Ecology and Theology in the Ancient World

Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives

Ailsa Hunt, Hilary F. Marlow

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350004054
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This multi-disciplinary volume brings together the voices of biblical scholars, classicists, philosophers, theologians and political theorists to explore how ecology and theology intersected in ancient thinking, both pagan, Jewish and Christian. Ecological awareness is by no means purely a modern phenomenon. Of course, melting icecaps and plastic bag charges were of no concern in antiquity: frequently what made examining your relationship with the natural world urgent was the light this shed on human relationships with the divine. For, in the ancient world, to think about ecology was also to think about theology. This ancient eco-theological thinking - whilst in many ways worlds apart from our own environmental concerns - has also had a surprisingly rich impact on modern responses to our ecological crisis. As such, the voices gathered in this volume also reflect on whether and how these ancient ideas could inform modern responses to our environment and its pressing challenges. Through multi-disciplinary conversation this volume offers a new and dynamic exploration of the intersection of ecology and theology in ancient thinking, and its living legacy.

CHAPTER 1

ANCIENT IDEAS OF POLITICS: MEDIATING BETWEEN ECOLOGY AND THEOLOGY

Melissa Lane

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‘We are as gods’, asserted Stewart Brand in 1968 in speaking of the human relation to the environment – and, he enjoined, we had better get good at it (Brand 1968). Yet the fact that distributed human agency has brought about what is now increasingly widely termed the Anthropocene, the proposal to define a geological era succeeding the Holocene in virtue of the newly ‘central role of mankind in geology and ecology’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 17), does not mean that a reverse intervention of a quasi-omnipotent and benevolent kind is as readily within our current agential capacities. The enormous human capacity for political neglect, treating carbon emissions as free externalities, is not so readily convertible into the converse capacity for political control.¹ That is to say that we may turn out to be more like Greek gods – rivalrous, quarrelsome, and sometimes ultimately hapless – than an idealized monotheistic one, in our inability to control or reverse the effects of our actions (as argued also in Lane 2016: 118).

Brand’s assertion is often taken to herald a major novelty in humans’ relation to the environment: previously we were not as gods, but now we are (though subsequent research debates the moment at which this happened, whether it should be indexed to the Industrial Revolution, or whether human interventions have had major effects on the biosphere for thousands of years before that, perhaps in bringing about the ‘fifth extinction’ long before currently threatening to bring about the sixth) (Kolbert 2014). Yet if this way of thinking is relatively new to the environmental movement, reflecting on the relationships between humans, god or gods and nature is much more deeply rooted in the history of human thought, flourishing in the Axial Age of synchronic great civilizations from about 800–200 BCE (Bellah 2005). Thinking about how human agency, in the absence or presence of political organization, can interact with nature, and how that agency compares to how one might imagine the divine, is engrained in the great texts of that era, and can perhaps provide some guidance as we ourselves confront these questions afresh. This article will explore three particular themes – labour, land and nature, especially as related to divine punishment and reward – in both ancient Greek texts and the Hebrew Bible, in order to see what both polytheistic and monotheistic approaches might have to offer in shaping our meditations on god, nature and human agency today.²

Of course, the role of antiquity, both pagan and monotheistic, in framing the relationship between humans, gods and nature, has long been a subject of discussion. More than fifty years ago, the distinguished medieval historian Lynn White, Jr, gave a lecture on ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’ that offered one of the earliest grand narratives – from the ancient world through the whole sweep of Western history – of the relationship between ecology and theology.³ The lecture is generally remembered as a key intervention inaugurating the debate about the relationship between what White called ‘Judeo-Christian teleology’ and scientific and technological advancement, one that White concluded by urging a return to the alternative Christian path charted by St Francis of Assisi, whose entertaining of the idea of animal souls was lost in the dominant Christian narrative of God and man as transcending nature (White 1974: 23).

