Duden looks at the work of historian Carolyn Merchant, who studies how the idea of nature was--until the Middle Ages--"baptized and progressively Christianized"
Nature, for early Christian thinkers, "is sustained and elevated by the hand of God"
"The technical word for this ontic anchorage of being and becoming, of all nature, in God who is life, is contingency. This term means that the aliveness of nature is experienced as the result of its 'closeness' to the Creator. Nature's aliveness is an outgrowth of that Life which God is and which finds its expression in innumerable shades of being alive, but differently in mud and gems, salvia plants and cedars of Lebanon, stars and woman" (Duden, 105)
"According to Merchant, the adventure of modern thought can be seen as the struggle to disentangle nature from its contingency, to sever its aliveness from the life of God. And, through this disentanglement, nature has been doubly redefined. It has lost not only its (Christian) contingency, but also its cosmic Greek aliveness."
Giordano Bruno "does this beautifully in his Oxford lectures, where he speaks of the cosmos as an organism of orderly worlds. Henceforth, nature is the order of things [...] Descartes takes the next step in the disembedding of things. For him, each thing has its own nature, and its existence rests on its entitlement to be according to its nature."
Merchant describes this as "the death of nature"
106: "With the death of nature, all things--from soil to beast, from the earth's attraction to a child's babble--lost the transcendent aliveness which had always been an integral aspect of their being. All things acquire the factualness characteristic of modernity; the fetus appears as 'a fact' in woman's womb"