Protecting Nature, Saving Creation

Ecological Conflicts, Religious Passions, and Political Quandaries

Pasquale Gagliardi, Philipp Valentini, A. Reijnen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137342669
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Can religions help us tackle the ecological crisis we are now facing? Can we redefine our relationship with the Earth, giving spiritual depth to ecological issues? This book attempts to answer these questions by exploring the relationship between ecology and theology.

PART I

PROCEEDINGS OF THE DIALOGUE

1

TAKING IN THE REAL: HUMAN BEINGS AND THE EARTH

OPENING SPEECH

Card. Angelo Scola

Patriarch of Venice

A CUE FROM MAHLER

“O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens, Lebens trunk’ne Welt!”: “O beauty, O world drunk with eternal love and life!” These words that Mahler added to the text of the last movement of Das Lied von der Erde (1907–1909) arguably sum up the whole spirit of the work. They are fundamental concepts shaping the structure of the composition.

First, beauty. According to Prince Myshkin’s celebrated claim in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, “Beauty will save the world.”¹ But beauty, if separated from good and truth would, to use Dostoevsky’s words again, this time pronounced by Dmitri Karamazov, be “terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles . . . The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”² And yet, as the great St. Augustine asks, significantly in De musica: “Tell me, I beg you, what else can one love if not beautiful things?”³

The second key concept in Mahler’s phrase is the world, seen as the whole of reality. In this connection, his reference to drunkenness requires close scrutiny. It is not meant as an allusion to the “third eye of the poet” pointing the way to other worlds, which the so-called poètes maudits in late nineteenth-century Paris (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and others) sought by drinking absinthe. It is an opening up to fullness, overabundance, and even the longing for. This brings us to love, the power that “moves the sun and the stars,”⁴ and often becomes solace in life. And lastly, life and eternity. Both because life is unquenchable thirst for eternity and because in every life there is something eternal.

TAKING IN THE REAL

Like all musical geniuses, Mahler alludes to an irreducible state of affairs. Reality speaks to man and man is able to take in reality. Indeed, there may well be an intimate correspondence between the two.

But where does the possibility of the relationship between man and the outside world come from? To come ex abrupto to the theme of this meeting: is this relationship the involvement—albeit at qualitatively different levels—of all beings in a single nature, or the relationship that both have with a Creator? Before attempting to answer this question, we must mention an important factor. Although the question concerning the relationship between man and the world is as old as humanity itself, today it has taken on an urgent new relevance. Unlike what happened up to the age of Kant, it now seems inconceivable that anthropological and ethical questions might come from cosmology. Considerations about the Earth no longer provide a picture in which man must find a place (anthropology); nor do they constitute an example to be followed⁵ or to which man must or can refer in some way (ethics). Man now appears literally to be im-mondo (“not of the world” or “unclean” and excluded from the sacred). The Earth often appears only to be a kind of inconsequential ornament. People confidently go about their affairs but their affairs owe nothing at all to the cosmos. They are extraneous to it: “We no longer know in what way it is morally good that there are human beings in the world; and, for example, why it is good that they continue to be there. Is their existence worth the sacrifices that it costs? To the biosphere, to their parents, to themselves?”⁶

Precisely on these grounds, deciding what kind of relationship man has with the Earth is an urgent, crucial issue.

MAN AND THE EARTH

An initial suggestion as to what our position in the surrounding environment is comes from the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople: “It is a fact that the term ‘environment’ presupposes someone encompassed by it. The two realities involved include, on the one hand, human beings as the ones encompassed, and, on the other hand, the natural creation as the one that encompasses . . . we must clearly retain this distinction between nature as constituting the environment and humanity as encompassed by it.”⁷ Besides providing an essential initial description of the relationship between man and the environment, Bartholomew’s remarks illustrate how this relationship belongs to the shared experience of life. Man experiences a living exchange with the created world and at the same time cannot avoid wondering about the meaning of being immersed in nature: where is that experience grounded?

In the Bible the environment in which man is created is represented by the figure of a garden (the Greek parádeisos), a place of beauty in which man’s constituent relations—with self, with God, and all other living beings—are harmonious. Moreover, the “environment” itself has been created for man, who is called on to cultivate and care for it (Gen. 2:15). He is also given the task of naming the living creatures (Gen. 2:19).

Starting from theological thinking about creation, we realize how God’s creative action is manifested not only in making the world exist, but also in making human beings free and therefore responsible for the whole of creation. The narrative of the Fall of man and woman is meant to signify that from the first instant of creation, man’s freedom is at stake. We cannot think of man separately from his freedom. And the Earth exists for man so much that the Church identifies the root of the environmental issue in original sin. John Paul II described the issue in exquisitely anthropological terms:

In his desire to have and to enjoy rather than to be and to grow, man consumes the resources of the earth and his own life in an excessive and disordered way. At the root of the senseless destruction of the natural environment lies an anthropological error, which unfortunately is widespread in our day. Man, who discovers his capacity to transform and, in a certain sense, create the world through his own work, forgets that this is always based on God’s prior and original gift of the things that are. Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the Earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though the Earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray. Instead of carrying out his role as a co-operator with God in the work of the creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him.⁸

This is why, as the Revelation still teaches us, the man-environment relation must be seen from the point of view of Redemption.

