observer of this relational order, especially as regards plants and insects. By painstaking examination of orchids and their moth pollinators, he was the first to show that the exquisite contortions of these flowers are not arbitrary decoration, but are the intelligible product of an ongoing “conversation” with the moths. This led him to a glimpse of the overall unity and beauty of the natural order, as he recalls a few paragraphs down in his autobiography from the citation with which we began:
[A rational conviction of the existence of God] follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker.
Perhaps this “weakening” could have been averted if Darwin had managed to maintain his youthful admiration for Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose later metaphysical thought closely echoes the logos-theory of Maximus. In any case, the winding roads of Darwin’s legacy are finally leading to a recovery of natural contemplation, unveiling a vast order of parts and wholes, united in the creative Wisdom of God, and actualized by the striving of natural will. The struggle for existence leads us back to the gift of existence, without which there would be nothing to strive for. By defending its existence according to its own logos, each living thing contributes to the good of the whole, in which all the logoi embrace one another as one Logos of creation.
