Priests of Creation

John Zizioulas on Discerning an Ecological Ethos

John Chryssavgis, Nikolaos Asproulis, John Chryssavgis, Nikolaos Asproulis

• Editore: T&T Clark
• Anno: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780567699121
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Theology & Religion
• Categoria: Theology

Based on a constructive reading of Scripture, the apostolic and patristic traditions and deeply rooted in the sacramental experience and spiritual ethos of the Orthodox Church, John Zizioulas offers a timely anthropological and cosmological perspective of human beings as "priests of creation" in addressing the current ecological crisis. Given the critical and urgent character of the global crisis and by adopting a clear line of argumentation, Zizioulas describes a vision based on a compassionate and incarnational conception of the human beings as liturgical beings, offering creation to God for the life of the world. He encourages the need for deeper interaction with modern science, from which theology stands to gain an appreciation of the interconnection of every aspect of materiality and life with humankind. The result is an articulate and promising vision that inspires a new ethos, or way of life, to overcome our alienation from the rest of creation.

III

Liturgical Perspectives

7

Preserving God’s Creation

Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology

Lecture I: Historical Overview

The subject of this chapter, which is based on three lectures, has to do with the ecological crisis as one of the most pressing and vital issues of our time. It is becoming increasingly evident that what has been named “the ecological crisis” is perhaps the most serious problem facing the worldwide human community. Unlike other problems this one is global, concerning all human beings—regardless the part of the world or social class to which they belong. It is a problem that does not simply have to do with well-being but with the very being of humanity and perhaps of creation as a whole. It is difficult to find any aspect of what we call “evil” or “sin” that would bear such all-embracing and devastating power as ecological evil. This way of describing the ecological problem may sound to some ears as a gross exaggeration, but there are hardly any responsible scientists or politicians who would not agree with it. If we follow the present course of events, the prediction of the Apocalyptic end of life on our planet at least is not a matter for prophecy but of sheer inevitability.

In view of this situation what does theology have to offer humanity? The first and most obvious thing is that theology cannot and should not remain silent on issues like this. Christian theology and the Church can hardly be excused for staying silent for such a long time on this matter. Particularly since—and not without good reason—they have both been accused of having something to do with the roots of the ecological problem. The Church and Christian theology alike are called to speak on this matter not so much in order to apologize or offer explanations in view of such accusations, but in order to offer their constructive contribution to the solution to the problem. They must have something constructive to say on matters like this, or else they risk being unable to live up to their claim to the truth. A truth which does not offer life would be empty of meaning.

If we try to identify the direction in which our Western societies are going regarding solutions to the ecological problem, we will realize that all our hopes seem to be placed in ethics. Whether enforced by state legislation or taught and instructed by the Church or academic institutions, it is ethics that seem to contain the hopes of mankind. If only we could behave better! If only we could use less energy! If only we could agree to lower a little our standard of living! If . . . if . . . But ethics, whether enforced or free, presupposes other more deeply existential motivations in order to function. People do not give up their standard of living because such a thing is “rational” or “moral.” By appealing to human reason we do not necessarily make people better, while moral rules—especially after their disassociation from religious beliefs—prove to be more and more meaningless and unpleasant to modern man. The experience of two world wars and their destructive consequences in our century came as a blow to the optimism of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century prophets of the Enlightenment, who thought that the way things were going—with the cultivation of reason and the spread of knowledge—the twentieth century would be the era of human paradise.

Humanity does not always behave rationally and cannot be made to do so either by force or persuasion. There are other forces besides the human intellect that decide the direction in which the fate of the world moves. Theology and the Church ought to embrace areas other than the ethical—that is to say, the rational prescription of behavior—if they are to be of any use in this case. Such areas must include all that in the pre-Enlightenment world used to belong to the mythological, the imaginative, the sacred. We did our best in the post-Enlightenment world to destroy the mythological, to leave the nonrational to the Belle-Lettres, which we separated sharply from hard-thinking philosophy. As a result, we destroyed our “world-view” (with the accent on “world”)—that is, the understanding of the world in which we live as a mysterious, sacred reality broader than the human mind can grasp or contain, a “cosmic liturgy” as the seventh-century Greek Father of the Church, St. Maximus the Confessor, would describe the world. Of course the fear of paganism and all that it implies can justify a great deal of the attitude that led to sheer rationalism. Yet there could be, as indeed there have been, other responses to this fear than the total dichotomy between nature and history, secular and profane, reason and myth, art and philosophy, which have marked our modern way of thinking in the West.