My interest here lies in an aspect of White’s narrative that has received scant attention: the place of politics in his account. He wrote that the fusion of science and technology was primarily achieved by the advance of modern democracy in the nineteenth century, which ‘by reducing social barriers’ brought about the ‘functional unity of brain and hand’, and he summed up his case by stressing not so much theology or science but the underlying role of democracy: ‘Our ecologic crisis is the product of an emerging, entirely novel, democratic culture’ (White 1974: 19). Without focusing specifically on the modern democratic element, what interests me in this thesis is the centrality that it gives to politics, a topic that has been relatively neglected in the great debates about the relationship between theology, science and technology, and ecology in Western and non-Western histories. In this chapter I explore the place of politics – in historical reality, in political theory and in philosophical imagery – in mediating between ecology and theology in the ancient world, both in Greek and Roman ideas and in the Hebrew Bible.⁴ Whereas in earlier work I have examined the relationship between politics and psychology as charted in Plato’s Republic as a key element of social stability, and hence of social and ecological sustainability (Lane 2011/2012), here I explore the relationship between politics and nature more directly, arguing that to think about ecology and theology is also – perhaps unexpectedly – to think about politics. Politics is not just an adventitious reaction to environmental and ecological issues. It is in ancient thought an integral part of how such issues were understood to arise and to be addressed.

Politics in the human relationship to nature in – and before? – the Anthropocene

To sustain the value of this thesis for thinking about ecology today, we need to confront a major preliminary challenge: that the categorical gulf between the way that humans related to nature in earlier geological eras, and in what is now known as the ‘Anthropocene’, in which humans have become the dominant force shaping the climate of the earth, makes any lessons from that earlier relationship irrelevant. While not spelling out such an implication, Dipesh Chakrabarty has laid out the basis for such a challenge in his important 2009 article, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’. There he argues as his first claim that while humans have always been ‘biological agents’, it is only recently that they have – ‘historically and collectively’ – become ‘geological agents’ in altering the chemistry of the atmosphere and so the basic conditions of climate, sea level and ice; he explains this geological agency as meaning that humanity now exerts ‘a force on the same scale as that released at other times when there has been a mass extinction of species’ – hence justifying the attribution of the new geological era of the Anthropocene (Chakrabarty 2009: 207).

There has no doubt been – if I may put it this way – a seismic shift in the nature of human agency in the Anthropocene. But Chakrabarty’s contrast between past merely biological agency, and current and recent geological agency, obscures the role potentially played by politics in each time period, at whatever scale and nature of impact. We can illustrate this for example by considering in what way humans may have played a role in ‘the disappearance of large mammalian fauna’ in Roman North Africa (Shaw 1981: 385, for this quotation and the others in this paragraph). An earlier view was that human biological agency was not important at all – that such disappearance and other shifts in the ecological balance of the region in late antiquity simply and directly reflected determinist effects of changes in climate. Against that view was an intervention by Brent Shaw asserting a role precisely for human ‘biological agency’: he countered the argument for the simple ‘effects of a deteriorating climate’ in causing this disappearance by arguing that such effects ‘cannot be sieved out neatly from the one major discernible cause, the hand of Man’.

Shaw had in mind changing hunting and agricultural practices. Those are themselves the products of human communities, mediated through linguistic and cultural inheritances and practices. Indeed, for the classical Greeks, a politeia (constitution) would have included the practices of a general way of life, from patterns of child-bearing and child-rearing to daily diet to exercise and education.⁵ So I would want to go a step beyond his explicit argument, to suggest that such changing practices must themselves reflect political choices, possibilities, doings and allowings. This is not to reduce human agency to politics, but to insist that as political animals (as Aristotle would say), the political dimension of our agency is always to be considered – while asking how self-aware, collectively adequate to its ends and comprehensively engaging that dimension might in any given case be.

