Very recent events, both horrific (massacres in Charleston, Tunisia, Kuwait) and hopeful (recognition of same-sex marriages across the US), have somewhat overshadowed the release of Laudato si’ [hereafter LS], the Bishop of Rome’s encyclical letter ‘on care for our common home’, in the public attention. We rightly wish to celebrate civil rights and to condemn racism and violence in the United States and elsewhere. Nevertheless we ignore the encyclical at our peril, for it rightly draws the connections between violence (or justice) towards our human neighbors and violence (or justice) toward the rest of our relatives on this earth (or, the earth herself), and elucidates the fundamental threat we now face and both the immediate and deep-seated causes thereof.
LS contains many beautiful passages – particularly in its central and concluding sections – meditating upon creation as sacramental, as communion, as divine self-revelation. Drawing upon Biblical passages concerning creation, Our Lord’s relationship to the natural world, and the Levitical provisions concerning the connections between land and justice, it furthermore sets forth economic–ecological concerns as properly and crucially Christian ones. One urgently hopes that religious and political leaders, and people of faith, the world over will take heed.
However, the heart of the document – its descriptions and prescriptions – flags a bit, failing to be either as coherent or as compelling as it might. While calling on humanity to reconsider the means and ends of ‘development’ and the meaning and consequences of our actions, and attempting to draw a distinction between the ‘dominion’ of Gn 1.28 and ‘absolute domination’, it nevertheless seems to assume that ‘development’ of one sort or another is inevitable and good; that agriculture and urbanism, industrialization and electricity, mass transport and mass communication, the harnessing and transformation of nature generally, and unchecked population growth are the lot and right of humankind; and that we, though not separate from the rest of creation, are nevertheless not only unique but also superior. Perhaps all this is inevitable coming from a religious tradition that grew up in an agrarian–urban society, and whose sacred story is a written one that begins in an enclosed garden and ends in a walled city.
But it does prompt the question of humanity’s place with regard to the rest of the earth or indeed the cosmos. Did God indeed create a world explicitly in need of human husbandry? If so, what of the countless millennia before we first walked the earth? Is our seemingly innate drive to change and shape our environment a ‘natural’ part of our ability to learn and grow? Is it a good or a bad thing, or has it only been misdirected? What is and is not ‘natural’ in human life, and how are we to handle what comes ‘naturally’ to us? In the end, can the Earth live without us? Can it live with us?
I of course cannot answer these ancient questions which have exercised many great minds than mine. But I for one am extremely skeptical that the Kingdom (a term almost entirely, and conspicuously, absent from LS) can be found in, or will be discovered by, ‘development’ (or ‘progress’, the predecessor term for which it seems to be a synonym) or any sort of large-scale human activity, however ‘kinder, gentler’ or ‘sustainable’ or whatever else we may call it. Indeed, I am not at all certain that civilization, with all that it entails,* is ultimately compatible with our survival and that of the rest of the planet. Rather, an entirely different way of living on this earth may well be required.
What might this look like? ‘No one is calling for a return to the Stone Age’, says LS; even hunter-gatherers whom it would be easy to idealize are not immune to the temptation of gratuitous or excessive taking from nature (witness the destruction of megafauna in every region into which humans have expanded, as a recent article by George Monbiot pointed out). But if shaping our environment – for food, shelter, clothing, art, as well as for perhaps less noble ends – is fundamental to our identity as humans and yet seems a threat to its and our existence, how can creation be redeemed?
LS begins to point the way, by looking at the Holy Father’s namesake – but it does not go far enough. The document acknowledges St Francis’s communion with nature, his ‘universal reconciliation with every creature’, as a return to ‘the state of original innocence’ (a common trope in hagiography) – but it fails to develop this as a model or goal for mankind generally. It notes the ‘concern’ St Francis showed for the poor and the ‘simplicity’ in which he lived – but only weakly calls for such simplicity to be taken up by the rest of us, and fails to convey that Francis’s ‘simplicity’ was in fact absolute poverty. In the same way, it invokes the example of Our Lord, who ‘came eating and drinking’, to affirm the goodness of creation and to refute any sort of matter-spirit dualism – but in describing His ‘appearance’ as ‘not that of an ascetic set apart from the world, nor of an enemy to the pleasant things of life’, it fails to account for His radical poverty, or for His time spent in the wilderness, where he not only wrestled with vocation and evil but also ‘was with the wild beasts’ and neither ate nor drank for forty days. Neither Jesus nor Francis (nor the Buddha, for that matter) was simply ‘concerned for’ the poor; they became poor; after much meditation on the plight of the world, they renounced private property altogether as the fiction that it is. LS unfortunately does not call us strongly enough to either this kind of contemplation or this kind of action.
