Throughout his lecture on life in light of affection, Berry attempts to remind us of the significance of the local and the personal.  Certain kinds of knowledge, certain kinds of ways of life, are ultimately antithetical to “the good life.”  For Berry, that good life is tied to a right relationship with the land (and those who share the land with him).  It’s a healthy localism, I think.

I’ve been going back through Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic, and a good portion of it rings true with Berry’s thoughts.  Levin’s approach to healthy conservatism sounds a lot like what Berry says about human knowledge and humility.  From Berry:

In my reading of the historian John Lukacs, I have been most instructed by his understanding that there is no knowledge but human knowledge, that we are therefore inescapably central to our own consciousness, and that this is “a statement not of arrogance but of humility. It is yet another recognition of the inevitable limitations of mankind.”  We are thus isolated within our uniquely human boundaries, which we certainly cannot transcend or escape by means of technological devices.

But as I understand this dilemma, we are not completely isolated. Though we cannot by our own powers escape our limits, we are subject to correction from, so to speak, the outside. I can hardly expect everybody to believe, as I do (with due caution), that inspiration can come from the outside. But inspiration is not the only way the human enclosure can be penetrated. Nature too may break in upon us, sometimes to our delight, sometimes to our dismay.

I don’t think he’s overly anthropomorphizing nature here (or in any of his thinking).  I think he sees an intrinsic cause-and-effect relationship between man and nature.  Nature has things to teach us: if we do not learn with humility, we will have to learn the hard way.

We cannot know the whole truth, which belongs to God alone, but our task nevertheless is to seek to know what is true. And if we offend gravely enough against what we know to be true, as by failing badly enough to deal affectionately and responsibly with our land and our neighbors, truth will retaliate with ugliness, poverty, and disease. The crisis of this line of thought is the realization that we are at once limited and unendingly responsible for what we know and do.

(image from express.co.uk)