In other words, the practice of politics is likely already to have been part of what has shaped how humans have acted as what Chakrabarty calls biological agents. And for all of its novelty, the same is true of our geological agency in the present era. Both of these forms of agency are always at least potentially mediated by politics. And that role of politics in connecting humans, gods and nature is something that the ancients understood in their time, reflection on which can help us to better understand the new forms of interaction between humans and nature in ours. Ancient thinkers like Hesiod, Plato and the authors of the Hebrew Bible did much to trace the effect of humans on nature not simply as ‘biological agents’, whose effects on the natural world were the unthinking material results of biological processes, but rather as political agents who engaged with nature through the practices of politics. In their reflections on this point we find much that can help us both to appreciate the complexity and shape of ancient views themselves, and also to think for ourselves about the ways in which politics remains a critical factor in shaping the future of ecology in the Anthropocene. Whereas in ancient times the different spheres of human influence were spatially demarcated in relationship to the divinity or divinities apportioning them different plots of land, they are now temporally demarcated in geological time for the globe as a whole.

Spontaneous food supply and the absence of politics

Let us begin with some strikingly overlapping visions of an idyllic era in biblical and Greek texts, in which for the most part we find a spontaneously self-renewing sustainability of nature and an absence of politics. This will equip us, in the subsequent section of the chapter, to appreciate the role that agricultural labour plays in opening up a role for politics. Finally, we will turn to the condition of the land as the result of a complex interplay between divine rule and human agency, including political agency.

So to begin on the absence of politics and its relation to ecology and divinity: I will consider the two different narratives of the creation story in Genesis (in Hebrew, berē’šît), and the three related but subtly different narratives of the Golden Age or Age of Kronos in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and in Plato’s Statesman and Laws (Lane 2017). In all of these we find a vision of a recurrent, perennial supply of food, paradigmatically in the form of seed-bearing plants that have self-renewing powers to provide food (in particular, fruits) while replenishing themselves for future growth. In other words, in the abundance of such plants, we find an intrinsically sustainable relationship between humans and nature – one that seems not to need politics to be maintained, though as we shall see, the danger that politics could undermine it is arguably foreshadowed in at least one of these accounts, in Plato’s Laws. Once the golden age is left behind, however, humans will have to develop further arts of agriculture and artisanry as well as politics – and the future sustainability of their relationship to nature will be dependent on those arts not undermining or harming it, as they will have the power to do. These accounts may combine some dimension of cultural memory, of the stages of evolution of nature and culture (as with the contrast between pastoralism and agriculture in the story of Cain and Abel, Genesis 4), with fantasies of pure and spontaneous provision that could eschew labour altogether.

In the first biblical account, on day three of the creation of the world, God creates vegetation: ‘seed-bearing plants of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it’ (Gen. 1.12). After human beings have been created on the sixth day, these seed-bearing plants and fruits are presented to them as ‘yours for food’ (1.29). In this first narrative of creation in Genesis, there is no mention of need for work or toil: the seed-bearing plants and trees constitute a sustainable and spontaneous source of food.⁶ Simultaneously, in the second creation account (Genesis 2) paradise is modelled as pertaining to a single conjugal pair, so excluding any role for collective politics.⁷

We find abundant fruit embodying the dream of food without toil in Hesiod and some works of Plato as well. In Works and Days, Hesiod describes the golden age which is under the kingship of Kronos thus (adding spontaneous pastoral animal reproduction to the spontaneity of fruit-bearing trees): ‘spontaneously then/The earth bore rich, abundant fruit; and these contented men/Living in peace, enjoyed its works and all its many goods,/Abundantly supplied with sheep, beloved of the blessed gods’ (116–20).⁸ Notice that unlike in the Bible’s initial portrayal of human life, here – among an entire race of humans, a plural collective as opposed to a single conjugal pair – war and political strife is conceivably possible. What rules it out, by implication, is the contentment that the golden race enjoys from the effortless sourcing of food (and sheep), hence leading to peace. In other words, a spontaneously sustainable food supply can make politics unnecessary.⁹ By inference, the absence of such a spontaneously sustainable balance of food provision will make politics necessary, but in turn, also potentially inimical to that paradisical balance.