Nevertheless we in the industrialized world will have to learn to radically simplify our lives and share our goods, in communion with not only the early Church but also saints and religious communities through the ages and indigenous peoples the world over. Whether this self-limitation will constitute a new level or kind of maturity, a return to an earlier paradisiacal state, or a sort of chosen ‘knowing innocence’, I do not know. Whether, given that our attempts to control both natural and sociopolitical processes seem very often to aggravate and not alleviate the phenomena in question, we could ever reach this state incrementally rather than catastrophically, without a complete collapse of everything we know and suffering on an unprecedented, incalculable, and incomprehensible scale, is another imponderable given the ongoing erosion of nation-states by corporations who operate above the law, by the expansionism of more powerful nation-states, by supernational organizations, and by radical militant groups.
I mentioned earlier that Christian Scripture begins in a garden and ends in a city. That city is remarkably devoid of created life besides humans and other rational, spiritual beings, and the tree of life. Between these scriptural bookends, other animate beings are viewed with a surprising amount of suspicion; the mountains, trees, and rivers, winds, dews, and frosts often praise God, but for the most part the animals are at least dumb brutes and more often wild and dangerous, as in the back-story to this Sunday’s portion of the Revised Common Lectionary’s semi-continuous Old Testament track, in which we are told that David had slain lions and bears that threatened the flocks he was watching. This adversarial relationship to nature is even imputed to God, who repeatedly throughout Scripture is said to rain down destruction upon creation – though a look round will remind us that we need no divine aid to this end.
The Gospel for the day (alluded to in LS), however, offers a view of a different relationship to nature: Christ commanding the storm to subside. Our Lord also walks on water, multiplies food, heals illness, rises from the dead, and appears and disappears through the course of His earthly ministry. And he promises some of the same – and even greater wonders – to his followers. This might well be called mastery over nature, but I submit that it is of a different kind than the domination which we attempt to wield, and is to be arrived at not through technology but through total self-sacrifice, true communion, an alignment of our will with the divine, as Our Lord and Blessed Francis and so many other saints have shown.
Anglicans are often shy about acknowledging the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet LS is fully in harmony with the Catechism of the Episcopal Church, which asserts that ‘to be created in the image of God’ is, among other things, to be ‘free...to live in harmony with creation and with God’, that we ‘live apart from God and out of harmony with creation’, that God ‘first helped us by revealing himself and his will, through nature and history...’, that we are ‘called to enjoy [the world] and to care for it in accordance with God’s purposes’, that we are commanded ‘to show respect for the life God has given us; to work and pray for peace; to bear no malice, prejudice, or hatred in our hearts; and to be kind to all the creatures of God; to use all our bodily desires as God intended; to be honest and fair in our dealings; to seek justice, freedom, and the necessities of life for all people; and to use our talents and possessions as ones who must answer for them to God’ – concerns echoed again and again throughout the text.
One prophet of our tradition, at least, did have a vision in which at least the animal played a positive role. If we are ever able to live in the way seen by Isaiah, seeing creation as a gift to be received and then offered back to God in union with Christ, then we may yet see the vision the prophet shared:
LS contains many beautiful passages – particularly in its central and concluding sections – meditating upon creation as sacramental, as communion, as divine self-
However, the heart of the document – its descriptions and prescriptions – flags a bit, failing to be either as coherent or as compelling as it might. While calling on humanity to reconsider the means and ends of ‘development’ and the meaning and consequences of our actions, and attempting to draw a distinction between the ‘dominion’ of Gn 1.28 and ‘absolute domination’, it nevertheless seems to assume that ‘development’ of one sort or another is inevitable and good; that agriculture and urbanism, industrialization and electricity, mass transport and mass communication, the harnessing and transformation of nature generally, and unchecked population growth are the lot and right of humankind; and that we, though not separate from the rest of creation, are nevertheless not only unique but also superior. Perhaps all this is inevitable coming from a religious tradition that grew up in an agrarian–
But it does prompt the question of humanity’s place with regard to the rest of the earth or indeed the cosmos. Did God indeed create a world explicitly in need of human husbandry? If so, what of the countless millennia before we first walked the earth? Is our seemingly innate drive to change and shape our environment a ‘natural’ part of our ability to learn and grow? Is it a good or a bad thing, or has it only been misdirected? What is and is not ‘natural’ in human life, and how are we to handle what comes ‘naturally’ to us? In the end, can the Earth live without us? Can it live with us?
I of course cannot answer these ancient questions which have exercised many great minds than mine. But I for one am extremely skeptical that the Kingdom (a term almost entirely, and conspicuously, absent from LS) can be found in, or will be discovered by, ‘development’ (or ‘progress’, the predecessor term for which it seems to be a synonym) or any sort of large-
What might this look like? ‘No one is calling for a return to the Stone Age’, says LS; even hunter-
LS begins to point the way, by looking at the Holy Father’s namesake – but it does not go far enough. The document acknowledges St Francis’s communion with nature, his ‘universal reconciliation with every creature’, as a return to ‘the state of original innocence’ (a common trope in hagiography) – but it fails to develop this as a model or goal for mankind generally. It notes the ‘concern’ St Francis showed for the poor and the ‘simplicity’ in which he lived – but only weakly calls for such simplicity to be taken up by the rest of us, and fails to convey that Francis’s ‘simplicity’ was in fact absolute poverty. In the same way, it invokes the example of Our Lord, who ‘came eating and drinking’, to affirm the goodness of creation and to refute any sort of matter-
Nevertheless we in the industrialized world will have to learn to radically simplify our lives and share our goods, in communion with not only the early Church but also saints and religious communities through the ages and indigenous peoples the world over. Whether this self-
I mentioned earlier that Christian Scripture begins in a garden and ends in a city. That city is remarkably devoid of created life besides humans and other rational, spiritual beings, and the tree of life. Between these scriptural bookends, other animate beings are viewed with a surprising amount of suspicion; the mountains, trees, and rivers, winds, dews, and frosts often praise God, but for the most part the animals are at least dumb brutes and more often wild and dangerous, as in the back-
The Gospel for the day (alluded to in LS), however, offers a view of a different relationship to nature: Christ commanding the storm to subside. Our Lord also walks on water, multiplies food, heals illness, rises from the dead, and appears and disappears through the course of His earthly ministry. And he promises some of the same – and even greater wonders – to his followers. This might well be called mastery over nature, but I submit that it is of a different kind than the domination which we attempt to wield, and is to be arrived at not through technology but through total self-
Anglicans are often shy about acknowledging the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Yet LS is fully in harmony with the Catechism of the Episcopal Church, which asserts that ‘to be created in the image of God’ is, among other things, to be ‘free...to live in harmony with creation and with God’, that we ‘live apart from God and out of harmony with creation’, that God ‘first helped us by revealing himself and his will, through nature and history...’, that we are ‘called to enjoy [the world] and to care for it in accordance with God’s purposes’, that we are commanded ‘to show respect for the life God has given us; to work and pray for peace; to bear no malice, prejudice, or hatred in our hearts; and to be kind to all the creatures of God; to use all our bodily desires as God intended; to be honest and fair in our dealings; to seek justice, freedom, and the necessities of life for all people; and to use our talents and possessions as ones who must answer for them to God’ – concerns echoed again and again throughout the text.
One prophet of our tradition, at least, did have a vision in which at least the animal played a positive role. If we are ever able to live in the way seen by Isaiah, seeing creation as a gift to be received and then offered back to God in union with Christ, then we may yet see the vision the prophet shared:
The wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.
Isaiah 11.6–9
the leopard shall lie down with the kid,
the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze,
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,
and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain;
for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea.
Isaiah 11.6–9
* Wikipedia offers a good – and damning – summary:
A civilization is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification, symbolic communication forms (typically, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment. Civilizations are intimately associated with and often further defined by other socio-politico-economic characteristics, including centralization, the domestication of both humans and other organisms, specialization of labor, culturally ingrained ideologies of progress and supremacism, monumental architecture, taxation, societal dependence upon agriculture, and expansionism. Historically, a civilization was an ‘advanced’ culture in contrast to more supposedly barbarian, savage, or primitive cultures. In this broad sense, a civilization contrasts with non-centralized feudal or tribal societies, including the cultures of nomadic pastoralists or hunter-gatherers. As an uncountable noun, civilization also refers to the process of a society developing into a centralized, urbanized, stratified structure.
Civilizations are organized in densely populated settlements divided into hierarchical social classes with a ruling elite and subordinate urban and rural populations, which engage in intensive agriculture, mining, small-scale manufacture and trade. Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings.
A civilization is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification, symbolic communication forms (typically, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment. Civilizations are intimately associated with and often further defined by other socio-
Civilizations are organized in densely populated settlements divided into hierarchical social classes with a ruling elite and subordinate urban and rural populations, which engage in intensive agriculture, mining, small-