Certainly the Church and theology ought to have found better ways to respond to such a fear than the way of separating the rational from the mythical, the sacred from the secular. They do, after all, claim that faith in Christ implies a unity between the transcendent and the immanent, as well as a recapitulation (anakephalaiosis) of all in the person of Christ. Appealing, therefore, only to the ethical solution, as so many Christians seem to do today, would only reinforce the reasons that led to the ecological crisis in the first place. If we try to solve the ecological problem by introducing new ethical values or rearranging traditional ones, I fear that we shall not go very far in reaching a solution. In the course of this chapter, I shall try to show why I think we stand in need of a new culture in which the liturgical dimension would occupy the central place and perhaps determine the ethical principle. If I were to give an overall title to this effort, a key notion for what I shall be trying to say to you here, it would be that of man as the priest of creation. I used this expression on the island of Patmos during the summer of 1988 in the context of the International Environment Conference that took place related to the 900th anniversary since the founding of the monastery of St John, the author of the book of Revelation.

I feel that our culture needs to realize that the superiority of the human being over the rest of creation does not consist in the reason it possesses, but in its ability to relate in such a way as to create events of communion, whereby individual beings are liberated from their limitations and are referred to something greater than themselves—namely, to God. The truth is that man cannot be conceived as a thinking agent but as a priestly person, and this is a notion that needs to be defined further in the course of this chapter. The notion of “priesthood” must be freed from its pejorative connotations and be seen as carrying with it the characteristic of “offering,” in the sense of opening up particular beings to a transcending relatedness with the “other”—an idea more or less corresponding to that of “love” in its deepest sense.

In all this the underlying assumption is that there exists an interdependence between man and nature, that the human being is not fulfilled until it become the anakephalaiosis or the summing up of nature. Thus, man and nature do not stand in opposition to each other in antagonism, but in positive relatedness. This cannot be achieved in any other way except through liturgical action, because it is only through such action that nature is involved itself in the very event of this positive relatedness. Man has to become a liturgical being before he can hope to overcome the ecological crisis. Nevertheless, before we come to an analysis of this thesis, we must become aware of the factors that have led to the present crisis and of the tools that history offers us toward its overcoming.

The First Centuries

The American historian Lynn White writing about the historical roots of the ecological problem in 1967 was quite categorical in attributing this problem to the Western intellectual tradition with its rationalistic view of man, and in assigning to theology and the Church an important role in this development. Regardless of the extent to which one agrees or disagrees with the judgment of this contemporary historian, it can hardly be disputed by anyone that history must have something to teach us about the roots of the present crisis and that religion, and Christianity in particular, has been a dominant force in the shaping of our culture throughout the centuries—at least up to the Enlightenment—and must have had some role to play in the background of this crisis. It will be necessary, therefore, to go back to the earliest stages of Christian history to try to identify the forces that have led to developments up to our own time.

If we accept the view that classical Christianity took shape in the context and perhaps under the influence of two cultures—the one dominated by the Hebrew and the other by the Hellenic way of thinking—it would be instructive to try to see in what ways these two cultures conceived man’s relationship to nature, along with the place that God occupied in this relationship. With regard to the Hebrew and Jewish culture, which formed the original milieu of Christianity, historians on the whole agree that the Hebrew mind tended to attach decisive importance to history—as the history of the elect people of God in particular—and to see God as revealing Himself mainly in and through His acts in history. Nature played a secondary role in this revelation; indeed, very often such a role was totally denied to it under the influence of an obsession with the fear of paganism that threatened the specific identity of the people of Israel.

This preoccupation with history rather than nature resulted in the development of prophetism at the expense of cosmology in Hebrew culture. Prophetism looked at the events marking the history of Israel, of other peoples—the “nations”—and often of individuals, and was concerned with the final outcome of these events. God was expected to reveal Himself in the final event that would supersede and at the same time give meaning to the previous events. Indeed, this final event—the eschaton, as it came to be called in the Greek speaking Jewish communities of the New Testament period—would be all that mattered in the Hebrew mind.

Greek culture, on the other hand, attached little significance to history. In fact, very soon in the circles of philosophers and scientists of classical Greece history was even looked upon with distrust and suspicion as the realm of change, flux, and disorder. Nature offered to the Greek the sense of security he needed, through the regular movement of the stars, the cyclical repetition of the seasons, and the beauty and harmony which the balanced and moderate climate of Attica—at that time, at least—offered.

Cosmology was the main concern of the Greek philosophers, who saw God as present and operating in and through its laws of cyclical movement and natural reproduction. Even minds as cultivated and as reflective theologically as Aristotle could not avoid worshiping the stars, while Plato (the theologian par excellence of classical Greece) could reach no further than a creator God who would be an artist creating a universe in accordance with preexisting matter, space, and ideas. This comparison between Hebrew and Greek attitudes to nature, allowing of course for all qualifications necessary for a generalized presentation of things such as the present one, implies among other things two points that are of immediate interest to our subject:

(a) The Hebrew mind seems to lack cosmological interest, while the Greek lacks prophetism. If Christianity were to make use of both Hebrew and Greek cultures, it ought somehow to arrive at what may be called “cosmological prophecy.” It is this that I believe we find for the first time in the book of Revelation, in which a Christian prophet following the best of typical Hebrew tradition rises above history and views the fate not of Israel alone but of all creation—that is, of the natural world, from the angle of eschatology as God’s final act in history. Cosmological prophecy is thus seen as a new type of prophecy, and this marks the beginning of a new approach to man’s relationship with nature, which the Church would pick up and subsequently develop further.

(b) The comparison between these two cultures that lie at the root of classical Christianity reveals that, whereas for the Greek the world was a reality that contained in itself sufficient energy to live forever—hence the understanding of the universe as eternal—for the Hebrew the world was itself an event, a gift that ought to be constantly referred back to its creator in order to survive and subsist. At this point the early Church had to combine a worldview that trusted nature for what it was—that is, believed in its rationality, in its logos or logoi—as well as one that regarded it as a gift and an event, constantly dependent upon its Creator and Giver.

It is out of this combination that early Christianity developed its “Eucharistic cosmology,” which like cosmological prophecy took a view of the world as finite and subject to its limitations in its nature, nevertheless as trustworthy and capable of survival in and through its being referred back to its Creator. Thus, in a typically Greek fashion, the world would be conceived as good and beautiful and would be conceived as man’s consciousness, but its beauty and permanency and centrality in man’s preoccupation would constantly depend on an event of reference back to what is not the world or nature—that is, to God. Thus, the earliest Eucharistic prayers of the Church, being composed in the best of typically Hebrew liturgical tradition, would involve a blessing over the fruits of the earth. However, this would be done in such a way as to involve also affirmation of faith in the survival of creation and nature, as if this survival—and not simply the survival of a people or of the human being—were central to the Church’s consciousness.

To sum up this point, both cosmological prophecy and Eucharistic cosmology, which emerged out of the encounter between Hebrew and Hellenic thought on Christian soil, involved the view that the world is an event and not a self-explainable process, but that owi ng to another event—namely, its being referred to the eternal and imperishable Creator—it can be said to be permanent and to survive. It is at this point that the responsibility of man as the one who refers the world back to the Creator arises and forms the basis of what we have called here his capacity to be the “Priest of Creation.” But we shall discuss this point later on. For the moment let us continue with our brief survey of history.

What we have said so far shows that, in primitive Christianity, cosmology and interest in nature occupied a central place in the Church’s consciousness, but this was done without falling into paganism, owing to the fact that the reality or nature of the world had to be conditioned by an event—that is, the event of referring the world to God. Thus, whereas in paganism faith in the survival of the world emerges from faith in the world’s eternal and inevitable self-perpetuation, in Christian cosmology the world is contingent and contains in itself no guarantee of survival except in so far as it is in communion with what is not world by nature—and not with what is part of nature—namely with God, as understood in the Judeo-Christian Bible. The crucial point, therefore, in the survival of the world lies in the act or the event of its communion with God as totally other than the world. Man’s responsibility becomes in this way crucial for the survival of nature.

The Middle Ages

All this describes the situation with regard to the first two or three centuries of the Christian era. Things, however, seem to change gradually and the Church is eventually led to a seriously modified view of the relationship between man and nature. Very briefly, the decisive steps in this development can be described in the following way:

1. The strong influence of Platonist Gnostic dualism in the second and third centuries resulted in undermining the importance of the material world and regarding it as at best irrelevant and at worst as evil. The Christian Gnostics of Alexandria, above all the extremely influential Origen, represent classical examples of this development. Origen in particular, who was widely read by the monks of Egypt, influenced a considerable part of Eastern monasticism that was fortunately rescued from this influence by monastic forces such as that of St. Macarius of Egypt and St. Maximus the Confessor.

2. In the West similar developments tended to introduce a dichotomy between man and nature by regarding the former as superior to the latter and as the center of everything. Typical examples of this development are to be found in Augustine and Boethius, who define...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: Toward an Ecological Ethos
• I Historical Roots
• II Theological Approaches
• III Liturgical Perspectives
• IV Ecological Ethics or Ecological Ethos?
• V Scientific and Spiritual Dimensions
• VI Ecumenical and Cultural Implications
• Conclusion: From Here to Where?
• Original Publications
• Select Bibliography
• Index of Names
• Index of Terms
• Copyright