In Plato’s muthos (story) in the Statesman (or Politicus), which directly references the Hesiodic ‘golden age’ under Kronos’ kingship as one of its sources, the daimonion (divine assistant) figures who divide up living beings among them – each to rule one kind of living beings – ensure that there is ‘no war or internal dissent’ among (I take it) all living beings (Plt. 271e2).¹⁰ The daimonion overseeing humans further ensures that humans may live ‘without toil’ (Plt. 271e4: automatou), with ‘an abundance of fruit from trees and many other plants, which grew not through cultivation but because the earth sent them up of its own accord’ (Plt. 272a2–5).¹¹ In this narrative, the absence of politics is not directly connected to the absence of toil for food afforded by the fruit trees, but rather to the more general condition of this era of direct tendance (expressed in the vocabulary of pastoral shepherding) by a divine being: ‘given his tendance, they had no political constitutions’ (Plt. 271e7–8). Still, the absence of toil for food, the self-renewing sustainability of the environment insofar as it meets human needs, and the absence of politics in this account go together.

Contrast the account of the age of Kronos given by the anonymous Athenian Visitor who is the main speaker in Plato’s Laws. On the one hand, the Athenian Visitor (like his Eleatic counterpart in the Statesman) stresses that the humans of that age ‘were provided with everything in abundance and without any effort on their part’, glossing this as ‘the wonderfully happy life people lived then’ (Leg. 713c2–4). More important for our purposes, in the Athenian’s account, the direct rule over humans by one or more daimonion figures is described as producing ‘peace, respect for others, good laws, justice in full measure, and a state of happiness and harmony among the races of the world’ (Leg. 713e1–3). Here, divine kingship and secondary-divine tutelage is compatible with politics of a certain kind – laws and justice – in addition to peace. In contrast to Hesiod who linked effortlessly abundant food directly (via contentment) to peace, the Athenian connects effortlessly abundant goods to a more active political vision, if one remaining under direct divine control. The moral is that a theology of divine rule can make room for a real role for politics, and in particular, for one that bears on the relation between humans and environment.

Agriculture and human impact

If Plato’s Laws injects human politics into the age of Kronos, the Bible’s second creation story in Genesis for its part injects human agriculture into paradise: the man is commanded ‘to till … and tend’ the garden (2:15). Many interpreters have read this second creation story as a humbler one that is a better model for modern ecological principles: Daniel Hillel, for example, contrasts the ‘anthropocentric’ focus on humans as being given the ‘right to dominate all other creatures’ in the first creation story in Genesis 1, with their ‘stewardship’ role not as rulers but as ‘custodians’ in the second creation story in Genesis 2.¹² My focus here however is on the fact that, although the soil is cooperative and the labour not painful (as it will become with the expulsion from paradise), in this second biblical account work must be done to produce food, even in Eden.¹³ This second biblical narrative reminds us that in fact, the dream of food without any toil is a fantasy. Even fruit trees need pruning if they are to flourish long term (though it is worth noting that they were the last kind of trees to be domesticated, in part, it seems, as their time to reproductive maturity is so long: Goldschmidt 2013). That is, even fruitarian food requires a cooperative venture between nature and human craft, all the more so insofar as human activities come to disrupt the health of the tree and plant self-reproduction with which divine creation originally endowed them. In its second creation story, the Bible recognizes this fact, acknowledging the partnership between humans and the natural world that sustaining food will require. Elsewhere the Bible also prohibits the destruction of fruit-bearing trees in the course of laying siege to a city in wartime (Deut. 20.19).

At the same time, the potent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Ancient Ideas of Politics: Mediating between Ecology and Theology
• 2. The Ecology of the Sibylline Oracles
• 3. Self-Sufficiency as a Divine Attribute in Greek Philosophy
• 4. A Lighter Shade of Green: Stoic Gods and Environmental Virtue Ethics
• 5. Cosmic Beauty in Stoicism: A Foundation for an Environmental Ethic as Love of the Other?
• 6. Some Ancient Philosophical and Religious Roots of Modern Environmentalism
• 7. Creatures in Creation: Human Perceptions of the Sea in the Hebrew Bible in Ecological Perspective
• 8. Reconsidering the Chthonic in Aeschylus’ Oresteia: Erinyes, the Earth’s Resources and the Cosmic Order
• 9. The Anguish of the Earth: Ecology and Warfare in the First World War and the Bible
• 10. Pagan Animism: A Modern Myth for a Green Age
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint