[This is an expanded, edited version of a comment I wrote in response to some interesting questions and points made by Annie Gottlieb in my previous post. I recommend reading the whole conversation here. ]
Appetite is desire, and desire is good or evil depending on its object. We're always looking for love in all the wrong places, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a right place where it can be found, i.e., something that is worthy of our deepest longings and highest aspirations. "Our hearts are restless, my God, until they rest in thee," said St. Augustine. I'm not a fan of the Buddhist extinction of desire, but rather of seeking to identify its correct or lawful ends, if by lawful we mean something more like the Chuang’s Tzu’s Tao and less like the reductive legalistic mentality that seeks to reify it in a propostional code.
Desire needs to be educated not extinguished (as in some forms of Buddhism). Our entire civilization now is based on if you feel it, do it so long as you don't hurt anybody. And of course hurting people doesn't come far behind, because why shouldn't I hurt people if I really, really want to—and if I can get away with it. J. S. Mill might be rolling in his grave, but Trump and his popular embrace by the demos is where that libertarian ethos leads.
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As far as Christianity being anti-nature, I'd argue that the Calvinists get the most blame here, but it traces back to an arguments that Duns Scotus and Wm of Occam made that laid the intellectual groundwork for the destruction of the great Christian Neoplatonic synthesis accomplished in the 1100s and 1200s. Without going into all the details, Christians, like everyone else in the expanse from Ireland to China until then thought that the world was shot through with the divine, that the mind of God was to be found everywhere, and that natural philosophy was about discovering God's presence,, i.e., his language, i.e,, his Logos or Tao, in the natural world.
Occam and Scotus, for perfectly pious reasons, argued that the transcendence and freedom of God were so central to his being, that the natural, created world must be seen as something as radically separated from God, and so not constraining his power and freedom in any way. The Natural world, as a consequence, becomes just neutral, profane stuff. Nothing divine about it. And besides all that divine-presence language, even in Aquinas, was suspiciously pantheistic, and we can't have that.
The Eastern Christians rejected this argument, and Catholics were ambivalent about it so long as Aquinas retained some prestige. But for many of the reformers, God is not to be found everywhere throughout creation, but only in the private, personal encounter with God in faith. Luther hated the Greek philosophers. Faith alone is all that matters. Sola Scriptura. And Calvinism brought its own bizarre ideas about double predestination into the mix in such a way that led to thinking of Nature as utterly depraved as most humans were, except the lucky few among the elect who would be pulled from this cesspool, aka, creation.
So once again, I'm not saying that the deep, personal faith that the Reformers wanted to focus on was wrong, but it was unbalanced insofar as they tried to make it a social program. You can't build an adaptive, rich, expansive civilization on fideism.
Of course, in such a limited space I'm simplifying here, but bottom line: the rich Christian Neoplatonic civilization that peaked in the high Middle Ages, a civilization that provided the framework for Aquinas, Dante, Gothic cathedrals, St. Francis, the Rhineland mystics and the Beguines, Chivalric Love and the romances, the cult of the Virgin–was overthrown first in thought, and then in practice.
God no longer has anything to do with the natural world in any intimate sense. Sure, he created it, but his doing so was like the invention of the clockmaker. He engineered it, wound it up, and now it runs on its own without his involvement. It’s up to humans to reverse engineer it, and to exploit it for their own benefit. Faith becomes something private in a way that clears the public domain for both the scientific revolution, capitalism, and how the two combine in the Baconian Project, which leads to our transhumanist moment now.
I’m no nostalgist. My focus is the future, and I’m all about getting after it. I don’t want to live in the middle ages, and I don’t want to minimize its cruelties and stupidities, but I do think premodern European other premodern civilizations were more successful at providing a coherent, vital, rich meaning framework than our materialist civilization does now. Civilizations fail when the emissaries usurp their masters, as in Nietzsche’s tale after which Iain McGilchrist entitled his book. (See Note 5 in “Thomas Merton on Taoism”.)
Ideas matter more than almost everyone thinks. Philosophy in our culture is nothing more than an interesting diversion for nerdy types who have a taste for it. It has nothing to do with how the real world works. That is true of philosophy in a decadent society, a society that has lost its vital, creative connection to the Deep Real.
But whether we are aware of it or not, our society has a metpahhysics, and it constitutes the invisible OS operating in the background that is running our materialist civilization, and the lives of everyone who is acculturated into it. The Churches used to provide a counterbalance of sorts to the raw, nihilistic, materialistic energies that drove its earlier phases in the Industrial Revolution. But the churches now, in almost every way, are failing to positively influence attitudes and behavior in the public sphere because those nihilistic forces have triumphed, and the churches simply cannot flourish as an 'app' running on the nihilist Techno-Capitalist OS.
So, sure, lots of people call themselves Christians, but the loudest and most visible among them, with a few exceptions, have given Christianity a bad name. This is true especially for that kind of conservative Chrisitan who sees no problem with the political economy that Techno-Capitalism has produced. Guys like David Brooks lament the un-churching of America but don't understand its causes. They want to eat their spirituality, and have their techno-capitalism too.
[A great book for those who want to go deeper on this is Thomas Plant’s The Lost Way to the Good: Dionysian Platonism, Shin Buddhism, and the Shared Quest to Reconnect a Divided World. (‘Dionysian’, is not a reference to Nietzsche, but to the great, early medieval Christian Neoplatonist, Dionysius the Areopagite.) This argument is also laid out in the first of the three Cathedral Lectures, where I draw on Charles Taylor’s and Plant’s books.]
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