The role of religion remains contested in critical accounts of King Lear. Debates about whether the play is morally redemptive or basely materialist overlook the play’s investments in Christian materialism. This chapter argues that Lear’s claim in the opening scene that “nothing will come of nothing” mirrors the metaphysical doctrine ex nihilo nihil fit from Parmenides, which posits the unity of nature, essence, being, time, and speech or logos. Lear’s fall from a divinely enabled monarch to a “bare, forked animal” fractures this logos but does not evacuate the play of theological meaning. The widening gap between Lear’s assumptions about nature and the order of nature he encounters as a mode of lived experience generates new experiments with language and forms of theatrical mimesis. Against the transcendent and pagan metaphysics of the opening scenes of the play, the extreme suffering of Lear and others also centers on the “natural” body and language of Lear, Edgar, and Cordelia, introducing a form of spiritual redemption grounded in Christian materialism and associated in particular with the herbal cure and other forms of plant life that provide both spiritual and physical remedy.