Christ’s resurrection ushers in a new stage in which the relationship between man and creation is set under the sign of birth or “labor,” which is painful but positive because intended for the good in life. And this is above all anthropological labor, which affects however, as St. Paul points out, the whole of creation: “For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that all creation is groaning in labor pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved” (Rom. 8:19–24). In this way anthropological labor and cosmological labor are interlocked in the ineluctable eschatological perspective. Thus in the second coming—already initiated on the path of the human family—what is already complete in Christ will be completed in us and in the world through the resurrection of our mortal body in our true body, in the new heavens and the new Earth. According to the Christian point of view, in this light we can look at the first creation and the new creation not as two separate realities that succeed each other mechanically, but as two moments that reciprocally embrace each other. The second assumes the first and gives its full meaning. The first in itself would inevitably remain incomplete and not adequately intelligible. Moreover, the historic-salvific path develops according to a plan conceived “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), which will be realized in “the fullness of times” (Eph. 1:10).

With the new creation, Christ is revealed as the Head of creation itself:⁹ the foundation of Christ’s caring for all men until his death and his resurrection for us lies in the creation of all men in Christ.¹⁰

With thus grasp the literal meaning of creation in Christianity as the primordial relationship between God and the human person in the world: Why did God create man and the world when he has no need of them? This question can be couched in the terms of modernity as: Why is there being rather than nothingness?

Creation is the gift that God makes of Himself. Through it, he freely brings into being and maintains creatures in life, who, although radically distinct from Him, bear His indelible mark.

TWO REDUCTIVE VERSIONS OF THE MAN-NATURE RELATIONSHIP

This vision of existence enables us to eschew two inadequate conceptions—inadequate because basically incapable of fully accounting for human experience—of the man-environment relationship.

On one hand, an extreme anthropocentrism, whereby man is the absolute master of the cosmos. We know that some ecological thinkers base this line of reasoning on the precedence that the Bible accords to man over the created world.¹¹ The argument comes from the first version of the Genesis narrative of creation, which takes the form of an order given to man: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth” (Gen. 1:28). Without entering into a detailed reply to this critique, we can simply refer to the “second narrative” of creation (Gen. 2:41–3:24), in which the biblical teaching is formulated as follows: “The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it” (Gen. 2:15). Here there are not only two protagonists in the man-creation relationship—the human community and creation—but three, given that the relationship originates with the Creator. This leads to a further consideration. If man cannot rise to be the omnipotent master of the cosmos, nor can he delude himself that he can save it from disaster only through his own efforts, even when resorting to the remarkable discoveries and applications of science and technology.

Moreover, this prevents us from naively accepting a biocentrism or eco-centrism that sets out to “eliminate the ontological and axiological difference between man and other living beings, since the biosphere is considered a biotic unity with undifferentiated value.”¹² Accordingly, “man’s superior responsibility can be eliminated in favor of an egalitarian consideration of the ‘dignity’ of all living beings.”¹³ But this view impoverishes both the value of man, who is ultimately denied the status of a free agent participating in the activities of the Creator, and the value of the earth, which is stripped of all meaning that is not its own pure conservation. In fact as Pope Benedict XVI writes: “Human salvation cannot come from nature alone, understood in a purely naturalistic sense.”¹⁴

If the cosmos is reduced to nature in which we are absorbed, our relationship with it can at most be aesthetical, but not ethical (Kierkegaard). Nature, however, is not only “a set of ‘things’ but also of ‘meanings,’”¹⁵ through which human freedom is called on to realize its own original vocation in the search for the face of the Creator.

ENVIRONMENTAL CONFLICTS AS AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ISSUE

After this brief survey of the Christian vision of the relationship between man and creation, we can ask—in line with the objectives of the organizers of this event—if and how this conception, and similarly those of the other great religions, can still effectively interact with a way of perceiving and tackling the current intense ecological conflicts.

It is obviously not up to me, nor am I competent in the field, even to attempt to answer the question that will be discussed by the experts during the Dialogue. It may roughly be framed in the following terms: are religions, as demonstrated by their influence in other fields in the past, able to mobilize energies to contribute to a thoroughgoing ecological conversion? This would require a kind of radical eschatology, as Latour argues,¹⁶ that is a long slow change affecting many areas of life referring to an enormous quantity of details and, most importantly, dependent on an infinite number of actions which, and this is the difficult part, demand that billions of people change their outlook. Can religious passions come to the aid of the low energy levels that seem to characterize the many ecological conflicts today?

This question contains a fairly overt invitation to frame in a radically new way the relationship between eco-logy and theo-logy in order to tackle openly the internal conflicts in these two worlds. I will only make a generic kind of suggestion.

I do not wish to go into the debate on the concept of nature. Almost everyone, in both the scientific and theological fields, now believes nature is doomed and considers this situation to be responsible for almost all the ills afflicting humanity. Personally, I believe that since something given is always given to someone, an ultimate ineffable element is ineliminable. And from Aristotle on, wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Ariadne and the Minotaur: A Thread Winding through the Labyrinth (A Guide for Readers)7
• Part I  Proceedings of the Dialogue
• Part II  Afterthoughts