Underground Rivers - University of New Mexico

Chapter 13 -- Hydrotheology/Theohydrology
CHAPTER 13
HYDROTHEOLOGY/THEOHYDROLOGY
"Idroteologia/Teoidrologia"(1504),
Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo
Revealed for the first time in this very book, the above collaboration is dated by the single
recorded meeting between the artists. Scholars consider this work to be the penultimate
Renaissance artwork, the definitive tie between hydrology and theology.
The challenge in da Vinci’s and Michelangelo's time was that of reconciling Aristotelian
cosmology with new-found Humanism. Two centuries later, the challenge had shifted to that of
that of validating Biblical inerrancy in an increasingly-quantifiable terrestrial sphere.
There are three general phases in theology’s adjustment to human experience.
1. Scriptural dismissal of unsettling evidence. We saw this in Chapter 4, The Cross.
2. Floundering dogma. Christendom was intellectually challenged by Renaissance thought, the
subject of Chapter 7.
3. Textual reconciliation with ascertained fact. Seventeenth-century theologians sought
attributes of God in the heavens (astronomy), the inhabitants (biology), and the earth
(geology). This chapter is about how nature's hydrologic wisdom came to serve Judeo-
Christianity as an object lesson.
The challenge in da Vinci’s time was that of reconciling Aristotelian cosmology with new-found
Humanism. Two centuries later, the challenge had shifted to that of that of validating Biblical
inerrancy in an increasingly-quantifiable terrestrial sphere.
"Revealed theology" seeks God's truth above reason, decreed by God and formulated by God's
sacred institutions. "Natural theology” or "physicotheology" seeks God's truth through Aristotelian
observation and logic. It being the 17th century, from either perspective the truth was of course
God's truth.
And what could better prove God's grace than God's setting natural perpetuity the replenishment
of that which sustains human kind, the hydrologic cycle?
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